Alexander Hamilton Essay

Alexander Hamilton’s innovative vision has remained relevant throughout the development of the United States’ financial system. The First Bank of the United States, championed by Hamilton, serves as the first model for the American financial system and banking structure. Remnants of Hamilton’s framework endure to this day. After nearly eight decades without a central bank, Congress revived Hamilton’s “notion of a centralized, quasi-governmental bank” in 1914, when the Federal Reserve System was created (Davies). Even so, Hamilton’s vision never fully disappeared. In the nineteenth century, bank lending “spurred business growth, planting the seeds for the nation’s flowering into an economic power after the Civil War” (Davies). Hamilton’s vision

The innovation of railroads, in particular, “helped to create new economic methods and institutions that were essential in guiding and shaping the American drive to industrialism” (Chandler 1965, 5). Chandler describes the railroads’ important impact on the “the expansion of wheat and cattle production, the coming of new commercial routes, and the adoption of mass-production methods in the manufacture of iron and consumer durables” (Chandler 1965, 23). These impacts all aided in the Westward movement. As Chandler recounts, “The railroad brought as significant changes to America’s industries as it did to its agriculture and commerce” (Chandler 1965, 22). The railroad revolutionized the transport of supplies that were necessary to industrial growth. By making the travel process easier, the railroads “lowered the final cost of manufactured goods in a number of industries and so increased the demand for their products” (Chandler 1965, 22). The railroad not only affected the West, but also impacted the Northeast, an already successful area financially. Regardless, “this sudden growth of a new transportation system stimulated the swift settlement of the Old Northwest,” an area previously unfamiliar to the effects of financial success (Chandler 1965, 21). The railroad had a profound impact on the financial development of the West, as it opened up new routes and encouraged the settlement of an area new to the effects of