Cracked Alabaster

By LANCE MORROW

THE YOUNG HAMILTON, A BIOGRAPHY by James Thomas Flexner Little, Brown; 497pages; $15

Like Hamlet and Polonius interpreting the shapes of clouds, psychohistorians tend to find whatever emotional apparitions they need to prove a thesis--as if the Third Reich, for example, could be explained by little Hitler's toilet training. Fortunately, Historian James T. Flexner is temperate and plausible enough in his psychologizing about the young Alexander Hamilton to offer a fascinating new analysis of a precocious and odd career.

His earlier biographers, often hagiolatrous in their enthusiasm for Hamilton, have known that he was born illegitimate in the Leeward Islands of the West Indies, his father the disinherited fourth son of an aristocratic Scots family. That part of the Hamilton story, briefly told, has suggested a certain domestic warmth surrounding the child, and even a hint of affluence. Flexner's research, he says, "turns the accepted story completely upside down. I found not affluence but relative squalor; not warmth but betrayal. Hamilton's home was a shambles." Being illegitimate, Alexander was officially designated an "obscene child." His mother Rachel was evidently something of a slut; before taking up with Hamilton's father, she served time in jail on St. Croix for committing adultery--"whoring with everyone," said her husband's complaint in court. Hamilton's father, a feckless romantic and bankrupt merchant, eventually deserted Rachel and their two children--or perhaps, as Flexner thinks, was himself abandoned by Rachel. When Rachel died in 1768, Alexander Hamilton was a child of eleven, virtually alone in the world.

Flexner, author of a magisterial four-volume life of George Washington, believes that this chaotic childhood left Hamilton, for all his brilliance, a strange and scarred man, "by far the most psychologically troubled of the founding fathers." He finds in Hamilton two very different, constantly warring creatures. One is the paragon of eighth-grade history: logical, visionary, very nearly alabaster; the other, "the semimadman who sought from the world an ever-denied release from inner wounds ... The accomplished, smooth and brilliant man of the world could at any moment change hysterically, invisibly, for the time being decisively, into an imperiled, anguished child." In Flexner's formulation, Hamilton bore a lifelong grudge against his mother and cherished a romantic dream of aristocracy and vanished honor; it was the only thing his father had to leave him.

The legacy, from both sides, made Hamilton a kind of perpetual outsider, with a low and cynical opinion of human beings. He thought men must be led through their interests and vices rather than their affections and virtues. Left so vulnerable, he was obsessed by power and order. He sought father figures--a role filled for some time by Washington; he became Washington's de facto chief of staff at the astonishing age of 20. Hamilton was given to nervous collapses, irrational eruptions and an anxious preoccupation with personal glory. It seemed somehow right that such a touchy man should die in a duel. Fortunately, Flexner never permits his psychological theories, which seem sound enough if not pursued to preposterous lengths, to overwhelm this rich and very solid biography, ending with Hamilton's 26th year, two decades before his death.

The logic of Hamilton's ambitions dictated that he should have become President of the country he did so much to create; it is just as well that the honor escaped him. When Jefferson once remarked that he thought the greatest men in history were Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke, Hamilton replied that, no, the greatest man who ever lived was Caesar.

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