Soldier, financial guru and hip-hop legend: who was the real Hamilton?

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical about the founding father is set to storm London. Often mistaken for a president, its hero engineered America and Britain’s special relationship, was rocked by a harassment scandal and got his face on the $10 billIt’s the end of the first act of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s runaway musical smash about the US founding father. The Americans have just won a decisive victory over the British at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781. Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette meet at centre-stage and say: “We’re immigrants. We get the job done.”Miranda’s parents migrated from the Caribbean to New York; Hamilton himself made that journey two centuries earlier. Born on Nevis in the British West Indies, he arrived on the American mainland aged 15. Aaron Burr, his future nemesis, begins the musical by asking how a “bastard orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman”, could rise in life to help found a new nation. The answer is that, along the way, Hamilton, like so many immigrants, worked harder than most, becoming a soldier, lawyer, finance minister and then duelist. He excelled at all of these – except the last. Continue reading…
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