Welcome to the present, we’re building a real constitution.īuilding a real constitution meant studying the text of the Constitution as it was actually written, not from a gauzy, 20,000 foot perspective. Welcome to the present, we’re running a real nation.” Jefferson’s response to Hamilton’s argument on the value of a Bill of Rights (mediated through letters he wrote to Madison) would have been nearly identical: Wilson does that a bill of rights was not necessary because all is reserved in the case of the general government which is not given, while in the particular ones all is given which is not reserved, might do for the audience to whom it was addressed, but is surely a gratis dictum.” In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s version of their bank battle, Hamilton tells Jefferson, “That was a real nice declaration. James Wilson had made the same theoretical arguments months before in Pennsylvania, but as Jefferson observed then, “To say, as Mr. Hamilton’s theoretical reassurances, however, would not be enough for Jefferson. In other words, just as Hamilton’s love at the end of the day “would be enough” for Elizabeth Schuyler, so also the theory of a limited government contained in the Constitution “would be enough” to ensure the protection of rights. Why limit the government’s ability to limit the freedom of the press, for example, when the power to regulate the press was nowhere to be found in the first place? Doing so, he said, might give “numerous handles” to “the doctrine of constructive powers.” Unlike countries such as England in which the government had plenary power over its citizens and lists of rights like Magna Carta were needed to carve out certain limits on that power, “here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing as they retain every thing, they have no need of particular reservations.” And a Bill of Rights was dangerous under such a government because it might suggest that the new federal government would have other powers not expressly delegated. A Bill of Rights was unnecessary under such a government, he reasoned, because everything that was not expressly given to it was reserved to the people. Such a government could only wield those powers which it was delegated. And he based this argument exclusively on a theory – the theory underlying a constitutionally limited government of enumerated powers. Months later in July of 1788, writing as “Publius” in Federalist 84, Hamilton shot back with what by then had become a conventional Federalist reply, explaining that a Bill of Rights was unnecessary and even potentially dangerous. Sounding every bit the philosophical “Sage of Monticello,” he fired his first shot: “A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, & what no just government should refuse, or rest on inferences.” He liked a number of things in it, he said, but worried chiefly about its omission of a bill of rights. On December 20, 1787, Jefferson wrote Madison from Paris to thank him for sending him a copy of the newly proposed Constitution. And what stands out in particular about that battle is that unlike his two other defeats, in which Hamilton outdueled Jefferson by playing the role of the hard-headed pragmatist opposite Jefferson’s out-of-touch theoretician, in the debate over the Bill of Rights, the roles were actually reversed. Today, in marking the 225 th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, we celebrate the culmination of that battle of wits. Diggs, then, that Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s brilliant creator, left out one battle in which Jefferson got the better of Hamilton. Hearing the oohs, ahhs, and applause as Hamilton slayed Jefferson felt just a bit like a personal defeat. Getting bested twice a show by the “ten dollar founding father” in a flurry of arguments and insults over whether to establish a national bank and whether to aid France in its war with England hurt especially when these youthful audiences reacted as if they were actually watching a real rap battle. Derek Webb looks at how Thomas Jefferson may have outdebated Alexander Hamilton when it came to the Bill of Rights.ĭaveed Diggs, the speed-rapping actor who played Thomas Jefferson in the original Broadway cast of Hamilton, once observed that losing two consecutive rap battles to Alexander Hamilton in every show before exuberant New York high school audiences always stung a little.
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