Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Burr regarded as the main impediment to the advancement of his career.

a memory that refused to surrender the past.

This was how Eliza wished to recall him: ardent, hopeful, and eternally young.

Dad.

though she salvaged every scrap of his writing, she apparently destroyed her own letters.

“a very great man, but not a great American.”5

8 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,

If Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton established the prose of American statecraft.

No other founder articulated such a clear and prescient vision of America’s future political, military, and economic strength or crafted such ingenious mechanisms to bind the nation together.

He embodied an enduring archetype: the obscure immigrant who comes to America, re-creates himself, and succeeds despite a lack of proper birth and breeding.

If Jefferson enunciated the more ample view of political democracy, Hamilton possessed the finer sense of economic opportunity.

At a time when Jefferson and Madison celebrated legislative power as the purest expression of the popular will, Hamilton argued for a dynamic executive branch and an independent judiciary, along with a professional military, a central bank, and an advanced financial system.

As a result, the small, scattered islands generated more wealth for Britain than all of her North American colonies combined.

In her proud defiance of persecution, her mental toughness, and her willingness to court controversy, it is hard not to see a startling preview of her son’s passionately willful behavior.

“The truth is that, on the question who my parents were, I have better pretensions than most of those who in this country plume themselves on ancestry.”

This was how Lavien designated Alexander and his brother: whore-children.

Let us pause briefly to tally the grim catalog of disasters that had befallen these two boys between 1765 and 1769: their father had vanished, their mother had died, their cousin and supposed protector had committed bloody suicide, and their aunt, uncle, and grandmother had all died. James, sixteen, and Alexander, fourteen, were now left alone, largely friendless and penniless. At every step in their rootless,

that this fatherless adolescent could have ended up a founding father of a country he had not yet even seen—seems little short of miraculous.

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

I shall conclude [by] saying I wish there was a war. Alex. Hamilton.

This nomadic, stateless boy found a home in the best possible city for a future treasury secretary, a city in which commerce always held an honored place.

If true to his later style, Hamilton gained energy as he spoke. He endorsed the Boston Tea Party, deplored the closure of Boston’s port, endorsed colonial unity against unfair taxation, and came down foursquare for a boycott of British goods.

“To think of succeeding by force of arms or by starving the nation into compliance is a proof of shameful ignorance, pride, and stupidity.”

“love of fame, the ruling passion of the noblest minds, which would prompt a man to plan and undertake extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit.”

Ambition was reckless if inspired by purely selfish motives but laudable if guided by great principles.

Unlike Franklin or Jefferson, he never learned to subdue his opponents with a light touch or a sly, artful, understated turn of phrase.

“If the sword of oppression be permitted to lop off one limb without opposition, reiterated strokes will soon dismember the whole body.”66

It showed that he could separate personal honor from political convictions and presaged a recurring theme of his career: the superiority of forgiveness over revolutionary vengeance.

The American Revolution was to succeed because it was undertaken by skeptical men who knew that the same passions that toppled tyrannies could be applied to destructive ends.