Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow: A Great and Complex Founder of America

Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton is one of those rare biographies that does two things at once: it resurrects a historical figure in full human complexity, and it makes a persuasive case that this figure mattered more than most readers were ever taught. Hamilton emerges not merely as a Founding Father, but as the engine of the early American republic—brilliant, abrasive, indispensable, and ultimately self-destructive.

Chernow begins with Hamilton’s astonishing rise from obscurity. Born illegitimate in the Caribbean, orphaned young, and educated through sheer force of talent, Hamilton arrives in North America already sharpened by hardship. Chernow is unsparing here—Hamilton’s hunger for order, status, and permanence is rooted in chaos. This psychological grounding matters, because it explains everything that follows. Hamilton’s obsession with structure, credit, and authority was not abstract theory; it was survival instinct elevated into national policy.

Hamilton’s Revolutionary War service is one of the book’s great strengths. As aide-de-camp to George Washington, Hamilton becomes indispensable—drafting correspondence, managing logistics, and acting as Washington’s intellectual lieutenant. Chernow makes clear that Washington recognized Hamilton’s genius early and trusted him deeply, even when he found him exasperating. The relationship is portrayed as mutually formative: Washington gave Hamilton legitimacy and restraint; Hamilton gave Washington a mind capable of thinking several steps ahead. Without Hamilton, Washington’s presidency would have been weaker. Without Washington, Hamilton would likely have burned himself out even faster.

The heart of the book—and the reason it has had such a long cultural afterlife—is Chernow’s treatment of Hamilton as Treasury Secretary. Here, Hamilton is not just a theorist but a relentless operator. His financial program—assumption of state debts, establishment of public credit, the Bank of the United States—was radical, controversial, and foundational. Chernow argues convincingly that Hamilton understood something his rivals did not: nations survive on confidence, not purity. Jefferson wanted a virtuous agrarian republic; Hamilton wanted a functioning one. History has largely sided with Hamilton, and Chernow does not pretend otherwise.

But this is not hagiography. Chernow is clear-eyed about Hamilton’s flaws, especially his inability to stop fighting. The political infighting with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison is presented as both ideological and personal. Hamilton’s pen was lethal, and he used it constantly. He could not resist humiliating opponents or escalating conflicts, even when discretion would have served him better. His feud with John Adams is particularly telling: Hamilton undermined a president from his own party out of intellectual contempt and strategic impatience, a move that all but guaranteed his political isolation.

The most devastating section of the book is Hamilton’s self-immolation in the Reynolds affair. Chernow treats this episode not as a scandal for its own sake but as a study in catastrophic judgment. Hamilton, obsessed with his reputation for probity, chose public confession over political survival. The result was moral clarity paired with total ruin. It is one of the strangest episodes in American political history, and Chernow narrates it with restraint and disbelief in equal measure.

The book’s final act—the rivalry with Aaron Burr and the fatal duel—is tragic precisely because it feels avoidable. Chernow resists easy moralizing. Burr is not a cartoon villain, and Hamilton is not a martyr. Instead, Chernow shows two men trapped by honor culture, pride, and accumulated grievance. Hamilton’s decision to throw away his shot, so to speak, reads less like noble sacrifice and more like exhaustion. He had been fighting all his life; the fight finally killed him.

What makes Chernow’s biography exceptional is its balance. Hamilton is neither sanitized nor dismissed. He is brilliant and reckless, visionary and intolerable. Chernow’s prose is clear, propulsive, and confident without being flashy. At nearly 800 pages, the book earns its length; there is very little padding. Every feud, memo, and policy debate builds toward a coherent portrait of a man who helped create the United States and then made himself impossible within it.

If there is a final judgment here, it is this: Hamilton was the Founder most attuned to modernity, and therefore the least comfortable in his own time. Chernow makes that case decisively. You finish the book convinced not only that Hamilton mattered, but that the country still runs—financially, bureaucratically, institutionally—on tracks he laid down. Loving this book is not surprising. It is serious history written with narrative force, and it leaves you thinking hard about power, ambition, and the costs of being right too soon.

In this year the nation Hamilton helped to found celebrates 250 years since The Declaration of Independence was published on July 4, 1776. I recently re-read On Revolution by Hannah Arendt in which she describes why most revolutions aspire to freedom and end in tyranny. Central to the book is her explanation of why the American Revolution succeeded when nearly all others failed. 

Will America continue into a more perfect union or after a quarter-millennium fall into the tyranny that is the fate of every other revolution?  This year 2026 will say a lot about America.

  

The Declaration of Independence

Thomas Jefferson. The sole author of 

the most influential document in the history of the world.

The Declaration of Independence 

In Congress, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.