Latest Reviews: 11.2003

"Randall's excellent book brings alive the complex combination of unbounded ambition and sense of duty that made Mr. Hamilton an overachiever in an age of great individuals. Mr. Randall's work easily holds its own in a recent spate of impressive biograsphies of Founding Fathers by eminent historians (including David McCullough's John Adams and Edmund Morgan's Benjamin Franklin.

-- Rex Bossert, New York Law Journal Magazine

Randall traces Hamilton's life in meticulous detail...Randall is an infectiously enthousiastic writer who brings a fresh perspective to Hamilton's role in our new republic....Randall is a great biographer and academic law librarians should be sure to order all of his books. He is the author of spellbinding and careful biographies of our founding fathers...Randall is a wonderful writer and scholar who brings history alive with details that have eluded past biographers. I've heard Professor Randall speak about Jefferson and Lincoln and find him a mesmerizing speaker."

-- Michael L. Rustand, Bimonthly Review of Law Books

Extraordinary talent always attracts notice. The life of Alexander Hamilton, vividly re-created in "Alexander Hamilton: A Life" by Willard Sterne Randall, offers stunning confirmation of this truism.

The four geniuses of American nation-building -- Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and Marshall -- gravitated unerringly toward their metiers: Madison the Constitution writer, Jefferson the creator of democratic polity, Hamilton the fiscal genius, and Marshall the architect of liberal jurisprudence. Their stories are holograms of the nation itself, which makes it all the more satisfying to discover the young Hamilton and his cohort in Randall's fine biography.

-- Joyce Appleby, Boston Globe
(Emerita professor of history, UCLA;
past president, American Historical Association)

Now comes a new biography by historian Willard Sterne Randall, visiting professor of humanities at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, and author of recent lives of Thomas Jefferson, Benedict Arnold and Ben Franklin. It's an easy read, but quite informative, bringing Hamilton's genius and impressive accomplishments to full light.

The book is well written, chock-full of interesting tidbits of American history. An example: on the day he presented his initial plan for the Treasury to Congress, five of the first seven U.S. presidents attended the debate-Washington, Adams, Madison, and Andrew Jackson! The author's academic status notwithstanding, is simple, elegant and occasionally humorous-in all, a most enjoyable read...I highly recommend the book.

-- George C. Brown, Shrewsbury (MA) Chronicle

The Hamilton legend is replete with quarter-truths and half-truths, that, in history, are at times more dangerous than outright lies. Certainly Hamilton was too intertesting and too important to be defined by cliches, and this readable new biography might be described as a work of restoration....Clearly we owe enough to Alexander Hamilton to get the picture right, and Randall's biography is a useful contriobution to that restorative process....This is a readable and worthy corrective to two centuries of textbook cliches.

-- Edwin M. Yoder Jr., Washington Post

Randall doesn't speculate. (He) gives us a nice mix of Hamilton's political and personal lives. This biography gives us not only a good picture of a Founding Father, it describes the struggle that was the Revolutionary War; one is left wondering how we ever managed to win.

-- Donald Breed, Providence Journal

In the first full, one volume biography of Alexander Hamilton in more than two decades, award-winning historian Willard Sterne Randall takes a fresh look at one of the most brilliant, conflicted and elusive of our nation's founders. Told in a highly readable style, Alexander Hamilton presents a totally fresh look at Hamilton, his contributions, and what they mean today.

-- New York Post

It is in his treatment of Hamilton's role in the war that Randall parts company with earlier biographers as well as with most historians of the American Revolution. He portrays Hamilton, Washington's often disgruntled and sometimes disrespectful aide-de-camp, as a brilliant strategist, heroic in battle, and an inspiration to his troops. This intriguing re-interpretation of Hamilton's life represents the chief value of the biography.

Besides recording and critiquing Hamilton's actions in his many roles, Randall does a fine job of reconstructing his disadvantaged origins and the course of events that brought him from the Caribbean island of St. Croix to New York. More important, he captures the character that powered him in his pursuit of seemingly impossible goals.

Randall excels in describing the conflicts Hamilton created and weathered as a soldier, politician and lawyer; his capacity for making enemies; and the peaks and valleys in his tumultuous personal and professional life."

-- Myron A. Marty, St. Louis Post Dispatch

Randall, a visiting professor at Champlain College, delivers an engaging biography that focuses on Hamilton's coming of age on the island of St. Croix and his political maturation during the roiling years of the American Revolution. It is a discerning portrait of a brilliant, ambitious and abrasive young man who had the foresight and imagination to place himself at the center of a great and dramatic struggle.

Skillfully, Randall cuts away from the war to chronicle Hamilton's personal life ....Illuminating and comprehensive biography.

--Rob Mitchell, Boston Herald

Drawing upon a formidable array of letters, diaries and other primary sources, Willard Sterne Randall, author of biographies on Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and Benedict Arnold, sketches a vivid, credible portrait of his new subject in Alexander Hamilton: A Life.

But the focus of Randall's biography is on Hamilton's incessant push toward a more centralized government after the Revolution. Randall carefully and thoroughly delineates the arguments between the Federalists (of which Hamilton was the champion), who desired a strong centralized government, and the Anti-Federalists, who wanted the states to retain most of their power.

Randall also delves deeply in to his subject's personal life. He covers Hamilton's two adulterous affairs, one with his wife's sister, and the personal and political feud with Burr (too lengthy to go into here) that culminated in his violent and untimely end in 1804.

Assiduously researched and appealingly written, Randall's Alexander Hamilton: A Life is an informative and insightful portrait of a highly complex personality.

-- Chris Patsilelis, Houston Chronicle

Only about half of this biography of more than 400 pages is devoted to Alexander Hamilton's youth, education, and career in law, finance, and politics. The other half treats Hamilton's service in the Continental Army, most of which he spent as an essential staff officer at the headquarters of General George Washington.

Although this biography is thinner on Alexander Hamilton's peacetime life than on his military career, perhaps the much less thorough treatment of the wary years by Hamilton's numerous other biographers requires this compensating account.

-- Brent Tarter, Richmond Times-Dispatch

Willard Randall has taken on one of the really difficult figures in American history and captured him with enviable narrative skill. This is biographical excellence-solid, first rate work.

--- William H. Hallahan, author of The Day the American Revolution Began

An arresting story told with wit, intelligence, and empathy. Randall has succeeded in getting under the skin of citizen Hamilton, who read the contours of America's future better than any other figure of his extraordinary generation.

Willard Sterne Randall's Excerpt From "Alexander Hamilton: A Life" in Smithsonian Magazine, January 2003. The article is now archived and unavailable via link previously published on this page.

Randall hews to a descriptive style, narrating Hamilton's fortune-marked rise to fame, which was sealed when the ambitious aide-de-camp of Washington pleaded for, and got, the assignment to lead the final assault at the Battle of Yorktown. Randall's coverage of Hamilton's subsequent career is covered economically in the one-volume format, so the reader here has an offering weighted toward Hamilton's' rise from obscurity on the Caribbean island of St. Croix, emigration to New York City, and enlistment in the Patriot cause in the Revolutionary War. An extremely intelligent and diligent prodigy, Hamilton had a talent for attracting influential patrons, a feature Randall capable emphasizes while also using adroit detailing to vivify the worlds Hamilton moved through, from the slave economy of St. Croix to the upper American social crust into which he married. Randall's vigorous prose captures shows the compass of Hamilton's life and his role in making the U.S. a going concern.

--- Booklist

A revealing but measured biography of the younger Founding Father, who, to the horror of libertarians ever since, "[drew] up" a blueprint for a relationship between government and money.

Who was right about America - Jefferson or Hamilton? Such, writes Randall (Humanities/Champlain Coll., Vermont, co-author, Forgotten Americans, 1998, etc.), was the single question leveled at him at a meeting of the American Revolution Round Table a few years back. "The hour was late," he writes, "my answer was brief: Jefferson for the eighteenth century, Hamilton for more modern times." He capably defends his judgment in this well-written life of Hamilton (1755-1804), who mixed Clintonesque appetites for pleasure and policy-winking while busily putting the new republic's economy on a sound footing. Hamilton's life was wreathed in legend even in his time, more or less adopted by George Washington, he also had a talent for acquiring powerful enemies who made every effort to discredit the young man as a bastard, a closet royalist and an enemy of democracy. Randall defends his subject on all counts; to be sure, he notes, Hamilton's parents were not technically married but "they lived as husband and wife for fifteen years,' which was good enough in the eyes of English common law; to be sure, he carried himself with the air of an aristocrat, but Hamilton was no fan of the Hanoverian kings, and if he showed unusual clemency to captured Loyalists, he remained a devoted soldier of the Continental Army all the same, ardently espousing the cause of liberty. Unlike more idealistic revolutionaries, however, Hamilton believed that the chief role of government was to subdue the passions of the people, who "are inherently corrupted by lust for power and greed for property,' which put him square up against the Jeffersonian camp and, in time, in the sights of Aaron Burr's pistol. But before he fell, Hamilton crafted several institutions - among them the national bank and the germ of the IRS -- that prove him a modern man indeed, for better or worse.

A sturdy and readable life, in company with Randall's other portraits of the Revolutionary generation.

- Kirkus Reviews

Biographer of Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, Randall is in his usual engaging form in dealing with the complex Hamilton, who in 1804 died in a duel with Aaron Burr. Randall's' restless Hamilton, illegitimate son of a West Indian Englishwoman, succeeds on his energy, industriousness and intelligence and a little help from distant relatives, becoming the new nation's first Secretary of the Treasury at 34.... Randall's narrative is vivid and accurate...

--- Publishers Weekly

If you are interested in the founding father who made the United States functional, you cannot do better than this lively, entertaining and informative book. Will Randall, a master biographer and renowned historian, uses his considerable skills to bring Alexander Hamilton and his turbulent times to life.

-- Rod Paschall, Editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History

Hamilton's turbulent life, the dramatic birth of a nation, all against the richly evoked gritty background of the 18th century-Randall's book is propelled with the page-turning intensity of an epic novel.

-- Ron Blumer, writer, PBS series "Benjamin Franklin"

This richly, detailed, deeply sympathetic biography gives us a Hamilton we're compelled to know-hungry, human, brilliant and magnificent.

--Virginia Scharff, author of Twenty Thousand Roads

Author Willard Sterne Randall didn't plan it this way, but his Alexander Hamilton: A Life comes at a time when a group of political devotees is hoping that Congress will remove Hamilton's portrait from the $10 bill and replace it with that of President Ronald Reagan. Randall's biography, which offers a fresh look at the many-faceted career of one of the Founding Fathers, becomes a persuasive response to that group's wish.

If Hamilton's only accomplishment were rescuing the infant nation from financial disaster, that would have been enough to ensure him a lasting name and America's gratitude. But many readers, remembering from their school days only that George Washington's "money man" was mortally injured in a duel with Aaron Burr, will be astonished to learn of Hamilton's truly momentous achievements and a legacy equaled by few others in U.S. annals.

Randall details Hamilton's battlefield performance, which led to his becoming Washington's most trusted aide-de-camp in matters of war and a favorite adviser in affairs of government; his authorship of most of the Federalist Papers, essays that helped to win New York's ratification of the Constitution and to otherwise shape U.S. political institutions; his principal roles leading to the creation of the Coast Guard and the Navy; and, of course, his critical goals and decisions as the first Secretary of the Treasury. Randall contends that if Washington was the nation's "indispensable man," Hamilton was Washington's indispensable man, even writing his Farewell Speech.

Author of previously acclaimed biographies of Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benedict Arnold and Benjamin Franklin, Randall provides more than a time-line of Hamilton's accomplishments. We are given a flesh-and-blood Hamilton. While we sometimes encounter the man at his tactful best, we also find him in moments of despair, such as when he confides to a friend, "I hate the world. I hate myself," and in times of frustration as he lashes out at most members of Congress as "mortal enemies to talent" who have "only contempt for integrity." We see Hamilton engaging in vitriolic and mudslinging exchanges with other politicians, and, yes, even committing adultery. (A perceptive Martha Washington once noticed an amorous tomcat and named it Hamilton.) Above all, Randall skillfully traces Hamilton's untiring efforts to establish a financial system based on a currency that has become the most trusted medium in the world and is still graced by his portrait.

Alan Prince, BookPage.com

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