Alexander Hamilton, American

Description

A compact, compelling biography of one of the greatest, though comparatively overlooked, of the nation’s founders. While Brookhiser (Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington, 1996), an editor at the National Review and a contributor to the New York Observer, is dead wrong that “there is nothing else by or about” Alexander Hamilton (what of biographies by Jacob Cooke, Broadus Mitchell, and Nathan Schachner?), his biography will quickly take its place as vastly more discerning than any of its predecessors. While Hamilton lacked the range, learning, and prudence of the other founders, he arguably possessed the most powerful intelligence of any of them. Moreover, foreign-born and illegitimate, his identity as an American, rather than as a Virginian or New Yorker, was deeper and more emotional than that of his great contemporaries. Brookhiser’s achievement is to capture the full nature of this flawed but great man—and to characterize him as nationalist, idealist, and visionary—in a lively and insightful biography. Along the way, the author gives us deft portraits of Hamilton’s contemporaries and analyses of the events in which Hamilton played a major role. Brookhiser also breaks new ground in portraying his subject as a masterful journalist and writer and raises him into the ranks of the nation’s greatest newspaper essayists—not only for his brilliant contributions to The Federalist but also for countless other works. Hamilton’s “relationship with words,” writes the author, “was intimate and inexhaustible.” Brookhiser is especially good at concise explanation of the young nation’s finances and at descriptions of the bitter political violence of the 1790s—passionate battles that make our own political squabbles seem like tea-party talk. Trying to strengthen Hamilton’s reputation, Brookhiser occasionally goes overboard in speculating about his subject’s psychological needs and extracting contemporary lessons from Hamilton’s behavior and ideas, but the results of his efforts are always plausible. Hamilton has gained a fair, sympathetic, and always objective biographer—and a biography for our time.

Description

Alexander Hamilton is one of the least understood, most important, and most impassioned and inspiring of the founding fathers. An impoverished immigrant when he first came to American shores at age fifteen, Hamilton defined what it meant to be American in an age when the definition was up for grabs. He pounced on the opportunities available in New York and rose rapidly as a patriot, war hero, prominent lawyer, pioneering journalist, and author of two-thirds of The Federalist Papers. An aide to Washington in the Revolutionary war, he was named the first Secretary of the Treasury at the age of thirty-two, in which post he audaciously mapped a system of law and finance that almost single-handedly lifted the new nation into a capitalist era. His economic vision was expansive, celebratory, idealistic, and yet also pragmatic. He deserves to be honored today as the founding father of American capitalism. As the author of so many of The Federalist Papers, not to mention Washington's Farewell Address and several key arguments used by Chief Justice John Marshall, Hamilton fashioned key elements of the American political system. As the founder of the New York Post, and one of the most prolific writers in the age of pamphleteers like Tom Paine, Hamilton also deserves to be remembered as one of the fathers of American journalism. Finally, as evidenced by his extraordinary preemptive confession of a sexual affair and subsequent blackmailing, Hamilton deserves to be remembered for an honesty, passion, and conviction that was as rare in his day as it is in ours.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Alexander Hamilton, AmericanFree Press1999-01-01
• Alexander Hamilton, AmericanFree Press1999-01-01
• Alexander Hamilton, AmericanThorndike Press1999-01-01
• Alexander Hamilton, AmericanSimon & Schuster2000-01-01