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

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 ofSlouching Towards Utopia

How Alexander Hamilton embraced American oligarchy to jumpstart American prosperity.

Forgotten founder no more, Alexander Hamilton has become a global celebrity. Millions know his name. Millions 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? Its ironic that the Hamilton revival has obscured the mans most dramatic battles and hardest-won achievementsas 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 dynamobanking, public debt, manufacturingfor 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 Madisonand 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 fightsand sharply dissenting from recent biographiesWilliam HogelandsThe Hamilton Schemebrings to life Hamiltons vision and the hard-knock struggles over democracy, wealth, and the meaning of America that drove the nations creation and hold enduring significance today.