The Self-Made Founder (April/May 2004 | Volume: 55, Issue: 2)

The Self-Made Founder

AH article image

Authors: John Steele Gordon

Historic Era: Era 3: Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s)

Historic Theme:

Subject:

April/May 2004 | Volume 55, Issue 2

The 18th century was an aristocratic age, even in relatively egalitarian America. The elite were the major landowners in the plantation colonies, such as Thomas Jefferson, and the great merchants in port cities, such as John Hancock.
 
So, it is hardly surprising that, of all the Founding Fathers, only two were not born into the higher reaches of American society. One was Benjamin Franklin. His father was a Boston chandler and soap-maker, what today we would call lower middle class, and Franklin was apprenticed to his older brother to learn the trade of printing. But, by the time of the American Revolution, he had become one of the most famous people in the world, not to mention very wealthy. If he was not born into the elite, Franklin had most certainly risen into it by the time of the Revolution.

The other low-born founder, Alexander Hamilton, started out life at a social level far below that of Benjamin Franklin. Indeed, in the typically snippy words of his political enemy John Adams, he had been born the “bastard brat of a Scots peddler,” for his parents were not married. He was not even born in what is now the United States, entering the world in the remote and unimportant island of Nevis in the British West Indies. By the time he was 10, his father had deserted the family. By the time he was 12, he was a penniless orphan, earning a precarious living in a St. Croix merchant establishment.

By the time he died, however, he had not only helped mightily to found the American republic (he was a signer of the Constitution and wrote two-thirds of the Federalist Papers, which have been fundamental constitutional literature ever since), but he had established a financial system that gave the new United States the best credit rating and money supply in the Western world. He was truly the founder of the American economy.

And yet Hamilton, it seems to my admittedly prejudiced eye, has never gotten his due attention from either the nation he served so well or from scholars. He is, to be sure, seen on the ten-dollar bill, and there is a first-rate statue of him outside the Treasury Building in Washington. But there is no official memorial to him in the nation’s capital. And the literature on his great contemporary and antagonist Thomas Jefferson is much larger. There is a bibliography of Jefferson-related materials that runs to no less than 486 pages, but there has been no full-scale modern bibliography of Hamilton at all. This is ironic, in that we live today in a world that is far, far closer to the future of America that Hamilton envisioned (and which he helped decisively to make possible), than to Jefferson’s always-utopian, and static, vision of a land full of yeoman farmers. Hamilton foresaw a dynamic economy in which endless opportunities would allow individuals, however lowly their births, to rise as far