Alexander Hamilton summary

Hamilton disembarked in Boston around 1772. He began his studies at Elizabethtown Academy in New Jersey before moving on to King’s College in New York to read law. But there were plenty of distractions to keep him from his books. Revolution was in the air. Relations between the colonies and Britain had been strained for some time. Things came to a head in 1773. It was the year Hamilton enrolled at King’s College, but it would go down in history for another reason: the Boston Tea Party.

The immediate cause of the tensions between Britain and its American colonies was simple: new taxes, including tea taxes, had been levied without consulting the population of the colonial territories. If they were to be the subjects of taxation, many believed, they should also be represented in the British parliament. Anger at this injustice reached a fever pitch when would-be revolutionaries stormed ships moored in the Boston harbor and dumped their cargos of tea into the water.

By now the revolution was in full swing. Hamilton had already shown his talents on the ideological battlefield as a talented polemical writer, but he wasn’t happy to remain a man of letters: wanting to prove himself in the theater of war, he joined a New York militia.

It didn’t take long before he saw his first action. In August 1775, Hamilton and 15 other volunteers belonging to an artillery militia company secured Manhattan’s heavy artillery from enemy capture while under fire from the British warship Asia. It was a heroic action demonstrating Hamilton’s talents in this new setting. It didn’t take long for his superiors to notice, and by March 1776, he was in charge of the same company.

Hamilton’s new role as Washington’s aide-de-camp gave him an insider’s view of the ongoing revolution. He not only wrote – and often composed – much of the general’s outgoing correspondence but also read the letters Washington received from Congress, other generals and diplomats. It was a crash course in military and political affairs as well as in the ways of the world. But it wasn’t enough for an intellect like Hamilton. He spent his nights reading philosophical, historical and literary works by candlelight. When he wasn’t reading, he was writing: his work from this period includes a 6,000-word essay laying out a 12-step program on how to govern a country.

But Hamilton wasn’t only a bookish type – he also had an amorous nature which sent him in pursuit of beautiful women. This side of his character was so pronounced that Washington’s wife even named her feral tomcat after him! His chance to settle down had come after meeting General Philip Schuyler of New York. In early 1780, Schuyler’s daughter Elizabeth, or Eliza for short, came to visit her father, who was now stationed in Washington’s headquarters in Morristown. Hamilton was soon composing romantic letters to woo her. In April 1780, Eliza’s father consented to Hamilton’s marriage proposal, and the couple were wed in December that year.

The war had been won, but there was still plenty to do. The question now was how to resolve the differences among the Thirteen Colonies and find a political framework on which they could all agree. Hamilton played a major part in finding an answer, but first, there were other matters to attend to. In 1782, he became a citizen of New York. He was a 27-year-old married war veteran and the father of a young child, Philip.

He returned to King’s College to complete his studies. That didn’t take long: within just six months, he’d passed the bar. Hamilton had also returned to writing, publishing the first four of his five “Continentalist” essays, works in which he drew on philosophy and history to make his argument on how to best govern a country.

What sort of government should the Thirteen Colonies adopt? In 1787, the Constitutional Convention was convened to hammer out an answer. Hamilton, now serving in the New York legislature, was once again chosen as a delegate. He packed his bags and headed to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Hamilton was a leading advocate of a powerful central government – a position putting him at odds with the other New York delegates as well as many others at the Convention. Disagreements of this kind threatened to derail the entire effort, and the Convention was gridlocked within weeks. It was Hamilton’s moment to shine. He took to the assembly floor and delivered his famous, uninterrupted six-hour speech laying out his vision of a centralized executive and senate with robust mechanisms for removing bad apples.

Drafting and ratifying the Constitution had been a divisive matter. Now that the United States had been established, it was time to unify the nation. But how? Well, it was vital that the country’s first president was someone who stood above party politics. As far as Hamilton was concerned, that left just one name in the hat: George Washington. After a hard-fought campaign in 1789, Hamilton’s preferred candidate beat the more polemical John Adams, who was made vice-president.

Constructing a nation from scratch took time, and Washington ran things single-handedly for the first few months of his presidency. When it came to appointing a cabinet, he made Hamilton his Treasury Secretary. Other appointees included Henry Knox as Secretary of War, Edmund Randolph as Attorney General and Thomas Jefferson as the Secretary of State. Unlike the other cabinet members, Jefferson had spent the time before his appointment abroad – he had been serving as an ambassador in France. His absence during the struggles of the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention meant that many viewed him with a degree of suspicion. Hamilton, for example, wondered if Jefferson could be trusted to safeguard a nation he hadn’t helped build with his own hands.

Economic issues loomed large in the republic’s early years. Solving them was a thorny issue. As ever, Hamilton had plenty of ideas up his sleeve, but his proposals weren’t universally popular. In fact, it was a clash over economic policy that earned him a new enemy: Thomas Jefferson, a man with whom he would cross swords for the rest of his life.

The continuing contention between the two men was the national debt. Hamilton’s first task as Treasury Secretary was to deal with the mountain of debt the federal states had built up during the Revolutionary War. Hamilton saw only one solution: the US government had to assume responsibility for all debts and commit to paying them back itself. That, he argued, would not only relieve the states but prove to international banks that it was safe to invest their money in the United States, thus attracting foreign credit.

Dealing with the nation’s debt crisis was a reaction to a pre-existing problem. Once that had been done, however, Hamilton was free to devote himself to more constructive tasks: the establishment of two national institutions which would shape the economic future of the United States.

The first of these was a national coastguard. That might seem like an odd priority, but Hamilton’s reasoning was sound. If the government was to finance Hamilton’s debt plan, it needed new sources of revenue. One way of doing that was to tax imported goods like whiskey. Hamilton had grown up in the Caribbean, where smuggling was common. He knew that declaring that taxes needed to be paid and making sure people paid them were two different things. The only way to stop importers evading them was to create a coast guard to patrol the nation’s borders.

Jefferson and Hamilton’s arguments continued throughout Washington’s first term. When he was re-elected in 1793, they clashed again. The issue this time was the war between Britain and France: Should the United States side with the French or remain neutral?

Hamilton came out for the latter option. Some 75 percent of the Treasury’s revenues came from customs on British goods. An alliance with the French, he advised Washington, would undermine the republic’s finances. Jefferson, on the other hand, remembered his time as ambassador in France fondly and thought the United States owed its support to France – after all, that nation had backed the colonists in the War of Independence. Hamilton once again prevailed, however, and the United States remained neutral in the conflict.

Back in 1791, Hamilton – then a delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia – had started an affair with a woman called Maria Reynolds. Reynolds had told Hamilton that her husband had left her destitute. Hamilton gave her $30, and Reynolds invited him into her bed. The affair lasted for a year. Hamilton hadn’t been aware that Reynolds’ husband James knew about the affair – information he later used to blackmail Hamilton into giving him $1,300.

Six years later, the affair returned to haunt Hamilton. In 1797, the journalist James Thomson Callender got hold of the details of the fling and published a series of pamphlets describing the details of the relationship and James Reynolds’ extortion. Hamilton found himself at the center of a public scandal. He responded in the way he knew best: writing. In August that year, he wrote a 95-page pamphlet in which he confessed to the affair but denied allegations that he’d used Treasury funds to pay off Reynolds. The damage, however, had already been done. Hamilton’s reputation was undermined, and his pamphlet had further humiliated his wife Elizabeth.

Adams’ decision to appoint the scandal-plagued Hamilton as second-in-command undermined his reputation. Overnight, he became a figure of ridicule, and his virtue was openly questioned. The affair died down, however, as it became clear that US troops would not fight the French in what became known as the “Quasi-War.” Adams sent a diplomatic envoy to France, and the conflict was defused before a shot was fired. But Hamilton and Adam’s relationship was beyond repair.

The next presidential election came in 1800. Hamilton viewed it as a chance to defeat his opponents, especially Jefferson – a politician he believed was set on undoing his work of establishing a strong federal government. When it was announced that the election was to be a contest between Adams and Jefferson, Hamilton came up with a plan to take out both candidates in one stroke.

Jefferson’s running mate in the 1800 election was Aaron Burr, another of Hamilton’s many enemies. The son of a prominent family, Burr had belonged to the same social circles as Hamilton for as long as either man could remember. They’d first clashed when Burr decided to run against Philip Schuyler, Hamilton’s father-in-law, in a senatorial election.

It wasn’t so much that Burr won the election that had displeased Hamilton as the way he’d done it. The race had been bitterly contested, and Burr had gone out of his way to discredit Schuyler. Hamilton also disliked Burr personally. As he saw it, Burr was unprincipled and simply said what he thought people wanted to hear rather than sticking up for his values as Hamilton did.

Hamilton’s scheming during the 1800 election alienated many former allies. His old friend George Washington had died in 1799. Hamilton was once again isolated. His critics and enemies smelled blood. According to them, Hamilton had always been a deeply flawed figure: power-hungry, too closely linked to England and an upstart in the style of Caesar. All Hamilton could do was trust that history would recognize his vital role in giving the nation its independence and shaping its government.

But politics weren’t Hamilton’s only concern. His marriage to Eliza Schuyler hadn’t just helped him establish his career: it had also made him a family man and a father of six children. By 1801, Eliza was once again pregnant. Their oldest son, Philip, was 19. Unfortunately for the Hamiltons, he took after his father, especially in his fiery temper. That would soon lead to a tragedy.

As we’ve seen, when push came to shove, Hamilton took Jefferson’s side against Burr. That wasn’t the last time the two men crossed paths. In fact, their rivalry grew so intense that it would end up costing Hamilton his life.

But before we get to that, let’s rewind a little. The next presidential election came round in 1804. After Jefferson decided to drop Burr from the Democratic-Republican ticket, Burr returned to New York where he planned on standing as a gubernatorial candidate. Hamilton, hardly a man to avoid reigniting conflict, believed it was his duty to stop Burr becoming the next governor of New York.