ALEXANDER HAMILTON
Alexander Hamilton (January 11, 1755 or 1757 – July 12, 1804) was an American statesman and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He was an influential interpreter and promoter of the U.S. Constitution, as well as the founder of the nation’s financial system, the Federalist Party, the United States Coast Guard, and The New York Post newspaper. As the first Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton was the main author of the economic policies of the George Washington administration. Thomas Jefferson was his leading opponent, arguing for agrarianism and smaller government. Hamilton was born out of wedlock in Charlestown, Nevis. Orphaned as a child he was taken in by a prosperous merchant. Hamilton led the Treasury Department as a trusted member of President Washington’s first Cabinet. He was a nationalist who emphasized strong central government and successfully argued that the implied powers of the Constitution provided the legal authority to fund the national debt, assume states’ debts, and create the government-backed Bank of the United States. (More from Wikipedia)
Alexander Hamilton was one of the Founding Fathers of our nation and was also the founder of the country’s first political party in the modern sense, the Federalist Party. In honor of his being the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury during the administration of President George Washington, his portrait has graced the front of the $10 bill since 1929. Before Hamilton became such a hit, that was about to change in the recent drive to put a woman on some of our folding money – word now is that President Andrew Jackson will soon be removed from the $20 bill.
Previously, Alexander Hamilton had become an aide-de-camp of General George Washington and had a key military role in winning the Revolutionary War. Succeeding administrations were from the Democratic-Republican Party, in opposition to the Federalist Party. I think it was on 60 Minutes when I heard that those who sought to downplay Hamilton’s legacy included John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe; these men were the second through fifth Presidents.
And then there was the famous duel that Alexander Hamilton lost with Vice-President Aaron Burr. There is no question that his story is long on drama. I did a book report in school once that featured the story of the duel, and frankly, that is about all I had remembered about him from my schoolboy days.
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Fresh from his success with his earlier musical In the Heights (set in the mostly Dominican-American communities in the Washington Heights section of Upper Manhattan), Lin-Manuel Miranda began reading the 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. Once he saw echoes of his own life there, he started envisioning the idea of Alexander Hamilton’s story as a Broadway musical.
The first any of us knew about it was at the nationally televised White House Evening of Poetry, Music and the Spoken Word on May 12, 2009. Instead of performing songs from In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda told the audience: “I’m thrilled the White House called me here tonight because I’m actually working on a hip hop album. It’s a concept album about the life of someone I think embodies hip hop: Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.”
Lin-Manuel Miranda had expected the incredulous laughter that greeted this statement, and it continued during his performance of a rough-cut number from the future musical Hamilton, though there was enthusiastic applause at the end. On its face, the idea is absurd: The early days of our nation and the birth of hip hop are separated by two full centuries. But Miranda has connected the dots: Alexander Hamilton was an immigrant to this country who was born in the West Indies and orphaned at a young age. Hamilton did not so much speak sentences as he did paragraphs; the rapid-fire singing in hip hop was ideal for getting those dense passages out to an audience. And as related in Wikipedia, the following story about Hamilton’s use of his writing to get him out of a miserable life is in precisely the same spirit as impoverished African-Americans who try to rap their way out of the ghetto:
“[Alexander] Hamilton wrote an essay published in the Royal Danish-American Gazette, a detailed account of a hurricane which had devastated Christiansted [now in the U. S. Virgin Islands] on August 30, 1772. His biographer [Ron Chernow] says that, ‘Hamilton’s famous letter about the storm astounds the reader for two reasons: For all its bombastic excesses, it does seem wondrous the 17-year-old self-educated clerk could write with such verve and gusto. Clearly, Hamilton was highly literate and already had considerable fund of verbal riches.’ The essay impressed community leaders, who collected a fund to send the young Hamilton to the North American colonies for his education.”
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In Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda kept the period costumes and the history, but he changed just about everything else. Miranda, who is a Puerto-Rican–American, played the title role of Alexander Hamilton; he also inserted African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans into other major roles in the play so that this story about the founding of the USA would look like our nation does today.
At least as bold as this move was his decision to tell the stories of the Founding Mothers who are usually relegated to set pieces on the gowns that they were wearing. Four of the 14 principal roles listed in the Wikipedia article are women, all tied closely to Alexander Hamilton: Hamilton’s wife, Eliza Schuyler Hamilton; her sisters Angelica Schuyler Church and Peggy Schuyler Van Rensselaer; and Maria Reynolds, with whom Hamilton had a two-year affair in the 1790’s in one of the nation’s first sex scandals.
(September 2016)
