Hamilton confirmed as Treasury Secretary within hours of his nomination
The new federal government was barely five months old and still had no one managing its money. On September 11, 1789, in New York City, President George Washington nominated Alexander Hamilton, his former wartime aide and a co-author of The Federalist Papers, to be the first Secretary of the Treasury. The Senate confirmed him that same day. Over the next six years, Hamilton built the financial system the young republic still runs on.
This is the moment the American financial state gets a name attached to it. Hamilton's same-day confirmation gave the Constitution's new Treasury Department its first officer, and within his six years in the post he built the debt assumption plan, the First Bank of the United States, and a national tax system, a framework whose disputes over federal power are still with us.
QWhat childhood tragedy nearly derailed Hamilton before he ever reached America?
Hamilton was orphaned twice over on Caribbean islands before he turned fourteen. His mother, Rachel Lavien, died of yellow fever in 1768 after her estranged first husband's legal claim stripped the family of its household silver and belongings in probate court. The teenage Hamilton and his brother James were then taken in by cousin Peter Lytton, who died by suicide the following year, leaving his property to a mistress and cutting the brothers out entirely. Alexander, left with nothing, was taken in by merchant Thomas Stevens while James apprenticed to a carpenter. A friend bought back the family's auctioned books and returned them to Hamilton, one of the few possessions he carried out of that childhood.
QHow did a hurricane essay get a Caribbean clerk shipped off to college in America?
In 1772, Hamilton wrote his father a vivid, apocalyptic account of a hurricane that had leveled Christiansted, describing it as divine punishment for human vanity. His mentor, the Presbyterian minister Hugh Knox, submitted the letter to the Royal Danish-American Gazette, where it was published. Biographer Ron Chernow later called it astonishing that a self-taught clerk could write with such force. Local merchants were impressed enough to pool money for Hamilton's passage and education, and he sailed for Boston that October before heading to New York. That single essay paid for his passage off the island.
QWhat role did Hamilton play in the mob violence of the Revolution's early days?
On May 10, 1775, Hamilton talked down an angry crowd to save King's College president Myles Cooper, a Loyalist the mob wanted to punish. Hamilton supported the Patriot cause but personally disapproved of mob violence against Loyalists, and he stalled the crowd with a speech long enough for Cooper to escape. Around the same period he coordinated with Hercules Mulligan and the Sons of Liberty on an armed raid on British cannons at the Battery, done under fire from the warship HMS Asia, which got his militia company, renamed the Hearts of Oak, redesignated as an artillery unit. Two very different instincts, protection and combat, showed up in Hamilton within months of each other.
