The Broadway hit reminds us there’s nothing new about political rows over federal superstates and the economy
When this article appeared, some readers objected to the fact that key roles in the Hamilton musical were taken by members of ethnic minorities when the people they were portraying were white. I defended the artistic statement pointing out that, yes, George Washington was not really African American, but it was equally true that when Alexander Hamilton first proposed federal assumption of state debt he didn’t do it in song.
Though he died before he was 50, Alexander Hamilton led an extraordinary life. An immigrant to America, he became a military hero of the revolution; right-hand man to George Washington; founder of the two-party system; first Secretary of the Treasury; creator of the currency and banking system; biggest influence in four presidential elections; and the subject of America’s first sex scandal.
All before being shot dead in a duel at the age of 47 by the vice-president.
Despite his turbulent life and undoubted importance, when his widow Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton died more than fifty years later she was still waiting for the first proper biography of her hero. Hamilton had been forgotten by his friends and traduced by his enemies. When Aaron Burr shot Alexander he didn’t merely kill him, he erased him.
But in the twenty-first century Hamilton has enjoyed a revival. From being the least-known Founding Father he has become one of the best known. It’s all because of two works: the first was Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, one of the best political biographies of the past thirty years.
One of the people who bought it was a musician called Lin-Manuel Miranda. Reading it by the pool on holiday, he wondered how he could turn it into a hip-hop concept album. This unlikely thought developed into the hit musical Hamilton, a fitting memorial to its inspired and inspiring subject. It has its first night in London tomorrow, and the scramble for tickets is as fierce as it has been everywhere it’s been staged.
Hamilton would have adored all the fuss. He was a man of monumental ambition and self-regard who, as the biography and musical show, cared more about his legacy than his life. He lived in order to be remembered.
One of the things that caught Miranda’s imagination was that, as Chernow put it, Hamilton ‘embodied an enduring archetype: the obscure immigrant who comes to America, recreates himself, and succeeds despite a lack of proper birth and breeding’. In the musical, the insurgency of immigrants is symbolised by an ethnically diverse cast. An African American played George Washington on Broadway, despite the first president having been a slave owner. But there is much more that makes Hamilton a show for our times. Miranda has made a song-and-dance routine about the founding of modern capitalism.
The political heart of Hamilton’s story is his battle with Thomas Jefferson, until recently the far better known Founding Father. Hamilton wanted the new American republic to be a capitalist state, and was fiercely resisted by Jefferson and his allies. And even though he died as a result of one of the arguments he provoked, he nonetheless prevailed.
The three big battles the two men fought dominate today’s politics. The first is the battle over capitalism. Hamilton believed that America needed to become a prosperous, trading economy. This contrasted with Jefferson’s belief that a market economy would destroy the purity of revolutionary society. He argued for a simple, communal, rural life.
Hamilton was contemptuous of this green vision. He pointed out that Jefferson lived in luxury and that the rural idyll of his landed estates was only made possible by slavery, which Hamilton saw as an abomination. He realised that if America was not a capitalist country, it would be forever a slave-owning one.
The second battle is over the merits of populist, direct democracy as opposed to representative bodies like Parliament. Jefferson romanticised the war of independence against Britain and had a fair deal of sympathy for direct action and the French Revolution. Hamilton feared disorder and mob rule. Hamilton’s allies promoted the power of the courts as a check on popular fervour and emphasised the power of the president to use his own judgment instead of blindly following public opinion.
Jefferson and his allies accused Hamilton of being a secret monarchist, in league with the English to undermine the revolution. They suggested (ludicrously) that Washington, under Hamilton’s malign influence, fancied himself King of America. Ultimately Justice Marshall’s Supreme Court settled this argument in Hamilton’s favour.
The third battle is between federalism and local sovereignty. Jefferson wanted America to be a loose collection of states, each sovereign over its own territory. Hamilton was certain the states could only be strong together and persuaded Washington to agree. As an activist or as a minister, Hamilton sought to strengthen federal bonds. It’s hard not to see our debate between Remainers and Leavers reflected in Hamilton and Jefferson’s respective positions.
The most important political act of Hamilton’s life came when, as Treasury Secretary, he sought to create the basis for a single federal currency and central bank by promising Congress that the Government would assume all the country’s debts. The Jeffersonians, under James Madison, controlled Congress and blocked the move.
Finally, Jefferson hosted a dinner for Madison and Hamilton and a deal was struck. It is wonderfully portrayed on stage by Miranda in the song ‘The Room Where It Happens’. They agree that the US capital will be in the South, on the Potomac, where Virginians might reasonably expect to hold sway and where slaves could be brought without fear that the Government would free them. In return, Hamilton, who had wanted a capital in the North, got his way on assumption of the national debt.
At first Jefferson laughed at Hamilton for accepting something so abstract in return for giving way on the location of the capital. But Jefferson came to see the deal as the biggest error of his life. Assumption allowed the creation of a strong federal currency, and that made federalism irreversible.
If Hamilton had lost his political battles, America would not have emerged as the engine of modern prosperity or the arsenal of liberty. There is good reason, therefore, to regard him as one of the most consequential political figures of the modern age.
In Ron Chernow and Lin-Manuel Miranda, Eliza has at last found narrators worthy of her husband’s achievements. And while Hamilton is in London, make sure to be in the room where it happens.