Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton was an American military officer, statesman, and Founding Father who served as the first U.S. secretary of the treasury from 1789 to 1795 under the presidency of George Washington. He also founded America's first political party, the Federalist Party, in 1791.
Born out of wedlock in Charlestown, Nevis, Hamilton was orphaned as a child and taken in by a prosperous merchant. He was given a scholarship and pursued his education at King's College in New York City where, despite his young age, he was an anonymous but prolific and widely read pamphleteer and advocate for the American Revolution. He then served as an artillery officer in the American Revolutionary War, where he saw military action against the British Army in the New York and New Jersey campaign, served for four years as aide-de-camp to Continental Army commander in chief George Washington, and fought under Washington's command in the war's climactic battle, the Siege of Yorktown, which secured American victory in the war and with it the independence of the United States.
After the Revolutionary War, Hamilton served as a delegate from New York to the Congress of the Confederation in Philadelphia. He resigned to practice law and founded the Bank of New York. In 1786, Hamilton led the Annapolis Convention, which sought to strengthen the power of the loose confederation of independent states under the limited authorities granted the Congress by the Articles of Confederation. The following year he was a delegate to the Philadelphia Convention, which drafted the U.S. Constitution creating a more centralized federal national government. He then authored 51 of the 85 installments of The Federalist Papers, which proved persuasive in securing its ratification by the states.
As a trusted member of President Washington's first cabinet, Hamilton served as the first U.S. secretary of the treasury. He envisioned a central government led by an energetic executive, a strong national defense, and a more diversified economy with significantly expanded industry. He successfully argued that the implied powers of the U.S. Constitution provided the legal basis to create the First Bank of the United States, and assume the states' war debts, which was funded by a tariff on imports and a whiskey tax. Hamilton opposed American entanglement with the succession of unstable French Revolutionary governments. In 1790, he persuaded the U.S. Congress to establish the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service to protect American shipping. In 1793, he advocated in support of the Jay Treaty under which the U.S. resumed friendly trade relations with the British Empire. Hamilton's views became the basis for the Federalist Party, which was opposed by the Democratic-Republican Party, led by Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton and other Federalists supported the Haitian Revolution, and Hamilton helped draft Haiti's constitution in 1801.
After resigning as the nation's secretary of the treasury in 1795, Hamilton resumed his legal and business activities and helped lead the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. In the Quasi-War, fought at sea between 1798 and 1800, Hamilton called for mobilization against France, and President John Adams appointed him major general. The U.S. Army, however, did not see combat in the conflict. Outraged by Adams' response to the crisis, Hamilton opposed his 1800 presidential re-election. Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied for the presidency in the electoral college and, despite philosophical differences, Hamilton endorsed Jefferson over Burr, whom he found unprincipled. When Burr ran for Governor of New York in 1804, Hamilton again opposed his candidacy, arguing that he was unfit for the office. Taking offense, Burr challenged Hamilton to a pistol duel, which took place in Weehawken, New Jersey, on July 11, 1804. Hamilton was mortally wounded and immediately transported back across the Hudson River in a delirious state to the home of William Bayard Jr. in Greenwich Village, New York, for medical attention. The following day, on July 12, 1804, Hamilton succumbed to his wounds.
Scholars generally regard Hamilton as an astute and intellectually brilliant administrator, politician, and financier who was sometimes impetuous. His ideas are credited with influencing the founding principles of American finance and government. In 1997, historian Paul Johnson wrote that Hamilton was a "genius—the only one of the Founding Fathers fully entitled to that accolade—and he had the elusive, indefinable characteristics of genius."
Early life and education
Hamilton was born on January 11, 1755, or 1757, in Charlestown, the capital of Nevis in the British Leeward Islands, where he spent his childhood. Hamilton and his older brother, James Jr., were born out of wedlock to Rachel Lavien, a married woman of half-British and half-Huguenot descent, and James A. Hamilton, a Scotsman and the fourth son of Alexander Hamilton, the laird of Grange, Ayrshire.Prior to Alexander's birth, in 1745, Rachel Lavien married Johann Lavien in Saint Croix. Together, they had one son, Peter. However, Rachel Lavien left her husband and first son in 1750, traveling to Saint Kitts, where she met James Hamilton. Hamilton and Lavien moved together to Nevis, her birthplace, where she had inherited a seaside lot in town from her father. While their mother was living, Alexander and James Jr. received individual tutoring and classes in a private school led by a Jewish headmistress. Alexander supplemented his education with a family library of 34 books.
James Hamilton later abandoned Rachel Lavien and their two sons, ostensibly to "spar a charge of bigamy...after finding out that her first husband intend to divorce her under Danish law on grounds of adultery and desertion." Lavien then moved with their two children back to Saint Croix, where she supported them by managing a small store in Christiansted. Both his mother and Hamilton contracted yellow fever. On February 19, 1768, Hamilton's mother died from the disease, leaving him orphaned.
In probate court, Lavien's "first husband seized her estate" and obtained the few valuables that she had owned, including some household silver. Many items were auctioned off, and a friend purchased the family's books, returning them to Hamilton.
The brothers were briefly taken in by their cousin Peter Lytton. However, Lytton took his own life in July 1769, leaving his property to his mistress and their son, and the propertyless Hamilton brothers were subsequently separated. James Jr. apprenticed with a local carpenter, while Alexander was given a home by Thomas Stevens, a merchant from Nevis.
Hamilton became a clerk at Beekman and Cruger, a local import-export firm that traded with the Province of New York and New England. Though still a teenager, Hamilton proved capable enough as a trader to be left in charge of the firm for five months in 1771 while the owner was at sea. He remained an avid reader, and later developed an interest in writing and a life outside Saint Croix. He wrote a detailed letter to his father regarding a hurricane that devastated Christiansted on August 30, 1772. The Presbyterian Reverend Hugh Knox, a tutor and mentor to Hamilton, submitted the letter for publication in the Royal Danish-American Gazette. Biographer Ron Chernow found the letter astounding because "for all its bombastic excesses, it does seem wondrous self-educated clerk could write with such verve and gusto" and that a teenage boy produced an apocalyptic "fire-and-brimstone sermon" viewing the hurricane as a "divine rebuke to human vanity and pomposity." The essay impressed community leaders, who collected a fund to send Hamilton to the North American colonies for his education.
In October 1772, Hamilton arrived by ship in Boston and then proceeded to New York City, where he boarded with Hercules Mulligan, the Irish-born brother of a trader known to Hamilton's benefactors. Mulligan assisted Hamilton in selling the cargo that Hamilton was to use to pay for his education and support. Hamilton sought to fill gaps in his education in preparation for college, and later that year began to attend Elizabethtown Academy, a preparatory school run by Francis Barber in Elizabeth, New Jersey. While there, he was introduced to William Livingston, a local leading intellectual and revolutionary who influenced him, and he boarded with the Livingstons while studying.
In fall 1773, Hamilton returned to New York and entered Mulligan's alma mater, King's College. Hamilton began as a private student and boarded again with Mulligan until he matriculated into the college the following year, in May 1774. His college roommate and lifelong friend Robert Troup spoke glowingly of Hamilton's clarity in concisely explaining the Patriot case against the British during the American Revolution in what was Hamilton's first public appearance, on July 6, 1774. As King's College students, Hamilton, Troup, and four other undergraduates formed an unnamed literary society that is regarded as a precursor to what is now the Philolexian Society.
Later in 1774, Church of England clergyman Samuel Seabury in New York published a series of pamphlets promoting the Loyalist cause, seeking to provoke fear in the Thirteen Colonies, which he hoped would discourage them from uniting against the British. Hamilton countered anonymously with his first published political writings, A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress and The Farmer Refuted. He published two additional pieces attacking the Quebec Act, and may have also authored the 15 anonymous installments of "The Monitor" for Holt's New York Journal. Hamilton supported the revolutionary cause before the war began, but he disapproved of mob violence against the Loyalists. On May 10, 1775, he was credited with saving King College president Myles Cooper, a Loyalist, from an angry mob by speaking to the crowd long enough to allow Cooper to escape. Hamilton was forced to discontinue his studies before graduating when the college closed its doors during the British occupation of New York City and his subsequent military service.