Volume 51, Number 14 · September 23, 2004
The Whirlwind
By Edmund S. Morgan
Alexander Hamilton
by Ron Chernow
Penguin, 818 pp., $35.00
Americans, perhaps more than most people, have pondered the question of who they are and what their country is. In recent years the question has grown perplexing. Hence, I think, a new attention to the Founding Fathers, who presumably knew what they were founding. Here now is a superb study of one of them who was himself uncertain of who he was and of what he and his colleagues did. Alexander Hamilton had as large a hand as any of them in shaping American government un-der the Constitution of 1787, and his interpretation of that Constitution in The Federalist, dashed off in haste, still carries almost as much authority as the Constitution itself.
Review, 4513 words
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