The last time I was in New York City I found myself on 141st Street with a couple hours to kill. I’m embarrassed to admit what I did with my time. I went to the Hamilton Grange, the 200-year-old home of Alexander Hamilton, our first secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton built the place as a country house, but it looks ridiculous now, wedged in on a Harlem side street between an old church and a crummy apartment building. I got to the house in midafternoon, but its sole occupant was a park ranger. I was the first visitor he’d had that day, and he just about begged to give me a tour of the house. Apparently it gets very lonesome in the Hamilton Grange.
Hamilton was born on Nevis, an island in the British West Indies, in either 1755 or 1757. His mother and father were not married. He was orphaned before his teens, but he managed to impress his bosses in the mercantile house where he clerked; in 1772 they sent him to New York City, and he wound up studying at what is now Columbia University. By 1774 he was publishing essays in defense of the First Continental Congress. During the Revolution he was made first a captain of artillery, then an aide to George Washington, who turned out to be a pretty useful patron.
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Arnold A. Rogow’s A Fatal Friendship: Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr spins the same facts in a completely different direction. For Rogow, Hamilton’s jealousy of Burr’s advantaged upbringing grew into an obsessive hatred that forced their duel and Hamilton’s death. But Rogow’s real contribution is in calling Hamilton’s defenders to task. Too often, he argues, they have overlooked evidence that Hamilton provided friends with insider-trading opportunities. Nor have they dug very deeply into Hamilton’s adulteries, he says. For good measure, he speculates that Hamilton was manic-depressive and chronically constipated.
The Hamilton Grange is no match for the Jefferson Memorial, part of the five-point plan for Washington that encompasses the White House, the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Washington Monument. Those who champion Hamilton can’t tolerate the fact that Jefferson—the hypocritical, slave-owning, noncombatant Jefferson—gets the Great Man treatment while Hamilton mostly gets ignored. America’s memorial to Hamilton is the ten-dollar bill: his portrait decorates the front, and the back shows the Treasury Building, with a statue of Hamilton visible at the entrance. But there’s no large monument to Hamilton in Washington; he was a political scientist, a journalist, and one hell of an accountant, but he was never a president or a wartime general.
Of course, the founders of the United States paid no income tax; that innovation wasn’t introduced here until 1862 and didn’t become entrenched until 1913. But Hamilton’s Federalist Party did promote a kind of 18th-century tax-and-spend program, some elements of which were hard to sell in a nation born of a tax revolt. By the late 1790s, John Steele Gordon writes in Hamilton’s Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt, the Federalists had enacted a load of new taxes and “even passed a stamp act similar to the one that had helped lead to the Revolution.” It provoked tax discontent all over again. “As economist John Kenneth Galbraith once famously remarked, while 18th-century Americans objected to taxation without representation, they objected equally to taxation with representation. And the Federalist taxes played a considerable part in the triumph of the Jeffersonians in the election of 1800.”
Hamilton’s Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt by John Steele Gordon, Penguin, $11.95
