TAGS:
Statesmen , United States -- Biography
United States , Politics and government - 1783-1809
YOUTH AND EARLY SERVICES
The life of Alexander Hamilton is an essential chapter in the story of the formation of the American Union. Hamilton's work was of that constructive sort which is vital for laying the foundations of new states. Whether the Union would have been formed under the Constitution and would have been consolidated into a powerful nation, instead of a loose confederation of sovereign states, without the great services of Hamilton, is one of those problems about which speculation is futile. It is certain that the conditions of the time presented a rare opportunity for such a man as Hamilton, and that without some directing and organizing genius like his, the consolidation of the Union must have been delayed, and have been accomplished with much travail.
The difference between the career of Hamilton in America and that of the two greatest organizing minds of other countries—Cæsar and Napoleon—marks the difference between Anglo-Saxon political ideals and capacity for self-government and those of other races. Where the organization of a strong government degenerated in Rome and France into absolutism, it tended in America, under the directing genius of Hamilton, to place in the hands of the people a more powerful instrument for executing their own will. So powerful a weapon was thus created that Hamilton himself became alarmed when it was seized by the hands of Jefferson, Madison, and other democratic leaders as the instrument of democratic ideas, and those long strides were taken in the states and under the federal government which wiped out the distinctions between classes, abolished the relations of church and state, extended the suffrage, and made the government only the servant of the popular will.
The development of two principles marked the early history of the Republic,—one, the growth of sentiment for the Union under the inspiration of Hamilton and the Federalist party; the other, the growth of the power of the masses, typified by the leadership of Jefferson and the Democratic party. These two tendencies, seemingly hostile in many of their aspects, waxed in strength together until they became the united and guiding principles of a new political order,—a nation of giant strength whose power rests upon the will of all the people. It was the steady progress of these two principles in the heart of the American people which in "the fullness of time" made it possible for the Union to be preserved as a union of free men under a free constitution. To Hamilton, the creator of the machinery of the Union, and to John Marshall, the great Chief Justice, who interpreted the Constitution as Hamilton would have had him do, in favor of the powers of the Union, this result was largely due.
If Cæsar, fighting the battles of Rome on the frontier of Germany, and kept from party quarrels at home, and Napoleon, born outside of France and free by his campaign in Egypt from the compromising intrigues of Parisian politics, were preëminently fitted by these accidents to transmute the spirit of revolution from chaos into order, Hamilton stood in somewhat the same position in America. Born in the little island of Nevis in the West Indies (January 11, 1757), he came to the United States when his mind was already mature, in spite of his fifteen years. He came without the local prejudices or state pride which influenced so many of the Revolutionary leade.......
