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Alexander Hamilton (精装)
by Ron Chernow
| Category:
American history, Fictional history |
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| MSL Pointer Review:
This masterly biography is another brilliant achievement by Ron Chernow, the bestselling author of The House of Morgan and Titan. |
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AllReviews |
1 2   | Total 2 pages 11 items |
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Library Journal (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
A first-rate and excellent addition to the ongoing debate about Hamilton's importance in the shaping of America.
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The Wall Street Journal (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
...[an] impressively thorough, superbly written and carefully researched biography.
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Robert A. Caro (Author of The Power Broker) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
A brilliant historian has done it again! The thoroughness and integrity of Ron Chernow's research shines forth on every page... |
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Michael Lind (The Washington Post) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
An illegitimate orphan from the West Indies, Alexander Hamilton rose to become George Washington's most trusted adviser in war and peace - only to be snared in a sex scandal and killed in a duel by Vice President Aaron Burr. None of the American Founders had a more dramatic life or death than Hamilton - and none did more to lay the foundations of America's future wealth and power. Revered by Lincoln Republicans, Hamilton fell out of favor in the middle of the 20th century thanks to the influence, first in the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt and then in today's Republican Party, of Southern and Western conservatives and populists for whom Hamilton's arch-rival, Thomas Jefferson, was the greatest of the Founding Fathers. But recent scholarship has replaced the sanitized image of Jefferson as an egalitarian idealist with the theorist of states' rights, pseudoscientific racism and agrarian economics who sold slaves to pay for his luxuries. Because Hamilton was an abolitionist, promoter of high-tech capitalism and champion of a world-class military, he is an ancestor whose attitudes do not embarrass contemporary Americans. In Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow, the author of The House of Morgan, The Warburgs and Titan, a biography of John D. Rockefeller, has brought to life the Founding Father who did more than any other to create the modern United States.
The self-made man and the immigrant who achieves success are figures dear to American culture; Hamilton, alone among the prominent Founders, was both. Chernow writes, "no immigrant in American history has ever made a larger contribution than Alexander Hamilton." Hamilton, who became one of the first American leaders to call for the abolition of slavery, grew up in the Caribbean slave societies of Nevis and St. Croix. He was the illegitimate child of James Hamilton, the younger son of a Scots laird, and Rachel Faucette, a woman of British and French Huguenot descent who had fled from her first husband. (Chernow's extensive research has uncovered nothing to substantiate claims that Hamilton, by way of his mother, was partly black.) Hamilton and his brother, James Jr., were abandoned by their father in 1765 and orphaned when their mother died in 1767. Hamilton was 12. Sent to New York as a scholarship boy, the orphan from the West Indies flourished at King's College (now Columbia University), penned an anti-British polemic, "The Farmer Refuted," and, when the Revolution broke out, became an artillery captain whose exploits inspired Washington to make Hamilton his aide-de-camp. Hamilton's transformation from outsider to insider was complete when he married Elizabeth "Eliza" Schuyler, a member of one of the richest and most politically influential families in New York.
Like Washington, Hamilton sought to replace the Articles of Federation with a stronger national constitution and took part in the Philadelphia convention. In the fall of 1787, Hamilton recruited John Jay and James Madison to help him write the essays that became the Federalist Papers, to persuade New York's ratifying convention to approve the new federal constitution. According to Chernow, "Hamilton supervised the entire Federalist project. He dreamed up the idea, enlisted the participants, wrote the overwhelming bulk of the essays, and oversaw the publication." While romantic agrarians like Jefferson dreamed of an isolationist America uncorrupted by manufacturing, Hamilton realized that to survive in a world of rival great powers the United States would have to adopt selected elements of the economic and military policies of Britain and France. As Washington's secretary of the treasury, Hamilton infuriated populists by refusing to distinguish between the original holders of Revolutionary War-era debt - many of them soldiers - and the speculators who had bought them out. In Chernow's words, Hamilton's refusal "established the legal and moral basis for securities trading in America: the notion that securities are freely transferable and that buyers assume all rights to profit or loss in transactions." Jefferson, Madison and other Southern agrarians were bribed into acquiescing in Hamilton's financial system by the decision to place the permanent U.S. capital on the Potomac. According to Chernow, "Madison and Henry Lee speculated in land on the Potomac, hoping to earn a windfall profit if the area was chosen for the capital." Hamilton went on to oversee the creation of the First Bank of the United States, the ancestor of today's Federal Reserve.
Even more important for America's future prosperity were Hamilton's plans for government-encouraged industrial capitalism. His ambitious industrial corporation, the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (SEUM), was a failure. But in his Report on Manufactures (1791), he made the classic "infant-industry" argument that American industries needed assistance from the federal government if they were to catch up with British manufacturing. Hamilton's most important successors in American politics were Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln, who, as president, presided over the enactment of Hamiltonian policies such as federal investment in railroads, national banking and support for U.S. industries by means of high tariffs (Hamilton himself had preferred "bounties" or subsidies to infant industries as an alternative to tariffs).
Hamilton had no more doubt than Lincoln did later that the constitution empowered the federal government to suppress insurrections. When an excise tax in 1794 provoked thousands of mostly Scots-Irish backwoodsmen to assault federal tax officials in what became known as "the Whiskey Rebellion," Hamilton insisted on a strong response. President Washington agreed: "If the laws are to be trampled upon with impunity, and a minority is to dictate to the majority, there is an end put at one stroke to republican government." In an echo of the Revolutionary War, the two men led a military expedition before which the rebels melted away.
A third reunion of Washington and Hamilton as military leaders came in 1798-99, when war loomed with France and President John Adams asked Washington to come out of retirement to lead an army that Hamilton organized. When Adams adopted a conciliatory policy toward France, Hamilton was furious and penned a denunciation of the president. "In writing an intemperate indictment of John Adams," Chernow says, "Hamilton committed a form of political suicide that blighted the rest of his career." Hamilton's denunciations of Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson's scheming vice president, led to Hamilton's shooting death in the famous duel at Weehawken, N. J., on July 11, 1804. Hamilton, who had become an increasingly pious Christian after his son, Philip, died in a duel, deliberately missed Burr. Chernow makes the interesting suggestion that Hamilton's willingness to fight a duel, along with his hypersensitivity about honor, reflects the influence of his West Indian background. In the West Indies as in the South, "plantation society was a feudal order, predicated on personal honor and dignity, making duels popular among whites who fancied themselves noblemen."
In this magisterial biography, Chernow tells the story not only of Hamilton but also of his wife, Eliza, a remarkable woman who died at the age of 97 in 1854. The year before, "When the ninety-five-year old Eliza dined at the White House... she made a grand entrance with her daughter. President Fillmore fussed over her, and the first lady gave up her chair to her. Everybody was eager to touch a living piece of American history." Generations earlier, Eliza had endured with stoic dignity the controversy over Hamilton's affair with Maria Reynolds, a woman who seduced the treasury secretary so that her husband could blackmail him (Chernow provides a good account of this, the first political sex scandal in American history.) Today Eliza is buried next to her husband in the Trinity Churchyard in New York City, which Jeffersonians once called "Hamiltonopolis."
"The magnitude of Hamilton's feats as treasury secretary has overshadowed many other facets of his life: clerk, college student, youthful poet, essayist, artillery captain, wartime adjutant to Washington, battlefield hero, congressman, abolitionist, Bank of New York founder, state assemblyman, member of the Constitutional Convention and New York Ratifying Convention, orator, lawyer, polemicist, educator, patron saint of the New-York Evening Post, foreign-policy theorist, and major general in the army," writes Chernow. His verdict is persuasive: "If Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton established the prose of American statecraft. No other founder articulated such a clear and prescient vision of America's future political, military, and economic strength or crafted such ingenious mechanisms to bind the nation together." |
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N. Cooley (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
In Alexander Hamilton, Chernow has written a masterful biography. Long overlooked as one of the most influential figures in the developmental stage of the Republic, Ron Cherhow tackled the task of sketching Alexander Hamilton's life superbly. Unlike many of the other founders, namely Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, or Adams, relatively little has been writing about Hamilton. Frankly speaking, however, Hamilton played as great a role in the development of this country when compared to some of the names listed above.
Chernow expends much energy elucidating Hamilton's very close relationship with General Washington which started during the Revolutionary War and extended up until Washington's death shortly after his presidency ended. During his presidency and after, Washington both confided in Hamilton and took counsel from him, thus solidifying Hamilton's position as the foremost advisor in Washington's cabinet. This fact alone elevates Hamilton to almost preeminent status.
Furthermore, Chernow describes the politics of the period, specifically how Hamilton's promotion of a national banking system and other Treasury functions led to the formation of the party system. Most notably, a continuing theme throughout the book deals specifically with Hamilton's role as founder of the federalist party and how he constantly feuded politically and personally with Jefferson, Madison, and Monrow as founders of the Republican party of the time.
With regard to this topic and Hamilton's politics in general, Chernow has defended Hamilton much to vociferously. Instead of telling the story of Hamilton's life, Chernow has taken on the ardor of an apologist. For eaxample, during his life, Hamilton was repeatedly painted (either appropriately or inappropriately) as a monarchist by his political enemies. Chernow has spent a considerable amount of space attempting to debunk this notion. However, in the final pages of the book Chernow himself admits that Gouverneur Morris, Hamilton's eulogist, worried aloud in his own diary that Hamilton "was on principle opposed to republican and attached to monarchical government." This is not to say that Hamilton did in fact harbor outright anti-republican and anti-constitutional feelings. In fact, to the contrary, Hamilton's greatest fear on behalf of the new nation was a secessionist movement perpetrated by Republicans in the South or other politcally malevolent factions. That said, however, from time to time Hamilton did express skepticism and other less-than-confident feelings with regard to the newly ratified Constitution. Though he worked tirelessly with Madison and John Jay in publishing the Federalist essays in the New York papers, Hamilton did not share Madison's nor Jefferson's absolute intrepidity with regard to the document.
Finally, the epilogue of Chernow's book specifically covers Eliza Hamilton and her life post-Hamilton's death. It seems entirely appropriate that the summation of a book about Alexander Hamilton is dedicated to his wife. Here was a woman who ardently supported her husband even after he had been forced to sheepishly broadcast to the world his marital indiscretions with Maria Reynolds. Furthermore, one cannot help but think compassionately of Eliza and her seven children as Chernow describes that fateful morning at Weehawken, New Jersey on the banks of the Hudson River. Chernow's chapter on "The Duel" was supremely written and as captivating as any climax to any novel ever written. Yet as I sat reading it, I could not help but think of Eliza and how oblivious she must have been to her husband's impending death.
Chernow's Alexander Hamilton is an incredible book even if it is interjected with somewhat less of an even-handed approach to the protagonist's life. It is highly readable and flows wonderfully. |
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Elizabeth Clare (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow is a detailed and fascinating biography of the greatest of the Founding Fathers never to become president. Hamilton is often caricatured as an elitist who wanted to hand control of early America to the prototypical "Eastern Establishment." Chernow instead shows us how Hamilton was a man of vision who laid the groundwork for the strong federal government and sound financial institutions that made possible American greatness. His partnership with George Washington as America's first Treasury Secretary was perhaps the greatest tour de force ever by a cabinet officer. Hamilton was a great lawyer with a deep grasp of history and the law. Along with James Madison, he was the primary author of The Federalist Papers, and his influence in the acceptance and interpretation of the Constitution was indispensable.
Alexander Hamilton will intrigue you if you are at all interested in the political aspects of early America, but it's also a terrific biography of the man. Hamilton was born illegitimate in the West Indies, and by sheer hard work and energy got himself to New York and King's College (now Columbia). He arrived just as the American Revolution was breaking out, and his talent soon brought him to the notice of George Washington, who made young Hamilton his chief aide. Hamilton and Washington had a father-son relationship, complete with frustration, resentment, and disappointment. Their partnership continued into Washington's presidency and became critical to the development of executive power.
There is juice in this book too. Hamilton was a man troubled by demons. He didn't suffer fools gladly, and when out from under Washington's steadying influence he was capable of spectacular errors in judgment. He also seems to have a strong sex drive. When he was a young man, he took a male lover, fellow Continental officer John Laurens, for whom he had a deep affection. Laurens was killed in the war. Hamilton then married the pretty and down-to-earth Eliza Schuyler, daughter of a prominent New York family. Alexander and Eliza loved and respected each other and delighted in their family, which eventually grew to eight children. Yet something in Hamilton drew him into a dark and sordid affair with a grifter named Maria Reynolds. Their affair became public in the first political sex scandal of the young Republic.
Hamilton's rivalry with Thomas Jefferson, Washington's secretary of state, defined his later life and became the basis for the emergence of the two-party system in America. It was interesting to read about how Jefferson cultivated his image as a simple farmer, giving up his early prediliction for fine clothes and powdered hair for rumpled suits and house slippers. Chernow does a good job of explaining how the two factions emerged and what they each stood for. All too often, the Federalists are said to stand for "business," while Jefferson's Republicans (confusingly enough, the ancestors of the Democratic party) stood for the "common man." As Chernow shows, the Federalists instead stood for a vision of a capitalist democracy, while the Republican vision of America was an agricultural republic that would, not coincidentally, benefit the slave-holding elite of the South.
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Timothy Graczewski (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
Few great characters in American history have seen their reputations wax and wane as frequently and dramatically as Alexander Hamilton. To some (including this reviewer and, evidently, Ron Chernow), he was one of the greatest minds and creative spirits in history - not just American history, but world history. To others, most notably Thomas Jefferson and his long and illustrious line of acolytes and champions in academia, he was a vile creature of moral turpitude and a genuine danger to the American republic.
This biography, by the most talented business historian of the past fifty years, is a vigorous and impassioned defense of Hamilton, his ideas, his character and his institutions. One feels as though Hamilton is on trial in the court of history and Chernow is serving as his very capable defense attorney. As the refined and rather feminine Hamilton sits in the dock, as it were, Chernow thunders away at the hypothetical jury, expounding on his client's greatness, the vindication of his vision of America as a great commercial power welded together by industrial enterprise and national unity, while lashing out at the many failings of his critics and tormentors, Thomas Jefferson foremost among them ("Objection your Honor!" one might imagine coming from the prosecutor's table).
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but it wasn't what I expecting from Chernow, whose life of John D. Rockefeller was the model objective biography of a controversial figure. In Titan the reader could easily grasp Rockefeller's greatness, yet also fully appreciate the hatred he engendered in many. Chernow was some how able to offer simultaneous perspectives on the oil tycoon, which provided an amazingly complete portrait of great depth and relief. Such is not the case with Hamilton. It isn't so easy to appreciate why he could drive men as different in background and outlook as the Yankee Federalist John Adams and the southern plantation Republican Jefferson to paroxysms of rage and fear.
Chernow "writes long," but fortunately he also writes clearly and beautifully. Hamilton is a tour de force, beginning in the squalid canebrakes of the West Indies and ending in a flash of pistol shots on the banks of the Hudson River. With a life as improbable and fascinating as Hamilton's told in the lyrical prose of Chernow, there are neither dull moments nor lulls in the action. Chernow describes a dynamo of staggering genius, capable of churning out the bulk of the Federalist Papers in seven months (in long hand) while also holding down a demanding private law practice. A man with a preternatural gift for prognostication, who clearly saw the length and course of the American Revolution in 1775 as a young student at King's College (Columbia), who foretold the bloody course of the French Revolution and the rise of an eventual Caesar in 1789, and who almost single-handedly laid the institutional groundwork for a federal economic structure that would encourage native investment and industrial development in 1791.
And Chernow doesn't stop with hailing Hamilton's philosophical and organizational achievements, as even some of his critics have conceded. He also passionately defends Hamilton's character, arguing that his primary failing was that he was "incorrigibly honest." Chernow argues that Hamilton was a true and life-long abolitionist, sympathetic to the plight of the Native Americans, orphans and the disadvantaged, and far from being the rake history has come to know him as (he writes that his only confirmed affair was with Maria Reynolds). Unlike his bete noir, Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton was no aristocrat who put on airs of a populist hero (Chernow clearly sees Jefferson as David McCollough does in his biography of John Adams - an intriguer and phony who has done a remarkable job in conning future generations into believing the myth of greatness and simplicity he created for himself).
The author does concede some of Hamilton's shortcomings, and you can almost feel Chernow's pain in conceding these chinks in his hero's armor. Most notably, Chernow writes that Hamilton had several enormous lapses of judgment that have forever sullied his reputation: mentioning the dreaded word "monarchy" in his 18 June 1787 Constitutional Convention speech; his silly affair with Maria Reynolds (which Chernow sees as an obvious blackmail scheme from beginning to end); his flirtation with using the new standing army for possible use in liberating Spanish possessions in America; and, perhaps above all, his shameful treatise against John Adams published immediately before the 1800 election.
This is a wonderful book, albeit clearly one with an argument to make. That I tend to agree with the argument has made it easier to read and enjoy. Nevertheless, anyone who loves to read interesting stories wonderfully told will enjoy Alexander Hamilton.
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Lucie Lehmann-Barclay (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
Make no mistake: Ron Chernow likes Alexander Hamilton!
And the reader is almost forced to as well - despite the multitude (and magnitude) of Hamilton's mistakes and flaws of character. Chernow shows that what he achieved in 49 years - no less than the architecture of a nation - was achieved despite lack of social standing (illegitimate birth) and his own choleric nature. And Chernow plays back and forth on these.
The scope of the book is immense and at times - when the same event (or person) is presented in different chapters and in different contexts - it was a little disorienting. I frankly wished for a chronology - the only thing that is missing here.
The player who emerges as the "sleeper" is Eliza Hamilton, who silently endured her husband's well-publicized adultery. She survived her husband by 50 years and lived an exemplary widow's life in the best conscious Christian tradition - as mother of seven surviving children, advocate of the poor and underprivileged, and as a co-founder of the country's first orphanage. And an enduring thanks is due her for urging their son, John Church Hamilton, to put in order his late father's voluminous collection of private papers.
While one can be amazed at the history that Chernow has presented here, no less amazing is Chernow's own contribution. He is a graceful writer, and his six pages of acknowledgements constitute an adventure in themselves - one full of wit and exuberance. And not to be overlooked is the fact that Chernow has taken the final words of Hamilton's farewell to Eliza "to the best of wives and the best of women" as his own dedication to his wife and helpmate.
A little Web research reveals the extent of Chernow's understanding of the world of finance. Not one to project his own erudition, he presents his explanations of terms the general reader might not understanding - such as a "sinking fund" for retiring the national debt - as grace notes.
I must confess that after several readings of "The Federalist," I had only the vaguest notion of Hamilton's contribution to the system of government we take for granted today. This book has, therefore, been the most felicitous way to rectify my own ignorance. But perhaps more important, I find myself looking at the issues in the news today - appointments to the Supreme Court, the advocacy of democracy, the war in Iraq, freedom of expression during war, a strong executive vs. Congress, etc. - and seeing that they are essentially the same issues that faced a new nation. Perhaps we can all be less aghast at what seems like the unraveling of our system, when we see that Hamilton almost single-handedly forged a system of government that can survive such tensions.
"Genial" as "referring to genius" is not a common term in American English - it's Webster's fourth definition. But it exists in a number of European languages in its connection with genius - and we translate it as "brilliant." While Alexander Hamilton is truly a brilliant achievement, Hamilton was clearly genial, as is Chernow - and both in the word's deepest sense.
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A. Slezak (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
I have read the House of Morgan and Titan and having enjoyed them immensely I was excited about this new book by Ron Chernow. Well it was no disappointment this was one of the enjoyable biographies that I have every read.
I did not realize that Hamilton was born in St. Croix and had such humble beginnings. It was interesting how afraid of the slave they were there and how many guns they needed to keep them from revolting. I was surprised how in graphic detail Chernow describes the punishment that they would give to the slaves if they ran away. The author doesn't exactly say why Hamilton was so opposed to slavery but leaves it to be self evident.
Hamilton's arrival in New York for his education had to be due to intellect. He was tireless in trying to increase his knowledge. He must have read all of Plutarch and other Roman writers to be versed so well with their histories.
I have not read any other books about the founding fathers besides my history books in high school so I learned a great many things. For one I thought that the first election was in 1792 instead of 1788. I never knew that Adams was so petty and paranoid, any slight that people would give him and he was out for revenge for the rest of his life. Everyone seemed to treat Washington in a god-like manner. He was never questioned and always tried to stay above petty politics. The most interesting character besides Hamilton had to be Jefferson. If you believe what you read in this book Jefferson was the most pernicious of all the founding fathers. He would make up all this drama because he thought Hamilton was lining his pockets with the Treasury money. He was so acrimonious toward Hamilton paying people to write all these slanders about him. The most diabolical thing Jefferson seem to do was the rubbing out of his old associate and having him mysteriously drown just before he was to testify. Jefferson was quite a character having the affair with Sally Hemming who was Jefferson original wife's half sister and having all the children. Yet all of these children were not freed when Jefferson died they were sold to pay off his debts. Washington was the greater man there freeing all his slaves when he died.
Hamilton had many character flaws as well. Hamilton had a fiery temper and his vituperative language toward his political enemies. I felt that he was foolish when he told Madison and Monroe about the affair that he had with Mary Reynolds and how easy it was to blackmail him.
Hamilton best character traits came out when he was under the most pressure. He excelled under Washington during the war then on his own without Washington. He came up with the whole treasury system and wrote reports to Congress with exacting details. He pushed the idea of a manufacturing America instead of the agrarian society envisioned by his southern opponents.
Hamilton treated Aaron Burr as if he was a buffoon when ever he talked of him in the press. Hamilton seemed to think that Burr would sell his mother to have more political power. I can see with all this invective abuse from Hamilton that when it finally came to the duel it was in Burr's mind to shoot to kill. I do not think Hamilton knew what hit him and foolishly expected other people to act with Hamilton's high moral standards.
I felt this was a very enjoyable book and that anyone interested in American History and not the watered down version that you get in school will thoroughly enjoy this excursion through history.
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Martin McCarthy (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
Ron Chernow's Hamilton represents a magnificient, ambitious and energetic tour-de-force that seems, in the end, a fitting tribute to Hamilton; a man for whom there was arguably no peer.
Hamilton will probably remain fettered to the simplistic formulation of the demi-god of "Hamiltonian aristocracy" who was overcome by "Jeffersonian democracy" in the Revolution of 1800. Such simplisitic formulations are, of course, complicated when one considers that the "champion of democracy" Jefferson held slaves and the "monarchical" Hamilton was a founding member of the New York Manumission Society. Though, it seems that Hamilton is doomed forever to be a "great man" but not a "great American," Chernow exerts considerable effort rescuing Hamilton from the caricatures of history.
In the introduction, Chernow quotes former President (and former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) William Howard Taft praising Hamilton as "our greatest constructive statesman." Chernow captures the Hamilton/Jefferson dichotomy succinctly when he writes, "If Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton established the prose of American statecraft." In the pages that follow, Chernow dedicates his pen and prose towards demonstrating just how constructive Hamilton really was.
The most obvious examples of Hamilton's constructive statecraft emanate from Hamilton's tenure as a member of George Washington's cabinent, serving as Secretary of the Treasury. Chernow spends a great deal of time detailing Hamilton's accomplishments and need not be recounted here.
Chernow really scores points in his argument of depicting Hamilton as constructive statesman in the chapter entiitled "Publius," which was the pen name used by Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay for what have collectively become known as the "Federalist Papers." Nothing can be more constructive than authoring a "how to" manual for the newly drafted Constitution of the United States. The Federalist Papers now only provided the agenda for the Constitutional debate, they also provide a lasting legacy with Chernow pointing out that "by the Year 2000, it ["The Federalist Papers"] had been quoted no fewer than 291 times in Supreme Court opinions, with the frequency of citations rising with the years."
For all of Hamilton's energy and ambition, Chernow rightly reveals another source for Hamilton's greatness- his wife, Eliza Hamilton. Eliza Hamilton provided entry into the Schuyler family, a great political family in New York. Eliza Hamilton also apparently provided a great deal of inward strength for Hamilton. Without either the Schuyler political connection or the stability Eliza provided at home, it is doubtful Hamilton would have been able to achieve all that he had. It is for this reason (and others) that Chernow spends a great deal of time explicating Hamilton's extra-marital affair with Maria Reynolds.
Though Chernow can, at times, be guilty of offering caricatures of Hamilton's opponents, there are only two villains in Chernow's work: James Monroe for his alleged role in divulging the Maria Reynolds affair and Aaron Burr for his course and conduct in the events leading up the the tragic affair at Weehaucken.
As a whole, Chernow's work is astonishing. The quality of his prose is magnificent and the rendering of his subject unparalleled. This book is worth every word.
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