Alexander Hamilton: A Life
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Overview
From his less than auspicious start in 1755 on the Caribbean island of Nevis to his untimely death in a duel with his old enemy Aaron Burr in 1804, Alexander Hamilton, despite his short life, left a huge legacy.
Orphaned at thirteen and apprenticed in a counting house, the precocious Hamilton learned principles of business that helped him create the American financial system and invent the modern corporation. But first the staunch, intrepid Hamilton served in the American Revolution, acting as General Washington's spymaster. Forging a successful legal career, Hamilton coauthored the Federalist Papers and plunged into politics. Irresistibly attractive to women, he was a man of many gifts, but he could be arrogant and was, at times, a poor judge of character.
In this meticulously researched, illuminating, and lively account, Willard Sterne Randall mines the latest scholarship to provide a new perspective on Alexander Hamilton, his illegitimate birth, little-known military activities, political and diplomatic intrigues, and sometimes scandalous private life.
Synopsis
Randall (humanities, Champlain College, Vermont) continues his long string of biographies and histories about the early US republic. Hamilton (1755-1804) is perhaps best known now for losing a duel with Aaron Burr, but was also the first secretary of the treasury, author of the Federalist Papers, enforcer for George Washington, creator of Wall Street, and founder of the US Navy. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Publishers Weekly
Biographer of Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, Randall is in his usual engaging form in dealing with the complex Hamilton, who in 1804 died in a duel with Aaron Burr. Creating a bigger-than-life hero, Randall sometimes strains credibility in the interest of color, and the evidence of occasional unreliability is exposed by gaps in documentation or in attributions like "according to tradition." One quotation credited to a Tory historian of the Revolution describes an American gallows erected near Charleston harbor, where "twenty-four reputable Loyalists [were] hanged in sight of the British fleet, with the army and refugees on board." In Randall's pages the close of the quotation is altered incredibly to "the army and thirty-five thousand Loyalists looking on." Randall's restless Hamilton, illegitimate son of a West Indian Englishwoman, succeeds on his energy, industriousness and intelligence, and a little help from distant relatives, becoming the new nation's first Secretary of the Treasury at 34. As a New York lawyer, aided by a loveless but lucrative marriage, he scrambled for riches before becoming a power behind the scenes in the federal government, then by Cabinet appointment. Even after Hamilton's resignation at 40, he is described, too sweepingly, as "a sort of unpaid prime minister in absentia," even though he was disgraced by two adulterous affairs, one with his wife's sister. Most of Randall's narrative is vivid and accurate, but the rest should give the reader pause. Eight pages b&w illus. not seen by PW. (Jan. 10) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Biographer of Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, Randall is in his usual engaging form in dealing with the complex Hamilton, who in 1804 died in a duel with Aaron Burr. Creating a bigger-than-life hero, Randall sometimes strains credibility in the interest of color, and the evidence of occasional unreliability is exposed by gaps in documentation or in attributions like "according to tradition." One quotation credited to a Tory historian of the Revolution describes an American gallows erected near Charleston harbor, where "twenty-four reputable Loyalists [were] hanged in sight of the British fleet, with the army and refugees on board." In Randall's pages the close of the quotation is altered incredibly to "the army and thirty-five thousand Loyalists looking on." Randall's restless Hamilton, illegitimate son of a West Indian Englishwoman, succeeds on his energy, industriousness and intelligence, and a little help from distant relatives, becoming the new nation's first Secretary of the Treasury at 34. As a New York lawyer, aided by a loveless but lucrative marriage, he scrambled for riches before becoming a power behind the scenes in the federal government, then by Cabinet appointment. Even after Hamilton's resignation at 40, he is described, too sweepingly, as "a sort of unpaid prime minister in absentia," even though he was disgraced by two adulterous affairs, one with his wife's sister. Most of Randall's narrative is vivid and accurate, but the rest should give the reader pause. Eight pages b&w illus. not seen by PW. (Jan. 10) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.Foreign Affairs
Hamilton's ideas on both foreign and domestic policy have resonated through every American generation. To write a first-rate Hamilton biography would be one of the most important and, given the craze for biographies of the founders, most lucrative tasks an American historian could undertake. This book, alas, does not fit that bill. There is too much heavy breathing over incidents such as the Peggy Arnold affair, too much lubricious analysis of punctuation irregularities (don't ask) in Hamilton's letters to his sister-in-law, and much too much attention to side issues such as Vermont's long quarrel with New York. By contrast, major episodes such as Hamilton's role in the fight to ratify the Constitution and his efforts to put the public finances of the new republic on a sound footing receive less attention, and less insight, than they require. Inexplicably, the last ten years of Hamilton's career get fewer than ten pages. The book seems less finished than abandoned.Kirkus Reviews
A revealing but measured biography of the younger Founding Father, who, to the horror of libertarians ever since, "[drew] up a blueprint for a relationship between government and money."Who was right about America--Jefferson or Hamilton? Such, writes Randall (Humanities/ Champlain Coll., Vermont; co-author, Forgotten Americans, 1998, etc.), was the single question leveled at him at a meeting of the American Revolution Round Table a few years back. "The hour was late," he writes, "my answer brief: Jefferson for the eighteenth century, Hamilton for more modern times." He capably defends his judgment in this well-written life of Hamilton (1755-1804), who mixed Clintonesque appetites for pleasure and policy-wonking while busily putting the new republic’s economy on a sound footing. Hamilton’s life was wreathed in legend even in his time; more or less adopted by George Washington, he also had a talent for acquiring powerful enemies who made every effort to discredit the young man as a bastard, a closet royalist, and an enemy of democracy. Randall defends his subject on all counts; to be sure, he notes, Hamilton’s parents were not technically married, but "they lived as husband and wife for fifteen years," which was good enough in the eyes of English common law; to be sure, he carried himself with the air of an aristocrat, but Hamilton was no fan of the Hanoverian kings, and if he showed unusual clemency to captured Loyalists, he remained a devoted soldier of the Continental Army all the same, ardently espousing the cause of liberty. Unlike more idealistic revolutionaries, however, Hamilton believed that the chief role of government was to subdue the passions of the people, who "areinherently corrupted by lust for power and greed for property," which put him square up against the Jeffersonian camp and, in time, in the sights of Aaron Burr’s pistol. But before he fell, Hamilton crafted several institutions--among them the national bank and the germ of the IRS--that prove him a modern man indeed, for better or worse.
A sturdy and readable life, in company with Randall’s other portraits of the Revolutionary generation.