So. Much. Finance. Talk. I trust that the #HamAlong will experience a sharp upward turn in action in the subsequent chapters, and can only conclude that the schedule for this week allotted a comparatively lowish number of pages to make up for how heavily taxy this section is.
One thing I learned that tied into knowledge I already possessed was that Britain had, at this time, something like a monopoly on textile production. A. Ham wanted to diversify American business, rather than continuing to depend on only agriculture, so he spent a lot of time learning about textiles and how Americans could produce them in factories. Britain, meanwhile, would not let their cleverest engineers even leave the country, lest they betray English textile secrets to the rest of the world. Crazy, eh? And particularly strange to think about given how, a few years on, India’s going to make the bottom fall out of the British textile industry anyway.
In his free time, when he’s not writing financial systems into existence, A. Ham is, I am sorry to say, becoming involved with Maria Reynolds. It is self-destructive AF, and knowing as I do the ultimate outcome, I wish and wish that he would change his mind and not fuck that lady.
Oh but then what. The chapter started off all sex-scandally and guess what came next. Guess for a sec.
YES. YOU ARE CORRECT. MORE FINANCE STUFF.
And not even, you know, like Hamilton’s barely even feuding with Jefferson and Madison yet. Jefferson does come home from France, and Chernow makes the excellent point that whereas we think of Jefferson as a revered Founding Father, Hamilton only knew about him what he had heard from other people. Which was, like, that he owned slaves and wasn’t a great commander and had asked Angelica to come back to Monticello with him to check out all his slaves. So it is no big surprise that Hamilton was all:
Since I paid less attention to this section than I have to most of the sections (and less than I will pay to future sections! I swear this is the most amount inattentive I will ever be throughout this HamAlong!), I will just leave you with this John Adams burn:
John Adams [told] Jefferson that [Hamilton] was an “insolent coxcomb who rarely dined in good company where there was good wine without getting silly and vaporing about his administration, like a young girl about her brilliants and trinkets.”
Y’all, that not only does not sound insolent or coxcomby, it sounds outright delightful. Like Hamilton’s true love for America was barely being kept under wraps at all times, and then you get a glass of wine into him and he can’t shut up about it. ADORABLE.