Alexander Hamilton

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexander Hamilton was still a teenager in 1771 when the owner of Beekman and Cruger, an import-export firm on the island of Saint Croix, sailed away and left him running the place for five months. The young man had been born out of wedlock on Nevis. He had lost his mother and been moved from home to home. His whole education had begun with a family library of 34 books. Nothing in that start pointed toward the councils of a new nation. This documentary follows the questions his life raises. How does an orphaned clerk from the Caribbean end up designing the finances of the United States? Why did so many of his peers trust his brilliance and still fear his ambition? And what did a late quarrel with Aaron Burr finally cost him?

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• 2. From Nevis to New York

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  The exact date of Hamilton's birth is uncertain. It was the 11th of January, in either 1755 or 1757, in Charlestown, the capital of Nevis in the British Leeward Islands. His parents were Rachel Lavien, a married woman of half-British and half-Huguenot descent, and James A. Hamilton, a Scotsman and the fourth son of a laird from Grange, Ayrshire. Rachel had married Johann Lavien in Saint Croix in 1745 and had a son, Peter. She left that marriage in 1750 and met James Hamilton on Saint Kitts. The couple settled on Nevis and had two boys, James Jr. and Alexander. While their mother lived, both boys had private tutoring and attended a school run by a Jewish headmistress.

  The household collapsed in stages. James Hamilton abandoned Rachel and the boys, and she took them back to Saint Croix, where she supported them by managing a small store in Christiansted. Yellow fever struck both mother and son. On the 19th of February 1768, Rachel died, and Alexander was orphaned. In probate court her first husband seized her estate, including some household silver. A friend bought the family's books at auction and returned them to the boy. Their cousin Peter Lytton briefly took the brothers in, but he took his own life in July 1769. The propertyless brothers were separated. James Jr. apprenticed with a local carpenter, and Alexander was given a home by Thomas Stevens, a merchant from Nevis.

  On the 30th of August 1772, a hurricane devastated Christiansted. Hamilton wrote his father a detailed account of it, and the Presbyterian Reverend Hugh Knox, his tutor and mentor, submitted it to the Royal Danish-American Gazette. Biographer Ron Chernow found the letter astounding, noting its bombastic excesses but also the verve of a self-educated clerk. He compared it to a fire-and-brimstone sermon that read the storm as a divine rebuke to human vanity. Community leaders were impressed enough to collect a fund to send the writer to the North American colonies for schooling.

  In October 1772, Hamilton arrived by ship in Boston and went on to New York City. There he boarded with Hercules Mulligan, whose brother was a trader known to Hamilton's benefactors. Mulligan helped him sell the cargo meant to pay for his education. To prepare for college, Hamilton attended Elizabethtown Academy in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a school run by Francis Barber. He met the revolutionary intellectual William Livingston there and boarded with the Livingston family. In the fall of 1773 he entered King's College, now Columbia University, and he matriculated in May 1774. His roommate Robert Troup later praised the clarity of Hamilton's first public appearance, on the 6th of July 1774, where he explained the Patriot case against Britain.

  Later in 1774, the Church of England clergyman Samuel Seabury published pamphlets for the Loyalist cause, hoping to frighten the colonies out of uniting. Hamilton answered anonymously with A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress and The Farmer Refuted. He added two pieces attacking the Quebec Act, and he may have written the 15 anonymous installments of The Monitor. Yet he disliked mob violence against Loyalists. On the 10th of May 1775, he was credited with saving King's College president Myles Cooper by talking to an angry crowd long enough for Cooper to escape. Hamilton never graduated, because the college closed during the British occupation of New York City.

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• 3. Guns and Glory

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  After the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, Hamilton and other King's College students joined a volunteer militia company called the Corsicans. The name honored the Corsican Republic, which had been suppressed six years earlier and which young patriots saw as a model. Hamilton drilled with the company before classes in the graveyard of St. Paul's Chapel and studied military history on his own. He was soon elected an officer. Under fire from HMS Asia, and working with Hercules Mulligan and the Sons of Liberty, he led the renamed Hearts of Oak on a raid for British cannons in the Battery. The seizure turned the unit into an artillery company.

  In 1776, Hamilton's friends among New York patriots, including Alexander McDougall and John Jay, helped him win a commission to raise the New York Provincial Company of Artillery. It numbered 60 men, and he was appointed its captain. The company served as rearguard when the Continental Army retreated up Manhattan and fought at Harlem Heights and White Plains. At Trenton it held the high ground where Warren and Broad streets now cross, keeping the Hessians pinned in their barracks. At Princeton, on the 3rd of January 1777, British troops took refuge in Nassau Hall. Hamilton brought up three cannons to fire on the building while others broke down the front door. A white flag appeared, and 194 British soldiers walked out and surrendered.

  Several generals invited Hamilton to join their staffs, including William Alexander, Lord Stirling. He declined, convinced that glory on the battlefield was his best route upward. The invitation he could not refuse came from George Washington, who offered him the rank of lieutenant colonel as an aide. Washington held that aides were people in whom entire confidence must be placed. Hamilton served four years as his chief staff aide. He handled letters to Congress, state governors and the most powerful generals, and he drafted many of Washington's orders. In time he issued orders over his own signature, and he also took on intelligence work, diplomacy and negotiation with senior officers.

  At the army's winter headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey, between December 1779 and March 1780, Hamilton met Elizabeth Schuyler. She was the daughter of General Philip Schuyler and Catherine Van Rensselaer. They married on the 14th of December 1780 at the Schuyler Mansion in Albany, New York, and had eight children: Philip, Angelica, Alexander, James, John, William, Eliza, and a second Philip. His wartime letters to the Marquis de Lafayette and John Laurens use the flowery sentiment of the late 18th century. Historian Jonathan Ned Katz reads them as hinting at a homosexual relationship. Biographer Gregory D. Massey and others reject that as unsubstantiated and call the friendships platonic.

  On the 15th of February 1781, Washington reprimanded Hamilton over a minor misunderstanding. Washington tried to repair the rift quickly, but Hamilton insisted on leaving. He departed in March and kept pressing for a field command, which Washington put off by citing the need to appoint men of higher rank. In early July, Hamilton sent a letter with his commission enclosed, a tacit threat to resign. Washington gave way on the 31st of July and handed him a battalion of light infantry. At Yorktown, Hamilton commanded three battalions, which took Redoubt No. 10 with bayonets alone to avoid accidental gunfire giving them away. The French took Redoubt No. 9. The British army surrendered, and the war was effectively over.

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• 4. A Union Too Weak

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  In a letter to James Duane dated the 3rd of September 1780, Hamilton wrote that the fundamental defect was a want of power in Congress. He added that the confederation was neither fit for war nor for peace. His complaint grew from the war itself. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress could not collect taxes or demand money from the states. It relied on subsidies from the King of France, European loans and voluntary state aid. The army struggled to get provisions and pay. A proposed five percent duty on imports, drafted by Thomas Burke in February 1781, needed every state to agree. Rhode Island rejected it in November 1782, and Virginia later rescinded its own approval.

  Hamilton resigned his commission in March 1782, passed the bar in July after six months of self-directed study, and was appointed to Congress that same month. The army was then posted at Newburgh, New York, where officers had gone eight months without pay. They had been promised half-pay pensions in May 1778, and a delegation led by Captain Alexander McDougall lobbied Congress for pay, pensions, and a lump sum in place of the pensions. Congress refused. Hamilton, Robert Morris and Gouverneur Morris tried to use the crisis to win support for national taxation. Hamilton wrote Washington suggesting he covertly take direction of the officers' efforts, and Washington declined. On the 15th of March, Washington defused the crisis by addressing the officers in person.

  In June 1783, soldiers from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, marched on Philadelphia demanding back pay. Congress charged Hamilton and two others with stopping them. He asked Pennsylvania's Supreme Executive Council for militia and was refused. The soldiers reached the city and berated Congress. Hamilton argued that Congress should adjourn to Princeton, and it did. There he drafted a call to revise the Articles. It contained features of the future Constitution, including the power to tax and raise an army, and a separation of powers among legislative, executive and judicial branches.

  Hamilton left Congress in 1783 and returned to New York City, where he practiced law in partnership with Richard Harison. He often defended Tories and British subjects. In Rutgers v. Waddington, he defeated a damages claim over a brewery that Englishmen had held during the occupation. In 1784 he founded the Bank of New York. In 1786 he played a major leadership role at the Annapolis Convention and drafted its resolution calling for a constitutional convention. In 1788, King's College, now reconstituted as Columbia College, awarded him a Master of Arts degree, and he served on its board of trustees. The Philadelphia gathering that his resolution made possible would test how much influence he really had.

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• 5. Constitution and Publius

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  In 1787, Hamilton's father-in-law Philip Schuyler arranged for him to be chosen as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. His power there was slight. Governor George Clinton's faction had picked New York's other two delegates, John Lansing Jr. and Robert Yates, and both opposed a strong national government. Whenever they were present, they decided New York's vote. Early in the proceedings, Hamilton proposed an elected president and elected senators who would serve for life, subject to good behavior and removal for corruption. According to James Madison's notes, he praised the English model and said an executive in office for life would be less dangerous than one serving seven years. The speech had no effect on the deliberations.

  Madison read the proposal as a claim of power for the rich and well born. That interpretation left Hamilton nearly isolated, and it fed Madison's view of him as a monarchist sympathizer. Hamilton also built a full draft constitution from the debates and never presented it. Its Senate would be two-fifths the size of the House, its president would have an absolute veto, and state governors would be appointed by the federal government. At the end he was still unhappy with the final text. Still, he signed it as a vast improvement over the Articles and urged others to follow. Lansing and Yates had already withdrawn, so he was the only New York signer.

  The Federalist Papers began appearing in The Independent Journal on the 27th of October 1787. Hamilton recruited John Jay and Madison to write essays defending the proposed Constitution, and each took on his own area. Jay covered foreign relations. Madison covered the history of republics and the structure of the new government. Hamilton took the executive and judicial branches, parts of the Senate, military matters and taxation. He wrote the first paper under the name Publius, which all later papers also used. In the end he wrote 51 of the 85 essays and oversaw the entire project.

  Ratification in New York turned on a convention at Poughkeepsie in June 1788. Hamilton, Jay, James Duane, Robert Livingston and Richard Morris faced a Clintonian faction led by Melancton Smith, Lansing, Yates and Gilbert Livingston. Clinton's side wanted amendments and a state right to secede if they failed. Hamilton's side opposed any conditional ratification, fearing New York would not be accepted into the Union. News that New Hampshire and Virginia had become the ninth and tenth states to ratify changed the pressure. On the 26th of July 1788, the convention ratified the Constitution by 30 votes to 27. Smith had come around more from necessity than from Hamilton's rhetoric. In 1789, President Washington would call on Hamilton to run the nation's money.

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• 6. Fixing the Public Credit

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  Robert Morris, Washington's first choice, advised him to appoint Hamilton, and on the 11th of September 1789 Hamilton was nominated, confirmed and sworn in as first United States secretary of the treasury, all on one day. The House asked for a report on public credit by January 1790. Hamilton had told Morris as early as 1781 that fixing public credit would help win independence. He drew on thinkers such as Jacques Necker, Montesquieu and Hume, and he consulted John Witherspoon and Madison. He split the debt into national and state parts, and the national part into foreign and domestic. Everyone agreed on paying the foreign debt, but domestic creditors were another matter.

  Veterans had been paid in promissory notes, and many sold them to speculators for as little as fifteen to twenty cents on the dollar. Hamilton argued that these securities should be paid at full value to their present owners. He held that honoring contracts underpinned public and private morality and would let the country borrow cheaply. A sinking fund would retire five percent of the debt each year. Madison objected that the windfall should reach the original holders, but his proposal lost 36 votes to 13 on the 22nd of February 1790. The proposal to assume state debts failed 31 to 29 on the 12th of April, though the plan later became law. Hamilton himself owned no share in the debt, even though some in his circle did.

  The temporary seat of government was settled in the same bargaining. Years later, Thomas Jefferson recalled Hamilton saying that moving the capital to Virginia was a pill that would be bitter to southern states, and that something should sweeten it. The bill to place the capital temporarily in Philadelphia passed the House 34 to 28 on the 26th of July 1790.

  Hamilton's national bank was to have a capitalization of $10 million, with the government holding one-fifth. Because it lacked the cash, the government would borrow its share from the bank and repay in ten even annual installments. A board of twenty-five directors would represent the private shareholders. Critics said the bank served the Northeast and not farming regions, and Madison warned he would attack it as unconstitutional. The House passed it 39 to 20 on the 8th of February 1791. Jefferson told Washington that enumerated powers could all be carried out without a bank. Hamilton replied that necessary often means no more than needful, requisite, or useful. Washington signed.

  In 1791, Hamilton also proposed a mint. Because Spanish coins circulated most widely, he proposed a dollar weighing almost as much as the Spanish peso. He wanted decimal fractions, an idea from Robert Morris, instead of eighths. He preferred a gold standard but issued a bimetallic currency at a fixed ratio of 15 silver to 1 gold. Small silver and copper coins, he hoped, would lower the cost of living for the poor. Congress passed the Coinage Act of 1792, with a ten-dollar gold Eagle among the coins. Meanwhile, on the 4th of August 1790, Congress had created the Revenue Cutter Service at his urging. It is viewed as the birth of the United States Coast Guard, and each of its first ten cutters carried a list of arms and equipment he specified.

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• 7. Whiskey, Factories, Treaty

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  Hamilton's excise on whiskey, which allowed distillers to pay 60 cents per gallon of still capacity, exempted small stills used only for home consumption. He knew rural areas would hate it, yet judged taxes on spirits less harmful than land taxes. He proposed inspectors who would visit twice a day and file weekly reports. By 1791, locals were shunning and threatening them, and some inspectors were tarred and feathered or whipped. In 1794, the resistance erupted into the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania and western Virginia, where whiskey was the basic export. Hamilton accompanied Washington and General Henry Lee, known as Light Horse Harry, with more federal troops than Washington had commanded in the Revolution. The show of force ended the rebellion virtually without bloodshed.

  Congress had asked for a report on manufacturing on the 15th of January 1790, but Hamilton did not submit his Report on Manufactures until the 5th of December 1791. It argued for protective duties to help infant industries reach economies of scale. It also called for dropping duties on raw materials and encouraging immigration. Congress shelved it with little debate, apart from Madison's objection to Hamilton's broad reading of the general welfare clause. In 1791, Hamilton, Tench Coxe and entrepreneurs from New York and Philadelphia formed the Society for the Establishment of Useful Manufactures. On the 4th of July 1792, the directors toured the Great Falls of the Passaic River in New Jersey, and the factory town of Paterson was named for Governor William Paterson. The company failed, and its governor William Duer died in debtors' prison.

  When France and Britain went to war in early 1793, Washington's cabinet agreed unanimously on neutrality and on recalling the French ambassador Edmond-Charles Genêt. By 1794, policy toward Britain had split the two parties. The Federalists wanted more trade with Britain, the largest trading partner. The Republicans proposed a trade war. Washington sent Chief Justice John Jay to negotiate, and Hamilton largely wrote Jay's instructions. The treaty passed the Senate in 1795 by exactly the required two-thirds, after Hamilton rallied support. It made possible ten years of peaceful trade. Historian George Herring noted the remarkable and fortuitous economic and diplomatic gains. In the 1920s, readers of British dispatches learned that Hamilton had privately told minister George Hammond a secret cabinet decision.

  Hamilton's wife suffered a miscarriage while he was away putting down the Whiskey Rebellion. On the 1st of December 1794, he gave Washington two months' notice, and he left office on the 31st of January 1795. His final act was a Report on a Plan for the Further Support of Public Credit, which Congress turned into a bill within about a month. He went back to his law practice in New York. When Jay left the Chief Justice post in June 1795, Attorney General William Bradford urged Hamilton to take it. Hamilton declined, preferring New York state politics.

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• 8. Rivals and the Duel

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  In summer 1791, the 34-year-old Hamilton began an affair with 23-year-old Maria Reynolds. By his own account, she came to his Philadelphia house saying her husband had abandoned her, and he brought her $30. The affair lasted until about June 1792. Her husband James Reynolds likely orchestrated it and extorted payments, which totaled over $1,300 including an initial $1,000. When Reynolds and Jacob Clingman were arrested for counterfeiting in November 1792, Clingman told James Monroe that Reynolds could incriminate Hamilton. On the 15th of December 1792, Monroe and two other congressmen confronted him. Hamilton disproved any treasury wrongdoing by revealing the affair, and the men agreed to keep the papers private.

  The journalist James T. Callender published accusations in the summer of 1797 that were based on those papers, taken out of context. Hamilton wrote to Monroe and the others on the 5th of July 1797, asking them to confirm his integrity. Monroe refused, and an argument with Hamilton nearly became a duel. Hamilton then became the first major American politician publicly involved in a sex scandal.

  By then the two-party system had formed. Thomas Jefferson and Madison led the Democratic-Republican Party, favoring strong state governments in rural America. They denounced Hamilton as too friendly toward Britain and too tied to cities, industry and banking. Hamilton and his allies took the name Federalists. Editors such as Noah Webster and John Fenno backed them, while Benjamin Franklin Bache and Philip Freneau wrote fiery pieces for Republicans. In 1801 Hamilton founded the New York Evening Post and made William Coleman its editor. A personal irritant had come earlier, in 1791, when Aaron Burr defeated Hamilton's father-in-law Philip Schuyler for a United States Senate seat.

  In 1796, Hamilton schemed to make Thomas Pinckney president over John Adams. Electors then had two votes each. Hamilton urged northern electors to back both men, while working with Edward Rutledge to get South Carolina's electors to vote for Jefferson and Pinckney. Federalists discovered the plan and withheld votes from Pinckney. Pinckney finished third, Adams won and Jefferson became vice president. In the Quasi-War with France, from 1798 to 1800, Hamilton called for mobilization, and Adams appointed him major general. The army never saw combat. Furious with Adams, he opposed his 1800 re-election.

  Other causes also drew his energy. Hamilton and other Federalists supported the Haitian Revolution, and in 1801 he helped draft Haiti's constitution. He also helped lead the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. When Jefferson and Burr tied in the electoral college in 1800, Hamilton endorsed Jefferson, whom he disagreed with philosophically, over Burr, whom he found unprincipled. In 1804 he opposed Burr's run for Governor of New York as unfit. Burr took offense and challenged him to a pistol duel in Weehawken, New Jersey, on the 11th of July 1804. Hamilton was mortally wounded and carried across the Hudson River, delirious, to the Greenwich Village home of William Bayard Jr. He died there on the 12th of July 1804.

  Scholars generally describe him as an astute and brilliant administrator, politician and financier who was sometimes impetuous. In 1997, historian Paul Johnson called him a genius, the only one among the Founding Fathers fully entitled to that accolade. Johnson added that he had the elusive, indefinable characteristics of genius.

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