On Hamilton, Trinity, and Revolution: Five questions for author Joanne B. Freeman

Looking through the lens of one of our country’s most famous founders, an acclaimed historian helps us see how a revolutionary era shaped the man, our city, and a nation — and why the surprisingly nasty politics of our day might not be so surprising after all. 

As a preteen in 1976, Joanne Freeman, today a professor of history and American studies at Yale University, couldn’t escape bicentennial celebrations. “They were unavoidable,” she says, “but they humanized the period for me.” They also piqued her interest, leading the budding history buff to devour books about John Adams, Abigail Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. But it was the stories that Freeman couldn’t find that ended up shaping her career, and its focus on Alexander Hamilton. “Believe it or not, he was rarely mentioned back then. The fact that he was born poor and illegitimate in the Caribbean and died in a duel caught my attention, but I could only find one biography,” she says. Then a librarian pointed her to the bound volumes of Hamilton’s own writings. “I read his writings voraciously, for years, start to end, start to end. To me, they were real history as it happened, free to analyze, with no one’s interpretation attached.”
The early joy Freeman found down those rabbit holes never subsided. Alexander Hamilton: Writings, her extensive collection of Hamilton’s writings, reports, letters, and essays, were primary sources for Ron Chernow and Lin-Manuel Miranda as they created their own masterworks. Her most recent book, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, explores incidents of physical violence in the U.S. Congress. “Digging into the human depths of historical evidence has never lost its appeal,” Freeman says. “Most of my work looks at the assumptions and culture and realities that compelled politicos to make some choices and avoid others. My views of our current crises are shaped by the same idea. People are making deliberate choices that seem destined to do damage. What motivates them? Politically, emotionally, or otherwise? What ground-level choices can Americans of all kinds make to fend off that damage — and what might inspire them to take action?”
On Wednesday, May 6, as we now approach America’s 250th anniversary, the Rev. Phillip A. Jackson will sit with Freeman, as part of the Trinity Talks series, for a discussion surrounding these questions, and how the political intrigue, ambitions, and polarization of Hamilton’s time continue to echo today. In advance of her visit, Freeman spoke with us about Trinity Church’s famous parishioner and the charged atmosphere of New York City during the Revolutionary Era.  

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Today’s politics seem particularly divisive and nasty, but how do they compare with the political violence of Hamilton’s day? 

American politics has always been divisive and nasty in one way or another, often (believe it or not) far more violent than today. People killed each other in political duels; there were riots at polling places that resulted in deaths; newspaper editors — and members of Congress — were viciously caned for their politics. But the founding generation routinely did something that few politically minded folk do today: they thought about posterity and the legacy of their actions. This does not mean that they were eternally high-minded. Quite the opposite. But thinking in the long-term did enable them to sometimes take a step back before walking off ledges. 

You've said that dueling was more a matter of honor and politics than hatred of one’s enemy. Can you put Hamilton’s fatal duel with Burr — and his son Phillip’s with George Eacker — into context for us? What factors led Hamilton to allow his son to participate (incomprehensible to a parent of this generation) and to put himself at risk three years later? 

For elite gentlemen of Hamilton’s era, their personal honor was a kind of possession. Dishonor could destroy their lives and career; in an age without organized political parties, politicians’ careers relied on their personal reputation more than anything else. Thus the need for dueling to repair wounded reputations. But as counterintuitive as it may seem, dueling was not about killing. Political duels were intended to prove that you were willing to sacrifice your life for your honor. But there was little if any bloodshed in most political duels. Thus Hamilton’s advice to his son Philip to fight a duel with George Eacker, who had insulted Philip’s father during a July Fourth address. Hamilton never expected Philip to be shot. He fought his own duel for similar reasons. He was aware that he might die – as might any duelist. But as he explained in a final statement, he fought the duel to preserve his reputation for “future crises.” As he himself put it, being a leader in those moments required him to be seen as a man of honor. 

The church, however, roundly condemned the practice. In fact, Hamilton’s dying plea to receive holy communion at his bedside was denied twice before Trinity’s rector Bishop Benjamin Moore agreed during a second visit, but only after Hamilton expressed repentance for dueling. The fact the Corporation of Trinity Church installed a monument on Hamilton’s grave to honor his importance in American (and New York) history was a noteworthy exception to the norm.  

Hamilton’s role in the story we have long been told about the country’s founding has grown because of a certain inescapable musical. What did Hamilton: An American Musical get wrong — and right? 

As hard as it is to imagine, before the musical (and Ron Chernow’s biography), most people had no idea who Alexander Hamilton was. I was lecturing, teaching, and writing about him for decades before his fame, and my files are filled with lectures that begin: “You’ve probably never heard of this man, but he’s important to remember.” Now, they tend to begin with: “Hamilton isn’t as great as you think he is; he was flawed!” Fortunately, the popular musical contains a remarkable amount of good history and uses Hamilton’s own words — as well as some from Thomas Jefferson. It even puts George Washington’s actual Farewell Address to music! 

The work does condense time and skip complications; and it doesn’t do much regarding the issue of slavery – a major gap. But one important thing it gets right is the enormous sense of contingency regarding the Revolution and its aftermath, illustrating how there were no “of courses.” There was no “of course” the colonists won; of course they wrote a constitution; of course it was ratified. These people were making things up as they went along, and they had absolutely no idea if their ideas would work. That do-or-die mentality shaped the politics of the period profoundly. It’s impossible to fully understand founding era politics without that realization. 
 

Lin-Manuel Miranda used your work to provide language for his characters. What is an example of something you found interesting that made its way into the music? 

There’s a lyric in the song The 10 Duel Commandments that comes from a document I unearthed at the New-York Historical Society and featured in my first book, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. I found notes from the trial of Aaron Burr’s second in the duel with Hamilton; when asked what he had seen, the doctor who attended the duel — Dr. David Hosack — testified that he had seen nothing, because his back was to the dueling ground. So, as the music suggests, he did indeed have “deniability!” It was beyond strange to hear it sung from the stage! Lin also used my edited collection of Hamilton’s writings — the Library of America’s Hamilton: Writings. That means some memorable lyrics were actually written by Hamilton himself. For example, Hamilton wrote the words “Best of wives and best of women” — featured in one of the musical’s songs — in a letter he wrote to Eliza Hamilton the night before his final fatal duel in 1804.

As a historian, you know the power of narrative; that “who tells your story” can actually shape history. For much of Trinity’s 300+ years, its stories were those of white, wealthy leaders, while others — enslaved people, women, immigrants, the poor — remained largely invisible. What can Hamilton’s evolving legacy teach us about who gets forgotten, who remembered — and how we today can fill in the silences in our stories?

In a sense, Hamilton’s life story is something of a reminder that our historical narrative – our national story – isn’t owned by wealthy, white leaders. Hamilton ended up in that camp, but started out as a poor, illegitimate orphan in the Caribbean who was sent to North America on charity to get an education. Unlike many in his era, he had anti-slavery sympathies, but you can’t learn much about slavery from his writings. So even in the case of someone who opposed slavery, you need to look beyond him and most of his cohort to get to the realities of slavery and the antislavery struggle. Adding to the problem, marginalized people of all kinds — Black Americans, women, Indigenous people, the poor, and more — didn’t leave behind masses of papers like the white elite did, so finding them in the historical record takes work. But they are there: in court cases; census data; newspapers, and more. New generations of historians are doing this work with remarkable creativity and skill — and enriching and correcting our national narrative in the process.

To hear more, please join us for Trinity Talks: Alexander Hamilton and the Making of America on Wednesday, May 6 at 6pm in St. Paul’s Chapel. 

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.