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Wall Street History
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04/16/2004
Alexander Hamilton, Part I
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 attorney’s, 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”
Wall Street History returns 4/23.
Brian Trumbore
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