Hamilton Scheme, The: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding by William Hogeland; 2024. Hardcover.

Thrilling to the romance of becoming the one-man inventor of a modern nation, our first Treasury secretary fostered growth by engineering an ingenious dynamo--banking, public debt, manufacturing--for concentrating national wealth in the hands of a government-connected elite. Seeking American prosperity, he built American oligarchy. Hence his animus and mutual sense of betrayal with Jefferson and Madison--and his career-long fight to suppress a rowdy egalitarian movement little remembered today: the eighteenth-century white working class. Marshaling an idiosyncratic cast of insiders and outsiders, vividly dramatizing backroom intrigues and literal street fights--and sharply dissenting from recent biographies--William Hogeland's "The Hamilton Scheme" brings to life Hamilton's vision and the hard-knock struggles over democracy, wealth, and the meaning of America that drove the nation's creation and hold enduring significance today.