BOOK REVIEW: ‘Washington and Hamilton: The Alliance that Forged America’

OPINION:

WASHINGTON AND HAMILTON: THE ALLIANCE THAT FORGED AMERICA

By Stephen F. Knott and Tony Williams

Sourcebooks, $24.99 hardbound, $15.99 paperback, 339 pages

God knows it took long enough, but Alexander Hamilton has finally come into his own, most recently as the hero of a hit Broadway musical. The real turning point goes back to the turn of the last century. In 1999 Richard Brookhiser’s “Alexander Hamilton, American” gave a new generation of readers a concise appreciation of one of the few men besides George Washington who contributed to the birth of our nation both as a courageous soldier and as a major shaper of the Constitution and our first truly national government. In 2002, Stephen Knott, one of the co-authors of the subject of this review, debunked many of the prejudicial — and mostly false — images of Hamilton perpetuated by historians bent on whitewashing Thomas Jefferson by smearing his political opponents in “Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth.” Then, in 2004, Ron Chernow published his magisterial “Alexander Hamilton,” a solid monument to Hamilton’s contributions as a soldier, a political philosopher and a practical nation-builder, as well as an insightful appreciation of a driven, imperfect but truly heroic man.

“Washington and Hamilton: The Alliance that Forged America” is not yet another life of Hamilton, nor is it a joint biography of Washington and Hamilton. Instead, it is the history of a remarkable collaboration between two very different individuals — part odd couple, part dynamic duo — that resulted in a joint achievement neither the senior partner (Washington) nor the junior partner (Hamilton) could have accomplished alone. As the authors expressed it in a recent interview, “these two men, more than any other, taught their fellow citizens to think of themselves as Americans” rather than as Virginians, New Englanders or New Yorkers.

Not that you’d think so if you relied on the conventional academic wisdom of most of the 20th century. That false liberal narrative cast Thomas Jefferson and James Madison as early champions of “democracy” against Hamiltonian plutocrats bent on establishing a tyrannical, even “monarchical” system. The facts tell another story. Both Jefferson and Madison were privileged Southern aristocrats bent on preserving — and, in the case of the Louisiana Purchase, expanding — their slave-based regional economy while Hamilton was a self-made man who opposed slavery and laid the foundation for an opportunity-based society open to all.

There is another reason for this long-standing prejudice. “Throughout their twenty-two year alliance, Washington and Hamilton would be shot at, literally and figuratively, from all sides. They drew this fire partly because their wartime experience set them apart from many of their founding brethren, some of whom developed an abstract, armchair radicalism, dangerously divorced from the cold reality of revolutionary death and destruction. Washington and Hamilton saw death up close and understood that there was a thin veneer separating order from chaos, which led them to embrace the virtue of moderation and to revere stability.”

They were “sober revolutionaries” and thanks to them “the American Revolution did not consume itself, unlike most modern revolutions.” Paradoxically, Jefferson, the great “democrat,” was also a great snob. He even ridiculed Hamilton, born in impoverished circumstances in the West Indies, for lacking the equestrian skills of a “gentleman.” Hamilton may have been a less graceful rider than Jefferson but at least he had the virtue of galloping toward rather than away from the enemy. By contrast, Jefferson’s horsemanship during the American Revolution only came into play when, as governor of Virginia, he panicked and fled from an invading British column, going into hiding until the danger had passed and never explaining his AWOL whereabouts to his contemporaries or to posterity.

Once the war was safely over and the Constitution adopted, the Jeffersonians soon engaged in a primitive form of McCarthyism: “Accusing a public figure of being a monarchist in the 1790s was the equivalent of accusing someone of being a communist in the 1950s. This charge was repeated incessantly after 1792; as with all lies, repetition was the key to its success.” Eventually, however, the truth will out. As Messrs. Knott and Williams conclude, thanks to the exertions of Washington and Hamilton, “the American people began to ’think continentally’ and created a strong union that decades and then centuries later helped defeat fascism and communism, explored the universe, produced endless scientific and technological breakthroughs, and perhaps most importantly abolished slavery and Jim Crow, thereby securing the blessings of liberty for all of their fellow citizens.”

• Aram Bakshian Jr., an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, writes widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.