Building on biographies by Richard Brookhiser and Willard Sterne Randall, Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton provides what may be the most comprehensive modern examination of the often overlooked Founding Father. From the start, Chernow argues that Hamilton’s premature death at age 49 left his record to be reinterpreted and even re-written by his more long-lived enemies, among them: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Monroe. Hamilton’s achievements as first Secretary of the Treasury, co-author of The Federalist Papers, and member of the Constitutional Convention were clouded after his death by strident claims that he was an arrogant, self-serving monarchist. Chernow delves into the almost 22,000 pages of letters, manuscripts, and articles that make up Hamilton’s legacy to reveal a man with a sophisticated intellect, a romantic spirit, and a late-blooming religiosity.

One fault of the book, is that Chernow is so convinced of Hamilton’s excellence that his narrative sometimes becomes hagiographic. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Chernow’s account of the infamous duel between Hamilton and Aaron Burr in 1804. He describes Hamilton’s final hours as pious, while Burr, Jefferson, and Adams achieve an almost cartoonish villainy at the news of Hamilton’s passing.

A defender of the union against New England secession and an opponent of slavery, Hamilton has a special appeal to modern sensibilities. Chernow argues that in contrast to Jefferson and Washington’s now outmoded agrarian idealism, Hamilton was "the prophet of the capitalist revolution" and the true forebear of modern America. In his Prologue, he writes: "In all probability, Alexander Hamilton is the foremost figure in American history who never attained the presidency, yet he probably had a much deeper and more lasting impact than many who did." With Alexander Hamilton, this impact can now be more widely appreciated. --Patrick O'Kelley


From 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. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
An illegitimate orphan from the West Indies, Alexander Hamilton rose to become George Washington's most trusted adviser in war and peace -- only to be snared in a sex scandal and killed in a duel by Vice President Aaron Burr. None of the American Founders had a more dramatic life or death than Hamilton -- and none did more to lay the foundations of America's future wealth and power. Revered by Lincoln Republicans, Hamilton fell out of favor in the middle of the 20th century thanks to the influence, first in the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt and then in today's Republican Party, of Southern and Western conservatives and populists for whom Hamilton's arch-rival, Thomas Jefferson, was the greatest of the Founding Fathers. But recent scholarship has replaced the sanitized image of Jefferson as an egalitarian idealist with the theorist of states' rights, pseudoscientific racism and agrarian economics who sold slaves to pay for his luxuries. Because Hamilton was an abolitionist, promoter of high-tech capitalism and champion of a world-class military, he is an ancestor whose attitudes do not embarrass contemporary Americans. In Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow, the author of The House of Morgan, The Warburgs and Titan, a biography of John D. Rockefeller, has brought to life the Founding Father who did more than any other to create the modern United States.The self-made man and the immigrant who achieves success are figures dear to American culture; Hamilton, alone among the prominent Founders, was both. Chernow writes, "no immigrant in American history has ever made a larger contribution than Alexander Hamilton." Hamilton, who became one of the first American leaders to call for the abolition of slavery, grew up in the Caribbean slave societies of Nevis and St. Croix. He was the illegitimate child of James Hamilton, the younger son of a Scots laird, and Rachel Faucette, a woman of British and French Huguenot descent who had fled from her first husband. (Chernow's extensive research has uncovered nothing to substantiate claims that Hamilton, by way of his mother, was partly black.) Hamilton and his brother, James Jr., were abandoned by their father in 1765 and orphaned when their mother died in 1767. Hamilton was 12. Sent to New York as a scholarship boy, the orphan from the West Indies flourished at King's College (now Columbia University), penned an anti-British polemic, "The Farmer Refuted," and, when the Revolution broke out, became an artillery captain whose exploits inspired Washington to make Hamilton his aide-de-camp. Hamilton's transformation from outsider to insider was complete when he married Elizabeth "Eliza" Schuyler, a member of one of the richest and most politically influential families in New York.Like Washington, Hamilton sought to replace the Articles of Federation with a stronger national constitution and took part in the Philadelphia convention. In the fall of 1787, Hamilton recruited John Jay and James Madison to help him write the essays that became the Federalist Papers, to persuade New York's ratifying convention to approve the new federal constitution. According to Chernow, "Hamilton supervised the entire Federalist project. He dreamed up the idea, enlisted the participants, wrote the overwhelming bulk of the essays, and oversaw the publication." While romantic agrarians like Jefferson dreamed of an isolationist America uncorrupted by manufacturing, Hamilton realized that to survive in a world of rival great powers the United States would have to adopt selected elements of the economic and military policies of Britain and France. As Washington's secretary of the treasury, Hamilton infuriated populists by refusing to distinguish between the original holders of Revolutionary War-era debt -- many of them soldiers -- and the speculators who had bought them out. In Chernow's words, Hamilton's refusal "established the legal and moral basis for securities trading in America: the notion that securities are freely transferable and that buyers assume all rights to profit or loss in transactions." Jefferson, Madison and other Southern agrarians were bribed into acquiescing in Hamilton's financial system by the decision to place the permanent U.S. capital on the Potomac. According to Chernow, "Madison and Henry Lee speculated in land on the Potomac, hoping to earn a windfall profit if the area was chosen for the capital." Hamilton went on to oversee the creation of the First Bank of the United States, the ancestor of today's Federal Reserve.Even more important for America's future prosperity were Hamilton's plans for government-encouraged industrial capitalism. His ambitious industrial corporation, the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (SEUM), was a failure. But in his Report on Manufactures (1791), he made the classic "infant-industry" argument that American industries needed assistance from the federal government if they were to catch up with British manufacturing. Hamilton's most important successors in American politics were Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln, who, as president, presided over the enactment of Hamiltonian policies such as federal investment in railroads, national banking and support for U.S. industries by means of high tariffs (Hamilton himself had preferred "bounties" or subsidies to infant industries as an alternative to tariffs).Hamilton had no more doubt than Lincoln did later that the constitution empowered the federal government to suppress insurrections. When an excise tax in 1794 provoked thousands of mostly Scots-Irish backwoodsmen to assault federal tax officials in what became known as "the Whiskey Rebellion," Hamilton insisted on a strong response. President Washington agreed: "If the laws are to be trampled upon with impunity, and a minority is to dictate to the majority, there is an end put at one stroke to republican government." In an echo of the Revolutionary War, the two men led a military expedition before which the rebels melted away.A third reunion of Washington and Hamilton as military leaders came in 1798-99, when war loomed with France and President John Adams asked Washington to come out of retirement to lead an army that Hamilton organized. When Adams adopted a conciliatory policy toward France, Hamilton was furious and penned a denunciation of the president. "In writing an intemperate indictment of John Adams," Chernow says, "Hamilton committed a form of political suicide that blighted the rest of his career." Hamilton's denunciations of Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson's scheming vice president, led to Hamilton's shooting death in the famous duel at Weehawken, N.J., on July 11, 1804. Hamilton, who had become an increasingly pious Christian after his son, Philip, died in a duel, deliberately missed Burr. Chernow makes the interesting suggestion that Hamilton's willingness to fight a duel, along with his hypersensitivity about honor, reflects the influence of his West Indian background. In the West Indies as in the South, "plantation society was a feudal order, predicated on personal honor and dignity, making duels popular among whites who fancied themselves noblemen." In this magisterial biography, Chernow tells the story not only of Hamilton but also of his wife, Eliza, a remarkable woman who died at the age of 97 in 1854. The year before, "When the ninety-five-year old Eliza dined at the White House . . . she made a grand entrance with her daughter. President Fillmore fussed over her, and the first lady gave up her chair to her. Everybody was eager to touch a living piece of American history." Generations earlier, Eliza had endured with stoic dignity the controversy over Hamilton's affair with Maria Reynolds, a woman who seduced the treasury secretary so that her husband could blackmail him (Chernow provides a good account of this, the first political sex scandal in American history.) Today Eliza is buried next to her husband in the Trinity Churchyard in New York City, which Jeffersonians once called "Hamiltonopolis.""The magnitude of Hamilton's feats as treasury secretary has overshadowed many other facets of his life: clerk, college student, youthful poet, essayist, artillery captain, wartime adjutant to Washington, battlefield hero, congressman, abolitionist, Bank of New York founder, state assemblyman, member of the Constitutional Convention and New York Ratifying Convention, orator, lawyer, polemicist, educator, patron saint of the New-York Evening Post, foreign-policy theorist, and major general in the army," writes Chernow. His verdict is persuasive: "If Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton established the prose of American statecraft. No other founder articulated such a clear and prescient vision of America's future political, military, and economic strength or crafted such ingenious mechanisms to bind the nation together." Reviewed by Michael LindCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From AudioFile
Chernow's biography follows chronology without being dull; but then Hamilton--hot-headed, brilliant, ambitious, oversexed--never was. His life follows a classically tragic arc, from unfortunate beginnings through brilliant success, marred by intemperance, to final tragedy. The precision of Grover Gardner's astringent tones aids clarity, and his inflections--though sometimes studied--give details their proper color. He keeps the story moving. Chernow tries to make Hamilton more of a hero than the facts will bear, but his service to the new nation was profound, his greatness indisputable. This solid biography, solidly performed, is a good corrective to the demonizing of Hamilton in David McCullough's John Adams. W.M. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
*Starred Review* Washington is revered as the "father of his country" and the "indispensable man." Jefferson 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 J. P. Morgan and John 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 © American Library Association. All rights reserved


David McCullough, author of John Adams and Truman
Grand-scale biography at its best—thorough, insightful, consistently fair, and superbly written . . . a genuinely great book.


The Wall Street Journal
Impressively thorough, superbly written and carefully researched.


USA Today
A substantial, detailed and masterful story about one of American history’s eminal figures... a must-read. Ron Chernow’s masterpiece.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Alexander Hamilton was arguably the most important figure in American history who never attained the presidency, but he had a far more lasting impact than many who did." "An illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, Hamilton rose with stunning speed to become George Washington's aide-de-camp, a battlefield hero, a member of the Constitutional Convention, the leading author of The Federalist Papers, and head of the Federalist party. As the first treasury secretary, he forged America's tax and budget systems, customs service, coast guard, and central bank. Chernow offers the whole sweep of Hamilton's turbulent life: his exotic, brutal upbringing; his brilliant military, legal, and financial exploits; his titanic feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Monroe; his shocking illicit romances; his enlightened abolitionism; and his famous death in a duel with Aaron Burr in July 1804." Throughout, Chernow blends Hamilton's public and private selves to present a fully rounded portrait of this handsome, witty, controversial genius and his poignant relations with his wife, Eliza, and their eight children. Hamilton's countless exploits never cramped his prolific literary labors. Chernow brings to light nearly fifty previously undiscovered essays as he explores Hamilton's fiery journalism, his youthful poetry, his magisterial state papers, and his revealing missives to colleagues and friends. Moreover, he conjures up portraits of Hamilton's celebrated peers, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Burr with all their shortcomings as well as their oft-sung triumphs.

FROM THE CRITICS

Michael Lind - The Washington Post

In Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow, the author of The House of Morgan, The Warburgs and Titan, a biography of John D. Rockefeller, has brought to life the Founding Father who did more than any other to create the modern United States … In this magisterial biography, Chernow tells the story not only of Hamilton but also of his wife, Eliza, a remarkable woman who died at the age of 97 in 1854.

Janet Maslin - The New York Times

… Mr. Chernow sets himself a compelling task: to add a third dimension to conventional views of Hamilton while reaching beyond the limits of a personal portrait. If Alexander Hamilton reflects its subject's far from charismatic nature, it also provides a serious, far-reaching measure of his place in history. And Mr. Chernow has done a splendid job of capturing the backbiting political climate of Hamilton's times, to the point that no cow is sacred here. The "golden age of literary assassination in American politics," featuring Thomas Jefferson as a particularly self-serving schemer, sounds astonishingly familiar today.

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. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

Readers' interest in American history tends to oscillate between two periods: the Civil War and the Revolution. We are currently well into a Revolutionary period. A slew of best-selling historical works has been published in recent years on the American Founders — including studies of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams. Now, Ron Chernow has produced an original, illuminating, and highly readable study of Alexander Hamilton that admirably introduces readers to Hamilton's personality and accomplishments.

Chernow penetrates more deeply into the mysteries of Hamilton's origins and family life than any previous biographer. And what a family it was. Hamilton, the only immigrant in the first ranks of the Founders, was the illegitimate son of a downwardly mobile Scottish father and a free-living and free-thinking woman of the West Indies. These difficult origins marked Hamilton for life as he struggled to integrate himself into the highest circles of American public life.

Library Journal