The Riverside Biographical Series
NUMBER 10
ALEXANDER HAMILTON
A Hamilton
ALEXANDER HAMILTON
BY
CHARLES A. CONANT
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1901
COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY CHARLES A. CONANT
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published October, 1901
ALEXANDER HAMILTON
I
YOUTH AND EARLY SERVICES
The life of Alexander Hamilton is an essential chapter in the story ofthe formation of the American Union. Hamilton's work was of thatconstructive sort which is vital for laying the foundations of newstates. Whether the Union would have been formed under theConstitution and would have been consolidated into a powerful nation,instead of a loose confederation of sovereign states, without thegreat services of Hamilton, is one of those problems about whichspeculation is futile. It is certain that the conditions of the timepresented a rare opportunity for such a man as Hamilton, and thatwithout some directing and organizing genius like his, theconsolidation of the[Pg 2] Union must have been delayed, and have beenaccomplished with much travail.
The difference between the career of Hamilton in America and that ofthe two greatest organizing minds of other countries—Cæsar andNapoleon—marks the difference between Anglo-Saxon political idealsand capacity for self-government and those of other races. Where theorganization of a strong government degenerated in Rome and Franceinto absolutism, it tended in America, under the directing genius ofHamilton, to place in the hands of the people a more powerfulinstrument for executing their own will. So powerful a weapon was thuscreated that Hamilton himself became alarmed when it was seized by thehands of Jefferson, Madison, and other democratic leaders as theinstrument of democratic ideas, and those long strides were taken inthe states and under the federal government which wiped out thedistinctions between classes, abolished the relations of church andstate, extended the suffrage, and made the government only the servantof the popular will.
The development of two principles marked the early history of theRepublic,—one, the growth of sentiment for the Union under theinspiration of Hamilton and the Federalist party; the other, thegrowth of the power of the masses, typified by the leadership ofJefferson and the Democratic party. These two tendencies, seeminglyhostile in many of their aspects, waxed in strength together untilthey became the united and guiding principles of a new politicalorder,—a nation of gian