If you’ve decided to protect your 401(k) and pass on tickets to “Hamilton” the musical, no worries — a Washington museum is offering a much more affordable look at Alexander Hamilton, the 18th-century media star.
The run of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” at the Kennedy Center has inspired a boomlet of Hamilton enthusiasm for D.C. museums, bars and tourist companies, exploring the manifold links between the nation’s first Treasury secretary and the nation’s capital.
The George Washington University exhibit, just in time for Independence Day, tells the story of our hottest Founding Father through 18 newspaper articles and documents that chronicle Hamilton’s major accomplishments and some of the major milestones of a new nation.
An article in the March 2, 1791, edition of the Gazette of the United States announces that Congress has passed the New Yorker’s plan for a National Bank. The debate is recounted in hip-hop verse in Mr. Miranda’s Tony-winning Broadway smash.
An article from the Salem (Massachusetts) Gazette analyzes the neck-and-neck presidential election of 1800, when Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson finished in a tie in the Electoral College. The reporter notes that Hamilton reluctantly expressed to his allies in Congress his backing of his Cabinet rival, Jefferson, over his old law colleague and New York City rival Burr.
The most dramatic press account is likely to be the Boston Centinel’s report on Hamilton’s death. The article details his deathbed experience, funeral plans and eulogies.
Though the exhibit’s spotlight focuses primarily on Hamilton, organizers also feature a selection from the Rural Repository newspaper about his wife, Eliza Hamilton, who helped him through many of his accomplishments. She went on to found the first private orphanage in New York City after Hamilton’s death in his famous 1804 duel with Burr.
“Mrs. Hamilton must be nearly eighty years of age,” reads the Rural Repository account published in February 1849. “She is head directress of the New York Orphan Asylum. … Previous to the establishment of this benevolent institution, there was no public receptacle for the numerous unfortunate infants, which are so frequently left by their depraved parents, to perish in the streets of the great metropolis.”
The Library of Congress is featuring a collection of Hamilton letters that are directly quoted or helped inspire songs and specific lyrics from the musical, including the moving “Best of Wins and Best of Women.” Mount Vernon has put on public display through Oct. 1 items tracing the personal and professional relationship between Hamilton and George Washington, including a consoling letter Hamilton wrote to Martha Washington on the death of his former commander in chief.
The National Archives also is offering the public a glimpse through mid-September of a number of Hamilton-related documents and items in its vast storehouse, among them an accounting of Hamilton’s assets and debts that he wrote up just days before the Burr duel.
Making a city a capital
At the George Washington University Museum, curator Anne Dobberteen said the decision to feature Hamilton came from his significant role in the designation of Washington as the nation’s capital — another pivotal plot point in the musical — and from the production’s first theatrical run in Washington.
“Hamilton played a very important role in the compromise in 1790, which helped to locate the nation’s capital of Washington, D.C., at its present location. … There’s a really important D.C. connection there that we thought would be important to explore,” she said.
She added, “Of course, we’re getting on the bandwagon of the musical being here at the Kennedy Center this summer. There’s a lot of interest.”
The curator said the items and articles on display were carefully selected based on a variety of factors.
“We picked documents that related to the parts of the musical and songs that people would be familiar with, because we wanted to make these 18th-century newspapers as accessible to people today as we could. Other than that, we tried to focus on newspapers that conveyed moments in Hamilton’s life that were important.”
The collection features a section on “How to Read a Historical Newspaper,” with a guide and accompanying magnifying glasses to read the often densely printed prose.
Private collector Antonia M. Chambers, who had amassed a large number of Hamilton-related articles, lent the newspapers to the GW Museum, said Ms. Dobberteen.
After the exhibit closes, the material will be on display at the Society of the Cincinnati’s Anderson House near Dupont Circle.
The exhibit will be open through Sept. 9. Although admission is free, the museum gladly accepts donations.
“I hope that people will come to this exhibit and walk away not only with a greater appreciation for Alexander Hamilton, but also for 18th-century newspapers as material objects in it of themselves,” said Ms. Dobberteen.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.