[x]

Southerners like Washington, Marshall, and Henry Lee would be puzzled by your vilification of Hamilton. We can certainly argue about whether Hamilton had the right political views or was too optimistic about centralization, protection and industrialism, but there were more than a few Southerners who agreed with his vision. Even some of those in the opposing party who strongly disliked and distrusted Hamilton, like Madison and Monroe, came around to his views on tariffs and a national bank.

When one considers how Alabamans put up a statue to the boll weevil for weening them from dependence on cotton, there looks like plenty of reason for putting in a good word for Hamilton's plan to achieve the same result with less pain. Modern-day Alabaman Forrest McDonald apparently agrees -- about Hamilton, maybe about the boll weevil, too.

We can consider that Davis may have been sincere about what he believed and may have wanted what he thought was best for people. But we can't simply stop there and bow down before him, as some would like. I would probably keep the statue up if I were a Kentuckian, but I'd try to see to it that the capitol and its monuments reflected our best judgement of what is true and valuable, rather than a permanent subjugation to views that we recognize to be flawed or incomplete. Given that so many Kentuckians supported the Union, there is plenty of reason to question the monument's appropriateness, though. If our principle is not to offend traditions, it's hard to see how the statue got put up to begin with, save as a shaky extension of tolerance and magnanimity to the defeated.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Forrest MacDonald's biography of H is without doubt the best explanation of his financial program of any which I have read. He wrote two other fantastic books about The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson and The Presidency of George Washington which very instructive as well as others.

He is at the University of Alabama still, I believe and is the greatest historian of that era, imho.