Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

gazed and gazed, as if she could never be satisfied.”

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

Justice shall be done to the memory of my Hamilton.

In all probability, Alexander Hamilton is the foremost political figure in American history who never attained the presidency,

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

Except for Washington, nobody stood closer to the center of American politics from 1776 to 1800 or cropped up at more turning points.

For all his superlative mental gifts, he was afflicted with a touchy ego that made him querulous and fatally combative.

Hamilton possessed the finer sense of economic opportunity. He was the messenger from a future that we now inhabit.

Samuel Seabury, the Anglican rector of the town of Westchester.

Seabury gave Hamilton what he always needed for his best work: a hard, strong position to contest.

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.”

Of all the incidents in Hamilton’s early life in America, his spontaneous defense of Myles Cooper was probably the most telling. 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.

Bunker Hill—or,

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.

Major General Philip Schuyler,

that the best government posture toward religion was one of passive tolerance, not active promotion of an established church.

He saw too clearly that greater freedom could lead to greater disorder and, by a dangerous dialectic, back to a loss of freedom.

Hamilton probably spent little more than two years at King’s and never formally graduated due to the outbreak of the Revolution. By April 6, 1776, King’s College, tarred by its earlier association with Myles Cooper, was commandeered by patriot forces and put to use as a military hospital.

I was born to die and my reason and conscience tell me it is impossible to die in a better or more important cause.”35

Throughout his career, Hamilton was fastidious about military dress,

By a curious coincidence, Burr, fresh from the failed patriot assault on Quebec, visited Washington in June and accepted his offer to serve on his military staff, or “family,” as it was known.

quickly quit in disgust and sent a letter to Washington protesting that less-qualified men had been promoted ahead of him.

insatiable chasing after women—grated on George Washington.

some three hundred ships and thirty-two thousand men, including eighty-four hundred Hessian mercenaries—a

The British had so many troops stationed aboard this floating city that they surpassed in numbers the patriotic soldiers and citizens left facing them in New York.

No colony had ever succeeded in breaking away from the mother country to set up a self-governing state, and the declaration signers knew that the historical odds were heavily stacked against them.

Captain Hamilton wandered about trying to find a purse with money that he had lost—he sometimes had a touch of the absentminded genius—the

On Sunday, September 15, they tardily resumed their offensive with a sustained, earsplitting bombardment of American positions at Kip’s Bay (approximately between Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Streets today), on Manhattan’s eastern shore. “So terrible and so incessant a roar of guns few even in the army and navy had ever heard before,” said Lord Howe’s secretary.64

Captain Nathan Hale, who was hung from the gallows at a spot thought to be near the present Third Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street.

Fort Washington on the Manhattan side and Fort Lee on the New Jersey side.

He moved his three thousand men into winter quarters at Morristown, New Jersey, thirty miles from New York and cupped in a beautiful valley that formed a protective perimeter around his men.

Washington penned a note to Hamilton, personally inviting him to join his staff as an aide-de-camp. Five days later, The Pennsylvania Evening

Washington chafed under the British condescension toward colonial officers and never forgot his experience as aide-de-camp to the abusive, pigheaded General Edward Braddock.

Washington had several surrogate sons during the Revolution, most notably the marquis de Lafayette, and he often referred to Hamilton as “my boy.”

the two men had clashing temperaments and frequently showed more mutual respect than true affection.

over time he became such a prisoner of his own celebrity that people couldn’t relax in his presence.

The notion that Hamilton was a surrogate son to Washington has some superficial merit but fails to capture fully the psychological interplay between them.

the general did lose the majority of battles he fought in the Revolution—but

Hamilton evolved from private secretary to something akin to chief of staff,

As in his first boyish love poems in St. Croix, Hamilton could fancy young women as chaste goddesses or naughty little vixens.

Laurens’s father enrolled him in a cosmopolitan school in Geneva, Switzerland.

Lord Mansfield’s legal decision that a slave became free by being brought to England. Laurens became a passionate convert to abolitionism, which was to create a strong ideological bond with Hamilton.

one Hamilton biographer, James T. Flexner, has detected homoerotic overtones in their relationship.

In all thirteen colonies, sodomy had been a capital offense, so if Hamilton and Laurens did become lovers—and it is impossible to say this with any certainty—they would have taken extraordinary precautions.

His meteoric ascent in the Continental Army owed much to a letter that Benjamin Franklin wrote to George Washington from Paris, urging the political expediency of welcoming this well-connected young man. Lafayette agreed to serve without pay, brought a ship to America outfitted at his own expense, and spent lavishly from his own purse to clothe and arm the patriots.

he named his only son George Washington Lafayette.

“There is a note of romance in their friendship, quite unusual even in those days, and Lafayette, especially during his early sojourn in this country, was on the closest terms with Hamilton”?

impressive. If Hamilton found Gates using the requested troops in a manner that benefited the patriotic cause, “it is not my wish to give any interruption,” Washington wrote. If that was not the case, however, “it is my desire that the reinforcements before mentioned . . . be immediately put in motion to join this army.”72 If there was a single moment during the Revolution when its outcome hinged on spontaneous decisions made by Alexander Hamilton, this was it.

During this visit to Schuyler’s mansion, Hamilton met for the first time the general’s second daughter, twenty-year-old Eliza, a relationship that was to resume more than two years later.

Putnam was much beloved by his aide, Aaron Burr, who referred to him as “My good old general.”79 It was Putnam who supposedly told his men at Bunker Hill, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.