On a trip to D.C. in August, I visited the Old Patent Office, which is now the National Portrait Gallery, and encountered the 1806 Trumbull portrait of Alexander Hamilton, and this note on his biography:
I previously blogged about this here. I am pleased to report that -- thanks to the attention and sympathy of Peter Malkin and the museum's Director -- the note has been replaced by the following:
This is much an improvement on the old version, although not what I submitted as a suggested replacement, which is the following:
Alexander Hamilton -- “the most brilliant American statesman who ever lived,” as Theodore Roosevelt called him -- was born on an isle in the Caribbean to an unwed single mother. Driven by a voracious appetite for knowledge and insatiable professional ambition, Hamilton was sent on full-scholarship to college on the mainland after his poetry was published in a local newspaper. Not yet thirty, Hamilton quit his job as General Washington’s senior advisor during the Revolutionary War so that he could see combat. Hamilton, together with Madison, was a prime mover behind the summoning of the Constitutional Convention, and the chief non-judicial interpreter of the Constitution through his authorship and editing of the The Federalist. As the first Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton laid the foundations for the nation’s financial system through charter of the first federal bank and the assumption of the states’ war debt by the federal government.
The new version takes small missteps. Hamilton was not actually orphaned until near the end of his life, when his father died on a small island in the Caribbean never having reconciled with his son. The description of Hamilton as part of Washington's "family" sounds strange to me, although Washington did in some ways take on the role of surrogate parent to Hamilton, and Hamilton's abrupt resignation to serve in combat does, in some ways, give the feel of teenage rebellion. Also, the "Federalist Papers" were published as "The Federalist," although that name for those documents is common enough so that I would not call it incorrect. More substantively, I wouldn't have mentioned Aaron Burr by name out of principle, although Hamilton's early death in a duel is a relevant fact that I had omitted from my version.
If you're interested in the early history of the United States, and in one of the most inspiring personal biographies from that period, then please read Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton, which was the ultimate impetus for the replacement of this note for the portrait.
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