https://www.instagram.com/p/Ctr64cvJh6w/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
He did also personally own slaves (like Hamilton and nearly every other man in the play did)
Very critical support to the real hero of Hamilton, Aaron Burr.
Can't recommend the Dollop episode on Burr enough. They did a good job of putting a light on that figure I haven't heard anywhere else.
Since some people might not be aware,
Hamilton lore
the Biden Administration's Inaugural Poem, "The Hill We Climb," aside from being highly goofy:
And the norms and notions
of what just is
Isn’t always just-ice
It also deliberately paraphrases Hamilton:
History has its eyes on us
And, I would argue, quotes the Bible via Hamilton!
Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree
And no one shall make them afraid
Because yes, that is a Biblical passage that the historical George Washington referenced, but when you look at the relative paucity of literary references in the poem of any kind other than the Constitution, and the way the Biblical quote is phrased in Hamilton:
Like the scripture says:
“Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree
And no one shall make them afraid.”
All this along with the fact that the poem goes on to use a Hamilton song much more directly, I believe, leads to the simplest explanation being that it is a Hamilton first and a Biblical reference second, i.e. that the Bible was quoted via Hamilton. QED
I wonder how Hilldawg felt about the poem being named after her
I think that happens a lot. The Bible has had a pretty big effect on English language literature
He seems like an incredible piece of shit for laundering the reputations of slavers the way that he did, but perhaps that's within your meaning
TBF the Founding Fathers get deified in popular culture ad nauseum regardless, it was more like another grain of sand on the pile than rehabilitation.
I think fundamentally the guy is just a giant dork. Like, I’m sure he didn’t make Hamilton thinking “I’m going to make slave owners and native slaughterers look cool,” it screams that he sees the Founding Fathers the way a third grader sees them. And then expressed it in a way that the dorkiest high school history teacher would come up with to make revolutionary history sound relevant to his students.
Well, I think there's more complexity to the hagiography than that. Both the connection to the famous biography of Hamilton -- which did discuss slavery -- and all the corporate sponsorship he received from early on, along with the actual research he did beyond the one biography makes me think it needed to be more conscious than you give him credit for. We even have him talking in interviews about how he originally discussed slavery -- and the various Founders' crimes -- more but then cut it because it was just kind of a downer, man, and he couldn't find a way to involve it in a story because it was generally a very static element in Hamilton's life. He was born into a slaver household and he died in one, with only poverty interrupting that status in between.
But more importantly, he doesn't just gloss over this shit, he rewrites it. He multiple times -- including from like the third song -- characterizes Hamilton as some type of abolitionist speaking out against slavery and the Schuylers as politically engaged feminists and so on when there is just zero evidence of it! He just invented it! And it persists to the very end of the play in Eliza's epilogue!
And I forgot about this part until now, but they cast Hamilton as an "immigrant" to deliberately liken him to immigrants in present-day America when one struggles to find similarity other than being poor at the time. There's a weird sort of brown-washing going on that ignores that Hamilton was a white colonizer, as though he was a fucking Latino Caribbean or something (LMM is ethnically a white Puerto Rican iirc, so perhaps this helps the illusion).
God, everything about this play just annoys me. It's so fucked up, pretending this social-climbing bastard who -- let us be clear -- was not just personally involved with the slaving Schuyler family for his own enrichment but also helped cement the federalist defense of chattel slavery with his central bank scheme that is celebrated as basically his central accomplishment in the play, but you hardly notice because he does it by delivering a line about how rich the southern slavers are! Good thing the virtuous north doesn't do slavery! Anyway, here's why we need to use some of the blood money from the south to help the north . . .
But more importantly, he doesn't just gloss over this shit, he rewrites it. He multiple times -- including from like the third song -- characterizes Hamilton as some type of abolitionist speaking out against slavery and the Schuylers as politically engaged feminists and so on when there is just zero evidence of it! He just invented it! And it persists to the very end of the play in Eliza's epilogue!
That’s been the revisionist project of the Founding Fathers since WWII when the US wanted to paper over the influence Nazi germany took from the US white ethnostate project. So those elements got reduced to character flaws rather than the ideological cores they were, and the liberal civil rights/good governance aspects were elevated and misstated.
I think that’s where the dorkiness comes in, part of that is the inability to get past the elementary school version of the mythos. So we get slavers portrayed as abolitionists who couldn’t free their slaves because reasons.
Which is a succinct description of modern liberalism. Constantly patting itself on the back for the great progressive things it would do, while also treating every hurdle to those things as an excuse for why it won’t actually try to implement them.
Constantly patting itself on the back for the great progressive things it would do, while also treating every hurdle to those things as an excuse for why it won’t actually try to implement them.
Obama writing about how he wanted to be more 'progressive', but felt he had to drone strike more brown people to show that he was 'tough' comes to mind.
that is just basically what happens when you learn history with 0 theory to operate under. slavery is bad, probably mostly because it is illegal to liberals. That's why the prison industrial complex is fine. He probably thinks washington was wrong to own slaves but like, it's what was done at the time, it wasn't illegal yet. And it wasn't the point of his story so who cares?
The weird thing is that the writing does condemn slavery from like its third song onward, and it tries to cast Hamilton as an abolitionist while making zero mention of anyone but Jefferson owning slaves, despite literally the entire cast other than John Adams personally being slavers or married to one (even Peggy Schuyler married one before she died, afaik). It doesn't just do the usual history book thing of "it was normal back then," it actively revises history to make Hamilton, the Schuylers, and so on look much more progressive than they were as though they were struggling against their era to promote human welfare!
Edit: Oh, there is the one actual abolitionist whose name I forget, but he is cynically used to, again, falsely paint Hamilton as a fellow abolitionist.
Yes, in "Schuyler Sisters":
"I've been reading "Common Sense" by Thomas Paine
So men say that I'm intense or I'm insane
You want a revolution? I want a revelation
So listen to my declaration
.
"'We hold these truths to be self-evident
That all men are created equal'
And when I meet Thomas Jefferson (unh!)
I'ma compel him to include women in the sequel (work!)"
The Schuyler Sisters were not this involved in politics beyond having family members who probably were by this point, well before the revolution (e.g. their father, a slaver, would have a seat in Congress following the revolution). I don't think there is evidence that any of them were particularly feminist except maybe Eliza at the end of her life (the stanza quoted is from Angelica). I don't know that any of them read Common Sense, either.
Basically it's pandering to white women in the audience that they can just sort of assume these 18th century white women were progressive because of course women are feminists! With no mind being paid to these being aristocratic women who mainly benefitted from the rightwing social order. But no, they are girlbosses.
Holy shit this thing is even worse than I thought. And of course Paine isn't in it, what am I thinking? Paine hated the federalists. They need to portray Jefferson as the unique slaveowner and Paine would fuck that image up and raise questions. That's the problem when an actual abolitionist was present during the fantasy libs want
i like how he played a character on house that was enthusiastic for attention, but lacked talent and overestimated his singing abilities.
life imitates art