Jefferson and Hamilton

JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON
The Struggle for Democracy In America BY CLAUDE G. BOWERS AUTHOR OF ‘THE PARTY BATTLES OF THE JACKSON PERIOD’ With Illustrations
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY CLAUDE G. BOWERS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TENTH IMPRESSION, JANUARY, 1927 The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
All American history has since run along the lines marked out by the antagonism of Jefferson and Hamilton. Our history is sometimes charged with a lack of picturesqueness because it does not deal with the belted knight and the moated grange. But to one who considers the moral import of events, it is hard to see how anything can be more picturesque than the spectacle of these two giant antagonists contending for political measures which were so profoundly to affect the lives of millions of human beings yet unborn.
John Fiske
IT is the author’s purpose, in developing the stirring story of the Plutarchian struggle of Jefferson and Hamilton, to show that without belted knights the period was picturesque and dramatic. The extraordinary men who gave and took lusty blows did not, as some would have us think, confine themselves to calm academic discussions of elemental principles. The dignified steel engravings of the participants, with which we are familiar, give no impression of the disheveled figures seen by their contemporaries on the battle-field.
This battle-field was rich in movement and color. There was tragedy and pathos, much of comedy, something of the grotesque. Here we shall meet marching mobs, witness duels and fist-fights, turbulent mass meetings, public dinners in groves and taverns, hangings in effigy, and champions of democracy in the galleries of theaters, pelting the aristocrats in the pits, and coercing the orchestras into playing ‘La Marseillaise.’ It was in the midst of such scenes as these that Jefferson and Hamilton fought the battle of the fundamentals.