“The bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar.”
That’s what John Adams more than once called Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first Treasury Secretary. Thomas Jefferson snobbishly described him as one who “from the moment at which history can stoop to notice him” was an enemy to American liberty. Now, more than two centuries after his death, we have on one hand the wildly popular hip-hop Broadway musical “Hamilton” celebrating his life, and on the other a movement to either kick him off the 10-dollar bill, or force him to share it with someone else. What is going on here?
Part of the answer, of course, lies in the growing consensus that it is well past time for a woman to be featured somewhere on our national currency. But why pick on Hamilton? Are there no other alternatives?
As Adams and Jefferson hint, he was an outsider. He was not born in North America, but in the Caribbean. His parents were not married. He was self-made. Yet of all of the Founders, Hamilton best fits the pattern of the American “rags-to-riches” legend, which is the basis of the musical that bears his name.
Born on the island of Nevis, Hamilton arrived in New York City in 1773, armed only with letters from friends. His father, James Hamilton, the “Scotch Pedlar,” was actually a fairly prosperous merchant who somehow never bothered to marry Hamilton’s mother. After graduating from King’s (later Columbia) College, Hamilton joined the Continental Army, where he attracted the attention of George Washington. From 1777 to 1781 he served as Washington’s aide de camp, and participated in the final battle at Yorktown.
In the 1780s Hamilton was a leader in the movement for a more effective national government, which culminated in the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. He was the principal author of the Federalist essays, which are still quoted today in interpreting the Constitution. In 1789 Washington appointed him head of the newly created Treasury Department. Hamilton used his position to strengthen the federal government in ways that led to admiration among merchants and investors and dismay among critics like Thomas Jefferson and his followers, who feared centralized power.
His reports as treasury secretary persuaded President Washington of the need for a national bank and persuaded Congress to pay off all the Revolutionary War debts run up by the states. His Report on Manufactures envisioned an industrial America, in contrast to the agrarian picture painted by the Jeffersonians.
Hamilton continued to have influence after he left the Treasury Department. The words, although not the ideas, in Washington’s Farewell Address are Hamilton’s. When Jefferson and Aaron Burr unexpectedly tied in the electoral vote in the presidential election of 1800, Hamilton threw his support to Jefferson. In 1804 Burr, then vice president, shot and killed Hamilton in a duel. He was only 49 years old.
Let us return to the currency question. Besides the 10-dollar bill, the three most widely used today are the dollar bill (Washington), the five-dollar bill (Lincoln) and the 20-dollar bill (Jackson). It is puzzling, to me at least, as to why Andrew Jackson seems to have escaped serious scrutiny.
Andrew Jackson combines some of the worst traits in the American psyche. He was a hot-tempered slaveholder, a frontier brawler who had killed a man in a duel, executed Native American warriors without trial, and later was instrumental in removing thousands of Indians from their ancestral lands. His major claim to fame was his spectacular victory in the War of 1812 over the British at New Orleans in January 1815. But the war had already ended two weeks before. Had there been an Atlantic cable in 1814, there would have been no battle, no claim to fame, and Jackson would be known today as just another frontier Indian-killer.
As president, one of Jackson’s proudest achievements was his destruction of Alexander Hamilton’s creation, the Bank of the United States. How ironic it would be if today’s Treasury Department determines that the anti-bank, Indian-removing slaveholding duelist Andrew Jackson remains in place, while its founder, “the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar,” is demoted.
Lynn H. Parsons of Castine is History Professor Emeritus at the SUNY College at Brockport in New York. His 1967 doctoral dissertation at the Johns Hopkins University was “The Image of Alexander Hamilton in the American Mind.”