Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be.

The passions of a revolution are apt to hurry even good men into excesses.

Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by the impulse of passion.

Opinion, whether well or ill founded, is the governing principle of human affairs.

Eliza Hamilton died at ninety-seven on November 9, 1854.

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

his exquisite tact often gave way to egregious failures of judgment that left even his keenest admirers aghast.

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.

the notion that Alexander was the biological son of Thomas Stevens instead of James Hamilton would clarify many oddities in Hamilton’s biography.

a massive hurricane tore through St. Croix on the night of August 31, 1772, and carved a wide swath of destruction through nearby islands.

Hamilton always displayed an unusual capacity for impressing older, influential men, and he gained his social footing in Elizabethtown with surpassing speed, crossing over an invisible divide into a privileged, patrician world in a way that would have been impossible in St. Croix.

Livingston tilted lances with royal authorities with such self-righteous glee that one Tory newspaper anointed him “the Don Quixote of the Jerseys.”3

Hamilton observed the courtship of the beautiful, high-spirited Sarah Livingston by a young lawyer named John Jay.

Hercules Mulligan contends that Hamilton told him that “he preferred Princeton to King’s College because it was more republican.”13 Indeed, the school bubbled with such political ferment that it was denounced in Tory quarters as a nursery of political radicalism.

young Virginia scholar who had entered as a sophomore in 1769 and worked himself into a state of nervous exhaustion by completing his bachelor’s degree in two years instead of three. His name was James Madison, later Hamilton’s illustrious collaborator on The Federalist Papers.

Spurned at Princeton, Hamilton ended up at King’s College.

Hamilton was motivated by a form of ambition much esteemed in the eighteenth century—what he later extolled as the “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.”

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

The task of government was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good.

In a moment of acute anxiety a year earlier, John Adams had wondered what would happen if “the multitude, the vulgar, the herd, the rabble” maintained such open defiance of authority.13

Even as he reviled the patriots in The Royal Gazette, Rivington was surreptitiously relaying British naval intelligence to Washington, sealed inside the covers of books he sold to patriotic spies.

In early January 1776, a self-taught English immigrant, Thomas Paine, who had arrived in Philadelphia two years earlier, provided Hamilton with a perfect model when he anonymously published Common Sense.

Washington knew that he lacked verbal flow, once writing, “With me it has always been a maxim rather to let my designs appear from my works than by my expressions.”

our safety depends on a total change of system. And this change of system will only be produced by misfortune.”

For all the merriment and high spirits, few guests could have overlooked the mortifying contrast between the enormous Schuyler clan, with their Van Cortlandt and Van Rensselaer relatives, and the lonely groom, who didn’t have a single family member in attendance.

These disappointments only buttressed his belief in meritocracy, not aristocracy, as the best system for government appointments.

General John Sullivan, now back in Congress, wanted to nominate Hamilton as the new superintendent of finance and sounded out Washington on his qualifications. However incredible it now seems, Washington confessed that he had never discussed finance with his aide, but he did volunteer: “This I can venture to advance from a thorough knowledge of him that there are few men to be found of his age who has [sic] a more general knowledge than he possesses, and none whose soul is more firmly engaged in the cause, or who exceeds him in probity and sterling virtue.”7

“A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing. It will be powerful cement of our union.”

Cornwallis had grown so desperate that he infected blacks with smallpox and forced them to wander toward enemy lines in an attempt to sicken the opposing forces.

“The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people,” he told Morris. “In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fickleness, and folly.”15 Increasingly Hamilton despaired of pure democracy, of politicians simply catering to the popular will, and favored educated leaders who would enlighten the people and exercise their own judgment.

At this juncture, they had a similar vision of the structural reforms needed by the government. Madison favored a standing army, a permanent navy, and other positions later associated with the Hamiltonians.

If Pennsylvania persisted in its spineless inaction, Congress would relocate to Trenton or Princeton—by

Yet with the war ending, many advocates of state sovereignty wanted Congress dismantled as a permanent body. They thought the current Congress was too strong. “The constant session of Congress cannot be necessary in times of peace,” said Thomas Jefferson, who wanted to replace it with a committee.64

Hamilton was easy to ruffle, whereas Burr hid his feelings behind an enigmatic facade.

“Burr’s habits have been never to trust himself on paper, if he could avoid it, and when he wrote, it was with great caution.”

As Burr once warned his law clerk, “Things written remain.”

Where Hamilton was often more interested in policy than politics, Burr seemed interested only in politics.

Hamilton said of Burr, “In civil life, he has never projected nor aided in producing a single measure of important public utility.”28

Revenge, greed, resentment, envy, and patriotism made for an inflammatory mix.

Hamilton said that, as a revolutionary veteran, he had “too deep a share in the common exertions of this revolution to be willing to see its fruits blasted by the violence of rash or unprincipled men, without at least protesting against their designs.”

The feisty Hamilton always reacted to controversy with stubborn grit and a certain perverse delight in his own iconoclasm. He never shrank from a good fight.

In urging the court to invalidate the Trespass Act, Hamilton expounded the all-important doctrine of judicial review—the notion that high courts had a right to scrutinize laws and if necessary declare them void. To appreciate the originality of this argument, we must recall that the country still lacked a federal judiciary. The state legislatures had been deemed the most perfect expression of the popular will and were supposed to possess supreme power.

“It must be conceded that the legislature of one state cannot repeal the law of the United States.”

The tone of politics had rapidly grown very harsh. Some poison was released into the American political atmosphere that was not put back into the bottle for a generation.

Snatching an interval of leisure during the next three weeks, Hamilton drafted, singlehandedly, a constitution for the new institution—the sort of herculean feat that seems almost commonplace in his life. As architect of New York’s first financial firm, he could sketch freely on a blank slate. The resulting document was taken up as the pattern for many subsequent bank charters and helped to define the rudiments of American banking.

Hamilton’s petition to the state legislature for a bank charter was denied for seven years, as Governor George Clinton succumbed to the prejudices of his agricultural constituents who thought the bank would give preferential treatment to merchants and shut out farmers. Clinton distrusted corporations as shady plots against the populace, foreshadowing the Jeffersonian revulsion against Hamilton’s economic programs.

In all, Alexander and Eliza produced eight children in a twenty-year span. As a result, Eliza was either pregnant or consumed with child rearing throughout their marriage, which may have encouraged Hamilton’s womanizing.

May 16, 1786, the Hamiltons performed an exceptional act of kindness that has long been overlooked: they added an orphan child to their burgeoning brood.

Eliza married one orphan, adopted another, and cofounded an orphanage points up a special compassion for abandoned children that might explain, beyond his obvious merits, her initial attraction to Hamilton.

Angelica never met a famous, intelligent man she didn’t enchant, and she had soon befriended Benjamin Franklin. She prayed that Hamilton might someday sail to Europe and succeed him as American minister.