Review of Hamilton (2025) by Notor12 — 08 Jul 2020

So I'm going to review Hamilton from a historical accuracy perspective here. Yes, I"m gonna be that guy. This will probably not be a popular opinion, so feel free to ignore me if this kind of thing bothers you:

1) Hamilton was not pulled up by his own bootstraps like the musical suggests.

Yes, he was an orphan born out of wedlock, but he was adopted by an incredibly rich merchant in what is now Kits and Nevis at a young age. That merchant paid for Hamilton to go to one of the more prestigious schools in New York in his teens (What is now Columbia University). He was not really an immigrant any more than the other colonists were....Before the revolution British colonists all over the Americas had a sort of collectively shared identity, including those in the Caribbean colonies....

They all identified as British, and generally all those white British males thought white British males were the pinnacle of human civilization. They had to believe that to justify colonization at all. They wanted white British males to have lots of freedoms that weren't afforded to people who weren't white British males and they wrote the U.S. Constitution to reflect that, to protect their freedoms but not those of other people they viewed as inferior and who were therefore subject to exploitation at their leisure. Sorry, but that's just how it was, and anyone portraying it otherwise is just not telling the truth about what happened.

There wasn't some secret hidden agenda to extend the same protections enshrined for themselves to other's freedoms at some later date as they wrote this document. That just was not on anyone's mind at the time, and there is no evidence to support that the framers secretly had that motive at all. That modern retelling of the narrative of the country's founding is completely made up for today's propaganda purposes, and the Hamilton musical was definitely indulging that fantasy a whole lot throughout.

2) Hamilton also would not have sniffed American high society without his wealthy adopted father's contacts and money and connections to fellow wealthy American merchant capitalists. Why does the musical seem to pretend this did not happen?

He did not come to the colonies to "find himself," he came to go to school and hobnob with power players in the colonies at his adoptive father's behest. I feel like this misleading portrayal was once again trying to sell people on the idea of an American Dream which wasn't even really true to begin with....That we somehow don't have a mostly-closed aristocracy (when we definitely do) and that inter-class mobility is much more possible than it actually is under these conditions. Perhaps other people in history do embody that narrative of America, but Alexander Hamilton did not.

3) Hamilton also was generally not opposed to slavery and participated in the slave trade himself. He did not own slaves because he was an urbanite who didn't have use for them, but he made purchases of slaves for his family members. He was not an abolitionist.

It's a great musical as a musical, but like most biopics/dramatizations it doesn't tell the honest story of the person and their privileges that helped get them where they got....In failing to tell that story it doesn't give an honest representation of the founding of the country either, because the country was shaped by the values and interests of a few people including Alexander Hamilton, wrong or right.

That's the problem with using real people in a story meant to sell tickets. Real life isn't glamorous enough, and hero worship often disappoints when you get to really know someone.