Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Theodore Roosevelt took up the cudgels and declared Hamilton “the most brilliant American statesman who ever lived, possessing the loftiest and keenest intellect of his time.”7

In all probability, Alexander Hamilton is the foremost political figure in American history who never attained the presidency, yet he probably had a much deeper and more lasting impact than many who did.

Hamilton was the supreme double threat among the founding fathers, at once thinker and doer, sparkling theoretician and masterful executive.

his exceptional capacity for work was its own unspoken commentary about his father’s.

“progress of the Jews . . . from their earliest history to the present time has been and is entirely out of the ordinary course of human affairs. Is it not then a fair conclusion that the cause also is an extraordinary one—in

ambitious, orphaned boys do not enjoy the option of idleness.

Many, on whom fortune has bestowed her favours, may trace their family to a more unprosperous station; and many who are now in obscurity, may look back upon the affluence and exalted rank of their ancestors.”

His life was a case study in the profitable use of time.

“From the day the exports from this province are stopped, the farmers may date the commencement of their ruin. Can you live without money?”52

To drive home the point, some copies were tarred and feathered and slapped on whipping posts.

“The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of the divinity itself and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”

“And whilst their curses load my head / With piercing steel they probe the bed

a recurring theme of his career: the superiority of forgiveness over revolutionary vengeance.

But Hamilton always expressed himself frankly, no matter what the consequences.

He saw too clearly that greater freedom could lead to greater disorder and, by a dangerous dialectic, back to a loss of freedom. Hamilton’s lifelong task was to try to straddle and resolve this contradiction and to balance liberty and order.

Now, for reasons both symbolic and practical, the crowd pulled George III down from his pedestal, decapitating him in the process. The four thousand pounds of gilded lead was rushed off to Litchfield, Connecticut, where it was melted down to make 42,088 musket bullets.

Washington tried to advance into polished society through a strenuous program of self-improvement. He learned to dance and dress properly, read biographies and histories, and memorized rules of deportment from a courtesy manual.

The four to six young aides usually slept in one room, often two to a bed, then worked long days in a single room with chairs crowded around small wooden tables.

“a bright gleam of sunshine, ever growing brighter as the general darkness thickened.”

Burgoyne and his army marched down the Hudson Valley in early October 1777 with all the cumbersome pomp of royalty. As if proceeding to a coronation, not a battle, Burgoyne loaded up no fewer than thirty carts with his personal belongings, dragged by horses through fly-ridden bogs and swamps.

Frederick William August von Steuben came from a military family and had served as an aide to Frederick the Great.

Soon Steuben was strutting around Valley Forge, teaching the amateur troops to march in formation, load muskets, and fix bayonets and sprinkling his orders with colorful goddamns and plentiful polyglot expletives that endeared him to the troops. Wrote one young private: “Never before or since have I had such an impression of the ancient fabled god of war as when I looked on the baron. He seemed to me a perfect personification of Mars. The trappings of his horse, the enormous holsters of his pistols, his large size, and his strikingly martial aspect, all seemed to favor the idea.”

To which Washington retorted, “You damned poltroon, you never tried them!”32 Washington did not ordinarily use profanities, but, faced with Lee’s insubordination that morning, he swore “till the leaves shook on the trees,” said one general.33

“My dear Laurens,” he had written to his friend that spring, “our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep in their compositions.”

I know I have talents and a good heart, but why am I not handsome? Why have I not every acquirement that can embellish human nature? Why have I not fortune, that I might hereafter have more leisure than I shall have to cultivate those improvements for which I am not entirely unfit?

Only in such passages do we see that Hamilton, for all his phenomenal success in the Continental Army, still felt unlucky and unlovely, still cursed by his past.

When Hamilton rode off to Albany in late November 1780 for the wedding, it was the first vacation he had taken in nearly five years of warfare.

“The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people,” he told Morris. “In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fickleness, and folly.”15 Increasingly Hamilton despaired of pure democracy, of politicians simply catering to the popular will, and favored educated leaders who would enlighten the people and exercise their own judgment.

After the death of John Laurens, Hamilton shut off some compartment of his emotions and never reopened it.

“and unwholesome smells are occasioned by such a number of people being crowded together in so small a compass, almost like herrings in a barrel, most of them very dirty and not a small number sick of some disease.”

he was “so entirely the friend of his friends . . . that his power over their affections was entire and lasted through his life.”

“He is a grave, silent, strange sort of animal, inasmuch that we know not what to make of him.”

As Burr once warned his law clerk, “Things written remain.”

Hordes of American soldiers had been incarcerated aboard lice-ridden British prison ships anchored in the East River. A staggering eleven thousand patriots had perished aboard these ships from filth, disease, malnutrition, and savage mistreatment. For many years, bones of the dead washed up on shore.

By early 1784, the city had erupted in a wave of reprisals against Tories, who were tarred and feathered.

extremist movement in Rhode Island that beat the drum for abolishing debt and dividing wealth equally. The Massachusetts uprising shocked many who wondered just how far the rebels would go. “Good God!” Washington proclaimed of the rebellion, aghast that some protesters regarded America’s land “to be the common property of all.”

They averaged forty-two years of age, meaning that Hamilton, thirty-two, and Madison, thirty-six, were relatively young.

his optimistic view of America’s potential coexisted with an essentially pessimistic view of human nature.

“Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many.”

He also opposed a presidential veto on legislation, thinking it would lead to executive corruption “till it ends in monarchy.”

Washington, for one, doubted that the new federal government would survive twenty years.

Since critics found it hard to defeat him on intellectual grounds, they stooped to personal attacks.

Words were his chief weapons, and his account books are crammed with purchases for thousands of quills, parchments, penknives, slate pencils, reams of foolscap, and wax.

“No axiom is more clearly established in law or in reason than that wherever the end is required, the means are authorized.”31

black velvet coat, yellow gloves, and black satin breeches, with a dress sword hanging in a scabbard.

When Washington rode out on public occasions, through unpaved streets teeming with wandering pigs,

Madison lamented, “We are in a wilderness without a single footstep to guide us.”

At one ball, Angelica dropped a garter that was swept gallantly off the floor by Hamilton. Angelica, who had a sly wit, teased him that he wasn’t a Knight of the Garter. Angelica’s sarcastic sister, Peggy, then remarked, “He would be a Knight of the Bedchamber, if he could.”

“He knows everything, sir,” Morris replied. “To a mind like his nothing comes amiss.”64

As in the Revolution, Hamilton and Washington had complementary talents. Neither could have achieved alone what they did together.