Hamilton was in fact deeply immersed in, marked by, and left
his mark upon the growing city.6
Yet all the exhibit offers us are scattered shards - here
a painting, there a map - which, had they been collected and
glued together, could have powerfully evoked his Manhattan
milieu. I'm not suggesting they should have added an URBANIST
"concept" case - Hamilton, though a city guy, and
resistant to agrarian cant, was not a self-conscious advocate
of urban life. Had they really wanted to keep one eye on the
New York City ball they could have adopted a different museological
strategy - one that made Gotham a co-protagonist of their
exhibition's drama. Had they done so, they might have solved
many of the current version's problems.
Let's imagine such an alternative exhibit - one that dropped
the presentism, canned the big screens, turned up the lights
to acceptable levels, moved out into the newly available space,
scrapped the Time Line, upped the explanatory apparatus, inserted
some state-of-the-art technology, and redeployed all the artifacts,
paintings, documents, and drawings into an old- fashioned
(which needn't mean dull) chronological Life and Times, with
the de-heroized Hamilton thoroughly grounded, every step of
the way, in the context of New York City.
A revamped presentation - after a revised introduction -
might have begun with Hamilton's difficult childhood and youthful
employment in a Caribbean outpost of New York's far flung
mercantile network, from whence he was whisked to the metropole
by members of the Manhattan merchant elite, a class open to
talent and willing to recruit promising youths, even from
the imperial periphery. He arrived to a city in revolutionary
ferment, a field that gave full scope to his pamphleteering
genius. The outbreak of war and his rapid ascent through the
ranks afforded him marital entree to the Schuyler family,
thus reaching the pinnacle of Gotham's political, social,
and economic worlds. It wasn't immigrant outsiderness that
shaped Hamilton's career (or his nationalist bent), but rather
his rapid integration into the uppermost echelons of New York's
merchant-patrician class.
After the Revolution, he emerged as the merchants' premier
spokesman, brilliantly articulating their ambitions and anxieties,
and fashioning policies that promoted their enterprises. He
would aid them to make their way in a global arena dominated
by the mighty British Empire; eliminate provincial impediments
to the free flow of continental commerce; develop the financial
and legal underpinnings of their commercial operations; help
create a state they (and their planter ally-rivals) could
effectively control; and use that state to create the capital
they sorely lacked.
In the city itself, he defended "loyalist" merchants
- those who had stayed in New York to support (and profit
from) the British occupation - from reprisals by returning
Revolutionary veterans. Whatever their sins, the city (and
country) needed their skills, connections, and especially
their capital: he was appalled that there were merchants considering
departing New York, "each of whom may carry away eight
or ten thousand guineas."
Hamilton's choice of class over revolutionary solidarity
heightened antagonisms with the artisans and sailors - leagued
in groups like the Sons of Liberty - with whom rebellious
merchants and lawyers had made common cause during the Revolution.
(This plebian class, the un-portraitworthy counterpart of
New York's patrician elite, does not figure in the existing
exhibition). But Hamilton also took the lead in negotiating
an inter-class compromise around mutual support for the Constitution,
arguing convincingly that artisanal prosperity depended on
mercantile success. The artisans' solid support made credible
New York City's threat to secede from New York State, which
in turn helped push upstate farmers into ratifying.
But class proved thicker than civic loyalty, too, and Hamilton
promptly sold New York down the river - the Potomac river
- swapping the Capitol for capital. (The existing exhibit
scurries over this with unseemly haste, perhaps mindful that
Walter O'Malley achieved local infamy merely for moving a
baseball team out of town!). The Virginians were eager to
extract the national government from Gotham's clutches, not
simply because they could walk (or row) to work in D.C., but
because they feared northern "moneyed men" (stock
jobbers in particular) would corrupt the political process
- Congressmen had been hip deep in speculative shenanigans
- and they were disturbed as well by Manhattan's aristocratic
and Anglophile ways. (The show might reflect on the lasting
consequences for city and nation of having a bifurcated U.S.
capital, one political, one economic and cultural). This would
also be the place to lay out Duer's dramatic story - itself
a subset of the overlap between Hamilton's social set and
speculative circles (of which NYC was the national center)-
and go on to mention the closely related formation of an organized
stock exchange on Wall Street, an oddly missed trick in what's
now on display.7
Our reconstituted chronological survey might throw in the
Maria (and James) Reynolds blackmail episode at this point
- a juicy story with which the exhibit does next to nothing
- noting the intersection of financial and familial affairs.
James, after all, was a foot soldier of the speculative army,
one of those sent south in 1790 by New York wheeler-dealers
to snare depreciated state paper from unsuspecting rubes.
He then turned to dabbling on his own account in Hamiltonian-generated
securities, profiting from Duer-provided inside information,
and it was after the 1792 crash that he turned up the screws
on the Secretary. The ensuing sex scandal, along with Hamilton's
family life, might be usefully situated within the larger
context of the city's gender and sexual order. The show could
even explore the (here verboten) issue of Hamilton's possible
affair with John Laurens. Scholars have gone back and forth
on this one, and Brookhiser in his book (plausibly) votes
against, but Chernow concludes only that, "if Hamilton
and Laurens did become lovers - and it is impossible to say
this with any certainty - they would have taken extraordinary
precautions."
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