Happy New Year, dear readers! And welcome to your January subscriber exclusive! I'm giving you a sneak peek at James Alexander Hamilton: Son of the American Revolution, which will be released in the UK on January 30 and in the US on March 30. It is available NOW on NetGalley.

So, what is inside?

James was a well placed witness to eighty years of early US history. His mother danced with George Washington at his inaugural ball and James was on a committee to advise Abraham Lincoln. In between those pivotal moments, James defended his father's national bank to Andrew Jackson, served as temporary Secretary of State, traveled down the Mississippi to New Orleans, sailed on the schooner America for which the famous Cup is named, spoke out against slavery, and so much more.

Here is the table of contents:

My main source in writing this biography was James's own words. I spent hours interpreting his penmanship in collections of letters at the University of Michigan, New York Public Library, and Historic Hudson Valley. I also had access to letter collections that included those written by his wife, son, daughters, and many political contacts. But my most vital source was a collection put together by James himself, Reminiscences of James A Hamilton: Men and Events at Home and Abroad During Three Quarters of a Century. This 600+ page memoir of sorts includes random observations, copies of letters, and valuable insights particular to James, but it also includes loads of gaps and assumptions of knowledge. I hope that I have made James's incredible life more accessible to modern readers.

You can read the first page of my biography below, but first I want to share one more fun bit of news. This book like all others will be judged by its cover, and I am thrilled with Pen & Sword's work on this! It started with a portrait of James that I am thrilled to have received permission from one of his descendants to use.

This original portrait is the property of Helen Hamilton Spaulding, and I love the way P&S incorporated it into the gorgeous cover art.

Now, for your peek inside!

Chapter 1

A varied and somewhat eventful life…

The first line of James A Hamilton’s Reminiscences reads, ‘In my seventy-ninth year I have employed a winter’s leisure in committing to paper these recollections of a varied and somewhat eventful life.’¹ James was understating his experience as the son of America’s first secretary of the treasury, the controversial Alexander Hamilton, and a life that spanned a country’s coming of age, from the Constitutional Convention to the conclusion of the Civil War. Few people in the first half of the nineteenth century were in a position like James A Hamilton to observe the formative politics and events that began the evolution of the United States into the country it is today. His Reminiscences and personal papers give modern readers a unique glimpse of that world.

During his lifetime, James observed the original thirteen states begin as a loosely connected confederation of separate governments and grow into thirty-eight states forming a unified nation. All this occurred under the leadership of nineteen different presidents, most of whom James knew personally. His mother danced with the first president on 7 May 1789 at George Washington’s first inaugural ball. Eight of the original colonies ratified the Constitution and officially became states in 1788, the year James was born on April 14, just a fortnight before Maryland became the seventh state. He watched US politics split into Republicans and Democrats and the Union split into North and South. He saw black men who had been enslaved become legal, voting citizens and women begin to strive toward their right to vote.

‘Without having been a principal actor in any of those affairs of public interest to which I shall refer, I have had peculiar opportunities for understanding the purposes and appreciating the characters of many of the leaders in these transactions, and I indulge the hope that I may now and then be able to throw a valuable side-light upon events in our past history,’² James wrote with modesty that he must have inherited from his mother, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton. James described himself as a bystander to history, despite holding various positions, including district attorney and secretary of state, but his most important role was as a confidante and advisor to presidents and political leaders like Martin Van Buren, Andrew Jackson, and Salmon P Chase. Why did these leaders seek James out? As Van Buren once wrote, ‘I know that you cannot intentionally do wrong.’³ As political leaders often tempted to consider right from wrong, James was a dependable voice for what was morally good.

Perhaps observing what personal fame had done to his father discouraged James from seeking his own, or maybe he was simply a man of quieter character who enjoyed advising those whose names would go down in history. And what a history it was! While most Americans know at least a few facts about the American Revolution and remember names like Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, the United States was truly forged into a nation through the growing pains of the nineteenth century. The Founding Fathers had set the course, but the next generation had to journey into the wilderness and determine what it meant to live in a modern republic. Fewer people remember names like John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Andrew Jackson, John Marshall, and John C Calhoun, but without them our path and the country we live in today would have been quite different even before men like Abraham Lincoln and a bloody Civil War entirely revolutionized what it meant to be an American.

James A Hamilton, who always signed his name with his middle initial to honor his father, did not grasp fame nor fortune for himself while living through this unprecedented time, and he did not record any regrets for not doing so. The same cannot be said of his father, though Alexander Hamilton did decline the opportunity to run for governor of New York and an offer of appointment to the Supreme Court.⁴ Hamilton’s name has become especially well known since the Broadway debut of the musical bearing his name and telling his story in 2015. That version of events is, of course, a blend of history and entertainment in which quiet, young James does not appear.

Continue reading in James Alexander Hamilton: Son of the American Revolution!