Alexander Hamilton: Founding Father and American Statesman | Biography

[Music] now that there's a Broadway musical and people are falling in love with Alexander Hamilton I think it's important for people to realize that most politicians have mixed legacies and that certainly is true for Hamilton Alexander Halton could be a difficult person you know I think he's a complicated person so clearly you know he had friends and people who loved him and he was seemingly charismatic and high-energy kind of an individual there are two Hamilton's there was the public Hamilton who was guided by virtue and who only wanted to serve the public good and then there's the private Hamilton and the private Hamilton is somebody who has extramarital affairs whose values might contradict the public good but Hamilton actually argued that his private life should not impact the way people think about his public life [Music] one of the important things to know about Hamilton is that at a very early point I mean still during the revolution he became convinced that there needed to be a stronger national government so he's a really early and really loud nationalist he was called a monarchist for a long time his response to that was no I'm not a monarchist because people are getting elected into office and if you don't like them you can let them out on the other hand he really was trying to give as much power as possible to the government Hamilton became the lightning rod for the first party system and part of the reason he's the focus is because nobody can attack Washington and so when the Jeffersonians and others need somebody to attack as this monarchist as this person who's undermining the revolutionary values they can't attack Washington Washington is the revolution it's Hamilton that they can focus on paladin when he became secretary of the Treasury he had a really pretty daunting challenge in front of him there was this massive amounts of debt and no national structure of Finance now he was the perfect guy for that job what he was really good at was administrating Washington and Hamilton both realized that in order for the country to be an international player their debt needed to be sound and so Hamilton had the unpopular but essential idea to unite the debt as one common debt that was shared by the nation and that more than anything else I think helped establish the United States Hamilton has sort of a mixed legacy particularly as Secretary of the Treasury on the one hand he was a vital force for establishing national credit he also was someone who was trying as hard as he could to empower the national government not trying to necessarily create a monarchy but he believed that the British monarchy was the finest government on the face of the earth he was not shy about saying that so that's an extreme guy and he's not the only person who believes that but he was a person who had a lot of power and was working towards that point of view so some of the impact that was good and some of the impact of that was scary his policies are so polarizing that people begin to rise up and protest against them Hamilton and our perception of him has changed over time he was reviled in his own lifetime and immediately afterwards but then as America's economy changed and as the institutions that support this economy have changed so to have our perceptions of Hamilton I think it was important to have his voice there pushing it was really also important to have other voices pushing against him I think we don't often think of the founding as a dialogue as a debate but it was and I think that many different voices needed to be part of that debate for whatever came out of that moment to be even somewhat balanced [Music] you

Channel: Biography

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Id: CRJrZwLN5B8

Length: 4min 12sec (252 seconds)

Published: Sat May 05 2018