Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry That Forged a Nation

The Federalist era, with its strong personalities, crucial decisions, and turmoil of conflicting values, has long intrigued. Most books on the era have been biographies of an individual or else on the dynamics of a larger group. Ferling (history, emeritus, Univ. of West Georgia) focuses on Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, locating the origins of their rivalry in their divergent upbringings, which led to their widely conflicting political viewpoints. Jefferson's ideas were shaped in plantation Virginia while Hamilton's emerged from his early ties to the cosmopolitan commercial world of New York. Jefferson was in France during much of the American republic's formative period, where he saw the downfall of centralized rule of the sort he detested. Hamilton, by contrast, stayed home working to secure a solid national economy as the U.S. Constitution was implemented. When the two, who met in the 1780s, became bitter rivals in the 1790s, their opposing positions came to define what would become the country's first political party system. Ferling ends his study with Hamilton's death in 1804.