How I Met Alexander Hamilton

For his birthday, our least appreciated member of the American Trinity:
Washington, Jefferson -- and Alexander Hamilton, the "bastard brat" who didn't start life
owning a plantation.
Hamilton was the man who miraculously managed to pay off a crippling war time deficit budget,
encouraged the introduction of new, innovative industries, and figured out how to run a brand
new radical social experiment on a shoestring by minimally taxing--gasp--the rich!

 (Where are your inheritors now?)

 

In a dim '50's bookshop,

where a huge, bad-tempered charcoal

cat with yellow eyes glared in the sepia shadow

of a fly specked window,

I found you.

A worn olive drab

with a bold gold title

on antique spine, the date, 1902.

Mother must have bought you,

because the cost was a whole $2.

There was a black and white

reproduction of

a painting by Trumbell,

and there you were!

You—ecstatic, thin, red head thrown back,

face shining, 1776 on fire!

No wonder your new friends,

fellow aides-de-camp to the great

George Washington, nicknamed

you “The Little Lion.”

Accustomed to escape like this,

I read and read, oddly compelled to

struggle through a dense jungle

of Edwardian prose,

the work of a once lauded,

but now forgotten

Lady Novelist.

Oh, but how well she knew you!

Baby-faced orphan who withstood the scorn

of a world where you were “baseborn,”

who held on somehow,

to your God Inside.