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Alexander Hamilton: Ambivalent Anglophile. By Lawrence S. Kaplan. (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2002. Pp. xvi, 196. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $19.95.)
Lawrence Kaplan's study of Alexander Hamilton is yet another entry into the burgeoning list of biographies and monographs dealing with the so-called Founding Brothers. Once dismissed as examples of the elitism and bewigged aristocracy that allegedly drove the thinking of the nation's founders, they have re-emerged in the past decade as the true "Greatest Generation" whose intellect, patriotism, and civic virtue, not coincidentally, stand in implied contrast with many of their counterparts today.
Alexander Hamilton, while undoubtedly a card-carrying member of the Brothers, has never been admitted to the inner circle. Though he stares at us from the ??-dollar bill, his oft-quoted denunciations of democracy, his exotic origins, his admitted adultery, and his violent death have combined to exclude him. He himself, toward the end of his life, wrote that "this American world was not made for me" (167), and many oi his critics, then and later, have come to agree.
But not Kaplan. As the subtitle of his book suggests, Kaplan argues that Hamilton does not entirely deserve the attacks launched against him by Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and their followers. In the realm of foreign policy, which is the main focus of the book, Kaplan follows in the footsteps of Felix Gilbert, Paul Varg, and others in arguing that the differences between Hannltonian and Jeffersonian foreign policy, while real, have been overstated by later historians in order to provide drama to the first decade of the early republic.
Although Kaplan's book is part of a series entitled "Biographies in American Foreign Policy," nearly one-half covers the well-traveled ground of Hamilton's early years: Ins...