Hamilton's coming out today, so in honour of its release I've compiled some facts that you may or may not already know but are entertaining nonetheless. (I'll try to include my sources for things that aren't easily found on the internet in case you want to look more into it.)
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Hamilton and Jefferson spent four to five days at sea stuck on a boat with each other.
Washington took a fishing trip at sea by order of his doctor to aid his stress. He decided to do the most stress relieving thing possible: bring both Hamilton and Jefferson along. Unfortunately, there are no accounts or letters recounting the experience, so we don't know exactly how it went, but you can imagine.
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Aaron Burr set himself on fire trying to light a candle.
He wrote about it – the excerpt from his diary reads:
"I did go to bed at 10, promising myself a rich sleep. Lay two hours vigil; that cursed one single dish of tea! Note: My bed had undergone a thorough ablution and there were no bugs or insects. Got up and attempted to light candle, but in vain; had flint and matches but only some shreds of punk which would not catch. Recollected a gun which I had on my late journey; filled the pan with powder and was just going to flash it when it occurred that though I had not loaded it someone else might; tried and found in it a very heavy charge! What a fine alarm it would have made if I had fired! Then poured out some powder on a piece of paper, put the shreds of punk with it and after fifty essays succeeded in firing the powder ; but it being dark, had put more powder than intended; my shirt caught fire, the papers on my table caught fire, burnt my fingers to a blister (the left hand, fortunately); it seemed like a general conflagration. Succeeded, however, in lighting my candle and passed the night till 5 this morning in smoking, reading, and writing this."
Honestly, any sentence that begins with 'And then I remembered I had a gun!' is not going to end well. Or it will end very well, depending on who you ask.
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Jefferson pranked everyone with a tomato.
A bit of background first – most Americans thought tomatoes were poisonous (this comes from the fact that tomatoes were eaten on lead plates, so people who consumed the tomatoes would become ill because of the lead, but everyone thought it was the fruit itself).
Jefferson, having been in France, knew that tomatoes weren't actually poisonous, and caused panic when he publicly ate a tomato, sending everyone rushing for doctors.
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I'm not going to go into depth for this one, for obvious reasons, but James Madison 'accidentally' bought prostitutes. You can look it up for more info.
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Washington played with utensils at dinner.
Instead of talking to everyone else at dinnertime, Washington would use his knife and fork and drumsticks and played music on the table (according to Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow).
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Jefferson owned a murderous sheep.
Jefferson had a bunch of animals at Monticello (FYI, that's "whatever the hell he does in Monticello". He breeds sheep.) and people started sending him sheep as gifts, leading to him having a flock of about forty sheep on the square in front of the President's House. Unfortunately, one of the rams was extremely bad-tempered, and attacked everyone who tried to walk across the square. A man (William Keough) wrote Jefferson saying that he "was attacked and severely wounded and bruised by your excellency's ram—of which [I] lay ill for five or six weeks," not to mention the six-year-old boy the ram KILLED, but Jefferson only got rid of it when it killed another sheep.
(Not as much of interest, but Jefferson also had a mockingbird called Dick.)
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One of John Adams' dogs was called Satan.
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Here's another excerpt from Burr's diary:
"Have spent fourteen shillings and sixpence magnificently; i.e., like an ass."
For more context, he spent it on dates and coconuts.
