http://www.nationalreview.com/node/426364/print Hamilton and Jefferson: The Deserving and the Deserter
These two Founding Fathers could hardly be more unlike.
By M. D. Aeschliman — October 31, 2015
The proposal to remove Alexander Hamilton from the ten-dollar bill shows yet again how poorly we often value the really deserving figures in our history: Other than Hamilton’s great patron, colleague, and friend George Washington and his lineal political descendant Abraham Lincoln, no one deserves more gratitude, interest, and credit for the relative success of the U.S.A. as a state, society, and economy than Hamilton. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton gives a popular edge to the picture we get from two outstanding books on Hamilton that explain in detail why he is among our greatest and most instructive figures — Richard Brookhiser’s Alexander Hamilton, American (1999) and Ron Chernow’s mammoth biography Hamilton (2004), which won the George Washington Book Prize in 2005 and inspired Miranda to write his musical.
Another interesting interplay between history and the contemporary arts, like the playwright/composer Miranda’s inspirational reading of Chernow’s biography, is to be found in Annette Gordon-Reed’s account of how she came to write her groundbreaking book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1995), which she followed up with her Pulitzer Prize–winning The Hemingses of Monticello (2009). An African-American woman now teaching at Harvard Law School, Gordon-Reed has described how she was inspired to write her book on Jefferson, his black mistress, and their offspring by watching in 1995 the Merchant–Ivory film Jefferson in Paris, a quite brilliant exposure of Jefferson as a hypocrite. This was also about the time when DNA testing on Hemings descendants made it overwhelmingly probable that Jefferson had indeed sired mixed-race children and that one of them, Madison Hemings, was telling the truth about Jefferson’s being his father when he told his life story to an Ohio newspaper in 1873. The Sally Hemings story had been widely circulated in Jefferson’s lifetime and afterward, and the historian Fawn Brodie skillfully made the case for it in Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974). But defenders of Jefferson such as biographer Dumas Malone harshly attacked Brodie’s book and sneered at Madison Hemings’s account as that of an untrustworthy, lower-class mulatto looking for gain, fame, or notoriety.
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