An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding
July 15, 2024
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.