The Young Hamilton, A Biography (review)

Reviews J. T. Flexner, The Young Hamilton, A Biography. Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1978. 497pp. $15.00. Biography has, in the last decade, enjoyed a resurgence as a form for the innovative investigation of colonial and revolutionary America. Building on the great tradition exemplified in the previous generation by Flexner's own Washington, by Malone's Jefferson, Mitchell's Hamilton and Brant's Madison, scholars have joined biographical form to non-narrative and inter-disciplinary material, techniques and insights. Biographers have used a life or a career to reveal a state of mind, a predicament ; to probe agonies as much as actions. I think of Bernard Bailyn's The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson and Fawn Brodie's Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Life, most recently of Peter Shaw's The Character of John Adams. Family and group biography has also attracted attention —Waters on the Otises, Klein on the Shippens. And a corollary has been the investigation of a group, a generational profile, of the kind essayed by Kenneth Lynn in his A Divided People. Lynn concluded (p. 68) that the revolutionary generation was, in terms of relationships with their fathers, the most contented of any in American history: leading a revolution came easily to them. Although Lynn admits to Hamilton's exceptional childhood, he argues that it had the effect of early "preparing Alexander Hamilton to take care of himself ' (p. 79). Thus Hamilton is squeezed into Lynn's "patriot backgrounds ": he was ready to take decisions, to assume responsibility. The implication is that Hamilton fitted well into American and revolutionary society. This is not the Hamilton presented by J. T. Flexner. For Flexner, 360 biography Vol. 2, No. 4 Hamilton "was by far the most psychologically troubled of the founding fathers." His spirit was cankered: "the great mind, so precocious at the start, never matured." His view was "always from the outside." Nor was his thought seamless: "the accomplished, smooth and brilliant man of the world could at any moment change hysterically, invisibly , for the time being decisively into an imperiled, anguished child" (pp. 3-7). From his fraught, West Indian childhood, Hamilton acquired a contempt for man and an adversary view of human relations. And these determined his own adult relationships and public policies. Having examined the impact of Hamilton's disturbing early years, Mr. Flexner shows how it produced the finished—or rather unfinished —Alexander Hamilton. The career is followed up to 1783. A summary chapter deals with the final two decades. Flexner makes four major points about Hamilton's character and his career: (1) that Hamilton was an outsider; (2) that he was psychologically unstable; (3) that his family background (or lack of it) prompted his views on private and public life; and (4) that, in a very direct way, the travails of the young American republic stem from his own troubles. So far, so good. But I find the textual demonstration and elaboration of these arguments unsatisfactory. The last point is fragile. Attempting to contain it, Mr. Flexner resorts to undue personalization. In treating the "siege" of Congress (1893) and Hamilton's part in the removal ofthat body from Philadelphia , for example, Flexner asserts: "It is amazing to consider that the District of Columbia might never have been established, the capital of Washington never built, had it not been for tiny scenes enacted years before on the faraway shores of the Leeward Islands. Hamilton, in whose mature body the wounded child still lived, had reacted according to an old pattern" (p. 428). Serious concern for the way in which character confronts and molds events gives way to spurious surprise and speculation: "Had Hamilton 's communication fallen into British hands, the history of the war and perhaps of the world would have been changed. ..." (p. 352). Frequent "but ifs," "surelys" and other such hypothetical constructions jar against the psychological interpretation and force the reader to view skeptically Flexner's claims. Mr. Flexner's style does not help matters. It is frequently breathless and often downright vulgar: metaphorical bombshells explode; explosions occur when headquarters is "a-boil"; the army comes "roaring in"; Congress tries "desperately to slug out something that might ameliorate the situation." So I do not...