The Hamilton Scheme
An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding
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"William Hogeland is the best guide I have found to understanding how we today are, for good and evil, children of Alexander.” —J. Bradford DeLong, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Slouching Towards Utopia
How Alexander Hamilton embraced American oligarchy to jumpstart American prosperity.
“Forgotten founder” no more, Alexander Hamilton has become a global celebrity. Millions know his name. Millions imagine knowing the man. But what did he really want for the country? What risks did he run in pursuing those vaulting ambitions? Who tried to stop him? How did they fight? It’s ironic that the Hamilton revival has obscured the man’s most dramatic battles and hardest-won achievements—as well as downplaying unsettling aspects of his legacy.
Thrilling to the romance of becoming the one-man inventor of a modern nation, our first Treasury secretary fostered growth by engineering an ingenious dynamo—banking, public debt, manufacturing—for concentrating national wealth in the hands of a government-connected elite. Seeking American prosperity, he built American oligarchy. Hence his animus and mutual sense of betrayal with Jefferson and Madison—and his career-long fight to suppress a rowdy egalitarian movement little remembered today: the eighteenth-century white working class.
Marshaling an idiosyncratic cast of insiders and outsiders, vividly dramatizing backroom intrigues and literal street fights—and sharply dissenting from recent biographies—William Hogeland’s The Hamilton Scheme brings to life Hamilton’s vision and the hard-knock struggles over democracy, wealth, and the meaning of America that drove the nation’s creation and hold enduring significance today.
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Alexander Hamilton was an unwavering elitist who worked tirelessly to transform the U.S. into an industrial empire ruled by oligarchs, according to this blistering study. Historian Hogeland (The Whiskey Rebellion) recaps Treasury Secretary Hamilton's project of using Revolutionary War debt to bind the new nation together, arguing that Hamilton designed his policy—whereby the federal government assumed state debts on terms generous to wealthy creditors—to give elites a stake in the government and as a rationale to levy taxes to finance more debt that would pay for business-friendly goals like building infrastructure, subsidizing industry, and funding the military. Crucial to Hamilton's scheme was a whiskey tax that galled the poor farmers who produced it, sparking the 1791 Whiskey Rebellion—which Hamilton welcomed, Hogeland contends, because it let him demonstrate federal power by organizing an army. Hogeland contrasts Hamilton, whose efforts promoting his elitist vision are depicted as "near-maniacal," with "the Democracy"—a term encompassing working-class radicals, backwoods moonshiners, and anyone who wanted rights for the nonpropertied—whom Hogeland wistfully celebrates for fighting back. His analysis of the early republic's finances is lucid and impressive, and the narrative is stocked with colorful, unflattering profiles of other founding fathers including George Washington, who emerges as a sharp operator who shaped government policy to boost the value of his frontier holdings. It's a bracing and insightful rejoinder to recent Hamilton worship.
