Here’s what I think you know about Alexander Hamilton: he was shot in a duel with Aaron Burr (who you don’t know much about, either). If you’re really good, you know that he’s on U.S. money (the ten-dollar bill) because he had something to do with creating the monetary system. Other than that, you’re in the dark. If I’m wrong, you know your history a lot better than I do. Or a lot better than I did, because thanks to the new book The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton, I’m in the know. A little more than I’d like to be, if you want to know the truth.

The Many Faces is not a biography of Alexander Hamilton, but rather a collection of essays from highly intellectual historians. Each has a theme related to some aspect of Hamilton's public life. At times the essays cover topics with a wide-angle lens, but more often they get into the minutiae that only a true scholar could appreciate. This is not necessarily the book’s fault, but more likely my fault for choosing a book that’s a little smarter than I am. (When I saw one essayist use the word “prolegomena,“ I knew I was in over my head. Worse, I still haven’t looked up that word to see what it means. Something to do with Legos maybe?)

The majority of the essays explore in one way or another the rivalry between the Federalists, which was simply another word for Hamilton in the minds of his enemies, and the Republicans, who were led to a great extent by Thomas Jefferson. What the split amounted to was that the Republicans believed Hamilton, as Secretary of the Treasury to George Washington, wanted to simply recreate a monarchy like that of England in the United States, while Republicans argued that the whole point of the revolution had been to break away from England’s ways and give the people a greater voice. They saw Hamilton as the symbol of everything they didn’t want, and assembled a party to combat his philosophies (or at least what they believed the Federalist philosophies were). This rift was the start of the two-party system that we all criticize each election season and yet have never worked very hard to change for the past 230-plus years.