| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Stephen F. Knott. Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth. (American Political Thought.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2002. Pp. x, 336. $34.95.

One of the enduring features of American historiography remains the discounted reputation of Alexander Hamilton. First Thomas Jefferson, and then his epigone and hagiographers, succeeded in painting the New Yorker as so deficient in patriotism, fidelity to the Revolution, and good breeding ("bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar") as to disqualify him from ever becoming the recipient of popular affection. The fact that Stephen F. Knott's study appears forty-two years after Merrill D. Peterson's classic Jefferson Image in the American Mind (1960) is altogether emblematic of the problem the author addresses. Yet Knott minces few words in showing how much Hamilton's reputation owes to others' inaccurate and sometimes knowingly dishonest use of evidence. He provides conclusive substantiation, for instance, that Hamilton never uttered the infamous statement that "your people, sir—your people is a great beast!" Knott bluntly states that its repeated invocation by historians and others reveals "a stunning disdain for the integrity of scholarship and journalism" (p. 215). No timid debater, this author, and one weeps at the utterances of some of the historians he cites. . . .

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