Alexander Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton built the financial system of the United States and was killed in a duel by the sitting vice-president. Born on Nevis in the West Indies in 1755 or 1757, illegitimate and orphaned, he was clerking for a trading house at about fourteen. A letter he wrote describing a hurricane so impressed local subscribers that they paid to send him to the mainland to be educated. He studied at King's College in New York, joined the revolution as an artillery captain, and became Washington's aide-de-camp for four years — writing much of his correspondence — before commanding an assault at Yorktown. He practised law, sat in Congress, and was a delegate at the Constitutional Convention, where his own proposals were too monarchical to be adopted. He then wrote fifty-one of the eighty-five Federalist Papers, at speed, which remain the standard commentary on the constitution. As the first Secretary of the Treasury from 1789 he did the essential work. He had the federal government assume the states' war debts, established public credit by paying them at face value, created the Bank of the United States, the Mint and the customs service, and set out a case for manufactures and tariffs. The programme created a functioning national economy and split the founding generation into parties. He was forced to publish a pamphlet in 1797 admitting an affair to refute a charge of speculation. He destroyed his own party's candidate in 1800 and then backed Jefferson over Aaron Burr, and blocked Burr again in 1804. Burr shot him at Weehawken in July 1804.

• Lived: 1757 CE – 1804 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: founder, statesman, military_leader

Related

• The American Revolution
• Siege of Yorktown
• Publication of the Federalist Papers
• Constitutional Convention