Alexander Hamilton

About this figure

Alexander Hamilton (traditionally dated 1755-1804, though some biographers place his birth in 1757) grew up on the Caribbean island of Nevis and then St. Croix, born outside marriage to Rachel Faucette and a Scottish merchant, James Hamilton, who left the family when Alexander was a boy; his mother died when he was in his early teens. As a clerk in a St. Croix trading house he was already fixed on rising past his circumstances - a surviving 1769 letter to a friend, written when he was still an adolescent, has him confessing that his "ambition is prevalent" and that he would "willingly risk my life... to exalt my station," and wishing outright for a war that might give him the chance. Local patrons, recognizing his ability, funded his passage to the mainland colonies, where he studied at King's College (now Columbia) in New York.

The war he had wished for arrived with the Revolution, and Hamilton served in it first as an artillery officer and then as an aide-de-camp to George Washington, gaining Washington's trust and later leading an infantry assault at Yorktown. In the 1780s he practiced law in New York, pressed for a stronger federal union, and was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787; to help secure the Constitution's ratification he wrote the great majority of The Federalist essays, with James Madison and John Jay, arguing the case for the new government point by point. His correspondence from this period, running from that first St. Croix letter through the ratification debates of 1788 and early 1789, shows him already at work on the arguments for national credit and a national bank that he would soon put into practice.

As the first Secretary of the Treasury under Washington, from 1789 to 1795, Hamilton built much of the financial architecture of the new nation: he arranged for the federal government to assume state Revolutionary War debts, established the first Bank of the United States, and set up the customs and revenue systems that funded the government. He clashed repeatedly with Thomas Jefferson and other members of Washington's cabinet over the scope of federal power, a rivalry that helped produce the first American party divisions.

His personal reputation was damaged in 1797 when, to rebut accusations of financial corruption, he published a pamphlet publicly admitting an extramarital affair with Maria Reynolds - a costly act of self-exposure that historians generally read as evidence of how highly he prized his integrity in public finance over his private reputation. His long political rivalry with Aaron Burr, then Vice President, ended in a duel at Weehawken, New Jersey, on July 11, 1804; Hamilton was mortally wounded and died the next day in New York, not yet fifty.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.