Americans have seen Alexander Hamilton as both a villain and, thanks to his recent appearance on Broadway, a folk hero. The reality, says Yale University’s Joanne Freeman, is that Hamilton was deeply suspicious of republican forms of government, didn’t trust the masses, was a “law and order extremist,” greatly admired the British constitutional monarchy, and, according to Thomas Jefferson, described the US Constitution as “a shilly-shally thing of mere milk and water, which could not last and was only a step to something better.”

Freeman examines these views and others—that presidents and senators should serve for life, for example—in the context of the early republic as Americans created the office of the presidency.

“There was no other president in the modern world at that time,” Freeman reminds us. Senators had to figure out whether to sit or stand when President Washington entered the room. Washington himself had to decide how he should behave in his new role. And even the title “president” elicited controversy: John Adams noted, with evident distress, that heads of cricket clubs were called presidents.

The lecture, and subsequent conversation, runs 90 minutes.

The Miller Center's director of Presidential Studies, Barbara Perry, introduces the program and the Center's Brian Balogh, who welcomes Freeman as a new member of the Backstory podcast team, serves as interlocutor and moderator.