Joanne Freeman on Hamilton: the Man, the Myth, the Musical 2017 Christen Lecture Part II of II

thank you i am very happy to answer questions yes i'm especially interested in starting with a student if i can find a student and then we'll be happy to hear from faculty and community members alumni you mentioned on his immigration beginning most samson immigration the question is i mentioned immigration and and oh his stance on immigration thank you i'm sorry i didn't hear that okay well that's an interesting question because uh it was a little ambivalent which would not totally make sense for a person who we identify as an immigrant but um i don't know if he ever really thought of himself that way what's interesting is he didn't up until the very end of his life he didn't ever quite 100 feel american so every once in a while as a matter of fact in the last like 1802 i want to say so maybe within his last two years he actually writes in a letter he's watching the nation turn away from what he thought it should be and turn towards jefferson and jefferson's vision of what america should be and he writes in a letter to a friend this american world was not made for me which is an amazing statement for someone who did all the work that he did but so on the one hand it's not as though he has a modern sense of who he is kind of as an immigrant um as someone who wanted a kind of manufacturing republic he certainly appreciated the fact that immigrants could come and could provide labor in some way but he did not love the idea of the scary ideas that immigrants might bring with them into the new nation and particularly because immigrants tended to be republican and not federalist in their loyalties so he actually was very distrustful uh particularly later on in his politics of immigrants which again doesn't make sense since particularly with the play we think of him as an immigrant but um he was very distrustful at a certain point he was trying to figure out how to put the kibosh on immigrants because he thought that they were all voting for jefferson i think what does he say in the letter he says something like um this is a another bad paraphrase um if only native americans meaning born in america voted in this election jefferson might not win you know so he's he's a politician you know i mean it kind of gets to what i was saying before right is on one hand we talk about his policies and his beliefs and on the other hand you stick him in the moment and he's grappling and fighting for what he thinks is right and he's going to respond to that moment and that's a great example of that was hamilton's fear of the french revolution a common sentiment amongst american political figures of the air that's a good question you guys are asking good questions um but i can answer in the word yes um but but actually yes i mean some people shared it and the feelings about the french revolution changed over time so initially i think a lot of people were kind of cheered because a lot of people thought that the american revolution had lit the spark of liberty and now it was going to spread around the world and look france is doing what we did how great the spark of liberty is spreading but of course the french revolution the wheels get going and it gets more and more violent and more and more out of control and then a good number of people in america get frightened at that tends to be federalists who are far more focused on order uh who do not love what they see going on and they think that the frightening social disorder of france is going to well hamilton's seal right that somehow or other it's going to find its way back and destroy and contaminate and ruin the republic so some people really were frightened by it some people held on you know jefferson remained like pretty hopeful about the french revolution well into when it turned a little scary he still thought well spark of liberty spark of liberty but that was a huge issue in the mid and late 1790s i mean foreign affairs and particularly france had a huge shaping influence on domestic politics so it was a huge big deal at that time um i understand that there is a scandal with a married woman with hamilton during his life that came out later um and because that lost a lot of public support uh would you say that was the main point that cost him the presidency for the possible presidency oh you mean so two questions would he have been a likely candidate for president and did his scandalous affair cost okay so i'll answer first the president question and then the scandal is a fair question i'll leave the scandal hovering um i don't think he thought that he would ever be president i don't i think he knew how unpopular he was and part of what leads me to say that is in 1795 washington was trying to figure out maybe 1794 who to send to england to negotiate a treaty which it becomes the j treaty so john jay is the guy who gets sent but hamilton's a contender and eventually hamilton withdraws and says to washington i i know how unpopular i am and this would not be a smart idea i should not so i don't think he would have expected to win an elected office i don't think that was in his cards i don't think he expected that and it could totally be true that other people were scared of that but i don't think he expected that but that leads us to the scandalous affair so he did indeed have a scandalous affair at the height of his busyness as secretary of the treasury um a woman named mariah reynolds uh comes and basically asks for loan to get back to new york her husband has left her and hamilton and we know this because he wrote a long pamphlet describing this in great detail um he describes in the pamphlet how he found some money to loan her and then that evening went to her apartment and was shown up the stairs and this is my favorite line from the pamphlet quote it quickly became apparent that more than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable now the reason why he writes this in a pamphlet is he gets accused of misusing treasury funds of maybe engaging in speculation so and and the the evidence comes from this affair he's making blackmail payments and people find the blackmail payments and they say oh he's misusing treasury funds so hamilton decides i shall clear my public name by confessing to being an adulterer and so the pamphlet he goes into great detail because he really wants to persuade people i really was committing adultery look i really was i wasn't speculating look i have evidence i went up to her bedroom like let me tell you all the details to prove that i was committing adultery so he writes that pamphlet this is not a wise thing to do it does not do his reputation any favors but i actually think it's the adam's pamphlet that comes a couple years later that really doesn't mean partly because that's a presidential election that he's helping to tank and partly because that's dumb pamphlet number two right it's not even done pamphlet number one i have a small collection at home of um pamphlets and things written by hamilton and i call it the dumb things hamilton did collection and i have a reynolds pamphlet and i have the adam's pamphlet and i have a collection about the dual so dumb pamphlet number two attacking his own party's candidate that's when you see people even his friends um saying things like one of them a new york friend says um that hamilton lacks discretion and is no longer fit to be a leader of party so i think it was it was doing that same thing twice what's really funny is in the case of that second pamphlet um as i said during the talk he really did not think he was wrong almost ever and he sometimes asks for advice but you can tell he really kind of doesn't care what the person is going to say except for once or twice so in this case he wants to write this pamphlet attacking adams and he writes letters to a number of his federalist friends and he says hey i'm thinking of writing this pamphlet attacking john adams and defending myself and making it clear who the federalists are what do you think and years ago i found all of this correspondence between the federalists who he asked and what's hilarious is they're all saying to each other i'm not gonna tell him he's wrong you tell him he's wrong and no one wants to be the one to come forward and say something and finally one guy says i'll do it i'll tell him he's wrong he will never speak to me again but i will tell him he's wrong of course hamilton doesn't listen anyway but uh it's a very long way of saying i think dumb pamphlet number two really was the clincher and not done pamphlet number one uh yeah so given washington's appointments of jefferson and hamilton as cabinet members to what degree do you feel that president should have been followed i feel that i feel that um give it like given their rivalry how do you feel like that was productive to our nation's development aha so the question is um is was it a good example to set to put people in the cabinet who didn't agree with each other yes okay well part of the answer to that is that no one knew that they didn't agree with each other until they were already there so which was a great surprise to all of them you know i mean washington made hamilton secretary of the treasury jefferson was in france he made him secretary of state he told each guy your job is really important both guys write letters basically saying mine is the most important job in the cabinet and this is all about me so they both arrived thinking you know hamilton thought he was kind of prime minister jefferson pretty much thought secretary of state encompassed everything they were kind of already set up to not get along and then as the pieces of hamilton's plan began falling into place that's when jefferson begins to be alarmed that's when he begins to realize he really doesn't like what he's seeing he really doesn't like hamilton's vision and that's when you begin to get opposition when you look at like when jefferson just comes back from france and he's just starting as secretary of state there are letters from hamilton to jefferson that are kind of chummy you know like oh i'm thinking of doing this what do you think which we would never expect because we see the whole period as jefferson versus hamilton but initially that wasn't the case and then of course they become great enemies and then there are all these wonderful letters i feel so bad for george washington because you know they they hated each other they hated each other's policies and they sat across this table from each other during cabinet meetings talking to each other jefferson complains in letters about what he calls yet another 45-minute jury speech from hamilton right when hamilton spoke in 45-minute jury speeches and halvedon writes a letter to someone saying um he can't stand the fact that whenever anything goes against hamilton in a cabinet meeting he can see jefferson across the table smirking at him so it would be was really unpleasant and i don't think he i do think um washington was someone who was very good at taking different opinions and weighing them and coming up with an opinion and a decision so he was you know measured judgment people always praised washington's judgment so i don't think necessarily having different people in the cabinet would have been a deal breaker and even during the revolution that's kind of how he dealt with his generals he got opinions he went away he thought about it he made up his mind but i think this particular clash becomes so over the top personal and extreme and it begins to go public that when washington finds that out he actually is alarmed he writes essentially the same letter to both guys um saying in one way or another um don't tear the union asunder i think is washington's language like bad things are happening you're ripping things to shreds please stop thinking the worst of each other and of course neither guy really listens you know jefferson they essentially say well his fault not mine so it doesn't bode well um so he might have even if he knew they disagreed he might have both put them there but maybe not if he knew how personal and nasty and public their disagreement would have gotten american political scholars often characterize uh hamilton as a strong abolitionist i've always thought maybe there's a little bit more to the story than that so i want to know how would you sort of position him on this sort of scale both about slavery and about race okay um which is a good question and a question i can answer in part um and the the hunting for hamilton chapter that's going to be about hamilton and lawrence is going to delve into hamilton and slavery but good so i can i can tell you what i know so far um he was definitely anti-slavery um and that's clear from the beginning of the war when he does indeed support his friend john lauren's fellow aide plan to arm black soldiers and give them their freedom and return for fighting so he's anti-slavery that's clear and the letter that he writes on behalf of lawrence is fascinating because he edits it and the edits reflect him reasoning about race so he says something like um i think that these enslaved people maybe are equal and able to do this and then he crosses it out and says probably are equal and are able to do this so he's kind of grappling and trying to figure it out and he does belong is a member of the new york manumission society so he's active in anti-slavery politics but when you look at the 27 volumes of his papers when hamilton was really committed and into something you couldn't shut him up and there's not very much there about slavery so i think he was anti-slavery i think he worked against it but i don't think that was like his cause and i think sometimes people go from he was anti-slavery to he was a trailblazing abolitionist and i wouldn't go that far [Music] first off thank you for being here and very enjoying your lecture my question is you've mentioned how hamilton thought that the government needs a little bit more power so what i'm interested in knowing what were the flaws he saw and what did he specifically want to do to strengthen the governor good question you guys are asking such good questions okay um he did very much want to strengthen the government and he he put a lot of his focus on the presidency on the executive and strengthening the executive he really did look towards great britain as his model he saw great britain as like this model of stability and custom and he says at some point early on like in 1789 i think something along the lines of ultimately it won't be very much short of that that we're going to need here what he's scared of in part and i'm going to say this and then go back and explain it is democracy and by that what i mean is he thought the the sort of unruly ties of democracy like the people in the street protesting to hamilton that was a real danger to the government which he considered to be so weak and easily overturned he did not have the sort of faith that jefferson did in the sort of stepping back and letting the people protest and do their will the federalists generally and hamilton specifically were nervous about disorder and and very concerned about maintaining law and order so part of what he's doing with the government is in his mind the government is so weak and the power of the people is so strong he's constantly trying to empower the government to in his mind balance out that imbalance now of course you know if you step back and look at american history what you can see is that gradually it becomes more democratic which means hamilton and the federalists are not moving with the tide which is why hamilton in the last couple of years of his life says you know this american world was not made for me he begins to call himself a disappointed politician he can kind of see that things are going in a different direction but he was trying to empower the government partly because he thought it would collapse and partly because he was a he was afraid of us he was afraid of the multitude and how easy it would be in his mind for them to protest and overturn things uh first off thank you for your talk not just the content but the enjoyable style in which you deliver your content thank you very much um my question has to do with uh given the importance that hamilton put on a national bank could you address his relationship with william and the banking crisis okay so yes hamilton felt that a national bank was vital he thought it would help the government move funds around he was excited by the idea that the wealthy and powerful could invest basically their support and money through basically bank stock so for a bunch of reasons for government reasons and for sort of general government support reasons he liked the idea of a bank william dewer was like the prince of speculating in in a negative way william dewer built like this pyramid scheme of of speculation in which he was sort of taking and giving and taking and giving and and speculating with government money in one way or another hamilton knew him i think from the war years and doer i think when finally this big scandal broke and everything crashed and a lot of people went to ruin when their money was destroyed when dewer went to ruin do a right to hamilton and basically says help i i'm going down you can help me and there's a really painful letter from hamilton to doer in which he says um i can't i really can't i'm really sorry you know you're going to have to go to denver's prison or whatever happens to you has to happen to you but i can't step forward in this hamilton was very um although everyone always assumed that he was somehow or other misusing government funds or doing something shifty behind the scenes he really knew that no matter what he did people would suspect that so he certainly didn't want to do things that made it look that way you know so he people over the years he had a buddy who wanted him to speculate in lands and hamilton said you know i really appreciate the sentiment but if i do anything like that bad bad things are gonna happen and i'm gonna my reputation will go down in flames but this is a case in which although he knew doer and was friendly with doer and dewer was talking as though he was an insider with a lot of knowledge hamilton had to step away i know you said that hamilton was washington's right-hand man and sometimes nathaniel green is put in that position so how did nathanael green fit into that dynamic gosh you guys are like so informed this is like the age of hamilton everyone knows this stuff um i would say they were different kinds of right-hand men um hamilton was right-hand man meaning um aide you know the person who wrote for him and fought for him and sometimes acted for him um green was a very trusted general so i would say maybe a you know right-hand general man versus right-hand aid man i mean he trusted them both hamilton trusted in life green as well but i think hamilton was more um a right-hand man in the sense that he was kind of just there by washington's side ready to act on his behalf and you know you can understand why he would have been invaluable in that job right he he thinks quickly he writes quickly in not a long amount of time he understood how washington thought and what he wanted to do so he could think for him and write for him and act for him in a way that not a lot of people could and he was speedy at it so he was you know you can understand why washington wanted to keep him at headquarters and you can understand why poor hamilton kept banging his head against the wall saying no i need to get out on the field and they ultimately have an enormous fight about this a petty but an enormous fight about this when after hamilton's plan his four-part plan does not work and he doesn't get his field command and washington loses his temper one day so as the story goes um they were working together and hamilton left uh went down a flight of stairs and left washington to deliver a letter and he's interrupted on his way back by the marquis to lafayette and as hamilton explains it the marquita lafayette had a way of taking you by the lapels and talking to you very vigorously and you couldn't break away so lafayette grabs him and he's talking to him and hamilton breaks away and turns and washington is at the top of the stairway looking down glowing and he says sir you have kept me waiting these 10 minutes i tell you sir you treat me with disrespect and hamilton who by this point is up to here with not having his field command says i'm sorry you feel that way but if you do i depart i quit and he storms off now washington sends someone out to apologize to hamilton to his aid and hamilton says no that's a hutzpah to help it has he at this point he's had it and he basically says i i i have to leave i have to go i can't i can't stand this anymore so he's the right-hand man but he's such a good right-hand man that he's not really allowed to leave now they make up washington and hamilton make up and hamilton gets his command at yorktown um but there's a little there's a there's a rough patch in there and there are two great letters in which hamilton explains the fight there's one to his father-in-law in which he's desperately trying to make himself look good like i know it's going to look really bad that i just had this enormous fight with george washington and i quit my job and he's trying to make it look good and then there's a letter to his friend another aide in which he says the general will be sorry this time for his temper which is probably what he was really feeling um but at any rate that he was a different kind of a right hand man i would say thank you so much for your time this is such a great talk um my question has to do with um kind of the aftermath of foreign hamilton's duel and kind of um i'm wondering what kind of repercussions and yeah which is a really good question so on the one hand yeah there were duels that happened uh all the time in this period i suppose you could say it's a little exaggerated but there are a lot of duels but what's worth noting is the point of dueling actually wasn't to kill the other person the point of dueling was to prove that you were willing to die for your name and your reputation and the vast majority of duels people didn't get killed you know there were a lot of leg wounds or no wounds you know so being killing someone in a sense if you killed someone in a duel you might be the loser of that duel because the tide could turn against you and he would look like a murderer so i actually don't think burr was trying to kill hamilton which is kind of tragically sad but i don't think he was um but at any rate after the duel just as i suggested a lot of people turn against burr so hamilton's friends turn against him burr's enemies turn against him everyone turns against him and basically says you evil fiend you deliberately murdered hamilton and particularly in new york where is at the time this tremendous outcry about this and bert he's vice president at the time he goes on the lamb he runs to south carolina and hides for a little while people didn't like helping much in south carolina so he's okay down there actually they kind of maybe even liked the fact that he eliminated hamilton i don't know but but he hides for a while because in new york they're talking about you know bringing him up for murder charges and all kinds of legal charges are circulating and even though most people didn't suffer that for dueling this duel ends up kind of standing out now people tend to uh and there's some scholarship in which people tend to think well this was such a horrible duel and it made such an outcry that it ended dueling forever it did not and doing forever by a long shot there were some anti-dueling societies that kind of banked on it and probably got stronger but it didn't end dueling but it didn't do a big bunch of favors for burr so burr he stays in south carolina for a while um he finally goes back he's vice president so he goes back to presiding over the senate there are these amazing letters by federalists sitting in the senate writing to each other and saying are we going to sit here and be presided over by the guy who murdered our friend really so it's a weird moment he actually was pretty good at presiding over the senate he wasn't a bad vice president you know so he finishes his term and then at this point you know his his national political career is not so good in new york his career now is no longer so good so he ultimately wanders out west it's unclear what he's doing out west but clearly on a certain level he thought well there's a new frontier i will do something out there i think he possibly thought something weird would be happening down near mexico and if he was in the right place at the right time with a bunch of men he could sort of sweep in and maybe have some position of power in relation to it it's unclear what he was doing and of course he's a very cryptic guy so he never explained himself but he gets arrested and tried for treason for those activities he's acquitted but then he flees to europe and stays in europe for a while hanging out with um william godwin and mary wollstonecraft and you know with these really interesting thinkers in europe uh and then after a while comes back and takes up his law practice again and you know sort of goes back to work but by this point after that life he's kind of something of a tourist attraction and there are actually books that describe you know if you go to new york one of the things you do is you go to his law office and look through the window so that you can say you saw the famous aaron burr so i can't imagine that that was a very enjoyable uh end of life for burr so you know hamilton that statement that i wrote in which he describes this is why i'm fighting but i'm mostly fighting for those you know to be future useful in those future crises that seem likely to happen um burr really in a way said you know hamilton set me up by making himself out to be this great martyr and then you know i kill him and that that letter becomes that statement becomes public and i look even more horrible than i would have been i don't think that was hamilton's goal was you know like i'll really kill him now um but that was the effect of writing that statement i think we have one two more questions we'll do and then uh hi i was hoping to not be the first idiot to ask a question about the musical but here goes go for it um hamilton and jefferson and their rivalry a fair amount um do you think that the musical kind of um you know puts forward hamilton and hamilton's vision of the country at the expense of jefferson or do you think it kind of treats them well i mean i think and i kind of you know hinted during my talk that it's not really about hamilton's politics or for that matter about jefferson's politics it's about hamilton's life arc um that said you know i i would say that the play suggests that hamilton is the forward-looking guy hamilton is the modern guy um hamilton is the anti-slavery guy and it makes jefferson out to be the backward-looking guy the agrarian guy the pro-slavery guy and it you know it does sort of create a jefferson versus hamilton future versus past kind of dichotomy um the play doesn't really grapple with politics that much as i said it doesn't have to it's not you know it's a piece of musical theater um so you know we could engage in a conversation about that but um i would say it the play how do i put this uncomplicates it because hamilton isn't absolutely forward-looking and jefferson isn't absolutely backward-looking you could say jefferson is the guy who has faith in democracy that's forward-looking you could say hamilton is the guy looking to great britain and monarchies is a great model that's actually not so forward-looking so the play i think for dramatic reasons doesn't deal with that and simplifies it but um i don't think you know anyone talking about the politics of the period in any detail would buy into that dichotomy the way it appears in the musical thanks for coming what role did religion play in hamilton's life and then how would he view free will say versus divine intervention wow okay that's a weighty last question um well i can give you a partial answer um as i kind of said at the outset uh he does not muse on paper very often you know which is why i love trying to decode him because you really do have to read between the lines and look for patterns because he just doesn't give you any clues in the case of religion it's clear at the beginning of his life that that religion is very present for him um the letter that he writes that gets him out of the caribbean and into north america is very religious and cast you know that it's not just about a hurricane but it's you know oh vile worm you know god's will has come down and we humanity are the vile worm so he's very religious minded as i said before um when he's at king's college people kind of know that about him but when you look at his correspondence that goes away pretty quickly and after a time he just doesn't talk about it or engage in anything obviously religious until the end of his life when it comes back and so his last i would say maybe four three or four years um it's very clear and again this is the moment where he feels disappointed politician this american world was not made for me he begins to turn back to religion elizabeth hamilton was extremely religious and had i think a pretty big library of religious volumes um it's unclear again how hamilton did or didn't engage with them but he becomes much more engaged religiously in those last years and then of course when his son phillip is killed in a duel in 1801 i think that really kind of puts him in a um you know we live in a world where horrible things happen and there's nothing that we could do but step back and and accept that it happens um those last few years are dark and religion although you get a sense on some level that's comforting to him um on some level it really isn't comforting to him and then of course his final moment there's a final sort of religious kerfuffle at the end there because he committed a duel that is not a particularly christian thing to do he wants you know a priest he wants someone by his bedside to you know give him last rights there are some who don't want to come because he's a duelist and there's so there's this last moment in which he actually has to struggle to figure out a way to settle himself in a way that he feels he's bringing him his life and his religion his principles to a close but so it's kind of like there's there's religion at the beginning and then this vast sort of i'm a busy guy and i'm not going to stop to muse about this on paper i don't know beyond paper what there is and then at the end it kind of comes crashing back on him um but not in a a satisfied and calming kind of a way but in a kind of i'm reaching for help kind of a way okay well thank you guys you

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Length: 32min 32sec (1952 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2017