Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Justice shall be done to the memory of my Hamilton.

from Eliza Hamilton

Hamilton was an exuberant genius who performed at a fiendish pace and must have produced the maximum number of words that a human being can scratch out in forty-nine years.

Today, we are indisputably the heirs to Hamilton’s America, and to repudiate his legacy is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.

and perhaps absorbed the useful lesson that people who manipulate the law wield the real power in society.

His life was a case study in the profitable use of time.

People would assume that Hamilton, as an “outsider” or “foreigner,” could not possibly be motivated by patriotic impulses. Hence, he must be power mad and governed by a secret agenda.

we should blend the advantages of a monarchy and of a republic in a happy and beneficial union.”

This was the great paradox of his career: his optimistic view of America’s potential coexisted with an essentially pessimistic view of human nature. His faith in Americans never quite matched his faith in America itself.

Since critics found it hard to defeat him on intellectual grounds, they stooped to personal attacks.

still happens today

Hamilton continually invoked the king of England as an example of what should be avoided, especially the monarch’s lack of accountability. Every president “ought to be personally responsible for his behaviour in office.”

This falling-out was to be more than personal, for the rift between Hamilton and Madison precipitated the start of the two-party system in America.

“If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independence with the one hand and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”

Looking at you Jefferson!

Hamilton could not do things halfway: he cared too passionately, too personally, about the fate of his adopted country.

In a nation of self-made people, Hamilton became an emblematic figure because he believed that government ought to promote self-fulfillment, self-improvement, and self-reliance.

Shortly before returning from France, he wrote that circumstances rendered it “impossible that America should become a manufacturing country during the time of any man now living.”

In fact, no immigrant in American history has ever made a larger contribution than Alexander Hamilton.

Again and again in his career, Hamilton committed the same political error: he never knew when to stop, and the resulting excesses led him into irremediable indiscretions.

Sadly, it was the perceived threat to his career, not regret over his pregnant wife, that restored Hamilton to his senses.

This is about his affair.

If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.

If Hamilton had a vice, it was clearly a craving for power, not money, and he left public office much poorer than he entered it.

Adams had spent most of his vice presidency exiled in the Senate, casting a record thirty-one tiebreaking votes. Of the number-two post, he said wearily but indelibly that it was “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”

Slaveholding presidents from the south occupied the presidency for approximately fifty of the seventy-two years following Washington’s first inauguration. Many of these slaveholding populists were celebrated by posterity as tribunes of the common people. Meanwhile, the self-made Hamilton, a fervent abolitionist and a staunch believer in meritocracy, was villainized in American history textbooks as an apologist of privilege and wealth.

Instead of applying balm to Burr’s wounds, Hamilton struck a didactic tone and quibbled over the word despicable.

In a shockingly brief span, the two men had moved to the brink of a duel and were ready to lay down their lives over an adjective.

Far from being suicidal, Hamilton planned to go straight from the early-morning duel to his office to catch up on work—hardly the behavior of a depressed man meditating suicide. Nobody who saw Hamilton right before the duel reported any special symptoms of gloom.