Alexander Hamilton
By Ron Chernow
Penguin, 818 pages, $35
There is no question that Alexander Hamilton deserves a big biographical treatment. He was probably, as author Catherine Drinker Bowen wrote, “the most potent single influence” toward calling the Constitutional Convention of 1787. As Publius, along with James Madison, he made contributions to the Federalist Papers that gave this country its best, most elaborate vocabulary for debating the natural tensions occurring within republican government. As George Washington’s treasury secretary, he was decisive in managing America’s revolution-era debt and projecting economic self-sufficiency. Hamilton fought to make the new national government respectable.
Ron Chernow’s “Alexander Hamilton” is a commanding book with massive flaws. Chernow writes beautifully and skillfully, and opens up aspects of Hamilton’s life that others have not understood. Some of the author’s most painstaking research deals with the years Hamilton spent on the islands of Nevis and St. Croix, before he went to New York, where he would rise to extraordinary heights as a lawyer and political activist. Chernow delicately shows the importance of his subject’s Caribbean experience–as the bastard child long accused of being “born in ‘whoredom’ “–and his struggle to make sense of the extended family from which he had sprung. There was a compassionate first cousin, Anne Venton, who got him on his feet financially, and a best friend, Edinburgh-trained physician Edward Stevens, who could write Hamilton with equal affection and sarcasm.
From his days as an ambitious Revolutionary War artillery officer and Washington’s foremost political aide, Hamilton conceived, planned out and acted, with blistering speed. He was, Chernow tells us, a true dynamo. During the defining years of 1789-1794, he moved mountains, because the first president, with all his tact and self-restraint, could hardly manage a budget. Owing to Hamilton’s energy, interest rates were low, a healthy speculation was encouraged, and foreign investment jump-started American commerce.
Chernow likes to quote others calling Hamilton “amiable” and “high-minded,” but in his monumental contest with Thomas Jefferson over the direction of the country–Would we be a manufacturing people or an agrarian people, a centralized or decentralized polity?–Hamilton wrote vicious newspaper editorials, pseudonymously, that Chernow thankfully makes no attempt to soften or apologize for, noting that the iron-willed New Yorker lacked an essential ingredient Jefferson possessed: sympathy for the people he would lead. Describing Hamilton’s partisan writings as “mocking, brilliant, prolix, bombastic,” Chernow identifies his subject’s obsessive desire to destroy one whose vision for the republic differed from his own. No one could show contempt quite like Hamilton. Writes Chernow of the founding generation, “How to explain this mix of elevated thinking and base slander?” Yet the author veers far from historical reality in his treatment of Hamilton’s intimate circle. A substantial portion of the book is an overwrought effort to sponsor Hamilton’s wife, Eliza, who lived 97 years, nearly half of them as a careworn widow. She was born Elizabeth Schuyler; her father, Philip, was descended from the early Dutch settlers and was a large landowner and political power broker. His singular adoration for his son-in-law eased Hamilton’s class anxieties (at least on the surface).
Eliza was undemonstrative and intellectually apathetic, but Chernow wants to give her the Abigail Adams or Theodosia Burr treatment, imagining hers as a comparably competitive, motivated mind. In this case, however, there is good reason why historians have said little of the widow Hamilton. We can allow for nice vignettes, such as her dance with Washington at his inaugural ball, but Chernow credits the banal Eliza not only with a “sterling character,” “utterly devoid of conceit,” but as one “avidly interested in the world around her,” and he uses her as a launching pad for his all-consuming notion that her fated husband has been improperly branded as a man of malice with despotic designs. Eliza just needs a little help to get her lifelong ambition fulfilled: restoring her husband to his deserved pedestal.
Then there is the rather sordid Maria Reynolds affair that dragged on through the 1790s. Hamilton made an unctuous effort to divert attention from his sexual indiscretions by proudly claiming that he resisted using government funds to pay off the blackmailing husband. Chernow pretends the whole affair was anomalous:
“If he had other women, why didn’t the scandal-loving Republican press refer to these other romances? . . . And why, if Hamilton was so promiscuous, did he father no illegitimate children that we know of?”
On the subject of Hamilton’s twin antagonists, Jefferson and Aaron Burr, Chernow generally makes his points intelligently but incautiously. Interpreting politics, there is always room for nuanced discussion. But the author strains to tell readers, “Far from being the subtle Machiavellian of Jeffersonian legend, Hamilton . . . suffered from excessive openness.” Jefferson and his followers were somehow petty and vindictive (well, they were), but Hamilton always comes across in Chernow’s pages as a headstrong man with a highly practical political plan who is otherwise pure of heart and committed to some sublime cosmic truth.
The worst wrong turn Chernow takes is his savaging of Burr, whom he describes from the outset as a willful murderer as the result of his 1804 duel with Hamilton. A selective use of sources accounts for part of this. No serious historian ought still to be relying on the tired invective left over from the 19th Century that “Burr’s abiding sin was a total lack of principles, which Hamilton could not forgive.” Burr was no more “dissipated” than any of the supposedly moral founders, Hamilton included, but literary depictions over the years have done much to confuse, and Chernow soaks them all up. In truth, Hamilton was frustrated with Burr’s political success and so, defensively, insisted that his rival lacked a political belief system.
As to the duel itself, the event has been written about ad nauseam, and nothing new or revealing can be written. Hamilton had been bad-mouthing Burr for a decade and lied when he claimed only to have criticized Burr’s political views but not his private character. Writing that Hamilton “comported himself with stoic gallantry” right up to the end, Chernow betrays his acceptance of silly old accounts. He includes quotes that are no more reliable than Washington’s cherry-tree-chopping episode; the entire “Fatal Errand” chapter should have been scrapped and the reader simply instructed to return to James Parton’s 1858 account for the story Chernow wants to convey. And if this is not enough, Chernow thinks he can be inside Burr’s head when the heartless murderer is blissfully having sex nine days after the kill.
Aside from his nearly demonic fascination with Burr’s popularity, Hamilton could not rest when it came to exposing the flaws of his other prominent political enemies. In early 1800, the “principled,” “[i]ncorrigibly honest” Hamilton that Chernow heralds wrote his compatriot, outgoing Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, instructing him to copy and make off with private papers of President John Adams that could be used to embarrass him later. Though Adams was, as Chernow deliciously puts it, “a man with an encyclopedic memory for slights,” Hamilton deserved most if not all of the second president’s unmitigated bile.
We must not underestimate Hamilton. He was an uncommon political talent. In one of his more sufficient phrases, Chernow writes with regard to the Constitutional Convention, though it can be more broadly applied:
“It was typical of Hamilton’s egotism, expansive imagination, and supranormal intellect that he refused to settle for refinements on somebody else’s plan. His mind had minted an entire program for a new government, not just scattered aspects of it.”
Yet we should bear in mind that Hamilton’s federalism did not allow for dissent or the infusion of much new talent. He was no good at orchestrating compromise. He seemed always to be assuring everyone, “I know what I’m doing; just let me do it.” Even Chernow’s sympathetic take on him does not seem to resist that statement.
The author, then, has written an entertaining if single-minded book. The oddest part of his construct is a metaphysical one: Chernow is channeling Eliza Hamilton. He is, quite self-consciously it seems, writing her book, passionately defending her long-suffering role as Hamilton’s widow, as unfairly judged as he. “To the extent that she has drawn attention,” Chernow concludes, “she has been depicted as a broken, weeping, neurasthenic creature, clinging to her Bible and lacking any identity other than that of Hamilton’s widow. In fact, she was a woman of towering strength and integrity.” If she forgave her straying husband’s indiscretions, he is in effect saying, who are we to withhold our praise?
The historical Hamilton–as opposed to Chernow’s romanticized Hamilton–was a cranky, snobbish, self-absorbed schemer who surrounded himself with toadies. To convey his character to a modern readership, let us say he was a cross between Donald Trump and Karl Rove. Like them, he understood money, power and publicity; he knew how to maneuver in the public eye and behind closed doors. In the hands of a more discriminating historian, his outstanding meanness would have appeared just as clearly as his visionary confidence, elegance and energy.
