Hamilton's Moment
Long obscured by the shadow of his rival, Jefferson, this Founding Father is proving to be a 21st-century hero
Suddenly, he is everywhere. A major new exhibition celebrating his life and work opened last week in New York. An exhaustive biography is winning admirers in high places, including the current and former occupants of the White House. A high-profile pundit invokes his ideas as the basis for a smarter kind of conservatism on the cover of a recent New York Times Magazine .
Is Alexander Hamilton finally receiving his due?
Perhaps--although most Americans, if they know who he is at all, remember Hamilton for two things: his face on the $10 bill and his fatal duel with Aaron Burr. Yet of all the great figures of the revolutionary era who did not become president, Alexander Hamilton probably most deserves to stand in the inner circle of the Founders' pantheon. A West Indies-born immigrant, he cut short his education in New York to become George Washington's most valued aide-de-camp and a hero at Yorktown. He was a prolific advocate of a stronger federal union under a new constitution, writing about two thirds of The Federalist. He served as President Washington's secretary of the treasury, creating institutions (including the Bank of the United States) and championing policies that laid the groundwork of America's future industrial, financial, and commercial pre-eminence.
Above all, Hamilton bequeathed to Americans a vision of an activist government led by an energetic executive and backed by a standing professional military. The goal: a secure nation with a diversified economy in which ever more individuals could improve their station through effort and talent. And among those individuals Hamilton pointedly included African-Americans, for whose freedom he, ahead of any other Founding Father, steadily campaigned.
Why, then, is this remarkable figure not better appreciated? The answer has to do with the way his reputation has fared across generations of American political life, rising and (mostly) falling in inverse relation to that of his greatest rival and antagonist, Thomas Jefferson. According to the prevailing myth, Jefferson was the foremost champion of equality and democracy, promoter of decentralized wealth and power. Hamilton, by contrast, is painted as the champion of bankers and merchants, a quasi monarchist and authoritarian who sought to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a select few. "We honor Jefferson," columnist George Will once wryly observed, "but live in Hamilton's country." And Ron Chernow, author of that recent Hamilton biography, explains why Jefferson still gets most of the honor: "We tend to remember the poet of our nation, and not its architect-engineer."
Chernow is not alone in trying to correct that injustice. Another attempt is a major exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America, which runs through February. Organized by Richard Brookhiser, author of a 1999 study of Hamilton, the show features some 150 documents, artifacts, and artworks relating to Hamilton's life. But the turn toward a more favorable evaluation of Hamilton has its roots in the 1960s and '70s, with reconsiderations of Jefferson. In addition to new arguments about Jefferson's affair with Sally Hemings, a slave, there was a growing acknowledgment that his states' rights position was inseparable from a defense of slavery. Into this climate came the first thorough modern re-examination of Hamilton, a 1979 biography by University of Alabama historian Forrest McDonald, which argued that "Hamilton was the real radical," says Stephen Knott, author of Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth (2002) and an associate professor at the University of Virginia. "He showed that Hamilton helped to create the conditions that made it possible for people to move upward in society, while Jefferson and other members of the southern 'squirearchy' were . . . defenders of a stable, aristocratic world."
advertisement
