Posted on 04/27/2004 11:06:13 PM PDT by Clemenza
In our imagination, the founding fathers are so embedded in their native states - Washington, Jefferson and Madison on their Virginia plantations, John Adams on his New England farm - that Alexander Hamilton can seem the footloose exception. The first treasury secretary prided himself on his broad, continental perspective, and even fervid admirers have been loath to cast him as a New Yorker, lest this tarnish his gleaming national vision. Yet in five years of research, I have found that Hamilton, loaded with brash charm, bottomless energy and worldly cunning, was in fact the classic New Yorker and a quintessential urbanite.
He was probably shaped by New York long before he glimpsed the tiny metropolis. An illegitimate child born in the Caribbean on the British island of Nevis, he spent his adolescence on the Danish island of St. Croix. Orphaned by age 13 by his father's desertion and his mother's death from fever, he toiled as a clerk at a St. Croix trading house that bound him to New York by extensive trading ties.
His three bosses were scions of distinguished Manhattan families, posted to the tropics as agents for their family firms. Right before the Boston Tea Party, they liberated this wunderkind from his ghastly Dickensian childhood by financing his education in North America.
In 1773, Hamilton, largely self-taught, crammed at a preparatory school in Elizabeth, N.J., before facing the momentous choice of a college. With the chronic impatience of a future New Yorker, he asked the president of Princeton (then the College of New Jersey) whether he could accelerate his education by proceeding "with as much rapidity as his exertions" allowed. When the school trustees spurned this youthful presumption, Hamilton wangled such a deal from Myles Cooper, president of King's College in Lower Manhattan, renamed Columbia after the Revolution.
His King's education spared Hamilton the small-town isolation of Princeton, thrusting him into the tumult of Revolutionary politics, and the city, split between Tories and Whigs, mirrored his own contradictory emotions. This articulate young firebrand electrified a patriotic crowd with a debut speech on the Common (now City Hall Park), and his busy quill scribbled anti-British broadsides of blazing intensity. Yet Hamilton balked at the retribution being meted out to Tories. When a patriotic mob flocked to King's to rough up Cooper, Hamilton bravely blocked the entryway and gave the president, a Tory, time to escape to the Hudson River.
Hamilton feared that his straitened circumstances would thwart his political ambitions, but wartime service as Washington's aide-de-camp elevated his social standing and enabled him to woo Elizabeth Schuyler, the daughter of Maj. Gen. Philip Schuyler, a grandee of New York politics. In a state dominated by Hudson River patroons, the match surely aided Hamilton, even if his fame soon eclipsed that of his father-in-law. A postwar ban on Tory lawyers proved a windfall for gifted young lawyers like Hamilton, lodged at 57 Wall Street, and Aaron Burr, at 3 Wall Street. Hamilton and Burr collaborated on some cases, squared off on others and socialized with easy conviviality.
That Hamilton ended up in New York was fortunate. What other town would have embraced so warmly an aspiring immigrant of murky origins or tolerated the frenetic pace of his career? Hamilton seldom traveled or vacationed or even took a day off as he labored in harness to his ideals and ambitions.
Though acquainted with Hamilton's many accomplishments as treasury secretary - creating the first budget and tax system, customs service, Coast Guard and central bank while funding the country's debt - Americans know little of his other political posts: tax receiver, state assemblyman, congressman.
Hamilton, who was given to foppish dress and light tropical colors, also left a strong imprint on the city. In 1784, he was a co-founder of the first local bank, the Bank of New York, and in 1801 he helped to found the city's oldest surviving paper, the New-York Evening Post. He was a longtime Columbia trustee and, with Aaron Burr, a moving force behind Erasmus Hall Academy, now Erasmus Hall High School, in Flatbush, Brooklyn, which is the state's oldest secondary school. He also performed legal work for charitable organizations (Sailors' Snug Harbor) and churches (St. Mark's in-the-Bowery).
An overlooked aspect of Hamilton's New York life, which belies his stereotype as a pseudo-aristocrat, was his passionate abolitionism. In early 1785, when one in five households in the city owned slaves, Hamilton enlisted as a founding member of the New York Manumission Society and lent more than celebrity credentials to the board. He drafted a tough report that urged society members to emancipate their slaves within seven years, radical proposals that were promptly scrapped. Until the end of his life, Hamilton donated his legal services to freeing blacks who had been brazenly kidnapped off city streets and sold back into slavery.
Hamilton was one of three New York delegates to the Constitutional Convention and the only one to endorse the new charter. The state had profited from customs duties for goods imported through New York Harbor and was reluctant to cede this advantage to the federal government. To combat such parochialism, Hamilton launched "The Federalist Papers" with the original intent of influencing delegate selection to the New York State Ratifying Convention. In a tour de force of composition, he tossed off 51 of the 85 essays. At the state convention, Hamilton spoke 26 times and helped turn around the hostile mood, securing passage for the Constitution in New York.
After George Washington was sworn in as president at Wall and Broad in April 1789, he appointed Hamilton, then 34, as treasury secretary. Hamilton was seen pacing the streets, eyes peeled to the pavement, as he mulled over programs for the new country. His prescient vision of a powerful nation of large cities, factories, banks and stock exchanges clearly owed something to his residence in New York.
ALWAYS a supporter of his adopted city, Hamilton dreamed of converting New York from temporary to permanent capital. Nonetheless, he bargained away the city's chance to become the capital in exchange for critical Southern support for his controversial plan to restore public credit. Though many New Yorkers deplored this loss, the absence of the federal government may have preserved the raucous irreverence and enterprising zeal that have always characterized the city.
Hamilton also promoted the financial markets that flourished on Wall Street in the early 1790's. By the time city brokers gathered under the famous buttonwood tree in 1792 to create the forerunner of the New York Stock Exchange, they traded five securities: three issues of Treasury bonds and the stocks of the Bank of New York and the Bank of the United States, America's first central bank. Hamilton had conjured all these entities into being.
During my research, I was especially thrilled to unearth a scrap of faded paper at Columbia University, buried in the files of Hamilton's son. On the morning of July 11, 1804, Hamilton crossed the Hudson to Weehawken, N.J., en route to his fatal encounter with Burr. According to John Church Hamilton, as his father glanced back at the embryonic city, still confined to the southern tip of Manhattan, "he pointed out the beauties of the scenery and spoke of the future greatness of the city."
Hamilton, as usual, proved prophetic.
BTW: Methinks Alexander Hamilton would be highly disappointed in what has become of Erasmus Hall "Academy" the school he founded here in Brooklyn...
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