Hamilton the Constitutionalist Was Not the Monarchist His Enemies Painted

Every political career has one bad afternoon that the opposition never lets go of. For Alexander Hamilton it was a long day in Philadelphia on June 18, 1787, when he stood up at the Constitutional Convention and talked for hours about the British constitution with what his enemies would call admiration and his friends would call candor. That speech gave the Jeffersonians a label they spent the next decade printing in every party newspaper they controlled: Hamilton the monarchist, Hamilton the closet aristocrat, Hamilton who wanted a king in all but name.

The label is a good one, as political labels go. It is short, it is memorable and it contains a grain of truth. It is also wrong about the man's actual constitutional work, which from 1786 to 1804 was a sustained, disciplined defense of a written, limited, republican Constitution with an executive strong enough to govern. If we want to understand that Constitution, and especially if we want to defend it, we have to separate the speech from the record. So let us go to the record, in order, with dates.

Annapolis, 1786: the man who called the meeting

Before there was a Philadelphia convention there was a failed one. In September 1786 delegates from just five states, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Virginia, met at Annapolis to talk about commerce among the states. Too few states came to do business. A lesser group would have gone home and blamed the absentees.

Instead the commissioners adopted an address, drafted by Hamilton, that turned a failure into a summons. It recommended that the states send delegates to Philadelphia on the second Monday of May 1787 to consider the situation of the United States and to devise the provisions needed to make the federal constitution adequate to the needs of the Union. Notice what that address did and did not do. It did not call for a crown. It did not call for the abolition of the states. It called for a meeting of state-appointed delegates to fix a confederation that could not pay its debts, could not raise a revenue and could not keep its own treaty promises.

That is the first fact about Hamilton the constitutionalist: he was a man of process. He wanted a stronger national government, and he went about getting it by persuading thirteen sovereign states to send their own representatives to deliberate. Monarchs do not usually begin that way.

June 18, 1787: the speech that made the label

Now the hard part. On June 18 the convention was stuck between the Virginia Plan, which based representation on population, and the New Jersey Plan, which kept equal state votes and a weak Congress. Hamilton rose and said, in substance, that neither plan would do.

By James Madison's notes, Hamilton said that in his private opinion the British government was the best in the world, and that he doubted whether anything short of it would work in America. He then sketched his own plan. It included an assembly elected by the people for three years, a senate whose members would serve during good behavior, and a single executive, the governor, also serving during good behavior. State governors would be appointed by the national government, and state laws contrary to national law would be void.

That is a lot of "good behavior." A chief executive serving for life is close enough to an elected king that the comparison writes itself, and Hamilton's opponents wrote it for twenty years.

But look at what happened next. No delegate moved Hamilton's plan. The convention never voted on it. Hamilton himself left Philadelphia for much of the summer, returned for the final weeks, and on September 17, 1787 he signed the Constitution that came out of the room. He signed it alone for New York, because the other two New York delegates, Robert Yates and John Lansing Jr., had walked out in protest that the convention was going too far.

Think about that. The supposed monarchist was the only man from his state willing to put his name to a republican constitution with an elected president serving a four-year term. The two men who left did so because they thought the document was too national, not too republican. Hamilton's private opinion lost, and he accepted the loss. More than that, he spent the next year campaigning harder than anyone in America for the plan that had beaten his own.

The Federalist: defending the Constitution he did not write

In October 1787 Hamilton conceived the series of newspaper essays signed "Publius," recruited Madison and John Jay, and wrote most of the eighty-five papers himself. He opened the first one with a question about whether free people can govern themselves at all:

whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

A man who thought only a hereditary crown could govern America does not frame the question that way. He frames it as a test of republican self-government and then argues that America can pass it.

The executive: energy, then safety

Hamilton's essays on the presidency are the core of his reputation, and they are the opposite of a brief for monarchy. Federalist 69 is a point-by-point comparison of the proposed president with the king of Great Britain, and the president loses every comparison on purpose. The president is elected for four years; the king is hereditary. The president can be impeached, tried and removed; the king's person is sacred. The president's veto can be overridden; the king's is absolute. The president commands the armed forces, but the power to declare war belongs to Congress; the king's prerogative covered declaring war and raising armies.

Federalist 70 then makes the positive case:

Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.

He lists the ingredients of that energy as unity, duration, adequate provision for its support and competent powers, and then, in the same paper, the ingredients of safety: a due dependence on the people and a due responsibility. A single executive, he argued, is easier to blame. A council of executives lets every member point at the others. That is a republican argument for accountability, not a royalist one for majesty. We walk through it in detail in Federalist 70 Read Closely, Hamilton's Case for Energy in One Executive.

The judiciary: neither force nor will

In Federalist 78 Hamilton defended life tenure for judges, the same "good behavior" standard he had wanted for the executive, but now for the branch he called the least dangerous. The judiciary, he wrote, has

neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment

and must depend on the executive even to carry out its judgments. His argument for judicial review was an argument for the Constitution as fundamental law above ordinary statutes: when the two conflict, the judge must prefer the will of the people expressed in the Constitution to the will of the legislature expressed in a statute. That reasoning is the seed of Marbury v. Madison (1803). Our close reading is at Neither Force Nor Will, Hamilton's Federalist 78 Read Line by Line.

The bill of rights: limited by design

In Federalist 84 Hamilton argued that a bill of rights was unnecessary and even dangerous, because the new government had only the powers it was given. His most famous line on the point:

For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?

You can think he was wrong on the tactics, and the country did add a Bill of Rights, but notice the premise. Hamilton's argument depends entirely on the federal government being a government of enumerated, limited powers. A man scheming for unlimited power would not make that argument in print. We weigh the argument fairly in Hamilton Argued in Federalist 84 That a Bill of Rights Could Be Dangerous.

Then he went home and won the hardest ratification fight in the country. At the New York convention in Poughkeepsie, where the Anti-Federalists held a large majority when it opened, Hamilton argued for weeks, and on July 26, 1788 New York ratified by 30 to 27. The story is in Hamilton at Poughkeepsie, How New York Ratified by Three Votes.

The bank opinion of 1791: implied powers, stated with limits

As the first Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton proposed a national bank. Congress passed the bill in February 1791. President Washington, uncertain whether it was constitutional, asked his cabinet. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Attorney General Edmund Randolph said no. Jefferson read the Necessary and Proper Clause narrowly: "necessary" meant indispensable, without which the enumerated power could not be exercised at all.

Hamilton answered with his opinion of February 23, 1791. The core of it was a test. If the end is clearly within one of the enumerated powers, and the measure has an obvious relation to that end, and no particular provision of the Constitution forbids it, then the measure falls within national authority. The bank, he argued, related to the powers to collect taxes, borrow money, regulate commerce and support the armed forces. Washington signed the bill on February 25.

Here is what conservatives should notice. Hamilton's test begins with the enumerated powers. The end has to be one the Constitution names. Every implied power, in his account, hangs from a specific listed power like a lamp from a hook. That is not an argument that Congress may do whatever it thinks good. It is an argument about means, not ends. Chief Justice John Marshall adopted much of the reasoning in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), with the same structure: let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the Constitution, and then appropriate means are allowed.

The trouble, which we will come to, is what later generations did with the hook.

Pacificus, 1793: the vesting clause argument

In the spring of 1793 revolutionary France and Britain were at war, and Washington issued what became known as the Neutrality Proclamation on April 22. Critics said the president had no power to declare neutrality; that was for Congress, which alone can declare war.

Hamilton defended the proclamation in a series of essays signed "Pacificus." His key move was textual. Article I begins, "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress." Article II begins, "The executive Power shall be vested in a President." The words "herein granted" appear in the first and not in the second. Hamilton read the difference as meaningful: Article II vests the executive power as a whole, and the specific powers listed afterward are examples and qualifications, not the complete inventory. Where the Constitution gives part of a traditionally executive power to Congress, as with declaring war, or to the Senate, as with treaties and appointments, those are exceptions to be read strictly.

At Jefferson's urging, Madison answered as "Helvidius," arguing that Hamilton was importing the royal prerogative into a republican charter. The exchange is still the starting point for every serious argument about presidential power over foreign affairs.

Again, the point is the method. Hamilton argued from the text, compared clause to clause, and accepted that Congress's specific powers limit the president. You can disagree with his reading. You cannot call it a call for a king. The textual argument is explored further in The Executive Power Shall Be Vested in a President, and Every Word Counts.

The strongest objection, answered

Fairness requires stating the case against Hamilton at full strength, in words his critics would accept.

The objection: Hamilton's constitutionalism was the respectable face of an agenda that, followed to its end, destroys limited government. His bank opinion gave us the elastic reading of the Necessary and Proper Clause. His Report on Manufactures of December 1791 read the General Welfare Clause as a power to spend on any object of general benefit, which is the reading the Supreme Court eventually adopted in United States v. Butler (1936) and the root of the modern spending state. His Pacificus essays opened the door to the imperial presidency. He did prefer a life-term executive in 1787. Whatever he said as Publius, his instincts were centralizing, and his legacy is Washington, D.C. as it is.

That is a serious case. Here is the answer, point by point.

1. A preference is not a program. Hamilton told the convention his private opinion. When it lost, he did not plot, refuse to sign or work to undermine the result. He signed, campaigned, and then served under the Constitution's limits for the rest of his public life. The measure of a constitutionalist is whether he obeys the constitution he got, not whether he wanted a different one.

1. His implied powers had a hook. Hamilton's test required a legitimate end found in the enumerated powers. The modern problem is not that Congress uses incidental means; it is that Congress claims ends the Constitution never listed. That is a departure from Hamilton's test, not an application of it.

1. On general welfare, the critics have a point. This is where he went too far, and we should say so plainly. Hamilton's reading of the spending power, that Congress may spend for any purpose it judges to be for the general welfare so long as the money is spent for general rather than local purposes, gave Congress a power that Madison rightly warned would make the enumeration pointless. Madison's view was that the phrase introduces the specific powers that follow, and conservatives should side with Madison here. The full argument is in Madison and Hamilton Fought Over Two Words, General Welfare, and We Still Pay.

1. On the executive, the safeguards are part of the theory. Hamilton's energetic president is a president answerable to elections, impeachment, the veto override, the Senate's advice and consent, and Congress's power of the purse. Take away those checks and you no longer have Hamilton's theory. The imperial presidency is what you get when Congress stops using its powers, not when the president uses his.

1. Where else he erred. The record includes other mistakes worth naming. During the Quasi-War with France he served as inspector general of an expanded army from 1798 to 1800, and he showed too much enthusiasm for military establishment at a time when the Federalist Congress also passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. In 1800 he published a pamphlet attacking President John Adams, a man of his own party, which helped split the Federalists. Those were errors of judgment and temperament. None of them was an attempt to install a king.

The verdict: Hamilton was a nationalist and an energetic-government man. He was not a monarchist. He gave us some of the best arguments ever written for a limited, written constitution, and one argument, on spending, that conservatives should keep rejecting.

Hamilton and the national purse

Because this post sits on the economy page as much as on the Washington page, it is worth one more look at the Treasury years. Hamilton's 1790 Report on Public Credit argued that the new government should pay the Revolutionary War debts at full value and assume the states' war debts. His reasoning was moral as much as financial: a nation that does not honor its promises will not be trusted to borrow when it next must. He wanted a government that borrowed rarely, paid faithfully and kept a dedicated revenue to retire the principal.

Set that next to the facts sheet. The total public debt was $38.05 trillion on November 4, 2025 and $40.56 trillion on November 5, 2026, according to Treasury's Debt to the Penny. The arithmetic: $40.56 trillion minus $38.05 trillion is $2.51 trillion added in about a year. Hamilton argued that a public debt could be a national blessing if it was funded and kept within limits. He never argued that a debt could grow without a plan to pay it. Whatever else he was, he was a man who believed the bill comes due. You can follow the number on the national debt clock, and the history is told in Hamilton's 1790 Report on Public Credit and what honest borrowing requires.

What to learn from him

Hamilton died on July 12, 1804, the day after Aaron Burr shot him at Weehawken, New Jersey. He was in his late forties. In the two decades of his public life he called the meeting that led to the Constitution, signed it when his own state's delegation abandoned it, wrote most of the essays that explained it, carried the ratification in the hardest state in the Union, and built the fiscal machinery that let the new republic pay its debts.

Three lessons follow for us.

First, the difference between private preference and public duty is the difference between a politician and a constitutionalist. Hamilton lost the argument he wanted to have in June 1787, and he then defended the document he got with everything he had.

Second, energetic government and limited government are not opposites. Hamilton wanted a government that could act decisively within its sphere and that was strictly answerable to the people for how it acted. Conservatives who want a president able to enforce the laws and secure the border are asking for Hamiltonian energy. Conservatives who want agencies confined to their statutes are asking for Hamiltonian limits.

Third, every argument has to be checked against the text. Hamilton argued from words on the page, clause by clause. When his reasoning drifted from the text, on general welfare especially, it went wrong. The text is still the best guard against his mistakes and everyone else's. Start with the Constitution page and the founders page.

The case in brief

1. The monarchist label comes from one speech on June 18, 1787, a private preference the convention never even voted on.
2. Hamilton called the Philadelphia meeting through the Annapolis address, signed the Constitution alone for New York, and defended it in the Federalist and at Poughkeepsie.
3. His Federalist essays argued for an energetic executive bound by elections, impeachment and Congress, and for judges with neither force nor will.
4. His 1791 bank opinion tied implied powers to enumerated ends; his reading of the General Welfare Clause went too far, and Madison was right to resist it.
5. Hamilton's record shows a nationalist who obeyed the limits of a republican constitution, which is more than many of his modern heirs can say.

What you can do: read Federalist 69 and Federalist 70 side by side this week, then ask your representative's office in writing which enumerated power supports the next large spending bill they vote on.