Hamilton: The Energetic Founder

Summary

Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804) was a key founding father—a politician, a constitutional thinker, and the nation’s first secretary of the treasury. He led the effort to write the brilliant defense and exposition of the Constitution, The Federalist, and later, as the nation’s first treasury secretary, he pioneered efforts to interpret the Constitution broadly, as a source of executive and judicial power.

Finding his purpose in the American Revolution and in its sequel, the creation of the United States and its constitutional form of government, he sought to give the nation and its government the power and energy required to preserve the fruits of the Revolution and the nation’s survival in a hostile world. In this concise, elegant, and scholarly overview of his life, thought, career, and legacies, acclaimed biographer R. B. Bernstein shows his life as a record of struggle, war, ambition, and of the practice of law, fierce politics, and good government.

A war hero, a brilliant lawyer, and a skilled and effective polemicist, Hamilton devoted his life and his career to the cause of American independence, the Union, and an effective general government. A perennial focus of controversy, a skilled and often ruthless political fighter, Hamilton helped to define the emerging partisan politics of the new nation. He was a key player in the quarrels over what its constitution meant and what powers it gave the Union. A brilliant administrator and a shrewd and cogent economic theorist, he created the American government’s role in the nation’s economic system and helped to secure for the nation an effective and energetic general government.

Hamilton was also a principal exponent of political combat in defense of personal and political honor. As such, he was a tragic victim of the honor culture he did so much to establish as a component of national politics, dying as the result of a mortal wound he suffered in his 1804 duel with Aaron Burr, his longtime antagonist.