Introduction: Their fights, our fights -- Part I The hatching. Meet Alexander Hamilton -- Founding fatcat -- Exchanging eye-rolls -- In which we are introduced to the public debt of the United States -- Part II The first great American class war. Man in black -- Nothing commonsensical -- Never waste a crisis -- Peacetime -- The new Jerusalem -- Washington's county -- To annihilate all debts -- Part III The scheme and the system. The Hamilton constitution -- Ta-da! -- Breakup -- Industry and Rye -- Six Greek columns and a Roman pediment -- Part IV To extremes. The husband scheme -- Reason -- Enemies everywhere -- Too big to fail -- Uprising, crackdown -- Biblical -- Part V A scheme superseded! Albert Optimiste -- The Jesuit -- Triumvirate -- Albert Agonistes -- Epilogue: From the Jackson era to the New Deal to the Great White Way -- Notes -- Sources -- Acknowledgments -- Index

Forgotten founder" no more, Alexander Hamilton has become a global celebrity. Millions know his name. Millions imagine knowing the man. But what did he really want for the country? What risks did he run in pursuing those vaulting ambitions? Who tried to stop him? How did they fight? It's ironic that the Hamilton revival has obscured the man's most dramatic battles and hardest-won achievements--as well as downplaying unsettling aspects of his legacy. 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