What made you want to study Alexander Hamilton?
Every time I look up a book or website pertaining to him or log into this account, I examine my conscience and reflect on exactly that question.
In 5th grade, I did a report on hauntings associated with Aaron Burr.
More seriously: because of race, gender, class, religion, etc., Alexander Hamilton’s America was not made for me, to paraphrase Langston Hughes and Hamilton himself. By 1789, all of my ancestors were living in or on land that would become the United States, and about the only person whom AH’s policies benefited was a white male ancestor who was the son of a plantation owner in North Carolina. Attributable to the brutality of the above that was experienced right down through my parents and their generation, I was conscious even in grade school American history classes that I was being taught a heavily romanticized and mythical history meant to conceal the realities - especially economic - of the American Revolution and the founding of the nation, so that’s always with me.
Then I read William Hogeland’s* The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty (2010) several years ago. That led to a brief interest in AH, and I read Chernow’s biographies of both AH and Washington.*
Hamilton: An American Musical has inspired a phenomenon that is fascinating to me. Moving away from Miranda’s building of a cult of personality around the man, Alexander Hamilton himself has become an old school celebrity (in a pre-social media definition of stardom). He’s been dead 200+ years, and yet in the current popular imagination he’s pretty much become a fantasy - a person to whom we can attach any attributes we want. I’m on the fence as to how dangerous this is (i.e., whether it continues a mythical narrative that is harmful, as Founders Chic critics argue; here’s Ken Owens’ critique); the pressure of the market has certainly had an awful effect on published biographies of AH. It made me curious as to why certain things about Hamilton, the actual person, have made him such an attractive character for this kind of treatment.
I’m interested in historiography. Why have some very prominent people in Hamilton’s life totally been pushed aside, to the point of exclusion? What accounts for that? Plus, there’s a wide gap with Hamilton between FACTS, and conjecture, speculation, pure nonsense that’s been written as FACTS. (When I say that Chernow is a careless writer, this is what I’m referring to.) There’s also a striking lack of social context in a lot of Hamilton biographies, and I know something about that context - as do a lot of scholars - but the fields have not really met.
I’m also a nit-picker, and there’s so much detail that gets pushed aside (I probably missed my vocation as a professional fact-checker). I can amuse myself for a long time just looking up who was/is in possession of letters, what letter text has been published although it’s now unknown where the actual letter is, and noting that for one person (very suspiciously), almost all the letters we have are actually copies of originals done within one to two generations after Hamilton’s death. That kind of stuff keeps me fascinated.
*Hogeland hates Founders chic, is critical of the Hamilton musical, is very critical of popular understanding of AH himself (while not being a Jefferson defender), has declared himself the biggest critic of Chernow, and is currently working on his own book about AH. I cannot wait! If one wants the sense of his work prior to borrowing or buying his fantastic books, see here: x, x, or just go through his entire Alexander Hamilton tag on his blog.
**I don’t object to Chernow as a writer of popular books meant for entertainment. My problem with Chernow, besides the FACT/speculation problem above, is threefold. First, his biographies are largely personal narratives that never engage in substantive social and economic issues of the persons and era in which he is writing, as informed by scholars in those areas; in other words, Chernow writes history in a way that I think many historians - at least the ones I like - see not only as old-fashioned, but as harmful. Second, his biographies have been treated by the general public as if they are indeed works of scholarship; which, unfortunately, is largely how Lin-Manuel Miranda also approached the Hamilton biography. Third, Chernow is poor at sourcing his material; when he does source, he has not necessarily even read the source material.
