Loser Submissive Omega Take: Washington Was A Unifying, Noble, Non-partisan Leader To His Very Last Breath.

Loser submissive omega take: Washington was a unifying, noble, non-partisan leader to his very last breath.

Chad sigma male take: Like most people, Washington did not live up to his ideals and by the end of his life was a disgruntled, visibly Federalist peepaw shaking his cane in the air because he didn't like the state of the country or the Democratic Republicans people running it. Joanne Freeman did this great impression of late-life Washington clenching his fist going "We gotta get Federalists into the Virginian legislature" and it's canon in my book. The man learned that James Madison was backing James Monroe for Governor of Virginia a literal day before his death and got so pissed that his secretary Tobias Lear went "pls chill".

He requested me to read to him the debates of the Virginia Assembly on the election of a Senator and a Governor; and on hearing Mr Madison’s observations respecting Mr Monroe, he appeared much affected and spoke with some degree of asperity on the subject; which I endeavoured to moderate, as I always did on such occasions. the "as I always did on such occasions" makes me think that this wasn't a one-time thing and washington frequently went on rants about monroe and the jeffersonians.

omfg the lack of correspondence insanity is so real. this is me with so many people - nicholas, some of the aide de camps like meade, and eliza. my literal library of alexandria.

if i had a time machine i would go back and plead "i get that y'all are owed autonomy and privacy as human beings but pls maybe you could take some scans of your letters and only send them to me, i promise i won't share them with anyone else :("

also: have i told you how interested and hyped i am about the american icarus? so excited that someone's working on a historically-based work from alex's pov! (alex & eliza claims to be "historically accurate" and just ended up traumatizing me so i'm not taking anyone's word for it lol)

nicholas fish is my daily reminder that letters aren't everything and we lack a whole bunch of context and interactions. he had a lifelong friendship with hamilton we don't know much about due to lack of correspondence (fish might've burned them for privacy, especially since he and morris got their hands on ham's papers after his death, i believe).

but i think it must have been a steady and deep 30 yr long friendship: they were college frat bros together (debate club actually but i bet they acted like frat bros), members of the hearts of oak in the 1770s - and he was later involved in hamfamily matters, referenced at times in letters between ham and betsey. he was even the second for a potential duel between ham and nicholson in 1795.

and of course, his son born in 1808 was named hamilton fish.

unfortunately i find the name "hamilton fish" hilarious, moreso because hamilton fish named his son hamilton fish II, who named his son hamilton fish III, who named his son hamilton fish IV. somebody named hamilton fish IV was walking around on this earth up to 1996.

i just get all emotional when i think about how family names often reflect close loved ones. even if the names end up being ridiculous. hamilton lasting in the fish family names until the literal 1990s, laurens slipping into the hamilton family names.

also, for my hamilton musical enthusiasts: the cellist for the west end run of hamilton was chris fish, a direct discendant of nicholas fish!

my journey across time into 2000s livejournal has enlightened me to the fact that hamilton has always been the whore of the amrev community because why was almost every single slash fic jamilton lams hamburr, sometimes hamliza & whamilton?

My body is but a #the aides de camp temple.

betsey to eliza holly and the grandkids

#save elizabeth schuyler hamilton from male biographers 2024

Just got pissed off so bad. I'm in the middle of reading Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: A Study in Character, which presents an intriguing argument that Burr deserves to be put back into the Founding Father Pantheon, so to speak. The author doesn't shy away from hitting hard against the idea that Jeff & Ham were morally superior to Burr, and I was on board! Ready to go!

But then. During the discussion of the women in each of their lives, the author decides the best way to further promote Burr's attitude towards women compared to Jefferson and Hamilton is to disparage Martha Jefferson & Elizabeth Hamilton?

On Martha Jefferson:

Martha Wayles Skelton had been a widow, and none of Jefferson's biographers, even the resourceful Fawn Brodie, has been able to tell us much about her—from the solitary letter remaining to us in her hand or the accounts of their contemporaries—beyond the general impression that she was handsome, musical, and frail.

On Elizabeth Hamilton:

Hamilton's Elizabeth was an heiress, the daughter of an upstate squire, Philip Schuyler, with Livingston and van Rensselaer connections. She was plain, straightforward, loyal, and neurasthenic, endured his flagrant and frequent infidelities, and lived to the brink of the Civil War.

I'm sorry, I don't know enough about Martha J. to protest to her characterization, but I think I can say something about Eliza. Plain? Neurasthenic? And once again, annoyed at the lack of citation or evidence for flagrant and frequent infidelities - but putting that aside, even if it were true, I don't like how her staying in her marriage is subtly implied to be some failure or at least less interesting than a woman who didn't "endure" them. There's a lack of consideration of both her own strength & the societal circumstances of that time that would have influenced her actions.

On Theodosia:

Her character emerges from their large and fervent correspondence. She was confident, well connected, well read, beautiful even after a burn scarred her face, witty, worldly, and full of expectations of him.

Okay. The author saw the point and it sailed over his head. "From their large and fervent correspondence" is key here. Like I said earlier, I don't know enough about Martha Jefferson, but I bet that "handsome, musical, frail" is probably not an all-encompassing picture of her. The similarity between her and Eliza? We don't have the letters that they wrote to their husbands. It's unfair to judge Theodosia (don't get me wrong! she was well read and intelligent, that's not what i'm denying) from her correspondence with Burr, but then not acknowledge that the lack of that perspective would impact how we view the other two women.

And to top it all off:

Unlike Jefferson's and Hamilton's, Burr's character was molded by the love of a woman of immense force and intelligence.

Neither Hamilton nor Jefferson married a woman who evidenced such force of character and independence of view.

Jesus Christ. There's plenty to criticize about Jefferson & Hamilton, and I really wanted to see a well-reasoned argument about Burr's character and whatnot but this lacks nuance and is unnecessarily dismissive. It pisses me off that a book that seems determined to break down the idolized version of Hamilton, somehow ends up using his wife to further their angle, just like biased Hamiltonian biographies. In both cases, Eliza is the plain, unintelligent, steadfast wife. For sympathetic authors like Chernow, that's somehow justification for the Reynolds affair. For Roger G. Kennedy, that's used in an argument against her husband. "Let's talk attitude towards women! Hamilton & Jefferson didn't have intellectual wives! Point for Burr!"

I don't know nearly enough about Martha Jefferson to say anything of merit, but really?

To give credit where credit is due, I think Kennedy is trying to make the point here that Theodosia Bartow Burr was a major influence on Burr, as "Burr's character blossomed in the radiance of his wife and mentor". He also goes on to talk about various genuine reasons why Burr's attitude towards women is noteworthy. But I still don't like the way he dismissed the other two women as what? Not smart enough to help their husbands' characters blossom? Maybe there's merit to this book outside of this one section, The Women, but right now I'm not in the mood. Am I being dramatic? Idk.