Transcripts For CSPAN3 Historian Joanne Freeman On Alexander

CSPAN3 Historian Joanne Freeman On Alexander Hamilton July 13, 2024

It is my pleasure to introduce our keynote session entitled ask the historian, Alexander Hamilton. Our speaker, historian joanne freeman. Dr. Freeman is a professor of history at yale university. She specializes in the American Revolutionary period and Early National american politics and culture. She is the author of several influential Award Winning books. I will mention just two of them. Affairs of honor, National Politics in the republic, 2001. Most recently, field of blood, congressional violence in antebellum america which i found particularly helpful for my own work. If you look at these two books combined, it seems like a reverse echo of the current and contemporary political scene in the United States. From honor to violence. I will leave it at that. Dr. Freeman is also known for her leading scholarship on Alexander Hamilton which she rediscovered, i would say, before broadway did just a couple of years ago. I asked dr. Freeman about her relation with history, and she was kind enough to respond to my request for that information. It really reads like a love story. She fell in love with history beginning back in 1776. No, im sorry. Shes much younger than that. The bicentennial, 1976. I do remember that time and those quarters that came out. I was fascinated by them as well. I developed the hobby of coin collecting. From there, she went to the hamilton papers, became a public historian, consultant, museum educator, very active in what we now call public history. She received her ph. D. From the university of virginia and has had since a very distinguished career at yale. One last thing, because we want to give as much time to her as possible. Dr. Freeman is also profoundly grateful for her teachers, professors and mentors who led the way. Im glad to see how over the years shes paid back demonstrating her very generous commitment to education and americans teachers. So please welcome dr. Freeman. Were excited to hear what you have to say. Thank you. Thank you. Again, we are very grateful for all the support he showed us. Were very excited to have you here. That was a great introduction. We have got a number of questions that folks have posted on social media. I just want to say to everyone in the audience, we are still taking questions. When you have questions i know you do because you love hamilton and you love joanne, put your questions in the chat box. We will put them together. Could you tell us a little bit more it sounds like 1976 was a pivotal time for you in your interest. Tell us a little bit more about particularly what draws you to the early american period and Alexander Hamilton in particular. Okay. Im happy to do that. I wanted to actually first say that thank you for that introduction. I also want to say, taking looking at whats been going on to convert a real conference into an online conference has been amazing to see. Even as a board member, i am applauding all the work that went into making this possible. Im kind of excited for the adventure of it. As far as what draws me to that period, i think in a way its not in some ways, not that different from what drew me to begin with. I think initially what got me interested was the human component of it. I think thats what the bicentennial did for me was show me the people underneath the events that i had always learned about as events. I began reading biographies. That was my entry. Even now as a mature historian who can pick my research agenda, what im really interested in this period i guess is two things. Its the human component of it and whether that means people behaving badly, which i seem to write about a lot, or just generally speaking, the underlying motives and emotions and intentions and things that drive politics that arent just pure policy, arent just demographics. Im really interested in getting to the root of that kind of behavior. Thats great. Alexander hamilton particularly. What is it about his character that make u. S you find him fascinating . Well, i think initially i started reading biographies. I actually think i started at a. I remember reading john adams and kind of going. When i got to hamilton, he was different. Again, i was, like, 14 years old. He was different because he had a dramatic beginning and a dramatic end as opposed to some of the other biographies i had been reading. And i think as a kid, what appealed to me was he was a young guy who wanted to achieve great things and i think i identify with that somehow. I want to do great things. Also, oddly enough, there wasnt a lot written about him. That intrigued me, too. So i read a biography of him, which i wont name, because i didnt like it. I didnt believe it. I dont know what in my 14yearold brain drew me to draw that conclusion, but i didnt. I asked a librarian what the person who had written the book had read that gave that person the right to say what they were saying in the book. The librarian showed me the hamilton papers. The 27 volumes of the hamilton papers, everything they have collected he has written or received over the course of his entire life. Its 27 volumes. I started reading those. To me, that was the most exciting thing of all. This is when you could tell im supposed to be a historian. My response was, wow, this is the real history. This is the real stuff. No one is going to tell me what this means. I get to read it and figure out what it means. So i think sort of beamed into him because he was different. But then ended up being fascinated by what i found in reading those papers. So i would read all 27 volumes and then finish and go back and start again. I just never stopped. I didnt know historian was a job. I didnt know anyone who had ever been a professor. I had no goal. It was just the thing i did because i was fascinated in hamilton. He is so flaws and selfdestructive and yet so central to the politics of that moment that by being interested in him i became interested in the time period and in its politics. It was kind of like concentric circumstancele circles and eventually i was interested in that period. It all did kind of start with hamilton. Many of us watching are history educators. We love primary documents, too. But thats a level of commitment im not sure all of us have. Thats great. I dont know if i would do that now. More impressive for a 14yearold. Kimberly is saying that this is proof that librarians are modern day heroes. Yes, i think we think librarians we are proud of you. Look what you started here. That commitment and that early kind of almost a relationship with Alexander Hamilton i think is very fascinating. I think many of us might have the feeling we have come to know Alexander Hamilton. We may feel like were close to him now, even those of us not historians who are just listening to the cd in our car, who have been lucky enough to see the play, which was very much influenced by your work. Could you tell us, what are some things that we may not know about Alexander Hamilton, even if we feel like maybe we know him, what are we miss sng whing . Whats doesnt the average american know . The biggest answer to that i guess the most serious answer to that is that the play draws a very particular image of him. It does a good job of capturing his personality to some degree. He is difficult. He never shuts up. He doesnt know how to stifle himself in any way. He gets in a lot of fights. You see all of that in the play. What the play doesnt do so much of im not sure i would expect musical theater to do so much of this. But as a politician, he had very strong feelings. They werent all progressive and they werent all democratic. The play kind of makes him out to be raised himself up by his boot straps and was modern and forward looking and jefferson was this backward looking guy, attached to slavery. To a degree, thats true. But the other half of that is, jefferson was the guy who cass comfortable with democracy. Hamilton was not. Hamilton, one of the last letters he writes as a matter of fact, not long before the duel, maybe the night before, he war s s a friend that the thing that might bring down is democracy. He felt democracy was mass popular participation on a level that wasnt controlled in any way. He was distrustful of the people. Oddly enough, he was not thrilled with immigrants having a lot of political input, which is odd given that he himself came to the north american colonies from somewhere else. Immigrants tended to vote jef r e jeffersonnian. Can we do something so only american americans can vote . Theres a side of hamilton thats more complicated. To me, really important because the founding is a big argument or conversation. There was no one right answer. Hamilton was not the right answer. Jefferson was not the right answer. Nor was anybody else, did they have the right answer. Its the banging up against each other of all of those ideas that ends causes us to end up with for what we have for better or worse. Some aspects are admirable. Some are not. To me, thats the part thats whats missing from the play. I dont criticize the play for that, because to be totally honest, the first time i saw it, one of my responses was, they are singing George Washingtons farewell address. Theyre singing about the assumption of state debts. How is this humanly possible . I was already impressed by the fact that any of that got on stage. Im willing to talk about this more later. To me, absences and holes and things invisible and shouldnt be in the play are teaching opportunities. Because then our job as teachers is to say, okay, what isnt on that stage . Let me show you what really happened. Its actually even more interesting than what the play shows. In one way or the another im sure so many of you out there have experienced this. There are so many young people interested in this time period to a degree that throughout my decades of teaching this i have never seen. My attitude toward that is excellent. Its the worlds best Teaching Opportunity. Even if we want to teach against it, no matter what were doing, thats a great starting point. I think thats wonderful, too. I have to tell you we have young people watching this right now. I thought i would take some questions from our young historians here. Thank you. That was very fascinating. We do have we have a number of people i do have a number of you typing into the chat box. Theres a q a box you can type in. That may help me organize it better. We do have great questions. Im going to take the ones from our youngest audience members first. We have a fifth grader. He would like to know if hamilton had a say in how the first money looked. Oh. Thats a really good question. There was certainly discussion about the amounts that it should be. Hamilton thought that there should be very small amounts of money, like what now pennies. There should be things of low value. That would encourage americans to all americans, rich and poor, to use currency. He was kind of thinking in a practical way. There was a debate about what should be on coins that was in congress. It was not hamilton. But congress did debate, for example, should George Washingtons face be on a coin. There was a lot of opposition to that, because that was moving into the territory of, are we treating him like a king. Is he sooner or later going to become king george . We have to be careful. This is a republic. We dont have kings in a republic. Lets not have his face on the money. Your question is a good one because it was a big question. Hamilton ultimately didnt influence that really. Thank you. I will give you a question from an eighth grader as well. Shes interested in i have a couple questions about aliza. Our eighth grade friend says she would like to know what role she played in hamiltons death. The musical makes it look like she did a lot. Did she really . As far as his death is concerns. We have a question of how did she organize the volume of his correspondence. If you could speak to the role she played in his life and his legacy. Sure. Shes fascinating. In part, shes fascinating because she did what i think a lot of wives and sisters of sort of elite political guys did, particularly wives, which is hide her personal correspondence or destroy her personal correspondence with her husband to maintain their privacy. In the play, she talks about burning letters because of the reynolds affair and the fact shes angry at her husband. She did destroy a lot of her correspondence with hamilton, most of her correspondence with hamilton. To some degree we dont know some things about her role during their marriage, except its there in those 27 volumes. Its there in the papers. You can see that she really organized and ran that household. You could see that she was the one who dealt with family finance. Theres a letter of hamiltons its from the 1790s. Im not going to be able to put my finger on the year right now. Hamilton confessing to a bank that he lost his bank book, which i love. Hes the secretary of the treasury and he lost his own personal bank book. Shes the one who really i think maintained that family. He was not an easy person to be around for any number of reasons. So she had to be really strong, i think, to weather had a whole relationship. Whats really one of the really interesting things about her, as you suggested a few minutes ago, is what she does after his death. Really put herself at the center, along with one or two of her sons, of the effort to preserve his memory, collect his papers, get someone to write a biography of him and she mostly John Church Hamilton and james hamilton, but mostly john, one of the sons, really dedicated themselves to doing everything that they could do to preserve and promote his reputation and what he did. So a lot of what we know now is in part because they were very carefully collecting together papers. If you think about it, we have a lot of letters from jefferson. We have a lot of letters from adams. Those men lived a long time and they had a long time to organize their papers. Hamilton did not. He couldnt leave his papers behind. He couldnt carefully arrange them. He did nothing. He just went off one day and then died the next. She was really important on that role. In addition to the work she did on her own. She was really active in new york city in a variety of ways. She was in charge of and significant in the founding of an orphanage in new york city. Shes a really whats the word im looking for . Strong character. Theres a story about her. She lived a really long time. She lived well into her 90s. She was one of the last people of that generation to live. Theres a story at the end of her life, she was living in washington, d. C. With one of her daughters. Theres a story that james monroe came to visit her, former president james monroe came to visit her. Said Something Like, you know, mrs. Hamilton, you and i are among the only ones left from that time. So i wanted to come and pay my respects. She blamed james monroe for leaking the reynolds affair. So she saw monroe as being cordial expresident , here we are, let us shake hands. She said something along the lines of, if you think our being one step closer to the grave means i forgive you, i do not. She stormed out of the room. Wow. Thats a woman with umph. Indeed. Quite a person. Thank you for speaking to her and also we did have a question about especially in a short life, how you organize those 27 volumes of material. That speaks to it. Hamilton did some of that but he did have the family members working on that afterward. Kind of curating e ining that l. Its important for us to think about as historians and history educators. Even one step beyond that. They ultimately sold his papers to the government. What is worth noting is that nowadays, there are all of these papers projects. Washington papers, madison papers, hamilton papers. These are organizations of people, documentary projects. Their job is to collect as much if not all of the correspondence and writings of these individuals, everything to them, everything from them. They hunt all over the world for these things. They track down all the names and references. Theyre it allows us right now a lot is coming out in founders online from the National Archives has the papers of a lot of the people. All of that comes from these documentary editor projects, these documentary edition projects. Its a huge amount of work. This is great. I get an opportunity to just appla applaud. So much of what historians do would be so much more difficult if not impossible without all that was work that these people do. Those of you watching, if you want to raeead through some of e papers. Joanne has edited two of those. One is a paper bark aback and a of. I believe, correct me if im wrong, but i believe the library of congress has many of the papers digitalized. There are many of you from the library of congress in the audience. Go to loc. Gov and check out the hamilton papers. We have a lot of questions coming in. I want to get to a couple more of those. We have a question. My understanding of Alexander Hamilton is he was involved in corruption speculation with bonds. Have we gone too far in presenting him . Beginning from his lifetime, about him being corrupt, benefitting somehow privately from insider knowledge. When you lock at his account books and look at his finances, its not immediately apparent in that happened. I dont know where that money would be. That said, its entirely conceivable that i know this happened. He would go to dinner parties and his wealthy and wellconnected friends would sit at the dinner party and ask questions and watch his response so that they could judge what the government was going to do and so they could do whatever they wanted to do to benefit themselves. Would i say he was out there speculating and collecting . No. Would i say that somehow others benefitted from him, whether he intended them to or not . Probably. I apologize. Im sitting in new york city right now. You could probably hear the sirens. We have eva asking we have tougher questions. Can you address hamiltons view on slavery and what stance he took . Okay. Thats a really good question because the play suggests that he was an abolitionist. I would not make that claim. When you read those 27 volumes, one of the things you see is that when hamilton took up a cause as being an important cause to him, he went all out. Slave rry he talks about from te to time. It doesnt appear in his papers as a major focus. He belongs to the new york manumition society. He is against slavery as a practice. He is helping create schools free schools for africanamerican new yorkers. He is on the cause, the side we would want him to be on. Ending slavery i would say is not a main cause of his. If you think about him as the guy who is really concerned about property and prope

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