Book Reviews:
Alexander Hamilton: A Life

William Sterne Randall, Alexander Hamilton: A Life (New York: Harper Collins, 2003). 476 pages. $15.95 paperback.

Reviewed by Scott B. MacDonald

Click here to purchase William Sterne Randall's book, "Alexander Hamilton: A Life", directly from Amazon.com

At a time when tales of U.S. Treasury Department secretaries appear to be all the rage, it is insightful to have at hand an excellent biography of the first man to fill that position, Alexander Hamilton. Although his life has been treated before, William Sterne Randall’s account, Alexander Hamilton: A Life is well worth the money. Randall, an accomplished historian with biographies on Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, presents a well-written and vivid re-telling of Hamilton, the bastard son of an English women in the Caribbean, who climbed his way from being a clerk in a West Indian clearing house to become the first Secretary of the Treasury Department and an active participant in the shaping of America’s political, economic and financial systems.

The strength of Randall’s book is that he makes Hamilton’s life, from his birth to his death in 1804, following a duel with Aaron Burr, accessible for the general reader. The story is indeed compelling. Yet, the bulk of the book is on youth and the war years. Less attention is given to his post-Revolutionary career, which for those in finance, is the most interesting. Even so, what Randall does give us has application to the post-stock market bubble of the 1990s. Hamilton was an early believer that the maturing private interest was the glue that would hold American society together and make it succeed. As Randall noted of Hamilton’s views: “Just as long as Americans learned to reign in their impulse toward unbridled greed and could control, channel, and regulate their prosperity for the public good, they would be invincible even against English military might.” To his credit, Hamilton had an active hand in founding the first bank in the United States, creating the Treasury Department during the first term of President Washington, and bringing the national debt under control.

Hamilton was also the first treasury secretary to effectively deal with a financial panic in 1792, by intervening in the market. As Randall noted: “By acting so fast, Hamilton actually helped the federal budget and cushioned the crash, keeping it from spreading and ruining major taxpayers.”

While Randall portrays Hamilton as a grand architect for the U.S. financial system, he also brings him across as a very human figure, with human weaknesses. Randall conveys some sense of Hamilton’s disdain for the mob, his two affairs outside of his marriage, and an inability to judge some people (such as first deputy at the Treasury William Duer, the man who sparked the financial panic of 1792). At the same time, Hamilton helped pay off the debts of his old comrade at arms, Baron Steuben, an act which kept the older man out of debtors prison.

For anyone looking for a good historical read with relevance to today’s world, Randall’s Alexander Hamilton has much to offer.