Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Hamilton read widely and accumulated books insatiably. The self-education of this autodidact never stopped.

Among his most prized possessions was an eight-volume set of The Spectator by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele; he frequently recommended these essays to young people to purify their writing style and inculcate virtue.

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.

From the way Hamilton broke the news to Eliza, we can see that she had long known the story of his being cheated of his inheritance. “You know the circumstances that abate my distress,” he told her, “yet my heart acknowledges the rights of a brother. He dies rich, but has disposed of the bulk of his fortune to strangers. I am told he has left me a legacy. I did not inquire how much.”

He admitted to bruised feelings: “When you were covered with the dust of the camp and had cannonballs whistling thick about your ears, you used to steal an hour’s converse with an old friend every 5 or 6 months; and now in a time of profound peace and tranquillity you cannot, it seems, find two minutes for this kind of office. . . . [A]re you grown too rich and proud to have a good memory? . . . Pray make haste to explain this strange mystery!”

Among many Americans, the Revolution had generated a backlash against slavery as a horrifying practice incompatible with republican ideals.

By no means confined to the south, slavery was well entrenched in much of the north.

The most damning and hypocritical critiques of his allegedly aristocratic economic system emanated from the most aristocratic southern slaveholders, who deflected attention from their own nefarious deeds by posing as populist champions and assailing the northern financial and mercantile interests aligned with Hamilton.

Few, if any, other founding fathers opposed slavery more consistently or toiled harder to eradicate it than Hamilton—a fact that belies the historical stereotype that he cared only for the rich and privileged.

As owner of about two hundred slaves at Monticello and other properties, Thomas Jefferson was acutely conscious of the discrepancy between high-minded revolutionary words and the bloody reality of slavery. Early in the Revolution, he endorsed a plan to stop importing slaves and was dismayed when Congress expunged a passage from the Declaration of Independence in which he blamed George III for the slave trade.

Over time Jefferson yielded to a craven policy of postponing action on slavery indefinitely, constantly foisting the problem onto future generations, hoping vaguely that it would wither away. Unlike Washington, Jefferson freed only a handful of his slaves, including the brothers of his apparent mistress, Sally Hemings.

Madison never tried to defend the morality of slavery—at the Constitutional Convention, he called it “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man”—but neither did he distinguish himself in trying to eliminate it.

The group was called the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves. Its members were especially roiled by the rampant kidnapping of free blacks on New York streets, who were then sold into slavery.

Though he owned five slaves, John Jay was voted chairman.

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Garrison recalled of Burr, “His manner was patronizing. . . . As he revealed himself to my moral sense, I saw he was destitute of any fixed principles.”

A politician's politician

the New York Manumission Society had to deal with the awkward fact that this contradiction was commonplace and that more than half of its own members owned slaves.

The founding of the Manumission Society and antislavery societies in other states in the 1780s represented a hopeful moment in American race relations, right before the Constitutional Convention and the new federal government created such an overriding need for concord that even debating the divisive slavery issue could no longer be tolerated.

Interesting how civil rights progress backslided from revolution to civil war. Moral arc of justice does not seem to exist

During most of his time in office, this pooh-bah of the people sported the pretentious title “His Excellency George Clinton, Esquire, the Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief of all the militia, and Admiral of the Navy of the State of New-York.”6

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

Potus 45

So grave were the interstate tensions over trade that Nathaniel Gorham, named president of Congress in 1786, feared that clashes between New York and its neighbors might degenerate into civil war.

Whether through luck, premeditation, or a knack for making things happen, Hamilton continued to demonstrate his unique flair for materializing at every major turning point in the early history of the republic.

Clearly, the love between Alexander and Eliza had not cooled in the time since courtship and matrimony had tamed the libidinous young man into something of a homebody.

The Annapolis address, with its conception of the political system as a finely crafted mechanism, composed of subtly interrelated parts, had a distinctly Hamiltonian ring. It reflected his penchant for systemic solutions, his sense of the fine interconnectedness of things.

As Hamilton had feared, after eight years of war violent protest against authority had become habitual. The farmers’ uprising was dubbed Shays’s Rebellion after one of its leaders, Daniel Shays, a former militia captain and suddenly a folk hero.

Shays’s Rebellion thrust to the fore economic issues—the very issues in which Hamilton specialized—as did an extremist movement in Rhode Island that beat the drum for abolishing debt and dividing wealth equally.

Like other delegates, Madison had a sense of high drama, believing the document about to be drawn up would “decide forever the fate of republican government.”

Why such undemocratic rules for a conclave crafting a new charter? Many delegates believed they were enlightened, independent citizens, concerned for the commonweal, not members of those detestable things called factions.

Of all the founders, Hamilton probably had the gravest doubts about the wisdom of the masses and wanted elected leaders who would guide them. This was the great paradox of his career: his optimistic view of America’s potential coexisted with an essentially pessimistic view of human nature. His faith in Americans never quite matched his faith in America itself.

Hamilton often seemed a man suspended between two worlds. He never supported a nobility, hereditary titles, or the other trappings of aristocracy. He never again uttered a kind word for monarchy.

Hamilton wasn’t the only delegate who offered harebrained ideas. At one point, Hugh Williamson of North Carolina claimed that it was “pretty certain that we should at some time or other have a king.”

Madison also insisted upon giving the federal government a veto over state laws “as the King of Great Britain heretofore had.”

John Dickinson wanted state legislatures to have the power to impeach the president.

Elbridge Gerry wanted a three-man “presidency,” with each member representing a different section of America.

One story, perhaps apocryphal, claims that when Hamilton was asked why the framers omitted the word God from the Constitution, he replied, “We forgot.” One is tempted to reply that Alexander Hamilton never forgot anything important.

Through the years, Hamilton was to exhaust himself in efforts to refute lies that grew up around him like choking vines. No matter how hard he tried to hack away at these myths, they continued to sprout deadly new shoots. These myths were perhaps the inevitable reaction to a man so brilliant, so outspoken, and so sure of himself.

As Madison conceded, the specter of slavery haunted the convention, and he argued that “the states were divided into different interests not by their difference of size, but principally from their having or not having slaves. . . . [The conflict] did not lie between the large and small states. It lay between the northern and southern.”

The issue was so explosive that the word slavery did not appear in the Constitution, replaced by the euphemism of people “held to service or labor.”

In exchange, southern states agreed that the importation of slaves might cease after 1808, feeding an illusory hope that slavery might someday just fade away.

Without the federal ratio, Hamilton glumly concluded, “no union could possibly have been formed.”87 Indeed, the whole superstructure erected in Philadelphia rested on that unstable, undemocratic foundation.

John Jay once wrote of the randy Morris, “Gouverneur’s leg has been a tax on my heart. I am almost tempted to wish he had lost something else.”95 Morris’s peg leg did not seem to detract from his sexual appeal and may even have enhanced it.

There is a splendid, if unsubstantiated, story about Hamilton and Morris

Hamilton and Morris were discussing how Washington signaled to people that they should maintain a respectful distance and not behave too familiarly with him. Hamilton wagered Morris that he would not dare to accost Washington with a friendly slap on the back. Taking up the challenge, Morris found Washington standing by the fireplace in a drawing room and genially cuffed him on the shoulder: “My dear general, how happy I am to see you look so well.” Washington fixed Morris with such a frigid gaze that Morris was sorry that he had ever taken up Hamilton’s dare.99

The federalists evoked disunion, civil war, and foreign intrigue, along with flagrant repudiation of debt and assaults on property. The antifederalists talked darkly of despotism and a monarchy, the ascendancy of the rich, and the outright abolition of the states.

The Revolution had focused on independence from Britain and sidestepped the question of what sort of society America ought to be—a question that could no longer be postponed.

The brevity and generality of the Constitution made it susceptible to many interpretations. One could imagine almost anything about a government that existed only on paper.

After castigating Hamilton as a treacherous foreigner, the author refers to Washington as Hamilton’s “immaculate daddy,” a snide reference to Hamilton’s illegitimacy.9 Thus began the baseless mythology, which persists to this day, that Hamilton was Washington’s “natural” child.

jeering at his foreign birth, his supposed racial identity, his illegitimacy, and his putative links to the British Crown—attacks that set a pattern for the rest of Hamilton’s career.

Hamilton supervised the entire Federalist project. He dreamed up the idea, enlisted the participants, wrote the overwhelming bulk of the essays, and oversaw the publication.

So excruciating was the schedule, Madison said, that often “whilst the printer was putting into type parts of a number, the following parts were under the pen and to be furnished in time for the press.”

Robert Troup noted of Hamilton’s haste in writing The Federalist: “All the numbers written by [Hamilton] were composed under the greatest possible pressure of business, for [he] always had a vast deal of law business to engage his attention.”

An incredible work ethic