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Tag Archives: Alexander Hamilton

George Washington’s Stare

01 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ Comments Off on George Washington’s Stare

Tags

Alexander Hamilton, America, American History, Constitutional Convention, George Washington, Gouverneur Morris, H.W. Brands, The First American

George Washington

“Washington’s arrival in Philadelphia [for the Constitutional Convention in 1787] prompted a civic celebration the likes of which had not been seen since the end of the war. A cadre of his old officers rode out to greet him… Church bells pealed as the hero passed; the leading citizens vied for his favor…

On this festive note the convention commenced its sober business. Only two men were even contemplated for president of the convention: Franklin and Washington. Franklin deferred to Washington, perhaps partly from concern that his health would not stand the wear of daily sessions, but at least equally from knowledge that the project would have the greatest chance of success under the aegis of the eminent general. (Washington’s distance above mere mortals was already legendary. Several delegates were discussing this phenomenon when Franklin’s Pennsylvania colleague, Gouverneur Morris, a hearty good fellow, suggested it was all in their minds. Alexander Hamilton challenged Morris: ‘If you will, at the next reception evenings, gently slap him on the shoulder and say, “My dear General, how happy I am to see you look so well!” a supper and wine shall be provided for you and a dozen of your friends.’ Morris accepted the challenge and did what Hamilton demanded. Washington immediately removed Morris’s hand from his shoulder, stepped away, and fixed Morris with an angry frown until the trespasser retreated in confusion. Hamilton paid up, yet at the dinner Morris declared, ‘I have won the bet, but paid dearly for it, and nothing could induce me to repeat it.’)”

__________

Pulled from H.W. Brands’s very good biography The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin.

Go on:

  • David McCullough: How Washington led so effectively
  • What Washington, our only president without a party, thought of party politics
  • A brilliant answer to the question How will future historians appraise the American experiment?

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The Incredible Rise of Alexander Hamilton

29 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Alexander Hamilton, American History, American Revolution, Biography, Childhood, David Brooks, Elizabeth Schuyler, founding fathers, history, James Hamilton, Jon Meacham, Jr., politics, Ron Chernow, Thomas Jefferson, United States History

Alexander Hamilton4

“Let us pause briefly to tally the grim catalog of disasters that had befallen these two boys between 1765 and 1769: their father had vanished, their mother had died, their cousin and supposed protector had committed bloody suicide, and their aunt, uncle, and grandmother had all died. James, sixteen, and Alexander, fourteen, were now left alone, largely friendless and penniless. At every step in their rootless, topsy-turvy existence, they had been surrounded by failed, broken, embittered people. Their short lives had been shadowed by a stupefying sequence of bankruptcies, marital separations, deaths, scandals, and disinheritance. Such repeated shocks must have stripped Alexander Hamilton of any sense that life was fair, that he existed in a benign universe, or that he could ever count on help from anyone. That this abominable childhood produced such a strong, productive, self-reliant human being — that this fatherless adolescent could have ended up a founding father of a country he had not yet even seen — seems little short of miraculous. Because he maintained perfect silence about his unspeakable past, never exploiting it to puff his later success, it was impossible for his contemporaries to comprehend the exceptional nature of his personal triumph. What we know of Hamilton’s childhood has been learned almost entirely during the past century.”

__________

From Ron Chernow’s biography Alexander Hamilton.

To make matters worse, and add yet another card to a deck already stacked against him, young Alexander was simultaneously struck with the same fever which eventually took his mother, and was therefore too delirious to even say farewell. Because the family had only a single bed, Chernow notes, Alexander was “probably writhing inches from his mother when she expired.”

The fact that Hamilton overcame these enormous setbacks to quickly rise to political prominence — not to mention emotional normalcy — is a testament to the singularity of both his intelligence and his resilience. What’s more, as one often senses in accounts of the Founders, not only was he a luminous statesman, but he also emerges from the page as, well, a pretty cool guy, with a personality somehow more endearingly human and three-dimensional than many in Washington today. I’ve already posted some about Hamilton the bachelor, to which Chernow adds a priceless anecdote:

Hamilton, twenty-five, was instantly smitten with Schuyler, twenty-two. Fellow aide Tench Tilghman reported: ‘Hamilton is a gone man.’ Pretty soon, Hamilton was a constant visitor at the two-story Campfield residence, spending every evening there. Everyone noticed that the young colonel was starry-eyed and distracted. Although a touch absentminded, Hamilton ordinarily had a faultless memory, but, returning from Schuyler one night, he forgot the password and was barred by the sentinel…

For those interested in reading more about Hamilton, I recommend Chernow’s book (which is lengthy yet well paced), but not before you watch the fantastic exchange between Jon Meacham and David Brooks about the competing political visions and personalities of Hamilton and his rival Thomas Jefferson. In this discussion, Meacham takes the side of the subject of his biography, as Brooks, a traditional conservative, defends Hamilton. The following remarks from Brooks are highlights of the discussion and supplement the words above:

I’m going to get the dates wrong, but you’ll get the idea.

So when Hamilton was thirteen, his mom died in the bed next to him. He was adopted by his uncle who died — who committed suicide — then he was adopted by his grandparents who died within a year. So by fourteen he’d lost everybody he ever loved except for his brother. A court came in and took away his property. So at fourteen he essentially had nothing. By twenty-five he is George Washington’s Chief of Staff and a war hero. By thirty-five he’s been the author of The Federalist Papers and is one of the top lawyers in New York. By forty or forty-five he has retired as the most successful treasury secretary in U.S. history.

And so he is a story of intense upward mobility. And his philosophy was to create a system of government which would allow poor boys and girls like him to succeed.

Read on:

  • Alexander Hamilton the bachelor identifies what he likes in a girl
  • David Brooks and Jon Meacham discuss Jefferson, Hamilton, and the ‘art of power’
  • Jefferson and Hamilton duke it out over the national debt

Alexander Hamilton

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How Jefferson Fostered Compromise on the National Debt

22 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, History, Politics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Alexander Hamilton, American History, Biography, compromise, debate, debt negotiations, economics, founding, founding fathers, Government, history, James Madison, Jon Meacham, Monticello, national debt, partisanship, Patsy Jefferson, politics, public debt, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, U.S. history

Thomas Jefferson engraving after painting by Rembrandt Peale.

“Hamilton had argued for a national financial system in which the central government would fund the national debt, assume responsibility for all state debts, and establish a national bank. Money for the federal government would be raised by tariffs on imports and excise taxes on distilled spirits… The assumption proposal, however, instantly divided the nation.

Jefferson knew matters were dire. The Congress seemed paralyzed…

The beginning of wisdom, Jefferson thought, might lie in a meeting of the principals out of the public eye. So he convened a dinner. Jefferson believed things could be worked out, he said, for ‘men of sound heads and honest views needed nothing more than explanation and mutual understanding to enable them to unite in some measures which might enable us to get along.’

No deal meant disaster. It was clear, Jefferson wrote, ‘that if everyone retains inflexibly his present opinion, there will be no bill passed at all for funding the public debts, and… without funding there is an end of the government.’…

The final result, Jefferson believed, was ‘the least bad of all the turns the thing can take.’ It was true that he hated the financial speculation that would result from the Hamiltonian vision of commerce. ‘It is much to be wished that every discouragement should be thrown in the way of men who undertake to trade without capital,’ Jefferson said. ‘The consumers pay for it in the end, and the debts contracted, and bankruptcies occasioned by such commercial adventurers, bring burden and disgrace on our country.’

Yet Jefferson also believed in compromise. He advised his daughter Patsy to approach all people and all things with forbearance. ‘Every human being, my dear, must thus be viewed according to what it is good for, for none of us, no not one, is perfect; and were we to love none who had imperfections this world would be a desert for our love,’ Jefferson wrote in July 1790. ‘All we can do is to make the best of our friends: love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way of what is bad: but no more think of rejecting them for it than of throwing away a piece of music for a flat passage or two.’ It was sound counsel for life at Monticello—and at New York.

In December 1790, a Virginian wrote Jefferson about the state General Assembly’s official protest over the debt assumption. ‘One party charges the Congress with an unconstitutional act; and both parties charge it with an act of injustice.’

So be it. Jefferson had struck the deal he could strike, and, for the moment, America was the stronger for it.”

__________

From the end of chapter 23 in part VI (“The First Secretary of State: 1789-1792”) of Jon Meacham’s new biography Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.

Gordon Wood called The Art of Power, “probably the best single-volume biography of Jefferson ever written.” Pick it up if you’re interested in the man, or take a look at additional posts about Thomas Jefferson.

Check out another text from American history which is especially relevant to the recent debt-ceiling/government shut-down machinations in Washington, DC. In this one, Abraham Lincoln considers political compromise on the eve of the Civil War:

Lincoln

A Shallow Pretext for Extorting Compromise

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Alexander Hamilton the Bachelor

19 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Alexander Hamilton, American History, courtship, Elizabeth Schuyler, founding, John Laurens, jokes, letter, Love, marriage, Michelangelo, sex, Shakespeare, Sistine Chapel

Alexander Hamilton

In December of 1779, a twenty-four year-old Alexander Hamilton wrote to his friend John Laurens, asking Laurens to find for him a wife in South Carolina:

“She must be young, handsome (I lay most stress upon a good shape), sensible (a little learning will do), well bred, chaste and tender (I am an enthusiast in my notions of fidelity and fondness); of some good nature, a great deal of generosity (she must neither love money nor scolding, for I dislike equally a termagant and an economist). In politics, I am indifferent what side she may be of. I think I have arguments that will safely convert her to mine. As to religion a moderate stock will satisfy me: she must believe in God and hate a saint. But as to fortune, the larger stock of that the better…”

__________

From a December 1779 letter from Alexander Hamilton to John Laurens. You can find more of Hamilton’s words, from adolescence to adulthood, in the definitive Alexander Hamilton: Writings.

In December 14th of the following year, Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler of Albany. Schuyler, whose mother Catherine Van Rensselaer was from one of New York’s most powerful and privileged families, and whose father, Philip Schuyler, was a decorated general of the Revolutionary War, eventually bore eight children before Alexander was killed in a duel in 1804.

Elizabeth, or Betsy as she was known, survived a half century after her husband’s untimely death, during which time she dedicated herself to helping dispossessed widows and founded New York’s first private orphanage, the New York Orphan Asylum Society. She is pictured below.

Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton

P.S. In closing this same letter, Hamilton wrote:

You will be pleased to recollect in your negotiations that I have no invincible antipathy to the maidenly beauties, and that I am willing to take the trouble of them upon myself.

If you should not readily meet with a lady that you think answers my description, you can only advertise in the public papers, and doubtless you will hear of many competitors for most of the qualifications required, who will be glad to become candidates for such a prize as I am. To excite their emulations it will be necessary for you to give an account of the lover—his size, make, qualities of mind and body, achievements, expectations, fortune, etc. In drawing my picture you will no doubt be civil to your friend, mind you do justice to the length of my nose, and don’t forget that I——

After reviewing what I have written, I am ready to ask myself what could have put it into my head to hazard this jeu de folie. Do I want a wife? No. I have plagues enough without desiring to add to the number that greatest of all; and if I were silly enough to do it I should take care how I employed a proxy. Did I mean to show my wit? If I did, I am sure I have missed my aim. 

I believe I can pick up most of the innuendo in this. Maidenly is a euphemism for virgin, while size and nose are substitutes for… well, you get the point. And at that, one’s tempted to just shrug boys will be boys, and put away the Hamilton letter for another day; that is, until the recognition hits you that it’s the author of Federalist No. 84 who’s making the lurid emails sent amongst your college buds look tame.

Yet there’s something warmly reassuring to these words. They’re a reminder that history is both linear and cyclical, that lives pass but that the pressures and preoccupations (and in this case the puerile sex jokes) repeat in each generation. Shakespeare’s horn and lance gags and even the snake imagery of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling betray the fact even our greatest geniuses were thinking and laughing about the same stuff you and I do.

To read a condensed but daunting biography of Hamilton, and see how his story contrasts with that of his political rival Thomas Jefferson, click below:

Alexander Hamilton

Jefferson, Hamilton, and the Art of Power

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Jon Meacham and David Brooks on Jefferson, Hamilton, and the Art of Power

24 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Politics

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Alexander Hamilton, David Brooks, Jon Meacham, Monticello, Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

Thomas Jefferson

Jon Meacham on Thomas Jefferson:

“He fell in love with his wife. It was a great marriage. Her early death was, for him, an almost suicide-provoking episode. He wandered the woods of Monticello with his daughter afterward, and his friends — Madison, Edmund Randolph, others — worried he wasn’t ever going to come back down from Monticello.

At that point in the traditional biography, the ‘Jefferson-as-lover’ story ends. And then you enter the alleged speculation about Sally Hemings, who was an enslaved person at Monticello. She was also Jefferson’s late wife’s half sister.

I think Sally Hemings reminded Jefferson of his wife.

And I believe that they had a relationship that lasted from 1787 to the day he died. Nearly forty years — the longest relationship he would have with any woman. They had, I believe, six children.

There is DNA evidence — and I think to argue that a man who had an endless appetite for art, for power, for food, for wine, for ice cream, for collecting, for land — to argue that, somehow or another, he would then stop short of engaging in the most sensuous of activities beggars belief.”

____

Alexander Hamilton

David Brooks on Hamilton:

“This is my big beef with Jefferson. Let me start with Hamilton. I’m going to get the dates wrong, but you’ll get the idea.

So when Hamilton was thirteen, his mom died in the bed next to him. He was adopted by his uncle who died — who committed suicide — then he was adopted by his grandparents who died within a year. So by fourteen he’d lost everybody he ever loved except for his brother. A court came in and took away his property. So at fourteen he essentially had nothing. By twenty-five he is George Washington’s Chief of Staff and a war hero. By thirty-five he’s been the author of The Federalist Papers and is one of the top lawyers in New York. By forty or forty-five he has retired as the most successful treasury secretary in U.S. history.

And so he is a story of intense upward mobility. And his philosophy was to create a system of government which would allow poor boys and girls like him to succeed. And there were two things in the way of that.

One was there were these local oligarchies that were holding down economic dynamism, run by rich plantation owners like that bastard Jefferson. And two: technology. Technology was not advancing as far and as fast as he thought it should. And therefore he created federal research projects. He created in New Jersey a research park which became America’s first industrial center. And so he was an enthusiastic embracer of technological innovation, whereas Jefferson, that old stick in the mud, believed in the yeoman virtues. You know, out there in the fields with the tobacco.”

__________

Excerpts from a conversation between Jon Meacham and David Brooks about Jefferson, Hamilton, and the art of power. Watch the entire entertaining and illuminating discussion below.

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