"Hamilton" is more than a fabulous Broadway musical based on Ron Chernow's extraordinary biography of Alexander Hamilton. The book and the play are the heroic story of a man who by dint of shear brilliance, an unbelievable capacity for work, and George Washington's fulsome support became the principal architect of American government and it's free enterprise economy. It is also the story of pathological vindictiveness that ended in Hamilton's death. What is so relevant for today is that the vindictiveness and the kind of baseless conspiracy theories that dogged Hamilton's life are the very essence of Donald Trump and Trumpism's appeal to those who perceive slights and seek revenge for them.
Hamilton, an immigrant born on the island of Nevis in the West Indies, was called "the bastard brat of a Scotch peddler" among many other things. Yet only 5 or 6 years after coming to New York in his mid-teens he had become George Washington's right hand man on nearly all things, and would remain so for 25 years. He was Washington's aide and alter ego for 7 years during the Revolutionary War, for most of his two terms as President, and then afterwards until the first President's death in 1799. Washington's impregnable reputation and cool judgement allowed Hamilton to be his brilliant self. The wise older man guided him, helped him control his temper, and protected him from his vindictive enemies, who also were Washington's sneaky detractors as the biography makes clear.
Hamilton had a jaundiced view of human nature, yet risked his life to create free representative government in his adopted land. Despite his pessimistic view of mankind, he believed that people could govern themselves if the system was engineered to assure that the country had educated leaders checked by others with their own bases of power. He also believed that America had a great future if she behaved wisely. To protect that vision he led a wild and victorious charge at Yorktown. His undoubted heroism, however, did not stop his enemies from accusing him of conspiring with the British during the war and being a tool of the British Crown afterward.
Hamilton also battled the radicals of his day, who claimed to speak against the elites and for the people, but whose leaders were owners of slave plantations who owed money to British creditors. The radicals of the French Revolution, Hamilton knew, had turned on moderates like Lafayette and Rochambeau, American allies who had fought bravely for us during the our Revolution. They guillotined thousands of other moderates like the Girondin who had helped bring down the French monarchy but who favored limited government as did Hamilton, not a dictatorship of the Paris mob. He feared that the radical American apologists for French excesses would turn our politics into a vindictive search for traitors, endangering families like his own and destroying the more conservative and moderate American experiment in representative government that he and Washington championed.
"Hamilton," the book and the musical are about today as well as yesterday. Every American young and old should read Chernow's engrossing biography and play Lin-Manuel Miranda's moving music and lyrics.