Duel Loyalty

Mr. Patterson is a professor of sociology at Harvard University and the author most recently of Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries.

WHILE it might be an exaggeration to call Alexander Hamilton America's "forgotten" founder, it is certainly true that he has been unfairly overshadowed by the monumental images of Jefferson, Washington, and even Madison. The reason could hardly be a lack of sources, since he wrote more voluminously than any other of the Founders and is the major author of the Federalist Papers. Nor could it be a want of interesting things to say about him, since the man not only led a perhaps too engrossing and varied life, but arguably did more than any of the other Founding Fathers except Washington to shape the future course of the nation: its political and legal systems, its commercial institutions, its tradition of public discourse, and its press. It is common knowledge that he has been badly served by scholars. Astonishingly, Forrest McDonald's biography was, until now, the only first-rate study in print, and though Hamilton's arresting image graces our ten- dollar bill, he has not become an icon. Why?

Richard Brookhiser's splendid biography comes closer than anything else to providing an answer and succeeds in doing what no other work has quite done before: provide a portrait of Hamilton that brings out the true genius of the man in a volume that is both elegantly written and accessible to a mass audience.

In just 240 pages, Brookhiser distills the major points in Hamilton's extraordinary life, from his precocious teenage years in St. Croix and youth in Manhattan, through his formative years as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, to his role in the writing of the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, to his later careers as secretary of the Treasury, lawyer, politician, and journalist. The work's primary objective, however, is the portrayal of Hamilton's character and achievement. Among the book's best chapters are thematic analyses of Hamilton's work as a journalist, his understanding of the rights of persons, and the passions that moved and eventually undid him.

Several recurring themes provide texture, depth, and coherence to the portrait: Hamilton's too-conservative dis- trust of the very voters whose approval he nonetheless sought; his too-radical faith in the possibilities of strong government; his "all-pervading ardor" and preoccupation with the darker side of pas- sion; his pragmatic rationality; his energetic self-fashioning; and his distance from the ruling class into which he had entered through marriage and merit.

What emerges as the most important influence in Hamilton's life is his humble West Indian childhood. Not only was he illegitimate and abandoned by his father, but his mother was of questionable morals. Brookhiser discreetly puts the best interpretation on the available evidence about her. She was certainly not the whore her angry husband claimed in his divorce papers, but from what I know of 18th-century Caribbean Creole society, she was hardly the good woman of St. Croix.

This ignominious past weighed heavily on Hamilton and accounts for his best and worst qualities. His ambition, his enormous energy, his abhorrence of slavery, his compassion -- all stemmed from what he learned growing up in a vicious little slave society and his need to overcome his personal past. Hamilton's immigrant status, and the fact that he hailed from "nowhere," largely accounts for his Federalist nationalism. More than any of the other Founding Fathers he could imagine a United States of America. Because he had no local ties (when Jefferson spoke of his "country," he meant Virginia) and because he despised and renounced his own foreign provenance, his one and only political loyalty was to America. Because the first place he knew was so ridiculously small, it was natural for him to become America's first "Continentalist," as he once signed himself. Hamilton's West Indian background may also explain his way with words-the enormous importance he placed on them, the ardor with which he used them. Something about the islands does this to its inhabitants, of every hue and ethnic group. It is no accident that several of the best poets in English, including Britain's likely next poet laureate, Derek Walcott, hail from these little islands, as do two of its best novelists: V. S. Naipaul and the late Jean Rhys, who could easily pass as a kinswoman of Hamilton. All acquired their distinctive felicity with words at the breasts of their Creole-speaking mothers or nannies. All used words as their passports out of what they eventually came to see as insular and barbaric dead-ends. Hamilton was simply one of the earliest, and perhaps the greatest, to go this route; as Brookhiser acutely observes, "words were his means."

But this same past was also the source of his worst vices and the deeper reason for his untimely death. Like most West Indian men of all colors, then and now, especially those brought up by strong-willed mothers, he was a compulsive womanizer. He believed in marrying high and sleeping low, in part because of his contempt for and fear of sex, given what it had done to the most important woman in his life. Hamilton was fatefully drawn to women in distress. Brookhiser handles this vice adroitly, resisting all temptation to belabor the psychologically obvious. The absurd affair with Mrs. Maria Reynolds -- America's first major political sex scandal-was driven by the "pride of a boy," the man-child of his fallen Creole mother, rather than the "pride of a man." Well said; and enough.

It is Hamilton's Caribbean background too that explains his seeming indifference toward labor and the environment. One of his justifications for a federal tax was his belief that it would force idlers to work. It sounds callous, until one recalls that Hamilton had gone to work before he was twelve. The Caribbean was also the source of his "monarchial bias" and politically suicidal Anglophilia. Like most West Indians, especially those of predominantly British ancestry, he never got over the fact that Britain was the mother country, which meant for him, the mother political culture. He was a true American patriot who fought against George III, but he still meant it when he told a British envoy that "we think in English." He was right of course-in a narrower sense, we still do-but it was rash to broadcast the fact so soon after a war of independence with Britain.

In one of the book's most incisive passages, Brookhiser explains James Madison's shifting stances with the astute observation that he was, at heart, a weak man, unduly influenced by more powerful personalities. This was certainly not Hamilton's problem, but he too harbored a deep-seated spiritual malady. It was an ingrained sense of loss and abandonment; an inalienable void that came from his father's rejection and dishonoring. Hamilton's astonishing success could not remove it. Indeed, the greater his success and the more he moved in the company of men with honorable parentage, the more acute his sense of loss, his yearning to repair the dishonor, the sheer embarrassment of his soul. This "passion for honor," Brookhiser tells us, "that could be laudable or destructive, bulked large in Hamilton's life and times." It explains why he so badly advised his son about the duel in which the latter died. From this he never recovered. Hamilton's own death in a duel, grasping the same pistol his son died with, seems like an honorable form of suicide-a last, mortal cri de cœur for the one thing he could never achieve.

I may have placed greater emphasis on Hamilton's West Indian background as the source of his complex and tragic personality than Brookhiser intended. But so vividly and engagingly has he drawn Hamilton that I feel free to interpret his lines and shadings as I will. This is biographical portraiture at its best, and it carries the form forward by drawing on and modernizing the form's greatest ancient practitioner. Plutarch pervades this book, partly because he was Hamilton's favorite author, but also because he clearly is Brookhiser's model. The work is Plutarchan in its brevity (compared with the grossly overwritten volumes typical of modern American biographies), in its emphasis on characterization over narrative, and in its frankly moral tone. So too is one of Brookhiser's most effective stylistic techniques: his delineation of aspects of his subject's character by contrasting him with conflicting personalities, what the classicist D. A. Russell calls the Plutarchan "internal sunkrisis," or comparison, as opposed to the extended comparisons appended to most of the Lives. Hardly a page passes without recourse to this method, and it works brilliantly for Brookhiser: His contrasts are always apt, and his judgments and reflections acute, often bracingly so.

The work's main fault springs from its chief virtue. The stylistic dictum "less is more" is sometimes taken too far, leaving the reader puzzled. For example, given what we are told about Hamilton's acrimonious political career in New York and his unhappy relationship with its voters, the expression of popular grief, shock, and outrage at his death comes as a complete surprise. Hamilton's complex relationship with his fellow New Yorkers clearly warrants more attention. And while his writing is generally taut and self-assured, Brookhiser is not immune to that literary virus of the modern American male writer: the sports metaphor. It simply does not work to compare Jefferson to a quarterback.

But these are minor flaws in a whole that is something of a triumph. The book succeeds wonderfully in reminding us that Alexander Hamilton was, next to Washington, the greatest of the Founding Fathers and that his life "can guide and caution us."