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HamAlong: I've lost count of which number we're on

How're you all feeling about Hamilton? Do you like him? While I assume he was likable, since the book keeps saying he was, I've kind of been pissed at him for a while. And this quote of his:

"I pledge myself to you and to every friend of mine that the strictest scrutiny into every part of my conduct, whether as a private citizen or as a public officer, can only serve to establish the perfect purity of it"

left a bad taste in my mouth about him, because sir. You have been having an affair for almost a year, and this is a baldfaced lie that you have said right here.

I mean. Everyone's human. People make mistakes. People do stupid, stupid things, and it doesn't make them "bad" people. But the Reynolds affair just straight-up sucked, which fortunately, after all the "fatal enchantress" etc comments, Chernow admits. Thank you, sir.

A lot of the rest was the Whiskey Tax (boooooo) and the French Revolution. Or rather the French Revolution after the execution of Louis XVI, when everything went bananas. Notre Dame was renamed The Temple of Reason, which, ahahahahahaha. Also, re the French ambassador to the U.S.:

On June 5, Jefferson had to tell Genêt to stop outfitting privateers and dragooning American citizens to serve on them.

That is amazing. "SIR. Stop making our citizens get on your boat."

Lastly for this section, whether for good or ill, the fighting between Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton makes you realize how literally nothing has changed in politics, and it's basically just always been terrible. I think this makes me feel somewhat despairing, actually, but at least when the Founding Fathers are held up as paragons of peace and virtue, now we can be like "O RLY because I have some anonymous newspaper columns from the 1790s that would beg to differ."

We're gonna finish this damn book.



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