Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 24.45.94.242 (talk) at 00:14, 19 October 2008. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

{{the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq. President of the United States) which was highly critical of Adams, although it closed with a tepid endorsement. He mailed this to two hundred leading Federalists; when a copy fell into Democratic-Republican hands, they printed it. This hurt Adams's 1800 reelection campaign and split the Federalist Party, virtually assuring the victory of the Democratic-Republican Party, led by Jefferson, in the election of 1800; it destroyed Hamilton's position among the Federalists.

On the Federalist side, Governor Arthur Fenner of Rhode Island denounced these "jockeying tricks" to make Pinckney President, and one Rhode Island Elector voted for Adams and Jay. Jefferson and Burr tied for first and second; and Pinckney came in fourth.

Jefferson had beaten Adams, but both he and his running mate, Aaron Burr, received 73 votes in the Electoral College. With Jefferson and Burr tied, the United States House of Representatives had to choose between the two men. (As a result of this election, the Twelfth Amendment was proposed and ratified, adopting the method under which presidential elections are held today.) Several Federalists who opposed Jefferson supported Burr, and for the first 35 ballots, Jefferson was denied a majority. Before the 36th ballot, Hamilton threw his weight behind Jefferson, supporting the arrangement reached by James A. Bayard of Delaware, in which five Federalist Representatives from Maryland and Vermont abstained from voting, allowing those states' delegations to go for Jefferson, ending the impasse and electing Jefferson President rather than Burr. Even though Hamilton did not like Jefferson and disagreed with him on many issues, he was quoted as saying, "At least Jefferson was honest." Hamilton felt that Burr was dangerous. Burr then became Vice President of the United States. When it became clear that he would not be asked to run again with Jefferson, Burr sought the New York governorship in 1804 with Federalist support, against the Jeffersonian Morgan Lewis, but was defeated by forces including Hamilton.

Duel with Aaron Burr and death

Soon after the gubernatorial election in New York—in which Morgan Lewis, greatly assisted by Hamilton, defeated Aaron Burr—the Albany Register published Charles D. Cooper's letter, citing Hamilton's opposition to Burr and alleging that Hamilton expressed "a still more despicable opinion" of the Vice President at an upstate New York dinner party. Burr, my second fire", thus asserting an intention to miss Burr. The circumstances of the duel, and Hamilton's actual intentions, are still disputed. Neither of the seconds, Pendleton or Van Ness, could determine who fired first. Soon after, they measured and triangulated the shooting, but could not determine from which angle Hamilton fired. Burr's shot, however, hit Hamilton in the lower abdomen above the right hip. The bullet ricocheted off Hamilton's second or third false rib, fracturing it and caused considerable damage to his internal organs, particularly his liver and diaphragm before becoming lodged in his first or second lumbar vertebra. Chernow considers the circumstances to have indicated Burr to have fired second, and taken deliberate aim.

If a duelist decided not to aim at his opponent there was a well-known procedure, available to everyone involved, for doing so. According to Freeman, Hamilton apparently did not follow this procedure; if he had, Burr might have followed suit, and Hamilton's death may have been avoided. It was a matter of honor among gentlemen to follow these rules. Because of the high incidence of septicemia and death resulting from torso wounds, a high percentage of duels employed this procedure of throwing away fire. Years later, when told that Hamilton may have misled him at the duel, the ever-laconic Burr replied, "Contemptible, if true."

Hamilton was ferried back to New York. After final visits from his family and friends and considerable suffering, Hamilton died on the following afternoon, July 12, 1804. Gouverneur Morris, a political ally of Hamilton's, gave the eulogy at his funeral and secretly established a fund to support his Hamilton comme les trois plus grands hommes de notre époque, et si je devais me prononcer entre les trois, je donnerais sans hesiter la première place à Hamilton. Il avait deviné l'Europe. .</ref> as "best of wives and best of women". An extremely religious woman, Eliza spent much of her life working to help widows and orphans. After Hamilton's death, Eliza sold the country house, the Grange, that she and Hamilton had built together from 1800 to 1802. She co-founded New York's first private orphanage, the New York Orphan Asylum Society. Despite the Reynolds affair, Alexander and Eliza were very close, and as a widow she always strove to guard his reputation and enhance his standing in American history.

Hamilton and Elizabeth had eight children, including two named Phillip. The elder Philip, Hamilton's first child (born January 22, 1782), was killed in 1801 in a duel with George I. Eacker, whom he had publicly insulted in a Manhattan theater. The second Philip, Hamilton's last child, was born on June 2, 1802, after the first Philip was killed. Their other children were Angelica, born September 25, 1784; Alexander, born May 16, 1796; James Alexander (April 14, 1788 – September 1878); John Church, born August 22, 1792; William Stephen, born August 4, 1797; and Eliza, born November 26, 1799.

On slavery

Modern scholarly views on Hamilton's attitude to slavery have been described as viewing Hamilton as anything from a "steadfast abolitionist" to a "hypocrite"; one middle view is that he was deeply ambivalent.

Hamilton's first polemic against King George's ministers contains a paragraph which speaks of the evils which "slavery" to the British would bring upon the Americans. One biographer sees this as an attack on actual slavery; such hostility was quite common in 1776.

During the Revolutionary War, there was a series of proposals to arm slaves, free them, and compensate their masters. Freeing any enlisted slaves had also become customary by then both for the British, who did not compensate their American masters, and for the Continental Army; some states were to require it before the end of the war. In 1779, Hamilton's friend John Laurens suggested such a unit be formed under his command, to relieve besieged Charleston, South Carolina; Hamilton wrote a letter to the Continental Congress to create up to four battalions of slaves for combat duty, and free them. Congress recommended that South Carolina (and Georgia) acquire up to three thousand slaves, if they saw fit; they did not, even though the South Carolina governor and Congressional delegation had supported the plan in Philadelphia.

Hamilton argued that blacks' natural faculties were as good as those of free whites, and he forestalled objections by citing Frederick the Great and others as praising obedience and lack of cultivation in soldiers; he also argued that if the Americans did not do this, the British would (as they had elsewhere). One of his biographers has cited this incident as evidence that Hamilton and Laurens saw the Revolution and the struggle against slavery as inseparable. Hamilton later attacked his political opponents as demanding freedom for themselves and refusing to allow it to blacks.

In January 1785, he attended the second meeting of the New York Manumission Society (NYMS). John Jay was president and Hamilton was secretary; he later became president. He was also a member of the committee of the society which put a bill through the New York Legislature banning the export of slaves from New York; three months later, Hamilton returned a fugitive slave to Henry Laurens of South Carolina.

Hamilton never supported forced emigration for freed slaves; it has been argued from this that he would be comfortable with a multiracial society, and this distinguished him from his contemporaries. In international affairs, he supported Toussaint L'Ouverture's black government in Haiti after the revolt that overthrew French control, as he had supported aid to the slaveowners in 1791—both measures hurt France. He may have owned household slaves himself (the evidence for this is indirect; one biographer interprets it as referring to paid employees), and he did buy and sell them on behalf of others. He supported a gag rule to keep divisive discussions of slavery out of Congress, and he supported the compromise by which the United States could not abolish the slave trade for twenty years. When the Quakers of New York petitioned the First Congress (under the Constitution) for the abolition of the slave trade, and Benjamin Franklin and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society petitioned for the abolition of slavery, the NYMS did not act.

On economics

Alexander Hamilton is sometimes considered the "patron saint" of the American School of economic philosophy that, according to one historian, dominated economic policy after 1861. He firmly supported government intervention in favor of business, after the manner of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, as early as the fall of 1781.

Hamilton opposed the British ideas of free trade which he believed skewed benefits to colonial/imperial powers, in favor of U.S. protectionism which

Memorial at colleges

Alexander Hamilton served as one of the first trustees of the Hamilton-Oneida Academy when the school opened in 1793. When the academy received a college charter in 1812 the school was formally renamed Hamilton College. There is a prominent statue of Alexander Hamilton in front of the school's chapel (commonly referred to as the "Al-Ham" statue) and the Burke Library has an extensive collection of Hamilton's personal documents.

Columbia College, Hamilton's alma mater, whose students formed his militia artillery company and fired some of the first shots against the British, has official memorials to Hamilton. The college's main ===

• Douglass Adair and Marvin Harvey: "Was Alexander Hamilton a Christian Statesman?" The William and Mary

1. Elkins and McKitrick, like other historians, speak of Hamilton's self-destructive tendencies in this connection.
2. Elkins and McKitrick, p. 734–40
3. ANB "Aaron Burr"
4. ^ Freeman, Joanne B. "Dueling as Politics: Reinterpreting the Burr-Hamilton Duel" (subscription). The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series. 53 (2). Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture: 289–318. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
5. Kennedy, Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson, p. 72.
6. Chernow, Ron Alexander Hamilton
7. Joseph Wheelan, Jefferson's Vendetta: The Pursuit of Aaron Burr and the Judiciary, New York, Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2005, ISBN 0786714379, p. 90
8. James Alexander Hamilton obituary, The New York Times. September 26, 1878.
9. Quotes describing the historiography from Weston, who disagrees with both, finding Hamilton ambivalent.
10. McDonald
11. McManus; "Many national leaders including Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, John Adams, John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and Rufus King, saw slavery as an immense problem, a curse, a blight, or a national disease." David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage p.156; Morison and Commager quote Patrick Henry's regrets at being unable to give up the comforts of slave-owning.
12. The first of these projects was made in August 1776, by Jonathan Dickinson Sargeant, see Arming slaves pp. 192–3, 206; Rhode Island had formed the First Rhode Island regiment in 1777. which fought the Battle of Rhode Island; and there were other black units. Sidney Kaplan: The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, p. 64 ff
13. McManus, pp. 153–58.
14. Mitchell 1:175–77, 550 n.92; citing the Journals of the Continental Congress for March 29, 1779; Wallace p 455. Congress offered to compensate their masters after the war.
15. letter to Jay of March 14, 1779; Chernow p.121. McManus, p. 154–7
16. McDonald, p. 34; Flexner, p. 257–8,
17. McManus, p. 168.
18. Chernow, p. 216
19. Littlefield, p. 126, citing Syrett: 3:605–8. The mention in Wills, p. 209, that Hamilton arranged, a decade later, as Secretary of the Treasury, to recapture one of Washington's slaves is a chronological error; it was his successor, Oliver Wolcott, of Connecticut.
20. Horton, p. 22
21. Horton; Kennedy p. 97–98; Littlefield. Wills, p. 35, 40
22. McDonald
23. Flexner, p. 39
24. McDonald, p. 177
25. Lind, Michael. Hamilton's Republic (1997) pages xiv–xv, 229–30.
26. Chernow, 170; citing Continentalist V, Syrett: 3:77; published April 1782, but written Fall 1781.