American Age:
Book Review
by Mike Mahn

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IPS Features Staff

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Title: Alexander Hamilton - American

 Author: Richard Brookhiser

Free Press

Notes from first reading: ‘Excellent book! I began marking impressive passages, intending to use quotes in a speech, but stopped because it slowed my enjoyment of the book. This presents the often-overlooked humanity and foibles of our Founders, in spite of which this great country emerged.”

Author Richard Brookhiser is a well-known historian and observer of the contemporary political scene, having served on the editorial staff of National Review (William Buckley’s conservative voice), yet also as a contributor to left-wing publications such as Time Magazine and the New York Times. The author does justice to one of the most important figures of the founding era, Alexander Hamilton.

I’ve always thought that Washington looked upon Hamilton as the son he never had, but would’ve been proud to have sired. Hamilton gave proof that the leading edge of the independence movement was more a meritocracy than an elitist, exclusive club of the independently wealthy. Hamilton rose from a humble household in the British West Indies possessions of Nevis and St. Croix, where he was raised by a mother who was called a ‘whore.’ His father abandoned the family when Hamilton was nine (9), the same year he went to work as a clerk in a merchant house. Brookhiser comments, “Americans like to think of themselves as self-made, though few of us are. Hamilton was, and wanted to give others the opportunity to become so.”

John Adams once called Hamilton, ‘the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar (sic).’ But that brat made his way to the colonies and quickly became a prolific writer. He started the New York Evening Post, a newspaper that survives to this day. He would join the fight when the revolution began, serving first as an artillerist under General Nathaniel Greene, then was chosen to be a member of General Washington’s staff, where he quickly rose to the rank of Colonel, and was given the honor by Washington of helping to lead the Continental Army at Yorktown.

Unlike Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison, Hamilton knew that independence must first be won on the battlefield, not in an exquisite assembly hall, where fancy prose and high-sounding rhetoric may proclaim it for posterity. Before there could be ballots, there were British bullets to be faced. Hamilton had not the luxury of reposing at a secluded estate in Virginia, like Jefferson and Madison, or a cozy Yankee farm, such as Adams, nor a Philadelphia location where the fighting was with words. This fact does not demean this illustrious trio, but should give perspective to the credentials of the ‘bastard brat,’ and give insight into the internal conflict and ambition competition that existed within the independence movement. 

After the war, Hamilton would self-educate and become a lawyer, whose talents made him America’s foremost legal scholar and co-author of the Constitution. John Marshall, famed for his leadership of the Supreme Court, once said of Hamilton that he, Marshall, ‘felt like a candle beside (Hamilton,) the sun at noonday.’ When the critical debates began to determine whether the Constitution would be ratified, Hamilton joined with John Jay and James Madison to pen the Federalist Papers, crucial arguments that then explained, and continue to define, the meaning of the document’s terms in persuasive terms which helped to gain approval of the charter. 

Hamilton, then only 32 and on the cusp of a great career that could have made him among the most wealthy and influential persons in the new nation, responded to the first President’s request to serve as Secretary of the Treasury. He brought with him a vision for the future of modern banking and finance that would be necessary for broad and uplifting prosperity, the proper role of taxation, and the importance of national government authority.

Hamilton has been proven correct, over the years, to have had the best model of the American system of government. However, in his era, Hamiltonian philosophy was opposed bitterly by many, perhaps none more famously than Thomas Jefferson, who favored the agrarian alternative premised on states’ rights with strictly limited national intrusion, and by TJ’s successors, notably Madison and Andrew Jackson, the latter who famously fought the National Bank. The Hamilton-Jefferson argument continues to this day.

The greatest tragedy of the founding era was the death of Hamilton in the duel at Weehawken with Aaron Burr, then vice-President under Jefferson. The great unknown, then and now, is the question, ‘what would the future have held for Hamilton, had he lived?’ We ask this question today because the mystery endures. Brookhiser’s book helps understand this complex and remarkable man who gave so much to the America of that time, and, in the process, made possible the economically strong America we know today.