Initiatives
"'The judgments of many must unite in the work; experience must guide their labor; time must bring it to perfection, and the feeling of inconveniences must correct the mistakes which they INEVITABLY fall into in their first trials and experiments.'"
David Hume as quoted in Alexander Hamilton, Federalist # 85
1. The founders of the AHI have designed a three-year program of scholarly activities centered on annual themes. We begin our first year of operations with the debate over slavery and the meaning of freedom in the antebellum United States. Gerrit Smith was graduated from Hamilton College in 1818, valedictorian of his class. In 1835 he witnessed a mob's disruption of an antislavery gathering in Utica's Bleeker Street Presbyterian Church. Smith offered the attendants sanctuary and crossed the threshold himself into political abolitionism. He became one of abolitionism's most important financiers, hiring John Brown to manage the North Elba experiment and enlisting into the Secret Six in support of Brown's attack on the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Smith, curiously enough, was related by marriage to the formidable Virginian proslavery advocate George Fitzhugh. Their correspondence, which consists of dozens of letters, most of which are housed in the Syracuse University library, has never been published. The AHI will bring students and scholars together in an innovative colloquium that will be headed by John Stauffer of Harvard, a prize-winning author on Gerrit Smith and abolitionism, to examine intensively the writings of Fitzhugh and Smith for insight into the broadening indictment of slavery, the southern defense of the peculiar institution, and the onset of the Civil War. Subsequent to the colloquium, the Smith-Fitzhugh correspondence will be edited and published. The AHI is working with Tad Brown of the Watson-Brown Foundation to bring this colloquium to fruition.
Alexander Hamilton spoke eloquently about the importance of private property rights in Federalist #71. The founders saw private property rights as the guardian of other rights. The recent Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. New London set off a firestorm of controversy nationwide by broadening the definition of "public use" so as to make private property vulnerable to takings by the state in the name of economic development. Our second-year programming will explore property rights from historical, political, and cross-cultural perspectives. Our colloquium will compare the recent history of private property rights in the United States and China, the use (and abuse) of eminent domain in both countries, and the impact of discrete legal and cultural traditions on economic growth and development.
In 2009, the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the AHI will revisit the central thesis of Garry Wills' Pulitzer prize-winning book Lincoln at Gettysburg to explore how both the founding fathers and subsequent generations of antebellum statesmen understood the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Wills argued that in memorializing the Battle of Gettysburg Lincoln pulled a sleight of hand by folding the Declaration into the Constitution, thereby changing not only the goals of the Civil War but the meaning of the Union itself. The AHI intends to commission essays by leading scholars on this subject. How did, for example, Patrick Henry or John Calhoun see the relationship between these hallowed documents? The third-year colloquium will be organized to have these essays read and critiqued in manuscript before their publication.
2. Eugene D. Genovese, one of this country's greatest historians, will donate a substantial portion of his library in American history to the AHI. In 1974, Genovese published Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, a prize-winning study of slavery in the antebellum South. More recently, he co-authored with wife Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Mind of the Master Class, a magisterial volume on the the political and theological thought of southern slaveholders.
In January of this year Professor Fox-Genovese, an influential public intellectual as well as a prize-winning historian, died after a long battle with multiple sclerosis. To house properly Professor Genovese's extraordinary gift, the AHI will raise funds to create a reading room in our headquarters, the former Alexander Hamilton Inn, in honor of Professors Genovese and Fox-Genovese. We encourage those who wish to donate to this worthy cause to contact us through this website.
3. Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams, confessed that he could not live without books. Alexander Hamilton, to a great extent, schooled himself in law by living as an undergraduate in the library of King's College (now Columbia University). Jefferson, as is well known, built one of the greatest private libraries of his generation. But the penchant for collecting books and the love of learning was not confined in the Early Republic to wealthy gentrymen. Indeed, persons of middling means--doctors, artisans, and farmers--driven by the responsibilities of citizenship in a popular government, devoted hard-earned resources to acquiring personal libraries.
The AHI recognizes that the rush to deploy new technologies in the information age has tended to background college libraries, once the centerpiece of intellectual life on college campuses. Major collections remain hidden in cramped and darkened spaces, like buried treasure, unmapped and unexplored. To support original research on issues related to the central concerns of the AHI, its founders will raise money to support competitive fellowships of $1600 each for one month of exploration in the special collections of Colgate University, Hamilton College, the Oneida County Historical Society, and other area repositories. Winners of these research fellowships will lodge free of charge in specially prepared rooms on the second floor of our headquarters.
Our website will provide detailed information on rare book and manuscript collections in the area. We encourage those who wish to support this initiative to contact us through this website.
4. The AHI seeks to inform readers by linking them to recommended websites that provide access to primary sources in American history and, more broadly, in the history of Western culture. The founders of the AHI would like to thank members of Hamilton College's Republican Club for offering to evaluate each website in American history for content, coverage, and accessibility. Their effort will result in annotations that will be posted on the website at the end of the fall semester.