‘We plant seeds in the South, we create?’ Keep ranting, we know who’s really doing the planting.” “Hey neighbor, your debts are paid because you don’t pay for labor. “A civics lesson from a slaver,” Hamilton seethes in the show. Hamilton leans into this fact when Alexander Hamilton, played in the new Disney+ movie by Miranda himself, mocks Jefferson (Daveed Diggs) for his hypocrisies in a rap battle. Even on his deathbed, Jefferson freed just five slaves, relatives all to his “mistress” (if such a word is fair), Sally Hemings.

Despite being one of the United States’ brightest thinkers about the rights of men, Jefferson failed time and again throughout his life to truly fight to end slavery-or free the hundreds of people he kept as possessions at Monticello. While the actual incident does not technically occur in the musical’s dizzying amount of narrative events, the tour de force work of art still uses its trenchant blending of historical fact and hip hop melodies to convey much the same idea: Jefferson was a demonstrable hypocrite on the issue of slavery. It is moments of moral standing like this, even if Hamilton hid his name under a pseudonym, that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton hangs its hat on. In this first of 25 essays, Hamilton wrote under the nom de plume of Phocion about the many hypocrisies of Jefferson, depicting the supposed philosopher as a moral and intellectual fraud, and something worse: a slave owner who knew slavery was evil but still took advantage, perhaps even of a sexual nature, of the Black people he kept in bondage. By this point in early United States history, George Washington had announced his retirement, refusing to seek a third term as president, and the race of self-styled great men hoping to take his place was on… with none more loathsome to Hamilton than Jefferson, the loquacious, if remote, thinker on a hill in Virginia.

It was mid-October 1796 when Alexander Hamilton released the first in a string of scathing essays about political opponent Thomas Jefferson.

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