The Hamilton Scheme

May 15, 2024
A lively if overlong history of the origins of federal power. A reader of a QAnon-ish bent might come away from this book convinced that Alexander Hamilton founded the so-called deep state. That person would have a point. As Revolutionary War-era historian Hogeland writes, Hamilton was committed to founding a strong, even imperial national government; to achieve it, he crafted instruments of a national economy. One of them was public debt, the "driving wheel" for a great nation. Without debt, the fledgling nation could not have funded any number of endeavors, not least the first foreign war against the pirates of the Barbary Coast. Much as Thomas Jefferson disliked the specter of a federal power stronger than that of the states, without that debt, the Louisiana Purchase could never have been completed. As Hogeland shows, the struggle between Hamilton and his states' rights-minded opponents was an existential one "over the fundamental meaning of American government," and in many respects, it continues today. Hamilton had a talent for making enemies, though friends such as Declaration of Independence signer Robert Morris, wealthy and powerful, helped him survive politically. Morris' great lesson was one of "commercial domination," to which Hamilton aspired more as a national than a personal accomplishment. Hogeland's story is lengthy and circumstantial, but marked by plenty of drama: Hamilton's stepping out from under George Washington's shadow to become the foremost "Continentalist" politician of his day; his pitched battles with Albert Gallatin, "treasury secretary to two presidents," over the structure of the national economy; and Thomas Jefferson's eventual dismantling of "the Hamilton scheme" and subsequent returns to it until the hybrid called "Jeffersonian ends by Hamiltonian means" took root. A well-wrought tale of how the American empire came to be born on the balance sheet as much as by the gun.

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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.