Alexander Hamilton

...

encouraging Congress to draft a Mint Act to create a national mint and stable national currency.

Hamilton wrote “On the Subject of Manufactures”, which stated that the United States should move the bulk of its economy from agriculture to industry. Hamilton also believed that manufacturing would bring more money into the country; Thomas Jefferson disagreed, and believed that a nation based on business would jeopardize the republican ideals the nation was founded upon. Hamilton followed an interpretation of the Constitution, in which he believed permitted everything that it did not expressly forbid. Jefferson, was a strict constructionist who believed that the Constitution forbade everything, it did not expressly permit. Hamilton and Jefferson’s battles spread throughout the nation and even laid the foundations for the first political parties.

Hamilton, as Secretary of the Treasury, also became involved in foreign policy. He encouraged President Washington to send John Jay to England in 1794, to negotiate a settlement to end a dispute between the two countries. In 1795 Hamilton resigned from his position in Washington’s cabinet and returned to his law practice. Hamilton did not remain entirely out of the political world after his resignation, through his involvement in politics after the late 1790s caused more harm than good. For example in the election of 1800, Hamilton inadvertently split the Federalist Party to allow his rival, Thomas Jefferson, to become the next President of the United States.

In 1804 Hamilton wrote a group of essays against Aaron Burr, that was partly responsible for Burr’s loss in the year’s New York gubernatorial race. Burr blamed Hamilton for the loss then challenged Hamilton to a duel in which he shot Hamilton. Hamilton died the next day, July 11, 1804, at the age of forty-seven.