Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Fraunces Tavern.

his family thought a profile—not a portrait—done by James Sharples the best likeness of him ever done.

Hamilton was regarded as one of the premier lawyers of the early republic

Judge Ambrose Spencer, who watched many legal titans pace his courtroom, pronounced Hamilton “the greatest man this country ever produced. . . . In power of reasoning, Hamilton was the equal of [Daniel] Webster and more than this could be said of no man. In creative power, Hamilton was infinitely Webster’s superior.”

“Hamilton’s reading was not confined to English law, for in addition to citations to basic Roman law texts we find him proffering passages from exotics like the Frenchman Domat, the Dutchman Vinnius, and the Spaniard Perez.”19

In 1786, the two men helped to finance the Erasmus Hall Academy in Flatbush, the forerunner of Erasmus Hall High School, today the oldest secondary school in New York State.

Shippen

With his impervious aplomb, he was a better listener than talker. Hamilton was easy to ruffle, whereas Burr hid his feelings behind an enigmatic facade.

Throughout his career, Hamilton was outspoken to a fault, while Burr was a man of ingrained secrecy.

As a politician, Burr usually spoke to one person at a time and then in confidence.

Burr’s failure to make any notable contribution in public policy is mystifying for such a bright, literate man. He was an omnivorous reader.

The records of the New York Society Library show that in 1790 Burr read nine consecutive volumes of Voltaire.

How many men at the time both read and ardently recommended Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman?

Hamilton venerated the law, while Burr often seemed mildly bored and cynical about it. “The law is whatever is successfully argued and plausibly maintained,” he stated.35

He was not a politician seeking popularity but a statesman determined to change minds.

the law of nations, which allowed for the wartime use of property in occupied territory.

The creation of New York’s first bank was a formative moment in the city’s rise as a world financial center. Banking was still a new phenomenon in America. The first such chartered institution, the Bank of North America, had been started in Philadelphia in 1781, and Hamilton had studied its affairs closely.

Congress adopted the dollar as the official monetary unit in 1785,

in June 1784 the Bank of New York opened as a private bank without a charter. It occupied the Walton mansion on St. George’s Square (now Pearl Street), a three-story building of yellow brick and brown trim, and three years later it relocated to Hanover Square. It was to house the personal bank accounts of both Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and prove one of Hamilton’s most durable monuments, becoming the oldest stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

His eight children never appeared to utter a single unkind word about their father.

Hamilton read widely and accumulated books insatiably. The self-education of this autodidact never stopped. He preferred wits, satirists, philosophers, historians, and novelists from the British Isles: Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Oliver Goldsmith, Edward Gibbon, Lord Chesterfield, Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas Hobbes, Horace Walpole, and David Hume. Among his most prized possessions was an eight-volume set of The Spectator by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele;

The politician who provoked a national furor with his fire-breathing denunciations of the French Revolution paid tutors so that all his children could speak French.

It must have distressed Hamilton to gaze backward, and he retained few acquaintances from his past.

As early as 1775, Philadelphia Quakers had launched the world’s first antislavery society,

In the interpretation of treaties, things odious or immoral are not to be presumed.

It is odious not only as it imposes an act of perfidy on one of the contracting parties,

William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of The Liberator,

Samuel Adams,

Destined to serve seven terms as governor and two as vice president, Clinton represented what would become a staple of American political folklore: the local populist boss, not overly punctilious or savory yet embraced warmly by the masses as one of their own.

“George Clinton’s friends considered him a man of the people; his enemies saw him as a demagogue.”4

Hamilton’s besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism.

George Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, and Aaron Burr all came to incarnate that dread for Hamilton.

George Mann’s City Tavern,

pervaded

the Indian Queen Tavern on Fourth Street.

The closed-door proceedings yielded inspired, uninhibited debate and brought forth one of the most luminous documents in history.

Windsor chairs,

Of all the founders, Hamilton probably had the gravest doubts about the wisdom of the masses

This was the great paradox of his career: his optimistic view of America’s potential coexisted with an essentially pessimistic view of human nature.

Hamilton had an abiding fear of mob rule

This broke the deadlock, though the Senate’s composition introduced a lasting political bias in American life in favor of smaller states.

Hamilton traced this absurdity to a letter sent “to one James Reynolds of this city”—the first reference he ever made to the man whose wife would someday be his fatal enchantress.

Slaveholding states wondered how their human property would be counted for congressional-apportionment purposes. Northern states finally agreed that five slaves would be counted as equivalent to three free whites, the infamous “federal ratio” that survived for another eighty years. The formula richly rewarded the southern states, artificially inflating their House seats and electoral votes and helping to explain why four of the first five presidents hailed from Virginia. This gross inequity was to play no small part in the eventual triumph of Jeffersonian Republicans over Hamiltonian Federalists.

Morris admired Hamilton’s intellect even as he reproved him for being “indiscreet, vain, and opinionated.”

September 17, 1787,

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

In the end, nobody would do more than Alexander Hamilton to infuse life into this parchment and make it the working mandate of the American government.

The antifederalists talked darkly of

the ascendancy of the rich,

The rancor ushered in a golden age of literary assassination in American politics.