Summary and Analysis of Alexander Hamilton: Based on the Book by Ron Chernow
30
Summary and Analysis of Alexander Hamilton: Based on the Book by Ron Chernow
30eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.
This short summary and analysis of Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow includes:
- Historical context
- Chapter-by-chapter summaries
- Detailed timeline of key events
- Important quotes
- Fascinating trivia
- Glossary of terms
- Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work
About Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow:
Ron Chernow’s New York Times–bestselling biography of Alexander Hamilton sets the record straight on the often-misunderstood founding father. Beginning with a thoroughly researched investigation of Hamilton’s controversial origins, the book takes an immersive look at the man who authored the Federalist Papers, fought in the Revolutionary War, crafted the nation’s financial system, and served as George Washington’s right-hand man before being killed in an infamous duel with Aaron Burr.
More than a portrait of one man, Alexander Hamilton is the story of America’s birth—and the inspiration for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Broadway musical.
The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504043052 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Worth Books |
| Publication date: | 11/29/2016 |
| Series: | Smart Summaries |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 30 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Worth Books’ smart summaries get straight to the point and provide essential tools to help you be an informed reader in a busy world, whether you’re browsing for new discoveries, managing your to-read list for work or school, or simply deepening your knowledge. Available for fiction and nonfiction titles, these are the book summaries that are worth your time.
Read an Excerpt
Summary and Analysis of Alexander Hamilton
By Ron Chernow
Worth Books
Copyright © 2016 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4305-2
CHAPTER 1
Summary
Chapter One: The Castaways
Alexander Hamilton was born in 1755. He was raised on various islands in the British West Indies, a center of the world sugar trade at the time, but the precise location of his birth remains a mystery. His father, James Hamilton, was the fourth child of a Scottish laird, and his mother, Rachel Faucette Lavien, was from a mixed English and French Huguenot family.
Because his mother was separated from her first husband (who would not grant her a divorce), from a legal and social standpoint, Hamilton is considered "illegitimate," a circumstance that is both a secret source of shame and arguably the major cause of his insatiable drive to succeed. Unique among the founding fathers, his childhood is beset by a nearly unimaginable number of tragedies and financial hardships.
Chapter Two: Hurricane
Despite his tumultuous upbringing, Hamilton is a remarkable student. A chance encounter with Hugh Knox, a fatherly Presbyterian minister who had recently relocated to the island of St. Croix, helps the precocious teenage Hamilton win sponsorship to study in North America. He leaves the island overwhelmed by the belief that he is, at last, fulfilling his destiny.
Chapter Three: The Collegian
After arriving in New York, Hamilton enrolls at the Elizabethtown Academy, a college preparatory school across the river in Elizabethtown (now Elizabeth), New Jersey. His connections in the West Indies put him into contact with members of the area elite, and he integrates himself into New York and New Jersey colonial society with remarkable speed and finesse.
Hamilton enrolls at King's College in lower Manhattan, which is overseen by a stern Tory president named Dr. Myles Cooper. Although New York is a Loyalist stronghold, recent British actions against Massachusetts in response to the Boston Tea Party enrage many people in the city, and Hamilton is quickly sucked in to the bubbling subculture of anti-British activism.
Chapter Four: The Pen and the Sword
By April 1775, the political situation in New York had become explosive. After news of the deadly skirmishes at Lexington and Concord reached the city, newly formed militia groups begin rallying and harassing Loyalists, many of whom flee to England fearing for their lives. Hamilton immediately volunteers for service, but, despite his enthusiastic military participation and fiery rhetoric, he worries that unchecked revolutionary fever could lead right back to the kind of tyranny he is fighting against. He is soon made an artillery captain, and fights a number of major — and agonizingly bloody — battles in and around New York City.
Chapter Five: The Little Lion
All-out war erupts in the colonies. Hamilton demonstrates strategic talent in a number of retreats, and the leader of the fledgling Continental Army, General George Washington, takes notice of the gifted young captain. Washington recruits Hamilton to be one of his aides-de-camp, and Hamilton accepts the position, despite his wish — admitted years later — to be given a senior fighting appointment. Nevertheless, Hamilton predictably flourishes in his administrator role and earns enough of Washington's trust to serve as a largely autonomous representative of the general.
This kicks off a number of feuds, some of which would become lifelong, with various Continental Army military and political leaders unaccustomed to taking orders from a confident twenty-two-year-old.
Chapter Six: A Frenzy of Valor
Due to the unimaginable deprivation and death count at Valley Forge, the winter of 1778 marks the low point of Continental Army morale. In June, its fortunes take a dramatic turn. At the battle of Monmouth, with Washington's steely leadership — and Hamilton's intensity (or perhaps recklessness) — the Army inflicts significant casualties. With assistance from France, American victory slowly came to be seen as less than impossible.
Hamilton and his close friend John Laurens, an antislavery aristocrat from South Carolina, draft a proposal to abolish slavery by giving blacks freedom in exchange for military service. The proposal fails, leading Hamilton to conclude bitterly that, "prejudice and private interest will be antagonists too powerful for public spirit and public good."
Chapter Seven: The Lovesick Colonel
In 1780, the Continental Army endures another devastating winter while stationed in Morristown, New Jersey. Fortune turns, however, after a chance visit to Morristown by Elizabeth (Eliza) Schuyler, the beguiling twenty-two-year-old daughter of Philip Schuyler, a Continental Army general and one of the most distinguished figures in New York Dutch society.
Hamilton falls head over heels for Eliza. After only a month of courtship, the pair decide to wed; they marry that December. His frustration with Washington reaches a boiling point, and after being denied yet another request for combat, Hamilton resigns his position as Washington's right-hand man.
Chapter Eight: Glory
Even though he is no longer a member of Washington's staff, Hamilton continues to hound him for a military assignment. Washington finally relents, and, in the summer of 1781, Hamilton is put in charge of a light-infantry battalion. In September, he leads a courageous charge at the Battle of Yorktown that helps provoke the surrender of British General Cornwallis, a turning point in the war.
Chapter Nine: Raging Billows
Hamilton returns to the Schuyler family homestead in Albany, New York. Eliza gives birth to a son, Philip. After a brief period of domestic bliss, the new father resumes his frenzied life of writing, politicking, and arguing. He picks up the law studies he had begun at King's College and corresponds with the superintendent of finance, Robert Morris, about fiscal and monetary policy.
Morris convinces Hamilton to become a tax receiver for New York State. The state legislature is so impressed with Hamilton's performance that it chooses him, along with four others, to represent New York at the Continental Congress. After a punishing seven months trying (in vain) to make a case for a robust central government, he returns to New York City to practice law. He sets up his firm — and his young family — in a house on Wall Street.
Chapter Ten: A Grave, Silent, Strange Sort of Animal
Hamilton's law practice thrives. He takes on all sorts of clients — there was no shortage of legal disputes in chaotic, post–Revolutionary War New York — but comes to earn a reputation as a defender of Tories. Hamilton is appalled by what he considers the unfairly punitive actions of New York State against ex-Loyalists, and he insists reconciliation is not only proper, but prudent for the young republic. His long dream of a central bank comes closer to materializing with the opening of the Bank of New York in 1784.
Chapter Eleven: Ghosts
Hamilton and Eliza waste no time expanding their family; eventually they will have eight children. In addition to his legal work, Hamilton takes up numerous other causes. He helps create a Board of Regents for New York State and served as a trustee of his alma mater, King's College (now known as Columbia College), and joins an antislavery group called the New York Manumission Society.
Chapter Twelve: August and Respectable Assembly
After serving a one-year term in the New York Assembly, Hamilton is selected to represent the state (along with two others) at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, which convenes in May 1787. The Convention's official agenda is merely to reform the failing Articles of Confederation, which earns it the reluctant approval of New York's populist governor George Clinton, a zealous advocate of "states' rights." After months of blistering discussion, however, the delegates emerge with an entirely new framework of governance: the Constitution.
Chapter Thirteen: Publius
As the specific details of the Constitution became available to the public, the country quickly splits into supporters ("federalists") and opponents ("antifederalists"). Hamilton believes that if he can just explain the logic behind the agreement, he can convert the masses to support it. Working with James Madison and John Jay, he published a series of eighty-five essays titled The Federalist Papers that make a case for the Constitution. They chose the pseudonym "Publius" for this venture, after Publius Valerius, known for overthrowing the monarchy and helping to set up the Roman Republic.
Chapter Fourteen: Putting the Machine in Motion
Given the deep divide over the Constitution, Hamilton understood that the new government had to be exemplary. Thus he pursued George Washington, who had come to take on mythical status, to run for president; the ex-general wins in a landslide. Robert Morris declined Washington's invitation to be Secretary of the Treasury, but recommends Hamilton, who accepts.
Chapter Fifteen: Villainous Business
Hamilton immediately gets to work laying the infrastructure of the country's financial system. With his typical intensity, he labors day and night researching and thinking about debt, bonds, customs accounting, and the like.
This culminates in yet another seminal work of analysis, Report on Public Credit, which he presents to Congress in January 1790. His recommendation to fund a meaty public debt causes a firestorm and is denounced by detractors — including his old ally James Madison — as a boon to speculators at the expense of the poor.
Chapter Sixteen: Dr. Pangloss
In March 1790, Thomas Jefferson, who had been serving in Paris as an American minister, arrives in New York to take up his post of secretary of state in George Washington's cabinet. Jefferson is horrified to learn of Hamilton's plan to have the central government assume the war debts of every state — a cornerstone of Hamilton's economic plan — and he joins James Madison in a rancorous opposition. In the end, the duo from Virginia agree to support Hamilton, under the condition that the country's permanent capital be built on the Potomac River.
Chapter Seventeen: The First Town in America
In the fall of 1790, the Washington administration moves to Philadelphia, the country's temporary capital. Hamilton quickly gets to work setting up customs regulations and a coast guard to enforce them. Insisting that the federal government needs additional sources of revenue, Hamilton proposes an excise tax on spirits; unsurprisingly, the measure faces stiff opposition from rural distillers.
Chapter Eighteen: Of Avarice and Enterprise
Hamilton's plan to charter a centralized financial institution, the Bank of the United States, provokes a showdown with Jefferson and Madison. For them — and many of the rural farmers in Virginia — banking is an evil, even treasonous, enterprise. In his defense, Alexander Hamilton invokes the necessary-and-proper clause of the Constitution, which, he argues, vests Congress with the power to generate revenue, thus creating the precedent for a liberal interpretation of the founding document.
Chapter Nineteen: City of the Future
Hamilton prevails against Jefferson and Madison, and the national bank is given its charter. In 1791, however, after a pregnant Eliza returns to Albany for the summer, he meets a twenty-three-year-old "maiden in distress" named Maria Reynolds. She speaks to him of an abusive husband and seeks his assistance. The two begin an affair that ultimately reveals itself to be a blackmail plot.
A panic erupts in the winter of 1792, implicating William Duer, a shady speculator Hamilton had been associated with. Government bond prices collapse, leading to a massive financial loss for bondholders. With no small amount of glee, Hamilton's critics accuse him — and the entire banking system he set up — of destroying the country.
Chapter Twenty: Corrupt Squadrons
The abiding hatred between Jefferson and Hamilton descends to new depths of ugliness. Jefferson hires the poet Philip Freneau to start a paper, the National Gazette, that is little more than a collection of editorials attacking Hamilton politically and personally; the paper eventually becomes the mouthpiece for the newly formed Republican political party.
Despite George Washington's pleas for a ceasefire, Hamilton strikes back with a batch of vicious editorials impugning the secretary of state.
Chapter Twenty-One: Exposure
Mrs. Reynolds and her "rascal" husband, James, continue their extortion of Hamilton. After an unlucky chain of events, the affair is discovered by a trio of Republican legislators that included Thomas Jefferson ally James Monroe. Confronted by the men in private, Hamilton confesses to the affair. The trio agree to secrecy, but, through Monroe, evidence of the affair leaks back to Jefferson.
Chapter Twenty-Two: Stabbed in the Dark
As George Washington ends his first term, the political death match between Jefferson and Hamilton continues with unabated ferocity; even George Washington, the American idol, gets caught in the crossfire. This polarization fuels the expansion of political parties, with followers of Jefferson increasingly organizing themselves into Republicans, and Hamilton supporters into Federalists.
Chapter Twenty-Three: Citizen Genêt
After Washington is sworn in for his second term as president in March 1793, revolution breaks out in France. As with everything else, positions on the conflict are seen as a litmus test of one's political philosophy: Jefferson supports it, while Hamilton, appalled by the revolutionaries' barbarism, denounces it.
The revolutionary government declares war on multiple European powers, and the cabinet convinces Washington to issue his Proclamation of Neutrality. The French minister to the United States, Citizen Genêt, angles for military and financial support for the cause, which would go against American foreign policy.
Exhausted by the constant battling and the president's perceived deference to Hamilton, Jefferson leaves the administration at the end of the year.
Chapter Twenty-Four: A Disagreeable Trade
In the summer of 1793, Alexander and Eliza Hamilton contract yellow fever. They are treated by Hamilton's boyhood friend Edward Stevens, now living in Philadelphia; Jefferson accuses Hamilton of hypochondria.
After he recovers, however, Hamilton faces a new threat: a Republican-led congressional committee investigating — again — his conduct in the Treasury Department. Hamilton is exonerated, but the event convinces him that "no character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated attacks."
Chapter Twenty-Five: Seas of Blood
Despite America's declaration of neutrality, British warships begin seizing American merchant ships in the French West Indies in November 1793. The country is livid. To Republicans, this offered further proof of British deception — and the worthlessness of the (Federalist) policy not to support France. John Jay, now chief justice of the Supreme Court, was sent to England to negotiate on George Washington's behalf.
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Wicked Insurgents of the West
In the summer of 1794, grumbling among distillers over the federal tax on spirits erupts into a mass revolt in the mountains of western Pennsylvania. The tax is the federal government's second-largest source of revenue, but Hamilton — and eventually, Washington — perceives the revolt as a dangerous rejection of the Constitution and the authority of the national government.
Under Washington's orders, a consortium of militiamen from three states put down the insurrection, now known as the Whiskey Rebellion.
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Sugar Plums and Toys
In March 1795, the treaty John Jay had concluded with England reaches Philadelphia. Hamilton and Washington support it; though unfavorable in many ways, it preserves peace with the world's most powerful military and economy. It narrowly passes the Senate, but is not fully revealed to the public until July, whereupon it is, predictably, interpreted according to party affiliation.
Republicans are incensed at the deference paid to England, and demonstrations, some violent, break out in numerous cities to protest the treaty.
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Spare Cassius
George Washington shocks the nation with his announcement that he will not seek a third term. Federalist John Adams is elected president, and Jefferson, who received the second-highest tally of votes, becomes vice president.
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Man in the Glass Bubble
In the interest of maintaining stability in the young, fractured nation, John Adams keeps the core of George Washington's cabinet on staff after he becomes president. In time, however, he begins to see this group as devious agents of Hamilton, whom he comes to despise for political and personal reasons.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Summary and Analysis of Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. Copyright © 2016 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Worth Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Context,Overview,
Summary,
Timeline,
Cast of Characters,
Direct Quotes and Analysis,
Trivia,
What's That Word?,
Critical Response,
About Ron Chernow,
For Your Information,
Bibliography,
Copyright,