Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

He was the messenger from a future that we now inhabit.

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

While other founding fathers were reared in tidy New England villages or cosseted on baronial Virginia estates, Hamilton grew up in a tropical hellhole of dissipated whites and fractious slaves, all framed by a backdrop of luxuriant natural beauty.

No white in the sugar islands was entirely exempt from the pervasive taint of slavery.

Rachel was invariably listed among the whites on local tax rolls. Her identification as someone of mixed race has no basis in verifiable fact.

At the time of Rachel’s birth, the four thousand slaves on Nevis outnumbered whites by a ratio of four to one, making inequitable carnal relations between black slaves and white masters a dreadful commonplace.

He inherited his father’s pride, though not his indolence, and his exceptional capacity for work was its own unspoken commentary about his father’s.

Their liaison was the sort of match that could easily produce a son hypersensitive about class and status and painfully conscious that social hierarchies ruled the world.

The one inescapable impression we have is that Hamilton received his brains and implacable willpower from his mother, not from his errant, indolent father.

we will opt here for a birthday of January 11, 1755.

His French Huguenot mother may also have instructed Hamilton, for he was comfortably bilingual and later was more at ease in French than Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and other American diplomats who had spent years struggling to master the tongue in Paris.

three out of five died within five years of arrival,

Island life contained enough bloodcurdling scenes to darken Hamilton’s vision for life, instilling an ineradicable pessimism about human nature that infused all his writing.

That this abominable childhood produced such a strong, productive, self-reliant human being—that this fatherless adolescent could have ended up a founding father of a country he had not yet even seen—seems little short of miraculous.

The twin specters of despotism and anarchy were to haunt him for the rest of his life.

Hamilton did not know it, but he had just written his way out of poverty.

Smart, handsome, and outgoing, he marched with an erect military carriage, thrusting out his chest in an assertive manner.

Never tentative about tackling new things and buoyed by a preternatural self-confidence, Hamilton proved a fantastically quick study.

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

He had read many of the polemical writers on religious subjects and he was a zealous believer in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.”

New York hosted its own “tea party” on April 22, 1774,

Both then and forever after, the poor boy from the West Indies commanded attention with the force and fervor of his words.

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

it was clear that he had found his calling as a fearless, swashbuckling intellectual warrior who excelled in bare-knuckled controversy.

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.

This was more than just precocious knowledge: this was intuitive judgment of the highest order.

He was to be a true child of the Revolution, growing up along with his new country and gaining in strength and wisdom as the hostilities mounted.

On the night of April 18, 1775, eight hundred British troops marched out of Boston to capture Samuel Adams and John Hancock and seize a stockpile of patriot munitions in Concord.

The news reached New York within four days, and a mood of insurrection promptly overtook the city.

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. Hamilton had shown exemplary courage.

the episode captured the contradictory impulses struggling inside this complex young man, a committed revolutionary with a profound dread that popular sentiment would boil over into dangerous excess.

The American Revolution was to succeed because it was undertaken by skeptical men who knew that the same passions that toppled tyrannies could be applied to destructive ends.

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.

What an unfair method of carrying on a war!”

Clearly, this ambivalent twenty-year-old favored the Revolution but also worried about the long-term effect of habitual disorder, especially among the uneducated masses.

Like many prolific authors, Hamilton sometimes quoted himself unwittingly.

the complacent British forces dawdled and botched an opportunity that might have ended the conflict.

As New York fell to the British, Hamilton and the ragged remnants of the Continental Army had little notion that they would be exiled from the city for seven years.

the flames leaping from house to house until this blazing conflagration consumed a quarter of the city’s housing.

Much of New York had been reduced to charred rubble.

The war was beginning to look like a farcical mismatch.

With his army having dwindled to fewer than three thousand forlorn men, Washington had no choice but to retreat across New Jersey, with the vile epithets of his critics ringing in his ears.

In fewer than five years, the twenty-two-year-old Alexander Hamilton had risen from despondent clerk in St. Croix to one of the aides to America’s most eminent man.

Washington towered over Hamilton by at least seven inches.

he saw that the volatile Hamilton needed a steadying hand.

He could transmute wispy ideas into detailed plans and turn revolutionary dreams into enduring realities. As a team, they were unbeatable and far more than the sum of their parts.

Hamilton was so brilliant, so coldly critical, that he detected flaws in Washington less visible to other aides.

It was temperamentally hard for Alexander Hamilton to subordinate himself to anyone, even someone with the extraordinary stature of George Washington.

General Nathanael Greene remembered his presence at headquarters as “a bright gleam of sunshine, ever growing brighter as the general darkness thickened.”

How does this square with Hamilton's cynical view of mankind?