"The passions of a revolution are apt to hurry even good men into excesses."
--Alexander Hamilton, August 12, 1795
In this magesterial new biography, historian Ron Chernow vividly captures the life and times of America's most brilliant and controversial founder. From the Caribbean tropics to Yorktown to Wall Street, Chernow paints the portrait of a man of unsurpassed insight and cognitive abilities, yet whose personal and public life were marred by severe lapses in judgment. Hamilton is perhaps the least appreciated and most misunderstood of all the founders, which is due in part to the circumstances of his death. Hamilton's tragically early death at the hands of Aaron Burr allowed his enemies--chiefly Thomas Jefferson and John Adams--to smear his reputation and distort his historical standing. This book--in addition to being a meticulously detailed and definitive work--sets out to correct some of the more persistent myths about Hamilton's eventful but brief life.
Born out of wedlock on the tiny Caribbean island of St. Nevis in 1755, young Alexander's childhood was a harsh and brutal experience that forever gave him a dim view of human nature. He was only a teenager when his mother died, leaving him orphaned. He would spend the rest of his life trying to compensate for his lowly birth. This feverish work ethic propelled him to excel, but it also steered him into his most egregious mistakes, including his final duel with Burr.
In the aftermath of a devastating hurricane that swept through the West Indies, Hamilton, then only sixteen, wrote a gloomy, apocalyptic soliloquy for the local newspaper. The piece struck a chord among the island's influential merchant class, and local businessmen set up a subscription that would send the young writer to America to be educated. Hamilton arrived in New York harbor in 1773, and enrolled in King's College (now Columbia). He would never again set foot on the island of his birth, nor did he ever express a desire to.
Hamilton had arrived at a momentous and tumultuous time in American history, the eve of the revolution. Anti-British sentiment was running high, and talk of a rebellion against royal authority was in the air. Hamilton, while still a college student, wrote several influential pamphlets urging revolution as the only way to safeguard liberty. When fighting broke out in 1775, the twenty-year-old Hamilton rushed to enlist, earning a commission as an artillery captain. He had long viewed war as the only avenue to glory and greatness.
It was not long before General Washington noticed the immensely gifted artillery captain. At age twenty-one, Hamilton became, in effect, Washington's chief of staff, an appointment that was to forever change his destiny and put him at the forefront of the struggle to first secure American independence, and then to forge a new nation. It was the beginning of one of the most important and enduring political partnerships in American history.
Through the long years of war, Hamilton became Washington's eyes, ears, and chief spokesman, as he routinely used his broad authority to give orders to generals twice his age. He was Washington's most able aid, and the venerable general--always a superb judge of talent--relied on him heavily.
Even during the chaos and confusion of the revolution, Hamilton was already looking ahead and envisioning what a unified and vibrant United States might look like. Perhaps because he was an immigrant, and thus unencumbered by the fierce state loyalties that threatened to cripple the union, he always took a broader, more nationalistic view than most of his compatriots, who were fighting for state first, nation second. After American independence had been secured, this strongly centralized vision of future governance opened Hamilton up to charges that he was an advocate of a monarchy, despite the fact that he had perhaps done more to win the revolution than anyone save Washington himself.
Following the revolution, Hamilton, not yet thirty, served a brief stint in the Confederation Congress, the sole branch of national government allowed under the debilitating Articles of Confederation. Seeing the national government forced to beg for handouts from the stingy state legislatures only reinforced Hamilton's goal for a strong cental government that had the power to tax. Disgusted and disillusioned, he resigned from Congress in 1784 to pursue a law career in New York.
As with everything else he tried during his eventful life, Hamilton excelled in the courtroom, astounding allies and enemies alike with his eloquent, spontaneous bursts of oratory. Hamilton's powers of persuasion and logic were hailed as being even more impressive than those of Aaron Burr, another prominent New York lawyer.
When a convention was called to revise the feckless and ineffective Articles of Confederation, Hamilton was an obvious choice to be a part of the New York delegation, although the staunchly anti-federalist governor, George Clinton, made sure Hamilton was outnumbered by pro-Articles cronies. At the Constitution, Hamilton proposed some ideas that struck some (most notably James Madison) as being faintly monarchial, which would come to plague his career years later. Although Hamilton had deep misgivings about the finished draft, he immediately and unequivocably devoted himself to doing everything in his considerable power to ensure its ratification by the states. He saw the Constitution, though flawed, as the only thing that could prevent disunion and civil war.
The grandest result of this seemingly superhuman effort (he would churn out essays at the rate of five or six a week, all the while maintaining his demanding legal practice) was The Federalist Papers, a collaborative effort between Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay. Hamilton wrote a large majority of the essays, defending the proposed Constitution with such skill that it is difficult to believe that only five years later, he would be accused by his political enemies of seeking to supplant the Constitution with a British-style monarchy.
Somehow during the time Hamilton was achieving military renown and legal fame, he also managed to become the nation's foremost authority in finance and economics. When President Washington appointed him to be the nation's first treasury secretary, he lost no time in launching a bold and controversial program of financial reforms. With customary verve, he literally overwhelmed his Congressional opponents (who were led by his erstwhile political partner, James Madison) with an avalanche of reports, proposals, and data. So sweeping and historically far-reaching were Hamilton's ideas that Chernow calls him "the father of the federal government."
But Hamilton's plan for restoring public credit and assuming state debts was not without fierce opposition. Influential Virginians, led by Washington's own Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, were alarmed at the direction in which Hamilton was leading the nascent republic. Sensing a renewed threat to American liberty, the Jeffersonians began lashing out at the Washington administration, with the most vitriolic attacks aimed squarely at the foreign-born Hamilton, who was seen as the epitome of all that was wrong with the federal government. The same awesome brilliance that inspired such fervent devotion among Hamilton's Federalists was what provoked such fear and outright paranoia among Jeffersonians. It was the beginnings of the two-party system of American politics, and it was a period of such ferocious partisan warfare that actual fighting often broke out.
The most polarizing issue of all was the French Revolution, which by the mid-1790s had taken a ghastly turn. To Jefferson, the bloody reign of the guillotine was a necessary, even welcome precursor to the spreading of liberty around the world. To Hamilton, it was a realization of his worst fears: Perpetual revolution giving way to anarchy, violence, and eventual tyranny. Where Jefferson saw a painful purification of the human spirit, Hamilton saw only the very darkest consequences of human passions gone unchecked. Unlike Jefferson, who was something of an utopian dreamer during this time of his life, Hamilton always sought a balance between public order and private liberty. The two had to be carefully balanced, he believed, or one would inevitably destroy the other.
It was during this time of internecine political conflict, even as his enemies hurled the most vicious insults at him and when he should have been most on his guard, that Hamilton committed the most inexplicable and damaging mistake of his career, giving ample fodder to his foes for years to come. He became ensnared in an adulterous affair with one Maria Reynolds, a twenty-three year old married woman. By this time, the thirty-eight year old Hamilton had been married to the former Eliza Schuyler for over a decade; he was already the father of six. As he later admitted, he was so consumed by his lust that he was unable to perceive the danger in which he was placing himself. As the affair continued for over a year, and as Maria and her husband James continued to extort increasingly large sums from Hamilton in exchange for keeping the affair hidden, the magnitude of his mistake only slowly began to dawn on him. He broke off the affair and stopped the blackmail payments, but it was far too late; within three years, the entire country would know of the illicit liason. None could have been more devastated than the faithful Eliza.
After the end of the Washington administration and the revelation of his adultery, Hamilton's political decline was ensured. With his influence waning and his relationship with President John Adams--which was never warm to begin with--souring, Hamilton turned to his long-neglected family for emotional support. He built a new family home to the north of the city. He christened it The Grange, in honor of the noble estate of his Scottish ancestors.
But Hamilton had little time to savor this rediscovered familial bliss. In 1801, his oldest and most talented son, nineteen-year-old Philip, was killed in a duel fought to defend his father's honor against slanderous charges of corruption. Hamilton had had no prior knowledge of the impending duel, and his beloved son's death hurt him more deeply than any poltical attack ever could. Hamilton's final years were shrouded in gloom and grief, as one family tragedy hit after another.
It was during these years of sorrow that Hamilton returned to the ardent Christian faith that he had mostly abandoned as he reached manhood. While attending the Episcipalian King's College, Hamilton had been a devout and faithful student, kneeling twice daily for prayers and memorizing scripture regularly. But the horrors of war and the cynicism of politcs had slackened his faith and made him suspicious of organized religion. He had espoused a mild form of Deism, but he always viewed Christianity as an essential base for social stability. In his final years, beset by tragedy and grief, Hamilton returned to the religious fervor of his youth, much to the joy of the longsuffering Eliza, who was a devout churchgoer her entire life.
After the painful aftermath of the Reynolds affair, Hamilton and Eliza drew closer together than ever before, as Hamilton did all he could to atone for his past sins. Their love was deepened by mutual tragedy, and by their shared faith in God.
Hamilton had not completely withdrawn from politics, but his remaining limited involvement was to cost him his life. In 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr, a longtime political rival of Hamilton's, was a bitter, vengeful man, lashing out at anyone who dared speak against his "honor." Because of numerous political misteps, Burr's career was effectively over, and President Jefferson was not expected to ask him to serve another term as vice president. Seeking someone to blame for his sudden misfortune, Burr settled on Hamilton, because of deragatory comments Hamilton had supposedly made of Burr during a private dinner party several months previously. Burr demanded an apology, and Hamilton, not knowing quite what to apologize for, refused. The feud escalated, and Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel in the summer of 1804.
Hamilton was against dueling in principle, but he feared that if he refused to participate, any future political comeback would be impossible. Because Hamilton often viewed America's fate to be entertwined with his own, he truly regarded the duel as a question of patriotism, not just honor. Without his family's knowledge, he met Burr on the dueling grounds in New Jersey. Hamilton had told several people beforehand that he would not shoot Burr, no matter the circumstances.
Burr had no such inhibitions. On Wednesday morning, July 11, 1804, the Vice President of the United States shot the former Secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton was rushed back to New York for medical care, but there was little hope that he might survive the wound. For the next thirty-one hours, Hamilton clung to life as a parade of friends, family, and collegues filed past his deathbed. It was a scene of nearly inexpressible sorrow. Poor Eliza was nearly frantic with grief. To comfort her, Hamilton kept intoning the one refrain he knew would soothe her trouble spirit about all others: "Remember, my Eliza, you are a Christian."
A close friend of Hamilton's, Reverend John Mason, was summoned to his bedside. Grasping his hand, Hamilton rolled his eyes heavenward, and exclaimed with fervor, "I have a tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ." He died peacefully at age forty-nine.
Eliza, now widowed with seven children, found a letter from her beloved husband at home, to be read only in the event of his death. Hamilton had written it only days before his fateful, secret duel. After poignantly expressing his undying love for her and their children, Hamilton wrote:
The consolation of religion, my beloved, can alone support you and these you have a right to enjoy. Fly to the bosom of your God and be comforted. With my last idea, I shall cherish the sweet hope of meeting you in a better world.
Chernow closes his deeply moving account of this most improbable founding father by giving a brief overview of the remainder of Eliza's life, who outlived her husband by over half a century and survived to the eve of the Civil War that Hamilton had so feared would come. She dedicated her life to charitable work, and to clearing her husband's name from the baseless accusations that followed him, even in death. She was not entirely successful, but in this masterful work, Chernow does just that, and for that he should be commended. Hamilton, though flawed, was a truly great man, a giant of American history, and it is only fitting that his biography should approach greatness itself.
