“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.