The hottest ticket on Broadway this season is, if you can believe it, a multiracial hip-hop musical about America’s first and forever greatest treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton. It was Hamilton’s genius alone that rapidly transformed the fledgling United States from a functional bankrupt with worthless currency into a financial powerhouse; it was his pathology to provoke a duel with no less than the Vice President of the United States, who killed him.

We stewards of wealth and practitioners of free-market capitalism are all Hamilton’s heirs, and it behooves us to know more about him. There are a number of excellent ways to do so.

For the advisor ready to get serious about the endeavor, there is Ron Chernow’s magisterial 2005 biography, surely the definitive one-volume life and the inspiration for the show. As always, Chernow is a wonder, but at 832 pages including notes, this may be just a bit more of a commitment than some time-constrained advisors will be prepared to make.

Fortunately, there’s an outstanding choice at less than a third the length in Richard Brookhiser’s sparkling Alexander Hamilton, American. (This duality is also the case with respect to George Washington. Chernow produced a door-stopper of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, reviewed in this space last year, but many may opt for Brookhiser’s thoughtful Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington.)

It is an odd but very significant fact that although four of the first five U.S. Presidents, who served 32 of the first 36 years under the Constitution, were Virginia planters, four of the first five treasury secretaries – who served for 21 of the Constitution’s first 27 years – were immigrants. Hamilton was the first, of course, born on the Caribbean island of Nevis. Albert Gallatin, the longest-serving secretary ever, came from Geneva. We get short biographies and a lot of welcome context in Thomas McCraw’s quite wonderful The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy. A unique treatment, this book’s financial focus is right up in the advisor’s wheelhouse.

Finally, for those fascinated to learn just how the greatest man never to be President of this country managed to get himself killed by the sitting Vice President, there is Thomas Fleming’s Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America, a genuinely great book.  

Among all the portraits in the Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing, a sentimental favorite of mine is John Trumbull’s posthumous Hamilton of 1804-06; it’s a copy of a painting the artist had originally done from life. The very first early American art work to enter the Met’s collection, almost a century after the duel, it captures Hamilton as we love him: handsome, far-seeing and confident, the pathology wiped away in death, leaving just the greatness.

Have a look on the Met’s website if you can’t get to the American Wing anytime soon, and you’ll find yourself wanting to read one (or more) of these remarkable books.
 

© 2016 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Nick reviews current books, articles and research findings in the “Resources” feature of his monthly newsletter, Nick Murray Interactive. To download the current sample issue, visit www.nickmurray.com, and click on “Newsletter.”