Born on the British West Indies island of Nevis on January 11, 1757, Alexander Hamilton was a close friend of George Washington, a leading Founding Father, and the first secretary of the treasury. His mother was a planter's daughter of French-Huguenot descent, and his father was an itinerant Scottish merchant. However, his mother had been previously married, and as a result her union with his father was not legally recognized, rendering Hamilton illegitimate. He spent much of his youth in the Danish West Indies in St. Croix, but his father abandoned his common-law family when Alexander was only 10. At a young age, Hamilton learned to speak fluent French as his mother and a Presbyterian minister provided him with a basic education. In 1768 his mother died, and Hamilton became an apprentice to a local mercantile establishment, whose owner perceived his intelligence and organized a fund for his proper education. In 1772 he left the West Indies for the North American continent. Hamilton arrived in New York with letters of introduction and attended grammar school at Barber's Academy in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. He excelled in his studies, and upon graduation he enrolled at King's College in New York City, which is presently Columbia University.

The Revolutionary War (1775-83) interrupted Hamilton's studies. A fervent Whig, he made his first public speech denouncing the British on July 6, 1774. He also authored and distributed fiery pamphlets responding to those who decried the First Continental Congress. While still in school, he joined a volunteer militia, drilling every morning before classes. When the war came to New York City (summer 1776), Hamilton was commissioned as a captain of an artillery company. He participated in the Battle of Long Island (August 27-30, 1776) and the Battle of White Plains (October 28, 1776), quickly gaining the attention of General Nathanael Greene. In the fighting at Princeton on January 3, 1777, he fired upon Nassau Hall when the British refused to surrender, earning himself an introduction to General George Washington.

Impressed with Hamilton, Washington offered him a position on his staff on January 20, 1777, and promoted him to lieutenant colonel. Hamilton became Washington's chief aide-de-camp, developed a close personal relationship with the general, and became his confidant. The two men worked seamlessly together; all Washington had to do was provide some general ideas about what he wanted done, and Hamilton would transcribe Washington's thoughts into detailed plans. He also developed important connections with the many of the senior officer corps that would pay political dividends in the 1780s and 1790s. These connections were strengthened on December 14, 1780, by his marriage to Elizabeth Schuyler, the daughter of a wealthy and politically powerful New York family.

Despite his new responsibilities, Hamilton yearned for military glory and repeatedly requested Washington to give him command of a regiment. After a quarrel with the general in mid-February 1781, Hamilton left Washington's staff. However, in late July Washington finally granted Hamilton's wish for a combat command, just as the Continental army was about to participate in the campaign leading to the surrender at Yorktown (October 19, 1781). On the night of October 14, 1781, Hamilton led his regiment in an attack at Yorktown, earning high praise.

Hamilton left the army in May 1782 and spent most of the 1780s pursuing both business and politics. He quickly trained himself in law, passed the New York bar exam in July 1782, and qualified as a "councillor" having the right to argue cases before the state supreme court in October. Opening an office on Wall Street, Hamilton emerged as one of the leading lawyers in the state. His most noteworthy case was Rutgers v. Waddington (1784), in which he successfully defended a Loyalist from a suit concerning property use in New York City during the British occupation in the war. He also founded the Bank of New York and was elected to Congress within two years of his military discharge. His political skills were honed during this time; in his letters he described the weaknesses of the confederation and asserted the necessity for a strong central government, ideas he would spend the rest of his public life defending. In 1786 he was a key participant at the Annapolis Convention, where he personally drafted the call to summon the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

Hamilton's presence in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787 was relatively limited. However, he sat on the committee of style and was the only New York delegate to sign the final document. He also gave an eloquent six-hour speech arguing that an elected monarchy with a Senate chosen for life, as well as a more democratic House of Representatives, would be the best possible government for the nation. Upon his return from Philadelphia, Hamilton put his energy into securing the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in New York. He waged an ardent campaign, coauthoring the Federalist Papers with John Jay and James Madison and narrowly winning ratification on July 26, 1788. His work remains an enduring commentary on constitutional law and the principles of government.

Once the federal government was securely established, Hamilton accepted President Washington's invitation to head the new Department of the Treasury. In this position, he was able to implement his theory of a strong central government and immediately set about reorganizing the country's disorganized financial system. In a five-point program spelled out in a series of reports to Congress, Hamilton built the foundation of the government's finances and secured the nation's credit abroad. He proposed an expanded revenue base, the establishment of a national bank, full funding of the national debt, assumption of state debts, and government support of industry as means by which the United States would take its place in the world. The first thing that the national government needed was revenue, and in 1789 Congress passed an impost on all imports into the country; additional taxes were raised by the excise on liquor in 1791. The Bank of the United States was a unique hybrid of a public and a private institution, lending considerable support for government finance and international trade. Hamilton argued that a fully funded national debt would secure public loyalty to the new government by directly connecting the nation's wealthy to the federal government. To further consolidate the national government, he insisted upon the assumption of state debts. Finally, he argued that the United States must become more like Great Britain, both in industry and finance, but to achieve such a goal, the government must encourage manufacturing.

Though Hamilton had the president's support, his financial program was controversial. Madison led the opposition to Hamilton in Congress; Thomas Jefferson as secretary of state confronted him in Washington's cabinet. They both believed that Hamilton's support for the wealthy smacked of aristocracy and that his pro-British sympathies threatened to reverse the outcome of the Revolutionary War. Jefferson and Madison wanted an agrarian republic; Hamilton's vision of an integrated economy with both industry and agriculture challenged the Jeffersonian ideal of the independent virtuous farmer. Regardless of this opposition, the secretary of the treasury still managed to have Congress accept his entire program, with the exception of federal support for manufacturing. However, in 1791 he was able to pursue his industrial dreams through the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (SEUM), which was a private corporation created to build factories in Paterson, New Jersey. Despite Hamilton's efforts, the SEUM failed to create a model industrial city.

Political divisions intensified in 1792 and 1793 as Hamilton became the focus of vicious attacks in the press by Philip Freneau, who had been recruited by Jefferson to establish an anti-Hamiltonian newspaper. Hamilton responded by writing newspaper essays declaring that Freneau held a sinecure in the State Department (where he was employed as a translator) and was therefore nothing more than a hireling and mouthpiece for Jefferson. The radicalization of the French Revolution (1789-99) in 1793 only aggravated these differences and contributed to the development of the first two-party political system; Hamilton led the Federalist Party, and Jefferson and Madison headed the Democratic-Republican Party. Hamilton's long-standing relationship with Washington, and the old general's own personal inclinations, meant that his opinion often prevailed in the executive branch. In 1794 both Washington and Hamilton were outraged by the Whiskey Rebellion against the excise in western Pennsylvania, and Hamilton helped to lead the military expedition sent to suppress the rebellion.

For largely personal reasons, Hamilton stepped down from the treasury department on January 31, 1795. Although he had straightened out the government's finances, he had all but ignored his own financial position, and he felt compelled to enter private life and make money as a lawyer. On a more personal level, his government work had taken him away from his family, and he wanted to spend more time with his wife, who had just had a miscarriage. In addition, he had a private secret that he hoped to keep from the public eye: an affair with a married woman by the name of Maria Reynolds that had begun in summer 1791 after Reynolds had visited him and told him that she had been left by her husband and was seeking financial assistance. The sexual liaison continued for several months until her husband returned and began to blackmail Hamilton. Hamilton broke off the affair and stopped paying the blackmail in early 1792, but the story was too explosive to keep under wraps for long. By December 1792 several leaders of the Democratic-Republican Party had heard of the affair and visited Hamilton to discuss it. Amazingly, these political opponents, including James Monroe, accepted Hamilton's explanation that the affair was a matter of marital infidelity and did not involve any mishandling of government funds. Monroe and others told Madison and Jefferson, but no one went public with word of the affair. Nonetheless, for the remainder of his time in public office, Hamilton had the threat of exposure hanging over him, and in 1797 James T. Callender, a Democratic-Republican journalist, finally revealed the story. Hamilton responded with a pamphlet of his own confessing the affair and explaining, as he had done earlier to his political opponents, that the relationship was personal and had nothing to do with his public service.

Despite a busy and lucrative law practice and the lack of government office, Hamilton continued to exert tremendous influence on the course of public events. He still advised the president through correspondence and even helped Washington write his Farewell Address in 1796. Hamilton maintained his controlling hand on the development of the Federalist Party and masterminded much of the defense of Jay's Treaty (1794). In the election of 1796 he secretly opposed John Adams, seeking to manipulate the electoral college to elect Thomas Pinckney instead. Although these machinations failed, he had influence in the workings of the executive office since Adams retained Washington's cabinet, which was packed with such Hamilton friends and colleagues as Oliver Wolcott, Jr., at the treasury, Timothy Pickering at state, and James McHenry at the war department.

During the Quasi-War (1798-1800), Hamilton pushed for all-out hostilities with France and used his cabinet connections to gain the appointment as second in command under Washington of an army created to fight the French. Since the aging father of his country was not expected to take to the field, Hamilton was for all intents and purposes the general in charge of the U.S. Army. When President Adams sought to defuse the crisis with France, Hamilton and his minions strove to delay negotiations. In 1800 political tension between Adams and Hamilton reached the boiling point. Hamilton again sought to outmaneuver Adams on the ballot, hoping to replace him with Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. When Adams got wind of this effort after the crucial electoral defeat in New York in May, the second president finally took firm control of his cabinet and got rid of Hamilton's supporters. Hamilton, in turn, wrote a pamphlet for private circulation that attacked Adams, declaring the president had "great intrinsic defects in his character, which unfit him for the office of Chief Magistrate." This letter became public, and the internal bickering within the Federalist Party contributed to its defeat in the election of 1800. Hamilton played a backstage role in the final settlement of that election, which was decided in the House of Representatives when Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied for electoral votes.

Animosity between Burr and Hamilton grew over the next few years. When Burr ran for governor of New York in 1804, he sought support from members of the Federalist Party flirting with the idea of New England and New York seceding from the United States. Hamilton, who believed strongly in the union's importance, opposed Burr and attacked his character by referring to him as "a profligate" and a "voluptuary in the extreme" who would ruin any man who followed him. After losing the election, Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel, which was fought at Weehawken, New Jersey, on July 11, 1804. The details of the duel remain hazy because of contradictory testimony. It is likely that Hamilton did not fire his pistol at Burr, but that it went off involuntarily as he was shot with a mortal wound by Burr. Hamilton died the next day at the age of 49. His death was lamented nationally, and Burr was forced to flee. Hamilton was buried in Trinity Churchyard in New York City.

Bibliography:

1)         Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin Press, 2004)

2)         Jacob Earnest Cooke, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Scribners, 1982)

3)         Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers (New York: Knopf, 2000)

4)         Broadus Mitchell, Alexander Hamilton: A Concise Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

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