Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804) was a West Indies-born immigrant who arrived in New York as a teenager, fought in the Revolutionary War as George Washington's chief aide, and then — more than almost anyone else — designed the financial and institutional mechanics of the United States government. He served as the first Treasury Secretary (1789-1795), brokered the deal that turned the federal government into the sole authority on national debt, created the First Bank of the United States, and wrote the economic reports that shaped American industrial policy for a century.
He never became president. He never held a major elected federal office. He spent most of his career in appointed positions or as a lawyer and political writer in New York. He was killed in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr on July 11, 1804, at the age of 47 or 49 — historians still argue about his birth year. His face is on the $10 bill.
Hamilton was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis in the British West Indies, most likely in 1755 — Hamilton himself claimed 1757, apparently to shave two years off his age, a common practice in an era where precocity had to be explained. His father, a Scottish merchant, abandoned the family when Alexander was around ten. His mother, Rachel Faucette, died in 1768, leaving him and his older brother orphaned with almost no resources.
He went to work as a clerk for a trading company in Christiansted, on the island of St. Croix, where he proved to have an almost unnatural talent for financial records and correspondence. In August 1772, a catastrophic hurricane struck the islands. Hamilton wrote a letter to his father describing the storm in vivid, literary language. The letter was published in a local newspaper, and the community of merchants and clergymen who read it, astonished by its author's intellect, collected funds to send Hamilton to the American colonies for a proper education.
He arrived in New York in 1773 and enrolled at King's College — now Columbia University, whose main campus sits at 116th Street and Broadway in Morningside Heights. He was still enrolled there when the Revolution began.
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Hamilton left King's College to fight and quickly demonstrated the qualities Washington was looking for: intelligence, French fluency (useful for coordinating with French allies), and the ability to produce enormous quantities of correspondence under pressure. In March 1777, Washington made Hamilton his aide-de-camp with the rank of lieutenant colonel. Hamilton spent the next four years essentially functioning as a chief of staff before the title existed.
The assignment chafed. Hamilton wanted battlefield command, not paperwork. He finally got it at Yorktown in October 1781, when Washington gave him command of a light infantry battalion. Hamilton led a nighttime assault on British Redoubt No. 10, a fortified position that had to fall before the larger British line could be flanked. The assault succeeded in ten minutes. Yorktown surrendered within two weeks, effectively ending the war.
After the war, Hamilton studied law largely on his own — reading borrowed texts, writing out summaries at extraordinary speed — and passed the bar in 1782. He set up a legal practice in New York and almost immediately turned his attention to the larger political problem: the Articles of Confederation were failing, and someone needed to fix them.
The Constitution drafted in Philadelphia in 1787 still had to be ratified by nine of the thirteen states to take effect. New York was the critical problem — the state's political establishment was deeply skeptical of centralized federal power, and ratification was far from certain.
Hamilton organized a response. With James Madison (a Virginia delegate) and John Jay (the diplomat who would become the first Chief Justice), Hamilton wrote 85 essays under the collective pseudonym 'Publius,' arguing the case for the new Constitution in systematic, exhaustive detail. The essays were published in New York newspapers between October 1787 and May 1788, sometimes appearing at a rate of four or five per week.
Hamilton wrote at least 51 of the 85. He wrote some of them during a single sitting on a ship crossing the Hudson River. Madison later said Hamilton's output during this period was almost incomprehensible. The Federalist Papers were never intended as timeless philosophical documents — they were political persuasion written under deadline pressure to change specific minds in one specific state. They worked. New York ratified. And for more than two centuries since, the Supreme Court has cited them in hundreds of rulings to interpret the intent of the framers.
When Washington named Hamilton the first Secretary of the Treasury in 1789, the United States had no national currency, no credit history, and enormous war debts owed to France, the Netherlands, and domestic creditors. The new government was effectively broke before it had governed a single day.
Hamilton's solution was both radical and deeply controversial. He proposed that the federal government assume all the states' Revolutionary War debts — roughly $25 million — and consolidate them into a single national obligation. This would establish the federal government's creditworthiness and concentrate financial authority in ways that smaller-government advocates, especially Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, fiercely opposed. The political deadlock broke with the famous Compromise of 1790: Hamilton got his debt assumption; in exchange, the permanent national capital would move from New York to a new site on the Potomac River — Washington, D.C.
He then established the First Bank of the United States in Philadelphia in 1791, the country's first central bank, chartered for 20 years and capitalized at $10 million. He founded the US Mint. He wrote four major reports to Congress — on public credit, manufacturing, a national bank, and the mint — that collectively sketched an industrial policy the country would follow for the next century. His portrait was added to the $10 bill in 1928.
Aaron Burr had been Hamilton's rival for the better part of two decades. The two men practiced law in the same New York circles, competed for the same political influence, and had a long, well-documented history of interference with each other's careers. Burr beat Hamilton's father-in-law Philip Schuyler for a US Senate seat in 1791. Hamilton's behind-the-scenes maneuvering helped tip the 1800 presidential election away from Burr — who had tied Jefferson in electoral votes — toward Jefferson, consigning Burr to a vice presidency he had never wanted.
In 1804, Burr ran for governor of New York. Hamilton campaigned against him, and remarks Hamilton made about Burr's character reached the newspapers. Burr demanded a formal retraction. Hamilton declined to give one that satisfied him. Burr challenged him to a duel.
The two men met at dawn on July 11, 1804, in Weehawken, New Jersey — dueling was illegal in both states, but New York prosecuted it more aggressively, so the cliffs above the Hudson had become the preferred venue for precisely these situations. Hamilton had written the night before that he intended to hold his fire. Accounts of what happened differ: one reading is that he fired into the air; another, that he fired and missed. Burr shot him in the abdomen. Hamilton was rowed back across the Hudson to Manhattan, where he died the next day, July 12, 1804, at the home of a friend in Greenwich Village.
Burr was never tried. But Hamilton's death, for which Burr was widely blamed, ended Burr's political career and marked the collapse of the Federalist Party Hamilton had spent his life building.
Lower Manhattan holds more Hamilton sites per square block than anywhere else in the country.
Trinity Church Cemetery (Broadway at Wall Street, Financial District) is where Hamilton is buried. His grave — a white marble pyramid with four urns — sits near the southern wall of the churchyard. His wife Eliza, who outlived him by 50 years and spent much of that time working to preserve his reputation, is buried at the foot of his monument. Angelica Schuyler, his sister-in-law, is in the north yard. The church and churchyard are open to the public daily, free of charge. Take the 4/5 train to Wall Street or the R/W to Rector Street.
Federal Hall National Memorial (26 Wall Street) stands on the site where Washington was inaugurated as the first president on April 30, 1789 — the same day Hamilton's Treasury Department was being organized nearby. The current building dates to 1842, but the basement museum holds artifacts from the original Federal Hall. The NPS runs free guided tours Monday through Friday, 10 AM to 5 PM; call 212-825-6990 to confirm current hours.
Hamilton Grange National Memorial (414 West 141st Street, Saint Nicholas Park, Harlem) is the only home Hamilton ever owned, built in 1802 two years before his death. The NPS restored and relocated the house in 2008. Free guided tours run Wednesday through Sunday at 11:30 AM, 1:30 PM, and 3:30 PM on weekdays, with additional sessions on weekends.
In Philadelphia, the First Bank of the United States (120 S. 3rd Street, Old City) reopened in July 2026 after a $43 million renovation as part of Independence National Historical Park. It is open Thursday through Sunday, 11 AM to 4 PM, free. The building has stood largely intact since 1797. If you are visiting Independence Hall, it is a four-block walk east.
Trinity Church Cemetery — Broadway at Wall St., Financial District; free; open daily; 4/5 to Wall St. or R/W to Rector St.
Federal Hall National Memorial — 26 Wall Street; free; Mon-Fri 10 AM-5 PM; confirm at 212-825-6990
Hamilton Grange — 414 W. 141st St., Harlem; free; Wed-Sun; tours at 11:30, 1:30, 3:30 (weekdays)
First Bank of the United States — 120 S. 3rd St., Philadelphia; free; Thu-Sun 11 AM-4 PM; reopened July 2026
Is he really buried in New York City? Yes — Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, where he owned pew No. 92 and where five of his eight children were baptized. The grave is in the churchyard along Broadway, steps from Wall Street.
How accurate is the Hamilton musical? Lin-Manuel Miranda's 2015 show compresses and dramatizes, but its core history is solid. Hamilton was genuinely self-made, genuinely prolific, and genuinely killed by Burr. The cabinet rap battles are invented; the emotional arc of his marriage to Eliza Schuyler draws on real correspondence. The show's most significant departure is giving Burr more psychological complexity than most historians would allow — in practice, Burr was simply a man who shot someone for refusing to apologize. See who Benjamin Franklin was for another founder whose popular image runs some distance from the documented record.
Is he still on the $10 bill? As of October 2026, yes. Hamilton has been on the ten-dollar bill since 1928.
What was the Reynolds Affair? In 1797, journalist James Callender exposed Hamilton's years-long affair with a married woman, Maria Reynolds, and the payments Hamilton had made to her husband to buy his silence. Hamilton's response — a 95-page pamphlet admitting the affair in full detail to disprove accusations of financial corruption — remains one of the stranger self-inflicted wounds in American political history. His argument was essentially: I did commit adultery, but I did not misuse Treasury funds. He was correct on the financial question. The personal damage was severe.
