The eponymous hero of Hamilton, played by Miranda, is an orphan “son of a whore,” who, by dint of hard work and determination, becomes a right-hand man to George Washington, the driving force behind the Constitutional Convention, and the creator of the financial system that runs America today. He’s the hero of the show, and though he may be less famous that the other Founding Fathers (and an adulterer to boot), he has the same rags-to-riches story as Oliver Twist. The audience roots for him as he earnestly raps about the principles he believes in, while surrounded by less honest men.

Hamilton is cast without regard to race—none of the actors who play Aaron Burr, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson are white—which makes it easier to forget that this is a retelling of history. It seems more a drama about the petty rivalries boys experience at school—the setting, in this case, being the American colonies. But the boy who has the biggest rivalry with Hamilton, in Miranda’s telling, isn’t Aaron Burr, played brilliantly by Leslie Odom, Jr., who serves as a sympathetic narrator. Instead, it’s Thomas Jefferson, who’s played by Daveed Diggs. In Miranda’s telling, Jefferson is a well-dressed dandy who avoided fighting in the war and—for a man who wrote the phrase “all men are created equal”—holds hypocritical positions about slave ownership and women’s rights.

“Hey neighbor. Your debts are paid because you don’t pay for labor,” Hamilton snaps at Jefferson during one of their two cabinet face-offs. Arguments about war in France and national debt are structured as rap battles between Hamilton and Jefferson, complete with ribald insults and, in one case, the dropping of a mic. That these are presented as verbal duels make the stakes seem higher, and it’s significant that they pit Hamilton against Jefferson, not against any other Founding Fathers. Their mutual animosity is on full display.​

If Alexander Hamilton represents everything currently in the zeitgeist—he’s an immigrant, he’s an orphan, he’s a self-made man, he doesn’t want the country to get into foreign wars—Jefferson represents everything that’s out-of-fashion. He’s a slave-owning aristocrat whose father was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses and who left him two-thirds of his estate, including 60 slaves, 25 horses, and 7,500 acres of land. Despite promises to free his 175 slaves upon his death, Jefferson only freed five—those related to his mistress Sally Hemings.

Popular history may see Jefferson as the man of the people and Hamilton as the creator of Wall Street and a monarchist. But in the musical (and Chernow’s book), the opposite is true. If Hamilton is the 99 percent, Jefferson is, in the show at least, the one percent. If Hamilton is Barack Obama (who told Jon Stewart he thought the show was “phenomenal”), Jefferson is Mitt Romney.