Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton. (Wikipedia)

My first impressions of Hamilton, now that I—and the rest of America—have finally seen it:

(1) An unavoidable irony: only the well-to-do can afford tickets to see a Broadway show about a penniless immigrant overcoming the odds.

(2) Assigning the role of narrator to Aaron Burr was a stroke of genius. And Leslie Odom Jr. was great in the role.

(3) Miranda did a fantastic job of distilling the complex political crises of the 18th century down to their essentials. As someone writing a story set in the 1790s, I know just how hard this task is. There’s not a single throwaway line in Hamilton. 

(4) Every jibe directed toward that hypocrite Thomas Jefferson made me cheer. Or giggle. Or cheer and giggle. My favorite: “He doesn’t have a plan, he just hates mine.” (As my husband says, plan beats no plan, every time.)

My sister recently reminded me that, as an eighth grader, I dared to ask a Monticello tour guide about Sally Hemings. This was before the DNA testing, and I received a not-so-subtle reprimand from the tour guide for being a smart-aleck.

Jefferson. Not a fan.

(5) I had forgotten about Martha Washington naming her feral tomcat after Hamilton. Snort.

(6) My one major critique of Hamilton (and it’s a big one): the story does a poor job of setting up Eliza and Hamilton’s relationship. For me, this undermined both Eliza’s character as well as the story pay-off and Eliza’s finale. If we in the audience don’t know what they had in the beginning, then we don’t experience catharsis as strongly as we ought when their marriage is threatened, nor when they reconcile.

How does the set-up fall short? 

The courtship sequence leans wholly on Eliza’s “Helpless.” We don’t see Hamilton falling in love with her, with him as the point-of-view character. The historical Hamilton was smitten with Eliza Schuyler to the point of distraction, as letters written by his fellow officers attest. The musical, however, gives the impression that Hamilton’s affection for Eliza didn’t match hers for him, which just… doesn’t work in a love story. Not having his viewpoint onstage was a huge missed opportunity. 

This weakness is compounded by the fact that Miranda pushed aside most of the historical ambiguity regarding Angelica and transformed her into a selfless martyr type, à la Éponine in Les Misérables. Angelica’s powerful story overshadows Eliza’s at Eliza’s expense. Angelica is intelligent and sympathetic; Eliza comes across as an uninteresting nag. (Though, perhaps this is apropos: Angelica overshadowed Eliza in real life, too.) If we keep the Angelica-as-martyr trope, then it’s absolutely essential to build up Eliza’s character and to make Hamilton’s love for Eliza more explicit, right at the beginning.

Did the historical Angelica love her brother-in-law? Yes. Did she suppress her love for her sister’s sake? Yes, as far as we know. Did she and Hamilton flirt? Oh, yeah. Was Angelica his intellectual interlocutor? Yes, though Eliza played her part in helping him in his work, too. But Angelica had been married two years when Hamilton met the Schuyler sisters. Eliza was never a second choice because marrying Angelica was never an option. 

Perhaps Miranda doesn’t write a lot of love stories? And therefore didn’t have a handle on love story genre conventions? Someone more familiar with his work might know.

(7) That said, Philip’s death made me tear up. That part worked for me.

(8) The Maria Reynolds affair continues to interest me as a study in human weakness.

(9) I’m curious what people think about Hamilton in light of our current debate on race. Hamilton is triumphalist about both race and America. Does it stand up to critique?

(10) I loved the Broadway references. “I am the very model of a modern major-general…”

(11) My New Yorker husband and I both enjoyed the jabs at New Jersey.

and lastly,

(12) King George III. I laughed so hard. Da-da-da-da-da…!!

One of my characters in my work-in-progress is an excellent cook. She was taught by the daughter of a French Huguenot refugee whose grandfather had been a pastry chef in Lyons. My character’s cooking is a blend of French, British, and American cuisine, with a preference for anything involving pastry.

Of course, cooking has evolved over time. While I always do a quick internet search to check the history of any particular dish before including it in my story, it's often easier to pick dishes from period cookbooks. The two I find myself returning to again and again are American Cookery by Amelia Simmons and The Modern Cook by Vincent La Chapelle.

And thanks to the wonders of Google Books, facsimiles of these books are not only available online for free, but also searchable. If historical cooking interests you, check them out!

Speaking of Custom House...

This online exhibit from the National Archives about early 19th century merchant shipping and its paper trail is amazing. I've referred to it again and again as I continue with Book Two revisions.

From the exhibit's introduction:

This exhibit features early federal records that document the first voyage made by the Ship Mount Vernon of Salem, Massachusetts in 1803. At that time, tall ships from Salem, like the Ship Mount Vernon, traveled around the world exporting and importing cargoes from the West and the East, including exotic locations such as Canton and Sumatra. These documents, and the information recorded on them, are typical examples of records for thousands of American ships of that time. They are also documents that were an integral part of the daily life of seamen, merchants, and officials.

All of the documents in this exhibit are from records created by officials of the Salem and Beverly Customs District for keeping track of American vessels, the cargoes that they carried, and most importantly, to account for the import and tonnage taxes that were the main source of federal revenue in those early days of the Republic.

As one of my characters says, "Paperwork is Custom House's raison d'être." While I would never bore my readers with the intricate details of said paperwork (snooze...), it's always fun to see historic documents and artifacts. If you have a few spare minutes, head over to the National Archives site and take a look!

Remember that little kerfuffle we call the American Revolutionary War?

Remember what started it all?

Taxes.

Detail of Paul Revere's engraving of the Boston Massacre, 1770; Custom House visible at right. (Public Domain)

In my current work-in-progress, the male lead character is offered a job as a government agent, gathering intelligence for the President's office. France declared war on England in 1793 and America was trying to stay out of their fight. American ports need to be watched, my character is told (we have historical evidence of this), and between his foreign language skills and experience as a merchant sailor, he's a perfect candidate for the job.

(Long story short: Washington had a black ops budget. Technically the funds were allocated for overseas operations and their incident expenses, but it's not too much of a fictional stretch to include domestic operations among those incident expenses.)

It's an intriguing offer. But for my character, there's one major drawback: the cover job. Specifically, working as a tidewaiter (inspector) at Boston Custom House.

The idea of being a tax collector doesn't thrill him, at all.

Tell me how you really feel about paying taxes: A depiction of the tarring and feathering of (British) Commissioner of Customs John Malcolm, a Loyalist, by five Patriots on 5 January 1774 under the Liberty Tree in Boston, Massachusetts. (Public Domain)

Taxes: America's favorite controversial topic. This is no less true today than in 1789, when the First United States Congress was faced with the task of figuring out how to raise revenue without ticking everyone off. 

Congress' solution was the Tariff Act of 1789, which established duties (taxes) on imported goods into the United States, and the subsequent Collection Act of 1789, which established the United States Customs Service and designated American ports of entry. Every inbound ship, American or foreign, was required to stop at the nearest port, undergo inspection, pay duties, and clear papers before going on its merry way.

For years, tariffs were the main source of revenue for the federal government - only in 1861, with the Civil War as an excuse, did Congress dare to impose an individual income tax. Tariffs, by comparison, were far less intrusive.

Every customhouse was run by a Collector of Customs. He was assisted by a naval officer (in the case of largest ports), who acted as deputy collector and supervised the clerical staff, and a surveyor, who measured ships and tonnage and supervised ground operations and inspection staff. Customs officers received their appointments from President Washington and answered to Alexander Hamilton, the Secretary of the Treasury. 

In order to make the idea of paying tariffs more palatable for the general public, the first customs officers were carefully chosen, well-respected Patriots, many of them war heroes. On the flip side, in order to attract good candidates, the Department of the Treasury paid its customhouse officers a percentage of incoming revenue, making the positions highly lucrative, especially for those officers assigned to the largest ports, such as Boston, where my story is set.

We know who ran Boston Custom House in 1793. And they weren't nobodies, either! My character may be fictional, but his employers were influential men. For a writer, this is where things get fun: my job is to blend fact and fiction, playing each off each other and seeing what kind of story develops.

So who is my character working for?

Benjamin Lincoln, Collector of Customs

General Benjamin Lincoln by Charles Wilson Peale. (Public Domain.)

Benjamin Lincoln served in the Provincial Congress and then as a major general for the Continental Army. As Washington's second-in-command at Yorktown, Lincoln was the man who formally accepted Cornwallis' sword of surrender. Afterwards, he served as Secretary of War for the Confederation government and led the troops that put down Shay's Rebellion. He was the second Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts. General Lincoln was then appointed Boston's first Collector of Customs in 1789, a post he held until 1809, the year before his death.

One would be hard-pressed to find a more respectable man to fill the position of Collector of Customs. With General Lincoln at the helm of Custom House, paying taxes felt almost patriotic.

James Lovell, Naval Officer

James Lovell was the son of the headmaster of Boston Latin School. After his graduation from Harvard, Lovell joined his father and served as an instructor. In 1771 he gave the first speech commemorating the Boston Massacre, making him a well-known Patriot, while his father was an ardent Loyalist.

In 1775, Lovell was arrested by the British for spying and was released in 1776 in exchange for Colonel Philip Skene. Afterwards he took his seat in the Continental Congress, where he served on the Committee of Foreign Correspondence and of Secret Correspondence, and as such was responsible for creating and implementing cyphers for the country.

So the real-life Lovell was involved in intelligence work, a fact which ought to dovetail nicely into my story, except for one itty, bitty little detail:

The chances of President Washington having actually trusted the man are slim to none.

Admittedly, this is conjecture on my part, but justified, I think. During the war, Lovell was a vocal critic of George Washington and an open supporter of General Horatio Gates. He took Gates' side in his quarrel with General Philip Schuyler (Hamilton's future father-in-law) and then (along with the Adamses) supported Gates in his attempt to usurp command of the Continental Army from Washington. Lovell was among those encouraging Gates to send his reports directly Congress instead of reporting to Washington, his commanding officer.

Surely Washington would remember a little detail like that.

But that's not all! Lovell found himself embroiled in personal scandal on more than one occasion. The most notorious was his... indiscreet flirtation? failed attempt at something more?... with Abigail Adams. Lovell and the Adamses were friends, and Lovell sent her some suggestive letters while her husband was overseas as commissioner to France. (Barking up the wrong tree, methinks.) Between the letters and an accusation that he was having an affair with his landlady, Lovell resigned from Congress in 1782 and returned home to Boston under a cloud.

Afterwards, Lovell served as collector of taxes and customs officer for the state of Massachusetts. His appointment as naval officer in 1789 was, in effect, a continuation of the job he was already doing, except that Custom House was now under the auspices of the federal government instead of the state. I find it notable that Lovell was not offered the job of Collector of Customs, despite being far more qualified for the position than Benjamin Lincoln, who had neither the experience nor education. Washington and Hamilton didn't fire Lovell, but they also didn't promote him.

What I'm going to do with all of this in later books in the series, I have no idea. I have a draft of the Book Two but haven't yet incorporated Lovell into it, for the simple reason that I didn't know of his existence until a month ago, when I found this document. Let the revision fun begin!

Thomas Melvill, Surveyor

Thomas Melvill (or Melville) was a cool cat, and I've taken the liberty of making him even cooler. As surveyor of Custom House, he oversaw all tidewaiters, weighers, and gaugers, and would be my character’s direct supervisor. But Melvill's supervisory role extends beyond his Custom House duties...

Melvill was a Son of Liberty and a close friend of Sam Adams. He was present at the Boston Tea Party. (He even came away with tea leaves stuck in his shoes, which he saved as a souvenir.) During the war he was an officer in the army and served in the Rhode Island campaigns.

After the war Melvill was appointed to Custom House as surveyor and eventually replaced Lovell as naval officer. He was also a fireward, a founder of Massachusetts General Hospital, and a member of the Massachusetts General Assembly. But his biggest claim to fame is being the paternal grandfather of Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick.

Major Melvill was a well-known figure in Boston, a robust, energetic, and charitable man, most especially loved by his fellow firefighters, and whose death was publicly mourned and eulogized for weeks in both poetry and prose.

Finally, for the purpose of my story, Melvill is also one of Washington's agents. Because... why not? He's just the kind of man who would be an agent, on top of everything else.

And now... time to go hunt down some bad guys!

"Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure than they have it now, They may change their Rulers and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty. They will only exchange Tyrants and Tyrannies."

John Adams, Letter to Zabdiel Adams, 21 June 1776.