What the Broadway musical Hamilton left out

One night Alexander Hamilton and I were at my house after dinner. The room was hung with portraits of remarkable men. Hamilton pointed to three of them and asked who they were. I told him they were Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke — the three greatest men the world had ever produced. Bacon advanced the scientific method and practical knowledge. Newton explained the laws of nature. Locke argued that governments exist to protect the rights of the people, not to rule them by force. Those ideas, not military conquest, seemed to me the foundation of free government.

Hamilton paused, then said the greatest man who ever lived was Julius Caesar. Caesar was the Roman general who seized power, ended the republic, and made himself dictator. I took the remark seriously. It suggested to me that Hamilton preferred strong personal rule or clever political management over the slower, more limited government I believed in. I wrote about it years later to Benjamin Rush, noting that Hamilton seemed willing to use force or corruption if needed to govern. Whether he was entirely serious or testing me, the contrast was clear: I looked to philosophers and scientists; he named a conqueror.

That is the historical exchange. It was not a cartoon of good versus evil. It was a disagreement between two men who had helped create the United States about how much power the new federal government should have, how strictly the Constitution should be read, and whether a strong executive and financial system would protect liberty or endanger it.

Now a popular Broadway musical called Hamilton has made many young people see me as the villain and Hamilton as the pure hero. The show is entertaining and has introduced millions to the founding era, but it simplifies and rearranges the facts for dramatic effect. It portrays Hamilton as a consistent opponent of slavery and me mainly as a slaveholding aristocrat who opposed progress. The real history is more complicated for both of us.

I called slavery a moral evil and a blot on the country. In my draft of the Declaration of Independence I included a long passage (later removed by Congress) condemning the slave trade and blaming the king for keeping open a market “where MEN should be bought and sold.” I capitalized MEN deliberately so no one could miss that the people being enslaved were fully human and covered by the principle that all men are created equal. I supported ending further importations. As President I signed the law that outlawed the international slave trade. I repeatedly said gradual emancipation, followed by settling the freed people outside the United States, was the only practical way to end the system without destroying the Union or producing greater violence.

Likewise Hamilton was publicly opposed to slavery. He belonged to the New York Manumission Society, which favored gradual ending of slavery, and during the Revolution he supported a plan to arm some enslaved men and free them for service. At the same time, later research shows he was involved in transactions involving enslaved people for family or clients, and his anti-slavery activity was not as constant or central as the musical suggests. In political writings he warned Southern planters that my ideas on emancipation should worry them more than John Adams’s policies. The Federalists accused me of being a concealed abolitionist.

In that sense Alexander Hamilton treated me as someone whose writings threatened the institution of slavery. He was correct there. In private letters during the election of 1800, Hamilton described me as a man of some integrity and principle. When the Electoral College produced a tie between Aaron Burr and me, the decision went to the House of Representatives. Hamilton wrote repeatedly to Federalist members, urging them to support me rather than Burr. The Broadway musical Hamilton did address Hamilton’s support for me in 1800, but it neglected to mention both his private letters praising my integrity and his earlier political writings accusing me of being a concealed abolitionist whose ideas threatened Southern slaveholders. I suppose the facts would have gotten in the way of the narrative they wanted to tell.