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The #1 New York Times bestseller, and the inspiration for the hit Broadway musical Hamilton !
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow presents a landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who galvanized, inspired, scandalized, and shaped the newborn nation.
"Grand-scale biography at its best--thorough, insightful, consistently fair, and superbly written . . . A genuinely great book." --David McCullough
"A robust full-length portrait, in my view the best ever written, of the most brilliant, charismatic and dangerous founder of them all." --Joseph Ellis
Few figures in American history have been more hotly debated or more grossly misunderstood than Alexander Hamilton. Chernow's biography gives Hamilton his due and sets the record straight, deftly illustrating that the political and economic greatness of today's America is the result of Hamilton's countless sacrifices to champion ideas that were often wildly disputed during his time. "To repudiate his legacy," Chernow writes, "is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world." Chernow here recounts Hamilton's turbulent life: an illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, he came out of nowhere to take America by storm, rising to become George Washington's aide-de-camp in the Continental Army, coauthoring The Federalist Papers, founding the Bank of New York, leading the Federalist Party, and becoming the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.Historians have long told the story of America's birth as the triumph of Jefferson's democratic ideals over the aristocratic intentions of Hamilton. Chernow presents an entirely different man, whose legendary ambitions were motivated not merely by self-interest but by passionate patriotism and a stubborn will to build the foundations of American prosperity and power. His is a Hamilton far more human than we've encountered before--from his shame about his birth to his fiery aspirations, from his intimate relationships with childhood friends to his titanic feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Monroe, and Burr, and from his highly public affair with Maria Reynolds to his loving marriage to his loyal wife Eliza. And never before has there been a more vivid account of Hamilton's famous and mysterious death in a duel with Aaron Burr in July of 1804.
Chernow's biography is not just a portrait of Hamilton, but the story of America's birth seen through its most central figure. At a critical time to look back to our roots, Alexander Hamilton will remind readers of the purpose of our institutions and our heritage as Americans.
9780143034759
Critiques (6)
Critique du Publishers Weekly
After hulking works on J.P. Morgan, the Warburgs and John D. Rockefeller, what other grandee of American finance was left for Chernow's overflowing pen than the one who puts the others in the shade? Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804) created public finance in the United States. In fact, it's arguable that without Hamilton's political and financial strategic brilliance, the United States might not have survived beyond its early years. Chernow's achievement is to give us a biography commensurate with Hamilton's character, as well as the full, complex context of his unflaggingly active life. Possessing the most powerful (though not the most profound) intelligence of his gifted contemporaries, Hamilton rose from Caribbean bastardy through military service in Washington's circle to historic importance at an early age and then, in a new era of partisan politics, gradually lost his political bearings. Chernow makes fresh contributions to Hamiltoniana: no one has discovered so much about Hamilton's illegitimate origins and harrowed youth; few have been so taken by Hamilton's long-suffering, loving wife, Eliza. Yet it's hard not to cringe at some of Hamilton's hotheaded words and behavior, especially sacrificing the well-being of his family on the altar of misplaced honor. This is a fine work that captures Hamilton's life with judiciousness and verve. Illus. Agent, Melanie Jackson. (Apr 26) Forecast: National Book Award winner Chernow's reputation and track record with a previous bestseller could make Alexander Hamilton as popular with readers as Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. With a 300,000 first printing, Penguin is banking on it. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Critique de Booklist
Washington is revered as the father of his country and the indispensable man. efferson is the apostle of liberty, the author of our most sacred national document, and his idealism, though flawed, continues to inspire us. And Alexander Hamilton? He inspires admiration for his financial acumen and respect for his drive to rise above the genteel poverty of his youth. Yet he seldom is accorded the affection reserved for some of our national icons. But as Chernow's comprehensive and superbly written biography makes clear, Hamilton was at least as influential as any of our Founding Fathers in shaping our national institutions and political culture. He was the driving force behind the calling of the Constitutional Convention, and he was instrumental in overcoming opposition to ratification. In Washington's cabinet, he consistently promoted a national perspective while placing our economy on a sound financial footing. Chernow, who has previously written biographies of. P. Morgan andohn D. Rockefeller, acknowledges Hamilton's arrogance, his bouts of self-pity, and his penchant for cynical manipulation. But this self-made man was capable of great compassion and was consistently outraged by the institution of slavery. Although his understanding of human limitations made him suspicious of unrestrained democracy, his devotion to individual liberty did not falter. --Jay Freeman Copyright 2004 Booklist
Critique de CHOICE
These volumes reaffirm Alexander Hamilton's standing as one of the greatest of the American Founding Fathers. Harper (Johns Hopkins Univ.) does so somewhat selectively in American Machiavelli, focusing on Hamilton's influence on carving out early US foreign policy. Hamilton, for his part, personified a kind of "new prince," desirous of wielding great influence over the newly formed US. Adopting the role of gentleman, the poorly born Hamilton proved to be an Anglophile who insisted on the need to shape a strong central government spearheaded by a powerful chief executive capable of unilaterally making foreign policy decisions. Helping to draft George Washington's Farewell Address, Hamilton emphasized the tenuousness of alliances with other nation-states. Hamilton, who sought to be named commander of an invigorated US army, favored "a policy of strength through peace." Award-winning biographer Chernow's encyclopedic Alexander Hamilton offers a full biographical treatment of its subject, containing revelatory information about Hamilton's ancestral background, driven nature, and relationship with figures such as Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Aaron Burr. Rising from lowly origins, Hamilton moved seamlessly into New York's aristocratic circles before becoming Washington's right-hand man. Brilliant, passionate, and tempestuous, Hamilton suffered from his own excesses (including those of a sexual cast) regarding his designs for the new American nation; this engendered antipathies and eventually led to his ill-fated duel with Burr. Chernow credits Hamilton, whom he terms "the father of the American government," with setting the stage "for both liberal democracy and capitalism," and ensuring that the presidency wielded considerable powers and that the US possessed the potential to become a dominant world player. Chernow also underscores the frailties that resulted in Hamilton's supporting the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts, as well as his quasi-militaristic bent. ^BSumming Up: Recommended, both books. General and academic libraries. R. C. Cottrell California State University, Chico
Critique du Guardian
This acclaimed biography, which inspired the award-winning hip-hop musical, salvages the reputation of a Founding Father long accused of despoiling the innocence of the US Alexander Hamilton, one of the late 18th-century Founding Fathers of the United States and its first treasury secretary, has enjoyed only limited name recognition in the UK. But that is changing. In 2004 Ron Chernow, a journalist and biographer specialising in financial history, first published this book, a mammoth work of research that charted the course of Hamilton's dazzling career and the dark controversies that accompanied it. Since then, Chernow's erudite biography has inspired a theatrical sensation, Lin-Manuel Miranda's hip-hop musical Hamilton, which started its Broadway run in 2015, and received 16 Tony nominations in 2016, scooping 11. The musical celebrates the multicultural United States of today as much as the Anglo-dominated US of Hamilton's time, with black and Hispanic actors playing the parts of the Founding Fathers. Hamilton will open in London next year, under the auspices of the impresario Cameron Mackintosh ; and, as a taster, Chernow's biography is being published for the first time in the UK. Chernow disentangles Hamilton's life from the enduring political legend concocted by his opponents, who demonised him as a "closet monarchist" and wannabe Caesar. Hamilton did champion a strong executive and a professional military, but his attempts to equip the fragile new republic for the harsh realities of competitive inter-state relations have earned him only obloquy. His reputation has long suffered by comparison with his contemporary and rival, Thomas Jefferson, who articulated an influential language of virtue; one which continues to inform America's self-image of butter-wouldn't-melt innocence. As Chernow notes: "If Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton established the prose of American statecraft." This is something for which he has received little thanks. Instead, "the proponent of such devilish contrivances as banks, factories and stock exchanges" lurks in the recesses of the American memory as the distant godfather of what became Wall Street and the military-industrial complex. Notwithstanding its long afterlife, the caricature of the sinister un-American plotter successfully peddled in Jeffersonian propaganda is a travesty. Hamilton's problem, as Chernow perceives it, was not a sleekit propensity to conspire, but the opposite: an impulsive and reckless frankness that verged on "a genius for the self-inflicted wound". Nor was Hamilton an innocuous victim of his opponents' slicker press management. While "touchy" and sensitive about his own reputation, he was a master polemicist with a "slashing style" who turned out elegantly phrased, pugnacious copy by the yard. Indeed, it was his precocious skill as a writer that rescued the teenage Hamilton from a life that, at best, seemed to offer only penurious dependence, drudgery or worse. That Hamilton's beginnings were far from auspicious is something of an understatement. In his early family life in the West Indies he was "surrounded by failed, broken, embittered people", who lived with the "vertiginous" anxieties of downwardly mobile whites. His mother Rachel Faucette was of French Huguenot stock and unhappily married on the Danish island of St Croix to a crushingly patriarchal Dane, Johann Michael Lavien, who had her imprisoned at one point in Fort Christiansvaern for adultery; his supposed father, James Hamilton, was the feckless younger son of a Scottish laird from Stevenston in Ayrshire. Hamilton was born on the island of Nevis, probably in 1755, and grew up in a cruel but cosmopolitan society. He was bilingual in French and English, thanks to his mother, and exposed both to race slavery -- which he consistently deplored throughout his career -- and to Jewish influences in Charlestown, where Jews made up a quarter of the white population. In 1765 the Hamiltons returned to the Anglo-Danish society of Christiansted in St Croix, but were soon deserted by Hamilton senior. Then, in quick succession, Hamilton's mother died, her estate was awarded to the legitimate son she had with Lavien, and a cousin, the guardian of the two boys she had with Hamilton senior, killed himself. Unsurprisingly, Hamilton was sensitive on questions of status -- including illegitimacy -- and reticent about his background. Chernow notes that what we now know of his childhood "has been learned almost entirely during the past century". What transformed Hamilton's life was the influence of a merchant, Thomas Stevens -- possibly, Chernow wonders, his actual biological father -- and a bizarre literary windfall: a published essay that he wrote about the devastating hurricane of 1772 prompted some local men of substance to club together to fund his education in North America. Hamilton went to King's College in New York -- which later became Columbia University -- in the early stages of the American revolution, an upheaval that ushered a further swift and dramatic change in circumstances. During the early stages of the war of independence, Hamilton's gifts of leadership, organisation and communication stood out, and the young man was soon elevated to a staff role in the revolutionary army, becoming George Washington's most trusted aide-de-camp in 1777 at the age of 22, and treasury secretary during his presidency. Victory against the British did not -- as Hamilton recognised -- solve America's problems. The Articles of Confederation among the newly independent states were simultaneously too loose and too cumbersome for effective governance; they were, in Chernow's words, "a prescription for rigor mortis". Hamilton played a prominent part in the constitutional convention of 1787, and then, in alliance with the brilliant Virginian James Madison, later a bitter enemy, in the debates over whether to ratify the new constitution. Hamilton wrote 51 of the 85 essays collected as The Federalist, which appeared in a variety of outlets during the ratification debates in New York. All the while he was running a law practice, but still managed to write an incredible 21 essays in the two-month period after Madison left New York. He was gifted with a "Mozart-like" facility for getting complex thoughts on to paper. Chernow's book serves as a reminder that the raw partisanship and personal hostility we see today in the Clinton-Trump contest is far from unprecedented. Contrary to legend, the Founding Fathers did not operate at a rarefied level removed from the grubby machinations of lesser hacks. While it's a sad descent from the genius of Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton to the fact-free bluster of Trump, the Founders succumbed -- especially during the alternating giddiness and anxiety of the 1790s -- to vituperation and downright abuse. Hamilton, who was "brimming with libido" and prone to flirtation, was the self-exposed victim of a political sex scandal. He was easily lured into an affair with Maria Reynolds, the wife of a swindler, and ended up revealing his own adultery to the world lest he be blamed for what he reckoned a worse sin, a lack of financial integrity. Alone among the leading Founding Fathers he perceived the necessity of learning from the fiscal-military statecraft of ancien regime Europe, Britain included: the world was as it was, not as Jefferson and other dreamy friends of the French Revolution wished it to be. Occasionally, however, hypocrisy has the best tunes, and during the 1790s Hamilton was blamed by high-minded Virginian slave owners -- who posed as champions of democracy -- for introducing speculative finance, central banks and the evils of capitalism to America's virtuous, agrarian Eden. Somehow the anti-capitalist mud flung by fashionably francophile slaveholders has stuck. Aaron Burr, a fellow New York politician, is an ironic presence throughout much of Chernow's book. Many readers will know that it was Burr who, when vice-president to Jefferson, killed Hamilton in a duel of honour in 1804. The ultimate cause was a press report on how Hamilton had slighted Burr at a dinner. Hamilton's son Philip had died a couple of years previously after being shot in a duel, and it remains unclear how much relish for life Hamilton retained by the time of his death. Notwithstanding the hurt of the Reynolds affair, his widow Eliza, who lived for a further 50 years, continued to cherish his memory, gathering his papers and agitating for a monumental biography. Hamilton now has his monument, and, with the stunning success of the musical, we are witnessing a reversal of reputational fortune. - Colin Kidd.
Critique de Kirkus
A splendid life of an enlightened reactionary and forgotten Founding Father. "In all probability," writes financial historian/biographer Chernow (Titan, 1998, etc.), "Alexander Hamilton is the foremost political figure in American history who never attained the presidency, yet he probably had a much deeper and lasting impact than many who did." Indeed, we live in a Hamiltonian republic through and through, and not a Jeffersonian democracy. Many of the financial and tax systems that Hamilton proposed and put in place as the nation's first treasury secretary are with us today, if in evolved form, as Chernow shows; and though Hamilton was derided in his time as being pro-British and even a secret monarchist, Chernow writes, he was second only to George Washington in political prominence, at least on the practical, day-to-day front. The author wisely acknowledges but does not dwell unduly on Washington's quasi-paternal role in Hamilton's life and fortunes; unlike many biographies that consider Hamilton only in Washington's shadow, this one grants him a life of his own--and a stirring one at that, for Hamilton was both intensely cerebral and a man of action. He was, Chernow writes, a brilliant ancestor of the abolitionist cause; a native of the slave island of Nevis, he came to hate "the tyranny embodied by the planters and their authoritarian rule, while also fearing the potential uprisings of the disaffected slaves"--a dichotomy that influenced his views of ordinary politics. He was also constantly in opposition to things as they were, particularly where those things were Jeffersonian; as Chernow shows, Hamilton had early on been "an unusually tolerant man with enlightened views on slavery, Native Americans, and Jews," but became a crusty conservative near the end of his brief life (1755-1804), perhaps as a result of one too many personal setbacks at the hands of the Jeffersonians. Literate and full of engaging historical asides. By far the best of the many lives of Hamilton now in print, and a model of the biographer's art. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Critique du Library Journal
In this favorable, hefty biography of Alexander Hamilton, Chernow (The Warburgs; The House of Morgan) makes the case for him as one of the most important Founding Fathers, arguing that America is heir to the Hamiltonian vision of the modern economic state. His sweeping narrative chronicles the complicated and often contradictory life of Hamilton, from his obscure birth on Nevis Island to his meteoric rise as confidant to Washington, coauthor of The Federalist Papers, and America's first Treasury secretary, to his bizarre death at the hands of Aaron Burr. A running theme is the contradictions exhibited during his life: a member of the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton nevertheless felt that the Constitution was seriously flawed and was fearful of rule by the people. A devoted father and husband, he had two known affairs. Lastly, he was philosophically and morally opposed to dueling, and yet that's how he met his end. Although quite sympathetic to Hamilton, Chernow attempts to present both sides of his many controversies, including Hamilton's momentous philosophical battles with Jefferson. Chernow relies heavily on primary sources and previously unused volumes of Hamilton's writings. A first-rate life and excellent addition to the ongoing debate about Hamilton's importance in the shaping of America. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries. [BOMC and History Book Club main selections.]-Robert Flatley, Kutztown Univ. Lib., PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
