“To this day,” Ron Chernow writes in his recent biography, Alexander Hamilton, “he seems trapped in a crude historical cartoon that pits ‘Jeffersonian democracy’ against ‘Hamiltonian aristocracy.’”īut now, two centuries after he was mortally wounded on a stony plot across the Hudson from Manhattan, Hamilton is emerging from historical limbo. As recently as last summer, a determined lobby sought to evict him from his longtime home on the $10 bill, to be replaced by Ronald Reagan. In his own time, Hamilton’s critics willfully misrepresented his political vision, and later generations of historians did little to correct the record.
Such caricatures are perhaps inevitable, but Hamilton has suffered more than the standard indignities. Treasury and the chief author of The Federalist Papers, is too often dismissed as a sort of Founding Office Manager - the detail man fussing over ledgers and protocol while Washington willed a nation into being and Jefferson penned its soul on parchment. Students of history may know better, but sometimes not a great deal more: Hamilton, as the first secretary of the U.S. In the ruthless shorthand to which historical figures are reduced, Alexander Hamilton is the powdered wig on the $10 bill and the luckless statesman on the wrong end of Aaron Burr’s dueling pistol.
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