I now understand much better why there were amendments to the American constitution.
Too often the success of the revolution and the formation of the American state as we know it today is treated almost like political certainty, or some sort of destiny, but reading this book you get a real sense of how figures like Washington and Hamilton could have lost, not just the revolution but in other great projects of theirs that they’re known for. Chernow does an amazing job of laying out just how fragile the early republic was. The country could have gone in so many other directions. I think a lot of my newfound fascination is a testament to Chernow’s ability to both humanize historical figures but also parse out their politics in an engaging, clear, and detailed way. As a Canadian historian, I’d never really been exposed to much of the detailed history of the American revolutionary era and early decades of the United States, and the early financial and political history of the independent country is surprisingly fascinating.
It is a truly excellent work of popular history. I have been working my way through Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton over the course of the last few months.
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