Alexander Hamilton, US founding father finally in the spotlight two centuries after his death

James Bryce, the Belfast-born classicist, historian, political scientist, jurist, politician, diplomat, inveterate traveller and mountaineer, was British ambassador to Washington, DC, from 1907 to 1913, and the author of a still much-admired magisterial survey of the United States Constitution, ‘The American Commonwealth’.

Of Alexander Hamilton, Bryce observed in his classic text: “One cannot note the disappearance of this brilliant figure, to Europeans the most interesting in the early history of the Republic, without the remark that his countrymen seem to have never, either in his lifetime or afterwards, duly recognised his splendid gifts.”

As to his brilliance, in another classic, Alistair Cooke’s ‘America’, which made its first appearance in 1973, Cooke, the British broadcaster, described Hamilton as “a very rare type – a precocious intellect that revelled in the worlds of business and politics. At 13 he was running a mercantile business expertly in two languages. It is impossible not to read his boyhood letters without believing you are in the presence of a man of affairs of extraordinary learning and maturity.”

The centrality of Hamilton’s role in the history and politics of late 18th-century America is striking. He served as secretary and aide-de-camp to George Washington (1777–81) and fought at Yorktown in October 1781.

In 1783 he began practising as a lawyer in New York and drafted the report which resulted in the summoning of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 where “for a time he intimidated the debaters with his wealth of ideas, his flashing personality, his precocious knowledge of the history of governments and forcefully argued for the establishment of a strong central government”. He, James Madison and John Jay set out their views in contributions to ‘The Federalist’.

Richard B Morris, the pre-eminent historian of colonial America and American constitutional expert, described their writings as an “incomparable exposition of the Constitution, a classic in political science unsurpassed in both breadth and depth by the product of any later American writer”.

From 1789 to 1795 he was the secretary of treasury and placed the country’s finances on a sound footing. He devised a system of taxation, insisted on payment of the national debt and proposed the creation of the Bank of the United States. George Washington’s first term as president was largely dominated by economic matters in which Hamilton excelled, prompting Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president of the United States, to observe that “we think of Mr Hamilton rather than of president Washington when we look back to the policy of the first administration”.

In 1795 Hamilton resigned from office but remained the leader of the Federalist Party and deeply immersed in the political fray.

His final years were characterised by a growing antipathy towards Aaron Burr whose political ambition he thwarted.

In 1800 when Burr and Thomas Jefferson tied in the electoral college presidential vote, throwing the election to the House of Representatives, Hamilton influenced Federalist congressmen to vote for Jefferson. In 1804 when Burr was campaigning to become governor of New York, Hamilton described Burr as “a dangerous man and one who ought not be trusted with the reins of government”.

Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel and fatally wounded him on July 11 1804. Hamilton died the following day.

In 1805 and 1806 Burr conspired with General James Wilkinson, Jonathan Dayton and others to create an empire independent of the United States in the Mississippi Valley, Mexico and the American west, for which he was indicted for treason in 1807. Although Burr was acquitted on the scarcely impressive grounds that he had not committed overt treasonable acts, this episode tends to suggest that Hamilton’s assessment of Burr was substantially correct.

Hamilton’s vision for America is usually contrasted with that of Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States. Hamilton viewed America’s future as a mercantile, capitalist nation and as its first secretary of treasury he set out to make that vision a reality.

On the other hand, Jefferson, a Virginian slave-owner, subscribed to a highly romanticised vision of America as a rural and agricultural idyll and had no time for the world of trade, industry, stock markets and banks. There can be little doubt as to which politician was looking to the future and which was clinging to the past.

Furthermore, Hamilton was actually an opponent of slavery.

Alexander Hamilton was one of those rare politicians who was not only a profound thinker but a man of action and this is what undoubtedly makes him interesting.

In the 1880s James Bryce’s observation that ‘his countrymen seem to have never, either in his lifetime or afterwards, duly recognised his splendid gifts’ was essentially accurate.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States, would declare that Hamilton was “the most brilliant American statesman who ever lived, possessing the loftiest and keenest intellect of his time”.

Woodrow Wilson quixotically praised Hamilton as “a very great man, but not a great American”.

In 1920 Henry Jones Ford, professor of politics at Princeton, a close associate of Woodrow Wilson (he wrote a campaign biography of Wilson for the 1916 presidential election) and the author of ‘The Scotch-Irish in America’, produced a fairly short but very fine book examining Hamilton’s life and achievements.

More recently, Ron Chernow’s very long best-selling biography of Hamilton, first published in 2004, has magnificently rehabilitated and rescued from relative obscurity the most interesting founding father of the United States.

Chernow’s biography is the inspiration behind Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical which has taken New York by storm, enjoying both critical acclaim and box office success.

Miranda readily concedes that the musical was based on “an insane idea but the story works”. The musical incorporates hip-hop, rhythm and blues, pop music and colour-conscious casting of non-white actors to play the roles of the ‘Founding Fathers’ and other characters. In London the musical has already been greeted with standing ovations and rave reviews.