Alexander Hamilton – Ron Chernow, 2004 ★★★★

Celebrating America's Own Alexander the Great

Dying on the battlefield was a fate avoided by the major figures of the American Revolution, unless you extend that battlefield to one of ideals. That was my core takeaway reading Ron Chernow’s bestselling biography on Alexander Hamilton, who survived the war only to die in a brave, bizarre duel over political differences 21 years later.

There’s a book idea out there, perhaps already written, about how the Founding Fathers have been variously remembered and set against each other over time. Some eras were more inclined to celebrate Thomas Jefferson as the consummate democrat. Others placed George Washington on the highest pedestal as a selfless leader. Recently, there was a run on John Adams as misunderstood genius.

Today we have Alexander Hamilton, rap star. Ironically, a few decades ago, he was likely to be regarded as a villain of the story, the one with aristocratic pretensions and imperialistic ambitions as cast by Charles Beard and other progressives. Now he is the subject of a hit Broadway show which celebrates how pro-immigrant and anti-slavery he was.

That show, “Hamilton,” was inspired by this book. Reading it, you see the hero-worship. For Chernow, Hamilton’s gifts were unmatched: “Hamilton was the supreme double threat among the founding fathers, at once thinker and doer, sparkling theoretician and masterful executive,” he writes. His powers of composition are described as “Mozart-like” for the way they poured onto the page, without revision.

When it comes to fiscal policy, Hamilton’s foresight was critical in developing the United States as freedom-loving capitalist engine:

He was the clear-eyed apostle of America’s economic future, setting forth a vision that many found enthralling, others unsettling, but that would ultimately prevail. He stood squarely on the modern side of a historical divide that seemed to separate him from other founders.

Not content to point out his subject’s strengths, Chernow frequently calls out the weaknesses of other early American leaders. You get Jefferson the hypocrite, James Madison the weasel, and Aaron Burr the poisonous conniver.

George Washington remains admirable, mostly because he listened to Hamilton and helped filter away the latter’s understandable if unfortunate excesses of expression:

Hamilton and Washington had complementary talents. Neither could have achieved alone what they did together.

Chernow’s take may be compressed and simplistic; it does make for exciting reading. His Hamilton is a man of action, decision, and arresting color amid a sometimes-grey landscape. Alone among the Founding Fathers, Hamilton was a city-dweller rather than a gentleman farmer. He was also quite literally a bastard, the murky product of an out-of-wedlock relationship between a married woman and an untitled Scottish aristocrat who grew up not in the American colonies but in the Caribbean under both British [Nevis] and Danish [St. Croix] flags.

Chernow points out how this contributed to Hamilton’s singular character, in terms of both his opposition to slavery and his distrust of his fellow man: 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.

Early portraits of Hamilton as a young man showcased his "trim physique and debonair style," Chernow notes. But his aspect took on a weightier air in later years, as captured here by Albany painter and acquaintance Ezra Ames. Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexander_Hamilton_portrait_by_Ezra_Ames-cropped.jpg.

It was this mindset that renders Chernow’s Hamilton both challenging and unique. Combine that with a self-made man of fierce energy and determination, and you get what he calls “a fearless, swashbuckling intellectual warrior who excelled in bare-knuckled controversy.” Excelled, that is, until the duel that ended his life in 1804.

Chernow’s story reads at times like gripping fiction. I recently reviewed a very similar story about a bastard immigrant who makes his fortune by taking a stand during the American Revolution; Alexander Hamilton likewise offers plenty of diverting sex, violence, and picaresque episodes to beguile as you review the circumstances of a nation’s precarious founding.

And what about those circumstances? It’s here you feel Chernow pulling hard at the edges of his story to keep you not only reading but reaching the same conclusions he did while researching his book. To that end, you get around our lead character a slew of figures who fall short, sometimes subtly, sometimes spectacularly, by comparison.

John Adams is invariably spiteful in his reckoning of Hamilton, unable to appreciate his many gifts while likening him to Napoleon, “not only contemptable but infamous, with infinitely less courage and capacity.” James Madison starts out an ally, partnering with Hamilton to champion the Constitution by authoring the Federalist Papers before being turned by Jefferson into an implacable foe. Even Washington falters at times when he balks at Hamilton’s centralizing notions of running the nation’s treasury.

Jefferson comes off very badly; a hypocrite who wrote about freedom while keeping (and fathering) slaves, an unabashed Francophile who championed the bloodshed of the French Revolution in such a way it set him at loggerheads with Hamilton, who took a broader, more sensible view of revolution even as a college student:

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. 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.

Balance is the key word here, providing an overarching theme to the entire book.

·   As a student at King’s College [later Columbia University] in Manhattan, Hamilton advocates independence in a full-throated way, yet looks out for a Tory friend who draws a murder-minded mob.

·   As an aide to General Washington, he develops a smooth-operating headquarters even as he chafes for battlefield experience.

·   As a member of Washington’s cabinet (the chief one, Chernow points out), he favored a path of gradually paying off debt and honoring bonds no matter who held them, sowing a point of great contention with Jefferson’s fiscally-looser, mob-oriented faction.

As history, Alexander Hamilton is no Mount Rushmore of stiff countenances staring off in the same direction. In most ways, it benefits from this “Crossfire” treatment. The foundation of the United States was no love-in; the Founding Fathers bickered and argued with one another to often-nasty extremes.

As Chernow points out, before meeting his doom on the Hudson shore against then-Vice President Burr, Hamilton nearly had another duel with a future president, James Monroe (who manages the impressive feat of coming off in the book less likable than either Jefferson or Madison).

Author Ron Chernow signs paperback editions of his bestselling biography. Image from http://mauicountryclub.org/event/august-book-club-gathering-alexander-hamilton-ron-chernow/.

Sometimes Chernow commits the infraction of presenting suppositions as facts; such as a youthful flirtation with a young woman, Kitty Livingston, he believes amounted to more than the record indicates. He notes the possibility of Hamilton owning slaves, or at least purchasing them for others, then dismisses it as incompatible with his work with an early abolitionist group, the New York Manumission Society.

Regarding a famous scandal, Hamilton’s admitted, adulterous relationship with one Maria Reynolds, Chernow suggests in an awkward passage that it was perhaps the one time Hamilton ever strayed from a marriage otherwise characterized by mutual respect and devotion:

One suspects that Alexander and Eliza [Hamilton] had slowly repaired the harm done by the Reynolds affair, that she had begun to forgive him, and that they had recaptured some earlier intimacy. Perhaps it took this scandal for Hamilton to recognize just how vital his wife had been in providing solace from his controversial political career.

This is wishful thinking disguised as scholarship. There is a good deal of it here. In the great divide of historians between academics and popularizers, Chernow stands squarely in the latter camp.

For the most part, I found this the right approach. Take the most famous episode of Hamilton’s life, the end. Here Chernow pushes against the relativist drift of many modern historians to present in Hamilton’s killer, Burr, a dangerous man of no scruple who twists himself to fit into whichever faction holds the whip hand, all the while working a number of profitable schemes to serve only himself.

After aligning himself with the Federalist faction of law and order represented by Washington and Hamilton, Burr switched over to the other camp, the Democratic-Republicans of Jefferson. Like Hamilton a New Yorker, Burr offered Jefferson a running mate in 1800 who could help water down Northern opposition. After getting the same number of votes as Jefferson, Burr schemed to win/steal the presidency outright in a tie-breaking Congressional vote.

This put Hamilton in the unenviable position of choosing his poison between an open enemy in Jefferson and Burr, with whom Hamilton had an ostensibly better relationship. Hamilton chose Jefferson, setting in motion his eventual doom:

But if Jefferson was a man of fanatical principles, he had principles all the same – which Hamilton could forgive. Burr’s abiding sin was a total lack of principles, which Hamilton could not forgive.

Just how much Hamilton’s support of Jefferson stopped Burr is another point of speculation for Chernow. He points to Hamilton’s advocacy of the case against Burr to an influential delegate from Delaware, which is fair, then adds because of it, “Jefferson probably owed his victory to Hamilton as much as to any other politician.”

It’s another debatable point in a book with many of them. But it serves the overarching thesis of Hamilton’s greatness and keeps you reading, which is Alexander Hamilton’s sharpest point of favor.