Hamilton mistrusted the political capacities of the common people and insisted on deference to elites. In a speech delivered at the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton praised the hierarchical principles of the British political system. He argued, for example, that the new American president and senators should serve for life. Many of the Convention participants feared the “excess of democracy,” but Hamilton went much further. He wanted to bring an elective monarchy and restore non-titled aristocracy to America. “The people are turbulent and changing,” he declared. “They seldom judge or determine right.” They must be ruled by “landholders, merchants and men of the learned professions,” whose experience and wisdom “travel beyond the circle” of their neighbors. For America to become an enduring republic, Hamilton argued, it had to insulate rulers and the economy as much as possible from the jealous multitude.

One of the musical’s most memorable scenes portrays Hamilton’s debate with Thomas Jefferson over the establishment of a national bank. What it doesn’t convey is Jefferson’s populist resistance to an economic plan that, in his view, supported the rule of commercial oligarchs who manipulated credit and currency at the expense of debtors and yeoman farmers. Instead, Mr. Miranda stages a confrontation between a hypocritical republican slave owner and an abolitionist visionary (“A civics lesson from a slaver,” a scoffing Hamilton says in response to Jefferson. “Hey, neighbor, your debts are paid ’cause you don’t pay for labor”) that conceals as much as it reveals.

Hamilton’s opposition to slavery — reflected, for example, in his being a founder of New York’s Manumission Society — was not central to his political vision. The musical’s suggestion that had he not been killed in the duel with Aaron Burr, Hamilton would have gone on to play an important role in the abolitionist struggle is fantasy. Even the lionization of Hamilton as the exemplar of America’s immigrant ideal neglects his ultimate endorsement of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which made it harder for immigrants to become citizens while allowing their deportation if they were suspected of disloyalty (he urged exceptions, though, for some foreign merchants and those “whose demeanor among us has been unexceptionable”). Jefferson led the opposition to this policy, and his victory in the presidential election of 1800 brought most of its provisions to an end.

Our point is not that Mr. Miranda should have offered a more balanced portrayal of Hamilton. But the aspect of Hamilton’s life he celebrates — the self-making entrepreneurialism of the American dream — cannot be fully understood without including, indeed without highlighting, Hamilton’s insistent and emphatic inegalitarianism. Hamilton and his contemporaries understood these seemingly contradictory positions as two sides of the same coin. Ignoring one side, as Mr. Miranda has done, obscures their connection both then and now.