Lapham's Quarterly

Paper Trails

"A library," wrote Henry Ward Beecher, "is but the soul's burial-ground. It is the land of shadows." Lapham's Quarterly, in cooperation with the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library, presents Paper Trails, the biographical companion blog to Déjà vu. Read More

Documents courtesy of:
Manuscripts and Archives Division
The New York Public Library
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
www.nypl.org/mss

Alexander Hamilton

Posted June 18, 2008

Alexander Hamilton (1755?-1804).

As Virginia claims Washington and Jefferson as its own, Pennsylvania jealously enshrines the memory of Franklin atop Philadelphia’s Society Hill, and Massachusetts boasts of introducing Hancock and the Adamses into the American pantheon—so, then, does New York—and New York City in particular—enjoy its status as the home of Hamilton, a distinction befitting both America’s economic mecca and her first Secretary of the Treasury. The financial wizard who envisioned Wall Street’s eventual outmuscling of Main Street and the banker’s eventual triumph over the farmer, Alexander Hamilton founded the Bank of New York in 1784, helped re-open (and re-name) Columbia University after the Revolutionary War, and represented Manhattan (and New York State) at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. And when middle age demanded that he take pause from the rigors of politics, it was in Harlem—near present-day 143rd Street and Convent Avenue—that he built The Grange, his country estate.

Hamilton died in an 1804 duel with Vice President Aaron Burr, but the nascent United States continued to evolve along lines deeply scored by Hamilton, who saw in America not a utopian New Jerusalem, but rather a budding commercial and industrial colossus that needed money, not prayerful idealism (or distant deism), to flourish. As one of Washington’s closest advisers, he stressed to the first president the importance of finance, foreign relations, and executive authority in the creation of a viable American state. He normalized relations with Britain, mended a fractured diplomacy with France, and, wary of what an overdose of revolutionary fervor had done during the French Revolution’s Terror, urged Washington to adopt a pragmatic and less zealous politics.

Legend has it, of course, that since Burr felled Hamilton at Weehawken that day, the United States has aimed consistently for a “Jeffersonian Democracy” (as opposed to a “Hamiltonian Aristocracy”); modern America, though, is as much The Grange as it is Monticello.