Alexander Hamilton Background

Alexander Hamilton is with us every day, in our wallets, on the $10 bill. But he is with us in another sense, for more than any other Founder, he foresaw the America we live in now. Alexander Hamilton shaped the financial, political, and legal systems of the young United States. His ideas on racial equality and economic diversity were so far ahead of their time that it took America decades to catch up with them. He made the early republic work, and set the agenda for its future. We live in the world he made. From birth till death, Hamilton lives in the hearts of many to this day.
Early life Alexander Hamilton was born in Charlestown, Nevis, in the West Indies on January 11, 1757. Like most founding fathers
Croix Through this early experience, Alexander Hamilton was first exposed to international trading and learned about the business of money and trade. Hamilton's boss, Nicholas Cruger, so valued Hamilton's cleverness when it came to accounting that he and other businessmen pooled their resources with a minister and Hugh Knox, a newspaper editor, to send Hamilton to America for an education. Alexander had impressed Knox with a powerful letter he had written describing a ferocious hurricane that had hit the island in 1772. In 1773, when he was around 16 years old, Alexander arrived in New York, where he enrolled in King's College in New York (later renamed Columbia University) after being rejected by the college of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton). Regardless his gratitude toward his generous boss, with the American colonies on the verge of a revolution, Alexander was drawn more to political involvement than he was to
While serving as a New York delegate in 1787, he met in Philadelphia with other representatives to discuss how to fix the Articles of Confederation. During the meeting he expressed his views, that a dependable ongoing source of income would be key to developing a more powerful and strong central government. Even though Hamilton didn't have a strong hand in writing the Constitution, but he did heavily influence its ratification. In collaboration with James Madison and John Jay, Hamilton wrote 51 of 85 essays under the collective title The Federalist. In the essays, he artfully clarified and defended the newly drafted Constitution before its approval. In 1788, at the New York Ratification Convention in Poughkeepsie, where two-thirds of delegates opposed the Constitution. Hamilton was a powerful promoter for the ratification, effectively arguing against the anti-Federalist views. In 1789, George Washington was elected president of the United States, where he appointed Alexander Hamilton as the first secretary of the treasury. Hamilton rammed heads with fellow cabinet members who were fearful of a central government holding so much