The Dark Side of Alexander Hamilton
The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding, by William Hogeland, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 544 pages, $35
Over the last two decades, Alexander Hamilton has become a folk hero. In 2004, Ron Chernow’s massive Hamilton biography was a bestseller. A decade later, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s spectacularly successful Hamilton: An American Musical further heightened the popularity of America’s first treasury secretary, despite—or, more likely, because of—its inaccuracies and simplifications. And this year, The New York Times and Bloomberg have run stories titled “There is a Secret Hamiltonian in the White House” and “Industrial Policy and Alexander Hamilton,” celebrating President Joe Biden’s economic initiatives.
Hamilton’s fondness for industrial policy was also one of the reasons the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard dubbed him the Mephistopheles of early U.S. history. William Hogeland’s new book, The Hamilton Scheme, essentially shares Rothbard’s view, although not for all the same reasons.
Unaffiliated with any university or think tank, Hogeland nonetheless has written several books about early U.S. history that are deservedly well-respected. His latest is not a full biography of Hamilton. It focuses instead on his political and economic policies and proposals, interlaced with mini-biographies of several of his supporters and opponents. Besides George Washington, these include Robert Morris, who served as the country’s superintendent of finance before the Constitution’s adoption; William Findley, one of Hamilton’s most vehement critics in the House of Representatives; and Albert Gallatin, who became treasury secretary under Thomas Jefferson. Hogeland does stray from his main themes to criticize Miranda’s portrayal of young Hamilton as a poor immigrant who had to surmount prejudice, emphasizing Hamilton’s “birth in a central economic site of a great empire [the British Caribbean] and his instant embrace by some of the most powerful people in revolutionary America.” Hogeland also debunks Chernow’s claim that Hamilton was an “uncompromising abolitionist.”
Hogeland is an enthusiastic egalitarian often hostile to market outcomes, which somewhat skews his analysis of such tax revolts as Shay’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion. Indeed, rather than treating this period of American history the way most accounts do, as an ongoing conflict between nationalists and defenders of states’ rights, he instead sees three separate contending interests: Continentalists, State Sovereigntists, and “the Democracy.” To be sure, the State Sovereigntists were dominated by elite leaders, and a fear of too much democracy was a major motivation for the Constitutional Convention. Some of the participants in the Democracy’s various revolts did indeed want to level wealth and cancel debts. Among the most extreme was Herman Husband, a peripatetic, popular, but bizarre religious zealot who is one of Hogeland’s heroes. But none of this undermines the book’s scrupulous scholarship.
Hogeland’s discussion of Hamilton’s role in what is called
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