Thanks! One of my great enjoyments in doing this is sticking Alexander Hamilton back in the 18th century.
...it was not more expressive than the single word uttered by Alexander Hamilton, who owed no small part of his supremacy to the faculty of expressing the prejudices of his followers more tersely than they themselves could do. Compressing the idea into one syllable, Hamilton, at a New York dinner, replied to some democratic sentiment by striking his hand on the table and saying, “Your people, sir,—your people is a great beast!” pg 87
This is from famed journalist/historian/memoirist Henry Adams (John’s great grandson, John Q’s grandson) in his History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889-1891). Adams did not provide a source. Adams’s volumes were (are) widely praised, and this anecdote was repeated numerous times in the 20th century as something AH definitely said. (Other parts about AH in these volumes are interesting, and for the most part, pretty fair about the dysfunction AH sowed into the Federalist Party from 1800-1804.)
I think the first person to find the actual source of Adams’s quote was historian Stephen F. Knott in Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth (2002). Turns out it’s from the Memoir of Theophilus Parsons, Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (1859), written by his son, Theophilus Parsons. (Parsons Sr. was a Federalist.)
Then, as always, extremes produced extremes; and in the excitement and exasperation of political antagonism, words were sometimes used which were more extreme than the speaker’s thought. At a dinner party in New York, soon after the adoption of the Federal Constitution, the conversation turned upon the prospects of the country. One gentleman, whose name I never heard, was an earnest “friend of the people,” and descanted with much enthusiasm upon the glorious future then opening upon this new-born nation, and predicted the perpetuity of our institutions, from the purity and intelligence of the people, their freedom from interest or prejudice, their enlightened love of liberty, &c, &c. Alexander Hamilton was among the guests; and, his patience being somewhat exhausted, he replied with much emphasis, striking his hand upon the table, “Your people, sir,—your people is a great beast!” I have this anecdote from a friend, to whom it was related by one who was a guest at the table. After-dinner utterances have little value, unless, perhaps, their very levity makes them good indicators of the wind. We do not know the qualifying words which may have followed, or the tone and manner of that which was, perhaps, in part or in the whole, a jest. And it is fair to suppose that the remark, if it had any serious meaning, meant only that the people might be corrupted by prosperity and adulation, until they would lose all wisdom, and all principles of right, and all guidance of reason. (page from book, my emphasis)
So a guest at the table (unnamed) told it to Parsons Jr’s friend (unnamed), who told it to Parsons Jr. And some 30 years later Adams used it in his much more popular volumes. One can decide for themselves whether this is a good source.
Founders notes that the closest AH ever came to writing such a statement is in this 1802 letter to Rufus King: “But I as yet discover no satisfactory symptoms of a revolution of opinion in the mass ‘informe in gens cui lumen ademptum’ “ 6 in which he’s quoting from The Aeneid (see linked footnote).
Did AH sometimes say shocking things at dinner tables? Jefferson and Burr would say yes. Would he say something like this in 1788? Um, I’m not sure. Does this sound like him? To me, not really. Is this a harsh version of an opinion on the masses/populace that the Federalists largely held? Yes. Please see G. Morris’s thoughts, including his take on AH.
