• I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be. —LETTER OF AUGUST 13, 1782

• Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by the impulse of passion. —LETTER OF APRIL 16, 1802

• Opinion, whether well or ill founded, is the governing principle of human affairs. —LETTER OF JUNE 18, 1778

• Well, has justice been done? Few figures in American history have aroused such visceral love or loathing as Alexander Hamilton. To this day, he seems trapped in a crude historical cartoon that pits “Jeffersonian democracy” against “Hamiltonian aristocracy.” For Jefferson and his followers, wedded to their vision of an agrarian Eden, Hamilton was the American Mephistopheles, the proponent of such devilish contrivances as banks, factories, and stock exchanges. They demonized him as a slavish pawn of the British Crown, a closet monarchist, a Machiavellian intriguer, a would-be Caesar.

• In all probability, Alexander Hamilton is the foremost political figure in American history who never attained the presidency, yet he probably had a much deeper and more lasting impact than many who did.

• In contriving the smoothly running machinery of a modern nation-state—including a budget system, a funded debt, a tax system, a central bank, a customs service, and a coast guard—and justifying them in some of America’s most influential state papers, he set a high-water mark for administrative competence that has never been equaled. 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.

• Hamilton was an exuberant genius who performed at a fiendish pace and must have produced the maximum number of words that a human being can scratch out in forty-nine years.

• 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.

• If Jefferson enunciated the more ample view of political democracy, Hamilton possessed the finer sense of economic opportunity.

• Today, we are indisputably the heirs to Hamilton’s America, and to repudiate his legacy is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.

• The sudden popularity of sugar, dubbed “white gold,” engendered a brutal world of overnight fortunes in which slavery proved indispensable.

• While other founding fathers were reared in tidy New England villages or cosseted on baronial Virginia estates, Hamilton grew up in a tropical hellhole of dissipated whites and fractious slaves, all framed by a backdrop of luxuriant natural beauty.

• After the 1707 union with England, as Scottish trade with the North American and West Indian colonies boomed, merchant princes grew rich trafficking in sugar, tobacco, and cotton.

• The Caribbean sugar economy was a system of inimitable savagery, making the tobacco and cotton plantations of the American south seem almost genteel by comparison.

• Of most compelling interest to our saga, the upstairs living quarters held thirty-four books—the first unmistakable sign of Hamilton’s omnivorous, self-directed reading. Many people on St. Croix would have snickered at his bookish habits, making him feel freakish and contributing to an urgent need to flee the West Indies.

• The poetry of Alexander Pope must have held an honored place, plus a French edition of Machiavelli’s The Prince and Plutarch’s Lives, rounded off by sermons and devotional tracts. If Hamilton felt something stiflingly provincial about St. Croix, literature would certainly have transported him to a more exalted realm.

• That this abominable childhood produced such a strong, productive, self-reliant human being—that this fatherless adolescent could have ended up a founding father of a country he had not yet even seen—seems little short of miraculous. Because he maintained perfect silence about his unspeakable past, never exploiting it to puff his later success, it was impossible for his contemporaries to comprehend the exceptional nature of his personal triumph. What we know of Hamilton’s childhood has been learned almost entirely during the past century.

• Already he sought psychic relief in extravagant fantasies of fame and faraway glory. The recipient was his dear friend and lookalike Edward Stevens, who had recently begun his studies at King’s College in New York:

• Like Ben Franklin, Hamilton was mostly self-taught and probably snatched every spare moment to read.

• In fact, this apparent attraction to two opposite types of women—the pure and angelic versus the earthy and flirtatious—ran straight through Hamilton’s life, a contradiction he never resolved and that was to lead to scandalous consequences.

• He wrote two years later, “Men are generally too much attached to their native countries to leave it and dissolve all their connexions, unless they are driven to it by necessity.”

• He chose a psychological strategy adopted by many orphans and immigrants: he decided to cut himself off from his past and forge a new identity. He would find a home where he would be accepted for what he did, not for who he was, and where he would no longer labor in the shadow of illegitimacy. His relentless drive, his wretched feelings of shame and degradation, and his precocious self-sufficiency combined to produce a young man with an insatiable craving for success.

• I challenge you to meet me in whatever path you dare. And, if you have no objection, for variety and amusement, we will even make excursions in the flowery walks and roseate bowers of Cupid. You know I am renowned for gallantry and shall always be able to entertain you with a choice collection of the prettiest things imaginable.... You shall be one of the graces, or Diana, or Venus, or something surpassing them all.

• An assemblage of military might was soon marshaled—some three hundred ships and thirty-two thousand men, including eighty-four hundred Hessian mercenaries—a fighting force designed expressly to intimidate the Americans and restore them to their sanity through a terrifying show of strength. The British had so many troops stationed aboard this floating city that they surpassed in numbers the patriotic soldiers and citizens left facing them in New York.

• According to Hamilton’s son, it was at Harlem Heights that Washington first recognized Hamilton’s unique organizational gifts, as he watched him supervise the building of an earthwork. It was also at Harlem Heights that Hamilton’s company first came under the direct command of Washington, who “entered into conversation with him, invited him to his tent, and received an impression of his military talent,” wrote John C. Hamilton.70 It was yet another striking example of the instantaneous rapport that this young man seemed to develop with even the most seasoned officers.

• His father died when he was twelve, and he had become his mother’s sole support. Like Hamilton, Knox was a voracious reader who had tutored himself in warfare by digesting books on military discipline and quizzing British officers who visited his bookshop.

• provocation, sometimes without just cause.”17 As a teenager who knew the insecurities of an outsider and was eager to earn respect, Washington tried to advance into polished society through a strenuous program of self-improvement. He learned to dance and dress properly, read biographies and histories, and memorized rules of deportment from a courtesy manual.

• Like Hamilton, the young Washington saw military fame as his vehicle for ascending in the world.

• The relationship between Washington and Hamilton was so consequential in early American history—rivaled only by the intense comradeship between Jefferson and Madison—that it is difficult to conceive of their careers apart. The two men had complementary talents, values, and opinions that survived many strains over their twenty-two years together.

• Washington possessed the outstanding judgment, sterling character, and clear sense of purpose needed to guide his sometimes wayward protégé; he saw that the volatile Hamilton needed a steadying hand. Hamilton, in turn, contributed philosophical depth, administrative expertise, and comprehensive policy knowledge that nobody in Washington’s ambit ever matched.

• As Hamilton evolved from private secretary to something akin to chief of staff, he rode with the general in combat, cantered off on diplomatic missions, dealt with bullheaded generals, sorted through intelligence, interrogated deserters, and negotiated prisoner exchanges.

• Hamilton was girl crazy and brimming with libido. Throughout his career, at unlikely moments, he tended to grow flirtatious, almost giddy, with women.

• Both were bookish and ambitious, bold and enterprising, and hungered for military honor. Both were imbued with a quixotic sense that it was noble to die in a worthy cause.

• “Never before or since have I had such an impression of the ancient fabled god of war as when I looked on the baron. He seemed to me a perfect personification of Mars.

• “Force of intellect and force of will were the sources of his success,”

• Hamilton fit the type of the self-improving autodidact, employing all his spare time to better himself. He aspired to the eighteenth-century aristocratic ideal of the versatile man conversant in every area of knowledge. Thanks to his pay book we know that he read a considerable amount of philosophy, including Bacon, Hobbes, Montaigne, and Cicero. He also perused histories of Greece, Prussia, and France. This was hardly light fare after a day of demanding correspondence for Washington, yet he retained the information and applied it to profitable use. While other Americans dreamed of a brand-new society that would expunge all traces of effete European civilization, Hamilton humbly studied those societies for clues to the formation of a new government.

• telling Washington that if Clinton was taken prisoner “it would be our misfortune, since the British government could not find another commander so incompetent to send in his place.”

• Many people were struck by Hamilton’s behavior at Monmouth, which showed more than mere courage. There was an element of ecstatic defiance, an indifference toward danger, that reflected his youthful fantasies of an illustrious death in battle.

• Hamilton also provided impeccable translations of diplomatic correspondence into French, with just the right dash of high-flown language. In this manner, the alliance with France further enhanced Hamilton’s stature in the Continental Army.

• Though Hamilton was adored by the French officers in their royal blue-and-scarlet uniforms, he also nursed grievances against them. Familiarity bred contempt along with affection. Hamilton deplored many French aristocrats as vainglorious self-promoters who wanted to snatch a particle of fame from the Revolution and parlay it into a superior rank at home. He had to endure in silence insults from them about incompetent continentals. “The French volunteers, generally speaking, were men of ordinary talents and skills in the military arts,” remarked Robert Troup, “and yet most of them were so conceited as to suppose themselves Caesars or Hannibals in comparison with the American officers.”

• She must be young, handsome (I lay most stress upon a good shape), sensible (a little learning will do), well-bred (but she must have an aversion to the word ton), chaste and tender (I am an enthusiast in my notions of fidelity and fondness), of some good nature, a great deal of generosity (she must neither love money nor scolding, for I dislike equally a termagant and an economist). In politics, I am indifferent what side she may be of; I think I have arguments that will easily convert her to mine. As to religion, a moderate streak will satisfy me. She must believe in god and hate a saint. But as to fortune, the larger stock of that the better. You know my temper and circumstances and will therefore pay special attention to this article in the treaty. Though I run no risk of going to purgatory for my avarice, yet as money is an essential ingredient to happiness in this world—as I have not much of my own and as I am very little calculated to get more either by my address or industry—it must needs be that my wife, if I get one, bring at least a sufficiency to administer to her own extravagancies.

• I venture to tell you in confidence that by some odd contrivance or other your sister has found out the secret of interesting me in everything that concerns her.... She is most unmercifully handsome and so perverse that she has none of those pretty affectations which are the prerogatives of beauty. Her good sense is destitute of that happy mixture of vanity and ostentation which would make it conspicuous to the whole tribe of fools and foplings.... She has good nature, affability, and vivacity unembellished with that charming frivolousness which is justly deemed one of the principal accomplishments of a belle. In short, she is so strange a creature that she possesses all the beauties, virtues, and graces of her sex without any of those amiable defects which... are esteemed by connoisseurs necessary shades in the character of a fine woman.

• She flaunts one of the powdered bouffant hairdos so popular among society women at the time—what one of her friends called her “Marie Antoinette coiffure.”

• “Elasticity of his mind. Variety of his knowledge. Playfulness of his wit. Excellence of his heart. His immense forbearance [and] virtues.”

• Both Hamilton and Schuyler spoke French, were well-read, appreciated military discipline, and had a common interest in business and internal-development schemes, such as canals. They also shared a common loyalty to Washington and impatience with congressional incompetence, even though Schuyler was a member of the Continental Congress.

• “There is always more decision, more dispatch, more secrecy, more responsibility where single men than when bodies are concerned. By a plan of this kind, we should blend the advantages of a monarchy and of a republic in a happy and beneficial union.”

• At noon on December 14, 1780, Alexander Hamilton, twenty-five, wed Elizabeth Schuyler, twenty-three, in the southeast parlor of the Schuyler mansion. The interior of the two-story brick residence was light and airy and had a magnificent curving staircase with beautifully carved balusters.

• Hamilton probably felt, for the moment, that he was the happiest man in the world. The wedding to Eliza Schuyler ended his nomadic existence and embedded him in the Anglo-Dutch aristocracy of New York. His upbringing, instead of making him resent the rich, had perhaps made him wish to reclaim his father’s lost nobility. Through marriage, he acquired an important base in a state in which politics revolved around the dynastic ambitions of the foremost Hudson River families. For the first time in his life, Alexander Hamilton must have had a true sense of belonging.

• After almost hourly contact with Washington for four years, Hamilton had become his alter ego, able to capture his tone on paper or in person, and was a casualty of his own success.

• These disappointments only buttressed his belief in meritocracy, not aristocracy, as the best system for government appointments.

• “Singularly precocious, he matured early; before his twenty-fifth year he seems to have developed every main principle of his political and economic philosophy, and thereafter he never hesitated or swerved from his path.”

• “I lose all taste for the pursuits of ambition. I sigh for nothing but the company of my wife and my baby.”

• However impressive it was that Hamilton could compress three years of legal training into nine months, he juggled several other balls at once. After Yorktown, he wrote two more installments of the “Continentalist” essays, which he then lost or misplaced. “He has lately recovered them,” The New-York Packet informed readers in April 1782 in introducing “The Continentalist No. V.”

• Increasingly Hamilton despaired of pure democracy, of politicians simply catering to the popular will, and favored educated leaders who would enlighten the people and exercise their own judgment.