I finished Ron Chernow’s definitive biography of Alexander Hamilton this month. It is easy to see how Lin-Manuel Miranda was inspired to write a musical about this overlooked “founding father without a father.” His life is truly operatic. I could envision the scenes as I read the seven hundred-plus pages. Of course, I had already listened to Miranda’s music dozens of times and seen the stage production on TV once, so my logic is circular: The story is operatic because I had already seen the opera! Still, I made note of every line in the book that reminded me of lyrics in the musical. It became a fun game, which I play out for you in what follows. Miranda wrote an awful lot of music for this complex drama. As I listen to it post-Chernow biography, I catch so much more both of historical detail and dramatic meaning in the lyrics. Below, I have examined “just” twenty songs for their connections with Chernow’s text.
The first number grabs the listener’s attention right away:
How does a bastard, orphan,
Son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean, by providence
Impoverished, in squalor
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?
The driving music grabs our emotions. But Miranda also uses this lengthy rap to fill in the backstory of Hamilton’s early life on Nevis, West Indies, that he read in Chernow:
Then a hurricane came, and devastation reigned
Our man saw his future drip, dripping down the drain
Put a pencil to his temple, connected it to his brain
And he wrote his first refrain, a testament to his pain
Well, the word got around, they said, this kid is insane, man
Took up a collection just to send him to the mainland
Get your education, don’t forget from whence you came
And the world is gonna know your name
What’s your name, man?
Alexander Hamilton
Surviving one of the worst hurricanes of the era, Hamilton was inspired to write a “melodramatic” account to his deadbeat father, who probably lived further south in the Windward Islands. The letter, full of “bombastic excesses” enabled by assiduous self-education, found its way into public circulation and earned the seventeen-year-old author local notoriety. Local businessmen took up a subscription fund to send Hamilton to North America for an education. As Chernow writes, “Hamilton did not know it, but he had just written his way out of poverty.” [36-37] The story, easy to miss in the rapid flow of the song’s lyrics, is more than a mere interesting anecdote. It underscores the role of contingency in history. No hurricane; no letter. No letter; no Constitution. Miranda underscores this importance by giving it it’s one song, “Hurricane,” which reemphasized this past in the context of the political whirlwind that surrounded him in the late 1790s.
“And me, I’m the damn fool that shot him”
This memorable line, set at the end of the musical’s opening number, finds corroboration in Chernow’s text, if indirectly. Burr’s political career was already on the rocks when he and Hamilton dueled at Weehawken. Indeed, Chernow finds a clear cause and effect between the two. Burr had become so desperate, he allowed his usual “patrician hauteur” to be overcome by what might have been, according to Chernow, a murderous outburst. [192] (And this is examined with appropriate ambiguity and subtle implication in the lyrics of the second act’s “The World Was Wide Enough.”) Whatever the truth, New Yorkers blamed Burr. Their love for Hamilton, the city’s undisputed founding father, was instantly rekindled and burned more brightly in their grief. Burr became a wanted man. As Chernow writes, “Thus, Hamilton triumphed posthumously over Burr, converting the latter’s victory at Weehawken into his political coup de grace.” [716] Chernow follows Burr to his end, three decades later, adding, “Burr never lost his sense of humor about having killed Hamilton and made facetious references to ‘my friend Hamilton, whom I shot.” [721, italics mine]
The rivalry with Aaron Burr is the most powerful driving force of plot and character development. (As I listen more closely to lyrics in the less catchy songs, I find so much in that Miranda weaves into this dramatic relationship.) It starts innocuously enough when the two meet in scene 2. Burr says,
While we’re talking
Let me offer you some free advice
Talk less
What?
Smile more
Memorable line and one that has its genesis in Chernow’s text. In his extended comparison of the two rivals, Chernow says “Hamilton was outspoken to a fault, while Burr was a man of ingrained secrecy.” [192] Later: “For Hamilton, unable to govern his tongue or his pen, his habit of self-exposure eventually placed him at the mercy of the tightly controlled Jefferson.” [320] Later still, Chernow cites Hamilton’s advice to his son, a life lesson he might have wished to address to his younger self: “A prudent silence will frequently be taken for wisdom and a sentence or two cautiously thrown in will sometimes gain the palm of knowledge, while a man well informed but indiscreet and unreserved will not uncommonly talk himself out of all consideration and weight.” [692] Talk less; smile more.
Whenever I listen to the soundtrack, I can’t help rapping along to the chorus of this song, as if in response to a challenge issued:
Hey yo, I’m just like my country
I’m young, scrappy and hungry
And I’m not throwin’ away my shot
I seldom meet the challenge. I can’t keep my tongue from tripping up on those five words in the second line. Memorable words, too, especially that middle modifier, which Miranda might well have lifted from Chernow’s text. The context is an extended newspaper debate between the twenty-year-old college student (alias not given by Chernow, or else I missed it) and a fusty Anglican rector (alias “A Westchester Farmer”). In his “The Farmer Refuted” response, Hamilton apparently perceived–two months before a revolutionary shot had been fired–crucial tactics in the coming conflict: “It will be better policy to harass and exhaust soldiery by frequent skirmishes and incursions than to take open field with them.” In Chernow’s words, “The twenty-year-old student, anticipated the scrappy, opportunistic military strategy that would defeat the British.” [61, italics mine]
But the refrain has a significance, I’m embarrassed to say, I did not appreciate until I reached the final chapters of Chernow’s book:
I am not throwin’ away my shot
I sensed something curious in the phrasing, which I probably attributed to some kind of hip-hop locution. But it was not that. The phrasing is a delightful kind of linguistic foreshadowing. In the tragedy at Weehawken, as described by Chernow, Hamilton will make a fateful decision to “throw away his shot–that is, purposely miss his opponent.” [690, 715]
One of the appealing aspects of Miranda’s musical is his effort to write in the overlooked players in our history. The Schuyler sisters, one or more, feature in four numbers, plus several more with Hamilton and others. In this, their introductory ensemble number, Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy (“work, work”) thrill with these lines:
Look around, look around at how
Lucky we are to be alive right now!
History is happening in Manhattan and we just happen to be
In the greatest city in the world!
In the greatest city in the world!
In fact, they lived in Albany with their father, General Philip Schuyler. Hamilton made their acquaintance there in 1777 while serving as envoy from Washington to General Gates at Saratoga. But he didn’t fall for Eliza until 1780 when she was envoy from her father to Washington in Morristown, New Jersey. He fell hard: “Hamilton is a gone man,” wrote one of his fellow aides. Chernow makes no mention of the Schuyler sisters “going downtown and slummin’ it with the poor,” as much as Miranda might wish to burnish their hip-hop bona fides for today’s Broadway fans.
Any hope of success is fleeting
How can I keep leading when the people I’m leading keep retreating?
What Washington actually said was: “Are these the men with whom I am to defend America?” [80]
If your mind wanders during this number, it will be brought sharply to attention with the final words, fortissimo, of this line sung by Burr and Hamilton:
We’re reliable with the
Ladies
Biographers don’t need to work hard to corroborate Burr and Hamilton’s reputations as ladies men. Culling from the then aide-de-camp’s wartime letters (he had time and opportunity for liaisons?), Chernow says, “Hamilton was girl crazy and brimming with libido.” Even in adulthood, Chernow avers, “He tended to grow flirtatious, almost giddy, with women.” [93] If Hamilton’s letters show a man enamored of women, Burr’s, with “racy asides about his sexual escapades,” implicate a womanizer.[192] Chernow refers to some of these escapades, but the Hamilton is subject of the biography, as he is the protagonist of the musical.
No stress, my love for you is never in doubt
We’ll get a little place in Harlem and we’ll figure it out
I always heard this couplet as a fun little anachronism. But the chronology inverted was much narrower than I had thought. Hamilton and Eliza did build a home “near the corner of present-day West 143rd Street and Convent Avenue.” [642] It was an isolated hilltop, at the time, though it is now in the heart of Harlem. “Our little retreat” he called it, in a letter to Eliza. With others, they called it the Grange. It was nine miles by horseback from his law offices downtown, so he spent half the week away. But, in 1802, this would have been far in the future from during this courtship scene. By then, all they had to “figure out” was how to pay off the $55,000 for the house (which, in fact, was “small for a man of his fame”). [642] The diligent Treasury secretary finally got a little loose with his personal finances.
Confession: The menage-a-trois between Angelica, Eliza, and Alexander in the musical was always a little opaque for me. Yes, I could follow it in the music and the staging, but I never captured meaning from the words. So I looked them up. Angelica sings, among other lines,
But Alexander, I’ll never forget the first time I saw your face
I have never been the same
Intelligent eyes in a hunger-pang frame
And when you said “Hi”, I forgot my dang name
Set my heart aflame, every part aflame
This is not a game
///
It’s a dream and it’s a bit of a dance
A bit of a posture, it’s a bit of a stance
He’s a bit of a flirt, but I’ma give it a chance
The forbidden relationship there, but still only a suggestion. One needs to read Chernow to get the full story. Even then, much can only be inferred or speculated. Chernow has read the letters in which “Angelica expressed open fondness for Hamilton in virtually every [one] that she sent her sister or to Hamilton himself.” In 1794, for example, she wrote her sister, “By my Amiable, you know that I mean your husband, for I love him very much and, if you were as generous as the old Romans, you would lend him to me for a little while.” [467] Miranda must have plucked this attention-grabbing line straight from Chernow and put it in “Helpless,” above, slightly transformed:
Laughin’ at my sister ’cause she wants to form a harem
I’m just sayin’, if you really loved me, you would share him [italics mine]
For his part, “Hamilton always wrote to [Angelica] in a buoyant, flirtatious tone.” [133] If there was more than met the eye, it can only be conjectured, though Chernow found one letter tantalizing in what it might have revealed had it survived in entirety: “This previously overlooked letter is contained in the papers of Hamilton’s son James, who tore off and crossed out other portions, making one wonder whether it contained evidence of the long-rumored affair between Hamilton and his sister-in-law.” [457]
This is my favorite number in the entire show (though there are so many runners-up, so there is no let-down after this point in the show). It captures the heart of the Burr-Hamilton dichotomy, which has nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with democracy vs. aristocracy, yeoman farmers vs. urban stockjobbers, legislative vs executive, weak government vs. strong government. It is one of style: patient and calculating versus restless and eager, secretive and manipulating versus outspoken, guileless, and unrelenting.
Hamilton’s pace is relentless
He wastes no time
///
Hamilton doesn’t hesitate
He exhibits no restraint
He takes and he takes and he takes
And he keeps winning anyway
He changes the game
He plays and he raises the stakes
And if there’s a reason
He seems to thrive when so few survive, then Goddamnit
I’m willing to wait for it (Wait for it)
Miranda’s words once again come from Chernow’s, who writes, “Hamilton was easy to ruffle, whereas Burr hid his feelings behind an enigmatic façade. …Hamilton was outspoken to a fault, while Burr was a man of ingrained secrecy.” [192] (The contrast is hit even more forcefully in the act’s final number, “Non-Stop.” See below.)
In Chernow’s early chapters on Hamilton–his self-education on Nevis, his formal education at King’s College, making a name for himself in the world–the young orphan was “in a constant rush, scarcely pausing for breath….” [46] During the War–drafting and selling the Constitution, establishing the Treasury and a banking system, battling his opponents in the press–Hamilton exhibited an energy and a productivity that his peers (Founding Fathers, all!) could not even approach. Late in his career, he gave this rationale to Eliza: “I cannot make everybody else as rapid as myself.” [52] Burr, while not at all slow-witted, was downright laid-back in his work ethic compared to his eventual nemesis.
Washington becomes Hamilton’s benefactor at the start of the war, but the relationship experiences a transition as victory comes within grasp. Hamilton wants a commission; Washington will not give up his “Right Hand Man.” When the General catches the Aide-de-Camp taking part in an “affair of honor,” he orders Hamilton to meet him inside his tent where he dresses him down, then dismisses him from his service.
The duel itself follows the historical record, as laid out by Chernow:
Lee, do you yield?
You [Laurens] shot him in the side
Yes, he yields
I’m satisfied
Yo, we gotta clear the field
But there was no dramatic confrontation in Chernow, that is in the historical record. Washington did not dismiss Hamilton for misbehavior. Hamilton, for all intents and purposes, resigned, and “Washington reluctantly honored” it. The young aide was simply unwilling to wield a pen any longer. He yearned to take up arms. Writing to his father-in-law Philip Schuyler, he was probably less than honest about the martial motivation for his decision. He chose to emphasize an interpersonal falling out which must have contained truth but feels overwrought: “For three years past, I have felt no friendship for him and have professed none. The truth is our own dispositions are the opposite of each other….” And to James McHenry, “The great man and I have come to an open rupture….” For his part, says Chernow, “Washington remained unwaveringly loyal toward Hamilton.” [152-153]
Dramatically, Miranda’s rendition works much better, and it is still in the main faithful to the facts.
“Yorktown (The Shot Heard Round the World)”
The most rousing song in the entire show marks the end of the war–but not the end of the act, as I had first anticipated. Before it gets into full driving mode, Lafayette and Hamilton, now a colonel, meet center stage.
[Hamilton:] How you say, no sweat
We’re finally on the field
We’ve had quite a run
[Lafayette:] Immigrants
[Both:] We get the job done
The final line is punctuated with a fist-pump for the ages and a lusty cheer from the politically liberal audience. It’s a feel-good line (and uncontestably true on its face), yet Chernow’s full-life depiction of Hamilton allows regret and even disgust to mar the good feeling.
“No immigrant in American history has ever made a larger contribution than Alexander Hamilton,” says Chernow, midway through the book. [406] For many years, Hamilton apparently did view himself as an immigrant and his story a testament to the benefits of immigration. Thus, during the Constitutional Convention, he argued that “the advantage of encouraging foreigners is obvious….” [238] Unfortunately, under attack and out of power later in his career, desperate to preserve the Constitution and the young government against potential enemies, he stooped to an ugly xenophobia.
In 1794, an Irish-America government official, William Findley, was appalled when Hamilton “expressed much surprise and indignation…that Gallatin and I were both foreigners and therefore not too be trusted.” [477] We have multiple examples of Hamilton’s own ugly words on the subject, too. During the debate over the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, he wrote, “My opinion is that the mass [of allegedly seditious aliens] ought to be obliged to leave the country.” [572] A year later he asked rhetorically, “Why are they [renegade aliens] not sent away?” [600] After the Jeffersonians took power in 1800, he inveighed against “the influx of foreigners” who would “change and corrupt the national spirit.” Still, harping on the Swiss-born Albert Gallatin who then held his former position at Treasury, he asked, “Who rules the councils of our own ill-fated, happy country? “A foreigner!” [658] The fist-pump with Lafayette makes a better image to remember Hamilton by, but it is, alas, undercut by the evidence.
Many of the act’s themes, musical and otherwise, are reprised in the finale, which does double duty by moving the plot forward through the Constitutional Convention and Hamilton’s appointment as Treasury secretary. The most important theme is, again, Hamilton’s prodigious productivity, which foretells both his rise and his fall.
Why do you assume you’re the smartest in the room? [Repeat]
Soon that attitude may be your doom!
Why do you write like you’re running out of time?
Write day and night like you’re running out of time?
Every day you fight, like you’re running out of time
Keep on fighting, in the meantime-
(Non-stop!)
Meanwhile, Burr is content to “wait for it” behind an “enigmatic façade.”
[Hamilton:] Burr, we studied and we fought and we killed
For the notion of a nation we now get to build
For once in your life, take a stand with pride
I don’t understand how you stand to the side
[Burr:] I’ll keep all my plans close to my chest
But the line that cuts through in this lengthy number occurs in the discussion of The Federalist. Miranda is somehow able to make a solitary endeavor–the writing of a political tract–dramatic. Once again, the seeds to Miranda’s song can be found in Chernow, who writes, “The Federalist Papers ran to eighty-five essays, with fifty-one attributed to Hamilton, twenty-nine to Madison, and only five to Jay.” [248] Miranda swaps the order for a more dramatic result:
The plan was to write a total of 25 essays
The work divided evenly among the three men
In the end, they wrote 85 essays
In the span of six months
John Jay got sick after writing five
James Madison wrote 29
Hamilton wrote the other 51
The number on the page does not convey the drama with which it is recited from the stage. Hamilton really did work non-stop.
ACT II
The second act begins, after a brief reprise of the first act’s opening number and some necessary backstory, with a foppish Thomas Jefferson strutting around stage, singing “What did I miss?”
You haven’t met him yet, you haven’t had the chance
‘Cause he’s been kickin’ ass as the ambassador to France
///
I’ve been in Paris meeting lots of different ladies
I guess I basically missed the late eighties
The words say less than the strutting: Jefferson is a dandy. That is Chernow’s view, for the most part. He writes: “Jefferson fancied himself a mere child of nature, a simple, unaffected man, rather than what he really was: a grandee, a gourmet, a hedonist, and a clever, ambitious politician.” [313-314]
Chernow provides eight pages of backstory as he brings Jefferson into his story, just as Miranda gives him a song to mark his entrance into his play. The ambassador to France returned to an America he helped set free with his pen but was now being governed by a constitution he had contributed not a word to. As he made his way to New York, the seat of the new government, Chernow writes, “Jefferson must have regretted having arrived so late” [319]–words that surely inspired a song titled, “What Did I Miss?”
We have seen that Hamilton “loved the ladies and had a high libido.” [536] Even so his “sordid affair with a married woman named Maria Reynolds,” in Chernow’s words, is “one of history’s most mystifying cases of bad judgment.” [362] For the historian trying to account for Hamilton’s behavior, “his moral laxity and absurd willingness to risk exposure…remain a baffling conundrum.” [409] How much more so for the libretticist, attempting to render the inexplicable explicable in a single song. Miranda does a good job showing how he was a victim, in roughly equal parts, of entrapment and of his own weakness. The man who forced through his political agenda on sheer will power lacked the gumption to say no to a sordid affair. Miranda has even set this song up with Eliza’s number from the first act:
Lord, show me how to say no to this
I don’t know how to say
No to this
Oh my god, she looks so helpless
And her body’s saying, “hell yes”
This affair was sordid not merely for the sexual titillation, nor even for the callousness with which Hamilton treated his supportive–and, by all accounts, beautiful–wife. The affair is disturbing for Hamilton’s willful, entitled hubris. At a time when polarized, gotcha politics was even more cut-thoat than our own, when the Republican press would publish any scandalous bit of gossip that might bring down the all-powerful (in their eyes) Treasury Secretary, Hamilton had the audacity to write a fellow Federalist: “I pledge myself to you and to every friend of mine that the strictest scrutiny into every part of my conduct, whether as a private citizen or as a public officer, can only serve to establish the perfect purity of it.” [412] For a man who otherwise lived by strictest principle, Hamilton was simply lying to himself.
The title of this song provides one of the show’s catchiest, most memorable refrains. The room in question is in Jefferson’s lodgings on Maiden Lane, New York City. The historic occasion is June 20, 1790. A consequential bargain was struck over dinner between Hamilton and Jefferson and Madison, with “perhaps one or two others in attendance.” [318]
No one else was in the room where it happened
The room where it happened
The deal gave Hamilton the Congressional votes for the assumption of state debts by the federal government, while the two Virginians gained a permanent site for the nation’s capital on the Potomac, across from their home state. Chernow calls it “perhaps the most celebrated meal in American history.” Miranda gets full dramatic power from the event by including Burr–who was not in the room either in fact or in the musical–in the song’s introduction and later verses. The New York attorney general and soon-to-be senator asks the Treasury Secretary asks,
And how you gonna get your debt plan through?
To which Hamilton responds:
I guess I’m gonna have to finally listen to you.
Really?
Talk less, smile more
Haha!
Do whatever it takes to get my plan on the congress floor
Miranda is being true to the history as presented in Chernow’s book. Hamilton was almost diametrically opposed to Burr in his approach to politics. He wore everything his sleeve, never left any doubt about where he stood, while Burr kept his plans opportunistically close to the vest, ready to change them when the political winds shifted. In the summer of 1790, Hamilton resorted to something he was otherwise almost constitutionally unable to do: compromise. He was willing to wage his battle, Burr-like, behind closed doors, rather than flamboyantly and openly with his pen. Chernow makes clear that Hamilton got the better of the bargain. By assuming the war debts of the states, Hamilton secured the preeminence of the federal government going forward. Jefferson and Madison let the Hamiltonian horse out of the barn; it would never find its way back in. All for a capital city that wasn’t New York or Philadelphia.
No one really knows how the game is played
The art of the trade
How the sausage gets made
We just assume that it happens
But no one else is in the room where it happens
In most iterations of the chorus, the verb is in the past tense. The debt-assumption/Potomac-capital compromise was a singular event. But here, as in the title, Miranda uses the present tense, transforming the song’s subject to the more generalized art of political deal-making: smoke-filled rooms and legislative sausage-making. It also moves to present tense when Burr reappears again at the end of the song. He seems to speak not merely for himself but for so many other politicos who have come after:
What do you want Burr? (What do you want Burr?)
If you stand for nothing then what’ll you fall for? (What do you want Burr?)
I, I wanna be in the room where it happens
The room where it happens
It must be nice, it must be nice
To have Washington on your side
The music, as much as the words, conveys callow resentment unbefitting our conception of the Founding Fathers. Yet the truth is not far from Miranda’s caricature. Hamilton was Washington’s protégé from the war years, when the general “often referred to Hamilton as ‘my boy.'” [87] After the war, the two grew closer with every passing year. Their understanding of the world and of the needs of their young country grew ever more in sync; they trusted each other instinctively. Hamilton’s enemies believed his rise had to do with his bewitching of the great general. One partisan of Hamilton’s adversary, New York Governor George Clinton, sneered, “I have also known an upstart attorney palm himself upon a great and good man for a youth of extraordinary genius and under a shadow of patronage make himself at once known and respected….” [237] In other words, it must be nice to have Washington in your pocket.
Jefferson and Madison were more concerned with the power that flowed in the other direction, from Hamilton to Washington. As Chernow writes, “It petrified Jefferson and Madison that the one man in America willing and able to lead the country in precisely the wrong direction was Washington’s right-hand man.” [389] As the two Republican leaders fought Hamilton’s agenda, Washington became yet more convinced of his own stance on the issues–and it wasn’t with his fellow Virginians. He became “increasingly disillusioned with both Jefferson and Madison” [499], writes Chernow, and correspondingly fond of Hamilton. By the end of his second term, “Washington no longer felt obliged to restrain his affection for his protégé.” [505] The two became equals and friends in the last years of his life. Yet Chernow also stresses Washington’s independence of mind. He documents every instance in which the president was not been merely a rubber stamp for Hamiltonian policies, as the Jeffersonians believed him to be.
Strange name for a song. It refers to the document Hamilton produced to explain his actions in the Reynolds scandal. In fact, he was originally accused of unethical business dealings with James, which accounted for by admitting his adulterous affair with Maria. As the scandal-mongering publisher James Callender explained, Hamilton’s defense rested on a logical fallacy: “I am a rake, therefore I am not a swindler.”
The charge against me is a connection
With one James Reynolds
For purposes of improper speculation
My real crime is an amorous
Connection with his wife
For a considerable time
With his knowing consent
These lines and the two below were Hamilton’s exact words from the Pamphlet and are also recited by his character from the stage:
I had frequent meetings with her
Most of them at my own house
“The Reynolds Pamphlet” is an astounding document, possibly unique in American history, an extensive mea culpa (thirty-seven pages, plus fifty-eight more of appendices) written and published for public consumption. Chernow provides some of his choicest observations in his section on the Pamphlet.
- “Hamilton now reverted to lifelong practice: he would drown his accusers with words.”
- “Hamilton’s strategy was simple: he was prepared to sacrifice his private reputation to preserve his public honor.”
- “Hamilton insisted in telling the story in almost picaresque detail.”
- “Hamilton was incapable of a wise silence.” [“Talk less; smile more.”]
He says that Hamilton’s Pamphlet was equal parts self-righteous indignation and self-flagellation.
Not confined to the sources, Miranda imagines an encounter with Angelica that allows him to make a more modern feminist critique of Hamilton’s adultery.
[Hamilton:] Angelica, thank God, someone
Who understand what I’m
Struggling here to do
[Angelica:] I’m not here for you
[Company:] Ooooh!
[Angelica:] I know my sister like I know my own mind
You will never find anyone as
Trusting or as kind
I love my sister more than anything in this life
I will choose her happiness over mine every time
Put what we had aside
I’m standing at her side
You could never be satisfied
God, I hope you’re satisfied
The play is about Hamilton. It’s always about the man, and how the man feels. Angelica’s words are an unexpected slap in the face–unexpected but deserved. The drama intensifies, and the sour contrast with the first act number is artfully established with the disdainful double use of “satisfied.”
One memorable line is more heavily documented than any other in the show. In the climax of this song, Hamilton drops this line like a bomb in a crowded market:
Thomas Jefferson has beliefs; Burr has none.
The supporting citations from Chernow’s biography are almost too numerous to mention.
- “Burr’s principle quality as a politician: he was a chameleon who evaded clear-cut positions. …Burr was an agile opportunist who maneuvered for advantage…. Hamilton asked rhetorically about Burr, “Is it a recommendation to have no theory? Can a man be a systematic or able statesman who has none?” [192]
- Hamilton, during the 1792 vice-presidential campaign: “I fear the other gentleman [Burr] is unprincipled both a public and private man. ….In fact, I take it he is for or against nothing but as it suits his interest or ambition….”
- With Chernow’s assessment: “But if Jefferson was a man of fanatical principles, he had principles all the same–which Hamilton could forgive. Burr’s abiding sin was a total lack of principles, which Hamilton could not forgive.” [422]
- Hamilton, during the 1800 campaign: “As to Burr,…his public principles have no other spring or aim than his own aggrandizement.” [632]
- The American Citizen, after the fateful duel at Weehawken, on the antipathy between the two duellers: “General Hamilton did not oppose Mr. Burr because he was a democrat…but because HE HAD NO PRINCIPLE, either in morals or in politics.” [674]
The words were there for the picking, and Miranda made them stand out memorably.
Even more interesting is the symmetry that Miranda works in with the first act’s “Mr. Burr, Sir”:
[Hamilton:] Is there anything you wouldn’t do?
[Burr:] No. I’m chasing what I want
And you know what?
[Hamilton:] What?
[Burr:] I learned that from you
The striking part of this song is in its epistolary nature, the repeated “Your Obedient Servant” with, “A dot Burr” and “A dot Ham.,” the juxtaposition of dignified formality and deadly purpose. Miranda did not get these words from Chernow. He must have gone directly to the sources. His words capture the eighteenth century feel, even if they were not the exact ones used by the duelists.
For his part, Chernow provides brief snippets from their epistolary exchange in the spring/summer of 1804, including the line he identifies as Burr’s direct challenge to a duel: “Your letter has furnished me with new reasons for requiring a definite reply.” [686] Not direct to our twenty-first century eyes and ears, perhaps, but to Hamilton it would have been readily understood. His own words had done everything to bring the confrontation to that point.
Chernow believes Hamilton could have appeased Burr by “offering a bland statement of apology or regret. Instead, he adopted the slightly irritated tone of a busy man being unjustly harassed [in a] niggling and hairsplitting style….” Miranda’s lyrics capture both tone and substance of one of Hamilton’s letters:
Even if I said what you think I said
You would need to cite a more specific grievance
Here’s an itemized list of thirty years of disagreements
The title comes from Aaron Burr’s probably apocryphal words uttered late in life: “Had I read [Laurence] Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.” [722] The words come at the end of the song, repeated as the last two lines, almost as an afterthought, just a they would have been in real life. But the rest of the “song” (a reprise from the duel rap in act one) enacts the entire duel scene: prelude, event, and aftermath. Again, Miranda is able to convey many factual details through Burr’s rapped monologue. But nothing is so affecting as Hamilton’s spoken soliloquy, bullet frozen midair in its deadly trajectory:
Legacy. What is a legacy?
It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see
I wrote some notes at the
Beginning of a song someone will sing for me
America, you great unfinished symphony,
You sent for me.
You let me make a difference.
A place where even orphan immigrants can leave
Their fingerprints and rise up
I’m running out of time, I’m running and
My time’s up.
Wise up. Eyes up.
The Burr-Hamilton friendship/rivalry/conflict/crux-of-the-play reaches its climax, literally. With Hamilton dead on the field, Burr gets the last word, no less affecting than Hamilton’s own:
Death doesn’t discriminate
Between the sinners and the saints,
It takes and it takes and it takes
History obliterates
In every picture it paints
It paints me and all my mistakes
We recall that Burr has been no less neglected by History than Hamilton. (Probably more so and with good reason, though he did get a bestselling, critically-acclaimed novel a full forty years before Hamilton got his smash-hit musical.) But he had no more control over his fatal flaws as Hamilton did over his singular gifts (and fatal flaws, too).
I survived, but I paid for it.
Burr satisfied his thirst for vengeance; at the same time, he destroyed any hope for the political triumph he so desperately desired.
“Best of Wives and Best of Women”
In this touching scene–which never actually happened–Eliza coaxes her husband back to bed in what we, the audience, know to be his final night with her. But Hamilton is still writing–“like [he’s] running out of time”–a good-bye letter should he fall in the next day’s duel. In fact, he wrote the letter in his offices downtown. The song’s lyrics give us none of the substance of the letter, only its closing. It is the song’s final line, which is also its title:
Best of wives and best of women
Chernow quotes the letter in full. In the second paragraph the husband explains his rash actions: “If it had been possible for me to avoid the interview, my love for you and my precious children would have been alone a decisive motive. But it was not possible without sacrifices which would have rendered me unworthy of your esteem.” In fact, Chernow shows that “sacrifices” to his honor were readily available along the way. But we have learned from both Chernow and Miranda that Hamilton was outspoken to a fault.
“Why do you always say what you believe?” [“Non-Stop”]
Six years earlier, when had left government to earn more money as an attorney, he still expected to be influential in the new Adams administration. Instead he was persona non grata. Though their political views were similar, their personal styles were incompatible. Adams couldn’t stand him. Hamilton learned what it meant to be out of power and to appreciate time with his family. He began closing his letters, “Adieu best of wives and best of mothers.” [583]
“Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?”
The final number in Miranda’s musical gives Eliza center stage, just as Chernow’s epilogue does in his biography. Both recount Eliza’s accomplishments in the fifty-plus years she lived after Hamilton’s death: founding an orphanage society, fundraising for the Washington Monument, seeing that her late husband’s story got told. She appointed their fourth son, John Church Hamilton, to gather and edit his father’s papers and produce a biographical volume for posterity. He didn’t complete the project until seven years after Eliza’s death.
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?
The song’s power resides in its focus on the meta-narrative, its switch from history to historiography, the big question that it asks: Why is it that Alexander Hamilton is so little celebrated among our Founding Fathers when his contributions are so manifestly central to the country we have become? As Treasury secretary of the United States’ first executive administration, Hamilton was the single-most important force behind “the creation of a sound federal government with a central bank, a funded debt, a high credit rating, a tax system, a customs service, a coast guard, a navy, and many other institutions.” [628] As Chernow says, “If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.” [ca 400]
Chernow cites four superlative encomia from contemporaries. The Reverend John Mason retrospectively called him “the greatest statesman of the western world, perhaps the greatest man of the age.” [714] Ambassador Talleyrand of France put Hamilton among the three greatest contemporary statesmen, along with Napoleon and Whig MP Charles James Fox. [466] No less an eminence than John Marshall, after reading the complete papers of George Washington, declared Hamilton “the greatest man (or one of the greatest men) that had ever appeared in the United States.” [648] Even a staunch enemy, Ambrose Spencer, acknowledged him as “the greatest man this country has produced…infinitely [Senator Daniel] Webster’s superior” in rhetorical ability. [670]
So why the neglect?
Perhaps it was his ignominious death at Weehawken.
How you remember me?
What if this bullet is my legacy? [“The World Was Wide Enough”]
But Hamilton was already out of political favor by 1804. His “paternalistic view of politics” had already gone out of fashion, according to Chernow. [657] The odds of resurrecting his career were slight. It is almost certain he would have aged poorly had he lived as long as Jefferson and Adams, who, themselves, became dinosaurs in proto-Jacksonian America. In a letter to good friend Gouvernor Morris, Hamilton was already despairing in 1802, “Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me.” [658] His early, tragic death should, if anything, have helped his standing in historical memory. As Will Rogers quipped more than a century later: “This thing of being a hero, about the main thing to do is to know when to die. Prolonged life has ruined more men than it ever made.”
A better explanation for Hamilton’s (previous) obscurity is that the Republican critique stuck. Fair or not–and Chernow argues repeatedly that it was mostly not–their critique was aided by being, we might say today, on the “right side of history.” America would become more democratic. Andrew Jackson would open the White House doors to the unwashed masses. Log cabin birth would become a political asset. Alexander Hamilton would have welcomed none of this. Republican charges of monarchy and aristocracy might have been off the mark, but Hamilton would never have become a Jacksonian democrat. Moreover, his behavior in the final years of the Adams administration was unmistakably paranoid and regrettably authoritarian.
His judgment became increasingly erratic. In the heat of the 1800 election, Hamilton engaged in “the most high-handed and undemocratic act of his career,” according to Chernow. [609] In a work of shenanigans we might more readily associate with the 2020 election, Hamilton conspired to change electoral rules mid-stream. (The baldly partisan scheme for choosing electors had already been rejected by Federalists when it was attempted by the Republicans in the previous cycle.) Normally a paragon of incisive reasoning, Hamilton resorted to the argument of a political hack: “In times like these in which we live, it will not do to be overscrupulous. It is easy to sacrifice the substantial interests of society by a strict adherence to ordinary rules.” His interlocutor, New York Governor John Jay, wisely ignored the appeal, and Jefferson received the state’s full slate of electors.
Alexander Hamilton was, in Miranda’s memorable words, “a bastard, orphan, son of a whore/and a Scotsman,” as well as a man who “got a lot farther by working a lot harder/By being a lot smarter/By being a self-starter.” He was both exceptional and all too human. No wonder Miranda couldn’t resist making him the subject of a Broadway musical, to all of our benefit.
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?
Alexander Hamilton lived life like he was “running out of time,” died succumbing to the kind of unruly passion he spent his professional career opposing, and–better late than never–benefitted from a top-notch biographer and Broadway composer to tell his story–not just for Americans but for the world.
Source:
Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: Penguin Random House, 2004.
https://hamiltonmusical.fandom.com/wiki/Broadway_Cast_Recording
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