Nor was Hamilton an innocuous victim of his opponents’ slicker press management. Hamilton’s problem, as Chernow perceives it, was not a sleekit propensity to conspire, but the opposite: an impulsive and reckless frankness that verged on “a genius for the self-inflicted wound”. Notwithstanding its long afterlife, the caricature of the sinister un-American plotter successfully peddled in Jeffersonian propaganda is a travesty. Instead, “the proponent of such devilish contrivances as banks, factories and stock exchanges” lurks in the recesses of the American memory as the distant godfather of what became Wall Street and the military-industrial complex. His reputation has long suffered by comparison with his contemporary and rival, Thomas Jefferson, who articulated an influential language of virtue one which continues to inform America’s self-image of butter-wouldn’t-melt innocence.Īs Chernow notes: “If Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton established the prose of American statecraft.” This is something for which he has received little thanks. Hamilton did champion a strong executive and a professional military, but his attempts to equip the fragile new republic for the harsh realities of competitive inter-state relations have earned him only obloquy. Hamilton will open in London next year, under the auspices of the impresario Cameron Mackintosh and, as a taster, Chernow’s biography is being published for the first time in the UK.Ĭhernow disentangles Hamilton’s life from the enduring political legend concocted by his opponents, who demonised him as a “closet monarchist” and wannabe Caesar. The musical celebrates the multicultural United States of today as much as the Anglo-dominated US of Hamilton’s time, with black and Hispanic actors playing the parts of the Founding Fathers.

Since then, Chernow’s erudite biography has inspired a theatrical sensation, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop musical Hamilton, which started its Broadway run in 2015, and received 16 Tony nominations in 2016, scooping 11. In 2004 Ron Chernow, a journalist and biographer specialising in financial history, first published this book, a mammoth work of research that charted the course of Hamilton’s dazzling career and the dark controversies that accompanied it.

A lexander Hamilton, one of the late 18th-century Founding Fathers of the United States and its first treasury secretary, has enjoyed only limited name recognition in the UK.

Chernow biography