Lehrman Visiting Lecturer Highlights Alexander Hamilton
Brunswick welcomed Richard Brookhiser — historian, biographer, journalist, and senior editor at National Review— to Baker Theater on Thursday, April 12.
Brookhiser — the 2008 winner of the National Medal of the Humanities, and a 2011 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship — is this year’s Louise Lehrman Visiting Senior Fellow.
The Fellowship, established in 2013 by a gift from the Lehrman Institute, engages experts in American History to visit Brunswick, instilling in students a greater understanding of the rights, privileges, and duties of American citizenship.
Brookhiser is the author a number of books and biographies about American historical figures, including George Washington, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln.
He focused his lecture, though, on Alexander Hamilton, the subject of his book Alexander Hamilton, American, chronicling one of America’s founding fathers’ origins, accomplishments, and failures.
Brookhiser detailed Hamilton’s upbringing on the islands of Nevis and St. Croix in the British West Indies, where he became an illegitimate orphan at the age of 11 and was forced to take his first job as an accounting clerk.
He recounted Hamilton’s courageous military career in the Revolutionary War after arriving in America — and his foundational and transformative financial work as the first Secretary of the Treasury under President Washington.
Brookhiser, too, told the story of Hamilton’s extramarital entanglement with a married woman, Maria Reynolds, and his hateful rivalries with Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr.
It was Burr, of course, who fatally wounded Hamilton in a duel at dawn on July 11, 1804, in Weehawken, New Jersey.
Brookhiser, himself, has visited the site of the duel.
“When you look to the east, you see all of Manhattan, from the Battery all the way up through Midtown and to Riverside Church — the Manhattan mountain range of skyscrapers and apartment buildings,” Brookhiser said.
“I knew that if Hamilton had seen that now, he would say, ‘This is why I came here, this is what I worked to build. Use it.’”
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