Alexander Hamilton: portrait

Born in the West Indies on Nevis, January 11, 1755, Alexander Hamilton was to scale great social and professional heights once he grew to manhood in the new United States. His beginnings were less elevated. His mother, Rachel Fawcett Levine, was jailed in 1745 having been convicted of “adultery and whoring with everyone.” Her husband’s divorce petition in 1759 declared she was the mother of two illegitimate children; one of them was Alexander Hamilton.

He carried the name of James Hamilton, a Scottish immigrant who may have been his father. He and Rachel certainly lived together. By the time she died, they were separated. Her son Alexander was sent to live with Rachel’s family. The boy of twelve was put out to work as a clerk, but was soon longing for bigger things.

His superior intelligence was easily apparent to local patrons on Nevis, including his cousin, Ann Lytton Mitchell, who saw to it that Alexander was educated in the American colony of New York. He arrived in New York in 1772 and began classes at Barber’s Elizabethtown Academy in New Jersey to prepare for college. His connections in Elizabethtown were good ones. He boarded with the well-to-do lawyer, William Livingston. Elias Boudinot, another leading citizen, is believed to have helped him financially.

In Elizabethtown Hamilton began his career as one of the great lovers of his generation by writing his host’s daughter: “I challenge you to meet me in whatever path you dare, and if you have no objection, for variety and amusement, we will even sometimes make excursions in the flowery walks, and roseate bowers of Cupid.”

Both Livingston and Boudinot were trustees of the College of New Jersey (Princeton), but Hamilton’s application there was rejected. He was accepted at Kings College (Columbia), then on Church Street at Barclay Street in Manhattan, and entered school there in the spring of 1774. Hamilton had no sooner settled in college when he became involved in revolutionary politics. In December he published his first revolutionary polemic followed by another in February 1775.

The pamphlets were embryonic statements of his later political philosophy.

The young Hamilton believed that a principal purpose of government was to protect property. He also believed that both property rights and a government’s authority rested on “natural justice.” He discussed the colonists right to restrict trade with England and warned that interference with import and export of goods would lead necessarily to manufacture within the American colony. He believed the common man needed governing in the direction of the common good, because his natural interest is self- interest and avarice. Without government, “the unthinking populace” would lead a nation to anarchy. This worldview set down and published when he was 20 years old, continued unchanged until Hamilton’s death 30 years later.

He began drilling with a military company in St. Paul’s churchyard and in August 1775, was part of an action to remove British cannons from a fort at the Battery under fire by British warships. He left Kings College without graduating and in March 1776 was made captain in New York’s provincial artillery. Following the Battle of Brooklyn, which Hamilton viewed from Bayard’s Hill in Manhattan, he took part in the retreat north, where he engaged in the Battle of Harlem Heights. After this defeat, as the army was retreating again across the Hudson, Hamilton’s battery fought a rear guard action against a Hessian Brigade. Shortly after, he began his four-year service as aide-de-camp to General George Washington.

Washington’s personal staff was comprised of 30 young officers he called his “family” over the course of the war. Hamilton was to be the favorite son. Promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel, Hamilton became the most relied upon and trusted member of Washington’s “family.” But even after he left the army, Hamilton continued to advise Washington on issues facing the new country and this continued after Washington was made President in 1789.

Washington’s faith in Hamilton may have been misplaced. Hamilton often criticized the general and the president behind his back. He thought him a poor general and a poor thinker. John Adams told the story of Hamilton seeking a command at the Battle of Yorktown, flying into a rage and threatening, “to expose General Washington’s conduct in a pamphlet.” General Francisco de Miranda, who was a friend of his, claimed that Hamilton spoke of Washington “with great contempt.”

Hamilton picked an argument with Washington that ended his tenure as aide-de-camp. Hamilton, writing to Philip Schuyler over his departure from Washington’s staff, said, “For three years past I have felt no friendship for him and have professed none.” For Washington’s part, he continued to foster his protégé’s career for the remainder of his life.

Even as Secretary of Treasury, Hamilton saw his true role in government as prime minister. He was always to admire the British form of government over the American democracy. In the Constitutional Convention he would propose that “the rich and well-born” have a permanent role in controlling the masses. In his law practice, following the Revolution, Hamilton’s specialty was representing Tories whose property or liberties were threatened in the new order.

As early as 1779, Hamilton was thinking of how he would marry a woman with money. He wrote a friend, “But as to fortune, the larger stock of it the better.” In 1780, by which time he was engaged to marry Elizabeth Schuyler, Hamilton’s friends were in “raptures” over the riches he was marrying into. Philip Schuyler, who was of a wealthy New York family, had married Catherine Van Rensselaer who had even more money. When Hamilton first met their daughter, Betsey, the Schuylers owned thousands of acres of land, farms, mills, timberland, one schooner and three sloops. Philip had made another fortune supplying first British and then American troops, charging double for flour.

The young Alexander back in Nevis did well to wish for a war. Without his solid credentials as an officer in the Revolution and the contacts he made through his service with George Washington, he could not have hoped to marry a girl as rich and with impeccable social connections as Betsey Schuyler. John Adams was to refer to Hamilton years later as “that bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar.” But with Betsey Schuyler at his side, Alexander Hamilton was a gentleman, whether the aristocratic Adams liked it or not.

Hamilton’s family and biographers have generally refuted the notion that he accepted money to live on from the Schuylers. However, it is hard to know how he and Betsey and their seven children lived on the scale they lived on without either family assistance or corrupt practices in government. Thomas Jefferson said, “Hamilton was not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption.”

While there is no evidence that Hamilton personally made money off his government work, his friends and relations are known to have profited by inside information he shared with them. Hamilton was a genius and if he wanted to could have buried his tracks quite easily. In 1792 he managed to get himself out of a congressional hearing on misuse of federal funds by shifting public focus to his adultery with Maria Reynolds, whose husband implicated Hamilton in shady dealings with veterans’ bonuses.

As Secretary of the Treasury his salary was a modest $3,500 a year. He made more money once he left the army in 1783 to open his law practice in New York, and before he joined Washington’s cabinet in 1789, but not enough to account for large investments he made in western land and other enterprises. Betsey’s sister, Angelica, who is believed to have been Hamilton's true love, had eloped with John Barker Church, an Englishman who had left Britain under a cloud of bankruptcy and scandal. In America, Church made a fortune in speculation in land, securities, currencies, and, several times a week, card games.

Hamilton arranged for Church to serve on the Board of Directors of the Bank of New York. Hamilton and Church were partners in many of Church’s business deals that benefited from Hamilton’s inside information on government actions. So did Philip Schuyler and other men of the class with which Hamilton chose to associate. Perhaps Hamilton sought approval of his social betters in providing them opportunities to further enrich themselves. But Hamilton truly believed the wellborn and wealthy were the appropriate leaders of any society and would have seen this sort of business activity as contributing to the national good.

As successfully as he managed the nation’s commerce, Hamilton seems to have managed his own very poorly. This was true of the Founding Fathers, in general: They lived far above their means and lost money on enterprise after enterprise. In Hamilton’s case, he owned a townhouse in the city and built a grand country home on Harlem Heights, sent his sons to exclusive private schools, and entertained lavishly. Where the money came from to support his lifestyle is open to question.

The election of 1800 was a turning point in Hamilton’s political fortunes. The nation had taken a turn for democracy. Hamilton’s all-powerful Federalist party had lost to the Democratic-Republicans. His political enemies and personal rivals, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, had won.

Hamilton had fought like a demon to destroy Burr, going so far as to try to get John Jay to overturn the election. He wrote to Jay, "It will not do to be overscrupulous." Jay refused and allied with Burr in 1804. Hamilton’s own party had already lost faith in him as their leader and were courting Aaron Burr to head a New England confederacy that would secede from the union.

The Reynolds Affair in 1792 started Hamilton’s free-fall. Publishing the details of his extra-marital affair, of which this was one of several, was not evaluated as much on moral grounds as on the quality of the man’s judgment. Further, it was viewed as a way to deflect the charges of official misconduct.

In the 1800 election season, he did something so inexplicably stupid it contributed to the Federalist loss of the presidency: He wrote a pamphlet saying incumbent Federalist President John Adams was unfit for office.

This mad act in the middle of a critical election destabilized the Federalist Party forever and ended Hamilton politically. Federalist Noah Webster wrote Hamilton in a private letter that Federalists and Anti-Federalists alike would in future believe that Hamilton's "ambition, pride, and overbearing temper have destined you to be the evil genius of this country." He closed saying, "Your conduct on this occasion will be deemed little short of insanity."

By 1802, Hamilton was severely depressed. He wrote he to Gouverneur Morris, "What can I do better than withdraw from the scene? Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me." Some of Hamilton’s biographers have written that he was a manic-depressive who suffered from bipolar disorder. Perhaps this is the source of his self-destruction.

He had good reason to be depressed by 1804 when he faced Aaron Burr on the field of honor and there is a theory the duel, for Hamilton, was an act of suicide. His eldest son, Philip, was killed in a duel in 1801 over insults to his father's honor. His oldest daughter, Angelica, went permanently mad with grief over the loss of her brother. The Hamiltonian vision of America had disappeared before his eyes. He had been bested in politics by the rival of his revolutionary youth, Aaron Burr.

While the circumstances of his birth were well known in the small world he lived in, Hamilton himself is not known to have admitted to it. When he had an opportunity in 1787 before the New York Council of Revision to revise a divorce law that forbade an adulterer from remarrying, Hamilton voted against the measure.

Rachel, his mother, was a victim of a similar law in the West Indies. Perhaps if she had been free to marry James Hamilton, their son would not have been born illegitimate and he would have entered adult life on a more secure footing. She would not have been held up for the world to see as a “fallen woman.” As it was, he does not appear to have been able to overcome the lingering hostility and shame over his birth. Perhaps he was afraid of drawing attention to it by voting to liberalize the divorce law.

Hamilton's brilliant success as a nation builder and genius at statehood, and his subsequent political and personal failures, then, may have stemmed from a conflicting response to his low birth. His illegitimate birth may have conflicted deeply with his aspirations to high social standing.

Driven to seek fame and fortune at all cost to overcome the stigma of illegitimacy, he may have been doomed to failure. Perhaps the strain of the pretense caught up with him. Perhaps, deep down, he believed himself ultimately unworthy of the station he had attained in life. Perhaps he never believed himself a gentleman.