Alexander Hamilton, American

Michael R. Beschloss The New York Times Book Review A dramatic, compact biography that fairly gallops through Hamilton´s picaresque life. Alexander Hamilton, American brilliantly succeeds in arguing that Hamilton deserves greater credit than he usually gets for his brainpower, idealism, and vision.

Auteur

Richard Brookhiser is an American journalist, biographer and historian. He is a senior editor at National Review.

Texte du rabat

The author of the highly acclaimed "Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington" brings his remarkable writing and acute intelligence to this fascinating portrait of America's only self-made founding father, Alexander Hamilton. of photos.

Résumé
Alexander Hamilton is one of the least understood, most important, and most impassioned and inspiring of the founding fathers. At last Hamilton has found a modern biographer who can bring him to full-blooded life; Richard Brookhiser. In these pages, Alexander Hamilton sheds his skewed image as the "bastard brat of a Scotch peddler," sex scandal survivor, and notoriously doomed dueling partner of Aaron Burr. Examined up close, throughout his meteoric and ever-fascinating (if tragically brief) life, Hamilton can at last be seen as one of the most crucial of the founders. Here, thanks to Brookhiser's accustomed wit and grace, this quintessential American lives again.

Échantillon de lecture
Chapter One

St. Croix/Manhattan

In the late eighteenth century, Bryan Edwards, a Jamaican author, inserted this description into a reference work on the West Indies. "The nights" in summer "are transcendantally beautiful. The clearness of the heavens, the serenity of the air, and the soft tranquility in which Nature reposes contribute to harmonize the mind, and produce the most calm and delightful sensations. The moon too in these climates displays far greater radiance than in Europe: the smallest print is legible by her light; and in the moon´s absence her function is not ill-supplied by the brightness of the milky-way, and that glorious planet Venus, which appears here like a little moon...cast[ing] a shade from trees."

When Alexander Hamilton was born, the Caribbean was as enchanting as it is now. It was also richer, thanks to sugar. At the end of the Seven Years´ War in 1763, when the British victors considered restoring some of their conquests to France, they seriously debated whether to return Canada, or the island of Guadeloupe. One sugar island weighed evenly in the balance with half of North America. Some West Indian planters made fortunes. They lived high in the islands, and when they returned to the old country. "Such eating and drinking I never saw," wrote a visitor to Jamaica. "Such loads of all sorts of high, rich and seasoned things and really gallons of wine and mixed liquors. They eat a late breakfast as if they had never eaten before. It is as disgusting as it is astonishing." "There was no such thing as a [seat in Parliament] to be had now," an English lord wrote in 1767; rich West Indians "had secured them all at the rate of 3,000 pounds at least, but many at four thousand pounds, and two or three that he knew at five thousand pounds".

If war, disease, and hurricanes spared them, sugar planters could do well indeed. But there was little else to do in the West Indies. The sugar islands were floating agricultural factories, with few small farms, and small service populations in their ports. When young George Washington of Virginia (hardly an egalitarian society) took a trip to Barbados in 1751, he was struck by the material disparity he saw there. "There are few who may be called middling people. They are either very rich or very poor."

Beneath the poor whites were the slaves. Sugar farming was labor intensive; on plantations, slaves outnumbered their white masters by twenty to one. Their life was harsh. In I755, Denmark decreed that masters in the Danish Virgin Islands could not punish their slaves by mutilating them, or putting them on the rack, though they might shackle and flog them. In spite of this lenience, the slaves of St. Croix planned a revolt in 1759. The free black man who revealed the plot ahead of time committed suicide, after which his body was hung, then burned at the stake. Slaves found riding or walking the streets of Christiansted, the main town, after eight o´clock at night were given 150 lashes at the fort, "at no expense to the owner." Edwards, describing the British island of Nevis as a "beautiful little spot," added that the population was 600 whites and 10,000 blacks: "a disproportion which necessarily converts all such white men as are not exempted by age and decrepitude into a well-regulated militia." In the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, the "well-regulated militia" would be a force for freedom. In the West Indies, it was a force for keeping the labor force in line.

Hamilton, who grew up in Nevis and St. Croix, never wrote a fond word about the Caribbean, and never made the slightest effort to return for a visit as an adult. The prosperity of the West Indies existed chiefly in its balance sheets, and made little use of human capital apart from muscle. With its barren riches and its lack of opportunity, it was a place to leave behind, and a model for what a happy country should avoid.

Hamilton´s early life and the lives of his family were set in the small islands -- the Leeward and the Virgin Islands -- that rim the northeast corner of the Caribbean. Hamilton´s mother, Rachel Faucett, was born on Nevis, but went to St. Croix, a twenty-hour sail with the trade winds, as a teenager. She followed one of her sisters, who had married a St. Croix planter named James Lytton. About 1745, Rachel married another planter, John Lavien, and a year later she bore him a son. Like many whites in the Caribbean, the families were a mix of nationalities, who had settled without regard to the islands´ formal owners: the Faucetts were Huguenots and the Lyttons English; Lavien was probably German.

Hamilton family tradition held that Rachel had "witnessed...family quarrels" as a gift. If so, she found a new set of them in her marriage to Lavien. They settled on a cotton plantation he owned, ironically named Contentment, but in 1750, he had her jailed in the town fort in Christiansted -- the same place where curfew-breaking slaves were lashed -- for refusing to live with him. When she got out, she returned to the British West Indies, where she met James Hamilton.

James Hamilton, the fourth son of a Scottish laird, had come to the Caribbean to make his fortune as a merchant. Fifty years later, Alexander Hamilton wrote a friend that "I have better pretensions than most of those who in this Country plume themselves on Ancestry." This was an unusually defensive tone for him: Hamilton characteristically expected people to endorse his ideas and his actions because he had shown how right they were, not because he had a good pedigree. He went on to admit that his birth was "not free from blemish," for Rachel had two sons with James Hamilton -- James Junior and Alexander -- without getting a divorce from John Lavien.

Illegitimacy may not have had quite the stigma in that century that it acquired under the Victorians in the next, but it was still shameful. A dozen years later, when Benjamin Franklin arranged for his illegitimate son William to be named royal governor of New Jersey, John Adams called it an "Insult to the Morals of America." Rachel and James Senior seem to have tried to avoid the stigma: Alexander believed that his mother had gotten a second marriage, and the records of a christening on the Dutch island of St. Eustatius mention the presence of James Hamilton and "Rachel Hamilton his wife." In the Danish Virgin Islands, however, Rachel was still Rachel Lavien -- until 1759, when John Lavien divorced her for her "ungodly mode of life…