Alexander Hamilton

Of all of the Founding Fathers of the American republic none, with the possible exception of Thomas Jefferson, has evoked more passions and aroused more controversy than Alexander Hamilton. As in Jefferson's case, these feelings originated in the political wars of the Federalist decade and still resorate two centuries later. The seemingly permanent friction between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians has been replicated in every generation. In the Jefferson-Jackson era Hamilton's persona as an elitist urban aristocrat condemned him as an enemy of an expanding democratic America-an Anglophile at a time when Great Britain was the major adversary, a defender of the central national bank when political pressures for decentralization doomed both the First and Second National Banks of the United States, and a spokesman for an Eastern oligarchy at a time when the westward movement assured the expansion of political rights. Such was his reputation as an enemy of the common man that his deep-seated opposition to the institution of slavery won little recognition from northern abolitionists. In this new biography, eminent historian Lawrence Kaplan examines Hamilton's conception of America's role i