Hamilton
I read Hamilton by Ron Chernow a few months ago, and was taken away by his character, his upbringing, his relentless drive, and how he made something for himself - from immigrant to America’s founding father. The book talks about how he overcame his impoverished background, it also shed light on his mistakes, his glories and most importantly, his legacy. Alexander Hamilton and George Washington made an excellent pair, each complementing the other - Hamilton with his capacity to turn abstract ideas into institutional realities, Washington with his wisdom, foresight and steadiness.
From this book, I learned about the tension between the federal and state power, the North and the South, and the compromises that happened in the coming together of the Constitution. The issue on slavery was already pertinent, with the balance of power between the land-owning plantation rich South vs. the more liberal North were to set the tone for the coming centuries, leading up to the Civil War and today’s racial divide.
The story has become a worldwide musical sensation, and here are some of my favorite sentences from this wonderful and sweeping biography.
He embodied an enduring archetype - the obscure immigrant who comes to America, re-creates himself, and succeeds despite a lack of proper birth and breeding.
For all his superlative mental gifts, he was afflicted with a touchy ego that made him querulous and fatally combative.
The sudden popularity of sugar, dubbed ‘white gold’, engendered a brutal world of overnight fortunes in which slavery proved indispensable.
The Caribbean sugar economy was a system of inimitable savagery, making the tobacco and cotton plantations of the American south seem almost genteel by comparison.
In short, Hamilton saw his father as amiable but lazily inept. He inherited his father’s pride, but not his indolence, and his exceptional capacity for work was its own unspoken commentary about his father’s.
The upstairs living quarters held 34 books - the first unmistakable sign of Hamilton’s omnivorous, self-directed reading.
If Hamilton felt something stiflingly provincial about St Croix, literature would certainly have transported him to a more exalted realm.
The exceptional nature of his personal triumph. That this abominable childhood produced such a strong, productive, self-reliant human being - that this fatherless adolescent could have ended up a founding father of a country he had not yet seen - seems like short of miraculous.
His first job afforded him valuable insights into global commerce and the maneuvers of imperial powers. He was exposed early on to the mercantilist policies that governed European economies, the most valuable part of his education.
His relentless drive, his wretched feelings of shame and degradation, and his precocious self-sufficiency combined to produce a young man with an insatiable craving for success.
He took his unhappy boyhood, tucked it away in a mental closet, and never opened the door again.
As a student of history, he knew the mutability of human fortune and later observed, ‘the changes in the human condition are uncertain and frequent.’
Like Ben Franklin, Hamilton was mostly self-taught and probably snatched every spare moment to read. Once his verbal fountain began to flow, it became a geyser that never ceased.
As the first treasury secretary and principal architect of the new government, Hamilton took constitutional principles and infused them with expansive life, turning abstractions into institutional realities.
George Washington was chosen as the head of the Continental Army for reasons that transcended talent and experience. The selection of Washington was the first of many efforts by the north to please and placate the south.
His (King George III) frosty rigidity demoralized moderates and guaranteed intensified military preparations. The world’s most powerful nation had now pledged itself, irrevocably, to breaking the resistance of its unruly overseas colonists.
Washington possessed the outstanding judgment, sterling character, and clear sense of purpose needed to guide the sometimes wayward protege. He saw that the volatile Hamilton needed a steadying hand.
Hamilton, in turn, contributed philosophical depth, administrative expertise and comprehensive policy knowledge that turned wispy ideas into detailed plans and turned revolutionary dreams into enduring realities. As a team, they were unbeatable and far more than the sum of their parts.
During the whole time that he was one of the General’s aide-de-camp, Hamilton had to think as well as to write for him in all his most important correspondence. This gave him a wide-angle view of economic, political, and military matters, further hastening his intellectual developments.
Both were bookish and ambitious, bold and enterprising, and hungered for military honor. Hamilton constantly educated himself, as if equipping his mind for the larger tasks ahead. Force of intellect and force of will were the sources of his success.
He fit the type of the self-improving autodidact employing all his spare time to better himself. He read a considerable amount of philosophy, perused the histories of Greece, Prussia and France, retaining that information and applying it. He always thought that the New World had much to learn from the Old.
The death (of John Laurens) deprived Hamilton of the political peer, the steadfast colleague, that he was to need in his tempestuous battles to consolidate the union.
His zeal for reform signaled anything but reluctance. He was seized with a crusading sense of purpose and had a momentous, long-term plan to enact. It reflected his penchant for systemic solutions, his sense of the interconnectedness of things.