A statesman for all seasons

We carry his face in our wallets, on the 10-dollar bill; we know he was killed in a duel 200 years ago this July by Vice President Aaron Burr. Yet in the present Founders’ revival, Alexander Hamilton -- bastard, immigrant, adulterer, genius, journalist, begetter of our prosperity -- has so far escaped a full-dress treatment. Now, Ron Chernow, whose previous books have chronicled the American Beauty roses and kudzu vines of mature American capitalism -- Warburgs, Morgans, John D. Rockefeller Sr. -- examines the man who planted the seeds.

Taking on Hamilton is no easy assignment. The legends surrounding him have irrigated numerous bogs in which scholars and wing nuts thrash. Was he black? Was he Jewish? Was he gay? Was he Washington’s love child, or a crook or a British agent? Was Burr really a great guy? Chernow picks his way judiciously through all these hazards (his answers are no, no, bisexual possible, no, no, no and certainly not). Hamilton’s life, part opera, part civics lesson, is interesting enough.

Hamilton was born, in 1755 or 1757 (Chernow thinks the former), on the West Indian island of Nevis to a spirited Huguenot woman, Rachel Faucette. Rachel was married, although not to the man she was living with at the time, James Hamilton, fourth son of a Scottish laird. The couple bumped from island to island in increasingly frayed gentility until they arrived on St. Croix, where James deserted the family. Rachel died two years later, and the orphan, age 14, went to work as a clerk in a mercantile firm, like some waif in a Dickens novel. His earliest surviving letter ends with a daydream: “I wish there was a war.” In another Dickensian turn, wealthy patrons sent him to North America in 1772 to be educated, where he soon found his war. In short order, Hamilton progressed from militiaman to artillery captain to lieutenant colonel on Gen. George Washington’s staff. He married Elizabeth Schuyler, daughter of a rich Anglo Dutch landowner. His eyes, Chernow quotes one admirer as rhapsodizing, “were of a deep azure ... and beamed with higher expressions of intelligence and discernment than any others that I ever saw.”

After the peace, he practiced law and politics, and wrote and wrote and wrote -- letters to his seniors and betters, lecturing them on public questions as if they were his peers, and essay after essay for the newspapers. Hamilton, Chernow marvels, “must have produced the maximum number of words that a human being can scratch out in forty-nine years.” He attended the Constitutional Convention and was not altogether happy with the result -- he had wanted the president elected for life -- but he was tireless in defending the document, conceiving the Federalist Papers and writing two-thirds of them, at a rate of three, four and sometimes five a week. (James Madison and John Jay wrote the remainder.) His career reached its zenith in the fall of 1789, when President Washington made his former aide the nation’s first Treasury secretary.

Hamilton’s accomplishments over the next five years make him arguably the most important Cabinet secretary ever, and more important than most presidents. He achieved his goals despite the incomprehension or opposition of many of his fellow Founders.

His primary assignment was to repair the United States’ chaotic finances. The government had run up a huge debt to win the Revolutionary War, and though the Constitution finally gave it the power to levy taxes, revenue had to be intelligently raised and spent. The lawyers and planters who were Hamilton’s colleagues had no clue as to how to do this; the economic opinions of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Vice President John Adams read like the money-crankery of Ezra Pound, who indeed admired them both. By establishing fair and regular schedules for paying off creditors, Hamilton made America’s IOUs worth something, in effect converting them into capital, thus injecting badly needed liquidity into a backwater society. Chernow writes: “He was the messenger from a future we now inhabit ... the bustling world of trade, industry, stock markets and banks.”

Hamilton looked beyond his department to advise Washington on the entire conduct of the government. Hamilton argued for “energy in the executive.” He wanted the government, led by the president, to do whatever needed doing as long as it was not explicitly forbidden. This advice brought him into conflict with his former co-author Madison, who had once seemed to agree with it but now got cold feet. Their quarrel over constitutional interpretation helped generate the first two-party system -- Hamilton’s Federalists versus Jefferson and Madison’s Republicans (ancestors of today’s Democrats, not the GOP). When Jefferson and then Madison became president, they both to a great extent followed Hamilton’s advice, without ever admitting it.

Some of Hamilton’s most important counsel was given in military and foreign affairs. The views of the Founders were shaped by their different experiences during the Revolution. Adams and Benjamin Franklin served as diplomats, Jefferson and Madison as congressmen and state-level politicians. Hamilton, who had fought in seven battles, saw the world as a dangerous place, in which America had to defend its interests, by force if necessary, and ought to expect nothing from old friends. The French Revolution, which began not quite three months after Washington’s first inauguration, would ignite a world war that fulfilled Hamilton’s worst expectations. Many Americans -- notably Jefferson, who had spent five years in Paris during the last days of the ancien regime -- ignored the French Revolution’s excesses and imagined that the United States could easily keep out of the vortex. “Hamilton,” notes Chernow, “who never set foot in Europe, was much more clear-sighted.”

Hamilton’s talents as a polemicist blended into his greatest failing as a leader: the berserk rage that consumed him when he responded to the opinions and assaults of his enemies, especially after he retired as Treasury secretary and lost his place at Washington’s right hand. He lacked Washington’s great gift as a leader -- the gift of silence. He starred in the nation’s first sex scandal, admitting he had paid blackmail to a small-time crook who had acted as a pimp for his own wife. When a Republican newspaper printed lies about him, the lifelong freelancer shut it down with a libel prosecution. He tangled with Adams, Washington’s successor as president, like a boy shouting insults in a schoolyard. It is no defense of Hamilton to say that his fellow Founders understood the morality of partisanship no better than he did. (Adams called him a “Creole bastard.”) It is a partial defense of him to note that when the electoral college produced a tie between Jefferson and Burr in the 1800 presidential race, Hamilton overlooked years of mutual eye-gouging to urge his fellow Federalists to back Jefferson.

Hamilton and Burr, both New York lawyers and pols, had crossed paths many times. Burr was a brave veteran with a bright tongue and an aristocratic mien -- not an obviously antipathetic figure. What drove Hamilton nuts about him was that he had no detectable beliefs. “Is it a recommendation to have no theory? Can that man be a systematic or able statesman who has none? I believe not.” Hamilton rang the changes on Burr’s untrustworthiness every time Burr ran for office. Finally, in 1804, Burr had had enough; a duel was arranged, to take place at Weehawken, N.J. The night before, Chernow writes, “provide[d] an instructive contrast. As the two men contemplated eternity, Hamilton feared for America’s future and the salvation of the union, while Burr worried about incriminating letters he had written to his mistresses....” Hamilton, shot, died the following day. Burr, unharmed, kept his mistresses’ secrets for 32 more years. Eliza Hamilton honored her husband’s memory for 50.

No work of 800-plus pages can be entirely free from sunspots. But “Alexander Hamilton” is thorough, admiring and sad -- just what a big book on its subject should be. Chernow will have a lot of company this year: commemorations in St. Croix, Weehawken and New York and an exhibit, “Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America,” at the New-York Historical Society, opening in August (I am the historian curator). This is more than calendrical piety. Hamilton is coming back because, of all the Founders, he is most relevant to the way we live now. His problems are our problems; his solutions anticipate (usually more intelligently) the wisdom of think tanks and talk shows.

Hamilton thought that blacks were “probably” as talented as whites and that only greed prevented whites from acknowledging it. The contrast with Jefferson and his speculations about black body odor and stupidity could not be more stark. Hamilton was a town and city dweller all his life. Some of his last words, as he rowed across the Hudson River to Weehawken, were about the “future greatness” of New York. No agrarian utopias for him.

We live in a world of nation-building, from Iraq and Afghanistan to the European Union; of globalization, outsourcing and war. Hamilton saw it all, the grim and the bright. He warned us to wake from “the deceitful dream of a golden age,” but he also hoped that “each individual” might find a suitable job that would “call into activity the whole vigour of his nature.” Jefferson, writes Chernow, was the national poet; Hamilton wrote “the prose of American statecraft.” We dream in poetry, but we live in prose. Whenever life is taxing, complex or dangerous, Hamilton will come into his own. *