Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Joanne B. Freeman, Yale University

Alexander Hamilton has long been the Snidely Whiplash of the founding period. Arrogant, aggressive, brash, impulsive, combative, and eternally convinced that he knew the answer to every question, he was disliked by many, even hated by some. During his lifetime, his problematic character, joined with his high-handed policies and opinions, made him a lightning rod for controversy. After his death, they made his a difficult memory to warm up to. Particularly in comparison with Thomas Jefferson, the spokesperson for America's egalitarian, democratic ideals, Hamilton looks heartlessly capitalistic, a sneering aristocratic prophet of America's dark side. In Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth, Stephen Knott seeks to "explain the evolution of Hamilton's controversial image in the American mind" (p. 7). Tracking the short rise and long fall of Hamilton's historical reputation across time, Knott offers a counterpart to Merrill Peterson's classic The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York, 1960).	1
Jefferson's shadow looms large in Knott's book, and rightly so, for Hamilton's reputation has remained linked with that of his foremost opponent almost from the moment of Hamilton's death. Knott argues that Jeffersonians who perceived "the memory of a dead Hamilton" (p. 25) as a threat to their cause did their best to destroy his reputation. Seizing on his seeming monarchism, as revealed by his proposal at the Federal Convention for a national executive to serve for life (during good behavior), they downplayed Hamilton's more democratic suggestions, such as his idea that the House of Representatives be elected by universal male suffrage. "It requires a leap of the imagination to find monarchical inclinations in his comments or actions," Knott writes, "but curiously, it is a leap that many Americans are still inclined to take" (p. 25).	2
Hamilton's reputation as a monarchist was solidified in the Jacksonian era. Despite a shared belief in an energetic executive along Hamiltonian lines, men like Andrew Jackson and James Polk attacked Hamilton (along with Henry Clay) as "enemies of the people" for seeming to support wealth and power at the expense of the common man. According to Knott, this was a demagogical effort to prey on "fear of economic complexity and change" (p. 44). The link between Hamilton and elite privilege would form the heart of his image for much of the next 150 years.	3
The mid to late nineteenth century was an exception to this rule. During the Civil War era, many northerners felt that the war vindicated Hamilton's advocacy of a strong national government. Even so, Hamilton was not quite embraced by the public mind. Despite Abraham Lincoln's support of a Hamiltonian dynamic, economically mobile society, he preferred Jefferson to Hamilton. Perhaps, Knott argues, this was an ingenious means of using "the South's most revered founder against them: by introducing Hamilton's ideas behind the éminence grise of Jefferson, Lincoln placed some of his Southern foes in a position of having either publicly to repudiate Jefferson's importance or to concede to some extent his alleged views" (p. 55). Confederate leader Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, praised Hamilton as a means of proving that even this ardent nationalist "rejected extreme centralization and supported the right of states to determine the status of slavery within their borders" (p. 57). After the war, northern Republicans continued to praise Hamilton, while southerners and northern Democrats looked to Jefferson as a South-friendly means of demonstrating their patriotism.	. . .