![]() ![]() ![]() To charge across that field under the flash of British artillery, rush into a hail of British musket fire, leap first over the parapet yelling for his fellow Patriots to follow and fight and by so doing win their freedom would have been enough for the man who had no father but became ours. Had Alexander Hamilton died taking Redoubt Ten at Yorktown, bayonets fixed and muskets unloaded, he would have died a more significant American than his fellow Columbia student Barack Obama, who has now deigned to displace him from the ten dollar bill. The inventions of an aggressively active mind who did not live to see them turned out to sustain the freedoms of a people Hamilton loved with the love of an adopted son. It was a vision that largely endured for a century and a half, and in that time saw a collection of colonies and a sleepy agrarian economy transformed into the greatest nation the world ever knew. In the debate over the course America ought to take, it is Hamilton’s vision of the American economic structure, the American system of government, and the American system of federalism that prevailed over the visions of others. They called him this for one reason above all: that when it came to forming the American nation, Alexander Hamilton ate their lunch. Indeed, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson never tired of calling him that – the ‘Bastard Brat of a Scots Pedlar’ who infuriated them time and again. ![]()
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