Posted on 07/23/2004 1:57:16 PM PDT by Coleus
Theory of a founding father's African ancestry
Friday, July 23, 2004
AS MUCH as I thought I knew about Alexander Hamilton, the first treasury secretary, nobody ever told me he was black. Yes. You heard it here first, folks.
And you'll think about it from now on every time you take out a $10 bill.
Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow is the latest one to explore the theory.
I was totally blown away by that information when a friend casually mentioned Hamilton's link to two significant anniversaries - the 250th anniversary of Columbia University, originally Kings College where he was schooled, and the 200th anniversary this month of the duel in Weehawken with Aaron Burr that claimed his life.
Hamilton was black? It was in none of the historical accounts I'd read.
Knowing if it's true would help explain why Hamilton and John Jay worked on legal strategies after the Revolution to keep former slaves and freedmen from being snatched back into slavery. They called it the New York Manumission Society.
"He was a passionate and consistent abolitionist," Chernow told me. "What he says about blacks is very sympathetic."
Hamilton wrote a letter to John Jay objecting to his reasons for rejecting slaves and free blacks as soldiers.
"Their natural faculties are probably as good as ours," Hamilton wrote.
Chernow says having been born and raised in two slave-dominant Caribbean cultures - Nevis, a British Island, and St. Croix, under Danish rule - might explain Hamilton's feelings about improving the lot of blacks in America.
In "Alexander Hamilton," Chernow, the author of the newly released Penguin Press biography quotes him: "The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor in experience."
Chernow says Hamilton never talked about his background, but everybody else - especially his enemies - knew he was born illegitimate and that, with no "family," he had risen fast after arriving on the continent. They called him names - immigrant, foreigner, Creole — punctuated with "bastard."
News accounts of the day called his mother Creole, but Chernow says there's been no proof that he was racially mixed.
Folklore, anonymous statements in the newspaper by political enemies, and the fact that African slaves dominated St. Croix demographics about 14 to one all add to what Chernow calls the "presumption" of blackness in Hamilton's bloodlines. It didn't help that his mother had a less than stellar reputation, having borne him and his brother James after leaving her husband and son on St. Croix and hooking up with her new man on Nevis.
Chernow says there was a "presumption" that his mother was part black, but there's no proof.
"From the time he started to become politically controversial, reports started to occur in the press that he was Creole," Chernow says.
"It does not come from friendly sources. It comes from people who wanted to discredit him." Chernow found a lock of Hamilton's hair, but says geneticists told him race could not be proven definitively using that hair.
William Cissel, a U.S. Park Service historian working on St. Croix, said his mother Rachel Fawcett Levien was listed as white on several census and church burial documents.
Hamilton's blackness is supported only by circumstantial argument.
I say let's dig him up and run some genetic tests on his DNA. It's been done with older bones than his, and we know where he's buried in the Trinity Church churchyard. Why not? A whole cemetery, the African Burial Grounds, was excavated in lower Manhattan and the bones scattered so the foundation of a new federal building could be poured.
Inquiring minds want to know if the Caribbean foreigner responsible for our banking structure and establishing manufacturing in Paterson was of African descent.
One school of thought says color shouldn't matter as long as he did a good job. But it would be a good idea to pin it down for sure to expand our knowledge of colonial history... and to reinforce in African-Americans a sense of "belonging" beyond their slave history.
The message for black youngsters is that African-Americans were present at every stage of the United States' development, and that one of the founding fathers was in fact an African-American.
If nothing else, Hamilton's rise to power and prominence from beginnings that could only be described as Dickensian, is a lesson in overcoming adversity.
Lawrence Aaron is a Record columnist. Contact him at aaron@northjersey.com . Send comments about this column to oped@northjersey.com .
He sure doesn't look black to me.
There is an idiotic group that for years has been claiming the Beethoven was black. People just have too much time on their hands.
Does this mean that Aaron Burr committed a hate crime when he shot Hamilton in a duel?
His mother, Rachel, taught him Hebrew. Her first husband was a Danish Jew.. There is much mmore evidence she was Jewish than that she was Black.
I heard this a few weeks ago when Forrest McDonald, who wrote one of the best bios of Hamilton, was on C-SPAN2 for a three hour interview. Some caller was asking about this very thing. Dr. McDonald pretty much said it is highly unlikely but irrelevant in any case.
Interestingly, Dr. McDonald mentioned that the most likely person to ever be POTUS and have black ancestry is Warren Harding. You don't hear that one talked about much. I guess Harding isn't "sexy" enough. (and, yes, I know that Hamilton was never POTUS.)
Heather Locklear:
Another family whose name is a giveaway for their African heritage is that of Locklear - yes, the same one that Heather, the blond bombshell of the TV series, "Melrose Place," claims as her own. Although as Anglo Saxon sounding as you can make it, the name is, in fact, an Indian one and in the language of the Tuscarora tribes means "hold fast." Indeed, it would appear that Ms. Locklear's family, at least on her father's side, once belonged to a segment of the population which in academic terminology is referred to as a tri-racial isolate - a community of individuals whose ancestry is a mixture of European, Indian and Black and who intermarried only with each other. ...
I think they are an adjunct of the group who wants to claim that all signigicant historical figures were gay.
"He was a passionate and consistent abolitionist," Chernow told me. "What he says about blacks is very sympathetic."
Hamilton wrote a letter to John Jay objecting to his reasons for rejecting slaves and free blacks as soldiers.
"Their natural faculties are probably as good as ours," Hamilton wrote.
I'm convinced.
No white man could hold these views.
for later
He would be Jewish if his mother was.
He's not black. He'd have african ancestry in the same way that I do. Whatever. I love historical revisionism.
Heheheh. Funny you should mention that. There also is a group who is convinced that Beethoven was gay, too!
But it would be a good idea to pin it down for sure to expand our knowledge of colonial history... and to reinforce in African-Americans a sense of "belonging" beyond their slave history.
** :SIGH:
Okay
So there goes replacing Hamilton with Ronald Reagan on the $10.
Freepers, what now? Shoot for the $20?
Yup. Heheheh.
Hamilton (who is one of my heroes BTW) was often referred to as a mulatto. I'm surprised this author doesn't mention that. I can see the benefit to the black community, but I'm squeamish about digging up long-dead founding fathers. (Whose portraits notoriously did not resemble their likenesses.)
No pun intended, but such a fad could create many cans of worms.
As I understand it, the idea that the word "creole" means a person of partial black ancestry is pretty recent. (I remember reading an article about a dating service that felt it had to tell its southern users that "creole" and "cajun" in personal ads were taken by nonsouthern users to mean part black-think that article was on FR.) In the 18th century , 'creole' meant a colonial of mixed Spanish and/or French ancestry-not African. Some creoles would indeed be part African or part Indian as well as French or Spanish ...but the word did not automatically mean part African, as the writer seems to believe. Napoleon referred to his first empress Josephine as "my little creole", and he didn't mean she was what he would have called a "Negroe" (preffered 18th century spelling.) So maybe Hamilton was part-black, maybe not-but references to his "creole" ancestry aren't proof.
With stories like these, I'm reminded of the old Cold War claim that any great invention was done first by the Russians. I like ancient Roman and Egyptian culture - does that mean I have to have some Italian or Egyptian in my ancestry to appreciate it? (this would be news to all those solid Germans in my background - though there's probably some Roman back there from the old Empire days, come to think of it)
The charge may come from a confusion of the meaning of the term 'Creole'.
It has sometimes been used to indicate an Expat, generally in the Caribean. Josephine Beauharnais, Napoleon's wife, is refered to as a 'Creole' meaning her father was a planter in the Caribean and she was born there.
Sometimes the term is used here to indicate a 'High Yellow' mixed breed, such as an octaroon.
We will never know.
So9
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