Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton—purblind and deaf but gallant to the end—was a stoic woman who never yielded to self-pity. With her gentle manner, Dutch tenacity, and quiet humor, she clung to the deeply rooted religious beliefs that had abetted her reconciliation to the extraordinary misfortunes she had endured.

Even in her early nineties, she still dropped to her knees for family prayers. Wrapped in shawls and garbed in the black bombazine dresses that were de rigueur for widows, she wore a starched white ruff and frilly white cap that bespoke a simpler era in American life. The dark eyes that gleamed behind large metal-rimmed glasses—those same dark eyes that had once enchanted a young officer on General George Washington’s staff—betokened a sharp intelligence, a fiercely indomitable spirit, and a memory that refused to surrender the past. In the front parlor of the house she now shared with her daughter, Eliza Hamilton had crammed the faded memorabilia of her now distant marriage. When visitors called, the tiny, erect, white-haired lady would grab her cane, rise gamely from a black sofa embroidered with a floral pattern of her own design, and escort them to a Gilbert Stuart painting of George Washington.

Eliza Hamilton was committed to one holy quest above all others: to rescue her husband’s historical reputation from the gross slanders that had tarnished it. For many years after the duel, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and other political enemies had taken full advantage of their eloquence and longevity to spread defamatory anecdotes about Hamilton, who had been condemned to everlasting silence. Determined to preserve her husband’s legacy, Eliza enlisted as many as thirty assistants to sift through his tall stacks of papers. Unfortunately, she was so self-effacing and so reverential toward her husband that, though she salvaged every scrap of his writing, she apparently destroyed her own letters.

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

Alexander Hamilton claimed Nevis in the British West Indies as his birthplace, although no surviving records substantiate this.

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.

As the redcoats retreated helter-skelter to Boston, they were riddled by sniper fire that erupted from behind hedges, stone walls, and fences, leaving a bloody trail of 273 British casualties versus ninety-five dead or wounded for the patriots.

On April 24, a huge throng of patriots, some eight thousand strong, massed in front of City Hall. While radicals grew giddy with excitement, many terrified Tory merchants began to book passage for England.

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.

Two days later, at Bunker Hill—or, rather, Breed’s Hill—north of Boston, a battle took place that hardly seemed at first like a patriotic victory. Americans were flushed from their elevated fortification, and more than four hundred were killed or wounded. Nevertheless, the patriotic soldiers showed great coolness under fire, and the British suffered more than one thousand casualties, including dozens of officers.

This first formal battle of the Revolution demolished the myth of British invincibility and raised, for the first time, the question of just how many deaths the mother country would tolerate to subjugate the colonies.

The British were unhinged by the colonists’ unorthodox fighting style and shocking failure to abide by gentlemanly rules of engagement. One scandalized British soldier complained that the American riflemen “conceal themselves behind trees etc. till an opportunity presents itself of taking a shot at our advance sentries, which done, they immediately retreat. What an unfair method of carrying on a war!”16

After Boston fell to the Continental Army in March—a shock for the British and a tonic to patriotic spirits—New York loomed as the next battlefront, and the city braced for impending invasion.

The Declaration of Independence did not achieve sacred status for many years and was not even officially inscribed on parchment for another two weeks.

Two days later, Washington held a printed copy of the declaration in his hands for the first time. The next day, the New York Provincial Congress ratified the document, and at 6:00 P.M.

The bilingual Hamilton befriended Lafayette with the almost instantaneous speed of all his early friendships and was soon assigned to him as a liaison officer.

In early July 1777, Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York fell to the British, prompting King George III to clap his hands and exclaim, “I have beat them! Beat all the Americans.”58 It was a potential calamity for the patriots, since it opened a corridor for General John Burgoyne and his invading army from Canada to push south to New York City, slicing the rebel army in half and isolating New England—an overarching objective of British war policy.

The frantic rides up and down the Hudson damaged Hamilton’s always fragile health.