Alexander Hamilton

Anyone asking who was Alexander Hamilton has to begin far from the mainland colonies he later helped transform. Hamilton was born on January 11, 1757, in Charlestown on the island of Nevis in the British West Indies, though some scholars have argued for a birth year of 1755 based on probate records from his youth ^[1]. His mother, Rachel Faucette, was of French Huguenot and British descent; his father, James Hamilton, was a Scottish trader who abandoned the family when Alexander was a boy. Rachel died of fever in 1768, leaving her sons effectively orphaned on the island of St. Croix ^[1].

The circumstances of his birth shadowed him for life. His parents were never legally married, and political enemies later used the fact against him. Yet the same hardship forced an early education in commerce. As a young teenager Hamilton clerked for the trading firm of Beekman and Cruger in Christiansted, where he handled cargoes, currencies, and correspondence with a competence that startled adults around him ^[2].

His escape came through writing. In 1772 a letter he composed describing a devastating hurricane was published in a local paper and impressed community leaders, who raised money to send the promising clerk to the mainland for schooling ^[1]. He studied briefly at a preparatory academy in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, then enrolled at King's College in New York City, the institution that later became Columbia University ^[3].

Revolution interrupted his studies and made his name. While still a student, Hamilton wrote forceful pamphlets defending the Continental Congress against Loyalist critics, and in 1775 he joined a New York volunteer militia company ^[2]. Early in 1776 he received command of a New York artillery company, which he led in the fighting around New York City and at the battles of Trenton and Princeton ^[1].

His performance caught the attention of General George Washington, who in March 1777 invited the twenty-year-old to join his staff as an aide-de-camp with the rank of lieutenant colonel ^[3]. For four years Hamilton drafted much of Washington's correspondence, handled sensitive negotiations, and absorbed a continental view of the war's problems: a weak Congress, worthless paper money, and an army chronically short of supplies. Those frustrations shaped nearly everything he later proposed as a statesman.

Hamilton pressed constantly for a field command, and in 1781 Washington gave him one. At the siege of Yorktown he led a night bayonet assault that captured a key British redoubt, an action that contributed to the surrender of General Cornwallis and effectively ended major combat in the war ^[1]. After the fighting he taught himself law in a matter of months, passed the New York bar, and opened a practice in Manhattan. He served in the Confederation Congress in 1782 and 1783, where his experience confirmed his conviction that the Articles of Confederation were too feeble to govern a nation ^[2].

Any honest accounting of Alexander Hamilton achievements starts with the Constitution and the fight to ratify it. He attended the Annapolis Convention of 1786 and drafted its call for a stronger national charter, then represented New York at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 ^[3]. Although his own proposals at the convention were more centralizing than what the delegates adopted, he signed the finished document and threw himself into securing its approval. With James Madison and John Jay he wrote The Federalist, a series of 85 essays published in New York newspapers in 1787 and 1788; Hamilton wrote the majority of them, and the collection remains a foundational commentary on American constitutional government ^[4].

In September 1789 President Washington appointed him the first Secretary of the Treasury. Over the next five years Hamilton delivered a sequence of reports to Congress that amounted to an economic blueprint for the new republic. His Report on Public Credit proposed that the federal government pay its Revolutionary debts at full value and assume the war debts of the states, a plan enacted in 1790 after a famous compromise that placed the national capital on the Potomac ^[1]. His plan for a Bank of the United States became law in 1791, and his defense of its constitutionality gave the doctrine of implied powers its classic statement ^[5].

He also designed the revenue system that kept the government solvent, establishing customs collection and, in 1790, the Revenue Cutter Service, a fleet of enforcement vessels that is an ancestor of the modern United States Coast Guard ^[6]. His 1791 Report on Manufactures argued for encouraging American industry, an idea ahead of its moment but influential for generations. Outside government he founded the Bank of New York in 1784 and, in 1801, the New York Evening Post, a newspaper that continues publication today as the New York Post ^[2]. Few careers in American history compressed so much institutional creation into so little time.

In December 1780 Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler, a daughter of Philip Schuyler, a wealthy New York landowner and Continental Army general ^[3]. The marriage connected the self-made immigrant to one of the state's most powerful families and produced eight children. Their eldest son, Philip, was killed in a duel in 1801 at age nineteen, a loss that devastated both parents ^[1].

Hamilton's private conduct produced the first major sex scandal in American national politics. Between 1791 and 1792 he carried on an affair with Maria Reynolds and paid blackmail to her husband. When rumors surfaced suggesting financial corruption at the Treasury, Hamilton published a remarkable 1797 pamphlet admitting the adultery in detail in order to prove that the payments were personal rather than official ^[2]. The confession preserved his reputation for public integrity at heavy private cost.

In 1802 the family moved into the Grange, a federal-style country house Hamilton built in upper Manhattan, the only home he ever owned. The house survives as Hamilton Grange National Memorial ^[6]. Elizabeth outlived her husband by fifty years, working to preserve his papers and helping to found one of New York's first private orphanages.

Hamilton left the Treasury in January 1795 and returned to his law practice, but he never really left politics. He remained the informal leader of the Federalist Party and continued to advise Washington, contributing substantially to the president's Farewell Address of 1796 ^[4]. During the Quasi-War crisis with France in 1798, he was commissioned major general and served as the effective organizer of an expanded army ^[3].

His political judgment grew harsher as the decade closed. He feuded openly with President John Adams, a fellow Federalist, and in 1800 published a scathing pamphlet attacking Adams that helped fracture the party ^[2]. When the presidential election of 1800 ended in an Electoral College tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, Hamilton urged Federalists in the House to prefer Jefferson, whom he opposed on principle, over Burr, whom he considered unprincipled. Jefferson prevailed on the thirty-sixth ballot ^[1].

The rivalry with Burr proved fatal. In 1804 Hamilton worked against Burr's campaign for governor of New York, and reports of insulting remarks led Burr, then the sitting Vice President, to demand satisfaction. The two men met with pistols at Weehawken, New Jersey, on the morning of July 11, 1804, on the same ground where Philip Hamilton had died. Burr's shot struck Hamilton in the abdomen. He was carried back across the Hudson and died the following afternoon, July 12, 1804, in New York City at about age 47 ^[1]. He was buried in the churchyard of Trinity Church in lower Manhattan ^[6].

Among the basic Alexander Hamilton facts that endure, the most visible is the ten dollar bill, which has carried his portrait for roughly a century even though he never served as president ^[5]. The recognition is fitting. The funded national debt, the customs service, the argument for implied constitutional powers, and the precedent of an energetic executive branch all trace back to his Treasury years, and historians generally credit his program with establishing American credit at home and abroad ^[2].

His reputation has swung with the country's politics. Jeffersonians painted him as a monarchist and a friend of moneyed elites, and for long stretches of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries his standing lagged behind that of Jefferson and Madison. Later scholarship, including Forrest McDonald's 1979 study and Ron Chernow's bestselling 2004 biography, restored attention to his nationalism, his opposition to slavery relative to many contemporaries, and his administrative genius ^[1][2].

Popular culture finished the revival. Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical Hamilton, which premiered in 2015 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2016, drew directly on Chernow's book and introduced the immigrant founder to a global audience ^[7]. Any modern Alexander Hamilton biography now competes with a Broadway score, but the underlying story needs no embellishment: an orphaned clerk from Nevis helped write the rules of a new nation and built the financial system that let it survive.