Are you still HamAlonging with us, ducklings? If you missed last week, there’s still plenty of time to catch up! The full schedule is posted at Alice’s blog, and a very nice schedule it is too! This week, Hamilton educates himself, goes into battle, and seeks a wife.
While some people such as you or me might find running an army (in an administrative role, but I mean — that’s where all the work’s at anyway, right?) to be a sufficient amount to take on at one time, Hamilton spends his evenings reading up on all the areas of knowledge he feels himself lacking in. It legitimately could not be more adorable:
He also stocked his mind with basic information about the world: “The continent of Europe is 2600 miles long and 2800 miles broad”; “Prague is the principal city of Bohemia, the principal part of the commerce of which is carried on by the Jews.”
We also get to the Battle of Monmouth, which you may remember from the musical Hamilton as the one at which Charles Lee shits the bed. In real life, Washington sent Hamilton to see how Charles Lee was getting on in battle, and Hamilton arrived to find Lee’s troops in full retreat. This leads to my favorite thing that Hamilton has done so far, and frankly I will be surprised if anything in the rest of this book can top it.
Hamilton rode up to Lee and shouted, “I will stay here with you, my dear general, and die with you! Let us all die rather than retreat!”
Ahahahaha, Alexander Hamilton is a noble delight. I can just picture Charles Lee holding the bridge of his nose and trying to figure out how to get out of this.
Then Hamilton gets some shore leave or whatever, and guess who enters the picture!
Angelica is already married by the time Hamilton shows up, or — Ron Chernow suggests — Hamilton might have married her instead. But he seems very into Eliza, and writes her lots of letters to explain how poor and wretched he expects to be once they are married, given that good fortune is as transitory and unconstant as the emotions of the human heart.
ROMANTIC STUFF.
Hamilton and Washington have a big fight, let’s gloss over that cause it bums me out, and nearly a year after Cornwallis surrenders at Yorktown, John Laurens is shot dead while trying to ambush some British expeditionaries in Charleston.
Sob sob. It is extra sad because Laurens seems to have been the absolute sweetest dear, and it would have been interesting to see what role (if any) he’d have played in the new nation. And just, like, why can’t Hamilton have his friends around, you know? Especially someone like Laurens, who offered to take his inheritance from his (wealthy, slave-owning) father “in the form of a black battalion, freed and equipped to defend South Carolina.” That is awesome, Laurens.
Hamilton and abolitionism: Sarah made the excellent point last week that Chernow’s description of Hamilton as a fierce abolitionist is a relatively recent opinion among scholars. We are consequently to be on high alert to see if Hamilton really was a fierce abolitionist, or if he was just, like, less slave-own-y than the rest of the Founding Fathers. There will be no grading on a curve. In this section, Hamilton says this:
The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience; and an unwillingness to part with property of so valuable a kind will furnish a thousand arguments to show the impracticability or pernicious tendency of a scheme which requires such a sacrifice.
It’s not exactly wholesale abolitionism (he’s arguing to free slaves who will then agree to fight in the Continental Army), but it’s a hell of a truth bomb anyway.
ALSO. I am going to start keeping count of the people who describe Hamilton as “sweet,” because I find it charming that so many people thought he was. Hamilton Sweetness Watch, chapters 6-9: The duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. Eliza not exactly but she does list among his virtues “the excellence of his heart.” Aww.