Alexander Hamilton

The counting house taught him more than any school did. Beekman and Cruger put him behind a desk on St. Croix while he was still a boy, and when Nicholas Cruger sailed for New York in 1771 he left the clerk running the firm alone for five months — pricing cargo, chasing debts, instructing ship captains twice his age. In August 1772 a hurricane flattened Christiansted, and the letter he wrote about it ran in the Royal Danish-American Gazette. Local men raised a subscription to send him north to school. He was at King's College inside two years, and by 19 he had published two anonymous pamphlets against the Loyalists that readers assumed a seasoned lawyer had written.

Between October 1787 and August 1788 he wrote 51 of the 85 Federalist essays, then carried a hostile New York convention at Poughkeepsie by 30 votes to 27. He built the revenue cutter service that became the Coast Guard, drafted the pages Washington reworked into the Farewell Address, and rode west with nearly 13,000 militia to end the whiskey tax rebellion without a battle. BriefHistory has the Treasury years and the system he left standing. What follows is the price he paid for insisting on being understood.

In the summer of 1797 he published a hundred pages describing his own adultery in detail. James Callender had accused him of speculating with public money, and Hamilton decided that proving the payments were blackmail over an affair with Maria Reynolds was better than letting a charge of corruption stand. He was right about the ledger and wrong about everything else. Four years later his son Philip, 19, took the field at Paulus Hook against George Eacker on his father's advice to throw away the first shot. Philip did. Eacker did not, and Philip died 14 hours later. His sister Angelica, 17, never recovered her mind.

For most of the 19th century the men who won the argument wrote the history, and Hamilton kept the reputation of a monarchist who distrusted ordinary people — a charge his own Constitutional Convention speech, which floated an executive serving for life, made hard to shake. Industrial-age Republicans claimed him, the New Deal dropped him, and economic historians spent the late 20th century quietly restoring him. Then a musical opened in 2015 with a Puerto Rican actor in the title role, and in April 2016 the Treasury announced that its plan to move him off the 10-dollar bill was dead.

Alexander Hamilton's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress article
  Published anonymously at 19 and credited to older men 1774
• The Federalist Papers book
  He wrote 51 of the 85 essays under the name Publius 1788
• Revenue Cutter Service company
  Authorized August 4, 1790 — the ancestor of the U.S. Coast Guard 1790
• Coinage Act of 1792 law
  Fixed the decimal dollar and created the U.S. Mint 1792
• Washington's Farewell Address speech
  Hamilton wrote drafts that Washington cut and reshaped 1796
• Observations on Certain Documents (the Reynolds Pamphlet) article
  A hundred pages confessing adultery to disprove corruption 1797

• 1771 aged ~16 Left in sole charge of the Beekman and Cruger counting house Nicholas Cruger sailed for New York and was gone five months.
• August 30, 1772 aged 17 Writes the hurricane letter that gets him off St. Croix It ran in the Royal Danish-American Gazette and local men raised a subscription for his schooling.
• December 14, 1780 aged 25 Marries Elizabeth Schuyler at the Schuyler Mansion in Albany
• October 27, 1787 aged 32 The first Federalist essay appears in The Independent Journal He would write 51 of the 85 in about ten months.
• July 26, 1788 aged 33 New York ratifies the Constitution, 30 to 27 He had led the pro-Constitution side against George Clinton at Poughkeepsie.
• 1797 aged ~42 Publishes the Reynolds Pamphlet He described the affair in full rather than let a charge of speculation stand.
• November 24, 1801 aged 46 His son Philip dies of a duelling wound at 19 Shot at Paulus Hook after taking his father's advice to throw away the first shot.
• July 11, 1804 aged 49 Shot by Aaron Burr at Weehawken, New Jersey
• July 12, 1804 aged 49 Dies in New York City the following afternoon

• Benjamin Franklin 1706–1790
  Polymath who invented the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove, among many other creations. fellow delegate at the Constitutional Convention
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. political heir
• Daniel Webster 1782–1852
  Senator and orator whose speeches on the Union and Constitution are among the greatest in history. carried his nationalism into the Senate
• Andrew Carnegie 1835–1919
  Steel magnate who built one of the largest steel empires in history and later became a major philanthropist. built the manufacturing economy he proposed
• Ben Bernanke b. 1953
  Led the Federal Reserve through the 2008 financial crisis and won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics. ran the central bank he argued for