If you never read Ron Chernow’s monumental (818-page) biography of Alexander Hamilton, or if you just want to check the facts behind the smash hit musical inspired by Chernow’s work, this slender new volume is just the book for you.
Written by the lawyer and law professor RB Bernstein, who died this year at the age of 67, Hamilton: The Energetic Founder reaches the same conclusion Chernow did two decades ago when he wrote, “If Washington is the father of the country and Madison the father of the constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.” Bernstein, however, only requires 107 pages before the notes to convey Hamilton’s vital role in the creation of our body politic.
Hamilton was born on 11 January, sometime between 1753 and 1758 – no one is certain. He was born on Nevis, the illegitimate son of a French Huguenot mother and James Hamilton, fourth son of Alexander Hamilton, Lord of the Grange in Ayrshire.
He had a wretched childhood. After his mother died, he was sent to live with one of her cousins, Robert Lytton, but that only lasted until Lytton hanged himself. Alexander’s fortunes improved after attending a Hebrew school in Charlestown. In his teens he became clerk to a successful merchant. The next stage of his life was determined by an act of god. In 1772, a hurricane destroyed St Croix. Hamilton wrote about the disaster and its religious significance in a letter to the Royal Danish American Gazette. The distinctive prose style which would make him such an influential and successful adult caught the attention of a Presbyterian minister, who took up a collection to pay for Hamilton’s education on the American mainland.
After “polishing his Greek and Latin” at an academy in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, Hamilton applied to the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton. Turned down, he ended up in New York at what would become Columbia, then called King’s College. Like millions of Ivy League undergraduates who followed in his footsteps, his college years gave him vital connections in New York City including two “lifelong friends … Robert Troup, his college roommate, and John Jay.
Bernstein argues there was something even more important about Hamilton’s truncated undergraduate career: it gave him “an American point of view, rather than a perspective attached to a particular colony such as New York”.
After the Revolutionary war forced the closing of King’s, Hamilton used the rest of his college money to start his own artillery brigade. Distinguishing himself at the battles of Trenton and Princeton, he caught the attention of George Washington, who made him his principal aide de camp.
From 1780 onwards, Hamilton had one abiding obsession: “Giving the United States the government that a new, independent nation needed and deserved.” Even before the original articles of Confederation were adopted, Hamilton recognized their inadequacies. He soon became one of the most forceful advocates for a much stronger constitution. He, Jay and James Madison wrote a twice-weekly column called The Federalist for New York City newspapers, under the pseudonym Publius. Together they produced 88 essays, but Hamilton wrote 51. Their greatest influence actually came after the constitution was adopted, in 1788.
Hamilton’s role in the uphill battle to get New York to ratify the constitution animates one of many exciting sections in Bernstein’s brisk and rigorous book. When Hamilton became a leader of the pro-constitution forces, he was “one of only 19 pro-convention delegates”, facing 46 opponents. But “grim determination and mastery of the arts of constitutional and political argument” was enough to reverse those numbers, especially after “express riders” paid for by Hamilton arrived at the New York convention, in Poughkeepsie, with news that New Hampshire and Virginia had ratified. Since one more state than needed had now approved the new document, New Yorkers faced a new choice: “They could vote to join the Union … or they could vote to leave the Union by rejecting” the constitution. The Federalists prevailed, 30-27.
Hamilton’s long association with Washington led to his most important appointment, as the first secretary of the treasury, and then to his most important victory: the creation by Congress of the Bank of the United States, over fierce opposition from Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton followed the creation of the bank with a report to Congress “on the subject of manufactures”, urging the country to take manufacturing as seriously as agriculture. Congress refused to adopt his recommendations.
More than two centuries later, though, Joe Biden’s greatest legislative achievements, the Build Back Better and Inflation Reduction acts, are both full of echoes of Hamilton’s ideas, including “subsidizing key industries”, “awarding prizes for new developments in technology”, “building a system of roads and canals” and “encouraging inventions by paying bounties”.
Hamilton would not live long enough to see his ideas about a powerful constitution enshrined. And this book suggests that the depression he felt after his son died a in a duel contributed to Hamilton’s own behavior when Aaron Burr demanded that he meet him at dawn for a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey.
In a farewell letter to his wife, Hamilton revealed that he planned to fire his gun into the air. That was what he did after Burr fired the fatal shot into Hamilton’s liver – suggesting the final act of Hamilton’s life was something not far from suicide.
Hamilton: The Energetic Founder is published in the US by Oxford University Press
This article was amended on 7 August 2023, to correct the author’s initials.
