Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton was born on January 11, 1755, or 1757, in Charlestown, the capital of Nevis in the British Leeward Islands, where he spent his childhood. Hamilton and his older brother, James Jr., were born out of wedlock to Rachel Lavien (née Faucette), a married woman of half-British and half-Huguenot descent, and James A. Hamilton, a Scotsman and the fourth son of Alexander Hamilton, the laird of Grange, Ayrshire. His maternal grandfather was John Faucette (born c. 1680–1684), a French Huguenot, planter and medical doctor born in the Saintonge province of France who had settled on the British West Indies island of Nevis, after the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV.

Prior to Alexander's birth, in 1745, Rachel Lavien married Johann Lavien in Saint Croix. Together, they had one son, Peter. However, Rachel Lavien left her husband and first son in 1750, traveling to Saint Kitts, where she met James Hamilton. Hamilton and Lavien moved together to Nevis, her birthplace, where she had inherited a seaside lot in town from her father. While their mother was living, Alexander and James Jr. received individual tutoring and classes in a private school led by a Jewish headmistress. Alexander supplemented his education with a family library of 34 books.

James Hamilton later abandoned Rachel Lavien and their two sons, ostensibly to "spar[e] [her] a charge of bigamy...after finding out that her first husband intend[ed] to divorce her under Danish law on grounds of adultery and desertion." Lavien then moved with their two children back to Saint Croix, where she supported them by managing a small store in Christiansted. Both his mother and Hamilton contracted yellow fever. On February 19, 1768, Hamilton's mother died from the disease, leaving him orphaned.

In probate court, Lavien's "first husband seized her estate" and obtained the few valuables that she had owned, including some household silver. Many items were auctioned off, and a friend purchased the family's books, returning them to Hamilton.

The brothers were briefly taken in by their cousin Peter Lytton. However, Lytton took his own life in July 1769, leaving his property to his mistress and their son, and the propertyless Hamilton brothers were subsequently separated. James Jr. apprenticed with a local carpenter, while Alexander was given a home by Thomas Stevens, a merchant from Nevis.

Hamilton became a clerk at Beekman and Cruger, a local import-export firm that traded with the Province of New York and New England. Though still a teenager, Hamilton proved capable enough as a trader to be left in charge of the firm for five months in 1771 while the owner was at sea. He remained an avid reader, and later developed an interest in writing and a life outside Saint Croix. He wrote a detailed letter to his father regarding a hurricane that devastated Christiansted on August 30, 1772. The Presbyterian Reverend Hugh Knox, a tutor and mentor to Hamilton, submitted the letter for publication in the Royal Danish-American Gazette. Biographer Ron Chernow found the letter astounding because "for all its bombastic excesses, it does seem wondrous [that a] self-educated clerk could write with such verve and gusto" and that a teenage boy produced an apocalyptic "fire-and-brimstone sermon" viewing the hurricane as a "divine rebuke to human vanity and pomposity." The essay impressed community leaders, who collected a fund to send Hamilton to the North American colonies for his education.

In October 1772, Hamilton arrived by ship in Boston and then proceeded to New York City, where he boarded with Hercules Mulligan, the Irish-born brother of a trader known to Hamilton's benefactors. Mulligan assisted Hamilton in selling the cargo that Hamilton was to use to pay for his education and support. Hamilton sought to fill gaps in his education in preparation for college, and later that year began to attend Elizabethtown Academy, a preparatory school run by Francis Barber in Elizabeth, New Jersey. While there, he was introduced to William Livingston, a local leading intellectual and revolutionary who influenced him, and he boarded with the Livingstons while studying.

In fall 1773, Hamilton returned to New York and entered Mulligan's alma mater, King's College (now Columbia University). Hamilton began as a private student and boarded again with Mulligan until he matriculated into the college the following year, in May 1774. His college roommate and lifelong friend Robert Troup spoke glowingly of Hamilton's clarity in concisely explaining the Patriot case against the British during the American Revolution in what was Hamilton's first public appearance, on July 6, 1774. As King's College students, Hamilton, Troup, and four other undergraduates formed an unnamed literary society that is regarded as a precursor to what is now the Philolexian Society.

Later in 1774, Church of England clergyman Samuel Seabury in New York published a series of pamphlets promoting the Loyalist cause, seeking to provoke fear in the Thirteen Colonies, which he hoped would discourage them from uniting against the British. Hamilton countered anonymously with his first published political writings, A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress and The Farmer Refuted. He published two additional pieces attacking the Quebec Act, and may have also authored the 15 anonymous installments of "The Monitor" for Holt's New York Journal. Hamilton supported the revolutionary cause before the war began, but he disapproved of mob violence against the Loyalists. On May 10, 1775, he was credited with saving King's College president Myles Cooper, a Loyalist, from an angry mob by speaking to the crowd long enough to allow Cooper to escape. Hamilton was forced to discontinue his studies before graduating when the college closed its doors during the British occupation of New York City and his subsequent military service.

Early military career

In 1775, following the outbreak of the Revolutionary War with the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Hamilton and other King's College students joined a New York volunteer militia company, the Corsicans, whose name reflected the Corsican Republic that was suppressed six years earlier and which young American patriots regarded as a political model to be emulated.

Hamilton drilled with the company before classes in the graveyard of nearby St. Paul's Chapel, studied military history and tactics on his own, and was soon elected an officer. Under fire from HMS Asia, and coordinating with Hercules Mulligan and the Sons of Liberty, he led his newly renamed unit, the "Hearts of Oak," on a successful raid for British cannons in the Battery. The seizure of the cannons resulted in the unit being re-designated an artillery company.

Through his connections with influential New York patriots, including Alexander McDougall and John Jay, Hamilton was commissioned by the revolutionary government to raise the New York Provincial Company of Artillery of 60 men in 1776, and was then appointed captain. The company took part in the campaign of 1776 in and around New York City; as rearguard of the Continental Army's retreat up Manhattan, serving at the Battle of Harlem Heights shortly after, and at the Battle of White Plains a month later. At the Battle of Trenton, the company was stationed at the high point of town at the intersection of present-day Warren and Broad streets to keep the Hessians pinned down in their barracks.

Hamilton participated in the Battle of Princeton on January 3, 1777. After an initial setback, Washington rallied the Continental Army troops and led them in a successful charge against the British forces. After making a brief stand, the British fell back, some leaving Princeton, and others taking up refuge in Nassau Hall. Hamilton transported three cannons to the hall, and had them fire upon the building as others rushed the front door and broke it down. The British subsequently put a white flag outside one of the windows; 194 British soldiers walked out of the building and laid down their arms, ending the battle in an American victory.

Religious faith

As a youth in the West Indies, Hamilton was an orthodox and conventional Presbyterian of the New Lights; he was mentored there by a former student of John Witherspoon, a moderate of the New School. He wrote two or three hymns, which were published in the local newspaper. Robert Troup, his college roommate, noted that Hamilton was "in the habit of praying on his knees night and morning".

During the American Revolution, however, Hamilton became less religious and instead became "a conventional liberal with theistic inclinations who was an irregular churchgoer at best," according to Brown University historian Gordon S. Wood. In his final years of life, though, Hamilton returned to his Protestant faith. Historian Ron Chernow wrote:

[H]e was not clearly affiliated with the denomination and did not seem to attend church regularly or take communion. Like Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson, Hamilton had probably fallen under the sway of deism, which sought to substitute reason for revelation and dropped the notion of an active God who intervened in human affairs. At the same time, he never doubted God's existence, embracing Christianity as a system of morality and cosmic justice.

When the Constitutional Convention opened in Philadelphia in May 1787, stories circulated that Hamilton made two quips about God at the convention. Asked by a Presbyterian minister why God was not referenced in the Constitution, Hamilton responded "Indeed, Doctor, we forgot it." When Benjamin Franklin asked that each session of the Constitutional Convention be opened with prayer, Hamilton is reported to have replied that there was no need for "foreign aid". During the French Revolution, Hamilton displayed a utilitarian approach to using religion for political ends, including maligning Thomas Jefferson as "the atheist", and insisting that Christianity and Jeffersonian democracy were incompatible. After 1801, Hamilton expressed his belief in Christianity, proposing a Christian Constitutional Society in 1802 to take hold of "some strong feeling of the mind" to elect "fit men" to office, and advocating "Christian welfare societies" for the poor.

After being shot in his duel with Aaron Burr on July 11, 1804, Hamilton spoke of his belief in God's mercy. On his deathbed, Hamilton asked the Episcopal Bishop of New York, Benjamin Moore, to give him holy communion. Moore initially declined to do so, on two grounds: that to participate in a duel was a mortal sin, and that Hamilton, although undoubtedly sincere in his faith, was not a member of the Episcopalian denomination. After leaving, Moore was persuaded to return that afternoon following urgent pleas of Hamilton's friends. After receiving Hamilton's solemn assurance that he never intended to shoot Burr and repented for his part in the duel, Moore gave him communion. Bishop Moore returned the next morning, stayed with Hamilton for several hours until his death, and conducted his subsequent funeral service at Trinity Church.

Emergence of political parties

Hamilton's vision was challenged by Virginia agrarians Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who formed the Democratic-Republican Party. They favored strong state governments based in rural America and protected by state militias as opposed to a strong national government supported by a national army and navy. They denounced Hamilton as insufficiently devoted to republicanism, too friendly toward corrupt Britain and the monarchy in general, and too oriented toward cities, industry and banking.

The two-party system began to emerge as political parties coalesced around competing interests. A congressional caucus, led by Madison, Jefferson, and William Branch Giles, began as an opposition group to Hamilton's financial programs. Hamilton and his allies began to call themselves the Federalists.

Hamilton assembled a nationwide coalition to garner support for the administration, including the expansive financial programs Hamilton had made administration policy and especially the president's policy of neutrality in the European war between Britain and France. Hamilton publicly denounced French minister Genêt, who commissioned American privateers and recruited Americans for private militias to attack British ships and colonial possessions of British allies. Eventually, even Jefferson joined Hamilton in seeking Genêt's recall. If Hamilton's administrative republic was to succeed, Americans had to see themselves first as citizens of a nation and experience an administration that proved firm and demonstrated the concepts found within the Constitution. The Federalists did impose some internal direct taxes, but they departed from most implications of Hamilton's administrative republic as risky.

The Republicans opposed banks and cities and favored the series of unstable revolutionary governments in France. They built their own national coalition to oppose the Federalists. Both sides gained the support of local political factions, and each side developed its own partisan newspapers. Noah Webster, John Fenno, and William Cobbett were energetic editors for the Federalists, while Benjamin Franklin Bache and Philip Freneau were fiery Republican editors. All of their newspapers were characterized by intense personal attacks, major exaggerations, and invented claims. In 1801, Hamilton established a daily newspaper, the New York Evening Post, and brought in William Coleman as its editor. Hamilton's and Jefferson's incompatibility was heightened by the unavowed wish of each to be Washington's principal and most trusted advisor.

An additional partisan irritant to Hamilton was the 1791 United States Senate election in New York, which resulted in the election of Democratic-Republican candidate Aaron Burr over Federalist candidate Philip Schuyler, the incumbent and Hamilton's father-in-law. Hamilton blamed Burr personally for this outcome, and negative characterizations of Burr began to appear in his correspondence thereafter. The two men did work together from time to time thereafter on various projects, including Hamilton's army of 1798 and the Manhattan Water Company.