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Alexander Hamilton: ambivalent Anglophile

2003; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 40; Issue: 08 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5860/choice.40-4817

1943-5975

American History and Culture

Alexander Hamilton: Ambivalent Anglophile. By Lawrence S. Kaplan. (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2002. Pp. xvi, 196. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $19.95.)Lawrence Kaplan's study of Alexander Hamilton is yet another entry into the burgeoning list of biographies and monographs dealing with the so-called Founding Brothers. Once dismissed as examples of the elitism and bewigged aristocracy that allegedly drove the thinking of the nation's founders, they have re-emerged in the past decade as the true Greatest Generation whose intellect, patriotism, and civic virtue, not coincidentally, stand in implied contrast with many of their counterparts today.Alexander Hamilton, while undoubtedly a card-carrying member of the Brothers, has never been admitted to the inner circle. Though he stares at us from the ??-dollar bill, his oft-quoted denunciations of democracy, his exotic origins, his admitted adultery, and his violent death have combined to exclude him. He himself, toward the end of his life, wrote that American world was not made for me (167), and many oi his critics, then and later, have come to agree.But not Kaplan. As the subtitle of his book suggests, Kaplan argues that Hamilton does not entirely deserve the attacks launched against him by Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and their followers. In the realm of foreign policy, which is the main focus of the book, Kaplan follows in the footsteps of Felix Gilbert, Paul Varg, and others in arguing that the differences between Hannltonian and Jeffersonian foreign policy, while real, have been overstated by later historians in order to provide drama to the first decade of the early republic.Although Kaplan's book is part of a series entitled Biographies in American Foreign Policy, nearly one-half covers the well-traveled ground of Hamilton's early years: Ins Caribbean origins, his precocious military career, the ambivalent relationship with George Washington, and his leadership in promoting the adoption of the Constitution. While foreign affairs occasionally drew comment from him in those years, it was only when he assumed the post of treasury secretary that his ideas become relevant to the history of the early republic. The first exhibit in Kaplan's case for something approaching a Hamilton-Jefferson consensus focuses on their agreement on public credit. No one knew better than Jefferson, newly returned from Europe in 1790, the need for the new nation to establish a sound credit rating abroad. Likewise with the domestic debt, where, Kaplan argues, Jefferson's claim of being duped by the wiles of his rival was made only after the division between the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians had become (96).The second exhibit has to do with the Nootka Sound crisis in 1790, which briefly threatened to disrupt Anglo-American relations as Britain contemplated an attack on Spanish possessions in North America. Kaplan maintains that both Jefferson and Hamilton were willing to allow a British army to cross American territory as part of the attack. The issue never came to a head.The third item concerns the Genet mission and American in the face of the Anglo-French war. Kaplan rightly notes that in the final analysis, neither Jefferson nor Hamilton contemplated an alliance with either France or Britain and differed only on the meaning of the term neutrality and who had the power to declare it.The fourth (and most dubious) argument lies in Kaplan's analysis of the Jay Treaty controversy. Most political historians have come to recognize that it was this issue, and not arguments over the loose or strict interpretations of the Constitution, that provoked schism among the Founders. …