The genius of the American constitution is that it intends for the people not only to determine who governs them, but also to determine government policy through their conglomerate vision of what America ought to be. Conflicts between Federalists and Anti-federalists, abolitionists and slaveholders, trust-busters and capitalists, unions and management, even Irish and Italians, are examples of how a national vision is formed from individual competing visions. When policy reflects the national vision, government is working as the constitutional Framers intended. History suggests, however, that the vision that drives the vehicle of American government is not always drawn from the competing voices of the people. It is sometimes imposed by an individual or a small group. The vision, in other words, can be hijacked.

In 1789, the loose federation of states that banded together to defeat the largest expeditionary force ever fielded by the British army until that time formally organized themselves under a new constitution as the United States of America. Although it had been eight years since the end of the Revolutionary War with the British surrender at Yorktown, no one knew exactly what shape this new country of theirs might take. Some, like the Quakers, had a vision of America as a city on a hill, providing a beacon of religious liberty and moral conduct to the rest of the world. Others saw America as a place where the God-given English freedoms that colonists had been denied by King George might be enjoyed even more fully than in England. Still others saw America in terms of economic opportunity, whether it be novel opportunities to own land or equally novel opportunities to found industrial dynasties. The Framers of the Constitution intended these competing visions for America to swirl and collide and brew in the pot of democratic process, emerging as a national vision that would drive policy. The federal structure was designed so that the vision of one man, no matter how prominent or revered, would not derail the composite vision of the states and their people. In 1791, a mere two years after the start of the new constitutional government, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton proved that a clever and determined man could do exactly that—subvert the intended process and impose his own vision on America in place of that generated by its people.

Hamilton’s vision for America was one he had harbored since escaping life as an orphaned bastard merchant’s clerk in the West Indies. Hamilton, despising Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian utopia, believed that America ought to become an industrial power capable of great works. Those works, Hamilton believed, required a concentration of capital in the hands of a few talented, ambitious elites, who could direct the wealth of the nation to great and useful ends, and a concentration of power at the national level.

Hamilton’s mentor was Robert Morris, a merchant known as the Financier of the Revolution. Morris was Washington’s first choice for Secretary of the Treasury. Morris declined, recommending Washington’s former aide and his own protégé Hamilton instead. Morris preferred to serve in the Senate, where he headed several committees on finance. Moriss’s influence was so great and his financial expertise so essential that when he threatened to resign from office unless he was exempted from conflict of interest rules, Congress agreed. Morris made a fortune while in public service.

Morris shared Hamilton’s vision of America as an industrial titan, its vast bounty liquidated and concentrated into the hands of ambitious investors who could use it to make her great. Morris is recorded to have said that the only way to accomplish this goal was to “open the purses of the people.” Hamilton absorbed the lesson, and devised a plan to channel wealth through the federal government to the ambitious investors of his vision while dealing a blow that would over time prove fatal to the principle that states, not the federal government, should be politically dominant in matters of economics.

Hamilton’s plan for opening the purses of the people bespoke his legendary intelligence and subtlety. After the Revolution, popular sentiment abhorred the idea of a direct federal tax on individual citizens. States, not the federal government, were seen as the only authority entitled to impose a direct tax. Hamilton’s first move was to make direct federal taxation financially unavoidable. Hamilton and Morris convinced Congress that the federal government should absorb each state’s debt from the Revolutionary War, including debts to individual citizens whose property had been commandeered by the Continental Army. Congress agreed, and the federal debt soared from roughly $11 million to over $80 million. Hamilton and Morris then offered a solution to this new, staggering national debt. They proposed that bonds should be sold on the debt with the interest guaranteed in gold. Congress authorized the bonds. Investors, many hand-picked by Morris, bought them. Hamilton and Morris created a pipeline by which federal funds would be transferred in gold to Hamilton’s envisioned class of investor elites. All that remained to build was the other end of the pipeline, connecting the federal government with the purses of the people. Hamilton proposed to Congress that the bonds, which deferred but did not eliminate the national debt, should be financed by an excise tax (income taxes being unpalatable to Morris’s investors, and land taxes unbearable to the powerful Virginia planter class). Hamilton proposed that whiskey, one of the most lucrative homegrown American products, ought to be the subject of this tax.

Debate raged, both in Congress and among the people. Citizens from west of the Appalachian Mountains, the heart of American whiskey-making, argued rightly that the proposed tax would fall hardest on their shoulders. It was difficult for Appalachian farmers to profit from surplus harvest. Local markets could only consume so much and Spanish markets down the Mississippi were not available to American trade. The only way to profit from a bountiful harvest was to sell part of it back east. The cost of transporting grain across the mountains was high, however, and often made such trips unprofitable. That same grain, fermented as mash and distilled into whiskey, could be transported cheaply and sold at a high profit. Almost every western farmer, and many millers, smiths, and other tradesmen, ran small stills, and many sold their whiskey back east or even overseas. Whiskey was the region’s only cash crop. Whiskey never spoils, and it retained constant value against the gold standard. In the west, where gold was scarce and paper money of little value, whiskey often served as surrogate currency. A tax on whiskey would affect every aspect of life in that area.

Hamilton, although part of the executive branch, led the charge in Congress to enact the whiskey excise. He argued it as a public health measure, and staunchly maintained that the tax was fair because it would only affect those who chose to drink whiskey (as America’s first great economist, he knew better). Hamilton stalked the halls of Congress, cornering legislators and impressing on them the importance of the measure. Despite heated opposition, the whiskey tax act passed.

Almost every aspect of the whiskey tax was designed to inflame westerners. The act required that stills be registered and stamped, a probably deliberate parallel with the Stamp Act that had helped spawn the American Revolution. Stills, no matter how small, were taxed either at a prohibitive flat rate or on a per-gallon capacity basis. The capacity of a still was calculated according to how much whiskey the still could produce if it were run 24 hours per day during the entire distilling season at efficiency rates Hamilton calculated from studying large eastern distilleries. In practice, large distillers, who could operate 24 hours per day for the whole season at efficiencies greater than assumed by the act, could reduce the tax per gallon produced substantially. Small distillers, like most of those in the west, could not operate their stills all day and night, and could not achieve the assumed efficiencies. Their tax per gallon produced was often several hundred percent higher than large distilleries.

This fundamental inequity was known both to the westerners and to Hamilton, who hoped to make whiskey one of the first titanic American industries. The whiskey tax served the dual purpose of channeling money to his investor class and discouraging small distilling with a heavy financial burden, leaving the field open for larger distillers who could operate more efficiently and become the industrial giants Hamilton hoped for.

The results were predictable. Western distillers refused to register their stills. Tax collectors began suffering attacks by disguised men with blackened faces or dressed as Indians. Citizens who aided local tax officials suffered social ostracism and outright intimidation. Many members of the local militia, charged with keeping order, were small distillers actively engaged in resisting the tax. The Mingo Creek Association soon formed, a purely democratic 500 member group whose sole aim appeared to be resisting the whiskey tax. The Mingo Creek Association became a kind of shadow government enforcing a code of noncompliance with the whiskey tax. Under their auspice, even complying with the whiskey tax by registering a still became grounds for intimidation or attack. The tax was soon acknowledged as uncollectible.

By 1794, Hamilton was urging Washington to raise an army to march to the Pittsburgh area, the center of the disturbance, or, failing that, to send a federal agent with warrants for those who had attacked tax collectors. Pittsburgh had no federal court; anyone served with a warrant would have to surrender themselves in Philadelphia. Washington understood that being required to answer for criminal activity several hundred miles from home, in front of an urban eastern jury, might be the last straw for the westerners, who saw the right to a local jury as one of the most sacred institutions of freedom. With Washington’s support, Congress passed legislation allowing federal warrants to be issued for state courts in Pittsburgh. Hamilton understood, too. He arranged to have the warrants served before the new law passed. Issued under the old law, the warrants that rode west with a federal marshal required defendants to report to Philadelphia.

As Hamilton predicted, the warrants were the last straw. Resistance blossomed into outright rebellion. The marshal serving the warrants, under threat of attack, took shelter in the house of General John Neville, a large distiller and the head of the local tax apparatus. Local militiamen belonging to the Mingo Creek Association attacked the house. Shots were exchanged and the house was burned to the ground. Events snowballed. The Mingo Creek Association soon sponsored a congress with delegates from four surrounding counties to consider declaring independence from the United States. The rebels demanded that General Neville and other whiskey-tax sympathizers be banished from Pittsburgh, or else they threatened to burn the town. Federalists fled. Moderates were silent, or feigned complicity, from fear of reprisal.

When news of the violence reached Philadelphia, Hamilton pressed Washington to raise an army and head west. Washington, although judicious, was no friend to threats to the constitutional union. He suspected that the rebellion was caused by the French or French-affiliated agitators. Hamilton encouraged this belief. Washington raised an awe-inspiring 13,000 troops and marched west, hoping that the show of force would both quell the Whiskey Rebellion and chill future insurrection in other areas. Hamilton, convincing Secretary of War Henry Knox to take a leave of absence to attend to personal business, accompanied Washington as acting Secretary of War. By the time this massive army reached the Pittsburgh area, the rebels, hearing of its coming, had either fled or submitted. Washington returned to Philadelphia. Hamilton remained, and, circumventing judicial process, hand-selected men to be marched back to Philadelphia to be made public examples of.

The results of Hamilton’s actions cannot be underestimated. In 1791, a direct federal tax was unthinkable, prevailing wisdom said that states had the sole right to tax and manage local economies, and the federal government was viewed as a distant entity with only the most marginal relation to individual citizens. In 1794, after the Whiskey Rebellion had been suppressed, the situation was reversed. Federal taxes—which, through bonds, went almost directly from the purses of the people to the purses of Hamilton’s investors—were accepted. Also accepted was a federal role in local economies, and the federal government was viewed with a new note of respect and fear as able and willing to exercise force against individuals. The vision of America that held personal liberty and the primacy of local government so dear that it countenanced rebellion when those principles were violated was dead. Hamilton had circumvented democratic process to impose his personal vision of federal primacy and industrial ambition. The national vision was, at least temporarily, determined by one man rather than the competing visions of the people.

Although the federal government has changed substantially over the last 200 years, those changes have not made the national vision for what America ought to be less susceptible to hijack. History has yet to judge the administration of President George W. Bush, for example, but public knowledge suggests that a Hamiltonian hijack has occurred. The personal responsibilities for this hijack, and its precise mechanism, will, doubtless, become known as time passes, but the fact remains: the democratic process of determining a collective vision of what America ought to be has been displaced by a new vision, imposed from above and not shared by any large segment of the people.

There is no parallel between President Bush, who has not displayed remarkable judiciousness, and George Washington, rightfully renowned for that trait. Nor is there a parallel between Vice President Dick Cheney (or any of the other individuals in President Bush’s administration) and the almost mythically brilliant Hamilton. But there is a parallel in the way that the executive branch has seized and reshaped the vision of what America ought to be against the will of its people.

Prior to September 11, 2001, various visions of what America ought to be swirled and collided and brewed in the pot of democratic process. Two categories of issue particularly stood at the fore. Domestically, there were competing visions of how the federal government ought to govern, with some calling for increasing legislative activity and accountability, and others seeking to concentrate power in less accountable but more efficient locations such as the presidency and the judiciary. In foreign relations, some sought a degree of isolationism, economic nationalism, and military disinvolvement, while others sought open borders, untarriffed free markets, and a world presence for the U.S. military. American policy took, as it was intended to, a meandering middle course defined by the relative strengths of these competing visions. National elections hinged on candidates’ positions on these matters (or on their proxies, such as abortion, NAFTA, and school prayer). Since that time, American policies appear to have been determined by a different vision, imposed from a source other than the brew of visions generated by the people.

Leaving aside how the hijack happened as an issue more appropriate for future historians (although the political capital of fear inspired by terrorist attacks has certainly played some role), there is little question that in the last seven years concentrated power, open borders, untarriffed global markets, and a worldwide U.S. military presence have become the entrenched policies of the United States government. The outcry against these policies, particularly the strong opposition to President Bush and Senator McCain’s immigration reform act, protest against the outsourcing that is the hallmark of global markets, indignation at the increasing amounts of power openly wielded by the executive branch and federal judges at the expense of states and Congress, and the remarkable public disapproval of the Iraq war, suggest that these policies conflict with the prevailing citizen view of what America ought to be. These policies, in other words, impose the vision of a few, rather than recognizing the composite vision of the people. The national vision has been hijacked.

The wisdom of this imposed vision is a subject beyond the scope of this essay—an iteration of the fundamental question every citizen is entitled to voice an answer to: “what ought America be?” The more immediate question is how to reestablish a national vision drawn from the competing visions of states and citizens. On one level, the answer seems simple: voters should demand policies consistent with their own visions, and, if the system works as intended, those aggregated demands will result in policies that reflect the true national vision. On another level, doubt remains. If the national vision can be appropriated so easily, what action can see it safely restored? Even more troubling, part of the new imposed vision appears to be the concentration of power in the hands of executive and judicial officers insulated from democratic process. As more power resides further from the reach of the people, it becomes less certain that, even if a national vision is asserted through the voices of the people, the federal government will be obligated to respond to it.

Hamilton’s hijack changed what America was to become in lasting ways, but it left open the means for the people to reassert their vision, and they ultimately did through Thomas Jefferson’s election to the presidency in 1800. This new hijack of America’s vision, however, concentrates power in a way that lays the foundation for making itself permanent. The question we face now is not only “what ought America be,” but “what ought Americans do about it?”