Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Take the references to Hamilton as an avowed monarchist: Hamilton had always wondered whether the Constitution would be durable enough to protect society and feared that a constitutional monarchy might be necessary; on the other hand, he had sworn to do everything in his power to give the new government a fair chance.

“Your people, sir—your people is a great beast!”

Constitution every possible chance: “I am affectionately attached to the republican theory. I desire above all things to see the equality of political rights, exclusive of all hereditary distinction, firmly established by a practical demonstration of its being consistent with the order and happiness

That Hamilton loved the ladies and had a high libido seems clear. But was his adult life really a rake’s progress of sexual conquests? For all the innuendoes about adultery, he did not engage in indiscriminate sex,

Alexander Hamilton was the most controversial public figure of his era. If he had other women, why didn’t the scandal-loving Republican press refer to these other romances?

Thus I have understood it of Hamilton. He set the estimation made of his uprightness against that which might be formed from the confession of his lewdness and he determined that

daily, and scribbled many notes in the margin of the family Bible. A lawyer by training, Hamilton wanted logical proofs of religion, not revelation, and amply annotated his copy of A View of the Evidences of Christianity, by William Paley. “I have examined carefully the evidence of the Christian religion,” he told one friend, “and if I was sitting as a juror upon its authenticity, I should rather abruptly give my verdict in its favor.”13 To Eliza, he said of Christianity, “I have studied it and I can prove its truth as clearly as any proposition ever submitted to the mind of man.”14 John Church Hamilton believed that the time his father spent at the Grange, strolling about the grounds, broadened his religious awareness. During his final months, he was walking with Eliza in the woods and speaking of their children when he suddenly turned to her and said in an enraptured voice, “I may yet have twenty years, please God, and I will one day build for them a chapel in this grove.”