The Works Of Alexander Hamilton

Added title pages, engraved."The collector's Federal edition of the Works of Alexander Hamilton is limited to six hundred signed and numbered sets."First edition (500 copies) in 9 vols., published 1885-86. "Bibliography of the 'Federalist'": v. 11, p. xxxi-xl.

The vital words of Alexander Hamilton, including essays, private correspondence, and public statements Alexander Hamilton is best known as the United States’ first Secretary of the Treasury and the author of the majority of The Federalist Papers, a series of essays that outlined the basic concepts and premises of the U.S. Constitution. Since the founding of the nation, these essays have been used by the U.S. Supreme Court as an authoritative guide to the intentions of the Founding Fathers in cases involving constitutional interpretation. Included in this volume are five of the most important essays from The Federalist Papers, plus personal correspondence and public statements from across Hamilton’s career as a statesman.

America’s first treasury secretary and one of the three authors of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton stands as one of the nation’s important early statesmen. Michael P. Federici places this Founding Father among the country’s original political philosophers as well. Hamilton remains something of an enigma. Conservatives and liberals both claim him, and in his writings one can find material to support the positions of either camp. Taking a balanced and objective approach, Federici sorts through the written and historical record to reveal Hamilton’s philosophy as the synthetic product of a well-read and pragmatic figure whose intellectual genealogy drew on Classical thinkers such as Cicero and Plutarch, Christian theologians, and Enlightenment philosophers, including Hume and Montesquieu. In evaluating the thought of this republican and would-be empire builder, Federici explains that the apparent contradictions found in the Federalist Papers and other examples of Hamilton’s writings reflect both his practical engagement with debates over the French Revolution, capital expansion, commercialism, and other large issues of his time, and his search for a balance between central authority and federalism in the embryonic American government. This book challenges the view of Hamilton as a monarchist and shows him instead to be a strong advocate of American constitutionalism. Devoted to the whole of Hamilton’s political writing, this accessible and teachable analysis makes clear the enormous influence Hamilton had on the development of American political and economic institutions and policies.

The great American founding father speaks from the past in his own voice through 170 letters, speeches, essays, reports, and other documents.