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  • Writer's pictureJoshua Li

31. Washington on Your Side

Updated: Aug 21, 2023

In this point of time, both parties were throwing rocks at the other. The cabinet was splitting into one of the 2 parties, and both parties were talking smack about each other in the press. In the next couple of lines, Jefferson concisely highlights his perspective on Hamilton:


"I get no satisfaction witnessing his fits of passion" - he sees Hamilton's actions as trivial and not helpful to the nation as a whole.


"Our poorest citizens, our farmers, live ration to ration/As Wall Street robs 'em blind in search of chips to cash in" - Jefferson is a large supporter of the poor citizens, which is why he thinks Hamilton is just throwing "fits of passion" and messing around by supporting Wall Street instead of the actual people.


"Somebody give me some dirt on his vacuous mask/So we can, at last, unmask him" - During that time, mudslinging (finding dirt on political opponents) was common and was used to undermine opponent's power or unseat them entirely.


So if what Jefferson says is true, how is Hamilton still in power? To put it simply. it was because Washington is supporting him. For the duration of his presidency, Washington tended to favor Hamilton over Jefferson, hence the line, "It must be nice, it must be nice/To have Washington on your side".


In the second half of the song, Jefferson and Madison took to find faults in Hamilton's actions rather than complain about Hamilton himself.

  1. "So he's doubled the size of the government/Wasn't the trouble with much of our previous government's size?" - As Hamilton's idea for a stronger central government was backed by Washington, we see the government's size double. However, Jefferson and Madison questions this because the problem with the British empire that ruled America beforehand was its massive size. At some point, it became needlessly bureaucratic and had trouble governing its people.

  2. "Centralizing national credit and making American credit competitive" - this refers to Hamilton's financial plan, as debated in Cabinet Battle #1. Although Jefferson and Madison agreed to the deal, they were still upset about the idea itself.

  3. "Somebody has to stand up for the South" - Hamilton largely represented the North with its wealthy financial economy. The South, however, was mainly composed of farmers and plantations, and was underrepresented and often overlooked by the Federalists.

Finally, after realizing Washington won't be convinced by Jefferson, he decides to take action himself. As Hamilton is the U.S. Treasurer, he is in charge of large sums of money, which also makes it easy for him to commit a scandal with that money. Hence, Jefferson and Madison decides to "follow the money and see where it leads", or to find Hamilton's illegal actions in his money, if there was any to begin with.

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