Trump, racism and the Scottish secret behind hit show Hamilton
In the week it swept the boards at the Olivier Awards, the remarkable story of the Scot celebrated in the musical
AS MUSICALS go, it’s quite the opening line: ‘How does the bastard orphan son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar?’
How indeed? Sung during the first number of Hamilton, the hip-hop musical that has dazzled audiences on both sides of the Atlantic with its historic thriller of a story and catchy, off-beat songs, it is a question that has fascinated theatregoers and academics.
On Sunday night, Hamilton swept the board at the Olivier Awards celebrating the finest performances in the West End, winning seven of the record 13 categories in which it was nominated and confirming the show as the hottest ticket in town.
It is a run that apes the musical’s success on Broadway, where Hamilton scooped a clutch of Tony awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and even attracted the ire of the current President of the United States.
But while most know that Hamilton is based on the life of Alexander Hamilton, one of America’s Founding Fathers, first Secretary of the Treasury and co-founder of, among other things, the nation’s financial system, the New York Post, the US Coast Guard and the Federalist party, less well known – despite its mention in the musical’s opening chords – is that the individual described as the man who made modern America was actually a Scot.
Indeed, some cite Alexander Hamilton as the greatest-ever Scottish influence on America, although Donald Trump, who is himself half-Scottish, might just dispute this.
Still, despite being born in the Caribbean, there can be no disputing Hamilton’s Scots heritage, even though he was ultimately to become ashamed of it.
His father, James Hamilton, hailed from Ayrshire, the fourth son of the Laird of Grange, and grew up near the village of Stevenston in the early 18th century.
While four of his brothers attended the University of Glasgow and devoted themselves to academic pursuits, James, described by Hamilton’s biographer Ron Chernow as ‘affable and feckless’, was instead apprenticed to a businessman in Glasgow who owned a linen and dye factory.
For four years he lived in the city, at the time a bustling metropolis at the heart of the British Empire, and learnt the rules of commerce and manufacturing from his boss, Richard Allan.
But when the four years were over and Hamilton was discharged in the early spring of 1741, he found himself disillusioned with the textile industry and harking after adventure. Instead of settling down to a sensible job at home in Scotland he became seduced by Glasgow’s burgeoning trade with the West Indian sugar islands and decided on an audacious move to the Caribbean as a merchant.
Handwritten papers noting the purchases that he made for his new home in St Kitts – borrowed on credit from his brother John – are now held in the Library of Congress and also show him stocking up on wares to sell upon his arrival.
But James’s plans for life as a merchant on St Kitts were not a success. Within four years he had been declared bankrupt, abandoned the project and was working as a watchman at the port of St Basseterre.
Meanwhile, he was still pestering his brother for money on credit, and when the watchman job did not work out, he fell back on the generosity of friends and relatives in Scotland who lent him cash.
HIS son Alexander later described the situation by saying his father’s ‘affairs at a very early day went to wreck’ because of ‘too generous and too easy a temper’ combined with ‘too much pride and too large a portion of indolence’.
Meanwhile, James Hamilton had met Rachel Fawcett Lavien, who was of British and French Huguenot descent.
She was married and had a son by her husband, but she left them both to live with James Hamilton.
While the situation was a scandal – her husband proclaimed her a whore – such unconventional relationships were not that unusual at that time on the islands of the Caribbean, and before long the couple had produced two sons, James Jr and Alexander, their second, who was born in 1765. The family moved to the island of St Croix and Alexander had a troubled childhood, not least because money was tight and his parents often fought.
When he was ten his father deserted the family (he left, he claimed, in order to spare Rachel being charged with bigamy) and at only 11 Alexander took his first job in order to help make ends meet.
But disaster struck when, three years later, Rachel died of yellow fever, leaving behind only a few pieces of clothing, a dozen silver spoons and 34 books.
At 13 years old Alexander was an immensely bright and intelligent child. Educating himself (from the books left behind by his mother, scholars now believe), he was sent to work in the accounts department of an export firm by his mother’s family, and was so good at the work he was put in charge.
Another Scot, the local Presbyterian minister Hugh Knox, noticed his talents and raised money among some of the wealthier men in the area for him to go to Princeton in America. Hamilton eventually settled upon King’s College in
New York (now Columbia University), and upon arriving in America, never returned to the Caribbean.
From there, Hamilton’s career skyrocketed. He fought in the Revolutionary war and while still in his twenties became aide-decamp to George Washington. He was also a practising lawyer and was a delegate at the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
In 1789 he was appointed first Secretary of the Treasury by Washington, and was famed for describing the United States as ‘a Hercules in the cradle’.
He was influential in a number of elections (particularly that of Jefferson in 1800) and passionate about politics and the idea of central government. He was killed in a duel with former vice-president Aaron Burr in 1804. Hamilton’s Scottishness, while a key part of his heritage, was often used against him and he was cautious about discussing it in public.
JOHN Adams, second president of the United States, described him as ‘the bastard brat of a Scottish peddler’. Unsurprisingly then, in later years Hamilton’s illegitimacy embarrassed him.
And although he still kept in touch with his father who, even in later years, signed his letters to Hamilton ‘Your very Affectionate Father’, he was prone to fanciful ideas regarding his parentage, including the notion that his real father was in fact George Washington, who had supposedly encountered his mother during a trip to Barbados.
And yet who else but a Scot could, under the miserable circumstances of his early life, become so thrawn and determined to succeed?
Part of the reason for the success of Hamilton the musical has been its deliberate choice, by creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, to cast young black, Asian, Latino and mixedrace actors as the old white founding fathers and their sidekicks.
It was a bold move which attempted to demonstrate the multi-ethnic fabric that makes up America today. And it also raises a tantalising question: was Hamilton himself mixed race?
There has been persistent speculation that his mother was of mixed race herself but it has never been proven. Certainly, what is not in doubt is that he was the product both of his Scottish father, his French mother, and the richly diverse Caribbean environment in which he was brought up.
Hamilton has not been a smash hit with everyone.
While Former President Barack Obama was a huge fan (indeed, some songs from the musical were given their first public performance in front of him in the White House back in 2009), it is intriguing to note that another enormously influential American son of a Scot – US president Donald Trump, whose mother Mary hailed from the Isle of Lewis – found himself at cross purposes with the show’s cast.
At the end of a Broadway performance in November 2016, just weeks after Trump won the presidential election, audience member and vice-president Mike Pence found himself not only being booed by the crowd, but addressed directly from the stage by actor Brandon Dixon, who played vicepresident Aaron Burr.
MIKE Pence, we welcome you here. We are the diverse Americans who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents.
‘We thank you for sharing this wonderful American story, told by a diverse group of men and women of different colours, creeds and orientations.’
Trump reacted by tweeting: ‘The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!’ They did not.
Thanks to the enormous success of the musical, the fascination today with Hamilton and his family knows no bounds. Whole websites are devoted to tracking down birth registers for Hamilton’s father and his siblings in Ayrshire.
Academics pick fights over his birth date (1755 or 1757) while Chernow’s biography – on which the musical is based – has enjoyed many months on bestseller lists.
Hamilton’s story started with a young and feckless Scot who wanted a different type of life for himself almost 300 years ago.
That it has found its way to the forefront of America’s discussions about race and identity is almost as extraordinary as the life of the man himself.