When “Hamilton” premiered on stage in 2015, the musical drew a large following among historians, who were delighted by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blatantly blatant attention to primary documents and academic literature.
But since historians are historians, they also offered plenty of footnotes, criticisms, and corrections, which were not always appreciated by enthusiastic fans of the show, who saw a lot of humorless, literal-minded scolding to kill their buzz.
Now, with the filmed version broadcast on Disney +, critical questions about Alexander Hamilton and his portrayal of the show are back, and not just from the ivory tower.
On Friday, director Ava DuVernay tweeted her appreciation for Miranda’s art, along with a real-life explosion from A.Ham, who was not the progressive model for multicultural democracy that some of those who watch the show can take on.
“He believed in manumission, not abolition,” he wrote. “He wrote violent filth on the natives. Believed only in elites with political power and without term limits. And banking innovation has problematic roots. ”
Historians, many of whom participated in a Twitter watch party under the hashtag #HATM (Historians at the Movies), took a generally softer tone, even as they reiterated some of their previous warnings. This is what some of them have been saying about “Hamilton,” and Hamilton, ever since Miranda took the “founding father of ten dollars” and stormed the United States.
Wasn’t Hamilton an abolitionist? I’m confused.
At the beginning of the show, Hamilton calls himself and his friends. “Revolutionary abolitionists of manumission”, a line that raised many eyebrows among academics.
Hamilton was genuinely anti-slavery, even if some scholars say the intensity of his opposition has been exaggerated. He was a founding member of the New York Manumission Society, created in 1785, which, among other things, pushed for a gradual emancipation law in New York State. (This law was approved in 1799).
Manumission involved the voluntary release of enslavers. Abolition was a more radical proposal, and Hamilton did not defend it. And while he Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed publicly criticized Thomas Jefferson’s views on the biological inferiority of blacks, noting that his record and writings from the 1790s until his death in 1804 include little or nothing against the slavery.
As the show indicates, Hamilton supported John Laurens’ 1779 plan to allow black soldiers to fight in the Revolution (and many eventually did). But that is as far as it went.
“Okay, Hamilton didn’t write anti-slavery pamphlets with Laurens,” Gordon-Reed tweeted during the #HATM watch party, adding, “I hate being that historian.”
So which characters in the show had slaves?
Most of them, actually. In one of the cabinet rap battles, Jefferson extols the southern agrarian economy and Hamilton responds. “Yes, keep ranting. We know who is really planting, “he scoffs, dismissing Jefferson’s argument as” a lesson in civic education from a slaver. “
But slavery was not just a southern issue. In 1790, about 40 percent of New York City’s immediate homes included enslaved people. Most of Hamilton’s associates who toasted liberty at the beginning of the show were slave owners, including Aaron Burr and Hercules Mulligan (whose slave slave Cato worked alongside him on an anti-British spy ring).
The Schuylers, the prominent family Hamilton marries, were great slavers. In fact, the mayor of Albany announced last month that the city would remove a statue of Philip Schuyler, Hamilton’s father-in-law, who at various points owned up to 27 slaves.
Angelica Schuyler and her husband also owned slaves, and Hamilton, who was a lawyer, helped them with their slavery-related transactions, including the purchase of a mother and son for $ 225.
Wait. Did Hamilton himself have slaves?
Possibly. When his mother died in 1768, he left Hamilton and his brother as an enslaved child, but they were unable to inherit them since they had been born out of wedlock.
And there is some documentation that suggests that Hamilton may have had slaves later, after his marriage to Elizabeth Schuyler. Historian Michelle DuRoss, in a 2010 article, noted that Hamilton’s grandson had said that Hamilton had slaves, citing references in family ledgers.
But the evidence is ambiguous. Ankeet Ball, in a role for The Columbia & Slavery research project noted a 1804 letter from Angelica Schuyler lamenting that Elizabeth and Alexander did not have enslaved servants to help them with a party.
Ball, echoing many other scholars, noted that Hamilton, as much as he hated slavery, agreed to it. “Hamilton finally agreed to protect slavery in the Constitution to solidify the union of North and South, which was crucial to the financial growth that Hamilton envisioned,” Ball wrote.
Was Hamilton a pro-immigrant?
“Immigrants, We Get the Job Done”, sung by Hamilton (who was born in Nevis) and the Marquis de Lafayette during the Battle of Yorktown, quickly emerged as one of the show’s biggest lines of applause. And although Hamilton, as a subject of the British crown moving from one British colony to another, was not an immigrant in the contemporary sense, he saw himself (and sometimes others saw him) as a stranger.
But his views on immigrants and how they fit into the United States were complicated. As historian Joanne Freeman noted, she wanted immigrant workers to fuel the manufacturing economy she envisioned, but she was concerned about its impact on the nation.
In 1798, amid naval hostilities with revolutionary France, Hamilton and other federalists supported the Aliens and Sedition Laws, which extended the time immigrants had to wait to apply for citizenship and allowed the President to deport immigrants considered “enemies “
The backlash against the laws, which were designed to weaken the Jefferson Democratic-Republican Party, contributed to Jefferson’s victory in 1800. After the elections, when Jefferson proposed that the citizenship requirements be relaxed, Professor Freeman wrote: “Hamilton protested, concerned about corruption of the national character.” He even suggested that if only “native citizens” had been allowed to vote, Jefferson would not have become president.
But Hamilton, who started out as a penniless orphan, was a champion of the little one, right?
Even before the musical (and the Ron Chernow biography that inspired him), Hamilton had a resurgence in popularity, fueled in part by conservatives and centrists who saw him as an avatar of capitalism and a strong national government.
And Hamilton, as many historians have pointed out, was hardly an innovative populist. He was a brazen elitist who had proposed that senators serve for life and that the president be an “elective monarch.” It also had a sometimes dubious relationship with representative democracy.
Amistad skeptics point to episodes such as the Newburgh Conspiracy of 1783, when forces within the Continental Army that were frustrated by non-payment and other issues argued that the army should challenge the authority of Congress. In a confidential letter, Hamilton, then a congressman, urged George Washington to “take the lead” on the army’s complaints, without appearing, advice that some academics have interpreted as urging a military coup.
Later Hamilton dreamed of invading Florida and Louisiana (which were still under the control of Spain). He even raised the idea of deploying the army to Virginia will crush the political opposition. And then there is her quote (probably apocryphal), broadcast by Henry Adams (the great-grandson of her nemesis John Adams): “Your people, sir, your people are a great beast.”
Sheesh, relax. “Hamilton” is a work of fiction, right?
The renewed critical comment on Hamilton, the man, has caused a shortage of attention, even by some historians. “Guys, I don’t think this was really the Battle of Yorktown,” historian Kevin Gannon tweeted during the #HATM watch. “I mean, I’m sure there was at least one more unit of dancers.”
For some historians, one of the most exciting things about the show is the way it plays on the tension between history and memory, the prejudices of sources, and the importance of who tells the story. And Miranda’s musical, despite its phenomenal success, may not have the last word.
One of the last times A.Ham was prominently on Broadway in Sidney Kingsley’s 1943 play “The Patriots,” the United States was engaged in a global fight for democracy. Hamilton was not a populist hero, but a border fascist trying to impose a wealthy aristocracy on the United States. Jefferson, with his vision of autonomous common people, was the defender of democracy.
Next time, who knows?
