ALEXANDER HAMILTON

 

Alexander Hamilton’s parents called themselves husband and wife, but they were not married. Not to each other, that is. Hamilton’s mother Rachel Fawcett was married to a merchant named Johann Lavien, with whom she had a son. Only sixteen years old when she and Lavien married, she left him shortly after the birth of their son and moved to the island of Nevis, where she met and took up residence with James Hamilton. She had two sons with Hamilton before he abandoned the family when Rachel was 36 years old and Alexander was 10.

Left to raise her sons as a single mother, Rachel made a modest living keeping a small store. In 1768, when Alexander was 13 years old, she contracted yellow fever and died at age 39.

A local charity bought young Alexander clothes so he would have something to wear to his mother’s funeral. Then Lavien showed up and claimed Rachel’s meager estate for the child of their marriage, her illegitimate sons (Alexander and his brother) having no legal claim to it.

So, at age 13 Alexander Hamilton was both orphaned and impoverished. He took a job as a clerk and he and his brother moved in with a cousin. But shortly afterwards the cousin committed suicide, and Hamilton was taken in by a neighbor. By age 16 he was running his employer’s business for months at a time. When at age 17 he published an account of a hurricane that hit the island, community leaders realized Alexander had exceptional talent, and was deserving of an education. They raised the money to pay for it and sent Alexander to New York to go to school.

Despite all the obstacles he had to overcome, Hamilton had always been ambitious. In the earliest letter we still have from him, written when was 14, Hamilton wrote “I wish there was a war.” He saw military success as his opportunity to elevate himself. Being a 20-year-old man in the North American colonies in 1775, he soon got his wish.

It was as a soldier that Hamilton established his career and secured his legacy. After heroic service in the Battle of Princeton, Nathanael Green offered to make Hamilton his aide de camp, but Hamilton refused, feeling a staff position would deny him the chance to win glory on the battlefield. But when George Washington made him the same offer, Hamilton knew he could not refuse it. Still, he never lost his desire for combat glory and at the Battle of Yorktown General Washington allowed Hamilton to lead the dangerous nighttime assault on British Redoubt #10, winning him the battlefield fame he had so long desired.

Alexander Hamilton’s extraordinary rise and his role as a Founding Father of the United States is too much to cover in a single Dose. Suffice it to say that he became the leading voice for an industrialized economy and a strong central government, putting him in conflict with Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned a republic of independent small famers and a weak central government. Their rivalry and their competing visions for America would contribute to the emergence of the first political parties in the country. Hamilton didn’t get everything he wanted (for example, he proposed that the President serve for life and that state governors be appointed by Congress), and Jeffersonian political theory dominated America well into the 19th century, but Hamilton’s vision eventually carried the day and is now dominant in modern American political and economic thought.

Alexander Hamilton was born on the island of Nevis in the British West Indies on January 11, 1755, two hundred sixty-nine years ago today.