#chernow

Whew, this is going to be a long answer. Since Jessie Serfilippi’s “As Odious and Immoral A Thing” was first published (I posted a few brief quotes here), likely as part of an ongoing interest in the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site with the subject of the Schuyler and Hamilton families and slavery (see here for blogposts labeled ‘slavery’ including a couple about AH specifically), there have been three versions of a rebuttal by Michael E. Newton and some people calling themselves Philo (”Love”) Hamilton, one of whom is Doug Hamilton*. The ongoing engagement on this topic also brings up issues of historiography and hagiography.

In this whole discussion there is only one new piece of evidence that Serfilippi has referenced on Twitter but is not part of her article - I’ll get into that below. Everything else is a re-analysis of known and fairly popular sources, so I don’t think going through it point by point would be helpful.

But let’s be clear about something. This discussion around AH is in large part because of this Chernow falsehood: “[f]ew, if any, other founding fathers opposed slavery more consistently or toiled harder to eradicate it than Hamilton.” Chernow also calls AH a “fierce abolitionist” and a “staunch abolitionist” because Chernow doesn’t know what abolitionism is. This lie got tons of mileage with Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose musical character AH may have personal moral defects, but not blind spots as huge and disastrous to a modern audience as a lackadaisical approach to the owning of other human beings. (That Miranda’s approach totally riled some Black artists and scholars is well-known, and I wrote briefly about it here.) Serfilippi’s article doesn’t get the media play it does without the popularity of the abolitionist Founding Father myth that Miranda put on stage. So this conflict and news-cycle interest arose from Chernow’s need to give AH the moral high ground by claiming that he was the best best best abolitionist because Chernow is interested in hagiography, not biography. Unfortunately, Newton-Hamilton seem interested in the same thing.

A brief note on word usage: an enslaver, in most current usage, is defined as someone who participated in any aspect of the slavery enterprise. Considering AH’s undisputed role as money-handler (or the more laughable ‘he was a banker’ assertion in the Newton-Hamilton essay) for members of the Schuyler family acquiring enslaved persons, AH was an enslaver.

In my opinion, on the issue of slavery, AH is damned by his extensive ties from 1780 onwards to the Schuyler family. There’s nothing that can explain away the fact that AH at times lived with, visited, and sent his wife and children for extended stays and to be educated by his slave-owning in-laws. AH did not somehow become innocently involved in slave trading and ownership. Rather, he knew what he was doing when he married into the heavy slave-trading and owning Schuyler family and when he engaged in business acts for that family, including helping them to acquire/sell enslaved persons. These were morally weighty - and abominable acts, argued even in his day - and he did them anyway. There is not any record that remains that he had a problem having his children reared within an abhorrent system/household where people were enslaved and served them; in fact, given the number of times he sent his children to his father- and mother-in-law’s home for extended periods, it could be suggested he found nothing morally objectionable going on there. Philip Hamilton even thanked his enslaver grandfather for his advice on how to “be a good man.” P. Schuyler’s wealth and trading was through the slavery economy. Moreover, AH’s economic concerns were also inextricably tied to slavery - keep in mind that every mention of tariffs on sugar is connected to the slave trade. Almost everything led back to that evil institution.

During AH’s lifetime, a number of white AND Black persons articulated that all enslaved Black and Indigenous persons should be freed, that the practice of enslavement was a grave moral failing. AH was well-informed enough to know that Black Americans were articulating how freedom should be applied to them - indeed, many of the manumission policies of the original states arose from these efforts. So AH was fully aware of the arguments. (His son was involved!) Maybe this helped inspire him and his slave-owning friends and political colleagues to form the NY Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, although none of this group agreed to give up their own enslaved persons as part of the organization of this group.

Or, as Newton-Hamilton audaciously state, “[AH] was more involved in building a nation” sotto voce based on enslavement and racial distinction than he could be bothered to care about the lives of enslaved people. This shouldn’t be a surprise when it comes to AH’s major moral failings/blind spots - he didn’t care about the lives of the people affected by his whiskey tax either. If one wants to nevertheless call this a “good man,” we’re probably looking at each other from across a void.

But this is well-trod territory. Several articles post-Chernow have evaluated and summarized positions on AH and slavery that I share:

“Hamilton's position on slavery is more complex than his biographers' suggest. Hamilton was not an advocate of slavery, but when the issue of slavery came into conflict with his personal ambitions, his belief in property rights, or his belief of what would promote America's interests, Hamilton chose those goals over opposing slavery. In the instances where Hamilton supported granting freedom to blacks, his primary motive was based more on practical concerns rather than an ideological view of slavery as immoral. Hamilton's decisions show that his desire for the abolition of slavery was not his priority.” Michelle DuRoss, “Somewhere in Between: Alexander Hamilton and Slavery,” Early American Review, 2011 [part 1, part 2]

“But it does illustrate something that his primary modern biographers have been reluctant to concede: Hamilton routinely subordinated his antislavery inclinations to other family and political concerns, and he did not ever approach even a modest level of engagement on the issue in his otherwise voluminous published works.” Phil Magness, “Alexander Hamilton’s Exaggerated Abolitionism,” 2015

“He was not an abolitionist...[h]e bought and sold slaves for his in-laws, and opposing slavery was never at the forefront of his agenda.” Annette Gordon-Reed, “Correcting ‘Hamilton’,” Harvard Gazette, 2016.

Serfilippi extends this:

When those sources are fully considered, a rarely acknowledged truth becomes inescapably apparent: not only did Alexander Hamilton enslave people, but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally.

I have no objection to her statement. We simply have no record of AH strongly challenging the institution of slavery, while several of his colleagues and friends most certainly did. Instead, we have the financial transactions, the possible use of enslaved labor, and the possible ownership of enslaved persons, alongside his strong personal, professional, and political ties to owners of enslaved persons. And the new evidence: the inclusion of the following in a list of persons dead of Yellow Fever in NYC 1798, “Hamilton Alexander, major-general, the black man of, 26 Broadway” An Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in the City of New-York, 1799. We cannot know if this was an enslaved man or a free Black man who lived and labored for the Hamiltons, but it should eliminate anyone confidently stating that the Hamiltons did not own enslaved persons.

Thus, Serfilippi has successfully accomplished at least one important goal: bringing to the forefront the names (as we have them) of persons, servant or enslaved, connected to the Hamiltons.

I wrote above that part of the problem here is hagiography. If his concern is with the truth, I certainly look forward to Newton’s chapter-by-chapter repudiations of books written by Chernow, Brookhiser, and Knott on AH and the AH/GW relationship.This leads to the second issue that has arisen: the unprofessional, and frankly gross, glee in trying to punch down on a young female scholar. In my own field (an ex-partner is a military historian so I’ll speak for their field too), the approach when one believes a colleague is publishing in error and one has additional information that could illuminate the issues is to contact them and seek to work together to analyze and draw conclusions. Newton and the anonymous Love Hamilton clan didn’t treat Serfilippi as if she were deserving of this respect. Moreover, Newton has never, to my knowledge - and I purchased his books! - gone this hard after Chernow, who certainly deserves it even more.

But Newton-Hamilton betray their own concerns here: “Considering the era in which Hamilton lived, the challenges he faced, and his accomplishments, it is not difficult to understand why Hamilton did not make opposition to slavery his primary focus. His attention was on building a nation.” And what kind of nation was that? At the Constitutional Convention, AH’s lengthy speeches on the formation of the government have been recorded. There is no record of him offering any statements about the slavery issue, unlike his friend Gouverneur Morris.

Newton-Hamilton continue: “Unfortunately, that meant neglecting other important matters, not just slavery but also his own financial well-being.” Wow, a comparison is made between AH’s personal finances and the ownership of human beings. Could these authors be any clearer that the slavery issue is an inconvenience that they are ultimately unconcerned about? I’m unsure if Newton-Hamilton realize just how gross their attempt at addressing this issue has been, and that it’s hard to take their interpretation and analysis of the evidence seriously when these are the kinds of statements making their way into the rebuttal essays.

Now there is an interesting discussion about how even later abolitionists did not see a conflict in the employment of enslaved labor, but that too isn’t something that Newton-Hamilton show interest in. Instead, their approach seems to be that AH needs to be celebrated at all costs, and thankfully, those days are passing into history.

*It’s ridiculous that a group of people have given themselves a stupid pseudonym to avoid attaching their actual names to a so-called scholarly article. And I’m aware that I’m writing this anonymously, but on tumblr where maybe 5 people have made it to the end of this (I’m not publishing it on my real blog).

The emotional bond between Laurens and Hamilton as illustrated by letters

“He always had to fight the residual sadness of the driven man, the unspoken melancholy of the prodigy, the wounds left by his accursed boyhood. Only to John Laurens and Elizabeth Schuyler did he confide his fears.”

- Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow

What do John Laurens and Eliza Schuyler have in common, I wonder?

*Opens book*

Me:

“Hers was a strong character with its depth and warmth, whether of feeling or temper controlled, but glowing underneath, bursting through at times in some emphatic expression.”*  

[This is as much a reminder to myself as to anyone else reading once I start quoting extensively from AH’s letters to ESH, as I will do in an upcoming post. ESH very much gets lost because of their one-sided correspondence.]

Unless you’re willing to dig a bit (and I don’t mean reading Tilar Mazzeo’s atrocious biography that makes her even more of a cipher, or taking seriously both Miranda and Chernow’s fictional creations), ESH is sort of a phantom. She’s not unknowable, but nothing is left of her letters to her husband, and we have comparatively few letters to her family during the years of her marriage (and to find those, one has to put in the work - they aren’t easily available transcribed on Founders or in a publicly accessible online volume, although a few letters from others to her do appear in Intimate Life of AH - the letters from Kitty Livingston are especially fun). We find most of ESH’s thoughts/reflections on AH in letters from 1804 and 1805, after his death, and then in her quest to get material for a biography. We also then get a lot of her voice in her letters to others. But to many, the real question is: what was Elizabeth Schuyler like when being courted by, and then married to AH? Who is this person that AH was stating was “the sole proprietor [of my heart]” (13July1781)?  

We have around 120 of AH’s letters to her - and we’re missing about another 60 that are mentioned in other letters - but we’re left with the lingering question: who in the world is he writing all of this highly emotional, gushy stuff to? Does she feel the same way? Does she feel more of this/less of that? How does she express herself to him? How does she think and feel? 

I’ve tried to do posts about A. Hamilton’s relationships with Nicholas Fish and Matthew Clarkson, and without letters from both sides, there’s no there there. And my post about AH’s feelings about Philip Schuyler was one of the most difficult: because we don’t have AH writing personally to PS in any but a handful of letters, I’m stuck reading what he wrote to other people about his father-in-law to get his take on his father-in-law. I’m doing a few posts quoting extensively from AH’s letters to her, but without her response, it’s like reading into a void. 

But there’s something else going on with ESH too, a mixture of misogyny and lack of understanding of the roles of women in the 18th century and just a total dismissal of women’s work. It often plays out as: why would a genius like that have been interested in her. Sometimes (Chernow), it descends into the “this guy was so smart and complicated he would have always needed multiple women to fulfill him intellectually/romantically/physically” trope.  

The sum total, when combined with heaping doses of misogyny, disregard for women’s labor, and lack of knowledge of the time period, is to erase her out of both his professional and intimate life. She’s around, maybe doing something, definitely having babies, but she just must not be that important. AH’s own testaments to her and to others about her are ignored.

Elizabeth Schuyler attended diplomatic and political meetings at a younger age than we have any record of AH doing so. She had relationships - often predating AH’s own - with nearly everyone important person in AH’s American life, including members of the Continental Congress, Washington, and members of Washington’s military family. ESH performed all the duties of soft diplomacy, from hosting and entertaining important politicians (Washington, Jefferson, Talleyrand, among many others) to performing the social visits that were so important in the Federalist political era. ESH ran their home (including negotiating where they lived, the rent, the furnishings, the servants, etc), educated their children (besides risking her life nine times that we know of to have them), helped AH with his correspondence, attended political and social events solo and alongside him, communicated political and military news to him and to her family, and advised him on political speeches. ESH was also pretty excellent at handicrafts (but oh wait, those are made by women, so they don’t matter). And I haven’t even touched on her life after his death! 

If one is interested in life of the historical AH in 1780 and beyond, one has to grasp that ESH is a real person deeply involved in all aspects of his life thereafter, whose affections AH regarded as “ the only blessing which can make life of any value to me” (10Jul1781), even if we don’t get to hear/read her side of things.  

Many here should appreciate the title of her essay: “Chernow gonna Chernow.” 

https://alexiscoe.substack.com/p/chernow-gonna-chernow

Chernow bemoaned Serfilippi’s “bald conclusions,” but never offered a defense of his own claims. In his biography, he writes that “the memories of his West Indian childhood left Hamilton with a settled antipathy to slavery.” In her paper, Serfilippi counters that “there is no indication, either in documents from Hamiton’s childhood or adulthood, that the horrors of slavery he witnessed on St. Croix turned him into an abolitionist.”

Did Chernow cite the missing documents? No.

... Historians aren’t here to present their subjects in the most favorable light, but rather to bring them as fully as possible into the light. Good and bad coexist in people, and they should in the books on them, too. That’s what I told the journalists and editors who contacted me about Serfilippi’s paper—off the record. I had no intention of saying more, but then Chernow came out swinging, and I saw some of the same Founder fetishists who had trolled me go after her, too.

... But let’s be realistic here. [Schuyler Mansion] is a historic site in Albany, New York, and no matter how many visitors the Schuyler Mansion gets, it’ll never come close to matching the number of people who have purchased Chernow’s book or memorized the Hamilton soundtrack. Every new edition of Alexander Hamilton will continue to state that Hamilton may have enslaved people, omitting evidence that shows he did. That narrative will dominate the conversation—for now. There’s a long game to be played here, and that’s exactly what the Schuyler Mansion is doing by supporting work like Serfilippi’s.

I passed 150 posts a couple of weeks ago. I’m pretty stunned that I have over 150 posts of mostly original content when I thought I’d finish up in about 50 posts. And I still have about another 50 or so to go at this point. 

When I started, I intended to largely focus on contextualizing Alexander Hamilton in order to come to a better understanding of some political decisions he made, because the popular narratives didn’t add up. At the same time, although I knew that Chernow made numerous factual and interpretative errors and I knew the birthdate controversy, I sort of thought the bulk of what we know, we know, and I was just ticked off by biographers citing facts that don’t exist. I’m a big believer in the Moynihan quote (and overbearing on this point): “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” 

What I’ve been most surprised by, in my own little bit of research, is all the facts that have been left out - and to me at least, it’s really interesting stuff. 

I also remain interested in this phenomenon whereby Alexander Hamilton exists as a fantasy - for that to happen, he in some way has to be unknowable.  Is he unknowable (barring the fact that there’s also a lot of hands-over-ears “ladidah I won’t listen” when it comes to clinging to the fantasy of Alexander Hamilton)?  Why did he not have a stronger hand in shaping his own narrative? His tragic death is certainly a reason, the silence of his friends is another, as was the destruction of the Federalist project. It also underscores that he was a failure as a politician, I think.