| Bio |

Who they were

Alexander Hamilton was born on 11 January 1757 on the Caribbean island of Nevis^{[2, p. 472]}. His parents were never married, and his illegitimate birth was, throughout his life, a source of hardship and self-consciousness^{[1, p. 2]}. As a teenager, he worked as a clerk in a merchant's counting house in the West Indies^[4]. A vivid letter he wrote describing a devastating 1772 hurricane showcased his writing talent^{[5, p. 5]}, and not long afterward he crossed the Atlantic to pursue a formal education in the American colonies.

In New York, Hamilton enrolled at King's College, now Columbia University^[6], just as tensions between Britain and its American colonies were coming to a head. When war broke out, he joined the fight, and in 1777 he was appointed an aide-de-camp to General George Washington^[7], serving at the centre of the Continental Army's command for much of the Revolutionary War. The role put the young immigrant clerk in direct, daily contact with the man who would remain his most important political patron for the rest of his career, and gave Hamilton firsthand experience of the young nation's chronic wartime money problems.

Hamilton's defining contribution came after the war, building the case for a stronger federal union. He co-wrote, with James Madison and John Jay, the Federalist Papers, a series of essays defending the proposed Constitution; Hamilton alone wrote roughly three-quarters of the eighty-five essays^[8]. As the nation's first Secretary of the Treasury under President Washington^{[9, p. 341]}, he then built the young republic's financial system from scratch, including the establishment of the First Bank of the United States^{[10, p. 4]}. In the deadlocked, contested election of 1800–1801, Hamilton used his influence to get the Federalist Party to back Thomas Jefferson over Aaron Burr, judging Burr the more dangerous of the two^{[1, p. 3]}.

Hamilton's long rivalry with Aaron Burr, sharpened by his role in denying Burr the presidency, eventually turned fatal. In 1804, after a chain of personal and political insults, Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel^{[11, p. 4]}. The two met at Weehawken, New Jersey, on 11 July 1804; Hamilton was mortally wounded and died the next day^[3]. He was shot at the same dueling ground where his own eldest son, Philip, had been killed in a duel just three years earlier^{[5, p. 17]}.

Hamilton's financial system, the funded national debt, tax structure, and the Bank of the United States, gave the young country's economy the credibility it needed to function and to borrow, shaping American public finance for generations. The Federalist Papers he co-wrote, three-quarters of them in his own hand^[8], remain one of the most detailed contemporary explanations of what the Constitution's framers intended. Unlike most of his fellow Founding Fathers, Hamilton never became president; his enduring reputation rests instead on the institutions and arguments he built rather than on holding the nation's highest office.

Three years before his own fatal duel, Hamilton had already buried a son at the same dueling ground. Philip Hamilton, his eldest, was killed at Weehawken in 1801, defending his father's honour^{[5, p. 17]}, and some accounts suggest the very same set of pistols may have been used in both encounters^{[11, p. 33]}.

| Legacy & Reputation |

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