SOURCE: An introduction to Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, American Book Company, 1934, pp. xi-lxxii.

In the excerpt below, Prescott traces Hamilton's career as both a political theorist and participant in government.

Hamilton's interests of public concern were mainly political. His work as a lawyer was secondary; that as a financier and economist, as will appear, was subordinate to his political activity. We are here concerned, therefore, primarily with the development of his political theory and its applications.

When the outbreak of the Revolution converted Hamilton, at the age of nineteen, from a student to a soldier, his political views, as in spite of his precocity we might expect, were drawn not so much from his own mind as from his reading and from the revolutionary atmosphere of the time. A memorandum kept in 1776 contains a list of books indicating the quality of his reading. This ranges from Orations...