Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Built the Engine

You know him from the musical. You know him from the $10 bill. However, here is the Alexander Hamilton that neither Broadway nor our currency quite captures. He was the orphan immigrant from the Caribbean who arrived in America at roughly 16 years of age, with nothing.  Within a decade he was running George Washington's army, and within two decades had constructed the financial architecture that made the United States of America a viable nation rather than a failed experiment.

Hamilton was born out of wedlock in 1755 on the island of Nevis in the British West Indies. His father abandoned the family. His mother died of fever when Hamilton was 13. By 15 he was working as a clerk for a trading company in St. Croix and was blowing people away with his grasp for economics. His employers and customers were so impressed that they raised money to send him to America for education. He enrolled at what is now Columbia University in 1773.

The war interrupted everything. Hamilton organized and led an artillery company, impressed Washington at the Battle of Trenton, and became Washington's aide at 22, which was practically the General's chief of staff, managing communication, coordinating with Congress, translating for foreign officers, and drafting strategic documents. He begged Washington for a field command and Washington refused, understanding what Hamilton was worth behind a desk. Hamilton finally forced the issue in 1781 and led the assault on Redoubt No. 10 at Yorktown with a bayonet charge in the dark that helped seal the final British defeat.

Then came the harder work. Hamilton looked at the United States in 1789 and saw what others chose not to, which was a nation about to be financially broke, with no legitimate currency, crushing war debt that it was defaulting on, and no way to generate the revenue needed to function. He became Secretary of the Treasury and did in three years what most nations take generations to accomplish.

His Report on Public Credit proposed that the federal government assume all state war debts and fund them at face value, which could build national creditworthiness from scratch. His Report on a National Bank proposed a Bank of the United States that would issue stable currency and serve as a financial agent. His Report on Manufactures laid out a vision of American industrial development that would make sense to modern economists.

Jefferson and Madison opposed nearly all of it, fearing a European-style commercial and banking system only for the elite. The argument between Hamilton's vision and Jefferson's was the first great debate of the American political economy, and it has never entirely ended. Both men were partly right. The America that emerged was a hybrid where it was commercial enough to become the world's greatest economy, agriculturally sound and suspicious of concentrated power enough to keep questioning whether that economy serves everyone equally.

Hamilton was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804, at 49. He deliberately held his fire and did not shoot. The nation he built with his pen outlasted him by more than two centuries and is still running on foundations he laid.

Some men build buildings. Some men build the ground the buildings stand on.

Sources

Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: Penguin Press, 2004.

McDonald, Forrest. Alexander Hamilton: A Biography. New York: Norton, 1979.

Hamilton, Alexander. 'Report on Public Credit.' January 9, 1790. Founders Online, National Archives.

Hamilton, Alexander. 'Report on a National Bank.' December 13, 1790. Founders Online, National Archives.

Knott, Stephen F. Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002.