Hamilton Musical(based on Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow)

The new smash hit musical Hamilton, written by and starring Lin-Manuel Miranda, centers on the life of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, based on his in-depth biography by Ron Chernow. This story is great grounds for the topic of the American Dream because it is focusing one of the men who built America, and thus the American Dream. The musical starts with a summary of Hamilton’s life, focusing on his tumultuous childhood as an orphan who was able to get himself to America through his writing. This is a central ideal with the American Dream; that even though someone may be in a rough situation, they are able to get to the top through hard work and sacrifice. However, Hamilton’s getting to America was just the beginning of his uphill climb in creating a new nation. While fighting in the Revolutionary War, Hamilton learns that his wife Eliza is pregnant with their first child. After learning this fact, the stakes of the war increased greatly. Not only did he have a nation to build for the entire population of colonists living in America at the time, but much more importantly he now had a nation to build for his own family, something he had never had before. In one song centered in the Battle of Yorktown, the battle that virtually ended the fighting of the war, Hamilton sings “gotta start a new nation, gotta meet my son”. This line enforces a central idea of the American Dream; that all of the trials and tribulations we go through are so that our children will have a better life than we did. Another song in the musical titled “Dear Theodosia”, song by both Hamilton and Aaron Burr, focuses on this idea. Though you would expect a musical based on a Founding Father to only have a positive reflection on the building of America and the American Dream, the Dream is questioned in this story. Even during and after all of Hamilton’s perseverance and hard work in building an entire nation, he still faces extremely tough times. Hamilton’s eldest son, Philip, dies the exact way that Hamilton will die three years later. After the death of his first child, Hamilton is never the same person and his life ends shortly after. Another event that questions the American Dream in Hamilton is Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reynolds that marked the nation’s first sex scandal. Just like Willy Loman’s affair in Death of a Salesman, Hamilton’s affair causes his family to be unlike the vision of the standard family that the American Dream calls on. As seen in a lot of literature, an affair can shatter the American Dream, and it does in Hamilton’s case. Though Hamilton and Eliza stay together, there is no longer the illusion of a perfect family. In the musical Hamilton, the American Dream is helped built by the titular character himself, and then questioned because of his life events.