Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton was born in Charlestown on the Caribbean island of Nevis, probably in 1757 (some evidence points to 1755). His parents were not married, his father left the family, and his mother died when he was a boy. As a clerk for a trading firm in the islands — work that brought him into contact with the brutal economy of sugar and slavery — he impressed local patrons, who raised money to send him to North America. He attended an academy in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, in 1772 and then King’s College (now Columbia University) in New York.

When the Revolution began, Hamilton became captain of an artillery company. In March 1777 Washington made him an aide-de-camp, and for four years he handled much of the commander’s correspondence. He married Elizabeth Schuyler, daughter of a powerful New York family, in 1780, and led an infantry assault at Yorktown in 1781.

After the war, admitted to the bar in July 1782 under a special allowance for veterans, he opened a law office on Wall Street, argued cases before New York’s highest court and later the U.S. Supreme Court, and became one of the strongest voices for a more powerful national government. He drafted the report of the 1786 Annapolis meeting that called for the Constitutional Convention, served as a New York delegate, and then threw himself into ratification — recruiting James Madison and John Jay and writing more than half of the Federalist Papers.

Appointed the first secretary of the Treasury in 1789, Hamilton faced a government burdened by the debt of the Revolutionary War. He insisted on repaying it in full — calling it “the price of liberty” — and persuaded Congress to have the federal government assume the states’ war debts as well. He built a revenue system of customs duties and excise taxes and proposed the First Bank of the United States, chartered in 1791. His reports on public credit and manufactures envisioned a diversified commercial economy backed by an active federal government. He lost one battle to Jefferson — over whether the new Mint belonged in the Treasury — and in 1795, his office paying only $3,500 a year, he resigned to return to his law practice, while continuing to advise Washington.

Hamilton believed that liberty required a government strong enough to defend the nation, enforce its laws, and command the confidence of creditors and investors. He read the Constitution’s grant of power broadly, arguing that the “necessary and proper” clause allowed Congress to create a bank — an argument the Supreme Court later adopted in McCulloch v. Maryland. He distrusted popular passions, favored close ties with Britain, and saw manufacturing and finance, not only farming, as the future of the American economy.

Hamilton’s financial program enriched speculators who had bought up war bonds cheaply, and his opponents, led by Jefferson and Madison, accused him of favoring Northern merchants and creating a corrupt alliance between government and money. Their conflict helped give birth to the first political parties. A federal excise on whiskey that he championed provoked the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania.

On slavery, Hamilton was a founder of the New York Manumission Society in the 1780s, which advocated gradual abolition in the state. He also married into one of New York’s largest slaveholding families, and historians continue to examine how closely his own household and business dealings were tied to slavery.

His temper and pen made enemies. A 1797 scandal over an affair forced him to publish a confession, and his attacks on fellow Federalist John Adams split their party in 1800. His long feud with Aaron Burr ended in the duel that killed him.

In 1802 Hamilton finished The Grange, a country house on a 32-acre estate in upper Manhattan, but he enjoyed it only two years. At a dinner in Albany in 1804 he called Aaron Burr a dangerous man who ought not to be trusted with the reins of government; the remark was repeated in the press, and the two men’s long feud ended in a duel at Weehawken, New Jersey, on July 11. Burr mortally wounded him, and Hamilton died in New York City the next day; his widow, Elizabeth, lived at The Grange for thirty more years. Long overshadowed by Jefferson in popular memory, he is now widely seen as the founder who did most to design the machinery of the federal government — the Treasury, national credit, and a broad reading of federal power — and his life story as an immigrant and self-made man has made him newly famous in the twenty-first century.