No one person invents a nation, of course. The American project is one that still goes on today, and as it continues we involve more and more people in the work. It may never end, as we strive to get it right, and that will be just as well.
We are, more than almost any other country, one invented by the conscious work of man. We are the first nation to exist wholly in the modern world—a republic of laws, where everyone has a say, and anyone can join as long as they uphold those laws. We made ourselves, and we are constantly remaking ourselves as our world changes and we debate, over and over again, just what it means to be an American.
It hasn’t been an easy process. There were plenty of missteps and flaws in the design. Our original sin of slavery, the false and pernicious doctrines of race. Our mistreatment of the peoples we found here, the land grabs we perpetrated against our neighbors. Like too many inventors, at times we have despoiled what we had in our rush to get ahead, get rich.
Yet when we’ve made it work, ours has been as free and prosperous and diverse a society as has ever existed on this earth—one that, uniquely, has been able to bring in masses of people from everywhere else to join in its success. Countless individuals, great and obscure, male and female, free and enslaved, of all colors and faiths and backgrounds, have contributed to that accomplishment.
Yet if one had to name a single founder who had the greatest vision of what America could be—and who, at the same time, best personified the American experience—it would have to be Alexander Hamilton.
Hamilton is having a certain vogue at the moment, right down to being the subject of a smash hip-hop Broadway musical. It’s easy to see why. No other Founding Father was so constantly reviled, even in the raucous politics of his day. None had his ancestry or his loyalty to his country so constantly impugned.
Hamilton did not hail from an old family or the landed aristocracy. He was an immigrant, one who grew up in wretched and sometimes horrible circumstances in the West Indies. Abandoned by his father at a young age, orphaned by the early death of his mother—in the bed beside him, as both convulsed with fever—frequently “accused” of being of mixed race, or dubious religion, or a bastard, and lacking most formal education, he rose by sheer dint of his ability and ambition. His talents were so obvious to the local businessmen he clerked for that they sent him to study at New York’s King’s College (later Columbia) at the age of seventeen. Just twenty-one (or possibly nineteen) when the American Revolution broke out, he distinguished himself as Washington’s beloved personal aide and led a key bayonet charge that broke the British lines at Yorktown.
Yet even through the hardest days of the war, Hamilton kept his eye fixed on what sort of country he was fighting to create, studying government and economics whenever he could. Convinced that the Articles of Confederation could not hold the nation together, he wrote the resolution to hold a constitutional convention, then became, with James Madison, one of the two leading architects and defenders of the Constitution that resulted.
Appointed the nation’s first secretary of the Treasury, he more than any other man made the literary construction that was the United States into a palpable reality. He built our first financial system, linking the nation together economically, making the states’ separate debts into the obligation of all. He advocated always a national government that would be strong enough to lead, to enforce the law, to build a public infrastructure, to defend itself in the greater world—while still acquiescing to the will of the people.
None of this went off without a hitch or worked perfectly from the start—or ever since, for that matter. Hamilton’s efforts brought us, however inadvertently, our first financial meltdown, first mistreatment of our veterans, first unfair and intrusive tax, and first use of American troops to subdue a popular rebellion. These blunders and excesses were in no small part the fault of the man himself—his zeal, his impetuosity, his passion, his hotheadedness, and his sometimes overwrought sense of honor. Such flaws would ultimately embroil him in what was also our national government’s first sex scandal, and even get him shot dead, at much too early an age.
Yet if being all too much like the rest of us—like all of us—is what makes Hamilton beloved today, it’s not what makes him great. Hamilton is great because he made America a country that could make things.
Much more than any other Founding Father, Hamilton understood that this was the nature of the modern world. Thomas Jefferson, for all his own vital contributions to our liberty, envisioned for America no more than a bucolic utopia of yeoman farmers. A more democratic version, in other words, of how mankind had always existed, tied to the land, churning out its bounty with the seasons.
Hamilton saw that in the new world, man would produce things himself. That as such, the world had become all about change. That all would have to take part, and there was no place in it for slavery, or other oppressive, feudal vestiges. That we would require education, capital, machines, cities, better communications, faster transportation, ways to bring greater and greater numbers of people into our common enterprise.
This was at the heart of inventing an America that would make possible so much more invention. It is the essence of us still. And even as we struggle with the messiness and sometimes the ugliness of democracy today, we must know that it is entirely within our power, our abilities, to make of America what we will.