hamilton & jefferson

Ben Everidge for Thomas

“They Were In The Room …

“They were adversaries. They were compatriots. They were enigmas of their generation - and ours.

Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.

One was the Federalist, and one was the Anti-Federalist.

The brilliant playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, in his award-winning Broadway play Hamilton, made one look brilliant and one look flamboyant. Both are entertaining and historically memorable.

In reality, the dazzling one became president of the United States after drafting the United States Declaration of Independence, and the other our first Secretary of the Treasury before being shot in a duel with the then-Vice President of the United States, Aaron Burr, on this same day in history, July 11th.

Hamilton would die the next day, July 12th, in New York City and is buried at Trinity Church.

Both prolific writers moved a nation with their words, wisdom, and driving ambition.

They were founding fathers, but who were they? How were they alike, and how were they different? What differences did they bring to the emerging Republic?

How might history best judge them? What impact did they have on this nation we call the United States of America?

The illustration following briefly summarizes how the two founding fathers differed. The two books depicted below can give you even greater insight into these remarkable Americans:

Hamilton and Jefferson were, as Miranda sings it, “in the room” when many of America’s most significant decisions were made in those very early revolutionary and post-revolutionary years.

As a trusted member of George Washington’s first cabinet, Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury and Thomas Jefferson Secretary of State. Together, they hammered out the agreement that created a national bank that Hamilton wanted and put the nation’s permanent capitol in Washington, D.C., which Jefferson wanted for his fellow Virginians and southerners.

Hamilton and Jefferson also had personal peccadillos to contend with during their years of public service. Hamilton had an admitted year-long affair with a married woman, Maria Reynolds, which nearly destroyed his marriage to Eliza. Jefferson, on the other hand, had a decades-long affair of some sort with his slave, Sally Hemings, fathering at least six children with her over time. Martha Jefferson had previously died, and Hemings, besides being an enslaved person at Monticello, may also have been Martha’s half-sister.

The Reynolds affair came to light when Hamilton was accused of financial irregularities, which resulted in financial transactions related to paying Mr. Reynolds to remain quiet about the affair.

Jefferson had financial woes of his own trying to maintain his mountaintop estate and thus used this as at least some misguided justification for keeping slaves at Monticello.

Both men were highly educated, both self and institutional, and used their power to communicate in writing and orally to their advantage.

Hamilton would die at a young age, however, the victim of an illegal duel with then-sitting Vice President Aaron Burr, a later-in-life adversary going back to the American Revolution. Hamilton never held elected office in his later years but might have become a president someday. His party, the Federalists, dissolved in relatively short order and had long-term political influence in both domestic and foreign policy.

After serving as Washington’s Secretary of State, Jefferson served as John Adams’ vice president before ascending to the presidency in 1801. Jefferson’s party, the Democrat-Republicans, would remain highly influential for eons after he died in 1826 on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence he crafted.

In either case, these two founding fathers have impacted what we know today as American democracy and the United States of America itself.

They were, indeed, “in the room” together.