#this is how john felt making the alien and sedition acts

[valend]

Gossiping with friends in 100°f heat, connecting dots that don’t exist, feeling like john adams

[shmegmilton]

Can you explain how Aaron and Alexander stopped being friends and started fighting?

They were never really ‘friends.’ I assume you got that idea from the play, but I have no idea why the play tried to push that narrative. Civil? Sure, but that was necessary. New York was less than 50,000 people at the time, and they were both accomplished lawyers & statesmen who had to work and interact with each other on a daily basis. Politics is politics, look at how people are acting right now during our election. 

As for your question, it’s a long line of policy & personal disagreements, mostly. They were on opposite sides of the aisle on pretty much everything. Lots of small things, but a lot of big, BIG things.

     Burr was (ironically) kind of a pacifist; he kept mostly to himself, didn’t really speak much publicly & didn’t necessarily go out of his way to confront people unless he’s been pushed long enough (everyone ‘snaps’ at some point, y’know?)

But that’s why the ‘Burr is an evil mastermind’ myth is so pervasive today. Burr just… didn’t bother defending himself, or correcting anything, because he (mistakingly) had faith in the inherent goodness of people that someday people would see him for his true character. So for that reason, we don’t really have a good timeline from Burr’s perspective as to how he felt about Hamilton—but BOY howdy did Hamilton never shut up about Burr.

----

Trespass & Confiscation Acts  (1782ish)

     During the Revolution, the British confiscated the property of patriots that fled the city. New York did the same thing, & for a while it was this game of: ‘Oh, you’re gonna take my stuff? **draws a line in the dirt** Well, everything behind this line is mine now.” It was all very bad, and after the way Tories & Loyalists faced a lot of honestly very fucked up discrimination & forfeiture of their rights. Hamilton (like most Federalists) was pro-British, so he represented a lot of these people in court. I’m sure it wasn’t purely out of the goodness of his heart--most of his clients were loaded--but the sentiment is there. On the other hand, there are multiple records of Burr buying up property around this time, most likely confiscated Tory property, which he would usually flip or give away to people that he knew, so he was taking full advantage of this. Burr also, most likely, went head-to-head with Hamilton on a few of these cases, because Burr tended to work with the ‘common folk.’

French Revolution (1789ish to 1799ish) & Proclamation of Neutrality (1793)

     Burr (like most Democratic-Republicans) was pro-French, so much so that he took in French refugees fleeing the Revolution into his home. He was very sympathetic to the cause.Hamilton was not. He basically saw it the same way that right-wing Conservatives see the Black Lives Matter movement is the best way I can explain it. He also hated it for the amount of immigrants that were now fleeing to the U.S.

Burr Gets Chosen For NY Senate (1791)

     Key word: chosen. As in, he didn’t actually run. That wasn’t how politics worked back then. The Hamilton musical just fucking lied outright about that, let’s be clear. He also never switched parties. Ever. Back then you were nominated by the people who were already in government--usually by one of the powerful families like the Clintons or the Livingstons, or yada yada. So Burr didn’t actually do anything. He didn’t even really want the position either, if I recall. But back then if you were ‘called to serve,’ you were obligated to do it. Hamilton was furious either way because it meant that Burr was replacing his father-in-law, Phillip Schuyler, meaning that he wouldn’t have that extra ear in government that he wanted. Burr also had a lot of views that were considered ‘extreme’ at the time, like getting extra rights for women, immigrants & black people, but I have no idea what Hamilton thought of those individual policies other than he just didn’t like women, immigrants or black people.

1792 & 1796 Presidential Election

Burr wasn’t really that serious about either of these elections, I don’t think (in ’92 he wasn’t that well-known & barely got any support, but it’s worth noting the fact he was nominated to run at all was really impressive. He’s tied with William Jennings Bryan as being one of the youngest people to ever receive an electoral vote, at 36 years old.) In ’96 he faired a little better—he got 30 votes, which is nearly half of what you need to get the ticket nomination, also very impressive.Hamilton was super staunchly opposed to both of these runs, though, and did his typical Hamilton thing of openly campaigning about how the people shouldn’t vote for Burr, yada yada.

Jay Treaty (1794)

     I highly suggest looking up supplemental information on this because it’s a bit complicated, but it was basically a treaty between us and Great Britain to reaffirm that we were going to continue to not mess with France, as well as a couple of other weird hang-ups. It was not popular, at all, especially with the Demo-Republicans. There is a specific instance (that is actually kind of insane) where Hamilton gave a public speech in defense of it, and the Democratic-Republicans in the crowd started pelting him & the other Federalists with rocks. Hamilton got SO mad that immediately challenged a man to a duel, and threatened to fight each of the Democratic-Republicans one-by-one.  

Reynolds Affair (1797)

     Burr had a personal relationship with Maria Reynolds; he was her divorce attorney in 1793/1794, helped her out financially, & successfully petitioned (+paid for) her daughter Susan to attend a boarding school. I believe they also stayed in his him with him during the divorce proceedings, but don’t quote me on that. He never said anything publicly that I could find, but Burr probably had a personal investment in the Reynolds Pamphlet, since it painted Maria in a really damaging light.

Alien & Sedition Acts (1798)

     These were some of the most worst laws ever passed in the history of the country. Like, these were AWFUL. It not only limited immigration, but it limited the freedom of the press and freedom of speech (ESPECIALLY immigrants, my god.)

Burr was right on the front lines helping defend people in court, he actively opposed it & is probably the thing that propelled him into Jefferson’s orbit as a potential Vice President.

John Barker Church Duel (1797)

John Barker Church had accused Burr of taking bribes (which was unfounded & untrue) and they ended up dueling. JBC was the husband of Angelica Schuyler, Hamilton’s sister-in-law.

Neither was injured (though, JBC apparently put a hole in Burr’s coat), but it supposed infuriated Hamilton & his associates so much that they would send out fake letters “from Burr” challenging people to duels.

The Manhattan Company (1799)

    Burr was getting sick of the difficulty he was having getting loans from the Federalist-run banks and decided to do something about it. There had been several seasonal epidemics of yellow fever—caused by mosquitos but, at the time, it was thought to be caused by improperly treated water, miasma (‘bad air’) or (if you asked Hamilton) stinky evil immigrant refuges who were fleeing France and Haiti. Burr saw this and spearheaded a campaign to get a proper water treatment plant, even getting Hamilton to help him. Through some really weird loophole that I don’t quite understand, Burr was somehow allowed to use the ‘surplus capital’ for banking, which essentially turned it into a bank. The actual water treatment portion of the company was plagued with problems due to improper management and things like that.     We’ll never know his exact thought process on this (people normally assume it was malicious trickery because people are biased to hate Burr anyway) & I highly doubt that Burr knew the extent of the issues (he was on the Board of Directors, but so were a dozen others--INCLUDING John Barker Church) so I don’t entirely think it’s his fault, but the fact of the matter is that it most likely exacerbated the existing problems & indirectly led to more people getting sick/dying until they finally fixed the problems.I would say that it’s completely justifiable for Hamilton to be mad at Burr, but, as we established, Hamilton hated both poor people & immigrants (two groups most likely affected by this) so he wasn’t actually mad at him for the reason a… y’know, a normal person would be mad at him. He was mad at him because Burr destroyed the monopoly that Federalists had on banks, making it easier for Democratic-Republicans & others to get loans. He was literally mad at him for making the economy fair.

1800 Election & 1804 NY Governor Election

  These two are self-explanatory, I think, and I’ve already been writing way too long, lol. My hand hurts.

[tparadox]

I've been consuming media lately that keeps coming back to the culture in America from September 2001 through the Iraq War, and it was mentioned that most people remember being more strongly opposed than polls would indicate they were, so I wanted to gather my recollections on that. Under a cut because nobody wants to actually read that.

As a point of reference, in the fall of 2001 I was in seventh grade and turned 13. The 2016 election is the only time so far where the candidate I supported in the general did not win, because I was too unaware of politics to really engage in 1996 beyond "I guess Clinton is doing fine, he should keep being president", and then in 2000 I had pretty well absorbed the politics of my parents' church.

So, specifically to the nationalism surge. I did a lot of pretty bad patriotic mourning art from September through sometime in early 2002, of the kind that can only be done by a 13 year old who has learned advanced techniques in The Gimp. I may have put them on a personal Geocities page.

I do not recall how I felt about going to war in Afghanistan, but I probably thought it was right. In and out, flatten the Taliban, 20 minute adventure.

The jockeying around "freedom fries" and flag pins were pretty silly to me at the time, but in an "I'm sure they're actually getting work done too" way.

I think I had some reservations about the Patriot act, but if it's for the purpose of stopping terrorism, maybe it was okay for a bit.

I think maybe it was the next year that my history class covered the early history of the United States in enough detail that I learned about the failure of the Articles of Confederation and more relevant to this post, the Alien and Sedition Act, which was a paragraph or two summarizing the John Adams Presidency as "the first administration formed along party lines spent most of its time trying to outlaw the opposing party. It was antidemocratic, cruel, and has generally been considered a bad idea ever since." I seem to recall thinking this seemed vaguely contemporary, but surely the adults would say something if it was repeating, so the current state of affairs must not be as bad somehow. I don't know if it takes an outsized position in my memory just because it seemed relevant or if my teacher put a little extra focus on it to try to get us to see something familiar.

I clearly recall my thoughts about invading Iraq. I don't believe I saw any kind of strong connection between 9/11 and Iraq, but Saddam Hussein was clearly flaunting his nukes and we needed to go in and take them away. In and out, 20 minute adventure. I recall articulating in the days before it began that this war was not very well justified, but if we can quickly liberate the Iraqi people from a dictator, we might as well. I think what I was trying not to say then was that I didn't want the war but it seemed inevitable so we should make the best of it.

My father suggested to me at the time that Hussein may have been stuck in a position where he was trying to make it as clear as possible to the UN and the USA that he didn't actually have nukes without admitting it and blowing his bluff to his neighboring countries that he wanted to dominate. I recall telling classmates in college that I believed that documents may eventually be declassified that proved there were WMDs, but now I think my father was on the right track.

The backlash against the then-Dixie Chicks was something stunning. I may not have had strong sentiments for or against what they said, but it was an amazing overreaction how they were frozen out overnight.

In 2004, my opinion of Bush had eroded a lot, but I still hadn't done much evolving and thought he was a better choice than Kerry. I think that was the election where I realized I really only had one or two issues I sided with the Republican platform on, but they were dealbreaker issues. Once the election was done, I'm not sure why, or whether there was one specific thing, but I quickly came to decide I'd made the wrong choice. At least I was only 16 at the time and I had only voted in a school mock election.

My political evolution really began around 2006, and in 2008 I was almost on board with "Bush is not my president" and those images of him with a Hitler mustache.

I recall that the only candidates for the Republican nomination in '08 that would've had a chance at my vote were Ron Paul and 2008-edition Mitt Romney, who was more "hey, states should consider adopting something like my state's universal healthcare plan" and less "hey, it was totally uncool when that black guy adopted something like my state's universal healthcare plan. Anything else you want me to say, my political masters?"

Maybe at the time my actual views were not as sympathetic as I end up remembering them now, as the oft-cited poll numbers might show, but also there were a few years there where it was strongly discouraged to say anything against the administration's decisions. I don't think I talked much about what I thought at the time, I just watched and considered and didn't talk politics.

So yeah, my memory of the Bush presidency is of slowly realizing my opinion had been manipulated specifically by a political machine as I was also coming to see that it had been manipulated more generally by conservative evangelicalism, which had been a key component in the former. I'm just thankful that I'd begun at least trying to reach my own conclusions by the time they let me start voting.