The Hamilton Collection

INTRODUCTION

In 2015, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the son of Puerto Rican immigrants to New York, brilliantly turned the American founding father and unrepentant elitist Alexander Hamilton into a rapping, dancing, populist hero in the smash hit Broadway musical Hamilton. Miranda presents Hamilton as a scrappy immigrant who spoke truth to power and used his extraordinary intelligence to bootstrap his way into the top echelons of the American military, government, and society.

But how accurate was this depiction of him? What was Hamilton, the man, really like?

When one looks at the broad contours of Hamilton's life, it is difficult not to be moved by the extreme hardship of his youth: born out of wedlock, abandoned by an insolvent father, and orphaned with no money or prospects before he turned thirteen. Against the backdrop of these circumstances, the magnitude of his inborn gifts, his incessant drive, and his enduring achievements are all the more dazzling. In an extraordinary coincidence, or perhaps an intervention of fate, his arrival on the North American continent coincided with the moment that American colonists were in the early stages of what developed into an open and violent rebellion against the British Empire. "I wish there was a war," he had written as a fourteen-year-old already hungry for glory, in a letter to his childhood friend Edward Stevens.¹ The rebels could not have wished for a more relentless advocate for independence, or a more ambitious and determined soldier, or a more skillful administrator than the gifted and arrogant teenager who arrived in their midst in 1772, a few years before the Boston Tea Party.

Hamilton quickly emerged as a leader of the colonial movement, distinguished himself on the battlefield, and indisputably had a hand—oftentimes, a forceful, guiding hand—in the creation of many of the American institutions that have defined and sustained the nation since its inception. As Ron Chernow, whose 2004 biography of Hamilton served as the inspiration for the musical, writes, "If [Thomas] Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton established the prose of American statecraft. No other founder articulated such a clear and prescient vision of America's future political, military, and economic strength or crafted such ingenious mechanisms to bind the nation together."²

So why has Hamilton been so frequently derided as an autocrat, an apologist for monarchy, and worse?

Hamilton was one of the most prolific correspondents, pamphleteers, and disseminators of political propaganda of the American Revolutionary era and the early years of the republic. His pen could be a devastating weapon, as anyone on the receiving end of one of his trademark attacks, notable for their bite as much as their astute reasoning, would have attested.

His political enemies returned the favor in kind. Perhaps more than anyone else, Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton's ideological and political nemesis, can be said to have engineered the decline in Hamilton's reputation. Jefferson engaged Hamilton in both political and personal battles during their time in George Washington's administration, orchestrating numerous public attacks on Hamilton that escalated through the Adams administration and into Jefferson's own presidency. After Hamilton's death, Jefferson, attempting to maintain his political ascendancy and to seal his political triumph, perpetuated those attacks.

John Adams, another antagonist of Hamilton's, had a more personal reason to loathe him: Hamilton had sabotaged his political career by undermining his presidency and ultimately helping limit it to one term. More frank and direct in his attacks than Jefferson, and more personally insulting about Hamilton's illegitimacy and background, Adams, too, continued to vilify Hamilton long after the latter's death.

Thanks to his own vanity and hubris, Hamilton had done an impressive job of damaging his own reputation before his death at forty-nine in 1804. By the time he was forty-five, he had essentially become politically irrelevant. Without his protector and alter ego, George Washington, to shield him, Hamilton became prey to the enemies he had made over the course of his political career, and to the fallout of his own rather colossal misjudgments. He was cast out of the Adams administration, for example, when Adams discovered that Hamilton had been quietly but powerfully influencing Adams's cabinet members without his knowledge or approval. Without Washington's protection, Hamilton's fears of besiegement by domestic and foreign enemies became more extreme, his judgments less reliable, his temper more volatile.

Hamilton sometimes displayed a tin ear for "retail" politics—the flesh-pressing business of influencing people in small groups and as individuals—as when he praised the British Constitution as "the only government in the world 'which unites public strength with individual security'"³ while addressing the Constitutional Convention in 1787. How could he not have known that this idea might have raised the hackles of the very people who only a few short years before had risked their lives fighting the British government? His "confidential" letter-writing campaign to thwart the candidacy of John Adams, whom he believed incapable of effective governance, was a naïve miscalculation. How could someone with so profound a mistrust of human nature expect those letters, caustically critical of Adams, to remain secret?

One can find plentiful evidence in Hamilton's letters and published writings not just of his elitism, but of his anti-democratic beliefs as well. His opponents and critics seized on the latter charge to give credence to their depiction of Hamilton as a closet monarchist and autocrat, but Hamilton would unhesitatingly have pleaded guilty to opposing democracy. Steeped in the writings of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, he had a deep distrust of human nature ("I have an indifferent opinion of the honesty of this country,"⁴ he wrote to George Washington in 1783). Human fears and frailty, in combination with the tumultuous nature of life in general, would lead inevitably to disorderly mob rule and conflict, in Hamilton's view. He saw direct democracy (as opposed to republicanism) to be a direct, slippery, and downhill road to anarchy. By the end of his life, he viewed the depredations of the French Revolution as vindication of these beliefs, referring to those, like Jefferson, who opposed a strong central government in favor of individual liberties as "Jacobins." Alluding to Jefferson's policies in a personal letter written in 1802, Hamilton lamented, "Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture."⁵

He also stirred up regional antipathies, though it was his express aim not to do so. He saw manufacturing and commerce, the engine of the northern states, as complementary rather than antagonistic to the agrarian economy of the south that Jefferson favored and idealized. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to trace in the arguments that Hamilton made in his "Report on the Public Credit" and his "Report on the Subject of Manufactures," as well as in the capitalist juggernaut that his policies and institutions unleashed, the fault lines that led up to the Civil War right up to Occupy Wall Street and beyond.

Given the fact that Hamilton was frequently derided for his Caribbean birth (a "Creole bastard," John Adams had called him), his nativist streak is inexplicable. Placed against the background of the violence of the Terror in France and Napoleonic expansionism throughout Europe and the Middle East, his girding against infiltration by foreign agents fomenting revolution in the United States is only somewhat more understandable. To most modern sensibilities, these fears tip over into jingoism and paranoia—though jingoism and fear mongering always seem to play well in times of upheaval and uncertainty. Perhaps, given the circumstances of his life at that time, cast out of the Adams administration, widely and routinely attacked in the press, denigrated in the halls of Congress, no longer shielded by George Washington—and having suffered the devastating loss of his eldest son, Philip, in a duel—it could be argued that Hamilton anticipated besiegement on every front in his life.

Unsurprisingly, Hamilton was a champion of contrarian causes. His representation of Loyalists after the Revolutionary War is one example of this. Another one, confounding to critics of Hamilton's "aristocratic" tendencies, was his consistent and principled opposition to slavery. Abolitionism was certainly not unprecedented at the time—Hamilton was one of thirty-one founding members of the New-York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves (a group that sought to abolish slavery) in 1785, along with John Jay and Aaron Burr. But Hamilton's firsthand experiences on the Caribbean side of the slave trade gave his views added insight and understanding. Few of his contemporaries, for example, shared his conviction that blacks had intrinsic abilities equal to those of whites. Of course, his mother had owned slaves (one of whom had been assigned to him), as did his in-laws, so it must be said that Hamilton is not exempt from the criticism to which his slave-owning fellow Founders—especially Jefferson—have been justifiably subject.

As maddeningly brilliant and hubristic as Hamilton's public life was, his letters to family and friends reveal a warmth and wit that put him in his best light. One gets the sense from them, particularly those to his sister-in-law, Angelica Schuyler Church, that Hamilton was simply fun to be with, and that he was a loyal and confiding friend. His letters to his wife, Elizabeth, reveal his tender and protective side. He was, in spite of his brief affair with Maria Reynolds, a loving husband and father.

One can only read the correspondence leading up to Hamilton's duel with Burr with a queasy sense of what is to come, and wonder whether in the early days of the nineteenth century Hamilton's reasons for pursuing the duel seemed less flimsy than they do now. Hamilton undoubtedly had his reasons for provoking Burr and then passively allowing the events leading up to the duel to unfold, down to his decision to throw away his shot (whether he actually did throw his shot away or not is open to question). But they remain elusive, even after reading and re-reading the words he so carefully wrote in the days leading up to the confrontation in Weehawken. In any case, it is a great irony that the man who took Hamilton's life on the field of honor represented, to Hamilton, the embodiment of a man without honor.

It is extremely unlikely that the United States would have emerged as a world power without Hamilton's federal system of finance, which harnessed the economic power of the individual states together to produce a single, more powerful driving force. Some of Hamilton's other contributions likewise contributed to American ascendancy over the last two-plus centuries: the Treasury with a publicly funded debt, a central bank, an independent judiciary and a strong executive, a standing army, the coast guard. Without these things individually and in combination, it is impossible to conceive of the United States' becoming the world power that it is, nor is it difficult to imagine its having devolved into a fractious continent resembling a more rustic version of Europe had Hamilton's contributions been absent.

Ultimately, Hamilton saw the fragile and nearly impossible art of governance as a balancing act between the forces of despotism and anarchy. Nearly 250 years of American history are testimony to the enduring power of his vision—his judgment that institutionally, at least, a strong, well-funded federal government was needed in order for the country to become a viable power has served it well. Yet, today's newspaper headlines show that we continue to struggle with the visions of Hamilton and Jefferson—to find the proper balance between centralized authority and individual liberty, between federal authority and states' rights.

So, what was Hamilton like as a man? It is tempting to say that he was brilliant and flawed, and to list his many extraordinary, endearing, and maddening qualities. This book is an attempt to allow him to tell his story in his own words. Hamilton's DNA runs through the American system and psyche in a way that is in abundant evidence today, and the more we can understand his character, choices, and context, the more we can understand about ourselves and our future.

EDITOR'S NOTE: All of Hamilton's letters and published writings reproduced in this book are taken from the astonishing Founders Online website (www.founders.archives.gov) operated by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the National Archives in cooperation with the University of Virginia Press. I have preserved Hamilton's spelling and grammar in order to retain his authentic voice and the sense of the historical period.

In some cases, Hamilton's letters were cobbled together by scholars (led by Harold C. Syrett) from multiple sources, among them signed original manuscripts retained by the recipient; manuscript copies made and retained by Hamilton himself; and copies of these letters made by family members and others after Hamilton's death. I have chosen not to distinguish between these sources, as the variations are slight and do not materially affect the understanding of Hamilton that I am seeking to create here. For those wishing for that level of nuance, I refer you to the Founders Online website mentioned above, where you can while away many a pleasurable hour in the company of America's founding fathers, and some of the mothers too.