The Rise of Alexander Hamilton

Ben Wilson
I'm gonna show you how great I am. This would have tiny shower. I just wanna say, from the bottom of me heart, I'd like to take this chance to apologize to absolutely nobody.

Alexander Hamilton was the most brilliant american statesman who ever lived, possessing the loftiest and keenest intellect of his time. Hello, and welcome to how to take over the world. This is Ben Wilson, and that was a quote from the american president, Theodore Roosevelt. Today we are obviously talking about Alexander Hamilton. I'm doing a series on the american founders, and I am convinced that there are only three founding fathers of the United States who were truly indispensable.

There are many who made extremely valuable contributions, but only three without whom, I think, the revolution would have failed. And those three are George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin. I don't mean to downplay the contributions of men like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Jay, Benjamin Rush, John Adams. I could go on. There were many great men in that generation.

There were giants on the earth in those days, to paraphrase the Bible, but only those three were genuinely indispensable. I think, and of those three, I agree with Teddy Roosevelt that Alexander Hamilton was the greatest. I've been really looking forward to this episode, and one of the reasons is the musical Hamilton. I'm really glad that the musical has popularized the character of Alexander Hamilton. But a quibble I have with it is that I think perhaps it doesn't convey the true greatness of the man.

There was a great french diplomat named Talleyrand, and he was central to the dealings of Napoleonic Europe. This was a man who knew all the great generals and heads of state in the late 18th and early 19th century. And he said, I consider Napoleon, Fox and Hamilton the three greatest men of our epoch. Fox was a very prominent english Whig politician. And if I were forced to decide between the three, I would give without hesitation the first place to Hamilton.

And that is like a pretty amazing quote. I mean, this is someone who was intimately familiar with Napoleon, who knew him extremely well, worked with him daily for a long time, and he thought that Alexander Hamilton, who he also knew well, as we shall see, was even more brilliant than Napoleon. In many ways, Hamilton is the american Napoleon. Both were short and thin with reddish hair. Both were brilliant artillery captains.

Both were from small islands off the coast of the country they would end up calling their home. Both were notorious flirts and womanizers. Both were extremely energetic. Both had titanic egos and were obsessed with earning military glory. Both implemented sweeping reforms to their country's governments.

They even died at nearly the same age. Napoleon was 51 and Hamilton was 49. When you read about Hamilton, if you have any experience or knowledge of Napoleon, you are just constantly reminded of the similarities between the two. There are even more commonalities that I will point out, but I find one of their differences to be illuminating. Of the two, only Alexander Hamilton was ever able to speak accentless French.

I'm not the first person to make this observation. Many people at the time used it as sort of a slur to say, you know, Hamilton, he has these napoleonic ambitions. And many people since then have noted the similarities between the two men. Historian Henry Adams wrote, from the first to the last words he wrote, I always read the same Napoleon kind of adventuredom in Hamilton. So why do I think Alexander Hamilton was the most indispensable, the greatest founding father of the United States?

Well, stay tuned to find out. That's what this series is all about. I will caveat this by saying that Washington is a very close second. They were a brilliant partnership, and without either one, things would have gone very differently. And my main argument is that Hamilton is underappreciated even after the musical.

Not that Washington was overrated or anything like that. I think he more than merits his place at the center of the american pantheon. Okay, so let's see what made Hamilton so great and why his contributions were so vital. I'll note that my main source is Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, but I'll also pull a couple quotes from the biography written by his son, John C. Hamilton.

With all that said, let's get into it. This is the rise of Alexander Hamilton. First, I want to make a plug for the premium tier of how to take over the world, where you will get all of my guide episodes, all of my end notes episodes, and all of my mini episodes. You can sign up for it at Takeoverpod Dot super cast.com dot. That link is in the show notes.

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Okay, so Hamilton was born on January 11, 1755, on the small caribbean island of Nevis. Chernow writes that he was slight and thin shouldered and distinctly scottish in appearance, with a florid complexion, reddish brown hair, and sparkling violet blue eyes. He was short, very handsome, but kind of delicate. Some even described him as feminine looking. He grew up on Nevis and also on the nearby island of St.

Croix, where his mother moved the family after being abandoned by Hamilton's father, James Hamilton. These were small islands that were unimportant in and of themselves, but were very important economic centers. They were huge producers of sugarcane. Slavery was absolutely central in both Nevis and St. Croix.

If you go somewhere like Virginia in the late 17 hundreds, slavery is very important to the functioning of the economy. But most people did not own slaves. Only the rich moneyed class actually had these large estates that were worked by slaves. But that was not the case in Nevis and St. Croix.

Even a poor widow like Rachel Hamilton owned a handful of slaves. The whole society was built around slavery. Alexander Hamilton's mother, Rachel, had been married previously to a man named Mister Levin, and she had never obtained a divorce, so that technically, Alexander and James Hamilton junior, his brother, were illegitimate. Though Rachel and James Hamilton lived together for 15 years, so it's not like he was born fatherless. As a child, he wouldn't have felt like an illegitimate child.

You know, he had a father and a mother in the household. Um, sometimes it was portrayed by his political enemies that he was the son of a prostitute. Um, but that's. That's not the case. When Hamilton was 13 years old, he and his mother contracted yellow fever.

They leaped together on small cots in a cramped room. And while young Alexander eventually recovered, his mother died right there next to him. Perhaps they were even touching as she passed away. With their father out of the picture, he and his brother James junior were sent to live with their cousin, who committed suicide shortly thereafter, and they were then separated. And Alexander was sent to live with a rich and prominent merchant, Thomas Stevens.

Hamilton became best friends with Stevens son, Edward Stevens. The boys were soul mates. Later in their lives, Stevens would write to Hamilton of those vows of eternal friendship which we have so often mutually exchanged, and that is a very intense friendship for these boys of only 14 years old to be swearing oaths of eternal loyalty to each other. It reminds me of the relationship between Genghis Khan and his blood brother Jamukha. These very powerful men often form these very intense friendships when they're young.

But anyway, many people think that they were in fact not just friends but half brothers. So this guy that he went to go live with, Thomas Stevens, he showed an enduring interest in the welfare of Alexander Hamilton. His son very closely resembled Alexander Hamilton. So Hamilton and his friend Edward Stevens, supposedly, when people saw them, they were just taken aback. They go, whoa, you two best friends look exactly alike.

And so that's pretty compelling evidence that maybe Thomas Stevens was in fact, Hamilton's father. Add to that the fact that James Hamilton, for whatever reason, didn't show a lot of interest in Alexander Hamilton. You know, they continued to write a little bit, but he never came to see him in America. It's just weird that when his son was having all this magnificent success in the United States, he never took more of an interest where this Thomas Stevens guy kind of did. So that's another data point.

In fact, in the 18 hundreds, this was taken as fact rather than a conspiracy theory. Timothy Pickering wrote, it was generally understood that Hamilton was an illegitimate son of a gentleman of the name of Stevens. And Henry Cabot Lodge wrote that every student of the period is familiar with the story which oral tradition has handed down, that Hamilton was the illegitimate son of a rich west indian planter or merchant, generally supposed to have been Mister Stevens, the father of Hamilton's early friend and schoolfellow. And this also explains some things, in that James Hamilton was kind of a lazy, feckless, ne'er do well. He could never get things to work and he wasn't very enterprising, he wasn't a go getter, whereas Thomas Stevens was enterprising and brilliant, just like Alexander Hamilton.

So I believe this secret parentage story, although, of course, unless someone does some grave digging and genetic testing, we'll likely never know the truth of his parentage. Even as a young boy, Hamilton had worked to put together an impressive library which included Plutarch's lives, the poetry of Alexander Pope and a french edition of Machiavelli's the Prince. And why a french edition? Well, his mother was of french huguenot extraction and so Hamilton spoke more or less fluent French from his childhood. And as we shall see, this came in handy later for Hamilton, his ability to speak fluent French.

Now, I have relayed the events of his childhood in a fairly straightforward manner, but it's worth noting how difficult of a childhood this was. Chernow summarizes it well. He says a grim catalog of disasters had befallen these two boys between 1765 and 1769. Their father had vanished, their mother had died, Hector had committed bloody suicide, and their aunt, uncle and grandmother had all died. James, 16, and Alexander, 14, were now left alone, largely friendless and penniless at every step.

In their rootless, topsy turvy existence, they had been surrounded by failed, broken, embittered people. Their short lives had been shadowed by a stupefying sequence of bankruptcies, marital separations, deaths, scandals and disinheritance. Okay, so it is an extremely difficult childhood. But despite these difficult circumstances, Alexander Hamilton thrived. As soon as he was given the opportunity, he received a big boost to his education when, at the age of 14, he was apprenticed to the merchant business, Beekman and Kruger.

And so even though he is in a faraway island, Hamilton gets a top rate mercantile education. He is basically in charge of their business in St. Croix. He has to monitor and oversee deals of timber, food, barrels, iron, lime, rope, bricks, cattle and slaves. You know, these are general merchants.

They trade in everything. And so Hamilton gets to handle all the accounts, make purchases, make sales, and see all the figures and keep track of them. He actually has almost exactly the same first job as John D. Rockefeller. Hamilton had a great memory, was great with numbers, and was extremely hardworking and energetic.

He does really well in his first job and shows himself to have a top notch mind for business. Now, the firm was actually based out of New York, and the partners were frequently gone for long stretches. So Hamilton gets very used to running things himself and is actually annoyed when one of the partners, Kruger, returns to St. Croix to oversee things himself for a little bit. And one of the defining attributes of Hamilton was that he always thought that he was the smartest person in the room, and he chafed under any sort of oversight or authority.

He hated to be subservient to anyone. He always wanted to be in control. And, you know, when you look at his record, you understand why. He always thought he was the smartest person in the room. He usually was.

And so this starts very, very early. He wants to be the man. He wants to be the person in charge. And he recognizes within himself this titanic ambition. He thinks that he has the ability to be the man to really accomplish things in life, and he just wants the opportunity to show it.

We have this amazing letter that he wrote to Edward Stevens, that guy who is his close friend and maybe half brother. And in it, he writes, to confess my weakness, Ned, my ambition is so prevalent that I condemn the groveling and conditions of a clerk and the like, to which my fortune, etcetera, condemns me and would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station. I'm confident, Ned, that my youth excludes me from any hopes of immediate preferment. Nor do I desire it, but I mean to prepare the way for futurity. I'm no philosopher, you see, and may be justly said to build castles in the air.

My folly makes me ashamed and beg. You'll conceal it yet, Nettie, we have seen such schemes successful when the projector is constant. I shall conclude by saying, I wish there was a war. So that's like. I love that letter that Hamilton is pining for a war at 14 years old, maybe 15.

And you see just how he's chomping at the bit to distinguish himself. And he kind of intuits that if there's a war, that would be an opportunity for him to show how smart and capable he is. And distinguish himself and rise in the ranks. Interestingly, his big break comes the same way it came for Napoleon, by writing an essay. So a huge hurricane comes and completely devastates a number of caribbean islands, including Nevis and St.

Croix. And Hamilton, in the wake of this huge natural disaster, writes a fantastic essay where he describes the storm. And offers reflections on life in its wake. I'll share a couple passages so you can get a feel for him and his writing style. Here's what he writes.

Good God. What horror and destruction. It's impossible for me to describe or you to form any idea of it. It seemed as if a total disillusion of nature was taking place. The roaring of the sea and wind, fiery meteors flying about it in the air, the prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning, the crash of the falling houses, the ear piercing shrieks of the distressed.

Were sufficient to strike astonishment into angels. And then he goes on to offer his thoughts on what has happened. He says, my reflections and feelings on the frightful and melancholy occasion. Are set forth in the following self discourse. Where now, o vile worm, is all thy boasted fortitude and resolution?

What is become of thine arrogance and self sufficiency? Why dost thou tremble and stand aghast? How humble, how helpless, how contemptible you now appear. And for why the jarring of elements, the discord of clouds? O impotent, presumptuous fool.

How durst thou offend that omnipotence. Whose nod alone were sufficient to quell the destruction that hovers over thee or crush thee into atoms? But see, the Lord relents. He hears our prayers. The lightning ceases.

The winds are appeased the warring elements are reconciled, and all things promise peace. The darkness is dispelled and drooping nature revives at the approaching dawn. Yet hold, o vain mortal, check thy ill timed joy. Art thou so selfish to exult because thy lot is happy in a season of universal woe? Hast thou no feeling for the miseries of thy fellow creatures?

Art thou incapable of the soft pangs of sympathetic sorrow? Look around thee and shudder at the view. See desolation and ruin where'er thou turn thine eyes. See thy fellow creatures, pale and lifeless, their bodies mangled, their souls snatched into eternity, unexpecting, alas, perhaps unprepared. Hark their bitter groans of distress.

O ye who revel in affluence, see the afflictions of humanity, and bestow your superfluity to ease them. Say not we have suffered also, and thence withhold your compassion. What are your sufferings compared to those ye have still more than enough left? Act wisely, succor the miserable, and lay up a treasure in heaven? Okay, so maybe its a bit overwrought and a bit heavy handed with the moralizing, but its excellent prose, especially for a teenager, especially in these far flung islands.

This essay takes St. Croix by storm, no pun intended, and well to do men start inquiring after the author. Hamilton had published it anonymously, and when people find out that a teenager has written this, they think, okay, a top notch writer like this shouldn't be stuck here on this island. And they raise a fund to send him to the United States so he can receive a college education. So in 1772, at the age of 17, Hamilton sets off for Boston.

By the way, I want to pause to give my first major lesson, which is that if you are a young person, even if you're not so young, one of the most valuable things that you can do is put out content, put out your thoughts, put out writing. So start a blog, a Twitter account, a podcast, a newsletter, anything like that. It lets people know how smart and capable you are. It attracts people who are inclined toward your interests or your mode of thinking. And it has the added benefit that in articulating what matters most to you, you have to think about and clarify and discover what matters most to you.

For me, personally, this podcast has been an exceptional way to find my people. People who believe what I do think like I do, are interested in what I'm interested in, and it has open doors I wouldn't have believed when I started this podcast. And it's not a coincidence that both Hamilton and Napoleon broke through in this way, if you forgot, Napoleon wrote a political pamphlet that attracted the attention of the government in Paris called the directory. And that was how he got his first big military appointments. So I think for anyone, learning to write well is one of those foundational skills that enables everything else that you do.

So get your thoughts out into the world. It creates a great surface area. Also for luck, it creates opportunities to be discovered and leap your career, progress forward. It's. It's just one of the most high impact things that you can do.

For Hamilton's work habits, his daily habits, we don't know much, but we do know that he rose early, drank strong coffee, and then, according to Chernow, quote, seated himself at his table where he would remain six, seven, or 8 hours. So breakfast was basically just coffee. At this point in his life. That changes a little bit once he gets married, but for now, that's how he works. I haven't found any direct references to him being a light eater.

But if you're waking up drinking coffee and then sitting at your desk for a marathon eight hour stretch without getting up from the table, then I think you probably qualify as a light eater. Uh, you know, it's not just when or how you eat that matters. Also, it's what you eat. And I'm one of those people who obsesses over environmental toxins, microplastics, things like that. I think they're a major contributor to all these things that people suffer nowadays.

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Okay, so Hamilton goes to the US. He goes first to Boston and then proceeds from there to New York. He tries to get into college at Princeton, which was then, and still is, one of America's most prestigious universities. But they won't let him in because he's too young. So I guess at this point, I have to mention that there is controversy around his birth year.

So Hamilton has a very turbulent background. He's basically an orphan. You know, his mother dies when he's young, and then he's passed from family to family to family. He's from the small island, probably. There weren't good records kept anyway, so we're actually not totally sure of his birth year.

So he thinks it's 1757, and that's what he tells everyone, that he was born in 1757, thereby making him 15 years old. There's actually pretty compelling evidence that he was actually born in 1755, so he's actually 17 years old. So that is the date I have been using. But anyway, he thinks he's two years younger than. Than most people think he actually was.

So the point is, he's trying to get into Princeton as a 15 year old, and they say, no, that's too young. And he brings up the example of another young man who had been admitted to Princeton at a young age just a few years previously, a young man named Aaron Burr. In fact, at this point, Hamilton might have heard the story from Burr himself. They might have already met, but Burr was a well connected american, whereas Hamilton was a penniless foreigner. And so he is rejected from Princeton, and he ends up going to King's College in New York, the institution that would eventually become known as Columbia University.

Now, Hamilton was always very good at making friends, and he does so right away. The fact that he is poor and a foreigner doesn't stop him. He quickly gains a group of very close friends and begins studies on his own in preparation for college. You know, one of the reasons that he's so good at making friends, even though, like, he doesn't know anyone, he's kind of starting from zero, is he's very charismatic, he's very smooth. A contemporary left this account.

It says his eyes were of a deep azure, eminently beautiful, without the slightest trace of hardness or severity, and beamed with higher expressions of intelligence and discernment than any others that I ever saw. He displayed in his manners and movements a degree of refinement and grace which I never witnessed in any other man. Okay, so even though he's. He's really small, he's got a very impressive physical presence and these great manners, and there's just something about him that really strikes people. Even when they just first meet him, they realize that he's unlike anyone they've ever met, you know?

The other kind of defining thing about Hamilton that is difficult to capture is his frenetic pace. There's a good quote from Chernow, who writes a copious note taker. He left behind in minute hand an exercise book in which he jotted down passages from the Iliad in Greek, took extensive notes on geography and history, and compiled detailed chapter synopses from the books of Genesis and revelation. As if wanting to pack every spare moment with achievement. He also found time to craft poetry and write the prologue and epilogue of an unspecified play performed by a local detachment of british soldiers.

Okay, so he's doing everything like, he's just got these few months until school starts, and he teaches himself greek and even reads the Iliad in Greek and takes all these notes. And he's writing poetry, he's writing plays, he's studying all the prerequisite materials for college. Like, he's. He's just doing everything. He had this incredible energy to just work, work, work, and get an unbelievable amount done in a very short amount of time at King's College.

When he does enter, he's a star student, never makes trouble, gets great grades, wakes up before 06:00 a.m. and just has this startling capacity for work. And not just work. He's very social. He goes to parties.

He's an incredibly hard worker, but he's not a stick in the mud. He uses all his time extremely productively, whether that is for work or whether that is for entertainment. No waste. He founds a weekly club dedicated to giving speeches, writing, and debating. These sorts of things used to be common at colleges here in the US.

Hamilton is the star of his club, and he uses it as an opportunity to refine his thinking and his writing and speaking skills. Now, this is obviously a time of a lot of political ferment in the United States. People are already talking about independence. Revolutionary. And by temperament, Hamilton is something of a loyalist.

He was someone who liked England. He was moderately conservative, okay. But he begins to identify with the growing patriot movement, in part because he legitimately thought the british government had overstepped their bounds and were acting egregiously toward their american colonies. But also, I can't help but wonder if Hamilton also smelled opportunity in the air. Remember, in that letter to his friend Edward Stevens, he had ended it by saying, I wish there was a war.

And this was the context of him discussing his ambition and his desire to get ahead. And so I think he knew intuitively that a revolution and a war would present larger than normal opportunities for ambitious and capable young men. So, yes, like he probably did legitimately, intellectually identify with the patriot movement, but he also probably saw a lot of opportunity there, a lot of opportunity to distinguish himself and make a name for himself. His first essay, which he publishes in an american newspaper, is a defense of the Boston Tea Party, an act in which some disguised patriots boarded british ships at night and dumped their cargo of tea into the Boston harbor as a protest of british taxes. And so this vandalism is a move that is popular in some circles, but in other circles, especially amongst merchants, it's very unpopular.

They're worried about having their cargo seized and thrown into the sea. And so with his background in commerce, Hamilton was able to assuage some of these fears from merchants in New York. He's able to explain why, actually, in the long run, you know, this is a good and important thing for us and for the colonies. A few weeks after that, he makes his first big public speech. There is a protest, and some people who know him urge him to get up in front of the crowd and make a speech.

And so he makes this spectacular, eloquent speech and receives a long, sustained ovation. And this speech rockets him in prominence as a popular speaker in defense of american independence. And this is catnip for Hamilton, who admitted to being motivated by this is, quote, love of fame. The ruling passion of the noblest minds, which would prompt a man to plan and undertake extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit. Okay, so that is his driving motivation.

A love of fame. He regularly writes under a pseudonym in the New York newspapers and carries on bruising written feuds with any who challenged him or defended the loyalists, the crown. And the style of Hamilton is he liked to just write and say more. He liked to overwhelm his opponents with the quantity and quality of his arguments and his research, which is not to say that he wasn't also clear and incisive. He was.

But his go to strategy was always more overwhelm. One major concern of the public at this time was whether America could win a conflict with Britain. And Hamilton writes very prophetically on this topic. He says, let it be remembered that there are no large planes for the two armies to meet in and decide the conquest. The circumstances of our country put it in our power to evade a pitched battle.

It will be better policy to harass and exhaust the soldiers by frequent skirmishes and incursions than to take the open field with them, by which means they would have the full benefit of their superior regularity and skills. Americans are better qualified for that kind of fighting, which is most adapted to this country than regular troops. And this is so interesting because, I mean, this is a teenager, and here he is laying out the strategy that the US would eventually adopt under Washington, well before fighting even breaks out. One of the crazier things about Hamilton is that he was right about basically everything. He was like a prophet in his ability to predict the future.

I think one of the things that made Hamilton so good at this was the breadth of his knowledge. He had an excellent understanding of commerce, finance, law, history, science, literature, poetry, you know, you name it. And so he could pull together all of this diffuse knowledge to accurately foresee all circumstances that would arise and predict, you know, what would be most important and therefore what would happen. And it's just amazing to see time after time. You know, he.

He predicts here the. The best american strategy in the revolutionary war. Later in the war, he has this amazing letter where he just writes down word for word what the british strategy is going to be for the entire war, and the British act it out as if they have this document and are trying to follow it. Like, he really prophetically is able to intuit what the British are going to try to do. He also accurately predicts what's going to happen in the French Revolution, like he says.

Exactly like it's going to devolve into anarchy, and then they're going to have some despot who's going to come in and take over as a monarch. So he predicts Napoleon later. He predicts kind of the future of the United States and what it will become like. Very good at seeing into the future. So, anyway, it's a few years like this that he's in college.

He's writing, he's speaking. He is raising his public profile as a patriot, intellectual. So it is in the midst of this public turmoil that the battle of Lexington takes place in Massachusetts. And as soon as fighting breaks out, he joins up with a local militia as an artillery officer. An officer because he was a, you know, he had no military background, but he was a university student and therefore educated, and that is where the officer corps was drawn from.

But he's obviously a low ranking officer. He's also still in college this whole time. One of my favorite stories about him comes when he is at college and all this stuff is happening. You know, the battle of Lexington has happened. And so now this patriotic fervor has reached a fever pitch.

And King's College was actually a bastion of loyalism. You know, it was King's College. It was supposed to be like a royal institution associated with the british crown. Well, one night, a rowdy group of drunk patriot rioters comes to attack the college's president, who was a very outspoken loyalist. And Hamilton is put in a bind because he is a leading patriot.

But he's also a friend and protege of this college president. His name's Miles Cooper. And Miles Cooper is the one who let him into college, even though he was underage and he has mentored him the entire time. So he's, in his mind, what does he do? Does he side with these rioters, with these patriots, or with his friend, the president of the university, Miles Cooper?

Well, loyalty was always near the top of Hamilton's virtues. He highly valued friendship and was extremely loyal to his friends. So here's what he did. Reading now from the Chernow biography, it says, after the mob knocked down the gate and surged toward the residents, Hamilton launched into an impassioned speech telling the vociferous protesters that their conduct, instead of promoting their cause, would disgrace and injure the glorious cause of liberty. Okay, so he kind of stops them with a speech.

He just, he gets them to listen to him for a few minutes. He can't actually stop them. Like, they don't listen to him. They don't turn around and go home. But he preoccupies them for a few minutes, and that is a long enough time that Cooper can escape out the back window and board a ship bound for England.

And I find this really admirable. I have given a diatribe in other episodes about loyalty, and so I won't reiterate that here, but I will just say that I believe there is no cause important enough that it is worth betraying your friends. There is almost nothing in this world that is more powerful and important than friendship and loyalty. And I find that really admirable in Hamilton, that he put himself in a dangerous situation, and one in which he was kind of, you know, morally and intellectually compromised just to make sure that no harm befell his friend. And, you know, there's another part of this, too.

It's not just personal loyalty. Hamilton really detested the mob. He was a big skeptic of kind of the public in general, especially of, like, popular emotion. Here's what Chernow writes. He says even amid an insurrection that he supported, he fretted about the damage to constituted authority and worried about mob rule.

Like other founding fathers, Hamilton would have preferred a stately revolution enacted decorously in courtrooms and parliamentary chambers by gifted orators in powdered wigs. The american revolution was to succeed because it was undertaken by skeptical men who knew that the same passions that toppled tyrannies could be applied to destructive ends. And so that was Hamilton. It did create some conflict in his life, because he was a revolutionary who was, by nature, kind of skeptical of revolutions. But I also think it's what created part of his greatness, that tension.

Before we move on and talk about Hamilton's life as an artillery officer, I want to tell you about another podcast called all the Hacks. It's an award winning podcast that will teach you to upgrade your life, money, and travel, all while spending less and saving more. So the host, Chris Hutchins, is a friend of mine, and he is genuinely a national treasure. I love Chris. To give you an idea of who he is, I told him I was thinking about getting Asana, and he said, oh, do you want to see my sauna spreadsheet?

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And that is Chris's personality. When he wants to learn something, he learns everything about it. He's a very successful guy who has had a successful career in startups. And so if you want to optimize your life, he helps you learn everything you need to know about a topic, whether that is credit cards and points, or optimizing your sleep, or optimizing your money through investing or starting a podcast. He has a great episode on starting a podcast.

He actually did it with Tim Ferriss and told Tim everything there is to know about podcasting. So all the hacks is just a really great resource if you want to upgrade and optimize your life. So check it out. That is all the hacks, and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so Hamilton, during this time, really takes to life as an artillery officer.

He learns by all means available. You know, he thinks he's behind. He doesn't know anything about being a soldier, and so he wants to take advantage of every opportunity to learn. So that includes personal experience. He's going out and drilling whenever he can.

That includes book learning. So he's setting up on old military textbooks, old military campaigns, memoirs, handbooks, like anything he can get his hands on to read. And then it also includes mentorship. So he goes out and he finds other people, in this case, old grizzled artillery officers who had served in the british army or in the french and indian war, and he befriends them and picks their brains and learns everything he can from them. I think that's actually a really key point that, like, if you can learn in all three of those ways, so that is book learning experience.

And from other people, they have this kind of synergistic effect where if you're just doing one of them, you just aren't going to learn as fast when you can do all three together. Okay, I'm learning from books. Like, I'm learning the textbook way to do it. I'm actually getting my hands dirty and getting experience, and I'm learning from people who have done it before. When you combine all three of those, that is the way to supercharge your learning and learn to do anything really fast.

And Hamilton does learn really fast, and he becomes a very capable artillery officer in basically no time. So keep that in mind if you want to learn. Get those three things together, book learning experience, and learn from other people. He also has a serious love of pomp and circumstance, and his men are always the best drilled. They are the smartest marchers, and they are incredibly well dressed.

He pays a lot of attention to their uniforms and the way they look. He's actually at the center of the action when the British attack New York for the first time. He's manning an artillery battery that is being fired on by the first british ships to attack New York. And he displays extreme bravery. Like Napoleon.

He's very brave under fire and appears to have this, like, almost flagrant disregard for his own life. This is displayed in the first battle when he lets one of his men borrow his musket. And the man leaves it at the battery near the place where the british fire is most intense. And so Hamilton asks the guy, hey, what'd you do with my musket? He goes, oh, shoot.

I left it back at the fortification, but, like, at the spot where the British are firing right now with their cannons from these ships. And then Hamilton goes and collects his musket as if nothing is happening. The soldier wrote, quote, I told him where I had left it, and he went for it. Notwithstanding that the firing continued with as much unconcern as if the vessel had not been there. I just like, I love that story.

He's just like, oh, okay, let me grab my own musket. Goes and grabs his musket. Cannonballs are flying all around him, and he just shows no concern. The battle for New York is a complete boondoggle for the Americans. If you learn a little bit more about that, you can listen to the Washington episode.

But they are defeated multiple times and are easily driven out by the British. And Hamilton is one of the few people who comes out looking good from this. At every step of the way, his artillery company steps into the breach and saves american troops from being overwhelmed and captured or destroyed with timely and accurate artillery fire. A contemporary wrote, quote, as soon as his company was raised, he proceeded with indefatigable pains to perfect it in every branch of discipline and duty. And it was not long before it was esteemed the most beautiful model of discipline in the whole army.

Okay? And I think that's kind of the key to why he was so successful in New York, is that he just did things the right way. Okay? That is one of the things you see from great leaders throughout history. They're professionals.

They know their craft. You know, da Vinci knew how to draw. Napoleon knew how to position cannons. Rockefeller knew how to read a ledger. Like, he could act as a low level accountant if he needed to.

They're just very solid professionals who know the minutiae of their craft. One of the other things he becomes known for is sharing the hardships of his gunners and bombardiers. He always shared their food, their conditions. He slept with his men. Even though he was an officer, he wanted them to know that he was in it with them.

Right? He wasn't asking them to do anything that he wouldn't do himself. He was known as a tough and strict disciplinarian, but always fair. And he promoted from within his own ranks based on merit. In fact, he's so renowned amongst his men for his fairness that one of his soldiers later in life became a staunch political enemy.

You know, Hamilton was a federalist. This guy was a radical Republican, and they had had it out in some newspapers, writing essays back and forth. And the guy hired Hamilton as his lawyer regardless. And when Hamilton asks him, you know, we're fighting in the political arena, are you sure you want to hire me as your lawyer? The man responds, quote, I served in your company during the war, and I know you will do me justice in spite of my rudeness.

So Hamilton now has this, this real reputation. He is, on the one hand, a very effective leader, just a great officer, a very capable military leader. And then he also has his reputation from before the war as a speaker and a writer. And this makes him a prime candidate to serve as a staff officer. Right.

You got someone who's both really good at the military side and really good at the writing side. And so he gets recruited to be the chief of staff of three different generals, and he turns them down every single time. He turns them down because he thirsts after military glory. He wants to be in the action. Yeah.

He doesn't want to be a desk jockey translating orders and, and moving around troops on a map. He wants to be with the men firing the cannons exposed to gunfire like a real military hero. And also because of his independence, which we discussed, he liked to be in charge. He doesn't want to be subservient to anyone, however, he turns down these three generals. But when General Washington recruits him, that's finally a big enough offer to tempt him.

He still wasn't thrilled about it, actually, but it seems like he felt that he couldn't say no. This is George Washington, the commander in chief, and he's asking him to come be his aide de camp, his chief of staff. In some ways, this was the second most important post in the entire american military. Right. He's basically going to be Washington's number two there with him every day in the trenches.

And so after an interview with Washington, he agrees to serve as his aide de camp and joins the staff of General George Washington. Hamilton had a lot of respect for Washington. They had a very good working relationship. But Hamilton later said he rebuffed Washington's advances to develop a more personal friendship. And part of that was Hamilton was turned off by Washington's temper and his personal foibles.

Right. Like, he's getting this really up close view of Washington, who did have a temper and wasn't a perfect person. And so part of that is just personal differences. They were very different people. But I think most of it was actually not due to that.

I think most of it was just that Hamilton could not abide to be subordinate to anyone. He loved control. He loved to be in charge. And so even George Washington, like the man, the hero, the God of the American Revolution, is still just chafes at him to be taking orders all day. Nevertheless, I mean, despite this mental pain that it puts Hamilton through, it really was an amazing working relationship.

Like I said, I mean, I guess right there, I'm kind of playing up the conflict. But they had enormous respect for one another. And in many respects, Hamilton becomes the brains behind Washington. He not only writes for him, but thinks for him. He translates general commands into specific orders.

He takes control of finance and supply for the military. He offers important ideas and advice to Washington, ideas that Washington often adopts. And in Washington's absence, he often issued orders in Washington's name. And it's worth noting that Washington never reprimands him for this. He always approves of these orders and tells them that he has done well to be proactive in his absence.

So Hamilton clearly possesses a genius that Washington does not. But Washington also has some attributes that Hamilton didn't have. There's a passage in the Trinidad biography that I think really highlights that. He says Washington possessed the outstanding judgment, sterling character, and clear sense of purpose needed to guide his sometimes wayward protege. He saw that the volatile Hamilton needed a steadying hand.

Hamilton, in turn, contributed philosophical depth, administrative expertise, and comprehensive policy knowledge that nobody in Washington's ambit ever matched. He could transmute wispy ideas into detailed plans and turn revolutionary dreams into enduring realities. As a team, they were unbeatable and far more than the sum of their parts. Okay, I love that. I think that is so true and such a testament to finding the right partner.

As a team, they were unbeatable and far more than some of their parts. I mean, it reminds me of, like, a Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak type partnership. Like, sometimes people try and talk down on Steve Jobs that, you know, he wasn't really this genius that was really Steve Wozniak. Well, you know what? It is true that he couldn't have done the engineering that Steve Wozniak did, but it's also true that Steve Wozniak couldn't have done the marketing and sales that Steve Jobs did.

Very similar to Washington and Hamilton. They were unbeatable as a team and far more than the sum of their parts. And so I think in business or in whatever pursuit you're in, that is true. If you can find one of those partnerships that that is greater than some of its parts, just, you have these incredible results. So Hamilton is really succeeding in doing well in his position on Washington staff.

I think it's worth mentioning how quickly this has all happened. In five years, he has gone from an apprenticed clerk in St. Croix to one of the most important commanders in the american military. So he's still only 22 years old at this point, and that contributes to his mystique. Also, he's only 22, and he looks even younger because he's got this slight stature and this youthful face.

He just kind of looks boyish. And so he is this wunderkin, this marvel. I love one passage that describes this. It says, a senior officer recalled Hamilton and his rump company marching into the village. I noticed a youth, a mere stripling, small, slender, almost delicate in frame, marching beside a piece of artillery with a cocked hat pulled down over his eyes, apparently lost in thought, with his hand resting on a cannon, and every now and then patting it as if it were a favorite horse or a pet plaything.

A mythic gleam began to cling to the young captain. People had already noticed his special attributes during the retreat across New Jersey. Well, do I recollect the day when Hamiltons company marched into Princeton, said a friend. It was a model of discipline. At their head was a boy, and I wondered at his youth.

But what was my surprise when that slight figure was pointed out to me as that Hamilton, of whom we had already heard so much? Okay, so I think that gives a good feel for him. He is this energetic, smart, cocky, young hotshot in the military. I should also mention that Hamilton, with his tireless energy, is also studying and learning new things, even as he's engaged in this war, as he sees the horrible problems that Continental Congress is having paying their troops. He studies finance and monetary policy.

He reads history. I mentioned that he had already read Plutarch's lives as a child. Well, he has this little notebook of notes and quotes that he keeps for himself, and he has 51 pages of notes from Plutarch's lives that he writes during the Revolutionary War, like 51 pages is almost a book. It's amazing to think that he has the time to do all this. He also writes a 7000 word treatise on the form of government that he thinks the United States should take after the conclusion of the war.

And he's able to do all of this even as he is very busy. As the chief of staff for George Washington, one of the most important people in the entire revolutionary army, gives you an idea for his magnificent work capacity, that he can be doing both of these things at the same time, and he is doing both. I mean, just because he's doing all this study, I don't want you to get the impression that he's a desk jockey, he's still a fighter. You know, he felt confined. He didnt like that he wasnt at the front as much as he would like to be.

But if anything, because he no longer has a direct combat role, he has a sort of mania for danger. In one incident, he rides into the middle of a retreat and has his horse shot out from under him. And in another incident, hes overseeing a raid when the British come and he and a few comrades run and jump into a boat to cross the river, and it is repeatedly shot as they are trying to row across this river. And one of his companions is killed, another one is injured by a musket shot, and Hamilton and the surviving men have to jump out of the boat and try to swim to safety. Some men on the far side of the shore see Hamilton go under the water, and they never see him re emerge.

And Trinow writes what happened next? Just before Hamilton returned to headquarters, Washington received a letter from Captain Lee announcing Hamilton's death. There were tears of jubilation as well as considerable laughter when the sodden corpse himself sauntered through the door. Okay, so he comes so close to death that his death is actually reported to Washington, although he shows up just a few seconds later. One contemporary wrote that he, quote, appeared to court death.

All right, so just like any opportunity he gets to put himself in danger, he's doing it. One thing that raises his status even further is when Benjamin Franklin is able to cement an alliance with the french. And so at that point, the French have a big professional army, much larger, much more professional than the Americans. So in some ways, they become kind of the primary actors in the war at that point. And the Americans become, frankly, somewhat auxiliary.

And so coordination between the two is really important. It's very important to be able to communicate with the French and find their plans and be able to act in concert. And so because Hamilton spoke fluent French, he spoke better French than anyone in the army. So he frequently acted as a liaison with french commanders. And so he kind of becomes the head negotiator with the french army.

And that makes him even more invaluable, even more important in the american army. Now, Hamilton asks Washington to leave his staff and be allowed to lead a division, but Washington tells him that he can't do that. He says, you're indispensable. You know I can't do without you. Like, I need you for your writing abilities, I need you for your ideas, and I need you, frankly, for your french, like no one else can liaison the way you can.

And he also brings up, I can't promote you over full colonels when you are still technically a lieutenant colonel and you haven't been commanding troops for most of the war. And this really ticks off Hamilton. And he lets it simmer until his frustration eventually explodes. And as is often the case, the thing that causes the rupture between Washington and Hamilton was a very small, personal incident. So Washington and Hamilton are at headquarters, and Washington is walking by and says, hey, come see me in my office.

And Hamilton says, sure. Let me just get this order sent off first. So he goes, he sends off the order, he comes to Washington's office, and Washington just blasts him, saying, you have kept me, the commander in chief, waiting for nearly 20 minutes. Who do you think you are? And Hamilton says, like, what are you talking about?

You're freaking out. It's only been five minutes, and it escalates into a shouting match. And in the shouting match, Hamilton quits. He says, I'm done here. I'm out.

Now, Washington had this big temper, but he was, at his core, a very calm and reasonable man. And he quickly sends a letter to Hamilton saying that he regrets the unfortunate incident and he wants to welcome Hamilton back to his staff. And I think Hamilton is quite rude in his response. And he says, no, I don't want to come back to your staff. I want independent command.

This has been coming for a long time. No, thank you. And I think it's a real testament to Washington that he never punished Hamilton for this insolence. He was able to set aside his feelings and value Hamilton for what he was instead of focusing on his foibles. And Hamilton definitely had foibles.

He was very prickly about his honor and any sense that. That it was being infringed upon or put down in any way. And he had this haughtiness, even towards George Washington. No one thought they were better than Washington, right? Washington was the man.

Hamilton alone had this, like, air of superiority, and to his credit, you know, Washington was able to see past that. I know this isn't a George Washington episode. I just did one of those. But I think there's a real lesson there that when you find a star player, you can't let that kind of talent go, and you have to enable them, even when they're being a diva or they have some significant flaw that you have to work around. And that is what Washington did.

Despite Hamilton's rudeness, Washington consistently promoted him, enabled him, and collaborated with him well. So Hamilton has to cool his heels for a bit while he waits for a command. He's pretty shameless and badgers everyone all the time, asking if there are any open positions, and that includes Washington, who he had just quit on in a huff. But eventually, a position opens up, and Washington promotes him and gives him his much coveted independent command. This leads Hamilton to the siege of Yorktown, the climactic battle of the revolution, where he is given three battalions under the overall command of General Washington.

At the climactic moment of the siege, two redoubts need to be taken. Okay, so, like, kind of two little mini forts outside the main fortifications, and the French are allowed to assault one, and Hamilton is given the opportunity to take the other redoubt. And this is supposed to kind of show the camaraderie, the partnership of the french and american militaries, right? The French take one and the Americans take the other, and Hamilton is the one who's given the command of the american assault. It is a daring nighttime assault, and Hamilton designs and executes a masterful plan.

He has his men unload their guns and attack with bayonets, only to preserve the element of surprise for as long as possible. Hamilton and his men actually move so quickly that they almost overtake the siege engineers who were disabling the enemy's fortifications. So they rush through the redoubt, taking it in ten minutes with very few casualties. It is quick, clinical work, a true hamiltonian performance. And on the other side of the battle, the French actually really struggle in their taking.

The other readout, which is kind of a testament to how capable of a commander Hamilton was, that he does basically the same mission but with far fewer casualties. Hamilton, who is already a war hero, gains a new level of stature as the man who led the decisive assault in the decisive battle of the revolution. Now, after the battle of Yorktown. It took months for the war to wind down, but Hamilton could see where things were going and was always in a rush, right? So he was quick to get things going to move his career forward.

So he rushed back home to be with his wife, Elizabeth Schuyler, who he had married during the war, and his infant son. And we'll talk more about his marriage and his family life next episode, as well as the civilian career that he embarked on after the war. But for now, let's end it here and talk about our takeaways from the rise of Alexander Hamilton. The first is that idea I mentioned of content. Get your thinking out there.

Start an anonymous Twitter account. Start a newsletter. Write pieces for an online publication. Start a podcast. Get your thinking out there.

It will open opportunities and attract the kind of people that you are interested in. Point number two is the law of more. The most sure way to succeed is to just do more. I'm reminded of the podcaster Chris Williamson. He has a podcast called Modern Wisdom, and he's just had a meteoric rise over the last few years.

And one of his strategies was just that he saw that most podcasters who did interview style podcasts did one or at most, two interviews per week. So he decided that he was going to do three interviews per week. And that has obviously really worked out for him. He's one of the biggest podcasters in the world now, and that is a strategy you can always control. You can't control the raw talent, what you were born with, but you can control how much you do.

And just doing more is something that always works. And it worked for Hamilton. He always, in his essays, he wrote more as an artillery captain, he practiced and he drilled more. As an intellectual, he studied and he read more like he just did, more than anyone else did. And that is a big reason behind his success.

Another takeaway is to go where the opportunity is. Find a function where you can have responsibility. Find the revolution that is happening. Settled places and settled industries are usually not the right place to break through quickly. Hamilton gravitated to America and then to the army because he intuited that these were frontiers where talented people could rise quickly.

So be like Hamilton. Find a frontier industry, a frontier domain. Go somewhere where it's not so settled, and you'll be able to succeed much more quickly. The next point I have written down is that Hamilton was a quick learner. And one reason for that is he was always learning through three ways, right through experience, from mentors and from reading and research.

And so if you want to learn something really quickly, that's exactly what you do. Start getting some practice. Find a mentor or a coach, or just someone who knows something about it, who can teach you, and then do your research. Every one of those learning styles becomes more powerful when done in conjunction with the others. And then lastly, I will mention that club that he started in college and that close group of friends that he seemed to gather every step of his career.

I actually didn't mention so much, but he was very good friends with this guy named Lawrence and the Marquis de Lafayette he had, just like in college, this very close coterie of friends in the military. So don't go it alone. Find a group of peers who you can bounce ideas off of and learn with. Okay, that does it for part one. Stay tuned for part two, dropping soon.

Until then, thank you for listening to how to take over the world.

By the way, if you've listened this far, there's another podcast I want to tell you about that I think you will love. It's actually one that I'm involved with. It's like how to take over the world, but for fictional characters. So a number of times I've heard people say, I would love for you to do an episode on Aragorn or Paul Atreides. And I love fiction.

And I didn't have time to start that podcast. I actually thought about it, but there's no way I could find the bandwidth. But I love fiction. I love that idea. So I worked with my friend Jameson Olson to launch a podcast that does exactly that.

It's called becoming the main character, and I think it's really great. Jameson has surpassed my loftiest hopes for the show. It's just phenomenally well done and super fun to listen to and really valuable. I just. I find it so inspiring.

So it's called becoming the main character. You can get it wherever you get your podcasts. And I've included a link in the show notes, so go give it a listen.

The Rise of Alexander Hamilton

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1: Early Life

2: Military Genius

3: Political Impact

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