The American Story

by David M. Rubenstein

JM: I’m glad you asked that, because I’m investing in a small company to create foot bowls.

  I was allowed, through the good graces of Monticello, to spend the night in Jefferson’s bedroom in the course of doing this book. Nothing inappropriate happened with anyone, I quickly, quickly add.

  But one of the things I learned, because I slept on the floor next to the bed, is there was this groove next to the bed. I asked the curator—marvelous staff there, marvelous people—I said, “What is that?” And she said, “Oh, that’s from the foot bowl,” as if I were a lunatic for not knowing this.

  Every morning a bucket of cold water was brought to Jefferson’s bedside and he plunged his feet in. And they were little feet. We looked at his boots recently, actually. They were tiny, but he was tall, above six feet. He plunged his feet into cold water and left them in for a few minutes. Benjamin Franklin did the same thing, and he lived a long time too.

  He also didn’t eat a lot of meat, and he avoided hard liquor, although four glasses of wine was just the beginning of a good time in Jefferson’s house. Soak those feet in cold water, and you too can live to be eighty-three years old.

  4 RON CHERNOW

  on Alexander Hamilton

  “Alexander Hamilton was someone who radiated genius.”

  BOOK DISCUSSED:

  Alexander Hamilton (The Penguin Press, 2004)

  Some biographers write books that are well regarded by serious scholars but that may be too detailed and too long to attract enormous popular interest. Other biographers write books that are quite popular with the book-buying public but that serious scholars feel lack original or serious scholarship.

  Then there is Ron Chernow. He is the rarest of biographers: able to write books that are best sellers but that are also praised by scholars. This has been true of all of his biographies, which include books on the House of Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, the famous Warburg banking family, George Washington (a book that won a Pulitzer Prize), and Ulysses S. Grant.

  And there is that other biography on a heretofore important but not all that well known Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton.

  When it was first published, it not only sold well, but it also was an important contribution to the scholarship on Hamilton. Of greater significance, it was read on a Mexican vacation by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who then used it as the basis for the biggest theatrical phenomenon of recent decades: the musical Hamilton.

  When I interviewed Chernow, Hamilton had just debuted on Broadway, but its now well-known spectacular success as a rare cultural force had not yet occurred, and everyone in the country was not yet familiar with the incredible story of Alexander Hamilton. Chernow does an excellent job of conveying the key elements of that story in this interview.

  A footnote: A few years ago, I received the Alexander Hamilton Award from the Museum of American Finance. The director of the museum asked if I would mind if the creator of a then off-Broadway show could sing a few hip-hop songs about Hamilton before I was given the award. I said fine, and a then unknown (to me) Lin-Manuel sang two songs from the musical, which I was told he was still fine-tuning.

  I listened, and told the museum director that I knew one thing about Broadway—a hip-hop show based on our first treasury secretary was doomed to fail, and I was glad I had not invested in it. I guess this is why I have not been an investor in Broadway shows. I have absolutely no talent in assessing potential winners.

  Chernow’s recounting of Hamilton’s life makes one realize what Lin-Manuel Miranda found so interesting, if not unbelievable: an illegitimate and orphaned young man from the Caribbean came to New York and, not too long thereafter, became General Washington’s top aide during the Revolutionary War, the principal author of The Federalist Papers, the first treasury secretary, and the architect of the country’s financial system.

  How did he pull this off? Chernow makes it clear that Hamilton was not only intellectually gifted but also a truly driven man (a workaholic in today’s terminology).

  But how could such a smart man, who was driven to accomplish so much more than he had already done, allow himself to die at the age of forty-nine in a duel with Aaron Burr, vice president of the United States? There is no good answer. But Chernow suggests that Hamilton did not intend to shoot Burr—that he was prepared to “waste his shot,” perhaps in the expectation (or hope) that Burr, a well-educated “gentleman,” would do the same.

  One wonders just how history might have been changed, or how many other brilliant feats Hamilton might have accomplished, if he had lived to a ripe old age, as so many of the other Founding Fathers did. We will never know.

  We will also never know what George Washington would think of Hamilton becoming so famous because of the success of Hamilton. Is he in heaven thinking that he was the Revolutionary War general, the president of the Constitutional Convention, the unanimously elected two-term president of the United States, while Hamilton was always subordinate to him? Why did Lin-Manuel not write a show about him? After all, Chernow’s book on Washington actually won the Pulitzer Prize.

  One suspects, though, that any concern Washington might feel about Hamilton becoming so popular is a fraction of the concern that Thomas Jefferson must be experiencing.

  * * *

  MR. DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): We’re going to delve into a conversation on our first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, with the man who’s written what I think is the definitive biography of him. How many people here have read the biography? How many people have seen the play? How many people are looking for tickets to the play?

  When you were writing this book, did you ever think it would be made into a show?

  MR. RON CHERNOW (RC): I think it’s safe to say, David, I never thought it would be made into a musical, much less a hip-hop musical.

  DR: But Hamilton was based on your book.

  RC: Yes, it’s very faithfully based on the book.

  DR: The producer read your book, or the lyricist read it?

  RC: Lin-Manuel Miranda, who stars in it—he wrote the lyrics, the music, and the book for the show—read the book back in 2008. When I met Lin-Manuel, he told me that he had been reading my Hamilton biography on vacation in Mexico, and he said that as he was reading it, hip-hop songs started rising off the page. Needless to say, this was not a typical reaction to one of my books. But he has produced the most extraordinary show I’ve ever seen.

  DR: How long did it take you to research the book, and how long to write it?

  RC: The book took me five years to write, which seems like a long time, but you have to understand that Alexander Hamilton was the most prolific author of all time. He died at age forty-nine, and yet he left behind thirty-two thick volumes of personal, political and business papers. The Papers of Alexander Hamilton was published by Columbia University Press, and the chief editor, Dr. Harold Syrett, made the facetious statement that he wanted to dedicate the volumes to Aaron Burr, without whose cooperation the project could never have been completed.

  DR: When we talk about the Founding Fathers, we often say Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin. But Hamilton hasn’t historically gotten the deification the others have. Why do you think he wasn’t as well recognized for his accomplishments, given all the things he did?

  RC: When I tell you, David, that Alexander Hamilton’s political enemies were John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe—and I’ll even throw in John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson—what do you notice about that list? It sometimes seemed like the fastest road to the White House was to be a political opponent of Alexander Hamilton.

  What happened is that Hamilton died in 1804. He never reached the age of fifty. If history is written by the victors, the victors were certainly the Jeffersonians who dominated American politics in the years leading up to the Civil War. No less important, I think, is that Hamilton’s party, the Federalist Party, disappeared in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, so there wasn’t an institutional structure perpetuating his memory.


  DR: Of all the Founding Fathers I mentioned, the only one who was not born in the United States was Alexander Hamilton. Can you go through the story of his birth and how he was considered by some to be illegitimate, and how that affected him?

  RC: This was a really ghastly Dickensian childhood. Hamilton was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis and spent his adolescence on the island of St. Croix. Hamilton’s father, James Hamilton, abandoned the family when Alexander was eleven. His mother, Rachel, died when Alexander was thirteen. He was lying there inches away from her, deathly sick himself.

  But he survived. He was farmed out to a first cousin, who committed suicide a year later. He was then sent to live with a planter named Thomas Stevens, whose son, Ned Stevens, became his best lifelong friend. Everyone who saw Ned in later years was shocked by the uncanny resemblance between him and Alexander Hamilton, so in all likelihood, Hamilton’s biological father was actually Thomas Stevens.

  He was clearly illegitimate. His mother, Rachel Faucette, came from a French Huguenot background. She had already been married when she met James Hamilton and, under the terms of her divorce, she could not legally remarry, so any children she had were illegitimate, and there was a tremendous stigma to that at the time.

  Hamilton’s birthplace on the Caribbean island of Nevis.

  DR: How does somebody whose mother was gone and whose father abandoned him make it from the Virgin Islands to the United States? How did that happen?

  RC: What happened was that Hamilton was a poor clerk working at a trading house on St. Croix when a killer hurricane hit the island in 1772. It was a monstrous hurricane. It’s thought that a tsunami rolled across the island. Hamilton sat down and he published a description of the hurricane in the local newspaper, and it was almost Shakespearean in its vividness.

  The local merchants read this, recognized the extraordinary literary flair of this young man, banded together, and took up a collection to educate him in North America. He came to America around 1773—in other words, right on the eve of the American Revolution. He didn’t know a soul, just came armed with a few letters of introduction. He was briefly educated in New Jersey and ended up in King’s College, now Columbia University, which was then on the southern tip of Manhattan.

  DR: He was in New York and going to college, paid for by friends and admirers. When did other people realize that he was a gifted writer and talker?

  RC: Almost immediately. Alexander Hamilton was someone who radiated genius.

  I remember a wonderful statement that Dr. Samuel Johnson made about Edmund Burke. He said that if there was a rainstorm one day and you sheltered under an awning with Edmund Burke, whom you had never met before, if you sheltered under an awning with him for five minutes, you would know that you had been in the presence of a genius. That describes the reaction people had to Hamilton.

  He was an undergraduate at King’s College, but he was already publishing fiery essays against the British and making rabble-rousing speeches in what today is City Hall Park. And then, as the Revolution started, he became the head of an artillery company, drilling in St. Paul’s churchyard.

  DR: Did he just start the artillery company himself and say, “Join me”?

  RC: Originally it was a group of students.

  DR: He was in the artillery company, fighting in the Revolutionary War. How did he wind up as the chief of staff to George Washington?

  RC: As a soldier and as the head of this artillery company, Hamilton was a daredevil. He was physically fearless at the Battle of White Plains in 1776, and as the Continental Army was retreating across New Jersey to the Delaware after the battle, Hamilton was covering the retreating soldiers. He was spraying the British and Hessian soldiers with fire.

  So he came to Washington’s attention first, I think, for his derring-do, but also because of his brilliance. There were four generals who tried to recruit Hamilton onto their staff, because he was so literate and capable. From Washington’s standpoint, Hamilton had an ideal combination of talents. He was already a very skilled soldier, but Washington’s most pressing need was for someone to write letters for him.

  Alexander Hamilton at the age of fifteen.

  DR: Because the generals in those days were writing dispatches all the time, and Washington had something like four people doing this for him?

  RC: He had a number of people doing it. To give some sense of how important these letters were, during the eight and a half years of the Revolutionary War, Washington was serving fourteen different political masters. He was keeping up extensive correspondence not only with the Continental Congress but with the governors of the thirteen states.

  Hamilton was handling this correspondence, which was even more important once we forged the alliance with France. Hamilton’s mother was a French Huguenot and he was therefore bilingual. When he was exchanging letters with the marquis de Lafayette, he would write to Lafayette in faultless French. Lafayette would send back letters that even I could see were full of spelling and grammatical mistakes in French.

  DR: So Washington brought Hamilton onto his staff, and he quickly rose up to be not just a letter writer but, in effect, the chief of staff?

  RC: It was quite remarkable. When you look at the lists of generals at the different war councils before the major battles, you have something like eleven generals, and then it will say “Colonel Hamilton” on the bottom. This was very important in terms of Hamilton’s career, because he was getting a really expansive view of the Revolutionary War, both from a military and also a political standpoint. This was his school.

  DR: So he was running the war, practically, for Washington. He was Washington’s mouthpiece.

  RC: Well, not exactly running the war, but weighing in on all sorts of issues.

  DR: Why was he not happy with that? At one point he said, “I want to do something else.” What was it he wanted to do?

  RC: Alexander Hamilton realized from the very beginning of the war that postwar political glory would not go to the person who had written the most beautiful letters for Washington during the war but would go to battlefield heroes. Throughout the war, he was lobbying Washington to give him a battlefield command. It produced real friction between them, and Hamilton ended up leaving Washington’s staff.

  Hamilton finally got Washington to give him a field command at Yorktown, and at last he had the moment he’d always fantasized about. He was assigned to take a defensive fortification.

  It was at night. He rose up out of the trenches, with shells exploding in the air, and led his men across this rutted battlefield. When they got to Redoubt No. 10 [a key part of the British defenses], Hamilton had one of the men in his company stoop down. He stood on the guy’s shoulders, sprang up on the parapet, and yelled to the other men to follow him. It was almost like a scene from a Hollywood action flick. That was the life of Hamilton.

  DR: And he became a bit of a hero for this.

  RC: Absolutely.

  DR: The Treaty of Paris took another two years or so to negotiate, but after Yorktown the war was over, more or less. What did Hamilton do?

  RC: What happened was Hamilton went back to New York. He was a great one for taking advantage of opportunities. Robert Morris, who was the superintendent of finance for the United States, appointed him tax receiver of New York.

  This would have been a very lowly job for anyone else, but Alexander Hamilton lobbied the New York legislature to create a special committee on how to make tax collection more efficient. Hamilton so impressed the New York State Legislature with his presentation that he was appointed one of the five New Yorkers at the Confederation Congress [the U.S. governing assembly from 1781 to 1789].

  DR: He was also practicing law. He got to become a lawyer without going to law school, right?

  RC: It was amazing, because at the time you became a lawyer by serving a two-year apprenticeship with an older lawyer. Hamilton passed the bar in New York after six months of self-study. He cobbled together a digest of New York legal precedents
and procedures that was so expertly done it became a crib sheet for law students for another two or three generations in New York.

  DR: In those days, if you came from a foreign country and you were, let’s say, illegitimate, you were not likely to rise up in New York. How did he manage to get to the top of New York society?

  RC: He married Elizabeth Schuyler, whose father, Major General Philip Schuyler, was not only one of the leading generals in the Revolution, he was a close friend of George Washington, and one of the leading landholders in New York State.

  I think what happened, David, was that because Hamilton was Washington’s chief of staff, even though he was this illegitimate orphaned kid from the Caribbean, it was like being chief of staff of the White House. It gave him tremendous standing.

  When Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler at the Schuyler mansion in Albany, the place was teeming with all her rich relatives—the Van Cortlandts, the Van Rensselaers, the Beekmans. They were the Anglo-Dutch royalty of New York State.

  Hamilton didn’t have a single family member there. He had only one friend, a James McHenry from Washington’s staff. So you can imagine the discrepancy in status. He was marrying into the most social and prosperous family in New York, and he had only one friend present.

  DR: He had a bit of an amorous reputation. In fact, what did Martha Washington call her tomcat?

  His marriage to Elizabeth Schuyler, a member of one of New York’s wealthiest families, raised Hamilton’s social status considerably.

  RC: Hamilton. Yeah, it was a big joke. She had this feral tomcat that she called Hamilton, although historians have disputed the accuracy of this.