As Rep. Adam Schiff opened the first impeachment trial of President Donald Trump in January 2020, he began with a quotation from Alexander Hamilton: 

“When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government and bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.””  (Papers of Alexander Hamilton, XII.252)

This one long sentence, from a lengthy memorandum about governmental administration that Hamilton wrote to George Washington in 1792, has been central to America’s presidential impeachment debates since that time.

Did you notice the quotation marks setting off the last seven words of Hamilton’s sentence?  Apparently no one ever does.  But Hamilton was careful to insert them.  Why?

The answer is exactly what you might expect:  Hamilton was pointedly indicating to Washington that he was quoting another author.  But whom, and to what purpose?  We no longer know.  We the people need to remember again.

A brief newspaper article such as this does not allow sufficient space for a careful explanation of Hamilton’s allusion and its impact.  So here I will simply share some very quick answers and then add a single spoiler alert.  But you can read the complete article on The Beacon’s website: AndoverBeacon.com. Select “History” from the top menu.

The literary allusion that Hamilton was deliberately broaching to Washington is one that both men, and indeed most of the Founders, knew very well.  It comes from a particularly famous passage in a once-famous poem, “The Campaign,” by the English author Joseph Addison, who had been commissioned to celebrate the Duke of Marlborough’s victory at the Battle of Blenheim (1704).  Hamilton then immediately alludes also to another, even more famous work by Addison, the tragedy Cato (1713), which was widely cherished by American Revolutionaries of all stripes as a celebration of selfless devotion to the cause of Republican liberty and was (as Hamilton well knew) Washington’s favorite play. Hamilton is using these allusions not only to warn against the threat to the Republic that could be posed by a particular kind of unprincipled would-be despot but also to implicitly honor and celebrate Washington himself.  But we can’t understand the dialogue Hamilton is having with Washington here if we don’t recognize and savor these allusions they are sharing with each other.

Now the spoiler alert:  the very same quotation to which Hamilton was referring in his 1792 memo to Washington was also featured in President George W. Bush’s first inaugural address in January 2001; Bush even reprised it in his closing lines.  No one caught the allusion then, either.

Here are two reasons why recognizing Hamilton’s quotation and appreciating its resonances matters to us today.  First, when we retrieve this knowledge from “deeply archaic” status and bring it again to light we are improving our ability to understand him, nuances and all.  The Founders, steeped in the literature and drama of their own era, could think and speak in iambic pentameters (“the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor”), could imagine their musings as soliloquies, could recognize themselves as performing roles in a living drama.  To understand them well, we need to appreciate the poetry and dramas of their very lives.  An allusion they shared easily among themselves that we do not catch is a thought we neither understand nor realize that we do not understand.  Once we do catch it, we can understand them better.

Second, a contemporaneous, “originalist” reading of Hamilton’s warning not only affirms but strongly reinforces Rep. Schiff’s use of it.  Schiff was right to deem Hamilton’s description of the despotic “man unprincipled in private life” highly relevant to the impeachment trial.  This was simply Hamilton’s latest contribution to a conversation that had been engaging the Founders for years, since The Federalist Papers and before.  A man who cannot or will not govern himself is not fit to govern others.  Such a man—a man just such as Hamilton described in his 1792 memorandum, apart from “having the advantage of military habits”—was on trial in the Senate that day.  A George Washington he was not.