Alexander the Great: yet another unappreciated founding father

Washington Monthly, April, 2004 by Matthew Dallek

Alexander Hamilton By Ron Chernow The Penguin Press; $35.00

Two very distinct views have guided our understanding of America's Revolutionary generation: the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian, as historian Joseph Ellis points out in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Founding Brothers. Alexander Hamilton saw the American Revolution as a collectivistic enterprise designed to forge a coherent nation under a strong centralized federal government. The Hamiltonians wanted a state that had the power to raise a militia, regulate trade and banking, and perhaps more importantly, unify the 13 colonies, fearing that the new nation would be riven by internal strife. In addition, Hamilton viewed urban centers, brimming with crafts, shipping, and manufacturing, as one key to America's self-sufficiency. President Thomas Jefferson, by contrast, disdained the federal government as a likely repository of tyrants. Jeffersonians favored an agrarian society with strong individual rights (primarily for white men), and in contrast to Hamilton, supported the practice of slavery. In many respects, these splits--urban versus rural, federal versus local--define our politics to this day.

In his exhaustive and engaging biography of Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow, (who has authored biographies of John D. Rockefeller Sr., and J.R Morgan) describes Hamilton as the indispensable revolutionary. Chernow's gripping story sheds new light not only on Hamilton's legacy but also on the conflicts that accompanied the republic's birth. He passionately believed that if America were going to survive, order had to be balanced with liberty. In Hamilton's view, economic institutions, properly conceived, could foster manufacturing, protect private property, expand opportunity, and impose order on society. Chernow contends that more than any other founder, Hamilton's vision paved the road to America's future.

Born in the mid-1750s on the British West Indies' island of Nevis, Alexander Hamilton's family "clung to the insecure middle rung of West Indian life." Hamilton's father, a ne'er-do-well Scot, fled from home when Hamilton was just a boy. For Hamilton's mother, the breakup of this, her second marriage, tarnished her reputation for the rest of her life.

Hamilton's prospects, by contrast, were not so bleak. When he was young, he found a job working as a clerk at a mercantile house in St. Croix. When Hamilton's first cousin offered to pay for his passage to Boston where he might improve his lot in life, Alexander Hamilton seized his opportunity.

Ingratiating himself with well-to-do families in New Jersey (where he briefly settled), he eventually gained notice as a pamphleteer, and activist in Revolutionary America. Hamilton attended Kings College, in upper Manhattan; a prolific writer and voracious reader, he penned tracts in which he denounced the British, defended the rights of man, and described the Revolution as a legitimate reaction to tyranny imposed from abroad. Hamilton, at first, displayed a "slashing style of attack would make [him] the most feared polemicist in America," writes Chernow.

But Hamilton also had a moderate streak. Though he supported the American Revolution, he also thought it should be an orderly one. At one point, Hamilton defended a Tory newspaper publisher whose life was threatened by New York's revolutionary mobs. Later, Hamilton wrote to John Jay: "In times of such commotion as the present, while the passions of men are worked up to an uncommon pitch, there is great danger of fatal extremes."

In 1777, Gen. George Washington hired the 20-year-old Hamilton as his aide-de-camp, and he was soon functioning as Washington's unofficial chief of staff. The young pamphleteer ran missions, re-supplied the Army, guided the Continental Congress, and soothed tensions among Washington's bedraggled soldiers. Eventually, Hamilton made such an impression that he was appointed a colonel. He successfully led a valiant assault on a British regiment at Yorktown, winning great praise for his performance on the battlefield. By the war's end, Hamilton had become "a certified hero"; so exalted, in fact, that when the Revolution ended, he served as a New York delegate to the Constitutional Convention as well as author-in-chief of the Federalist Papers.

Ultimately, it was as President Washington's secretary of the treasury that Chernow argues Hamilton made his greatest contribution.

In riveting passages, Chernow describes the rise of the modern economy. Opposed to slavery based on the horrors Hamilton had witnessed during his West Indian boyhood, Hamilton wanted to end an institution he viewed as both backwards and brutal. Though frightened by the prospect of war between the South and the North, he spent his political capital pushing for the creation of strong central institutions he believed vital to the survival and prosperity of the new republic.

Almost single-handedly, the treasury secretary won passage of bills that established a U.S. bank, common currency, customs service, and coast guard. Hamilton negotiated a deal in which the capital would be moved from New York to Philadelphia to, ultimately, Washington, D.C., and in exchange the federal government would assume debts incurred by the states during the Revolution. (In assuming these debts, the federal government also assumed the authority to raise taxes to pay off those debts.) The power of the federal government to levy taxes had been enshrined into law.