Hamilton True Story: What Did Lin-Manuel Miranda Change?

Hamilton True Story: What Did Lin-Manuel Miranda Change?
Hamilton: An American Musical is now on Disney+, but how historically accurate is Lin-Manuel Miranda's adaptation, based on Ron Chernow's biography?
Lin-Manuel Miranda has been both praised and critiqued over the historical accuracy of his hit Broadway show Hamilton: An American Musical, about the incredible life story of Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Miranda, the hip-hop musical’s creator and star, was inspired to interpret Hamilton’s life through music after reading Ron Chernow’s 2004 historical biography Alexander Hamilton while on vacation. What happened next is its own history, with the original Broadway production now available to stream on Disney+.
In everything from articles and academic essays, to blog posts and Facebook group chains, historians and scholars have been debating Hamilton’s historical accuracy since it premiered at the Public Theatre in 2015. While some have praised the extensive research that went into the show’s creation, others have criticized it for over-glorifying the historical figure, in particular by exaggerating the extent of his opposition to slavery. Miranda himself told The Atlantic that he “felt an enormous responsibility to be as historically accurate as possible, while still telling the most dramatic story possible.” Often, dramatizing a story requires the taking of creative liberties, and though it mostly abides by historical records, Hamilton is still no exception.
In an interview with The New York Times, Chernow, who also served as a historical consultant to the production, praised Miranda’s take on the Founding Father: “I think he has plucked out the dramatic essence of the character – his vaulting ambition, his obsession with his legacy, his driven nature, his roving eye, his brilliant mind, his faulty judgment.” When he did exercise his dramatic license for the sake of greater storytelling, Miranda emphasizes that “none of those choices [were] made lightly.” Even beyond the Founding Fathers singing, dancing, and engaging in rap battles, Miranda altered the historical canon in a number of significant ways.
The Real Alexander Hamilton Was Not So Progressive
Hamilton was not as in tune with contemporary, progressive values as the musical, which also employs race-blind casting, would suggest. Presenting him as a “young, scrappy and hungry” immigrant, egalitarian and abolitionist makes Hamilton a cultural hero of the Obama era, bursting with optimism and revolutionary ideology. The historical reality is unfortunately not so rosy.
While Hamilton did publicly criticize Thomas Jefferson’s views on the biological inferiority of African-Americans, and though he was a founding member of the New York Manumission Society which pushed for gradual emancipation in New York State, his public record from the 1790s until his death in 1804 included very little action against slavery. Meanwhile, Hamilton’s widow Eliza sings in the show’s final song, Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story that she “speak[s] out against slavery/ You could’ve done so much more if you only had time”. Race and slavery are invoked in Miranda’s Hamilton to emphasize the lead protagonist’s goodness, particularly in contrast to Jefferson. As Harvard professor and historian Annette Gordon-Reed explains, the portrayal of Hamilton as an ardent abolitionist is an idealization of who the American public would have liked the Founding Father to be. She goes on to explain that “he was not pro-immigrant… he was not an abolitionist… he was not a champion of the little guy”. The real Hamilton had sold and bought slaves for his in-laws, and though he held moderately progressive views towards slavery, particularly for the time, opposing it was never at the forefront of his political agenda, which in fact often prioritized property rights.
The musical certainly sanitizes history and offers a hero more palatable and attractive to contemporary audiences, and thus should not be regarded as historical realism. However, others (both historians and cultural critics) have praised Miranda for his casting of Black and Latinx actors as a way of writing people of color into the story of America’s creation. Daveed Diggs, who played Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette in the original Broadway cast, told the Wall Street Journal that he “walked out of the show with a sense of ownership over American history. Part of it is seeing brown bodies play these people.” In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s own words, Hamilton is “a story about America then, told by America now” which aims to eliminate the distance between history and a contemporary audience. The show reminds audiences that American history is not only the history of white people, and instead highlights how revolutionaries’ fight for freedom excluded that of Black slaves, and the important role played by immigrants in America’s independence.
Alexander and Angelica Were Not Star-Crossed Lovers
The show places much emphasis on Angelica and Alexander’s missed love connection, as the latter ends up marrying Angelica’s younger sister, Eliza. As Angelica Schuyler sings in Satisfied, "I’m a girl in a world in which my only job is to marry rich/ My father has no sons so/ I’m the one who has to social climb," and that is why she cannot let herself fall for a penniless man such as Hamilton, despite her feelings towards him. While a love triangle or a tale of star-crossed lovers make for great drama, the reality was very different.
In actuality Angelica, Eliza and Peggy’s father, Philip Schuyler, had fifteen children of whom several were sons who survived into adulthood. Furthermore, the real Angelica was already a married woman and the mother of two children when she first met Hamilton, having eloped with British-born John Barker Church three years prior. Despite this, some historians consider Hamilton and Angelica’s correspondence, which is preserved in the Library of Congress, to have been flirtatious. Chernow in particular wrote in his book that their attraction was “potent and obvious”, while other scholars argue that their letters were simply the product of a close friendship. What all scholars can agree on is that Angelica and Hamilton were very close, but whether they held romantic feelings for one another will most certainly remain a mystery.
Hamilton and Burr’s Lives Were Not So Intertwined
Although Miranda’s play places a lot of emphasis on the parallel lives of Hamilton and his rival, Aaron Burr, the two men’s lives did not cross paths as frequently as the show suggests. In Hamilton, he and Burr serve as seconds to John Laurens and Charles Lee, when in reality there exists no evidence that Burr was involved in the duel. Similarly, the show tells how Hamilton went about penning The Federalist Papers, essays intended to gather support for the U.S. Constitution. Miranda’s Hamilton asks Burr to contribute to the essays, arguing that “we studied and we fought and we killed/ For the notion of a nation we now get to build” only to have Burr firmly turn him down.
In the musical adaptation and in history, the Federalist Papers are written by Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay; there is no historical evidence that Burr was ever approached to contribute to or be involved in the creation of these papers. Hamilton over-emphasizes Burr’s relationship with Alexander Hamilton yet again when the show depicts Jefferson, Madison and Burr confronting Hamilton about his affair with Maria Reynolds. In reality, the matter was raised by James Monroe, Frederick Muhlenberg, and Abraham Venable. Fans would likely agree, however, that the intertwining of Burr and Hamilton’s lives in the stage production help to build momentum and conflict, allowing for greater catharsis in the last act, which sees Burr kill Hamilton in a duel (something that actually did happen in real life).