Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr are forever linked by their
duel (a contraction of duo bellum, Latin for "war of two"), when the sitting Vice
President killed a founding father and member of the first cabinet. This book brings
them to life as more than just our third Vice President and the guy on the ten
dollar bill, which, if pressed, is about all that I could have supplied about
them. Instead, in addition to being
interesting characters in their own rights, they serve as foils for describing
essential tensions about what kind of country the United States was going to
become during and shortly after its birth and maybe to this day. I read this book as homework before seeing the musical Hamilton, which I have now done and reported on here. The lives of these two men are linked in this book as kind of mirror images and a
chapter on Hamilton alternates with a chapter on Burr, frequently covering the
same time period and often the same events from the perspective of the other as
a way of articulating their duel not just as an event that linked them, but as
the fated culmination of their parallel but very different lives.
The author wrote a popular book. He is a magazine reporter turned historical
fiction writer and the book relies on the work of others and thus is not an
original work of historical non-fiction, but he bookends this tale with a
letter from Hamilton, written on the eve of his death, to his own great, great,
great grandfather Theodore Sedgwick. The
letter contains language that is cryptic and foreign sounding, and the author
wisely hints at it in the beginning, producing the full text only after telling
his tale. Even then, though, the letter
is tough to make sense of, at least to me – not just because it alludes
to things obliquely, but because what it is articulating sounds to my ear, and
it is weird to say this: un-American.
Hamilton, by far the more interesting character of the two,
was born in the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. Five small
islands here produced, in the form of sugar, more wealth than all 13
colonies. Sr. Croix, where Hamilton
settled when he was 10, was as big a city as New York, and just
as wealthy. Sugar cane, growing on the
islands, and its resulting sugar, had just been discovered by Europe, and the
Europeans were figuring out that it was good for more than just putting in tea
and were going mad for it, and willing to pay a premium to have it to bake into
things they were discovering as quickly as they were devouring – cakes and
cookies and stuff that at least I thought of as existing since the beginning of
time.
Alexander Hamilton, who was the second son of a woman who left
but could not divorce a cruel husband, was a bastard. Further, the author alleges that Hamilton was
not the son of James Alexander, the man she took up with, but a Mr. Stevens, who
apparently cuckolded Mr. Alexander. One
of the consistent but not highlighted themes of this book is how badly women
were treated during colonial times and how little freedom they had – but also
that many of them used sexual relations to try to better their situations –
often with disastrous results, but with few other options. One could read this like a failed version of
a Jane Austen novel – if you look at it from the perspective of the women,
which the author seldom does. (The musical does look through women's eyes in interesting ways - perhaps in part because it was based on a different text that includes more sensitivity to the experience of women). In any
case, Hamilton and his mother were stricken by yellow fever when he was 12 and
she died. He had to fend for himself; he
was apprenticed to an import/export firm where he proved so competent that the
owners felt free to return to New York and leave him in charge by the time he
was 14 or 15. He did a remarkable job –
keeping books, but also learning how to dress down ship captains for delivering
substandard goods. The skills he learned
– and an apparent aptitude for dealing with both numbers and people, served him
well when he worked for George Washington during the Revolutionary War, helping
Washington with correspondence and the problem of supplying the troops with
provisions, and this, in turn, led Washington to appoint him the first secretary of the treasury. In between, he contributed to the constitution and wrote the majority of the Federalist Papers - essays that helped to convince people to ratify the constitution. More immediately, in St. Croix, a
benefactor recognized that he had many skills; including writing poetry and the
benefactor raised money to send Hamilton to New York to go to school, and
Hamilton never looked back. After the
war, with his constitution in place, and as treasury secretary, he developed the Federal
Monetary system that continues to be the basic foundation of our
banking system today.
That Horatio Alger type story is told in much more detail in
the book, and there are many bends and twists in it. And Burr is used as a kind of foil – the
author claims they are mirror images, or black and white versions of each
other. I am struck by the similarities of
these men from different social strata – Burr, who came from all but American
noble parentage – his grandfather was a very well known preacher and both his
grandfather and father were Presidents of Princeton University – which at that
time was essentially a seminary – training men to take on the most noble of
professions. But, like Hamilton, Burr
was orphaned. Also like Hamilton, he was
incredibly smart and was the youngest graduate of Princeton, due not just to
smarts but – in a mirror again of Hamilton – to very hard work. Unlike Hamilton, Burr seemed to work hard,
but in spurts – with periods of indolence or purposelessness in between.
I think that the way that the author means to be contrasting
Burr with Hamilton is that Burr was driven by the principle of doing what was
in Burr’s best interest – he appeared to be a man without external
principle. But I think there is more
similarity in the two men’s positions than he points out. Not that Hamilton is just driven by
self-interest, which he certainly is, but that Hamilton’s principles are not
clearly articulated. Early on, in the
time before the revolution, Hamilton is a believer in the crown, and he manages
to talk his way out of a siege of King’s College by revolutionaries by the use
of sophisticated rhetoric that allows him to sound sympathetic to the cause
while retaining loyalty to the king.
Indeed, one of his claims – through the paternity that the author questions
– it that he is descended, through James Hamilton, from Scottish Royalty. Now we know that he fought on the
Revolutionary side and was one of the founding fathers, working on the
constitution, and, more than just that, working to get it ratified.
As the first secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton shaped in
essential ways the country that we would become. He was able to conceptualize the tremendous
debt we accumulated in fighting the war as an asset – as something that could
be sold. He built a strong central bank
and, when Jefferson was elected, it was working well enough that, even though
it was counter to Jefferson’s principles, Jefferson retained it. What principles was the bank in conflict
with? Jefferson, and the Southern
Republicans opposed the northern Federalists' intent to make our nation into an
industrial power. Their interest, and
their reliance on slave labor, created the ability to retain a noble way of
life while preserving the agrarian lifestyle they valued.
Cincinnati from Covington, Kentucky, cira 1851 (Detail)
Robert S. Duncanson (1821-1872)
Really quite by accident, I was in our local art museum this afternoon, and wandering through the local wing in between seeing two travelling exhibits. Two paintings struck my eye. One was a vista that was painted looking north across the Ohio River early in the 1800s. On the south side, there was a bucolic scene with slaves and cows and lots of green space. Across the river was a city, with crowded housing, smoke mixing with the clouds to create a very early version of smog. The second painting, also from the early 1800s, was of a poor white family headed north – leaving the south because they were unable to generate a living in competition with slave labor.
The Republicans, the Southerners, had a vision of the United
States that was complex. It included
something that the Sierra Club would admire – something that today we would
call ecologically sound. But it also
included a weird vision of a social system that was based on a class system of
nobles – white privileged folks – and the slaves who supported them. Those who did not fit in would, like
Hamilton’s father – not one of the first two or three children of his royal
father – be left to fend for themselves and have to settle for the
leavings.
Now, the Federalists were also all male, all white, and
their vision was not without its internal problems. But it was a very different vision of a world
that would be based on economic opportunity.
It would create the bustling cities of the north that would draw the
southerners to their prosperity and would belch smoke into the sky, but also
create a middle class – a group of people who, while not wealthy, would be able
to survive setbacks. These people would
create the backbone of an economic system – one driven by mass consumerism –
that would become the world that we inhabit today.
So this book, read in preparation for seeing the hit musical
“Hamilton” in New York next month (though my reluctant friend Dan maintains that I would
have better prepared by buying and listening to the soundtrack), revealed an
unexpected history, the seeds of the economic system that has come to define us. Aaron Burr, the other character, is a shadowy
figure. Enamored first of his wife and
then of his daughter who was named for his wife, he became vice president under
peculiar circumstances. He and Hamilton were among the first
politicians in America to actively campaign and to organize voters – remember that
we invented the modern democracy and so had to figure out how to move away from
noble functioning – including the noble inhibitions that prevented pandering to
the common man. Burr had secured the votes that Jefferson needed to become
president by campaigning for him in the north.
There were no provisions made for parties in the constitution, so he and
Jefferson – by running as a ticket – each received the same number of votes –
but there was no distinction about which office the votes were cast - each received the exact same number of electoral votes –
though clearly it was Jefferson the people intended to be president. Burr didn’t quickly concede, angering
Jefferson. This kind of slinky, self-promoting
behavior had previously alienated Burr from Hamilton and, when Hamilton
besmirched his honor, Burr demanded a duel.
So, the letter; the night before the duel, Hamilton wrote
his friend, Theodore Sedgwick, and the following terse paragraph summarizes some
thoughts that he had been struggling with:
I will here
express one sentiment, which is, that Dismemberment of our Empire will be a
clear sacrifice of great positive advantages, without any counterbalancing
good; administering no real relief to our real Disease; which is Democracy,
the poison of which by a subdivision will only be the more concentrated in each
part, and consequently the more virulent.
This is a funky paragraph.
Democracy is a disease? Let’s set
that aside for a moment. Subdivision is
a presentiment of the civil war – though also of a weird plot of Burr’s to
divide off the Ohio Territories and the Louisiana purchase from the eastern
colonies and create a second country that would conquer Florida and the other
Spanish lands including Texas and Mexico.
Obviously that never came to pass – and Burr’s attempt ended up being
incredibly feeble and thus I, at least, had never heard of it in the history
books. But there were natural divisions
in the young country. And Hamilton’s
vision was that “our Empire” had positive advantages – and I think that the
glue of that empire is economic. And the
goal of the empire? In Hamilton’s mind
it appears to be to support a country that is not Democratic, but one that is –
what – aristocratic? And Democracy is a
poison that would only become more concentrated in a smaller batches – in smaller
parts of the whole. So Democracy is diluted
by the large Federalist state or empire.
The bigger the government – the more it can be determined – not by the
will of the people, who are perhaps fickle or driven by self-interest (this is
speculation on my part), but instead by the governors – the ones who are in the
know and who can determine a course of action which will be good for what? For the Empire, I believe – for our Empire.
This is a stunning paragraph that is left by one of our
founding fathers. He was in decline –
Jefferson’s ascent had not been good for his political fortunes, nor had a
series of other factors, including his own behaviors. But the sentiments included here are not
hidden or coded – as they would have been if sent by the secretive Burr. There is no sense that Hamilton experiences
them as being in any way seditious or problematic. Quite the contrary, he is speaking with
certainty about beliefs that he believes others will share. Remember, many were clamoring for Washington
to declare himself King. And seeing the musical helped clarify that his attachment to Washington was a source of much of Hamilton's power. This letter is partly a mourning of what might have been. We were in
uncharted waters – and this had been a revolution that was led by the
aristocrats, not the common men. As low
as Hamilton’s birth might objectively have been, he saw himself as the son of a
nobleman and functioned as a patrician in a country that was harshly divided
between the privileged and those who were not, while simultaneously it was a
country that would be increasingly open to Horatio Alger like transformations
that Hamilton himself had undergone - transformations supported by the financial system that Hamilton had built.
I am not at all sure what to make of this book. I am struck, as I am reading another book about many
things including our shared reluctance to acknowledge the impact of our
development on our mature selves (I expect that I
will be posting on that book here soon), that what I am marveling at is how
important it is for us to reflect on our roots as a nation as well as doing it as
individuals. Our current political
climate might be better understood if we abandoned some two dimensional views
of history – the northerners were for X and the southerners were for Y – and substituted
something more complex: Our founding fathers were an interesting blend of men
who were struggling to articulate a new vision of a country – and were doing
that from manifold perspectives – and as they did that they were necessarily
influenced by the personal and cultural histories that each of them had lived. They were articulating, and building into the
DNA of the country, visions that contained unassimilated bits of previous
governments – and imagined future Empires – that were expressed in a variety of
founding documents – not just the constitution – and that may still be exerting
powerful – if now distorted - influences on our political functioning. Sedgwick points out that the monument to
Hamilton visible from the dueling grounds at Weehawken New Jersey are not anything constructed on that site, but the skyline of Manhattan, visible across the Hudson River.
We are the children of parents whose vision could not have imagined what would come to pass as a result of their actions and our subsequent labors.
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