Richard Brookhiser: Alexander Hamilton, American

what we know about Hamilton what most people know about Hamilton is that he was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr and that he's on the $10 bill and that's not enough to know but it's not a bad place to start because it encapsulates in two emblematic incidents both the failures and the limitations of his career and the great achievements and tonight I just want to touch on for you where he came from what some of those achievements were and what the failures and the limitations were and why those happen to him as well Hamilton like many New Yorkers was not born here he was born in the island of Nevis and the Caribbean and he was raised on the island of st. Croix in the Virgin Islands that in possession of Denmark the the Caribbean at that time was far richer than it is today or has ever been and the source of its riches was sugar the Caribbean was the producer of the world sugar supply and the amount of money that the sugar that the production of sugar generated was simply fantastic unfortunately it was held in the hands of a very small class the planter class of the West Indies many of whom didn't even live on their plantations many of them were absent teas who lived in England or or France or elsewhere and tiny in numbers they they they held all the wealth that was extracted from this crop the majority of the population in the West Indies was slaves a huge class of slave laborers the proportion of slaves to Freeman was far higher than any place in the United States even Georgia and South Carolina which had indigo and rice plantations of their own on the typical Caribbean sugar plantation the proportion of slaves to Freeman was about twenty to one in the islands as a whole it would be about twelve to one the slaves were worked very hard it's been calculated that the average life of a slave in Jamaica a slave brought to Jamaica was eight years before dying of exhaustion and overwork and between these two classes there was a small class of service providers of various sorts entirely white and it was into this class that Alexander Hamilton was born none of the founding fathers came from as far back as he came Benjamin Franklin was as poor but he did not have some of Hamilton's other disadvantages Hamilton's father James Hamilton was the fourth son of a Scottish Laird and he had gone to the Caribbean without prospects in Scotland he hoped to make money there he failed he was not a competent businessman or seemingly competent very much his mother raced Rachael Fawcett kept a store seems to have kept it very well seems to have been a good business woman unfortunately she and James Hamilton were not married Rachael Fawcett had been married to a cotton planter in st. Croix but he seems to have been brutal she left him she took up with James Hamilton lived together with him for about a dozen years they lived together as man and wife they had two sons James jr. and Alexander then when Alexander was nine they moved from Nevis where he had been born back to st. Croix his father left him and his family at the age of nine then his mother Rachel died when he was 11 years old so at the age of 11 Alexander Hamilton was an illegitimate orphan living in the sugar islands of the West Indies now he got out of that grim situation thanks to his employer he had been apprenticed as a clerk in a merchant House and Christiansted the main town in st. Croix and this house was owned by a family firm named Kruger they were a big New York firm New York was their headquarters they had a branch in st. Croix in Jamaica also in Bristol in England and Nicholas Kruger who was responsible for the business in st. Croix saw that this was a bright young man who was working for him was very impressed with his talents and he and some other figures got the idea that they would send Alexander to the mainland to the British colonies of North America to be educated and the thought was that he would become a doctor come back to the islands and practice medicine so when he was 15 years old he was sent altum Utley he was sent to New York to be educated at first the first thought was to send him to Princeton but Princeton wouldn't let him study at his own pace so he went to King's College now Columbia and and that's where he studied it's important that New York was where he came New York was the city in the thirteen colonies whose origin was entirely commercial whose origin and character was entirely commercial Boston and Philadelphia were religious experiments and still in in mood theocracies if not in in form of law New York had never been a theocracy it was not the city on the hill was not the city of brotherly love the founding myth of New York was the deal of its purchase from the Indians and dealing and making money was what New York was about from the 1620s New York had been a Dutch post for for extracting furs from the interior and then it became a port an economic activity was the heart and soul of New York so Hamilton was coming from an economic background in a merchant house and he was coming to the most economically oriented city in the thirteen colonies I want one thing that amused me in researching this book was to see how the character of New York has not changed from the mid 18th century until now travelers would say things like New Yorkers speak very fast very loud and all together well when they ask you a question they give you a minute to reply and then they break in upon you and talk away once again travelers also commented on the stylishness of the women on on the variety of the food that was available on the number of the prostitutes that were available yeah and this was at a time when the population of New York was 20,000 all Englishmen and Dutch to ethnic groups that hardly figure here anymore and yet the psychic energy was absolutely the same as it is today or so it so it seems Hamilton did not become a doctor as he was studying at King's College the the Revolution began the controversies of the Revolution were already happening and he was caught up in those and then his course was deflected into the path that his life took I'll briefly run over his curriculum vitae he was a colonel on George Washington's staff for four years after the war he became a lawyer and tried some of the most important post war cases in New York City law having to do with property rights and the rights of Tories were people who had taken the wrong side in the Revolutionary War and Hamilton defended their rights he was a delegate to the Continental Congress from New York State he was elected to the New York Assembly he attended the Constitutional Convention as a delegate from New York he conceived and wrote two-thirds of the Federalist Papers and then he was picked by George Washington his former commander-in-chief to be the first secretary of the Treasury at that time he was 32 years old he continued his Treasury Secretary for five years after that he went back into private life but he was not idle he founded a newspaper the New York Evening Post which still exists and he also took time out to go back into the Army as a Major General during the war scare with France in the late 1790s so those are the high points of a very of a very busy life but the main achievements the main achievements of course are his economic policies as Treasury secretary and they primarily revolve around the question of our debts we had huge debts run up during the Revolutionary War and no prospect of paying them we printed a lot of paper money which would become worthless we took out loans in Europe but when we became unable to pay even the interest on the loans we found the loan market drying up at the time that Hamilton became Treasury secretary our paper was selling in Europe at 25 percent of its value that's all European money man thought that it was worth what Hamilton did was two things he consolidated the debt and he also decided that it should be paid off at close to par regardless of who held it now the consolidation is in a way like these 800 numbers you see on TV if you're going bankrupt you now call this number you get one easy monthly payment Hamilton took all the debts of the national government and the 13 state governments and put them together in one pot this was politically hard to do because some state governments had already paid off their debts and they thought we're going to be saddled with the debts of the state governments that haven't paid off their debt this isn't fair now the problem with that was that a lot of the states that had paid their debts had done it by shady means arbitrarily knocking off you know a quarter to a half of the debt Rhode Island had printed a lot of paper money so there was a lot of shifting us behind some of the moralizing Hamilton them countered his plan to pay off debt holders without discriminating among them was bitterly opposed and the reasoning was that here you hear you have two debt holders one as a soldier two we've given a certificate for the back pay we have owed him the other is a speculator who has bought some soldiers certificate at a discount in hopes that the price will rise are you secretary Hamilton prepared to pay both these men at the same right rate the man who gave his time potentially risked his life for his country and the speculator and Hamilton's answer was yes because this is the way that money markets work this is the way markets work you don't know what the man who sold his debt to the speculator gained by doing it at the moment he gained it maybe the game to him was more important than any benefit he would have reaped if he'd held on to that certificate maybe he needed the money right away maybe he had to have it to live or for some other project of his and so he gained by selling it and the speculator took the risk and it's also Hamilton knew from his experience in this financial world that speculation heats up as the day of reckoning approaches and so and so as as debts were you know as the prospect that the United States would pay its debts became more realistic and as people were trading the paper faster and faster Hamilton was not appalled by that this is what he foreseen this is what he had desired and so he pushed ahead with his program but even more important than what he did and the results of it were dramatic a few years after he'd consolidated the debt our securities were trading in Europe at 10% of both power so they've gone from trading at a quarter of their value to trading over their value because Europeans were so happy with American paper as an investment even more important than Hamilton's achievement was his vision and his vision of what a future American economy might be he saw it as a diverse economy an economy that was not only farmers which overwhelmingly was at that time but also merchants and also manufacturers producers of manufactured goods this was something there wasn't a lot of in this country but Hamilton hoped that that would come and his reasons were twofold he thought a diverse economy is a more prosperous one that's in a way an obvious point but there was also a deep psychological meaning to his emphasis on diversity because he thought that diversity would help citizens realize their potential and I just want to read you a sentence of his from his report on manufacturers minds of the strongest and most active powers fall below mediocrity and labor without effect if confined to uncongenial pursuits but when all the different kinds of Industry obtain in a community each individual can find his proper element and can call into activity the whole vigour of his nature and Hamilton is writing about his countryman but of course he's writing about himself because who who more easily could have fallen into mediocrity than Alexander Hamilton living in st. Croix orphan illegitimate Clerke in a merchant house with no prospects of going anywhere or amounting to anything he had almost suffered that fate he'd avoided it because of the luck of having a farsighted employer because of his own tremendous talent but he did not want future Alexander Hamilton's to face such heavy odds he wanted to create a situation better than the situation he faced and he wanted to help his fellow Americans and and their successors and their future have an easier time than he himself had had and this is what makes his program I think very moving and very poignant so much for his achievement now as to his failures one cause of his failures was Hamilton himself in his own personality Hamilton wasn't know at all he just thought he knew every problem that came to his attention and one problem was that he often did and that can make it worse I mean some people like know-it-alls some people are happy to let know-it-alls they'll handle everything that's fine I'll take my lead from the know it all other people hate know-it-alls especially if they have pride in their own in their own accomplishments or their own intelligence and Hamilton's personality rubbed many men very much the wrong way the most important enemy he produced in his career as as Lewis already mentioned was Thomas Jefferson they served together in Washington's first cabinet Jefferson was the secretary of state Hamilton was the secretary of the Treasury and there were a number of reasons why they finally drifted apart at first it was peaceful the whole country was new the whole project was new they weren't really aware of who each each each of the other was they hadn't yet found reasons to hate each other they went Washington took camel tone and Jefferson fishing for bluefish off Sandy Hook once in 1790 when the capital was still in New York and they got along for I would say about a year and a half then the troubles began part of it was personal Thomas Jefferson was a very shy man very reserved very polite obviously very intelligent but he did not conduct himself as a know-it-all and the presence of this brash are revista was very disconcerting to him there's an angry letter that Jefferson wrote to Washington after they had fallen out and in it Jefferson uses a very revealing and ugly phrase he says of Hamilton that his entire career from the time that history can stoop to notice him has been a tissue of machinations against the liberty of his country that phrase history can stoop to notice him has all the pride of a Virginian aristocrat of a slave owner of a man in a hierarchical society who is confident of his own position and has to deal with this bastard foreigner who unaccountably has the ear of George Washington fellow aristocrat a fellow Virginian fellow slave owner and it rankled Jefferson no end also Jefferson had a different vision of America's economic future Jefferson wanted to see a perpetuation of the present he did not wish for America to have cities to have manufacturers to have banking and finance he once wrote that cities add no more to the health of the body politic than sores due to a body that was Thomas Jefferson's vision for New York for other American cities he didn't carefully exist in or not he was happy to have people on their farms and that was his ideal and his idle finally they differed in their approach to politics and their approached persuading their fellow citizens Hamilton's method of argument was always demonstration he's one of the most productive of the founding fathers his editor Harold siren the man who edited his collected papers and joked that the only reason they got it finished so soon was thanks to Aaron Burr but Hamilton was extremely productive his contributions to the Federalist Papers were a hundred thousand words the Federalist Papers each one is about two thousand words long and they were written at a rate of four a week and as a journalist myself I can tell you that is very fast and when you add the fact that they're all so good it's even faster another series of essays he did the Camillus papers he wrote 70,000 words for those he could just produce torrents of words torrents of argumentation on any on any point and his method was always to explain what he wanted and why he wanted it and he was confident that once he had done that you would agree he was an arrogant man but there was something very generous about his arrogance because he always assumed that once he laid out his reasons they would be your reasons and that you would understand it as well as he did once he explained it to you so he operated at the level of demonstration there are two other levels of rhetoric and politics the highest level is inspiration and this is this is a a mode that short-circuits demonstration it gets around it it cuts through it it can be a ringing words such as Jefferson's and the Declaration of Independence it can be an immortal action such as so many in the life of George Washington an inspiration is at the moment that you read it or hear it or see it done you understand it without following all the steps of reasoning and you say yes that's right this is true I can do this then there is a third level which is lower than demonstration and that is flattery that's telling people nothing new is telling them what they want to here it's telling them what they already believe and Thomas Jefferson lived at the level both of inspiration end of flattery and he could go back and forth between them sometimes in the same piece sometimes in the same paragraph now Alexander Hamilton could not rise to the level of inspiration but he would not sink to the level of flattery and so Jefferson was both above him and below him and that's why Jefferson beat him in the politics of their own lives and in later judgments on our part another enemy that Hamilton raised up was of course Aaron Burr he was in some ways like Hamilton they were both New York lawyers they had both been veterans Burr was a very brave soldier in the revolution he'd taken part in a quixotic attack on Quebec in the winter of 1775 76 and he was only 19 years old he conducted himself with great gallantry and brave with bravery in that battle a borough was charming he was intelligent he was well-read but Alexander Hamilton always opposed his efforts to win high office Hamilton began opposing him in 1792 when Burr was toying with running for vice president he opposed him in the election of 1800 when Burr and Jefferson deadlocked in the electoral college he opposed him again in 1804 when Aaron Burr was running for governor of New York and I think what Hamilton saw is what any any careful reader of burrs record can see now when we're not subjected to his charm which was that Aaron Burr was an empty man Aaron Burr had the emptiness of a narcissist I understood Aaron Burr like a flash when I read one footnote in a book on Hamilton that came out in about 1910 and the author had asked a very old man who'd known burr when he was very young burr died in 1838 so that's that's how the time frame goes he said everybody says Aaron Burr was charming what did that mean and the old man said it was the way he listened to you he listened to you as if what you were saying was more important to him than it was to you no flattery could be more subtle now the virtuous and the wise can listen but narcissists also listen very well because that's all they can do they only exist when they're having interactions with other people when they're alone they disappear there's no one home so of course they listen well this explains Burroughs conspiracy which is outside the time frame of my book but no one has ever been able to figure out what Burroughs conspiracy was that's because Burr hadn't figured it out he didn't know what he was doing he was vamping he was going down the Ohio and the Mississippi and he was collecting malcontents and anybody who was malcontent would talk to Aaron Burr and burr would listen and they think he's the guy he'll make it happen for me I'll go with him but they didn't realize there was there was no one there Aaron Burr was like a new refrigerator he was bright cold and empty and one person one person who saw this was George Washington Aaron Burr was on Washington's staff for ten days in 1776 and no one knows what happened but George Washington hated Aaron Burr from that day forward and went out of his way to diss him and to prevent him from getting important offices Aaron Burr Hamilton was another man who saw this quality in Burr and and made it a point to oppose his political ambitions so finally in 1804 Aaron Burr runs for the governorship of New York loses this is clearly the end of his political career he he is on the outs with his own party he hasn't been able to jump over to the Federalist Party and he's had enough after all these years 12 years of opposition and he challenges out sander Hamilton to a duel who's whose results we know now the duel was scheduled for July 11th and a week before the duel the Society of the Cincinnati celebrated the 4th of July and this was a group of Revolutionary officers of veterans and Hamilton was the head of the organization's the death of Washington and burr as a colonel was also a member so they attended this meeting in New York they were the only two at the meeting who know that the duel was to take place of course afterwards other people who were there tried to remember try to remember what their frame of mind had been and people seemed to recall that Hamilton was very convivial he was very high-spirited and that he sang he sang old military songs with the gathering and two of Hamilton's grandchildren grandsons disagree as to what songs their grandfather sang but one of them was a song called how stands the glass around which was thought to have been written by General Wolfe on the eve of the Battle of Quebec almost certainly not written by him but that was the popular impression and the song goes it goes like this how stands the glass of round for shame you take no care my boys how stands the glass of round let me enjoy a bomb but trumpets sound the colors they are flying boys to fight kill or wound may we still be found content with our hard fare my boys on the cold cold ground why soldiers why should we be melancholy boys why soldiers why whose business tis to die what sighing fie damn fear drinkin be jolly boys tis he or cold hot wet or dry we're always bound to follow boys and scorn to fly his part in vain I mean not to upgrade your boys tis but in vain for soldiers to complain should next campaign send us to him who made us boys were free from pain but should we remain a bottle and kind landlady use all looking Colonel Burke did not sing colonel bird is not sing and he left early I couldn't tell you a lot about the duel a lot it's known about it but I think that's wrong it feeds our appetite it feeds our curiosity about duels dueling was an evil system it was evil it was irrational it was capricious as a gentleman Hamilton and had a lot of experience with duels as a second as a potential principal and duels which had not come to the field of Honor his most recent experience had been in 1801 three years earlier when his eldest son Philip had fought a duel Philip was a 19 year old man a student at Columbia and he'd gotten into a political argument about his father's career and a challenge had been issued he went to his father for advice as to what he should do and Hamilton told him that it was wrong to kill a man in the duel but so that he should waste his first shot although of course as a gentleman he had to fight the duel unfortunately no one gave this advice to Philips opponent Philips gun went off in the air Philip was struck in the abdomen it took him 16 hours to die with his mother and father on either side of him on his deathbed the scene was as horrible as can be imagined it also struck Hamilton's second oldest child his daughter Angelica who was a year younger than Philip and as a result she lost her mind and for the rest of her life and she lived into her seventies she never spoke with Philip was dead she always spoke of him as still being alive she could not have accept the fact that he had been killed so Hamilton accepted Colonel burst challenged the duel was to be held at Weehawken on the New Jersey side of the Hudson that was the same place where Philip had been killed and the pistols used belong to Hamilton's brother-in-law they were the same set of pistols that Philip Hamilton had used the two duelists came to the field at seven o'clock in the morning Hamilton had told a few of his friends and he'd also written in a letter to his wife that his opinion of do dueling was the same as it had been three years earlier it was immoral to kill men and duels and therefore he would waste his first shot but he felt honor bound to go through with this one Hamilton shot went off into the air Burris struck him in the stomach the bullet lodged in his spine he was rowed back to Manhattan to the house of a friend took him 36 hours to die he died on the 12th of July the funeral was held at Trinity Church on the fourteenth eulogy was delivered by governor Morris a longtime friend of Hamilton's the author of the Constitution and it's not a memorable eulogy but Morris got one thing right and it was the most important thing to get right at the end of the speech he said he was trying to quiet the crowd in his diary he said if I had been like Mark Anthony I could have driven them absolutely mad but he was determined not to do that and he said he told them not to insult the offended majesty of the law he said this is the last message from Hamilton you will never hear his voice anymore so hear it from my lips respect yourself I went a few months ago to the dueling ground and we Hawk and where there's a little a bust of Hamilton on a pillar and a flag both tiny Park and there's nothing really to see there but if you look across the Hudson what you do see is the Manhattan skyline the whole thing from the World Trade Center all the way up to Riverside Church and beyond all the skyscrapers as if on review and it occurred to me that if Hamilton could see that skyline he might say this is why I came here this is what I work to build use it you [Applause]

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Length: 31min 15sec (1875 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 21 2017