The Federalist; Biography of Hamilton

This document supports The Federalist, a production of LeftJustified Publiks.

"A national debt, if it is not excessive,
will be to us a national blessing."

ALEXANDER HAMILTON was perhaps the most ardent nationalist of his day. What he lacked in fervor, he made up in involvement & influence at the highest levels of the newly forming federal government.

He was born in the Island of Nevis in the British West Indies. At the age of 15 he was placed in a grammar school at Elizabethtown, New Jersey. A year later he entered King's College (now Columbia University). He was a noted for his intense intelligence & ingratiating charm.

Hamilton volunteered for service in the Revolutionary War in a New York artillery company. As a Captain, he was introduced to General George Washington who liked the young officer & enlisted him as an aide-de-camp, at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, in 1777. In the last year of the war (1781) he left this post to join the ranks in what would prove to be the last major battle of the revolutionary war, the battle of Yorktown.

In 1782 Hamilton was admitted to the bar in Albany & began to practice law in New York. That year he also took his seat in the Continental Congress where he was a leader in the discussions pertaining to finance.

In 1785, Washington & Hamilton organized the Alexandria Conference to iron out differences between Virginia & Maryland over navigation of the Potomac River. This meeting was so successful that delegates from Maryland proposed that Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, & Virginia should each appoint commissioners to meet & adopt a uniform commercial system. James Madison took this proposal one step further & suggested a meeting of all the states to discuss commercial concerns of the day with the ultimate objective to amend the Articles of Confederation. This meeting was a failure, but Hamilton & Madison designed a plan for another convention in Philadelphia on the second Monday of May, 1787. This ultimately became the Constitutional Convention.

Hamilton persuaded New York to send a delegation to the convention. He & two other delegates were sent but both of his companions were rabid anti-federalists. Even though Mr. Hamilton was consistently out-voted two to one, he out-lasted his fellow delegates from New York & it was he who signed the Constitution. Alexander Hamilton had decided during the war that the United States needed the strongest possible federal government. He was by all accounts a most undemocratic fellow. He argued for a limited monarchy like that of England. If this could not be, then he insisted that the country adopt an "aristocratic republic" with members elected for life. Hamilton was attacked widely & repeatedly at the convention for these views. He withdrew from the convention for about a month & then returned, keeping quiet until the end. Despite his uncomfortable contributions to the convention in Philadelphia, his articles in the Federalist Papers & his speeches in the New York convention later helped secure adoption of the Constitution by the states.

In 1789 Congress established the Treasury Department. Hamilton was appointed the first Secretary of the Treasury by President George Washington. In this capacity he did much to strengthen the federal government. He saw to it that the federal government first guaranteed & then paid its debts. He also convinced the Congress to assume debts incurred by the states in the course of the war. Hamilton first established the good credit of the United States. He did so, in part, by establishing the Bank of the United States in 1791. The primary business of the bank was the control of monetary policy. The economy of the new nation was booming & a lot of people were borrowing money in order to expand operations. The effect of this activity was to place too much currency in circulation, resulting in inflation. In order to protect the value of assets, the national bank exerted pressure on money-lending institutions in order to control the supply of money & prevent the banks from over-extending the mselves. Because of strong opposition to such "federal meddling," the charter for the Bank of the United States was not renewed by the Congress in 1811. Hamilton's effort, however, was somewhat vindicated in 1816 when the need for such an institution became apparent even to his most diligent critics. The Second National Bank was chartered during the presidency of James Madison. The Federal Reserve System—established in 1913 with these very same objectives in mind, but with a less politically charged profile—is the legacy of that first effort by Alexander Hamilton.

Secretary Hamilton's administration is also noted for the first efforts by the federal government to establish taxes to generate revenue for specific federal projects. In a series of reports (Report on the Public Credit, 2'nd Report on the Public Credit, Report on Manufactures), he advocated policies of monetary control & public taxes that would strengthen the role & power of the federal government. He proposed protective tariffs for American industries & taxes on commercial farming to fund construction of roads & lighthouses. The object was to boost an already rapidly developing economy. Because of the political force carried by the densely populated coast, none of the tariffs on shipping or manufactures made it through Congress. The taxes on farmers who were concentrated to the west across the mountains were sustained. This resulted in the Whiskey Tax. Whiskey was an important commodity in colonial America. It was prohibitively expensive for the farmers to haul grain across the mountains so they instead distilled whiskey, a very compact & profitable product. Everyone was very sensitive about taxes; the revolutionary war was fought with the battle cry "No Taxation without Representation." Not only did the farmers think that the tax was unfair, they had severe doubts about any form of taxation, especially as levied by the federal government. In 1792 large-scale popular protest organized across western Pennsylvania. Eventually a convention in Pittsburgh drew up a declaration that denounced the tax & promised to prevent its collection. In August, 1794 Madison lead 13,000 militia over the mountains to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion. Seeing an army that was perhaps the largest ever formed on the continent in that day, the groups of rebelling farmers fell apart & fled. Of course, no one in the area could account for where any of the rebels had gone.

Hamilton retired from his cabinet position near the end of Washington's second term, in 1795. However, he did not retire from political life. Hamilton took it upon himself to prevent the election of John Adams, who would none-the-less be elected the second President of the United States. From his law office in New York City, Hamilton attempted to manipulate the electoral collage in the southern states. Each member was to cast two votes: one for a Presidential candidate & another for a vice-president. Hamilton secretly urged southern electors to vote only for the Federalist vice-presidential candidate Thomas Pinckney in the hope that it would prevent Adams from garnering enough votes to carry the election. New Englanders heard about this maneuver & cast all of their votes only for Adams. So the Federalist Adams was elected—& the Republican challenger, a very unhappy Thomas Jefferson, became the vice-president. Adams inherited much of Washington's cabinet & he felt that they spent an inordinate amount of time consulting in secret with Hamilton. This was a very uncomfortable situation for President Adams, but to dismiss any of the cabinet would be an open affront to the wisdom of George Washington.

In the presidential election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson & Aaron Burr both ran against incumbent John Adams. There had been much animosity between Hamilton & Jefferson when they had served together in Washington's cabinet (Jefferson was the first Secretary of State.) But Hamilton put all of this aside for he distrusted Burr & could not stand the idea of his attaining any political office, much less the presidency. Initially Hamilton had tried to engineer a gimmick of the college of electors in the state of New York in order to secure the reelection of Adams. Failing this, he set about making sure that Burr would not attain the presidency in any case. Burr & Jefferson got an equal number of votes in the election & so the Congress had to choose between them. Hamilton worked visibly & hard to steer the Federalist Majority in favor of Jefferson. Later he labored to prevent Burr from winning the governership in New York. Burr was so furious that he challenged Hamilton to a duel. Hamilton died of a wound inflicted by Vice President Burr's first shot, fired on the morning of July 11th, 1804.