Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

the principal author of the Declaration of Independence was recommending to the chief architect of the U.S. Constitution that any Virginia bank functionary who cooperated with Hamilton’s bank should be found guilty of treason and executed.

brilliant argument for a broad interpretation of the Constitution

The Bank of the United States would enable the government to make good on four powers cited explicitly in the Constitution: the rights to collect taxes, borrow money, regulate trade among states, and support fleets and armies.

Marshall said that necessary didn’t mean indispensable so much as appropriate.

Counterfeiting was also widespread, and when Hamilton became treasury secretary it was still a crime punishable by death in New York State.

“bimetallism” that was to become the curse of American financial history.

arrant

For Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton was more than just dead wrong in his prescriptions. He was becoming a menace to the American experiment, one who had to be stopped at all costs.

Philadelphia had its quota of sensual pleasures. Though French visitors dismissed it as quaintly puritanical, it enjoyed a livelier reputation among Americans.

The queen bee of local society was Anne Willing Bingham,

To avoid epidemics, many people vacated Philadelphia and other large cities in sultry weather.

cynosure

The man accused by his enemies of bottomless craft could be a most credulous dupe.

a pair of unscrupulous swindlers.

the first steam engine that James Watt built in Great Britain in the 1760s

Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin and the use of interchangeable parts in the 1790s,

autarky

in the words of one Hamilton chronicler, he “prophesied much of post–Civil War America.”40

Physiocrats, the school of French economists that extolled agriculture as the most productive form of human labor and condemned government attempts to steer the economy.

the capital markets that Hamilton had singlehandedly brought into being.

“There is a vast mass of discontent gathered in the South and how and when it will break God knows,” Jefferson told Robert R. Livingston on the eve of the trip.

“Of all the events that shaped the political life of the new republic in its earliest years,” Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick wrote in their history of the period, “none was more central than the massive personal and political enmity, classic in the annals of American history, which developed in the course of the 1790s between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.”

Today we cherish the two-party system as a cornerstone of American democracy. The founders, however, viewed parties, or “factions” as they termed them, as monarchical vestiges that had no legitimate place in a true republic.

The Federalists were allied with powerful banking and merchant interests in New England and on the Atlantic seaboard and were disproportionately Congregationalists and Episcopalians.

Often Baptists and Methodists, Republicans drew their strength from rich southern planters and small farmers.

Each side possessed a lurid, distorted view of the other, buttressed by an idealized sense of itself.

no sense yet existed of a loyal opposition to the government in power.

Washington, Hamilton, and then John Adams on the Federalist side, Jefferson, Madison, and then James Monroe on the Republican side—rather

patronage

A proficient political ventriloquist, Jefferson was skilled at using proxies while keeping his own lips tightly sealed.

Hamilton observed of Jefferson, “He knows how to put a man in a situation calculated to produce all the effects he desires without the gross and awkward formality of telling him, ‘Sir I mean to hire you for the purpose.’”

By now, monarchy and aristocracy were standard code words for Hamilton and the Federalists.

cat’s-paw

sedulous

arraigns

no immigrant in American history has ever made a larger contribution than Alexander Hamilton.

Again and again in his career, Hamilton committed the same political error: he never knew when to stop, and the resulting excesses led him into irremediable indiscretions.

limned

The stupefied Clingman wondered how James Reynolds could boss around America’s second most powerful man.

the siren of Philadelphia politics

His fears of legislative tyranny

captious

inveteracy

protean

Beckley said, the treasury secretary’s efforts both “direct and indirect are unceasing and extraordinary. . . . [T]here is no inferior degree of sagacity in the combinations of this extraordinary man. With a comprehensive eye, a subtle and contriving mind, and a soul devoted to his object, all his measures are promptly and aptly designed and, like the links of a chain, depend on each other [and] acquire additional strength by their union.”

Even as Jefferson mouthed sedative pledges of peace, he and Madison were secretly orchestrating the first concerted effort in American history to expel a cabinet member for official misconduct.

nobody ever proved that Alexander Hamilton had diverted a penny of public money for personal profit.

folderol

farrago

For Hamilton, the utopian revolutionaries in France had emphasized liberty to the exclusion of order, morality, religion, and property rights.