The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding

by William Hogeland Narrated by William Hogeland

Overview

Alexander Hamilton has become a global celebrity. Millions know his name and 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 struggles over democracy, wealth, and the meaning of America that drove the nation's creation and hold enduring significance today.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"[A] blistering study...the narrative is stocked with colorful, unflattering profiles of other founding fathers...lucid and impressive...bracing and insightful." —Publishers Weekly

"A well-wrought tale of how the American empire came to be born on the balance sheet as much as by the gun." —Kirkus Reviews

"[D]rama-filled and insightful . . . Finely drawn characters bring The Hamilton Scheme to life and show the divisions in postwar economic philosophy that are still at play today." —BookPage

“America's exceptional wealth relative to other North Atlantic economies is, to a remarkable degree, Alexander Hamilton's creation. And so is America's remarkable tolerance for high inequality. 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

"I've always loved William Hogeland's writing, especially the confidence and verve with which he knocks down others' stupid sentimentalities in favor of a smart sentimentality that's actually worth holding onto: that American can truly be democratic. This book reveals a knockdown, drag-out, and often violent class war that hid in plain sight over what kind of economy America should have. It makes for as riveting a story as any hip-hop Broadway musical. And it's far more accurate to boot." —Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland and Reaganland

“Alexander Hamilton’s plans to consolidate wealth in an investor class were once as hotly debated as anything in American history. It took a lot of forgetting to make him a hero of the people. We’re in William Hogeland’s debt for getting the story straight and for telling it so engagingly, as it needs to be told, from the top down and from the bottom up.” —David Waldstreicher, distinguished professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of Slavery’s Constitution and The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley

"A bold and creative new narrative of Alexander Hamilton’s role in the American founding that brings lesser known but vital players into view." —Annette Gordon-Reed, Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University and author of On Juneteenth and The Hemingses of Monticello

Kirkus Reviews

2024-04-17
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940160399263
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	05/28/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	375,958

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