SOURCE: "Alexander Hamilton's Place in the Founding of the Nation," in American Themes: Selected Essays and Addresses of John Allen Krout, edited by Clifford Lord and Henry F. Graff, Columbia University Press, 1963, pp. 19-32.

In the following essay, originally a paper delivered before a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in 1957, Krout stresses Hamilton's importance as a pioneer American economist and advocate of centralized government.

Every successful nation-builder of modern times—Colbert in the seventeenth century, the elder Pitt in the eighteenth, Cavour and Bismarck in the nineteenth—understood the relation of economic strength to political power, and the links between each of these and national security. Alexander Hamilton was no exception. If he seems, at times, to tower above the others in that company of talented men who brought into being the United States of America, it is because he stated more precisely and more forcefully than...