Hamilton, Alexander, and African Americans

By: Lawrence A. Peskin

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Hamilton, Alexander, and African Americans

To a greater extent than any of the other American founders, Alexander Hamilton (c. 1755–1804)

grew up among people of color. He spent his youth amid the plantations of the West Indies, where he gained an insider's view of slave labor and the slave trade.

The first secretary of the treasury of the United States was born out of wedlock and in relative poverty on 11 January in either 1755 or 1757 on the island of Nevis in the British West Indies. His mother, Rachel Faucett Lavien, left her first husband, Johann Lavien, in 1750 but did not obtain a divorce until 1759. Hamilton's father, James Hamilton, born into an aristocratic Scottish clan, hoped to build a fortune in the West Indies but was soon reduced to a “groveling condition,” according to his son. The Hamilton family spent Alexander's early years moving around the Leeward Islands, settling for the longest period in Saint Croix. James Hamilton left his wife and family in 1765, and Rachel died three years later, when Alexander was thirteen years old. By then the young Hamilton was already managing his mother's small business affairs, and at her death her merchant creditors took him in as a clerk.

On Saint Croix, Hamilton was constantly confronted with the issues of slavery and race, as only about 5 percent of the island's population was white. Unsubstantiated local rumors long held that Hamilton's mother had some African ancestry; at her death she owned nine slaves. Hamilton's cousin and one-time guardian, Peter Lytton, appears to have had two mulatto children whom he attempted to establish as his heirs. As a youth Hamilton belonged to the Saint Croix militia, which chiefly served to put down slave rebellions. At one point his father was seriously wounded in such an uprising. The Saint Croix merchant firm for which the young Hamilton clerked was deeply involved in the slave trade, and on at least one occasion human merchandise was sold directly outside his office.

Alexander Hamilton, in a portrait by John Trumbull, 1792. Hamilton frequently supported abolitionist measures, but antislavery played a smaller role in his public service than in his personal life.

Library of Congress.

view larger image

In 1772, four years after the death of Hamilton's mother, some Saint Croix residents were so impressed by the clerk's literary abilities that they contributed funds to send him to North America for an education. The future financier landed in New York City, probably in June 1773, with very few personal connections and very little money. Denied admission to what is now Princeton University, in 1774 he enrolled in King's College (now Columbia University). He soon became an active supporter of the Patriot cause, publishing several pamphlets as well as letters in New York newspapers. He was appointed the captain of a special New York artillery company in 1776. The following year George Washington selected him as an aide-de-camp. In nearly four years at Washington's side Hamilton's social world expanded to include most of the Revolutionary leaders. In 1780 he became engaged to Elizabeth Schuyler, the daughter of the general Philip Schuyler, one of New York's wealthiest landholders.

Perhaps Hamilton's earlier situation, as a dependent ward on the fringes of a society that labeled him a “whorechild,” had instilled in him a revulsion to slavery. Whatever the reason, in adulthood Hamilton frequently supported abolitionist measures and never showed much fondness for the institution of slavery. His first recorded thoughts on the subject arose from the need to recruit soldiers during the American Revolution. John Laurens, a close friend of Hamilton's from South Carolina, proposed in 1779 to ameliorate the manpower shortage by enlisting slaves with the promise of emancipation at the successful conclusion of the war. Hamilton supported the plan, noting in a letter to John Jay, the president of the Continental Congress, that the slaves' “natural faculties are probably as good as ours” and that the “habit of subordination which they acquire from a life of servitude, will make them sooner become soldiers than our white inhabitants.” He also expressed hope that Laurens's plan might be the first step toward wider emancipation: “For the dictates of humanity and true policy equally interest me in favour of this unfortunate class of men.”

After the war Hamilton continued to show interest in the antislavery cause as a leader of the New York Manumission Society. Although some modern scholars have criticized the society for its advocacy of gradual emancipation, it was the most influential organization of its type in New York. Hamilton was present at the society's founding in 1785 and was appointed to chair a committee to determine how members who owned slaves should dispose of their property. This committee recommended a course of gradual manumission, although specific guidelines were never agreed upon by the society as a whole. Nevertheless, the committee's general recommendations struck a chord with the society's members, who lobbied for statewide gradual emancipation. The New York legislature eventually agreed and passed a gradual abolition act in 1799, although the impact of the New York Manumission Society's lobbying in formulating that measure is debatable. Hamilton succeeded John Jay as president of the society in 1789 but was forced to resign in 1790 when his duties as secretary of the treasury took him to Philadelphia. Later, from 1799 until his death, he served as legal counsel to the society, a crucial position in the organization's continuing efforts to ensure fair treatment of New York's slaves and free blacks.

Over the years Hamilton managed to juggle a lucrative law practice and an initially promising political career. He was elected to the New York state legislature in 1787 and to the Continental Congress in 1788. A vocal proponent of central government, he was one of the three New York delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia—and the only one to support the constitution produced. With James Madison and John Jay, he was one of the anonymous authors of the Federalist Papers. In 1789 his former commander, George Washington, appointed him secretary of the treasury of the United States. In that position Hamilton drafted a series of brilliant reports that molded the financial apparatus and political economy of the new nation and helped shape the program of the Federalist Party, but his political career was badly damaged by his opposition to John Adams, who succeeded Washington as president.

Antislavery played a much smaller role in Hamilton's public service than in his personal life. He is often portrayed as the founder of the modern American economy and thus given some responsibility for the advent of free labor and the eventual destruction of the plantation system; such an honor is probably undeserved, however, for two reasons. First, the primary motivation for Hamilton and his followers was always to create a financially stable central government rather than to address the issue of labor. Second, while they expressed interest in developing commerce and industry, Hamiltonians viewed such economic activity as complementary to agriculture rather than an alternative.

The willingness of the Hamiltonians to sacrifice antislavery measures for a financially strong government is best exemplified by the machinations in Congress in 1790. In that year antislavery Quakers petitioned the legislators to end the slave trade and domestic slavery. A congressional committee chaired by Abiel Foster prepared a report that was relatively favorable toward the abolitionists. At the same time Congress was considering Hamilton's Report on Public Credit, which shaped the financial structure of the new federal government. Some southerners were uneasy with the centralizing tendencies of this report, and one of the ways that Hamiltonians gained southern support was by eviscerating Foster's antislavery report. They also curried the South's favor by proposing to lay out the nation's capital in a more southerly location—now Washington, D.C.

In their economic vision for the United States, Hamiltonians hoped to see extensive development of commerce and industry. On its face this vision could seem to imply a diminution, or even an eventual end, to the slave system that flourished in the agricultural South. In truth, however, even the most ardent eighteenth-century proponents of economic modernization assumed that plantation agriculture would remain central to the American economy into the foreseeable future. In his 1791 Report on Manufactures, Hamilton wrote that agriculture “has intrinsically a strong claim to pre-eminence over every other kind of industry.” Emerging from a dependent, colonial economy, the United States engaged in very little manufacturing in 1790. Hamilton's intention in writing the report was not to launch a manufacturing colossus but rather to show that a more developed industrial sector would benefit the existing economy by creating domestic markets for agricultural raw materials; the report was silent on the issue of abolition. Hamilton wrote that women, children, and immigrants would most likely provide the workforce for the new factories, while slaves would presumably continue to toil in the fields. Thus, despite Hamilton's personal scruples, Hamiltonianism was hardly antithetical to slavery.

In 1804, after years of political and personal conflict, Aaron Burr, then the vice president of the United States, challenged Hamilton to a duel. The two met in Weehawken, New Jersey, on 11 July. Hamilton was fatally wounded, and he died the next day in Manhattan, at the age of forty-nine.

See also Abolitionism; Adams, John, on African Americans; American Revolution; Burr, Aaron, and African Americans; Caribbean; Constitution, U.S.; Constitutional Convention, African Americans and; Emancipation; Gradual Emancipation; Inheritance and Slave Status; Jay, John, on African Americans; Laws and Legislation; Madison, James, and African Americans; Manumission Societies; Military; New York City; New York Manumission Society; Newspapers; Political Participation; Race, Theories of; Riots and Rebellions; Slave Trade; Slavery: Northeast; Society of Friends (Quakers) and African Americans; and Washington, George, and African Americans.

processed xml | source xml