Who was Alexander Hamilton?

Alexander Hamilton was a New York lawyer, soldier, and political thinker who served as George Washington's most trusted aide during the Revolutionary War, co-authored The Federalist Papers, and built the financial foundations of the United States as the first Secretary of the Treasury from September 11, 1789 to January 31, 1795. He was born on January 11, 1755 or 1757 on the Caribbean island of Nevis, the illegitimate son of a Scottish merchant and a Frenchwoman of partial Huguenot descent. After his mother's death in 1768 and his abandonment by his father, friends in St. Croix raised funds to send him to study in North America.

He arrived in 1772, attended King's College (now Columbia) in New York, and emerged as a Patriot pamphleteer in his teens. He raised a New York artillery company in 1776 and won Washington's notice at the battles of Trenton and Princeton. From March 1777 to February 1781 he served as Washington's aide de camp, drafting much of the general's correspondence. He led the assault on Redoubt Number 10 at the siege of Yorktown on October 14, 1781.

After the war he studied law in Albany, married Elizabeth Schuyler in 1780 connecting him to a powerful New York family, and represented New York at the Annapolis Convention in 1786 and the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Although he played a smaller drafting role at the convention than Madison, he was the only New York delegate to sign the Constitution.

He then conceived The Federalist Papers, recruiting Madison and John Jay, and wrote 51 of the 85 essays himself between October 1787 and August 1788, publishing them in New York newspapers under the pseudonym Publius.

As Treasury Secretary, Hamilton authored four landmark reports that defined American political economy: the First Report on Public Credit (January 1790) proposing federal assumption of state Revolutionary War debts, the Report on a National Bank (December 1790) leading to the First Bank of the United States, the Report on the Establishment of a Mint (January 1791), and the Report on Manufactures (December 1791) advocating tariffs and federal support for industry. His program created the Federalist Party in opposition to Jefferson and Madison's Democratic-Republicans.

He resigned in 1795 to return to law practice but remained politically active. His feud with Aaron Burr ended in a duel at Weehawken, New Jersey on July 11, 1804, in which Hamilton was mortally wounded; he died the next day, July 12, 1804, in New York City.