"FAVORITE SON" ALEXANDER HAMILTON

Reviewed by David F. Barry, Emeritus Professor, Upsala College

New Jersey has never looked lovelier than it does in "Favorite Son," a film by Michael Bober which weaves together a long, lyrical look at the life of Alexander Hamilton, our state’s adopted son (like so many of us, he wasn’t born here) with story threads drawn from two centuries of development which have transformed the New Jersey Hamilton knew. Doron Schlair’s sweeping cinematographic views and incisive snapshots give the Garden State a beauty and a gravitas it is rarely accorded.

As Bober himself says, "Favorite Son" is not a biography of Hamilton in the traditional sense but a series of episodically linked vignettes to which the story of Hamilton is central.

The film opens with some brief reflections about Alexander Hamilton and his relationship with George Washington, who was not just his political and military superior but a father-figure. It is always startling to remember just how young Hamilton was when he first came to Washington’s notice. A native of Nevis in the Caribbean, there is some uncertainty about the date of his birth. He may have been only sixteen years old when he entered King’s (now Columbia) College and just seventeen when he published his first pamphlet defending the Continental Congress. At nineteen, he commanded an artillery company and at twenty Washington chose him as an aide-de-camp and secretary with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Those brief reflections are but an introduction as the film swiftly shifts to a stunning view of the Great Falls and the voice of William Carlos Williams is heard reading from his magisterial, five-volume poem, "Paterson" for which Williams, a native and life-long resident of Rutherford, apart from the years he spent in medical school, won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1983. Williams, who as Marianne Moore once said, "wrote in plain American which dogs and cats can read," calls up a vision of the Eighteenth Century and the surrounding community of old Dutch stock.

At that point Bober introduces one of the two fictional characters he uses to provide narrative continuity as the film shifts from the Eighteenth to the Nineteenth and then to the Twentieth centuries and back again, and from Hamilton and Washington to JFK and back again. Julia Lowe Walker is "Nyla" an attractive, twentieth century woman seeking to come to grips with the past.

After some early reflections on the Lenni Lenape, the Native American community pushed westward from their ancestral Delaware homelands in New Jersey, the film leaps forward to Hamilton’s role as Secretary of the Treasury in the first Washington administration.

Hamilton in the 1790's was the author of several great State Papers: his Report on Manufacturing, his Report on the Public Credit, and his Report on the Bank of the United States. All three, and several others, had major impact on the economic development of the United States. But it was the Report on Manufacturing, or "Manufactures," which most touched New Jersey.

Together with his colleague, William Paterson, Hamilton was a prime mover and shaker in the creation of the Society of Useful Manufactures, chartered by the New Jersey legislature to promote the use of the Great Falls to stimulate manufacturing. As Bober notes, the development of the Great Falls and the city of Paterson were the seeds of Henry Clay’s "American System" some decades later. The idea Hamilton promoted and Clay developed was simply that the federal government of the United States had to be the instrument of capitalist development.

Hamilton, of course, was not merely a prototypical political economist. Played very effectively by Jesse Pennington, one sees him thrown back into the stream of history as British troops, who had landed on Staten Island in July, 1776, sweep through Brooklyn and Queens and into Manhattan, where Hamilton’s bravery as a commander of an artillery unit in the Battle of Harlem Heights commends him to Washington. Washington’s voice is supplied by Michael Emerson, an Emmy Award winning actor.

The film notes Washington Irving’s appreciation of Hamilton as Washington’s intimate in his "Life of Washington."

This is followed by a brief look at Hamilton’s romance of Philippa Schuyler, the beautiful daughter of General Phillip Schuyler, a major Albany landowner who like Washington had served the British cause in the French and Indian War and was one of Washington’s four Major Generals during the Revolution. The marriage cemented Hamilton’s connections with the leadership of the new republic.

"Nyla" leads the film from the Hamilton-Schuyler romance to another romance which had a far less happy outcome. The film voyages up the Hudson, filmed magnificently in time-lapse photography, to Sleepy Hollow and Major John Andre.

According to "Nyla," Hamilton lamented the fate of Major Andre, hanged for spying after the British Army had hanged Nathan Hale for espionage in the Revolutionary forces’ behalf. "Nyla" says Hamilton’s sympathies were with Andre as a victim of Benedict Arnold’s machinations. Andre would never have undertaken a military mission in civilian clothes, "Nyla" says Hamilton believed, if Arnold had not prevailed upon him to do so.

As for Arnold, Hamilton, if "Nyla" is to be believed, was far more concerned about Arnold’s wife, Peggy Shippen. Miss Shippen was a member of the Philadelphia ‘aristocracy’ whom Arnold met and married after being given command of the Revolutionary Army in that city. Hamilton evidently believed Peggy to have been betrayed by Arnold’s crime although subsequently it appeared that she shared her husband’s sympathies with the Crown.

The film then jumps to Hamilton’s command of a unit in the successful Battle of Yorktown in 1781, which was for all practical purposes the last major military engagement of the Revolutionary War. But it deals only fleetingly with Hamilton’s break with Washington that year for reasons which the film leaves obscure.

Here George Washington comes into focus. "Nyla" meets "Ben" who undertakes to explicate the "Father of the American Nation" with an anecdote about Washington crossing the Delaware on his way to the Battle of Trenton and an explanation of why school children have always been intimidated by the portrait of him made by John Gilbert Stuart which has hung in American schoolrooms for the last two centuries.

To put Washington’s troops and their suffering into a larger context, Bober quickly moves from Valley Forge to scenes from the Korean War and then to the Vietnam Memorial on the Mall in the city of Washington.

Toward the end of this 81-minute film, Hamilton’s role in promoting the creation of a new Constitution for the American Republic which would create a federal government capable of meeting the needs of its citizens is quickly but effectively surveyed.

Hamilton, whose death on the day following his duel with Aaron Burr at Weehawken on July 11, 1804, is touchingly described without a great deal of explanation of the Burr-Hamilton antagonism, receives his due in this film, although it is far from the usual scholastic treatment of the life of a "Founding Father." Instead, it is an enjoyable series of quick visualizations of a man who mattered in a changing set of contexts.

[from ‘Our Story’, the Journal of the New Jersey Council for History Education, Spring 2004]