Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

It is hard to grasp Hamilton’s later politics without contemplating the raw cruelty that he witnessed as a boy and that later deprived him of the hopefulness so contagious in the American milieu. On the most obvious level, the slave trade of St. Croix generated a permanent detestation of the system and resulted in his later abolitionist efforts.

Hamilton lacked the temperament of a true-blue revolutionary. He saw too clearly that greater freedom could lead to greater disorder and, by a dangerous dialectic, back to a loss of freedom. Hamilton’s lifelong task was to try to straddle and resolve this contradiction and to balance liberty and order.

Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never saw the creation of America as a magical leap across a chasm to an entirely new landscape, and he always thought the New World had much to learn from the Old.

Hamilton read widely and accumulated books insatiably. The self-education of this autodidact never stopped.

He had expressed an unwavering belief in the genetic equality of blacks and whites—unlike Jefferson, for instance, who regarded blacks as innately inferior—that was enlightened for his day.

Northern states finally agreed that five slaves would be counted as equivalent to three free whites, the infamous “federal ratio” that survived for another eighty years. The formula richly rewarded the southern states, artificially inflating their House seats and electoral votes and helping to explain why four of the first five presidents hailed from Virginia.

His papers show that, Mozart-like, he could transpose complex thoughts onto paper with few revisions.

He wrote with the speed of a beautifully organized mind that digested ideas thoroughly, slotted them into appropriate pigeonholes, then regurgitated them at will.

There is again a Dickensian quality to his story: the young hero escapes a tawdry life only to be lured back into it by a pair of unscrupulous swindlers.

England and France functioned as proxies in the domestic debate over what kind of society America should be. For Jefferson and Madison, the problem was not simply that Hamilton was pro-British but that his policies would replicate aspects of the British government they loathed. And for Hamilton, the French Revolution was a bloody cautionary tale of a revolution gone awry.

Hamilton refused to condone the carnage in Paris or separate means from ends. He did not think a revolution should cast off the past overnight or repudiate law, order, and tradition.

For Hamilton, the French Revolution had become a compendium of heretical doctrines, including the notion that morality could exist without religion or that human nature could be so refined by revolution that “government itself will become useless and society will subsist and flourish free from its shackles.”

“There is no road to despotism more sure or more to be dreaded than that which begins at anarchy.”20 In Hamilton’s opinion, the most sacred duty of government was an “inviolable respect for the Constitution and laws.”

Washington left a legacy of prosperity, neutrality, sound public credit, stable government, and a viable constitution. As the resident policy genius of the administration, Hamilton deserves a large share of the accolades.

Both Hamilton and Jefferson believed in democracy, but Hamilton tended to be more suspicious of the governed and Jefferson of the governors. A strange blend of dreamy idealist and manipulative politician, Jefferson was a virtuoso of the sunny phrases and hopeful themes that became staples of American politics. He continually paid homage to the wisdom of the masses.

Only once did Burr betray any misgivings about killing Hamilton. While reading the scene in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in which the tenderhearted Uncle Toby picks up a fly and delicately places it outside a window instead of killing it, Burr is said to have remarked, “Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.”