If his judgment seems infallible, it’s really Washington’s judgment that we are witnessing. There’s certainly a lot of needless controversy in his life.įrom the time he became aide-de-camp to George Washington during the Revolutionary War, through the Constitutional Convention and his time as Treasury secretary, he was operating under Washington’s guidance. He would very often overreact to attacks against him and only worsen matters. But he had an extraordinary knack for making political enemies as well. Hamilton had a zest for political combat and a knack for winning admirers. But that brilliance was undermined by his rather atrocious political judgment. Q: Would you say Hamilton was the smartest of the Founding Fathers?Ī: He was certainly as brilliant if not more brilliant than any of the other Founding Fathers. It was a caricature, and it has undergone quite a change. The image we grew up with was that Hamilton was the stooge of the plutocrats. So he literally had created the entire infrastructure of Wall Street.īut I feel strongly that he was a more liberal figure than people think. The fifth, shares of the Bank of New York-the first private bank of New York-were also created by Hamilton. The fourth were shares of the Bank of the United States, created by Hamilton. Three were Treasury securities created by Hamilton. In fact, when he was Treasury secretary back in the 1790s, there were only five securities traded. It is more valid to say that Hamilton was a patron saint of Wall Street. We have caught up to his prophetic vision. I think one reason for the eventual reappraisal of Hamilton is that America has grown into the contours of the country of his imagination, not Jefferson’s. Jefferson represented a more soothing point of view: an America of small towns and traditional agriculture. This was a frightening and sinister vision to a lot of Americans at the time. He envisioned a country built on banks, corporations, stock exchanges and factories. On the other hand, Hamilton had a very modern take on our economic future. And if history is written by the victors, the victor during this era was the Democratic Party. Hamilton’s Federalist Party had disappeared by the start of the 19th century.

What do you notice about that list? Those were the men who were solidly in charge of American politics for many decades after Hamilton’s death. Hamilton’s main political enemies were John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe-and I’ll even throw in John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson for good measure.

A: I think the fact that he was killed in that duel has something to do with the lack of appreciation it robbed him of the opportunity in later years to write his own defense, or his own history of the events of the early republic.

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