Alexander the Great: yet another unappreciated founding father.

• Author: Dallek, Matthew
• Position: Alexander Hamilton - Book Review

Alexander Hamilton By Ron Chernow The Penguin Press; $35.00

Two very distinct views have guided our understanding of America's Revolutionary generation: the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian, as historian Joseph Ellis points out in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Founding Brothers. Alexander Hamilton saw the American Revolution as a collectivistic enterprise designed to forge a coherent nation under a strong centralized federal government. The Hamiltonians wanted a state that had the power to raise a militia, regulate trade and banking, and perhaps more importantly, unify the 13 colonies, fearing that the new nation would be riven by internal strife. In addition, Hamilton viewed urban centers, brimming with crafts, shipping, and manufacturing, as one key to America's self-sufficiency. President Thomas Jefferson, by contrast, disdained the federal government as a likely repository of tyrants. Jeffersonians favored an agrarian society with strong individual rights (primarily for white men), and in contrast to Hamilton, supported the practice of slavery. In many respects, these splits--urban versus rural, federal versus local--define our politics to this day.

In his exhaustive and engaging biography of Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow, (who has authored biographies of John D. Rockefeller Sr., and J.R Morgan) describes Hamilton as the indispensable revolutionary. Chernow's gripping story sheds new light not only on Hamilton's legacy but also on the conflicts that accompanied the republic's birth. He passionately believed that if America were going to survive, order had to be balanced with liberty. In Hamilton's view, economic institutions, properly conceived, could foster manufacturing, protect private property, expand opportunity, and impose order on society. Chernow contends that more than any other founder, Hamilton's vision paved the road to America's future.

Born in the mid-1750s on the British West Indies' island of Nevis, Alexander Hamilton's family "clung to the insecure middle rung of West Indian life." Hamilton's father, a ne'er-do-well Scot, fled from home when Hamilton was just a boy. For Hamilton's mother, the breakup of this, her second marriage, tarnished her reputation for the rest of her life.

Hamilton's prospects, by contrast, were not so bleak. When he was young, he found a job working as a clerk at a mercantile house in St. Croix. When Hamilton's first cousin offered to pay for his passage to Boston where he might improve his lot...