Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

In short order, Congress fled across the state line and set up a movable capital in Princeton. The delegates settled crankily into cramped,

So primitive were the Princeton lodgings that one month later Congress, like a French medieval court in the hunting season, packed up again and moved to Annapolis, followed by Trenton one year later, then New York City in 1785.

A perpetual magnet for controversy, Hamilton was stung by charges that he had conspired to move the capital from Philadelphia as part of a plot to transfer it to New York.

to the notion that the national capital should be housed in a special federal district where it would never stand at the mercy of state governments.

While marking time in Princeton in July, Hamilton drafted a resolution that again called for a convention to revise the Articles

a federal government with powers separated among legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and a Congress with the power to levy taxes and raise an army.

This stopover gave Hamilton a queasy foretaste of the tensions brewing between returning patriots and British sympathizers. He was scandalized by the flight of Tory businessmen—seven thousand had sailed for Nova Scotia in April alone—and feared the economic wreckage that might ensue from this large-scale exodus.

For more than a century, November 25, 1783, was commemorated in New York City as Evacuation Day, the blessed end to seven years of British rule and martial law.

America had been purged of the last vestiges of British rule.

twenty-five thousand American military deaths amounted to nearly 1 percent of the entire population, a percentage exceeded only by the Civil War.

The British had never rebuilt those sections of the town blighted by the giant conflagration of September 1776.

As British hopes of victory faded, many Loyalists had crowded aboard convoys and escaped to Britain, Canada, and Bermuda. At the same time, there was a countervailing influx of patriots that doubled New York City’s population from about twelve thousand on Evacuation Day to twenty-four thousand just two years later, making it a booming metropolis that surpassed Boston and Baltimore in size.

On December 4, Washington made his tearful farewell to his officers at Fraunces Tavern at the corner of Broad and Pearl Streets,

Alexander and Eliza Hamilton, along with baby Philip, had begun to rent a house at 57 (later 58) Wall Street,

Aaron and Theodosia Burr lived at tony 3 Wall Street—“next door but one to the City Hall,” at Wall and Broad,

The lives of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr continued in parallel.

Hamilton busied himself defending persecuted Tories and halting their banishment.

Perhaps no individual was identified more with the postwar resurgence of New York City—not to mention the city’s future greatness—than Alexander Hamilton.

That Alexander Hamilton opted to purchase land in the far northern woods and bungled the chance to buy dirt-cheap Manhattan real estate must certainly count as one of his few conspicuous failures of economic judgment.

The departure of many Tory lawyers had cleared the path for capable, ambitious men in their late twenties and early thirties, including Burr, Brockholst Livingston, Robert Troup, John Laurance, and Morgan Lewis.

“The lack of interest in money, rare anywhere, but even rarer in America, is one of the most universally recognized traits of Mr. Hamilton, although his current practice is quite lucrative.

Unlike many modern lawyers, Hamilton represented clients only if he believed in their innocence.

George Turner, who was indicted as a “dueller, fighter, and disturber of the peace,” again suggesting that Hamilton was perhaps less averse to dueling than he later intimated.

A good-natured legal rivalry arose between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.

Later on, Hamilton said that in their early relationship they had “always been opposed in politics but always on good terms.

Many weird coincidences stamped the lives of Hamilton and Burr, yet their origins were quite dissimilar. Burr embodied the old aristocracy, such as it then existed in America, and Hamilton the new meritocracy. Born on February 6, 1756, one year after Hamilton, Burr boasted an illustrious lineage. His maternal grandfather was Jonathan Edwards, the esteemed Calvinist theologian and New England’s foremost cleric. Edwards’s third daughter, Esther, married the Reverend Aaron Burr, a classical scholar and theologian who became president of Princeton.

At the time of Burr’s birth, the college was moving from Newark to Princeton,

had recently been struck by smallpox, which Edwards promptly contracted by inoculation, dying two weeks after settling in. Then Burr’s mother, Esther, came down with smallpox and died two weeks after her father. Dr. William Shippen took Burr and his orphaned sister into his Philadelphia home. When Grandmother Edwards came to reclaim the children, she contracted virulent dysentery and died shortly afterward. Thus, by October 1758, two-year-old Aaron Burr had already lost a mother, a father, a grandfather, a grandmother, and a great-grandfather.

Burr never shed a certain patrician hauteur, epicurean tastes, and a faint disdain for moneymaking activities.

Starting in college, he wrote coded letters to his sister and classmates and never entirely discarded the self-protective habit.

he was a chameleon who evaded clear-cut positions on most issues and was a genius at studied ambiguity.

It is puzzling that Aaron Burr is sometimes classified among the founding fathers. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin, and Hamilton all left behind papers that run to dozens of thick volumes,

By contrast, Burr’s editors have been able to eke out just two volumes of his letters,

In a still more severe indictment, Hamilton said of Burr, “In civil life, he has never projected nor aided in producing a single measure of important public utility.”28

Hamilton was flowing and rapturous.”32 Hamilton smothered opponents with arguments, while Burr resorted to cunning ruses and unexpected tricks to carry the day.

Hamilton’s actions abruptly altered his image. He was accused of betraying the Revolution and tarnishing his bright promise,

A mere nine months after Evacuation Day, he had won a real if partial victory for a rich British subject against a patriotic widow.

In 1783, John Church sailed for Europe with Angelica and their four children to settle wartime accounts with the French government. In his absence, Church named Hamilton as his American business agent, a task that was to consume a good deal of his time in coming years.

Ironically, he held in his own name only a single share of the bank that was long to be associated with his memory.

William Seton,

oldest stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

On September 25, 1784, the Hamiltons had their first daughter, named Angelica in honor of Eliza’s sister.

fourth and favorite child, James Alexander, came along in 1788 did they christen a baby in homage to the absentee grandfather in the Caribbean.

third child, Alexander, was born on May 16, 1786,

orphan, adopted another, and cofounded an orphanage points up a special compassion for abandoned children that might explain, beyond his obvious merits, her initial attraction to Hamilton.

Park Theater on lower Broadway.

After 1790, the Hamiltons rented pew ninety-two,

Nominally Episcopalian, he was not clearly affiliated with the denomination and did not seem to attend church regularly or take communion.

Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson, Hamilton had probably fallen under the sway of deism, which sought to substitute reason for revelation and dropped the notion of an active God who intervened in human affairs. At the same time, he never doubted God’s existence, embracing Christianity as a system of morality and cosmic justice.

on it from 1784 to 1787. In this capacity, he was also a trustee of his alma mater, now renamed Columbia College to banish any royal remnants, and received from it an honorary master-of-arts degree.