Alexander Hamilton
By Charles A. Conant

Contents

I-Youth and Early Services

II-The Fight for the Constitution

III-Establishing the Public Credit

IV-Congress sustains Hamilton

V-Strengthening the Bonds of Union

VI-Foreign Affairs and Neutrality

VII-Hamilton as a Party Leader

VIII-Hamilton’s Death and Character

Excerpt from Chapter I

The life of Alexander Hamilton is an essential chapter in the story of the formation of the American union. Hamilton’s work was of that constructive sort which is vital for laying the foundations of new states. Whether the Union would have been formed under the Constitution and would have been consolidated into a powerful nation, instead of a loose confederation of sovereign states, without the great services of Hamilton, is one of those problems about which speculation is futile. It is certain that the conditions of the time presented a rare opportunity for such a man as Hamilton, and that without some directing and organizing genius like his, the consolidation of the Union must have been delayed, and have been accomplished with much travail.

The difference between the career of Hamilton in America and that of the two greatest organizing minds of other countries–Caesar and Napoleon–marks the difference between Anglo-Saxon political ideals and capacity for self-government and those of other races. Where the organization of a strong government degenerated in Rome and France into absolutism, it tended in America, under the directing genius of Hamilton, to place in the hands of the people a more powerful instrument for executing their own will. So powerful a weapon was thus created that Hamilton himself became alarmed when it was seized by the hands of Jefferson, Madison, and other democratic leaders as the instrument of democratic ideas, and those long strides were taken in the states and under the federal government which wiped out the distinctions between classes, abolished the relations of church and state, extended the suffrage, and made the government only the servant of the popular will.

The development of two principles marked the early history of the Republic, –one, the growth of sentiment for the Union under the inspiration of Hamilton and the Federalist party; the other, the growth of the power of the masses, typified by the leadership of Jefferson and the Democratic party. These two tendencies, seemingly hostile in many of their aspects, waxed in strength together until they became the united and guiding principles of a new political order, –a nation of giant strength whose power rests upon the will of all the people. It was the steady progress of these two principles in the heart of…

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