Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Hamilton was girl crazy and brimming with libido.

It is worth noting here, however, how frequently people used the word feminine to describe Hamilton—the more surprising given his military bearing and virile exploits.

“The gay trio to which Hamilton and Laurens belonged was made complete by Lafayette,” Hamilton’s grandson later wrote.

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.

Thomas Jefferson pinpointed one especially flagrant fault: “His foible is a canine appetite for popularity and fame.”

In which Lafayette reminds me of someone else we all know.

The broader point is that Alexander Hamilton, the outsider from the West Indies, had a rare capacity for friendship and was already attracting a circle of devoted, well-placed people who were to help to propel him to the highest political plateau.

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

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.

the senate was to the commonwealth what the ballast is to a ship and preserved the whole in a just equilibrium.

For anyone studying Hamilton’s pay book, it would come as no surprise that he would someday emerge as a first-rate constitutional scholar, an unsurpassed treasury secretary, and the protagonist of the first great sex scandal in American political history.

When avarice takes the lead in a state, it is commonly the forerunner of its fall.

Hamilton expected that someday the struggling confederation of states would be welded into a mighty nation, and he believed that every step now taken by politicians would reverberate by example far into the future.

In response, Hamilton would display a deep insecurity that he normally kept well hidden behind his confident demeanor. If struck, he tended to hit back hard.

Another parallel with Trump.

The virulent charges made against him sometimes alienated him from his adopted country, leaving him feeling that perhaps his critics had a point after all.

He likes religion in moderation. Clearly, he dislikes fanaticism and sanctimony.

The memories of Valley Forge and Morristown would powerfully affect the future political agendas of both Washington and Hamilton, who had to grapple with the defects of a weak central government.

Hamilton, twenty-five, was instantly smitten with Schuyler, twenty-two. Fellow aide Tench Tilghman reported: “Hamilton is a gone man.”

your sister has found out the secret of interesting me in everything that concerns her.

Beneath an animated, engaging facade, she was loyal, generous, compassionate, strong willed, funny, and courageous. Short and pretty, she was utterly devoid of conceit and was to prove an ideal companion for Hamilton, lending a strong home foundation to his turbulent life. His letters to her reflected not a single moment of pique, irritation, or disappointment.

“Hers was a strong character with its depth and warmth, whether of feeling or temper controlled, but glowing underneath, bursting through at times in some emphatic expression.

All in all, she seems a cheerful, modest soul, blessed with gumption.

Though Schuyler knew that Hamilton was a figure of awesome intelligence, he won her more with his kindly nature than with his intellect.

In later years, when harvesting anecdotes about her husband, Eliza Hamilton gave correspondents a list of his qualities that she wanted to illustrate, and it sums up her view of his multiple talents: “Elasticity of his mind. Variety of his knowledge. Playfulness of his wit. Excellence of his heart. His immense forbearance [and] virtues.”

An apt description of my own father, a lion at 90.

It is hard to escape the impression that Hamilton’s married life was sometimes a curious ménage à trois with two sisters who were only one year apart.

By a plan of this kind, we should blend the advantages of a monarchy and of a republic in a happy and beneficial union.”

After almost hourly contact with Washington for four years, Hamilton had become his alter ego, able to capture his tone on paper or in person, and was a casualty of his own success.

Hamilton exhibited the recklessness of youth and a disquieting touch of folie de grandeur.

This was an extremely subtle, sophisticated analysis for a young man immersed in wartime details for four years: America could defeat the British in the bond market more readily than on the battlefield.

The Articles of Confederation promised little more than a fragile alliance of thirteen miniature republics.

“Blackstone taught Hamilton a reverential enthusiasm for the law itself. . . . Moreover, the law as Blackstone spelled it out resolved once and for all the tension Hamilton had felt between liberty and law.”

If Hamilton seemed born to rule, then Madison seemed born to reflect.

With unerring foresight, Washington perceived the importance of enshrining the principle that military power should be subordinated to civilian control.

Hamilton saw embodied his worst nightmare: a portion of the revolutionary army had broken down into a mob that was intimidating an enfeebled central government.

If Pennsylvania could not guarantee the safety of Congress, then it would suspend all further meetings in the city.

Of this runaway Congress, hounded from its home, Benjamin Rush said that it was “abused, laughed at, and cursed in every company.”

Convinced that appearances, not reality, ruled in politics, he never wanted to allow misimpressions to linger, however briefly, in the air.

The Philadelphia mutiny had major repercussions in American history, for it gave rise to the notion that the national capital should be housed in a special federal district where it would never stand at the mercy of state governments.

With his hyperactive mind, Hamilton was already fleshing out a rough draft of America’s future government.

the future battle lines were being drawn between those who wanted an energetic central government and those who wanted rights to revert to the states.

For more than a century, November 25, 1783, was commemorated in New York City as Evacuation Day, the blessed end to seven years of British rule and martial law.

the twenty-five thousand American military deaths amounted to nearly 1 percent of the entire population, a percentage exceeded only by the Civil War.

The lives of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr continued in parallel. Both had passed the bar in Albany at almost the same time, and they now occupied the same New York street and inaugurated their legal practices at almost the same time.

As a fierce opponent of such vengeance, Hamilton busied himself defending persecuted Tories and halting their banishment.

That Alexander Hamilton opted to purchase land in the far northern woods and bungled the chance to buy dirt-cheap Manhattan real estate must certainly count as one of his few conspicuous failures of economic judgment.

This mixture of the grave and the playful was the very essence of his nature. His grandson wrote that Hamilton’s personality was “a mixture of aggressive force and infinite tenderness and amiability.”

Burr boasted an illustrious lineage. His maternal grandfather was Jonathan Edwards, the esteemed Calvinist theologian and New England’s foremost cleric.

It is puzzling that Aaron Burr is sometimes classified among the founding fathers.

At a time of tremendous ideological cleavages, Burr was an agile opportunist who maneuvered for advantage among colleagues of fixed political views.

Without the bonds of wartime comradeship, would the divisive pulls of class, region, and ideology tear the new country apart?

For many patriots, the Tories were traitors, pure and simple, and they would fight anyone who sought to stop them from exacting revenge.