confirming the doctrine of implied powers. Nevertheless, the American Civil War and the Progressive Era demonstrated the sorts of crises and politics Hamilton's administrative republic sought to avoid. Hamilton's policies have greatly affected the United States government. His constitutional interpretation, particularly of the Necessary and Proper Clause, set precedents for federal authority that are still used by the courts and are considered an authority on constitutional interpretation. French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who spent 1794 in the United States, wrote, "I consider Napoleon, Fox, and Hamilton the three greatest men of our epoch, and if I were forced to decide between the three, I would give without hesitation the first place to Hamilton," adding that Hamilton had intuited the problems of European conservatives. Opinions of Hamilton have run the gamut as both Adams and Jefferson viewed him as unprincipled and dangerously aristocratic. Hamilton's reputation was mostly negative in the eras of Jeffersonian democracy and Jacksonian democracy. The older Jeffersonian view attacked Hamilton as a centralizer, sometimes to the point of accusations that he advocated monarchy. By the Progressive Era, Herbert Croly, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt praised his leadership of a strong government. Several Republicans in 19th and 20th centuries entered politics by writing laudatory biographies of Hamilton. According to Sean Wilentz, more recent views of Hamilton and his reputation have been favorable among scholars, who portray him as the visionary architect of the modern liberal capitalist economy and of a dynamic federal government headed by an energetic executive. Conversely, modern scholars favoring Hamilton have portrayed Jefferson and his allies as naïve, dreamy idealists. Slavery Hamilton is not known to have ever owned slaves, although members of his family were slave owners. At the time of her death, Hamilton's mother owned two slaves and wrote a will leaving them to her sons. However, due to their illegitimacy, Hamilton and his brother were held ineligible to inherit her property and never took ownership of the slaves. Later, as a youth in Saint Croix, Hamilton worked for a company trading in commodities that included slaves. He occasionally handled slave transactions as the legal representative of his own family members, and one of his grandsons interpreted some of these journal entries as being purchases for himself. In 1840, his son John maintained that his father "never owned a slave; but on the contrary, having learned that a domestic whom he had