Sovereignty and Solvency

Alexander Hamilton. The National Adventure 1788-1804, by Broadus Mitchell. Macmillan, $12.50 Just turned seventy, Broadus Mitchell has completed the second and final volume of his Alexander Hamilton the first having been published in 1957. Thus ends ten years of research, study and reflection, which have taken him to Copenhagen and St. Croix and to every library and repository in the United States where relevant materials were to be found; in the process he has read everything about Hamilton, his contemporaries and his age. Some notion of his labors may be had from the fact that his first volume contains 465 pages of text and 179 pages of notes; the present one, 555 pages of text and 217 pages of notes. The result is a magnificent political biography, indeed one of the best in the English language, and sounder and fairer than those currently being written about Jefferson (by Dumas Malone) and Madison (by Irving Brant). It has everything a “Life and Times” of a great man should have—an unerring feel for the period and all the important actors in it; a sense of their destiny, fulfilled or not, as they go about their day-to-day affairs struggling with both trivial and monotonous matters; style—that is to say, the utilization of language which embodies judgment of immediate events and wisdom concerning their relevance in time.

How does a new nation—struggling to escape earlier false starts and disaster, caught in the crossfire of greatpower conflict, with a disordered currency, no fiscal resources, indeed no élan—survive to achieve stability and an awareness of national purpose which will permit it to grow and prosper? It needs men of probity, vision and resolution: and these the young United States found in Alexander Hamilton and his older friend and patron and chief George Washington. In a striking passage, Mitchell sums up the relationship of the two:

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Louis M. Hacker

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Alexander Hamilton. The National Adventure 1788-1804, by Broadus Mitchell. Macmillan, $12.50 Just turned seventy, Broadus Mitchell has completed the second and final volume of his Alexander Hamilton the first having been published in 1957. Thus ends ten years of research, study and reflection, which have taken him to Copenhagen and St. Croix and to every library and repository in the United States where relevant materials were to be found; in the process he has read everything about Hamilton, his contemporaries and his age. Some notion of his labors may be had from the fact that his first volume contains 465 pages of text and 179 pages of notes; the present one, 555 pages of text and 217 pages of notes. The result is a magnificent political biography, indeed one of the best in the English language, and sounder and fairer than those currently being written about Jefferson (by Dumas Malone) and Madison (by Irving Brant). It has everything a “Life and Times” of a great man should have—an unerring feel for the period and all the important actors in it; a sense of their destiny, fulfilled or not, as they go about their day-to-day affairs struggling with both trivial and monotonous matters; style—that is to say, the utilization of language which embodies judgment of immediate events and wisdom concerning their relevance in time.

How does a new nation—struggling to escape earlier false starts and disaster, caught in the crossfire of greatpower conflict, with a disordered currency, no fiscal resources, indeed no élan—survive to achieve stability and an awareness of national purpose which will permit it to grow and prosper? It needs men of probity, vision and resolution: and these the young United States found in Alexander Hamilton and his older friend and patron and chief George Washington. In a striking passage, Mitchell sums up the relationship of the two: