Prince of Darkness: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street's First Black Millionaire

by Shane White

“millionaire.”

the word, first used by Lord Byron in 1816,

Most white Americans viewed African Americans as irrelevant to economic progress, a people left floundering off to one side of capitalism’s onward rush.

Blackmail was a lucrative sideline for many antebellum tabloids.

eight-volume reference work African American National Biography (2008) contains an entry for each of more than 4,100 African Americans,

reading newspapers discolored with age—reveling in their feel, smell and appearance—remains, to my mind, one of the pleasures of being an historian.

Jeremiah Hamilton was sui generis, typical of nothing.

The forgotten story of Jeremiah Hamilton serves to remind us that African Americans too were actors in the history of American capitalism, not just slaves and some white man or woman’s capital investment.

In the late eighteenth century Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then known, was the most profitable colony on the planet, exporting more sugar than Jamaica, Cuba and Brazil combined and growing half of the world’s supply of coffee.

Hamilton “at one time offered a large sum of money to any white man who would marry one” of his daughters.

Spanish ancestry helped account for a “white person” having a dark complexion.

Hamilton resembled nothing so much as a hustler working at an upturned wooden crate on the sidewalk, moving around his shells and never letting the mark know under which one he has secreted the money.

toward the end of 1834 or the beginning of 1835, the black businessman seemed to find himself on a much sounder financial footing.

Of the four main types of insurance—accident, fire, life and marine—the last was initially the most developed in the United States.

Most infamously, in 1781, Captain Luke Collingwood of the Zong informed the crew of his slaver that “if the slaves died a natural death, it would be the loss of the owners of the ship; but if they were thrown alive into the sea, it would be the loss of the underwriters.”

Capitalism valued death higher than life

there was no particular reason why this black man should be held to a higher standard of behavior than any of his contemporaries in and around Wall Street.

Jefferson, one of the country’s most skilled ever wordsmiths, deliberately associated slavery and white guilt about the peculiar institution with fire. The link between slavery and fire was an old one, but ever since the Haitian Revolution,

in 1799, the New York Assembly legislated to end slavery,

The bill freed only those slaves not yet born, and they had to serve a lengthy apprenticeship.

not until 1817 would the legislature agree finally to liberate such persons—and even then, they would not be free actually for another decade, until July 4, 1827.

The lawsuit became his chosen weapon; Hamilton has left a lasting impression on the historical record as a serial litigant.

American ideas of race had little room for the subtleties of color gradations common in the Caribbean or South America—in New York you were either black or white. No matter how much Hamilton tried to distance himself from other African Americans, to anyone who saw him on the street he was just one more Negro.

Jim Crow segregation, named after the theatrical blackface figure made famous by T. D. (Daddy) Rice in the 1830s,

In business, he was a Master of the Universe, but the moment he stepped out of his office he was, by the lights of most New Yorkers, an inferior being.

It is uncertain how Jeremiah Hamilton and Eliza Jane Morris met or when their relationship started.

for Jeremiah Hamilton, a black man, to father a child with a white girl barely half of his age must have caused tongues to wag.

In the 1830s, the best-known—perhaps by this time “notorious” is a better word—black man in New York to have a white wife was the actor James Hewlett. And he had more than one.

the blackface acts of George Washington Dixon and T. D. Rice in the 1830s put him out of business.

Several became irascible when they noticed that one of the latecomers, Caleb Alexander, “a grey headed negro,” had not just a white wife, but a very young white wife.

the prospect for blacks of buying a house receded even further into the distance, their exercising of the right to vote was made conditional on meeting a stiff property requirement, one not asked of whites.

For many white New Yorkers, independent property-owning blacks remained a disturbing inversion of the natural order.

As with every boom the world over, the expectation of continued easy and large profits drew in new investors who were inexperienced, often touchingly naïve, and ill prepared to lose their painstakingly accumulated savings.

many of New York’s prominent families profited from the sex trade.

Earlier, in 1833, Thompson had bought several adjoining lots of land with frontages of fifty feet on Seventh Avenue, fifty feet on the Bloomingdale Road (or Broadway) and 112 feet on Forty-Second Street.

The Bank of England—an institution that Philip Hone noted grimly was “arbiter of the fate of the American merchant”—jacked up its discount rate and staunched the flow of money to the United States.

the panic of 1837.

Although a few individuals publicized the link between human bondage and sweetened tea, Hamilton and almost every other businessman in the Atlantic world focused on the potential returns on capital to be made by trading in sugar.

In 1841, the Whig-dominated 27th Congress created a federal bankruptcy system.

The Bankruptcy Act

Antebellum Wall Street had a terrible reputation, and for more than just sharp practice.

He took out a sixty-day option on one hundred shares of Long Island Railroad, agreeing to forfeit $250 in the case of his not buying them. The stock fell in price, so Hamilton did not exercise his option and lost his $250.

Not only was the stock exchange’s public blackballing of Hamilton extremely unusual, it was also newsworthy.

Expecting the black broker to have boycotted buying and selling these shares is unreasonable—ideas of using economic leverage for the benefit of African Americans did not become commonplace until the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” struggles in Harlem ninety years later, and disinvestment would not become a serious issue for a further half-century, when the campaigns were launched against South African apartheid.

the arresting image of a black millionaire strolling through the terraced garden in front of his mansion, surveying the splendors of his New Jersey estate, let alone the startling idea of him fishing for trout or shooting quail for sport, does not fit well with our usual understanding of the way African Americans lived in the antebellum North.

Hamilton made a point of hiring the best lawyers.

Isabella Ganneclift, born in Gibraltar in 1793, had married a Spaniard at twelve years of age and by the time she was seventeen had borne four children, only one of whom survived.

In early 1852, James McCune Smith, the black intellectual, canvassed the relationship between wealth and race in several letters to Frederick Douglass. As intended, these wide-ranging essays were published in Frederick Douglass’ Paper. In the first piece, Smith contemplated what would occur if every free black man received $100,000 and owned a “brownstone front and a pair of greys in the avenues.” He concluded that little would change:

Alexander Crummell [an antislavery activist and early pan-Africanist] has done more for the advancement of our people

William Wilson, writing under the name Ethiop, responded to Smith’s essay.

for the statistical purposes of the federal government Jeremiah Hamilton was not a black man. In the 1850, 1860 and 1870 censuses he was counted as a white individual.