Throw in his intense dislike of slavery, and he’s doomed.

As a largely self-taught polymath, a nobody who rises to be Washington’s right hand-his accomplishments are truly mind-boggling–Hamilton poses a threat to men who feel they have the right to rule. How ironic that his opponents cast him as beholden to patrician interests when they’re the patricians - the Virginia planters like Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, or the New York gentry like Burr or Clinton. Her Hamilton doesn’t suffer a fool gladly, but there’s much more to it. I’ve now learned that this is the viewpoint his detractors left to history, because they had the last word.īut it’s how he got those enemies that makes Cobbs’s narrative of interest. Cobbs does a great service paying due homage to Hamilton, whom I had always thought a man of ability but an elitist. You can see, for example, how the North-South divide over slavery, banking, manufacturing, trade, and foreign policy crops up the minute the Revolution ends, setting up the Civil War. Cobbs, a noted historian, renders the scenery, sensations of everyday life, mores, and issues in vivid, economical prose. The description reveals a major strength of The Hamilton Affair. Thank goodness, Eliza thought, since she hadn’t the faintest idea how to sit on a bearskin with the dignity she knew her father expected. The translator showed them to a bench facing a low table made from a single plank. Groups of men lounged on rugs, some made from bearskin, others from cloth. Shelves burdened with gourds and lidded baskets lined the walls, and ears of drying maize tied by their silks hung from the rafters. The shadowy interior smelled of wood smoke and roasting meat. An early passage recounts her visit with her father to a conclave of the Six Nations:

Meanwhile, Eliza feels like the odd one out too, awkward, unschooled, incapable of knowing what to say or how to act. James Sharples’s pastel portrait of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, 1795 (courtesy Smithsonian Institution, via Wikimedia Commons)

The hamilton affair by elizabeth cobbs