It’s easy to blame Alexander Hamilton for laying the groundwork for the overbearing federal government, but Ron Chernow’s excellent biography (Penguin, 2004) offers a more complete picture.
Yes, a reader learns about Hamilton’s many faults, but that reader will also encounter assessments like the one Chernow offers when describing Hamilton’s impact as the first Treasury Secretary:
Bankrupt when Hamilton took office, the United States now enjoyed a credit rating equal to that of any European nation. He had laid the groundwork for both liberal democracy and capitalism and had helped to transform the role of the president from passive administrator to active policy maker, creating the intellectual scaffolding for America’s future emergence as a great power. He had demonstrated the creative uses of government and helped to weld the states irreversibly into one nation. He had also defended Washington’s administration more brilliantly than anyone else, articulating its constitutional underpinnings and enunciating key tenets of foreign policy. “We look in vain for a man who, in an equal space of time, has produced such direct and lasting effects upon our institutions and history,” Henry Cabot Lodge was to contend. Hamilton’s achievements were never matched because he was present at the government’s inception, when he could draw freely on a blank slate. If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.
