"An Unlucky Honest Man"

THE PAPERS OF ALEXANDER HAMILTON, VOLUMES I & II (1,337 pp.)--Edifed by Harold C. Syreff and Jacob E. Cooke--Columbia Universify ($25).

Anyone past the age of 25 who still recalls his history lessons has precise images of the giants who made the American Revolution. Washington was noble--so noble, in fact, that he did not look at all self-conscious when they carved his head on a mountainside. Franklin was a cross between Will Rogers and Santa Claus. Jefferson was the great champion of all that was good--democracy, social justice, and the common man. Hamilton was Jefferson's bitter antagonist. He distrusted democracy, had no time for social justice, and thought the common man to be too common to bother much about. In the great pageant surrounding the birth of the nation, Hamilton clearly played the heavy.

These convenient caricatures have been sharply revised during recent years by the surge of scholarly interest in the Revolutionary period, and no image has been more greatly altered than that of Alexander Hamilton. In these first two volumes of The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, which trace him to the age of 27, Hamilton emerges as a dazzlingly brilliant young man, autocratic certainly, but far from austere, a proud and self-confident pragmatist, a deft writer with an equal flair for savage public sarcasm and impassioned private love letters, and a leader who suffered fools not at all.

Part of the recent widespread effort of historians to compile source material on the great 18th century Americans,* the two Hamilton volumes are primarily intended for the use of other historians, and like other such collections are choked with trivia. But Hamilton's pen is so sharp and blunt by turn that the letters, notes and official papers, assembled by Editors Syrett and Cooke, contain surprisingly lively material for the nonhistorian, and certain sections read like an epistolary novel.

Kid Colonel. Hamilton was the bastard son of a French-English mother and a Scotch father who lived together apparently with full approval of the community on the West Indian island of St. Kitts. At the age of 14, Hamilton confided to a friend: "My Ambition is prevalent that I contemn the grov'ling and the condition of a Clerk or the like, to which my Fortune &c. condemns me and would willingly risk my life tho' not my Character to exalt my Station. I shall Conclude saying I wish there was a War."

When the war Hamilton wished for came along in 1776, he was attending New York's King's College (later Columbia University), and he had already won a name for himself as an anti-British pamphleteer. He quit college to command an artillery company, fought hard and well in the campaigns around New York City, and caught the eye of George Washington himself. At the age of 22, Alexander Hamilton became aide-de-camp to Washington with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Chasing History. Washington was soon entrusting his brilliant young officer with ticklish matters, ranging from negotiating the exchange of prisoners to soothing the feelings of jealous generals. Given power, Hamilton did not hestitate to act. When New York State was plagued by Tories, Hamilton wrote worried officials that corporal punishment was apt only "to excite compassion and breed disgust." Instead, he suggested that "an execution or two, by way of emample [sic] would strike terror, and powerfully discourage the wicked practices going on."

Always on hand when history was in the making, Hamilton was the man who took to horse and clattered after the defecting Benedict Arnold, only to have the traitor escape by boat down the Hudson River. Returning to West Point, Hamilton watched Washington trying to soothe Arnold's distraught wife. "It was the most affecting scene I ever was witness to," Hamilton wrote his fiancee. "She for a considerable time intirely lost her senses. She upbraided him with being in a plot to murder her child; one moment she raved, another she melted into tears; sometimes she pressed her infant to her bosom and lamented its fate occasioned by the imprudence of its father."

Banks & Dogs. Hamilton's papers give some rare glimpses into just what kind of war the Revolution was. "The enemy yesterday perpetrated a most barbarous butchery upon a Lieutenant Martin of ours," he wrote. "He had not a single bullet wound, but was hacked to pieces with the sword. The greater part of his wounds must have been given him when [he was] utterly out of a condition to resist." Yet the Revolution was also a war between 18th century gentlemen: in a letter written for him by Hamilton, Washington gravely told Sir William Howe that he was returning the British general's lost dog.

As the war went on, Hamilton developed his ideas about the government that the new nation should have. He had lost what few illusions might have lingered in his mind about the wisdom of entrusting power to the people. "Our countrymen have all the folly of the ass." he said, "and all the passiveness of the sheep in their compositions." In 1779, two years before the end of the war, Hamilton already was detailing his plans for a national bank. He argued for the supremacy of a national government over its member states. "The idea of an uncontrollable sovereignty in each state will defeat the other powers given to Congress, and make our union feeble and precarious."

A Matter of Honor. Then, in 1781, Hamilton abruptly split with Washington. As Hamilton told the story in a long letter to a close friend, Washington passed him on the stairs and said he wanted to speak to him. Hamilton replied he would meet with him immediately, sent out a letter, chatted briefly with General Lafayette and hurried back up the stairs to find an irate Washington, who declared angrily: "Colonel Hamilton, you have kept me waiting at the head of the stairs these ten minutes. I must tell you Sir you treat me with disrespect." Hamilton retorted: "I am not conscious of it Sir, but since you have thought it necessary to tell me so we part."

Less than an hour later, Washington sent an envoy to heal the breach, but the proud Hamilton ("I am an unlucky honest man, that speak my sentiments to all and with emphasis") turned him away. Hamilton conceded that Washington was honest enough, and that "his popularity has often been essential to the safety of America." But he declared that the two of them were so opposite in temperament that he had not felt any friendship for the general for three years. Hamilton blamed Washington's petulance on his rejection of the great man's offers of friendship: "You," he wrote his friend, "are too good a judge of human nature not to be sensible how this conduct in me must have operated on a man to whom all the world is offering incense."

But Washington was generous enough to give Hamilton a field command. The two volumes end with Hamilton gallantly leading a charge that helps carry the day at Yorktown. In the 18 volumes still to come, the editors will trace Alexander Hamilton's postwar rise to Secretary of the Treasury and his influence upon the young nation, which ended in 1804 when he was killed with a single shot by Aaron Burr in a duel of honor.

*Also in the works: the papers of Franklin, Jefferson and Adams. TIME Inc. has given or pledged $400,000 to support the research on Franklin, $250,000 on Adams and $185,000 on Hamilton.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.