Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Revenge, greed, resentment, envy, and patriotism made for an inflammatory mix.

The feisty Hamilton always reacted to controversy with stubborn grit and a certain perverse delight in his own iconoclasm.

Congress adopted the dollar as the official monetary unit in 1785,

Many Americans still regarded banking as a black, unfathomable art, and it was anathema to upstate populists.

Like Bitcoin in 2018?

It was to house the personal bank accounts of both Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and prove one of Hamilton’s most durable monuments, becoming the oldest stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Alexander and Eliza produced eight children in a twenty-year span.

After 1790, the Hamiltons rented pew ninety-two, and Alexander performed free legal work for the church, then the meeting ground for the city’s Episcopalian blue bloods.

Like Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson, Hamilton had probably fallen under the sway of deism, which sought to substitute reason for revelation and dropped the notion of an active God who intervened in human affairs.

The second he got home, he shed his office cares and entered into his children’s imaginative world.

Moved by his plight, Hamilton induced Eliza “to go to the debtors’ jail to sit for her portrait and she induced other ladies to do the same,” wrote James Hamilton.

Did he need some psychic distance from the West Indies to reinvent himself in America?

The states were arrogating a right that properly belonged to a central government: the right to formulate trade policy.

Hamilton continued to demonstrate his unique flair for materializing at every major turning point in the early history of the republic.

The closed-door proceedings yielded inspired, uninhibited debate and brought forth one of the most luminous documents in history.

This was the great paradox of his career: his optimistic view of America’s potential coexisted with an essentially pessimistic view of human nature.

He told the assembly that “the advantage of encouraging foreigners is obvious. . . . Persons in Europe of moderate fortunes will be fond of coming here, where they will be on a level with the first citizens.

On September 17, 1787, after almost four months of hard-fought battles, the convention ended when thirty-nine delegates from twelve states signed the Constitution.

Washington, for one, doubted that the new federal government would survive twenty years.

With the possible exception of James Madison, nobody had exerted more influence than Hamilton in bringing about the convention or a greater influence afterward in securing passage of its sterling product.

nobody would do more than Alexander Hamilton to infuse life into this parchment and make it the working mandate of the American government.

The two sides projected competing nightmares of what would happen if the other side prevailed.

This sounds familiar!

Paranoid thinking seems to be a legacy of all revolutions, with purists searching for signs of heresy, and the American experience was no exception.

The Federalist Papers ran to eighty-five essays, with fifty-one attributed to Hamilton, twenty-nine to Madison, and only five to Jay.

Theodore Roosevelt commented “that it is on the whole the greatest book” dealing with practical politics.

Very often, Hamilton and Madison first read each other’s contributions in print.

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

the Revolution produced an insatiable need for thinkers who could generate ideas and wordsmiths who could lucidly expound them.

Hamilton and Madison came to symbolize opposite ends of the political spectrum.

So the battle for the Constitution seemed to boil down to the contests in Virginia and New York, whose conventions began in June.

Hamilton was implacable in his resolve to win against long odds.

Hamilton believed that revolutions ended in tyranny because they glorified revolution as a permanent state of mind. A spirit of compromise and a concern with order were needed to balance the quest for liberty.

Gliding down Broadway, pulled by ten horses, was a miniature frigate, twenty-seven feet long, baptized the “Federal Ship Hamilton.”

I bet this is in the musical.

For Hamilton, the whole American experiment hinged upon having Washington as president.

That Hamilton could be so sensitive to criticisms of himself and so insensitive to the effect his words had on others was a central mystery of his psyche.

The political genius of Aaron Burr was to lie in figuring out endless ways to profit from the partisan wrangling in his home state.

From the outset, the fifty-seven-year-old Washington was determined to strike a happy medium between regal dignity and republican austerity.

Hamilton wanted a president invested with a touch of grandeur and buffered from popular pressure.

Washington was taciturn, once advising his adopted grandson, “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.”

Washington had seven slaves shipped up from Mount Vernon to assist his white household servants.

They worried that if the capital stayed in New York, American innocence would be undone by urban hedonism.

Alexander and Eliza seemed united, not divided, by their shared adoration of Angelica.

Hamilton seemed to spark controversy at every turn.

A man of irreproachable integrity, Hamilton severed all outside sources of income while in office, something that neither Washington nor Jefferson nor Madison dared to do.

Hamilton knew the symbolic value of rapid decision making and phenomenal energy.

Alexander Hamilton never seemed to wander around in a normal human muddle.

Jefferson had it wrong when he charged that Hamilton manipulated Washington. On fundamental political matters, Washington was simply more attuned to Hamilton than he was to Jefferson.

He foresaw that America, if now junior to Britain in status, would someday rival her as an economic power:

Within weeks of his confirmation as treasury secretary, Hamilton had already staked out a position as the administration’s most influential figure on foreign policy.

Hamilton wanted to use British methods to defeat Britain economically.

Inviolable property rights lay at the heart of the capitalist culture that Hamilton wished to enshrine in America.