An overflow audience gathered at the New-York Historical Society last Thursday to hear a debate on which of two statesmen exerted the greatest influence on shaping the character of their shared homeland. The program was “Alexander Hamilton vs. Thomas Jefferson: Of These Two Great Americans, Which Had the Greatest Impact Upon America?”

The debaters appropriately hailed from the law schools of Columbia University, which Hamilton attended and that boasts a classroom building named after him, and the University of Virginia, which was founded by Jefferson. The provosts of both institutions were in the audience.

The evening, which was part of the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Distinguished Speakers Series, held in cooperation with the CUNY Graduate Center, offered a window into Republican and Federalist views of post-Revolutionary America.

New York and Virginia received equal billing throughout the night. (Although the turf belonged more to Hamilton, since he, among other endeavors, once lived and practiced law here.) The president of NYHS, Louise Mirrer, offered a welcome. Then followed a welcome from the president of the Virginia Historical Society, Charles Bryan Jr. He said, “You cannot assume that the Virginia Historical Society will officially side with Mr. Jefferson this evening. To do so, our first president would be spinning in his grave,” referring to Chief Justice John Marshall, who initially headed the VHS.

Marshall may have been a cousin of Jefferson, but the two were bitter political enemies. Mr. Bryan said that Marshall once wrote that he never considered Jefferson a particularly wise, sound, or practical statesman. By contrast, Jefferson believed, “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle”

The vice president for communications and marketing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harold Holzer, took the podium next. He said that, paradoxically, he felt right at home and a bit out of place: At home because he is a New Yorker, a museum professional, and a historian on the political culture of the period of the Civil War. Out of place, he said, because “the subject for me – pardon the pun – is in one era and out the other.” He said Lincoln and Douglas could find much in the words of the two figures being debated that evening.

Matthew Adams, who was ranked sixth nationally as a speaker and fourth nationally as a team member of the American Parliamentary Debate Association, spoke first, on Jefferson’s behalf. He works as an associate at Foley Hoag in Boston.

He said that Jefferson, while he was U.S. minister to France, communicated his ideas about the Constitution and corresponded with James Madison. In late 1787, Jefferson received a draft of the Constitution from his colleague. His chief objection was that it lacked a bill of rights, Mr. Adams said.

Mr. Adams argued that Jefferson’s writing of the Declaration of Independence defined the character of the nation, since it “burned into our understanding the belief that we are born equal.” President Lincoln also praised the third president – he once said, “All honor to Jefferson, to the man who in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce to a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuttal and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.” Mr. Adams also noted that Martin Luther King Jr., in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” cited that sentence from the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal.

Matthew Schwartz rose to speak on behalf of Hamilton. Mr. Schwartz, who served as president and chief executive of the American Parliamentary Debate Association, is an associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York. He opened with the statement, “We live in Alexander Hamilton’s world, and we are all better for it.”

He recounted Hamilton’s rags-to riches rise to fame – a true American dream tale. Hamilton, an illegitimate child, became a war hero by age 21. Once he entered politics, a key issue at stake, Mr. Schwartz said, was whether America would be a centralized government or a decentralized government.

Hamilton, Mr. Schwartz said, realized that the Articles of Confederation were a disaster. Jefferson wanted a strong Virginia government, rather than a strong federal government, as Hamilton did. Hamilton’s many achievements include helping to write the “Federalist Papers,” his role in getting the government to take on debt; his role in establishing the Navy and Army; helping draft a flexible Constitution and supported judicial review; set up the Bank of New York and the stock exchange, Mr. Schwartz continued. Hamilton wanted both farming and manufacturing, but Jefferson thought cities to be “sinks of voluntary misery” and stock markets to be instruments of pure speculation.

Mr. Schwartz said Hamilton was not anti-farmer but wanted to let people do different things with their lives. On the issue of slavery, he said Jefferson did claim to oppose it but “actions speak louder than words.” He then cited Jefferson’s opinion that African Americans were inferior.

He said Hamilton was a firm abolitionist who personally helped to end slavery in New York and New Jersey.

Adrienne Penta, who works at the law firm of Choate, Hall & Stewart in Boston, took the next turn in defending Jefferson, saying he had changed the world around him. Jeffrey Williams of the Hamilton team interrupted her to ask how good an Anglican Jefferson was. She cited a book Jefferson compiled called “The Philosophy of Jesus” and said it would be wrong to say he was not a Christian.

She spoke of his role in helping create the separation of church and state, how Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on their expedition west, and his role in the Louisiana Purchase.

Columbia Law School student Mr. Williams, who served as president of the American Parliamentary Debate Association, spoke last, saying, on behalf of Hamilton and against Jefferson: “I fail to see how the Declaration of Independence has more currency than the U.S. dollar.”

Mr. Williams also played the race card and said that with regard to Jefferson’s owning slaves, “It doesn’t seem that his benevolence matched his rhetoric.”

Speaking from the audience, Columbia’s provost, Alan Brinkley, said it was clear that Hamilton was the more recognizably modern of the two, and recognition of his status as a thinker is perhaps past due. But “at the risk of betraying my own university” he went on say a word on behalf of Jefferson. “Democracy needs many things,” such as governmental institutions and finance, and Hamilton made inestimable contributions. But a democracy also needs an ideology, and no one more than Jefferson set forth the idea of liberty as the foundation of the American dream, he said.

UVA’s provost, Gene Block, who was also in the audience, cited Jefferson as founder of the patent system. He also cited the fact that Jefferson received more hits than Hamilton when their names were entered on search engines such as Google, Ask Jeeves, Amazon, and Yahoo. “The University of Virginia chose its founder very wisely,” he said.

Mr. Schwartz – in a clever rebuttal to Mr. Block – said, “Let’s Google search Britney Spears and Mozart” to see which gets the most hits.

Before the final remarks were given, Mr. Holzer joked, “I wonder how Jefferson would have felt that the final word on Jefferson will come from an Adams.” The two Adamses are of no relation.

There was a show vote of hands as to whether Jefferson or Hamilton had more impact on America, and Hamilton won. Mr. Holzer quipped of the votes, “We don’t have time to certify them, count them, or recount them.” One man raised his hand with a “point of order” before the vote and objected that the audience was biased since it was a Hamiltonian audience.

Disclosure: The Knickerbocker is a Columbia Law School graduate.