Soldier, financial guru and hip-hop legend: who was the real Hamilton?
It’s the end of the first act of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s runaway musical smash about the US founding father. The Americans have just won a decisive victory over the British at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781. Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette meet at centre-stage and say: “We’re immigrants. We get the job done.”
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Miranda’s parents migrated from the Caribbean to New York; Hamilton himself made that journey two centuries earlier. Born on Nevis in the British West Indies, he arrived on the American mainland aged 15. Aaron Burr, his future nemesis, begins the musical by asking how a “bastard orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman”, could rise in life to help found a new nation. The answer is that, along the way, Hamilton, like so many immigrants, worked harder than most, becoming a soldier, lawyer, finance minister and then duelist. He excelled at all of these – except the last.
The British historian Paul Johnson called Hamilton “a genius – the only one of the founding fathers fully entitled to that accolade”. But what does that mean? As a teenage pamphleteer, Hamilton agitated for American independence and then fought for it as a soldier for more than six years. His skills and performance as an artillery captain meant he was quickly promoted to principal aide de camp to General George Washington, and it’s fair to call theirs one of the most significant partnerships in all of American history. As an infantry commander, Hamilton led several hundred troops in a bayonet charge to capture the British position at Yorktown, which effectively marked the end of the war.
Daveed Diggs, Okieriete Onaodowan, Anthony Ramos and Lin-Manuel Miranda in Hamilton at the Richard Rodgers theatre in New York. Photograph: Joan Marcus
During lulls in the fighting, Hamilton studied financial history, developing a deep admiration for the Bank of England and how Britain managed its huge national debt. He argued that, if America was to prevail, reforming its finances was more important than winning the occasional battle. He also contended that only a strong, national government could stabilise the finances of the fledgling nation. At this point in Miranda’s musical, George III trots out in robes and crown and trills to us rebellious Continentals that: “You’ll be back.” He’s wrong of course, but he almost steals the show.
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Hamilton began his career as one of Britain’s worst enemies and then ironically turned into one of the UK’s best friends. He became a lawyer in near record time – after just 10 months of study – and in some of his first cases he did the unthinkable: he defended Tories. American supporters of the British cause were facing persecution, and vengeful state laws were taking aim at their properties. But those state persecutions violated the Treaty of Paris, which the federal government had signed to end the war. As a knock-on effect, those new state laws were driving away some of America’s most accomplished citizens.
While Hamilton was defending the Tories, he was rallying tirelessly for a constitutional convention. After the convention formed and drafted the constitution, he promoted its ratification by explaining and defending it in the now famous and foundational Federalist essays.
Washington became the first president under the constitution in 1789 and appointed Hamilton the first secretary of the Treasury. For his financial innovations Hamilton is dubbed in the show “the ten-dollar founding father”. His face has graced the $10 banknote since the 1920s, leading some to assume erroneously that he must have been an early president.
An illustration of the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Photograph: Bettmann Archive
As finance minister, Hamilton engineered his own revolution, much like Britain’s a century earlier. He restructured America’s war debts to establish public credit; he founded the Bank of the United States as the country’s first central bank; and he set the dollar as the nation’s currency. His measures prompted state governments to charter more banks and other corporations and led traders to establish securities markets and stock exchanges, such as that in New York, founded in 1792.
Central to Hamilton’s plan was peaceful trade with Britain. Import taxes supplied almost all of the federal government’s revenues, and most of America’s imports still came from the UK. But Britain was discriminating against American trade. Thomas Jefferson wanted to play hardball, but Hamilton prevailed by persuading Washington that getting tough would cause a trade war and another military engagement.
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So Hamilton laid the foundations of the special relationship between America and Britain. It has proved rocky from time to time, but it flowered beautifully during the two world wars and their aftermaths. Following Hamilton’s directives for maintaining strong markets, the Marshall plan after World War II, in its way, helped repay Britain for the revenues that had allowed Hamilton to revolutionise America’s finances.
Not that he was without flaws. While treasury secretary, he had an affair with a woman named Maria Reynolds. In cahoots with her husband, she accused Hamilton of sexual harassment. He paid them off to keep quiet, but the affair came to light a few years later. Rather than bury it again, Hamilton wrote a lengthy pamphlet explaining everything. Admitting to adultery protected his public reputation, and his wife, Eliza, forgave him, but the musical reveals her inner sorrows.
Lin-Manuel Miranda as Hamilton with Phillipa Soo as his wife, Eliza. Photograph: Joan Marcus
A year after coming clean, Hamilton became a major general and inspector general of the US army. Then came the presidential election of 1800. The two candidates were Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. One, a former secretary of state seen by many as a dangerous leftwing radical who would stop at nothing to gain the presidency. The other, a self-absorbed narcissist and womaniser convinced that he couldn’t lose unless his opponent stooped to rigging the election. Sound familiar?
Hamilton knew both men well. One was his enemy, the other his nemesis. “His politics are tinctured with fanaticism,” he said of Jefferson. “He is a contemptible hypocrite.” Burr didn’t fare any better: “This man has no principle, public or private.” Hamilton condemned him as “the most unfit man in the US for the office of president”.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, centre, with Hamilton cast members at the Tony awards in 2016. Photograph: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
The election culminated in a tie. According to the rules of the time, the runner up became vice-president, but a tie triggered a runoff election decided by the House of Representatives. Hamilton supported Jefferson because he preferred a candidate with disagreeable principles rather than one without any at all. He executed a frenetic letter-writing campaign that ultimately put Jefferson in the White House.
Four years later, upset by rumours that Hamilton had badmouthed him, vice-president Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel. They met on a duelling ground in New Jersey. Hamilton threw away his shot by firing into the air. Burr didn’t return the favour.
Hamilton didn’t live to see Jefferson and Madison get tough with Britain, which, just as he had predicted, led to a trade war and then the War of 1812. But from humble beginnings, Hamilton had had a shot to help write history – and he didn’t throw that one away.
Hamilton opens at the Victoria Palace theatre, London, on 6 December 2017.
Richard Sylla is the author of Alexander Hamilton: The Illustrated Biography (Sterling, 2016). He is chairman of the Museum of American Finance and professor emeritus of economics at New York University.

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