Republican Empire: Alexander Hamilton on War and Free Government.

• Author: SYLLA, RICHARD
• Position: Review

* Republican Empire: Alexander Hamilton on War and Free Government By Karl-Friedrich Walling Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999. Pp. xii, 356. $40.00.

According to one of the precious little stories of the founding of the United States after the Philadelphia convention Benjamin Franklin was asked what the delegates hat come up with for the country. His answer was, "A republic--if you can keep it." That republics--free governments based on consent of the governed--have not been easy to keep is the starting point of Karl-Friedrich Walling's deep and scholarly meditation on political science and history. The main wrecker of republics has been war. In both the ancient and the modern worlds, Walling writes, "The necessities, accidents, and passions of war contributed mightily to the collapse of free governments" (p. xi).

The United States, he contends, is "the outstanding exception to the well-grounded historical axiom that war is the destroyer of free governments," adding, "After more than 200 years under essentially the same Constitution, Americans have fought numerous wars, both major and minor, both declared and undeclared, yet they still remain free. Why?" (p. xi). Walling's short answer, elaborated in the book, is Alexander Hamilton.

Hamilton? Most Americans, if they think about Hamilton at all, recall him as the man on the ten-dollar bill and as the first secretary of the Treasury, who straightened out the country's tangled public finances, in the process shaping its financial system and its diversified, capitalist economy. Those who delve a little more into the founding era know that Hamilton was a prime mover for the Constitution, its defender and expositor in The Federalist, and the initiator of the Constitution's expansive or broad construction. They ,also know that Hamilton's policies as Treasury secretary were controversial, provoking an Anti-Federalist opposition that coalesced under the leadership of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison into a political movement stressing states' rights, strict constitutional construction, and an agrarian economy.

Walling, who seems on the evidence of his book to have read just about everything that Hamilton ever wrote and much of what has been written about him, views Hamilton differently and from two angles. One angle is that of Hamilton's contemporaries, who saw him as a military man and the army general Americans buried with full military honors in 1804 while visiting British and French...