Transcription
- Let me say that there are, - Okay - even though those lives are so different, there are certain parallels in terms of where these two men have come from. Because Hamilton is an illegitimate, orphaned boy from the Caribbean, is painfully aware of his lack of status, is tremendously ambitious in terms of wanting to enter into high society, and into the political world. He's an autodidact; he's constantly improving himself. But he really is an outsider trying to fight his way into the inner, you know, ranks of society and government.
George Washington's story, although he was born at a much higher level, as I recall, his father had ten thousand, an enormous amount of acreage and slaves. But Washington, too, was very self-conscious about what he referred to as his defective education. He wants to enter the upper ranks of Virginia gentry, and so he was, in his way, as hard-charging and ambitious as Hamilton was, and had a similar consciousness of being an outsider. Also, both of them, as young men, had an unusual capacity for befriending powerful older men who became their mentors and champions.
And so I think, and this, we can talk about this when we come to the show, because, have you seen the show yet? - [Interviewer] No. - Good, this is actually very central to the show, because Lin Manuel Miranda asked me, "Would Washington have seen Hamilton as a younger version of himself?" And I said, "Yes, their personalities were so unlike, but there was something about their situations that would have seemed familiar to Washington." Now, Hamilton always said that their personalities could not have been more different. He used the word dispositions; he said our dispositions could not have been more unlike. But what we mean by personality, I think, is what he meant by dispositions.
Hamilton was a brash and headstrong personality. He was very mercurial, and brilliant, and very impulsive. Washington was the opposite. Washington was cautious, thorough, you know, slow, methodical in his approaches to things. So that their personal style cannot have been more dissimilar. But these two men complement each other in a way that just feels uncannily right.
George Washington was a very smart man. I think that he was much, much smarter than people realize. But he was not an original thinker, either in terms of political theory or in statecraft. Washington could not have been one of the contributors to the Federalist Papers. Washington could not have forged the provisions of the Constitution, and could not have forged a lot of the policies of his administration. But what Washington had in abundance was judgment, which was often the very thing that Alexander Hamilton lacked. (Interview laughs)
To my mind, George Washington had what I would call a reactive genius; many people noticed that when presented with a set of options, he had an amazing ability to latch on to the right one. He couldn't have generated a lot of those options himself, but because of his judgment, his patriotism, his character, he could spot the right one. And he was a tremendous talent scout, and assembled around him so many of the great figures of the time.
So what we see is that during the years when Hamilton is operating under the direct tutelage of George Washington, whether during the Revolutionary War, at the Constitutional Convention, or during Washington's presidency, Hamilton goes from strength to strength. At moments he almost seems invincible. The second that he's no longer operating under George Washington's guidance, we see how fallible his judgment was, and how self-destructive his behavior could be. But Washington established a kind of set of guidelines within which Hamilton operated, and managed to—this is taking nothing away from Hamilton to say this—managed to get this extraordinary performance out of Hamilton again, and again, and early on recognized what an enormously intelligent young man he was.
So I think this was really the most productive partnership of the early years of the Republic; the only one that, obviously, can rival it would be Madison and Jefferson. But it's really Washington and Hamilton who are setting the stage by having to win the Revolution, enact the Constitution, and create the federal government. And then Madison and Jefferson, you know, carry that into a second phase of the country.
So I think that they just are an unbeatable team, and it's one of those cases in history where the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts. And I think that if you try to—well certainly if you picture Hamilton's career without Washington, it would have been a much more limited career. You know, when Washington died, Hamilton made a famous statement, "Washington was an aegis, that is a shield, most essential to me."
We can more easily, I think, imagine Washington's career without Hamilton, certainly in terms of the Revolutionary War and the Constitutional Convention. More difficult, though, I think, in terms of his presidency, because Hamilton's accomplishments as Treasury Secretary are so fundamental to, especially, that first term in office, that it is difficult to imagine what Washington's first term would've looked like. And that was not a gap I think that either a Madison or a Jefferson could have supplied.
Hamilton had a genius for statecraft. And, you know, Hamilton combined the political—he was both a political theorist and a brilliant technocrat. And that particular combination, I mean, Madison was certainly his equal as a political theorist, or a Jefferson, but they didn't combine that gift for forging policies, creating governmental institutions.
I think that what happened was that their political vision of the country had been very much forged by their experience of going through the war together. They watched, for instance, the chaos of the congress. The war left both of them with, I think, the same set of political beliefs, which was the need for a strong and energetic central government, skepticism about legislative leadership, and faith in executive leadership, and a sense that our government has to not only be strong and energetic, but flexible in terms of meeting the needs of the country.
They also, one very strong bond between them was that both of them felt that historically, one of the dangers of revolutions was that they tended to run off to extremes. So it was a question, how do you kind of begin to turn off the fervor of the Revolutionary War without losing that idealism? In other words, how do you kind of move this into a more pragmatic mode? And when they saw things like Shays' Rebellion, when they saw states squabbling between each other, both of them were fearful of anarchy, fearful of mob rule. Both of them had a—wary of human nature is the way that I would say it.
And, you know, this comes to, you know, defines a set of beliefs that unites them. So really, Hamilton and Washington, at first apart, then together, are having very similar reactions to the post-war political situation, and have very, very similar diagnosis in terms of the need to revise, or even replace, the Articles of Confederation, and to establish a much stronger government.
So Hamilton, he wasn't the only one, but I think that Hamilton was very important in terms of coaxing Washington back out of retirement, beginning to sort of tutor him in the constitutional issues, which Hamilton did, along with Madison and Knox, Jay. They're all sending him memos, beginning to brief him for the Constitutional Convention. But also convincing Washington that the American Revolution is incomplete without the Constitutional Convention. Then they'll convince him that the Constitutional Convention is incomplete without the creation of the federal government, with Washington as president.
And so actually, when they come back together at the Constitutional Convention, the personal feeling between the two men seems to have warmed up again. I think the fact that Washington was so eager to have Hamilton come back, which he did—of course Hamilton was the only one from New York who signed the document—that Washington saw them as kindred spirits in terms of these constitutional issues.
So really, you know, at that point, from the lead-up to the Constitutional Convention and beyond, they really never lose contact with each other again. And the relationship only grows broader and deeper as time goes on.
Well, Hamilton's reputation preceded him, even before January 1777, which is when notice was sent out for Hamilton to contact Washington about being aide-de-camp. Hamilton had already distinguished himself at the Battle of White Plains, crossing of New Jersey. Hamilton had fought at the battles of Trenton and Princeton, and both places where he had really stood out. And he had already rebuffed invitations from Alexander McDougall, and Nathaniel Green, and Lord Sterling to join their staffs.
So Hamilton was a famous holdout; this boy wonder of the Continental Army had already declined to be on the staffs of three people. I guess Washington figured, correctly as it turned out, that an invitation from him would be irresistible. But Hamilton had this unusual combination of gifts. 'Cause on the one hand, he was very well-versed in military lore; he was always something of a daredevil, he was very fearless in battle, throughout his life he was a physically fearless personality.
But he was also smart. He had not completed his college education at King's, but his intellectual reputation preceded him. And so, you know, Washington during the Revolution was feeling quite oppressed by the weight of the correspondence that he had to handle. He was in a very unenviable situation. He was serving 14 political masters, 13 state governors and the Continental Congress. And so his correspondence is immense, and like any general he wanted to be able to concentrate on military matters, rather than writing these endless letters.
But the endless letters were necessary, 'cause he was short of men and gunpowder, shoes, clothing, blankets, food—everything. So it was like eight and a half years of badgering people to contribute to the cause. And Hamilton was a superb letter writer. The way that Washington worked with his aides is that Washington would give them what he called headings—I guess what we would call topics, you know, or points to be covered—and he would give them to Hamilton early in the morning, and then Hamilton would write beautiful letters in response.
And Hamilton was also good, not so much mimicking Washington's voice, although there was a little bit of that, but he always—the letters feel Washingtonian, rather than Hamiltonian. 'Cause, like all good speech writers or all good secretaries in that situation, he had a way of intuiting what the boss wanted in the letter. That was hard for him, but also a little bit frustrating for Hamilton, because he had a large ego; subordinating himself to someone else was uncomfortable.
And, actually, - [Interviewer] Of all people to subordinate yourself to, though, I mean, at that moment, Washington is the only guy he would've, I guess. - Yeah, absolutely, but you know, Hamilton from the time that he was a boy had this obsession with military glory. Actually, the very first letter that we have from Hamilton, when he was in his early teens, was Hamilton writing, I wish there was a war so that he could prove himself.
And Hamilton knew, and he was right about this, that post-war political glory would not go to the person who'd written the most beautiful letters during the war, but to the battlefield's heroes. - [Interviewer] So is that the seed of their, his growing frustration in Washington's— - Absolutely, 'cause he keeps asking Washington for a field command. You know, another young man would have been so pleased and flattered to be on Washington's family that he would've asked for nothing more. But Hamilton had this vaulting ambition and was really intent, before the war ended, of distinguishing himself on the field of battle, which he did.
But it's a testimony to how much Washington needed him that Washington would not let him go. And also one thing that I discovered was very, very important in terms of their relationship was that Hamilton was bilingual. Hamilton's mother was French Huguenot, and so Hamilton, you know, grew up not only with English, but French. And as the French alliance became so important, it was no small thing because Hamilton was handling all of the correspondence with our French allies.
And Hamilton's French was so good; it was very funny reading, for instance, his times when Lafayette was away, and they were exchanging letters, Lafayette would write a letter to Hamilton in French, and it would be full of spelling and grammatical errors. And then Hamilton would write back an absolutely faultless letter in French to the Frenchman. His French was much better than Lafayette's.
So there were kind of all of these things that I think made it very difficult for Washington to let go of this young man who was sulking about the fact that he couldn't get a field command. But Washington made the right decision, that Hamilton was probably more valuable behind a desk than he was on the field of battle. But when he finally had his chance at Yorktown, he certainly did cover himself with glory. And it was very much the realization of his boyhood dream.
I think what happens is that Washington, although as time goes on, it's clear that his sympathies are much more with the Federalists than with the Republicans, or Jeffersonians at the time. Washington was a very good president in terms of encouraging a free interplay of ideas within the government. And so he generally wants different voices. He uses the same style of governance, actually, that he used as a general, in terms of canvassing opinion, and he would ask people and then he would kind of very slowly ponder.
You know, Hamilton said he "ponders slowly, ponders surely," and that was Washington's style. And even when Hamilton and Jefferson start feuding, instead of wanting a unified or monolithic voice in his administration, he does want to have these differences of opinion going on. He's very upset by the feud, and he's very upset when Jefferson leaves. You know, a modern president might react and say, he's not a member of the team, and we have to get rid of him, he's not sympathetic within, and Washington was able to tolerate really quite a significant degree of dissent from within his own administration.
You know, I think that what happens on the one hand, Madison fairly quickly, with the new government, goes from being a trusted advisor to Washington on political and constitutional questions, goes to being an apostate, and begins to make speeches attacking Hamilton's financial system.
So it's really Madison who begins to exile himself from Washington's affection. It was Madison who was initiating that, not Washington. So Washington starts feeling a sense of betrayal with Madison. And then again, Washington doesn't realize at first the extent to which Jefferson, as Secretary of State, is helping to orchestrate a lot of the congressional and press attacks on the administration. But again, it's Jefferson who is pulling away from Washington; it's not Washington who is pushing him away.
And also, I think that one reason that Washington and Hamilton become so extraordinarily close is that Hamilton showed extraordinary loyalty to Washington. He was never scheming against Washington behind his back, and Hamilton could scheme, but not against Washington. And so Washington never had cause to doubt the personal and political loyalty of Alexander Hamilton, right up till the day that he died. It was an extraordinarily good relationship. And Washington ended up feeling quite bitter towards Madison and Jefferson; he really didn't speak to them the last few years of his life.
And I was very struck when I came upon the story, when I was doing the biography, of when Jefferson visited Mount Vernon after Washington died, and Martha Washington said it was the second worst day of her life. The first day being when her husband died. But it's a very, very strong statement. I think he knew at the time, because remember the country was effectively bankrupt at the time.
You know, we were in arrears, not just on the principal, but the interest of both the state and local debt that had been used to finance the war. So, immediately confronted George Washington the day that he took office were the economic and financial ones.
You know, and I tell—one of the questions you had was about the choice of Hamilton as Treasury Secretary. You know, a story that I tell in the book, which I think came from Hamilton's son, it was about Washington stopping off in Philadelphia en route to the inauguration, offering the job to Robert Morris. That has the ring of truth. And then Morris turning it down, and recommending Hamilton. And according to the story, Washington said well, I knew that Mr. Hamilton was a young man of enormous talents, but I didn't realize that he had this financial knowledge, and then Morris said to him, "To a mind like his, nothing is amiss."
I'm sure that Washington knew much more about Hamilton's views at that point. They were having dinner every day during the Revolutionary War when all these topics were being freely discussed. Also, Washington couldn't have been oblivious to this; Hamilton, as they're going from camp to camp, Hamilton is lugging all of these books about economics and finance. He's already boning up to be treasury secretary. And he's writing letters and essays, and very much, kind of, the Hamiltonian system is already foreshadowed in letters that he was writing back during the Revolutionary War.
So Washington must have had some inkling of this, but I would love to have had better information, that moment in the book. The only name that I was able to come up with in terms of other people being considered was Robert Morris, and that would be completely predictable, since he'd been the chief financier.
Well, first of all, you know, in 1798 when Adams pretty much drafted Washington to become the general of this new provisional army, Washington was 66 years old, quite infirm. You know, we know from the Gilbert Stuart paintings, just a few years earlier, that Washington had become this stiff and craggy person; he had aged considerably. He doesn't—when you're looking at the famous standing portrait, Washington doesn't look like somebody who could go out and take the battlefield as the general.
And I think that he realized that probably this was physically beyond him. Also, George Washington's entire life, I mean, every time he returns to his beloved Mount Vernon, there's another crisis, and he's pulled back into the maelstrom. And so I think that what he does in that situation, Washington never felt that he could say no to the call of his country in a situation like that. On the other hand, he clearly didn't relish it.
And so what he did, understandably, is he said to himself, "Okay I'm going to accept this, but I'm going to define it in a minimal way," rather than a—kind of a maximalist way. Twenty years before he would have defined it in a maximalist way. Now he's defining it in the minimalist way. And so he lays down this stipulation that he does not want to actually become the commander in the field until the war has actually started.
Okay, think of that: until the war has actually started means I think the provisional army is gonna be about 10,000 men. So who is going to recruit, and train, and equip this entire army? It would have to be someone extraordinarily capable to do it. And Washington was not prepared to do that himself. He was prepared to, as it were, it was sorta like the batter who comes up, you know, the pinch hitter, the bases loaded with two outs in the ninth. He was ready to do that.
But, you know, a lot of the hard work of actually forging an army would be done by the number two, the so-called inspector general. And that was Hamilton. And Hamilton, he just felt that Hamilton was more capable of doing that than Henry Knox. Hamilton actually had probably a more rounded sense of an army. Remember, Knox had been head of artillery.
Hamilton was aide-de-camp, was Washington's military secretary, but if you look at a lot of those Revolutionary War councils, Hamilton was there. He was a colonel, and the other 10 people in the room were generals, so he was in on all the major strategy discussions. I think also being on Washington's staff, Hamilton had a kind of nuts and bolts sense, 'cause he was involved with all the correspondence with congress, in terms of all of the kind of commissary and quartermaster matters of creating an army, feeding them, clothing them, housing them, all of this, training them, which I don't know that Knox would have had that. And there had kind of been other things that happened with Henry Knox that would have made Washington—and also Hamilton—reluctant to bring him back.
But, you know, so Hamilton becomes the inspector general, Hamilton becomes a major general; people don't realize that Alexander Hamilton ended up a major general, but of course it was, as we all know, waving a red flag in front of president Adams, and the result was explosive and unfortunate all around. But Washington must have been relieved that he never actually had to come out.
You know, just one last thing I'd like to bring up, in their letters about a possible war with France, which they took seriously, they actually took seriously the idea of a French invasion, and they discussed what form it would take. And they felt that when the French landed, it wouldn't be like the British strategy, where you occupy a few coastal cities. It would be very rapid and very mobile, that they would start to invade the interior, and they would need a fast-moving army in response.
And Washington didn't feel that he had the reflexes at that age in order to be the general for that kind of fast-moving campaign. I think it probably would have been even physically beyond his capacity.
You know, I feel very humble about this. I feel that if I at all saw farther than other biographers, it was 'cause I was standing on the shoulders of this extraordinary team of editors down at Charlottesville. And that was actually one of the reasons that I did the book. 'Cause the old edition that had formed the basis for, you know, Freeman, Flexner, and that generation of historians, was really very limited. I have it in the bedroom; I think it was 17 volumes, very large print, very wide margins.
So that by the time I started the Washington biography, I think about 60 of the projected 90 plus volumes now had been published. So I said to myself, do I wanna wait until, you know, all 90 plus volumes were published? I thought that was, given my age, tempting fate to do that. But I thought that there was already enough on the record.
Undoubtedly when all of the 90 plus have been finished, someone will come, you know, along and try another synthesis. But it was probably the single most frequently asked question that I got when I was working on the book. People would say, is there anything new left to say? And I would say to people, the work is just beginning now. We actually know so much more about George Washington than his own contemporaries.
I daresay we know more about George Washington than Martha did, because there are moments where his life is so minutely documented in those volumes, you can feel on certain days that, on an hour to hour basis, you're following him around Mount Vernon. Or on an hour basis, you're following him through a series of meetings with his cabinet secretaries and visiting dignitaries. It's astonishing.
And Washington was very thorough and meticulous. He was a consummate record keeper, god bless him. And not only recorded everything, sometimes rather surprising the things that he would record. But he had a great regard for the paper trail that he was creating.
I was very fascinated that during the Revolutionary War, he creates a staff of people and gets a special appropriation to create his beautiful edition of his wartime letters. And then took great care in terms of transporting them back to Mount Vernon, and of course you know the story much better than I do, he even thought of creating a house and a library; it could've been the first presidential library on the estate.
So he's tending the documentary record as if he knew that, you know, I was gonna come along and dozens of other biographers were gonna come along - Ah, that's the— - and be combing through. - [Interviewer] The egomaniacal version. - Combing through all of these, you know, things.
You feel that he is—you feel that it was Washington himself who spread a banquet table of documents that all of us have been feasting on, you know, for a great many years. But you know, he then, when he sat down and wrote this letter to his father-in-law, he described what it was like working for Washington. And he describes Washington as very moody and temperamental, and says, "The great man and I have come to an open rupture; he shall for once, at least, repent his ill humor."
Now I had never encountered George Washington in that mode. You know, and far from being disappointed by that, I actually was relieved. It suddenly humanized him. He came alive for me in that moment, seeing him not only in that letter, but in other letters that Hamilton wrote during the war, actually gave an immediacy to Washington, you know, that I hadn't experienced before.
You know, they say that no man is a hero to his valet. And Washington during the Revolutionary War was working under excruciating pressure. And I think that precisely because he had such immense self-control, and he had this enormous image to live up to, he blew off steam in private, and Hamilton saw that.
I think, also, Washington's nature was that—it was why Washington did so well in life—Washington was a real perfectionist. He was very, whether it was at Mount Vernon or in the federal government, he was very exacting and demanding in terms of what he wanted, and demanded very, very high performance from people. So he was a very hard-charging boss. Not at all the easygoing, soft-shoe boss that people had imagined.
But I can remember that moment when I read that letter; I felt that there was a George Washington that had not been captured, and I wonder, because Hamilton was very good at penning word portraits of people; he was very perceptive, and he was a good enough writer that he could really make characters come alive. So that, for me, that was the keyhole through which I began to spy a portrait of Washington that had not been done before.
And I think what happens with Washington, you know, because we all love and revere Washington so much, both then and now, there's an almost automatic tendency to try to wipe away the blemishes, or look the other way. And I feel that— - [Interviewer] He gets the benefit of the doubt. - He gets the benefit of the doubt. And unfortunately, that's done him a terrible disservice, because it's turned him into a somewhat unreal character in the American imagination, when he was all too real.
And I felt that the flaws in his character, to my mind, instead of detracting from his greatness, actually enhanced the greatness, because you realize what he had to overcome emotionally to be George Washington. The country was looking to him for a kind of perfection. He had normal human flaws, and he was always kind of caught in the conflict between those two things. So that was really the starting point of that book.
And of course, when I was doing, Hamilton was great fun to write about because he was, on the one hand, so brilliant, and on the other hand, so flawed, that the more I studied Hamilton, the more I admired Hamilton, but the more I revered Washington.
And I can remember when I was working on the Hamilton biography, I would say to people, "Hamilton is the subject of my biography, but Washington's the hero of the biography." You know, Washington always does the right thing; Hamilton, most of the time (laughs) does the right thing.
In 2009, I was walking one day in the neighborhood, and I ran into my friend Garrow, whose daughter had gone to Wesleyan with Lin Manuel Miranda. And Lin Manuel was starring in his first show, called In the Heights. And he told me that Lin Manuel had read my Hamilton book and it made an enormous impression on him, and he wanted to meet me.
So I went to a matinee of In the Heights one Sunday, and he invited me backstage. And I said to him, "So I gather my book made an impression on you?" And he said, "Ron, as I was reading it on vacation in Mexico, and as I was reading it, hip-hop songs started rising off the page."
So I said, "Really?" - [Interviewer] (laughs) That wasn't what you were going for? - This was not a typical reaction to one of my books. And he asked me on the spot to be the historical consultant.
And so I said to him, "You mean you want me to tell you when something is wrong?" And he said, "Yes," he said, "I want historians to take this seriously," which I think they are. So that launched what has been an amazing six-year process working with him.
And, you know, in the early period we would have lunch and discuss Hamilton's psychology, relationships. He would send me via email every month one or two songs; I would just hear Lin at the keyboard playing it. But then what happened, once it started to go into various rehearsals and workshop productions, he would keep bringing me back in.
And I would have the opportunity afterwards to sit down for an hour or two, and really give him my comments. And the comments—some of the comments were if I thought something was factually incorrect, although I have to say, he's very well-read, and he was almost always aware when he was departing from the facts. But he had a sound dramatic reason.
I think that—I'm not sure that, how to put this, I think that there probably are a lot of historians and biographers who would not be entirely comfortable doing this, because you have to have some flexibility in terms of the requirements of a show. I mean, here you know, we were going from an 800-page book to a two-and-a-half-hour musical, and my involvement with the show made me realize history is long, messy, and complicated (laughs).
- [Interviewer] Yes, yes. - You know, if there's one thing that we all learn as historians, it's how difficult it is to generalize. The more you know, the more difficult it is to simplify some of this stuff. - [Interviewer] That's what I've been telling 'em at Mount Vernon ever since I've been there.
But, you know, a two-and-a-half-hour show has to be short, and tight, and you know, very coherent. And so, he would always have—I thought, a very plausible explanation of why he had changed something.
I mean I could just give you one, 'cause it comes right at the beginning of the show; the show begins right at the start of the American Revolution, and he has John Laurens and Lafayette in New York a year or two before he actually meets them.
So I said to him, "Lin, you know, and you know, this, I forget, 1775, 1776, but they didn't, you know, meet Hamilton until 1777." But he wanted to—one of Hamilton's first friends when he came to New York was a tailor named Hercules Mulligan; I think Lin found the name irresistible.
And Lin wanted to start a series of quartets that run through the first act of Hamilton with his friends Mulligan, Laurens, and Lafayette, which means that with Laurens and Lafayette, he has to introduce them a little bit earlier than they appear. You know, there are moments where you have to scramble the time sequence a little bit; there are moments where you sort of have to collapse, you know, different events together.
And so, you know, I was always kind of feeling my way, trying to figure out how does one strike the right balance between historical accuracy and a tightly constructed show? You know, and I hope the people who see it, particularly historians and biographers, will feel that we made the right decisions in doing it.
So far, actually, we've gotten very, very good reactions. - [Interviewer] The reviews have been really superlative. - Superlative, and the reactions from Rick Brookhiser, I mean, people who know the story, who know the history have come and have been, I think, amazed at how much accurate history is packed into this show.
I think that it has real integrity, and I think that Lin Manuel showed real strength in terms of having a historian hanging around on the fringes of this conversation. I mean, usually someone creating a Broadway show or a Hollywood movie, the last person they want around is someone who is going to tell them that this didn't actually happen. - [Interviewer] Right, they want them there to tell them what buttons people should have on their shirts, but not the actual story.
- And he did. This was absolutely delightful for me because we did—our discussions were more than in terms of accuracy. We discussed the characters, the relationships, and really the entire dramatic trajectory of Hamilton's life.
And it was fascinating for me, as I mentioned earlier, he said to me one day early on, "Would Washington have seen Hamilton as a younger version of himself?" And I said, "Yes." And Lin responded to that very powerfully, and you'll see he created a couple of beautiful songs where Washington sings to Hamilton, "Let me tell you what I wish I'd known when I was a younger man." And he starts talking about—he doesn't name Fort Necessity, but he's clearly talking about the Jumonville incident, and Fort Necessity, and the mistakes that he made as a younger man.
- That's interesting. Yeah, that's really neat. - Yeah, it really is. Yeah, and it's accurate. I remember the first show that I ever saw about the founding fathers was called 1776. - [Interviewer] Yeah, another musical. - Yeah, and you know, I loved it; it was delightful. But it was a quaint period piece. It was a bunch of late middle-aged white males, you know, with wigs and buckle shoes.
Okay, this is a show about the founding fathers where probably three-fourths of the people in the cast are Black, Latino, Eurasian, biracial. Almost the entire cast is under 35. And so this is a very unusual case of a historical show that's simultaneously showing us who we were back then as a country, and who we are today. - [Interviewer] Mm, yeah.
So it's kind of—it has a way of being both about the 18th century and the early 21st century. And even what Lin has done with the lyrics, he's created an idiom that is a blend of standard 18th-century speech and early 21st-century slang. And it all comes out sounding of a piece.
Have you seen? Did you see the song that he did at the White House? - I've seen clips on it on YouTube, and that sort of thing; I haven't, yeah. - Well that kinda gave you a sense of the way that he blends it. And then even kind of musically, the sounds blend the 18th century and the 21st century.
And so, you know, this young, largely Black and Latino cast has a very, very special feel for the early years of the republic. I think that it's—'cause the show itself very much casts Hamilton as a classic immigrant, as an outsider, you know, and of the American Revolution being created by these people who felt outsiders, and who became insiders— - The revolutionaries. - in the course of creating this new country.
And so it has the energy, and the fervor, and the passion of the period, and it comes closer than anything I've seen, either on stage or screen, to capturing that mood. It really is quite extraordinary. I think people are loving it because Lin Manuel has done something extraordinary. He's made American history hip and cool, and erudite at the same time.
And only he could have done it. 'Cause very often, without mentioning any specific examples, when people, you know, stage or screen, do the founding era, they kind of dumb it down. They seem to start off with the assumption that this is boring, dated stuff, no one's really interested in this stuff, so we better have a lot of action, we better have a lot of cannons, you know, booming, and muskets firing. We better try to, you know, spice it up with some sex.
But there's an underlying assumption that the contemporary audience is going to find it boring. Lin, instead of finding the history constraining, he finds the history liberating. He finds it exciting. And the more deeply he gets into the history, the more dramatic it's gonna be. And I think the audience feels that.
So this is like the history class of a lifetime, seeing this show. And we've had kids as young as 10 and 11 come down to see the show, and just absolutely adored it. And at the same time, you know, highly literate adults have seen it and took pleasure. There're kind of, you know, if you don't know anything about the period, you'll learn an enormous amount. If you do know a lot about the period, you'll pick up a lot of in-jokes.
I could just give one. There's one moment Hamilton's working on his financial plan, and his wife Eliza is trying to get him to, you know, take a rest and go away to the country. And so, Eliza and Hamilton, and Hamilton's sister-in-law Angelica, they're sitting, and Eliza turns to Angelica and says, "Angelica, you know, tell my husband that John Adams spends his summers with his family."
And then Hamilton says to Angelica, "Angelica tell my wife that John Adams doesn't have a real job anyway."