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.
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