The Dark Side of Alexander Hamilton

Today is Independence Day, the day when the United States annually celebrates the approval of the Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress on July 4th, 1776. (The congress had actually voted to declare independence from Britain two days earlier on July 2nd.)

Coinciding with the occasion, yesterday, Disney released a recording of the hit Broadway musical Hamilton on their streaming service Disney+. My family and I watched it together. I had listened to the soundtrack previously, but this was the first time I had the opportunity to actually see the show in any form.

Hamilton accurately captures some of Alexander Hamilton’s more obvious personality faults: his arrogance, his impulsiveness, his temper, his womanizing, and his tactlessness. Unfortunately, the musical glosses over some of his more troubling faults, most notably his authoritarian political leanings. In this article, I want to explore some of the overlooked flaws of the real-life Alexander Hamilton.

Alexander Hamilton’s elitism and hatred of democracy

You wouldn’t know this from watching Hamilton, but, as an adult, Alexander Hamilton was an elitist cynic who distrusted basically anyone who wasn’t wealthy, was ardently opposed to anything that could even be construed as resembling democracy, and loved monarchical authoritarianism.

The musical Hamilton correctly mentions that Hamilton gave a speech at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 arguing for his own form of government, but the musical leaves out what that form of government was—probably because, if audiences heard about it, they wouldn’t like it.

At the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton warned that the common people should under no circumstances be given any substantial measure of power in government and that wealthy landowners should be in near-complete control of the government, because people who aren’t wealthy are capricious, jealous of the wealthy, and always demanding change; whereas the wealthy are dependable and have no motive to stray from the path of good governance, so they make ideal leaders. Here is an excerpt from his speech, as quoted by James Madison:

“In every community where industry is encouraged, there will be a division of it into the few and the many. Hence, separate interests will arise. There will be debtors and creditors, etc. Give all the power to the many, they will oppress the few. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God, and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right.”

“Give therefore to the first class [i.e. the wealthiest people] a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second [i.e. everyone who is not wealthy], and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government. Can a democratic assembly, who annually revolve in the mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.”

This anti-democratic rhetoric isn’t unusual for the Founding Fathers; as I note in this article from May 2020, John Adams believed that democracy was just as bad as monarchy because, according to him, when the common people are given power, they abuse it, just as tyrants do.

Hamilton took things much further than Adams, though.

ABOVE: Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, painted in 1940 by Howard Chandler Christy

In his speech at the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton went on to praise the British monarchy, saying that it was the only good executive system that had ever existed and that it worked because the king was so wealthy that he couldn’t possibly be bribed or influenced by any foreign government. According to Madison, Hamilton said:

“The hereditary interest of the king was so interwoven with that of the nation, and his personal emoluments so great, that he was placed above the danger of being corrupted from abroad—and at the same time was both sufficiently independent and sufficiently controlled to answer the purpose of the institution at home. One of the weak sides of republics was their being liable to foreign influence and corruption. Men of little character acquiring great power become easily the tools of intermeddling neighbors…”

Based on these points, Hamilton argued that the United States should have one supreme executive with absolute veto, who would not be elected by the ignorant masses, but rather by electors, who, according to him, would better understand the country’s needs. He argued that the executive and all the Senators should remain in their positions for life and that the only way to remove the executive from power once he is elected should be by the Senate through the process of impeachment.

Hamilton anticipated that some of the other delegates at the convention might accuse him of proposing an “elective monarchy.” This was his response:

“It may be said this constitutes an elective monarchy! Pray, what is a monarchy? May not the governors of the respective states be considered in that light? But by making the executive subject to impeachment, the term ‘monarchy’ cannot apply.”

Needless to say, Hamilton’s plan was not at all popular and many of the delegates became convinced that he was a monarchist.

ABOVE: Full-length portrait of King George III, painted in 1762 by Allan Ramsay

Hamilton maintained his bitter hatred for all forms of democracy even after the Constitutional Convention concluded. In a speech delivered in New York City on 21 June 1788, Hamilton proclaimed that, even if it were possible to implement democracy in the United States, it would be a terrible idea:

“It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.”

Alexander Hamilton and immigration

The musical Hamilton repeatedly refers to Alexander Hamilton as an “immigrant,” but this is only partly true. Hamilton was born in 1755 or 1757 on the tiny island of Nevis in the Leeward Islands chain in the Caribbean, which, at the time, was a British colony. In 1772, when he was either fifteen or seventeen, he went to New York City to continue his education.

It is therefore true that Hamilton came to what is now the United States from outside what is now the United States—except, at the time he did so, the place where he came from and the place where he went were both ruled by the same country, Britain.

Furthermore, despite being an “immigrant” himself, as a politician, Hamilton wasn’t exactly supportive of immigration. In 1798, he supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it much harder for immigrants to become United States citizens and gave the president the authority to deport or imprison any non-citizen living in the United States who was considered dangerous or who had come from a country that was hostile to the United States.

ABOVE: Original document of one of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which Hamilton supported

Alexander Hamilton and slavery

Hamilton portrays Alexander Hamilton as passionately arguing for the immediate abolition of slavery. It is true that Hamilton seems to have generally disapproved of slavery and that he supported gradual emancipation, but, sadly, his track record on slavery is nowhere near as progressive as the musical suggests.

In 1779, Hamilton supported a plan proposed by his friend John Laurens to allow enslaved black people to serve in the Continental Army and be granted their freedom as a reward. Hamilton defends Laurens’s plan in a letter he wrote to John Jay on 14 March 1779. At one point in the letter, Hamilton says this:

“…I frequently hear it objected to the scheme of embodying negroes that they are too stupid to make soldiers. This is so far from appearing to me a valid objection that I think their want of cultivation (for their natural faculties are probably as good as ours) joined to that habit of subordination which they acquire from a life of servitude, will make them sooner became soldiers than our White inhabitants. Let officers be men of sense and sentiment, and the nearer the soldiers approach to machines perhaps the better.”

Here Hamilton says that black people “probably” aren’t as stupid as people think and that, even if they are stupid, it doesn’t matter, because soldiers don’t need intelligence; they just need to follow orders. This seems to indicate that, at least at the time he wrote this letter, Hamilton was neither a convinced racist nor a convinced anti-racist.

Later in the letter, Hamilton explicitly states that he supports Laurens’s plan not only because he thinks it will give the Continental Army an advantage against the British, but also because he has sympathy for enslaved people and he wants them to be free:

“An essential part of the plan is to give them their freedom with their muskets. This will secure their fidelity, animate their courage, and I believe will have a good influence upon those who remain, by opening a door to their emancipation. This circumstance, I confess, has no small weight in inducing me to wish the success of the project; for the dictates of humanity and true policy equally interest me in favour of this unfortunate class of men.”

Of course, Hamilton makes it very clear in the letter that he supports the plan primarily because he believes it will give the Continental Army an advantage.

ABOVE: Portrait of Alexander Hamilton’s friend John Laurens, who proposed a plan to allow enslaved black people to serve in the army in exchange for their freedom, which Hamilton supported

Hamilton was willing to put aside his personal misgivings about slavery when it was advantageous for him to do so. Notably, on 14 December 1780, Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler, a member of the Schuyler family, which was one of the wealthiest families in New York City. The Schuylers owned a large number of slaves, whom they used as household servants. Hamilton never seems to have voiced any objections to his in-laws’ ownership of slaves. In fact, he engaged in transactions involving slaves for them on numerous occasions.

In 1785, Hamilton became a founding member of the Manumission Society of New York. Defenders of Hamilton have made a big deal of this fact, claiming that it proves he was dedicated to the abolition of slavery, but his involvement in the Society doesn’t mean nearly as much as they claim it does, since the Society was very moderate; it supported the voluntary manumission of slaves by their masters in the state of New York, not the immediate abolition of slavery nationwide. The Society even allowed its members to continue owning slaves, as long as they had plans to manumit them eventually.

Furthermore, Hamilton is reported to have attended meetings for the Society infrequently and he does not seem to have discussed his involvement in the society with non-members. It is probable that the only reason Hamilton joined the society to begin with was because many members of the group were New Yorkers of high status and Hamilton likely saw it as an opportunity to rub elbows with members of the wealthy elite.

ABOVE: Engraving from a silver pitcher created in 1817 for the Manumission Society of New York showing the personification of Liberty setting slaves free from their shackles. Alexander Hamilton was a founding member of the Society.

Finally, it is highly probable that Hamilton at least briefly owned at least two slaves himself. An entry in his personal account book dated to 1796 states: “Cash to N. Low 2 Negro servants purchased by him for me, $250.” Hamilton’s grandson Allen McLane Hamilton, who had access to all Hamilton’s personal letters and financial records, published a biography of him in 1910 titled The Intimate Life of Alexander Hamilton, in which he testifies:

“It has been stated that Hamilton never owned a negro slave, but this is untrue. We find that in his books there are entries showing that he purchased them for himself and for others.”

While the evidence isn’t completely airtight, it is enough to convince me that Alexander Hamilton, far from being an uncompromising abolitionist, was actually at least briefly a slaveowner himself.

All the evidence, taken together, paints a complicated picture of Hamilton as a man who wasn’t fond of slavery, but who wasn’t particularly committed to the goal of abolishing it and who was perfectly willing to set aside his personal feelings on the subject when it was personally expedient for him to do so.

A comparison of Hamilton with some other Founding Fathers on the issue of slavery

On the issue of slavery, Hamilton does come out looking a lot better than some of the other Founding Fathers; as I discuss in this article I originally published in April 2017, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison all owned hundreds of slaves. Washington posthumously manumitted all his slaves through his will; Jefferson only freed a few slaves during his entire lifetime and none after his death; and Madison never freed any of his slaves at all.

On the other hand, there are other Founding Fathers who come out looking better than Hamilton. Notably, John Adams never owned any slaves at any point in his whole life and wrote on multiple occasions that he despised the institution of slavery wholeheartedly. Adams, however, opposed the immediate abolition of slavery, because he believed that slaves were property and that the government taking away white people’s slaves by force would be an even worse crime than slavery itself. Instead, like Hamilton, he believed in the gradual emancipation of slaves through voluntary manumission.

Benjamin Franklin owned slaves when he was younger, but he eventually set all the slaves he ever owned free. As he grew older, he became increasingly outspoken in his opposition to slavery. Near the end of his life, he became a committed abolitionist, writing and publishing multiple essays arguing for the abolition of slavery and the integration of black people into American society.

ABOVE: Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, painted in 1778 by the portrait artist Joseph Duplessis. Unlike Hamilton, Franklin did eventually become a committed abolitionist, albeit only near the end of his life.

Conclusion

I’m not writing this article just to bash Hamilton. Even I will admit that he was a brilliant man. He certainly is an important historical figure. After all, he wrote fifty-one of The Federalist Papers, which played a crucial role in getting the Constitution ratified and which continue to shape how we think about our government. Then, as the first Secretary of the Treasury, he more-or-less defined the role that the government continues to play in the economy.

The point I’m trying to make here is that we shouldn’t romanticize him and we should recognize that he had some wrongheaded ideas. He was an eighteenth-century quasi-monarchist, not a twenty-first century liberal.