Alexander Hamilton, Part I
Brian Trumbore
President/Editor, StocksandNews.com

Alexander Hamilton is back in the news. Granted, he's been dead 200 years but thanks to a new book on his life by Ron Chernow that is gaining a fair amount of publicity, I thought we'd take our own, albeit brief, look at Hamilton; a Revolutionary War hero, a framer of the U.S. Constitution, founder of the Bank of New York, the first Treasury Secretary of the United States, and the driving force behind the First Bank of the U.S., among many other things. He is, simply put, a giant in American history.

Of course it's more than a bit beyond the scope of this column to do Hamilton's full life justice, so I thought we'd just focus on his youth and then next week his role in the Whiskey Rebellion, the latter because it had to do with a 1794 tax revolt in Pennsylvania (and thus fits in nicely to "Wall Street History" in the eyes of your editor).

But first off, we have a debate over when Alexander was born. Was it 1755 or 1757? Most books you come across, such as the ones listed below, say 1755 because that is when a single document on the subject says he was. But as Richard Brookhiser points out, Hamilton himself indicated that he was born in 1757, so I'll go with this.

John Adams once called Hamilton "the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar." Alexander's mother was Rachel Faucett, a French Huguenot who was born on the West Indies island of Nevis. She moved to St. Croix and married a planter, John Lavien, around 1745. But in 1750, Lavien had Rachel jailed for refusing to live with him. So, after she got out, Rachel returned to the West Indies where she met James Hamilton, a Scotsman who was seeking fortune as a merchant in the Caribbean.

Alexander later admitted his birth was "not free from blemish," for as Richard Brookhiser notes, Rachel had two sons with James Hamilton - James Junior and Alexander - "without getting a divorce from John Lavien," thus the background behind Adams's comment.

Alexander thought his mother was married a second time, but Rachel was Rachel Lavien until 1759, when John Lavien divorced her for her "ungodly mode of life." [Brookhiser]

Back then the Caribbean was not a great place, unless you owned a sugar plantation, and as George Washington observed on a trip to the region in 1751, you were either very rich or very poor and on most islands slaves outnumbered white masters 20 to 1. Nevis, for example, had a population of 600 whites and 10,000 blacks. For his part, Alexander never wrote a kind word about the Caribbean and once he arrived in America, he didn't return to the place of his birth.

The Hamilton's had moved to St. Croix in 1765 and a year later, Alexander's father, a real dirtball, up and left. Then in 1768, both Alexander and his mother came down with the fever. Alexander lived, Rachel died. He was an orphan at the age of 11 (again, if you go with the 1757 birth date).

Rachel had been a brilliant woman by some accounts and she had prepared Alexander well. He had a terrific talent for writing, even at an early age, and he was apprenticing with a local merchant at 9. The first letter of Hamilton's that survives was to a friend who had been sent to New York to attend King's College, now Columbia University.

"To confess my weakness, Ned, my ambition is so prevalent that I contemn the grov'ling and condition of a Clerk or the like, to which my Fortune &c. condemns me and would willingly risk my life tho' not my Character to exalt my Station." [All sic.]

In 1772, Hamilton's employer in St. Croix sent Alexander to New York, where he too ended up at King's College (though Princeton?then the College of New Jersey?was the original intent).

What was Hamilton like? Author Jules Witcover quotes another historian, Claude G. Bowers.

Short and slender, "(he) was graceful and debonair, elegant and courtly, seductive and ingratiating, playful or impassioned, he could have fitted into the picture at the Versailles of Louis XV." Hamilton was also a vain egotist "singularly lacking in tact, offensively opinionated, impatient and often insulting to well- meaning mediocrity, and dictatorial. He did not consult- he directed. He did not conciliate - he commanded?He was a failure in the management of men, and only his superior genius made it possible for him to dominate so long."

Hamilton was a real rabble-rouser while in school and he used his prodigious writing ability to become one of the great pamphleteers of the pre-Revolutionary War era. Then in 1776 he joined a local militia and was appointed by New York to be an artillery captain. When the British attacked General George Washington on Long Island, Hamilton participated in the retreat across to New Jersey and it was here that his abilities caught the eye of Washington. After heroic service in the counterattacks on Princeton and Trenton later that year, Hamilton became Washington's chief aide-de-camp.

Historian Paul Johnson calls Hamilton the "most effective aide any American commander-in-chief has ever had," adding that Washington gave Alexander responsibilities that would prove he was "brave to a fault, and absolutely loyal."

But I just want to digress a bit because in researching this piece, I came across some facts about the Continental Army that may be of interest to some of you not too familiar with the era.

John Adams once said that when it came to the people of America during the Revolutionary War, 1/3rd were opposed, 1/3rd supported the cause, and 1/3rd were neutral. And in some respects Washington's forces mirrored this.

"Washington's army reached its first peak of strength with 18,000 in the summer of 1776. It fell to 5,000 by the end of that year, rose to a little over 20,000 in mid-1778, and then declined. No provision was made for the families of men in service, and no pensions were paid to the dependents of those who fell; so enlistments were largely restricted to the very young, the adventurous, the floating population, and the super-patriotic. But with all these allowances the fact remains that a disgracefully small number of Americans were willing to do any sustained fighting for their country's cause." ["The Growth of the American Republic"]

Hamilton himself remarked on this lack of enthusiasm, noting "our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep?They are determined not to be free ?If we are saved, France and Spain must save us." [France did ? "A People's History of the United States, 1492-present"]

In March 1780, Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler, the daughter of a major-general and large Hudson Valley (N.Y.) landowner. They were to have 8 children. But by 1781, war still on and with Hamilton alongside Washington, Alexander was growing weary of it all. Washington and Hamilton had a vigorous argument and Hamilton, long desirous of his own field command, called for reassignment. Washington gave him command of a battalion in May and by October Alexander Hamilton was performing heroically at the Battle of Yorktown, the last conflict of the war. Washington and Hamilton patched things up.

Hamilton returned to New York where he became one of the nation's leading attorneys, a self-made aristocrat. Historians George Brown Tindall and David Shi write that he was "shrewd, energetic, and determined, quick to take offense and reluctant to forgive, impatient with critics and intolerant of error." Once in a conversation with Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton said "The greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar," a comment in keeping with his own ambition.

Hamilton commenced his political career, serving in the Continental Congress 1782-83, he helped establish the Bank of New York in 1784, and in 1786 he was named to the state legislature. Then in 1787, Hamilton attended the Constitutional Convention and it was at this time that his stature grew another ten-fold as writing under the name Publius, Hamilton, with help from James Madison and John Jay, published the "Federalist Papers," a series of 85 essays arguing for ratification of the proposed Constitution as the best safeguard of individual rights and state sovereignty.

When it came time to form the nation's first cabinet in 1789, President George Washington had but one choice for the new Department of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton.

Next week, the Whiskey Rebellion.

Sources:

Michael Beschloss, general editor: "American Heritage: The Presidents"
Paul S. Boyer, editor: "The Oxford Companion to United States History"
Richard Brookhiser: "Alexander Hamilton: American"
Paul Johnson: "A History of the American People"
George Brown Tindall and David Shi: "America: A Narrative History"
Jules Witcover: "A History of the Democrats"
Howard Zinn: "A People's History of the United States: 1492- present"

Brian Trumbore