Alexander Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton was a Caribbean-born orphan who became George Washington's closest aide, a leading author of the Federalist Papers and the first secretary of the treasury of the United States. His financial programme of 1790–1791 gave the new federal government sound credit, a national bank and a working tax system, and his vision of a strong central state shaped American politics long after his death in a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804.

Hamilton was born on 11 January in Charlestown, the capital of Nevis, a British sugar island in the Leeward Islands, today part of Saint Kitts and Nevis. The year is uncertain: he gave 1757, but a probate record from St Croix suggests 1755, and historians are divided. His mother, Rachel Faucette, had left an unhappy marriage and was not free to remarry, so Hamilton and his elder brother were born out of wedlock to her and James Hamilton, a Scottish trader. The family moved to St Croix in the Danish West Indies, where James left them around 1765. Rachel died of a fever in February 1768, and her sons were left almost penniless.

Hamilton worked as a clerk for an import-export firm in Christiansted that traded with New York, St Croix, and was soon running parts of the business, learning about trade, currency and shipping in a slave-based economy. In 1772 a vivid letter he wrote describing a hurricane was printed in a local newspaper, and local patrons raised money to send him to North America for an education.

He arrived in 1772, studied at a school in New Jersey, and in 1773 entered King's College, now Columbia University, in New York. He quickly turned to politics, writing pamphlets in defence of the colonial cause. When the American Revolution became a war in 1775 he joined a volunteer militia company, and in 1776 he became captain of a New York artillery company, fighting in the campaigns around New York and New Jersey.

In 1777 George Washington took him onto his staff as an aide-de-camp with the rank of lieutenant colonel. For four years Hamilton drafted much of the commander's correspondence and handled dealings with Congress, the states and French officers. In 1780 he married Elizabeth Schuyler, daughter of Philip Schuyler, a wealthy New York landowner and general, which gave him powerful connections. Wanting a field command, he left the staff in 1781 and at Yorktown in October led a night assault that captured one of the British redoubts, shortly before the surrender that effectively ended the war.

After the war Hamilton practised law in New York, sat briefly in the Confederation Congress, and in 1784 helped found the Bank of New York. He was convinced that the Articles of Confederation left the national government too weak to pay its debts or defend the country. He helped call the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, where his own proposals, including a president and senators serving for life, went much further than the other delegates would accept.

Although the final Constitution was weaker than he wished, he campaigned hard for it. With James Madison and John Jay he wrote The Federalist, a series of 85 newspaper essays published in 1787–1788 under the pen name Publius; Hamilton wrote 51 of them. They defended an energetic executive, an independent judiciary and judicial review, and are still the most cited guide to what the framers intended. He then helped secure New York's narrow ratification in 1788.

Washington appointed Hamilton the first secretary of the treasury in September 1789. In a series of reports to Congress he set out a programme that drew on British practice and on writers such as Adam Smith. The Report on Public Credit of January 1790 proposed paying the national debt at full value and having the federal government take over the war debts of the states. Assumption was bitterly opposed by southern states that had already paid much of their debt, and passed only after a bargain, arranged over dinner with Madison and Thomas Jefferson, that placed the permanent capital on the Potomac.

He then proposed the First Bank of the United States, chartered in 1791 despite Jefferson's and Madison's argument that the Constitution gave Congress no power to create one; Hamilton's reply, that the Constitution carried implied powers, became a lasting principle of American law. He also pushed through excise taxes, including the whiskey tax, set up the Revenue Cutter Service, ancestor of the Coast Guard, and in his 1791 Report on Manufactures argued for government encouragement of industry. When farmers in western Pennsylvania rose against the whiskey tax in 1794, he rode with the militia army that suppressed them.

Hamilton's policies divided Washington's government. Jefferson and Madison saw his bank and his ties to merchants and creditors as a threat to a republic of farmers, and they organised the opposition that became the Democratic-Republicans, while Hamilton's supporters formed the Federalists. Foreign policy deepened the split: Hamilton favoured Britain and was alarmed by the French Revolution, and he defended the 1795 Jay Treaty with Britain.

He left the Treasury in January 1795 but remained the Federalists' leading strategist. In 1797 he published a pamphlet admitting an affair in 1791–1792 with Maria Reynolds, whose husband had blackmailed him, in order to clear himself of charges of financial corruption. During the Quasi-War with France he was made a major general and second in command, under Washington, of an expanded army. He quarrelled publicly with President John Adams, splitting the Federalists before the election of 1800. When that election ended in a tie between Jefferson and Aaron Burr, Hamilton urged Federalists in the House to choose Jefferson, whom he distrusted less.

Hamilton was a founding member of the New York Manumission Society in 1785, which worked for gradual emancipation in New York. His records also show him arranging purchases of enslaved people for his wife's family, and historians disagree over whether he and Elizabeth owned enslaved household servants themselves.

In 1801 Hamilton's eldest son Philip was killed in a duel defending his father's honour. In 1804 Burr, then vice president, ran for governor of New York and lost, and he blamed Hamilton's insults for his defeat. Burr challenged him, and on 11 July 1804 they met at Weehawken, New Jersey, across the Hudson from New York. Burr's shot struck Hamilton in the abdomen, and he died the next day. He was buried at Trinity Church in Manhattan.

Hamilton's reputation has risen and fallen with American politics. Admirers credit him with the financial and administrative foundations of the federal state and the case for a commercial, industrial economy; critics have seen him as an elitist who distrusted popular government. Interest in him surged again after the 2015 musical Hamilton, which drew on Ron Chernow's 2004 biography. His career is central to the founding period in the History of the United States.