Alexander Hamilton(c. 1755–1804)

Alexander Hamilton was born about 1755 on the small Caribbean island of Nevis, the son of James Hamilton, a younger son of the Scottish Hamiltons of Ayrshire, and Rachel Faucette. His father deserted the family and his mother died when he was a boy, leaving him an orphan of no fortune and uncertain birth on a distant island. He had only his extraordinary mind, and it carried him: as a teenage clerk in a trading house on St Croix he so impressed the local merchants and ministers that they raised a subscription to send him to the mainland of North America to be educated. He arrived in New York about 1772 and threw himself into the gathering quarrel between the colonies and the British crown.

When the war came he raised an artillery company, fought in the New York and New Jersey campaigns, and so caught the eye of the commander-in-chief that George Washington took him onto his staff, where for four years he served as the general's most trusted aide and effectively his chief of staff, drafting orders, dispatches and policy through the hardest years of the Revolution. He pressed for a field command, and at the siege of Yorktown in October 1781 Washington gave it to him: Hamilton led the night assault on Redoubt Number Ten, taking the British strongpoint at bayonet point in a few furious minutes, one of the actions that sealed the surrender of Cornwallis and effectively won American independence.

Peace turned him from soldier to founder. Convinced that the loose union of the states would not hold, he was a leading force behind the convention that drew up the federal constitution, and then, with James Madison and John Jay, wrote the Federalist Papers, the series of essays defending the new charter that remains the single greatest work of American political argument and is cited in the courts to this day. Hamilton wrote the majority of them, at speed, under a Roman pen-name.

As the first Secretary of the Treasury, from 1789, he built the financial machinery of the United States from a blank sheet. He had the new federal government assume the war debts of the states, founded a national bank, established the public credit and the customs and revenue service, and set the country on the path to becoming a commercial and industrial power. More than any other man he designed the economic structure of the republic, and the system he built is essentially the one the country uses still.

He was killed on 12 July 1804 in a duel with the sitting Vice-President, Aaron Burr, a political enemy of long standing, shot on the heights of Weehawken across the river from the city he had made his own. He was not yet fifty. The Hamilton name carries his memory as the penniless orphan of Scottish descent who came from a Caribbean counting-house to storm the redoubt at Yorktown, argue the constitution into being, and build the finances of a new nation, his face known today to every American who carries a ten-dollar note.