What is Alexander Hamilton about?

Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton — immigrant, orphan, Revolutionary War aide-de-camp, first Secretary of the Treasury, founder of the American financial system, and victim of Aaron Burr's bullet — is the most comprehensive single-volume account of Hamilton's life and the book that most directly sparked the Hamilton revival in popular culture, including Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical. Published in 2004, it rehabilitated a founder who had been largely overshadowed by Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, and argued for his central importance to the America that actually exists.

Hamilton arrived in New York from the Caribbean with almost nothing — an illegitimate child born in Nevis, orphaned when his mother died of yellow fever, sent to America by benefactors who recognized his intelligence — and the ambition he developed in those circumstances never left him. Chernow traces the formation carefully: the Caribbean poverty, the self-education, the youthful newspaper polemics that showed a rhetorical gift, the military service under Washington during the Revolutionary War where he became the general's most trusted aide and eventually his surrogate son.

The political chapters are the biography's most important historical contribution. Hamilton's design of the American financial system — the national bank, assumption of state debts, a funded national debt, a customs service, a coast guard — was opposed by Jefferson and Madison on constitutional and political grounds, and the debate between them defined the first generation of American politics and many of the divisions that persist today. Chernow is sympathetic to Hamilton and argues that his financial innovations were foundational; Jeffersonian critics will find the balance imperfect.

The duel with Burr, which Hamilton knew was likely to kill him and which he walked into anyway, is the biography's most psychologically interesting episode. Chernow's explanation — that Hamilton believed declining the duel would have destroyed his political reputation and rendered all his public service meaningless — is plausible, but it also reveals something about Hamilton's relationship to honor and sacrifice that the biography traces back to the Caribbean orphan's need to prove himself repeatedly.