ALEXANDER THE GREAT

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By David Gates

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When Alexander Hamilton was killed in that 1804 duel with Vice President Aaron Burr--which, along with his face on the 10-dollar bill, is what most people remember him for--his friend Gouverneur Morris had to deliver his eulogy. "The first point in his biography is that he was... of illegitimate birth," Morris fretted in his diary. "Some mode must be contrived to pass over this handsomely. I must not either dwell on his domestic life. He has long since foolishly published the avowal of conjugal infidelity. He was indiscreet, vain and opinionated. These things must be told... and yet... in such a manner as not to destroy the interest." Morris even decided not to mention the duel, lest he stir up the crowd against Burr, who skipped New York ahead of a murder charge and went back to presiding over the Senate. If politics has gotten less raw after 200 years, biography has taken off the gloves.

Ron Chernow's absorbing, exhaustively researched "Alexander Hamilton" justifies his claim that Hamilton's was "the most dramatic and improbable life among the founding fathers." Hamilton grew up poor, illegitimate and orphaned on the Caribbean island of Nevis, served as an artillery officer in the American Revolution and was picked by Washington as his top military aide. He became Washington's Treasury secretary, in effect, ran his administration and endured the nation's first political sex scandal--lured into an affair and blackmailed by the woman's husband. (He went public so the payments wouldn't be misconstrued as financial hanky-panky.) On a less gossipy level, his "Federalist" papers (the essays he wrote for the series outnumber those by James Madison) definitively interpreted the new Constitution, and he essentially invented both the American governmental and economic systems. As Chernow says, "He was the messenger from a future we now inhabit."

Yet Hamilton was also a pessimist about that future, and had an elitist's dread of "democracy," by which he meant pretty much what we've got. Chernow, who won the National Book Award for "The House of Morgan," shows all Hamilton's complexity and inconsistency: his flirtatiousness, religiosity, manic productivity (his collected writings run to 22,000 pages), tetchiness, well-hidden insecurity and his tendency to self-destruct. But the best character, of course, is that scene stealer Burr, who in later years liked to refer to "my friend Hamilton, whom I shot." Chernow wisely doesn't exhibit Burr in his full Byronic/sardonic weirdness until Hamilton's safely buried. After 700-odd pages in Hamilton's stimulating, exasperating company, even Aaron Burr can't destroy the interest.

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