Another abbreviated, watered down, sleep deprived history lesson, but this time it’s all about literally the hottest founding father we have- Alexander Hamilton.
I mean have you seen him on the 10 dollar bill?
Anyways, so this is directly for @alexanderhamiltonlive the boy who deserves someone not trying to shit on him at least 23/7, I mean really. Anyways.
So the Ham man is born in the Caribbean, specifically Nevis, and obviously there’s some real strenuous circumstances, like you know- being born out of wedlock, nearly dying thanks to hurricanes and disease, being orphaned as a child.
You’d think this is enough to make anyone like, turn over and go back to Fucking bed, like “thanks god, I really fucking appreciate it- I’ll try again tomorrow.”
Instead this tiny Ham is so fucking smart, despite the fact the schools were like “no Bastard Orphans allowed.” He starts working for a really shady creep named Cruger and his trading company. And despite having literally no formal education he’s making these adults look like fucking idiots, he’s so smart, he’s like 13 and handling the goddamn finances for a fuckin’ trading company. And garbage boy Cruger is like “shit, I wonder how much money you could make me if you had a formal education.” So they raise money to send Hamilton to the mainland and are like “okay- get smart and come back.”
And Hamilton is like “lol k.” Cause obviously that’s exactly what he’s NOT gonna do.
Anyways, he gets to America, and shows up at King’s college like the lil’ 15 year old twerp he is kicking the door in yelling about graduating early and everyone’s just kind of like “whatever if you want to or something..?” And that’s when he meets Mulligan.
He’s got a bunch of other friends like Robert Troup, but the play doesn’t like them, so we don’t like them.
So the war is finally kicking off, and I like to think Hamilton’s college days were the equivalent of this—as a bunch of frat boys banging on shit in the street, yelling “come at me bro.” At the British.
They join in with a militia with a bunch of other students call themselves the “Hearts of Oak” make up a bunch of drills to practice in preparation. They’re actively fighting and one of my favorite goddamn moments in existence is The Battle of Princeton and just how much nonchalant big dick energy Hamilton radiated when STEALING FUCKING CANONS. I MEAN LITERALLY I NEED TO FIND THE MULLIGAN QUOTE—
‘I was engaged in hauling off one of the cannons, when Mister Hamilton came up and gave me his musket to hold and he took hold of the rope. . . . Hamilton [got] away with the cannon. I left his musket in the Battery and retreated. As he was returning, I met him and he asked for his piece. I told him where I had left it and he went for it, notwithstanding the firing continued, with as much concern as if the [Asia] had not been there.’
Like I’m so fucking?????? JUST waltzed back across into enemy lines to get his fucking gun?? Stops to look st a redcoat like “hey man, nice weather we’re having hear? Good for war.” Casual as fuck.
Anyways, flash forward a bit, Ham man is suddenly like a hot fuckin commodity. His brain and his recklessness has all the military leaders fighting for him as a secretary. Washington ends up winning and boom he’s an Aide-de-camp.
Things a pretty great until pretty boy John Laurens comes in from London like “hi I’m here to fight a war and be gay while doing it.”
They’re disaster gays, or well, Hams a disaster bisexual— but I don’t need to tell everyone how gay it was. We. All. Know.
He’s besties with Lafayette and Laurens. (alexanderhamiltonlive claims he’s kissed Lafayette once, but I have a firm stance on: PICS OR IT DIDNT HAPPEN.)
But point is, they’re called the ‘gay trio’ they’re just fucking besties constantly getting shot and fighting in a war. Lafayette rivals Laurens in just how often one of them gets WIA.
There’s not much I really need to explain in this I feel? We all know he got command of a battalion eventually, and beat some British ass in the battle of Yorktown.
Around this time Hamilton is married to Elizabeth Schuyler. There’s not much to know on where Laurens and Hamilton stood at that point, my firm opinion is that he just— marriage was important in political careers. And Hamilton was poly. we know you can love multiple people.
Now whether or not Laurens was cool with that is a different story, but that’s a different topic.
We win the war!! There’s party poppers everywhere, it’s like a week long party.
Hamilton goes back to school, passes the bar pretty quickly, graduates becomes a lawyer and pretty much single handedly shapes our judicial system. Like he gets credit for being the founding father of our economy but he did so much god damn more. And Hamilton was an excellent lawyer.
But he’s also a little shit who basically went ‘go big or go home.’ And took all the ridiculously hard cases. AND. WON. THEM. He made a name for himself.
So then he goes into working as secretary treasury and spends all his goddamn time arguing with a bunch of old racist white men. And then we have the Reynolds affair which I’m about to get real biased on for a second.
A lot of people give Hamilton flack for being a slut, but I think we’re thinking through the 21st century lense on it. There’s theories that Hamilton was bipolar and manic episodes that can cause you to write over 50 essays in the federalist papers can also impact you negatively.
We know James Reynolds was a con man, we know Hamilton made a mistake, but there’s so many more factors playing into than just Hamilton going “heehee, helpless pretty girl.”
People forget that charisma can be very flirtatious but it doesn’t correlate to lose morals. Hamilton wasn’t a slut, he was a romantic sure- it’s very clear Ham man was the type of person who fell in love ridiculously hard and fast, but we also forget he was human, he made mistakes.
And at the end of the day he did pay for those mistakes.
He didn’t get off scotch free with his affair. There’s too many attributing factors to the affair, it was already a sketchy situation, the bipolar mania and lack of knowledge or study on mental disorders, the level of charisma that Hamilton possessed that made people pay attention to him. Dumbing it down to “Alexander Hamilton is a slut” is just bad critical thinking skills.
We also know Laurens death has a major effect on Hamilton, it shut him off and in some cases made him reckless, but there are things for certain- Alexander Hamilton was not a bad person or father, there are a lot of accounts in writing that show he had the mentality of “kind to my loved ones, vicious to my enemies” and when you’re surrounded by enemies, that’s kind of the only real face you see.
I don’t have to describe the duel, we all know how it went down, Hamilton threw away his shot, Burr shot him and ran away, losing him was losing a great potential
president. Which hella sucks.
