Anne freeman talks about her lifelong research on hamilton hafment. Owe she talks about how she became interested in this founding father and how she used his writings to understand what motivated him. The museum of the American Revolution hosted this talk. It is about an hour. Forgive me. I have not only grown gray, but almost blind in the service of this museum. [laughter] well, it is incredibly exciting to welcome my friend of nearly 30 years now, joanne freeman, who i got to know running the streets of charlottesville when we were both graduate students. Apparent at the time. There were a lot of smart people, but joanne was already head and shoulders above her colleagues, just head a an incredibly sharp mind. Was already talking about this founding father guy, Alexander Hamilton. The rest of us were come on, that is sort of boring, but a lot of things about the work of joanne. R first book, public lish in 2001, does this sound familiar . A rousing discourse on the utopian republic. She has gone on to edit several works that are letters or writings of hamilton, one was named atlantic monthlys best book of 2001. I hope she tells us how close to a lifelong interest she has had. She was in eighth grade when she wrote her first he is aabout it. Philip mead in the corner is a guy who was reading Joseph Plumb Martin when he was 14 years old and running around a revolutionary war battle hefield. When you have people with a lifelong passion, you know you are in foe aed good ride as we are this evening. Another thing i appreciate about joanne is she does not limit herself to the words on page. She is very experiential in the way she did research. You are going to laugh that she d to go to st. Croix and places down there to explore the caribbean roots of Alexander Hamilton. She was lead consultant when e the National Parks doing the was re home. She has been on a Police Firing range and shot a flintlock dueling pistol. She understands that. It is that type of holistic way of approaching the pass. This is a true story. Spoke with joanne on numerous occasions as she was doing the unlikely project of doing a musical based on the life of Alexander Hamilton. Indispense rk he called her work indispensable. A lot of times they are just minds for historians to go. But joanne is an incredible public intellect wal and hub historian. She is a frequent commentator for media outlets. We are being recorded by cspan. Everybody turn around and waive at the cspan audience. This will live on after tonight. Most extraordinary is her course, appropriately given the number of yale person here, the American Revolution course, which was taped in 2011 taped in 2010, and i think it was put on to the internet in 2011, which joanne was telling me earlier this evening, who in the world would want to watch a professor lecture . By our calculations it has been viewed actually more than a million times now by people online. The bootleg version of it is on yute, and that version has been viewed 250,000 times. You are in for a treat here. Finally she is a weekly cohost of a wonderful podcast called pack story, which was founded by some of our former and current professors at u. V. A. It is a weekly podcast that sort of looks at the news and there has been a lot of news in the news lately, hasnt there that it is very important to understand deep Historical Context for things like charlottesville, the federal city and whatever is going on down there. I would encourage you all through itunes to look at back story because it is a great treat to watch the podcast. Her new work, finally in april of 2018, coming up in a couple of months, and i hope that means you will be able to return and talk next year about the new book. How does this season . The field of blood, a study of physical violence in the u. S. Congress. Maybe a bit of historic alcontext for where we are today. And then finally the book i know i am going to enjoy the most. It is titled hunting for hamilton. More l be hearing a rollicking version of getting to know Alexander Hamilton in his world. Lease join me in welcoming joanne freeman. [applause] i feel so tall. [laughter] are yourful. Thank you, scott, so much for that endurox. I appreciate it greatly. It is my great, great pleasure to be here. And not only that, to be here in front of a museum and a yale crowd, and to get to talk about hamilton. So good on all fronts. As scott suggested, i have indeed been studying hamilton for a really long time. I was indeed 14 years old when and mbled across hamilton, it has indeed taken me to some wonderful places. I did get to go to the caribbean, struggled to to go to the caribbean, such a sacrifice, because i wanted to get a sense of the places where he was. I did manage to shoot the black powder dueling pistol at the gilford Police Firing range because i wanted to see what that felt like. As a matter of fact, i basically put myself through 18th century gentlemen training because i figured if i was going to write about this population of people, i should kind of have a sense of what they would have been doing in their lifetime. I took riding lessons and fencing lessons. What i discovered is i would have died a thousand times as an 18th century gentleman. I was bad at all of it. [laughter] but i really tried. And the other thing that i did, and this is going to be more what my remarks come from this evening is i have read hamiltons writings. 27 volumes of hamiltons writings. He died pretty young, so 27 volumes is pretty good. I read those. I was actually interested in hamilton. I wish i could remember what led me to question this, but i read a biography when i was 14. It was a bicentennial, so the founders were ever. Read a biography of hamilton. Didnt like it. I wont say which one it was. Didnt believe it. And t to the live e. R. A. I went to the live e. R. A. And asked what the person the 27 volumes, those are the things he wrote and that is what this author read. I took down volume one and starting reading and got up to 27 and started again. What was fascinating to me, and this will be clear in some of the comments this evening. What was fascinating is that was a real person to my on those pages. That is just the things that patterson wrote over the course of a life tifmente as you will hear, some of them are formal writings and report. Some of them are letters to political figures, some are letters to friends. Some of them are inform almemos. Sometimes it is the things that dont seem official and dont see formal that are the most interesting. So reading those papers really did give me a sense of who he was as a person. But as scott suggested, it has been about 35 or 40 years that i have been studying hamilton. For most of that time, no one knew who he was. No one had ever heard of hamilton. So when i first, in light of the play, began getting invited to give lectures in a variety of different places, i went on my computer and thought well, i have a lifetime of giving lectures of Alexander Hamilton, so surely i can begin to recycle some of them. All of them are premised on the idea that no one knows who he is. They all start with there is this defy, and you have never heard of this guy, but let me explain because he is significant in ther help rick. We are in a different universe. So rather than wandering around saying you havent heard about this guy, i spent a lot of time saying he is not as great as you think he is. [laughter] he is interesting, but he is not as great as you think he is. So clearly for me this is kind of a surreal moment. But what i want to do this evening as scott suggested is give you a sense of who hamilton was, for better and worse, and i want to do that partly through his writings. Not the official things he wrote, but some of the informal things that he wrote. In essence i want to give you a sense of what it is like to hunt for hamilton and to give you some insight. Actually hunting for hamilton is something you can all do because of the wonderful 27 volumes of hamiltons papers. As scott suggested, i am in the process of beginning. So i am finishing my book on physical violence in the u. S. Congress. I found about 100 violent incidents between 1830 and 1860 at were censurred out of the record. That is the first book. I am very excited to do this, and it will be partly by graphical, and partly talking about how do you find him, and how do you define him, among other things, in his writings . And not just for his ideas, but how do you find him as a person . How do you find him as a politician . How do you figure out who a person is by reading what was wrong over the course of a lifetime . Understood in the right historical con particular, even a persons personal letter can be amazingly revealing in really giving you a sense of a lifetime, a person, a personality and a mind at work. How many people here have a sense of hamilton lyrics . Once you have seen the play, it is kind of in your brain forever. I apologize in advance for any hamilton lyrics that come out of my mouth. I cant quite help it. They are in there, and now they will stay there forever. I should say that actually testament to the fact that i really do i am a person who is passionate about historically evidence, historically documents and really pulling the past from these that are left from the past in writing. When i heard there was what i considered a slightly crazy human being out there who was going to write a musical on Alexander Hamilton, and i heard it was going to be based on a biography, my Immediate Reaction is well, hamiltons words and writings have to be in that play. There will probably not be another musical about Alexander Hamilton. So given this is the one, hamiltons words have to be there. So i actually had a friend who manninged to comeback him managed itter who to contact him through twitter. I handed him hamiltons letters so he would put them in the play. I basically gave a version to him that i just gave to you. He is in here. You have to put hamiltons words in the place, and he did. There are actually a lot of words pulled right from hamiltons correspondence that are in the musical. A lot of people probably dont realize that, but that is a sense of a person in the past in these documents. Before we plunge in, i want to offer a really quick run dianna of hamilton as life just so i can set the scene for those of us who arent immediately familiar with that. As you will here hear, it is logical that hamiltons life translates well on stage because there is a sort of dramatic shakespearean arc to his life. He was born boar and illegitimate in the west people on se st. Croix set up a Charitable Fund to send him to america to get an he had capings. He got to north america as the revolution was just about to take off. In not a long amount of time he was washingtons righthand man. He became an aiddecamp to washington and where he spent the revolution. When washington became president in 179, he made hamilton the first second of the treasury. Hamilton structured a National Financial system and pushed to strengthen the government. Watching a fierce political battle against those who wanted a far less powerful National Government. Thomas jefferson and James Madison were his foremost political opponents. When washington retired, hamilton continued to try to exert influence over the government by secretly advising john adams cabinet behind the scenes, but he was found out by president adams and ultimately blocked out over having any influence over the cabinet. This did not make hamilton very happy, and he wrote a lengthy mphlet attacking adams thinking he could sway the election to a different federalist. It did not work. It was an incredibly over the top crazy pamphlet. I just yesterday have an undergraduate student come into my office. They are writing a paper. A lot of them are excited about the fact that they are rummaging around in the 1th century. One came in and said i saw that hamilton pamphlet thing he wrote about john adams. Whoa it is a nasty pamphlet. It did not do any favors for adams, and it also did not do any favors for hamilton. That bad Political Movement along with some others helped to destroy hamiltons political career. In 1804, hamilton as ongoing duel with aaron burr ended hamilton as life. That is the life arc. His politics were also extreme and could be kind of dramatic. He felt that the National Government needed to be centralized, powerful. At an age where mark had just broken away from a monarchy, that was a radical thing to do. That made him unpopular. He also was the sort of people who tended, when people went up in arms, and he thought they werent respecting the National Government enough, his immediate impulse was to call in the military. This was a bit of a scary combums on his part too. He was not super trusting in democracy. He was an extreme r dreamist in politics. Musical theater doesnt need to talk about all these things, but his politics are interesting, extreme and tangled, and there is a reason why he was a really controversial figure during his lifetime. The fact of the matter is his personality, too, is dramatic and extreme. He could be arrogant. He was definitely aggressive. E was really touchy, extremely touchy person. When i was working on my first book, and there is a chapter on the burrhamilton duel. I discovered over the course of his lifetime, 10 times he almost got involved in a duel before that final duel. 10 times. That is a lot foe someone in that time period. Ten times he got in a fight with someone, they exchanged harsh words, they negotiated back and forth, and then ultimately managed to settle things. But that is a touchy individual is what that is. So in all of these ways he is a dramatic character. Again, discovering him at 14 is the reason why i found him interesting. You cant question the fact that he is interesting. But what particular is particularly interesting to really sort of get beneath the drama into who hamilton really was, then you have to turn to his writings. What i want to do this evening is talk about his writings in two different ways. I want to talk a little bit about how you can read letters and find patterns in them that really reveal something about a person. Then i want to show you about how you can read between the lines and uncover really interesting things about a person. Let me start off by talking a little bit about patterns. Just two little anecdotes that i think are going to give you a sense of what i am talking about on how you can decode a person, things that seem minor but open a personality to you. One of the things is what he did when he first got to north america. He comes from the caribbean. He has nothing but this Charitable Fund. He doesnt have a great family to turn on. He doesnt hatch very much money to rely on. He gets to kings college, to columbia, which is where he goes to college. Clearly, for someone who came from where he came from, this was his moment. In his mind, i either make something of this moment, or i have nothing. What does he do . Ing it interesting. When you read accounts of what he did in college, and you read recommendness enses of what he did in college reminiscences of what he did in college, he did a number of things. He took anatomy closes, which is interesting. He worked on his debating skills. He established himself as being very interested in religion. And he did a lot of military drilling. That sounds kind of random, but there were a limited number of pathways you could take in the 18th century to become a gentleman, someone who was of higher status. Army officer, clergyman, doctor, lawyer. He covered every base. He went to columbia, and he was like ok, im coming out of here as a gentleman with a career. Here we go. And he literally mapped a plan of acts. That is really what he did throughout his life. He was very good at doing the sorts of things he needed to do as secretary of the treasury. That is kind of the way he thought. A second example of that, and this was from a letter i stumbled across and couldnt figure out what it pawlenty and thought it was hamilton being hamilton. I stumbled across a key to lafayette, written in 1780 by this point, hamilton had been working at washingtons side as an aid for several years, and he was absolutely desperate to have a field command. He didnt know George Washington was going to go on to become George Washington. In his mind, he had to leave the war with something that he could claim that would give him a way to promote himself on, that he could advance further. So in his mind, the field command, that was it. He had to have a command in the field to prove he was a man of honor, a man of bravery, and that he had a reputation and that he was someone who should be respected. Now he wanted that really badly, but the fact of the matter is washington wanted him at headquarters. So he kept not getting a field command. So i find this letter from lafayette, and it is kind of quirky. Did basically it basically says why are you making me write a letter to washington to ask for a field command . What are you doing, hamilton . I am right here wit washington. I could go talk to washington and ask him. Why are you making me write a letter . I thought why is he making him write a letter . That is strange. So i backed up and looked to see how hamilton asked no a field command. He had a fourpart plan. First he went to washington and wrote a letter to washington, and washington said no. Then he went to washington in person, and washington said no. So he wanted lafayette to first write a letter, and then if he said no, then he wanted lafayette to go in person and ask him again. So he had four possible ways in which he might get the field command. Lafayette skipped a step, and hamilton was like no. You are denying one of my opportunity to get a field command. Again, this is who he was, how he thought, and it partly helps to show you why this kind of a person is going to be someone who certainly thrives in the kind of things that secretary of the treasury was. But i want to move on. I want to talk a little bit about his agent wal writings and reading between the lines. What i suggested a few minutes ago is what i want to do now, which is not look at his great reports, important documents, important letters to washington or his important letters to jefferson. I want to look at seemingly unimportant documents an