Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

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

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!”

“Force of intellect and force of will were the sources of his success,” Henry Cabot Lodge later wrote.12

“our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep in their compositions.”

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.

This caution reflected Burr’s principal quality as a politician: he was a chameleon who evaded clear-cut positions on most issues and was a genius at studied ambiguity. In his wickedly mordant world, everything was reduced to clever small talk, and he enjoyed saying funny, shocking things. “We die reasonably fast,” he wrote during a yellow-fever outbreak in New York. “But then Mrs. Smith had twins this morning, so the account is even.”26 By

The rancor ushered in a golden age of literary assassination in American politics. No etiquette had yet evolved to define the legitimate boundaries of dissent. Poison-pen artists on both sides wrote vitriolic essays that were overtly partisan, often paid scant heed to accuracy, and sought a visceral impact.

“It is best to be silent, for there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.”

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“Damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won’t damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won’t put up lights in the windows and sit up all night damning John Jay.”21

On the Fourth of July, Jay was burned in effigy in so many cities that he said he could have walked the length of America by the glow from his own flaming figure.

He was no less directive when it came to curricula, declaring that the engineering school should teach “fluxions, conic sections, hydraulics, hydrostatics, and pneumatics.”

Hamilton put calculus (fluxions) on the curriculum at West Point.

Alexander Hamilton triumphed as a doer and thinker, not as a leader of the average voter. He was simply too unashamedly brainy to appeal to the masses. Fisher Ames observed of Hamilton that the common people don’t want leaders “whom they see elevated by nature and education so far above their heads.”