ABSTRACT

Alexander Hamilton's understanding of national credit was shaped by his status as the illegitimate son of a Caribbean merchant. Hamilton highlights the irony that Hamilton, in his efforts to build public credit, worked to create the very kind of government that colonists had objected to under British rule. Hamilton's encouragement of enterprise no doubt stemmed from his own experience as a poor immigrant, but as many historians have observed, his economic policies favored large-scale manufacturing and necessarily excluded farmers, artisans, and small-scale producers. Nevertheless, the story of Hamilton's rise from lowly origins in Miranda's musical gives credence to the American experiment, even as it acknowledges the injustices of slavery and the restricted rights of women. Hamilton's story of American opportunity is self-consciously circumscribed not simply by the hero's limited vision of enterprise but also by the different modes of narrative at work in the musical.