Alexander Hamilton: Biography, Accomplishments, Children, Economics, Education, Facts (2003)

story and Willard Stern Randall is author of a new biography of Alexander Hamilton it details the founding fathers role in the Revolutionary War and his influence in shaping the government of the United States until his fatal duel with Aaron Burr this public lives feature is about an hour Willard Stern Randall visiting professor of humanities at Champlain College is the author of 12 books including 5 biographies a former investigative in reporter mr. Randall won the National Magazine Award for public service from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism the Hillman prize the Loeb award and three Pulitzer Prize nominations during his 17-year career in Philadelphia journalism after graduate studies in history at Princeton University Randall moved to Vermont to write biographies his first Benjamin Franklin and his son won a Frank Luthor Mott Prize for research from Missouri Graduate School of Journalism Benedict Arnold patriot and trader was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a notable book of the New York Times Thomas Jefferson a life was a history book main selection history book club main selection was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and was named one of publisher weeklies 10 best biographies of 1993 George Washington life was selected for Reader's Digest volume best nonfiction of 1997 Randall recently received the award of merit of the American Revolution round table only awarded twice before in 45 years he is also a contributing editor to mhq the quarterly magazine of military history tonight professor Randall will tell us about his latest biography Alexander Hamilton a life please welcome professor Randall good evening of all the founding fathers of the United States the man who might be the most important to us today is probably the one we know the least about Alexander Hamilton the youngest of the founders the face on our $10 bill spend his whole life struggling with two great problems war and money and the relationship between them as an orphan boy at 13 he thought he was doomed to a life on a stool in a Counting house in the Caribbean after his father deserted him at age 9 and his mother died at age 13 in a letter he wrote to a young friend who had escaped the islands and gone to New York to study medicine Hamilton confided I wish there was a war he got his wish the American Revolution he arrived on a scholarship in New York just as the street rioting began he signed up as a student at King's College which would soon have to change its name to Columbia and there in the library at night he pored over the writings of the French philosophers the revolutionary tracts written in the last 10 years before him and turned out pamphlets that everyone thought were written by somebody 10 years old or at least when word of Lexington and Concord came he organized the first militia company in New York City which is now the oldest army unit stealing the Canon from right under the British officers nose is it Fort George training students and dock workers alike in the art Gunnery using his knowledge of trigonometry even though his math was so bad that he had flunked out of the pre-med program he distinguished himself in the revolution by bravery at first escaping from New York after the Americans lost the city to the British with only two cannon patting them like a pet dog everywhere he went he was the rearguard again and again for Washington's fleeing army as it escaped the superior forces of the British across New York New Jersey and into Pennsylvania no one could believe that he was only twenty years old at the time but Washington after seeing Hamilton and his two guns hold off an entire British Brigade at the Raritan River found out who he was not that Hamilton would have kept it a secret he had a nose for power for patronage he always pitched his tent right next to Washington's headquarters until Washington noticed him at the Battle of Trenton and again at Princeton Hamilton distinguished himself with the ferocity of his artillery barrages helping to kill hundreds of Hessians and force the surrender of a thousand of the paid troops of the king at Princeton he got a little revenge when he came to the mainland he really wanted to go to Princeton on an accelerated program but the President of Princeton said no nobody goes through here fast President of Princeton was selling the meals as well as the studies and so Hamilton instead took himself off to Columbia when he came back to Princeton in 1777 with his cannon he took dead aim at Nassau Hall and now if you take the guided tour they'll show you the grooves in the floor where the cannonballs came in from Hamilton's guns the British surrendered Hamilton joined Washington's staff as an aide to camp this is an office that we don't have really any more but basically ten or eleven of the brightest young men in the American colonies competed with each other for the favor of the general they slept at night often on the floor with their heads in toward the fire to stay warm but in the daytime they were the mind and the pen of the commander-in-chief he chose only bright young men who could write he said he didn't have time he told them the way he thought they were on their own he gave it a quick look and then he signed a model CEO as aide to camp Hamilton took on more and more responsibilities he became the leading go-between with Washington's network of some we now know 200 secret agents he also handled prisoner of war negotiations and exchanges among the people that he exchanged and got out of British prison was Ethan Allen of Vermont more than that however he was the writing arm the legal mind and the man who would pull a gun and shoot at anyone who objected to Washington or his policies he actually rifled the files of general Horatio gates to get the goods on the hero of Saratoga when gates and other officers planned a coup against Washington it was absolutely loyal to his commander at the same time in other ways he was a young man on the make he had no money he was an orphan everyone around him was from a leading American family good money good connections and Hamilton knew that most of all to get ahead in the new nation that they were fighting to establish he would have to marry well Martha Washington when she arrived at Washington's headquarters to set up the dances and the teas around the commander in the wintertime quickly noticed Hamilton she also noticed a tomcat that was pursuing every loose feline at headquarters she named the cat Hamilton he pursued a variety of young women the daughter of the Governor of New Jersey her relatives the daughter of a major-general but eventually he settled on Betsy Schuyler whose father was one of the Dutch Patroons who owned roughly one fourteenth of New York some of the best land along the Hudson including Albany Saratoga Schuylerville he married into a leading family but he never took a cent what he wanted was the political connection Betsy didn't stay around headquarters very long she was good at pouring tea but the letters that survived are all from Hamilton himself and they show her as not wanting to be part of the officers Wives scene they find find her going back to her father constantly living in Schuylerville raising the children while Hamilton pursued his military ambitions Hamilton knew that to get ahead in the new nation from the very beginning you had to be a war hero and he chafed at the staff job once again he was confined to a stool for some five years writing the orders and the letters of Washington he yearned for a field command finally when Washington made it clear that he could not spare him Hamilton in a moment of pique said well then I resign he made it stick he went back to his father-in-law's house and decided on a law career but still he could not stay at home he was Restless the war was coming to an end he wanted to be in on the last battle and at the last moment George Washington made him the commander of a light infantry Corps marching on Yorktown and there in the last battle of the revolution he let Hamilton lead the last charge taking redoubt number 10 which led to the fall of the British Army when it was all over Hamilton went home this time to study law but there were no law books no way to study law so he wrote one fundamentals of New York law it is still used by young law students it was his way among the other lawyers studying at the same table with him were captain Aaron Burr and people who would become his rivals in New York politics as a young man in the islands filling in when his boss got sick Hamilton had learned about money banking Commerce and smuggling it was good at it he instructed the ship captains on how to forge bills of lading and ships papers how to get through the Spanish guards off Cuba this came in handy when he became the first tax collector for the Port of New York under the New Republic it was especially helpful when he went on to become the first secretary of the Treasury and it was his job to set up the custom service so this man who smuggled as a boy founded what is now called the I n s Immigration and Naturalization Service the Treasury Department its collection agencies the border crossings most of all though he was he was a lawyer a writer and a politician who wanted a strong nation he was a nationalist an immigrant always an outsider he had a clear picture he thought of what the nation needed he thought that if the nation were to survive it would take more than the founding fathers the soldiers the Franklin's the diplomats would take that second generation it could not remain a quarrelsome string of 13 banana republics as the original States were threatening and taxing each other and not at all respected by fahren powers when America's diplomats went to visit the king and the foreign minister at Versailles in those early years they went in the order of importance of their country the emissary from the United States was dead last in line America was still so unimportant Hamilton thought that it was important for the country to win the credit of Europe and so he set out as he always did systematically to study the problems of the new nation its financial needs he soon discovered that the new country had a pile of debts three different kinds of debts the debts incurred by the Continental Army the debts incurred by the Continental Congress and each of the individual states put all together it was a pile of seventy-six million dollars their money factored that out by 41 times and you'll see the problem while the revenues of the Continental Congress were only a million dollars a year so what he decided to do was to turn America's debts into its assets he studied the French and the English especially the three volumes of Jacques macare the reformer from France and he studied the banking system of England and he folded the two of them together into a new system he thought that what the nation needed was to pay all its debtors at once at par a hundred cents on the dollar and create something new called a national debt we don't think of it as an asset now but it was Washington's blessing upon the country because his scheme for paying for it is what gave the country instant credit he set up or urged Congress to something he called a sinking fund a new idea where a fixed amount of the debt of the income of the country each year was dedicated to paying off its national debt the nearest analogy I can find today is that Lockbox of the Social Security trust fund the surplus interest of which has been used to decrease the national debt hamilton recommended this to congress in the first of a series of four reports he was so little trusted by congress that they wouldn't let him in the room even to sit in the gallery as they debated his plan day after day but when it was all over the united states had a national bank that received all revenues mostly from customs issued all federal paychecks mostly the Hamiltons department he wound up with the largest department of government at a time when the entire federal government was fifteen hundred men's he had a thousand bringing in the money the army in those days was 80 men the entire cabinet and government was in for attached houses in Philadelphia those were the good old days but in addition to setting up the first bank and creating the national debt he found that he had to educate everybody Congress the people the president at every step it was a nation of farmers and sailors ninety-five percent of the people were engaged in farming or selling farm goods and shipping them to foreign customers he had to educate Thomas Jefferson who basically thought he knew it all and who represented the debtor class the farmers especially of the south and James Madison they were afraid of his scheme of a centralization of money and power in one place and behind-the-scenes Hamilton and Jefferson worked to try to patch over their differences they both came out of their adjoining offices one afternoon one hot summer afternoon in 1790 and bumped literally bumped into each other these two redheads sweating in the Philadelphia Sun and heat and they decided they had to sit down together and so in a secret meeting the next night they struck what is known as the dinner table bargain in exchange for Jefferson and Madison and the South supporting Hamilton's plan for funding all debts at par and establishing a National Bank concentrating the wealth in the north hamilton agreed to let the capital be built in the south in washington DC in a new district carved out within a horseback ride of president washington's house within one week of the news leaking out of Hamilton's plan the value of stocks securities on the new york market rose 50% and he received a letter short after after that from Amsterdam from the Dutch bankers that the United States could have as much credit as any nation in Europe what a week but Hamilton had not only to invent a National Bank but he had to form the first corporation in the world he invented the modern corporation until that time the only corporations were joint stock companies chartered by the crown in England or in France usually of charities or colonies but basically a closed list of investors it was Hamilton's idea to lower a corporate veil over the identities of investors so that anyone from anywhere could participate in paying off the debt of the United States investing in its ventures in its industry behind the veil among others was the wife of Benedict Arnold living in England in exile hedging her bets getting a pension from the Queen but putting her American inheritance into Alexander Hamilton's bank the corporation also or offered immunity from prosecution for directors something that I think a lot of people were having a second thought about these days but to have a bank in a corporation it was also necessary to have money the United States had no currency of its own nine different currencies were fluctuating in the United States at the time his idea was to come up with a new currency that instead of having on its face the ruler the king has it been the custom for thousands of years to have Columbia a mythical figure and back and forth with condor say in france he studied the making of money coming up with a currency that could not be cropped one of the problems at the time as people would snip off a little gold from one coin snip off a little gold from another coin it was the gold that was valuable not the coin even the dollar was only 1/8 of a Spanish coin so Americans had specialized in cropping coins from the beginning and so they came up with a decimal coin with serrated edges from the very beginning Hamilton thought of everything a little too much so his colleagues became his rivals he wasn't exactly smooth around the edges if he didn't like the way things went in the Tuesday afternoon cabinet meeting he went out to a newspaper he formed that was circulated three times a week to attack the opponents of the government and defend its policies Jefferson in the same room as a cabinet member reciprocated by forming his newspaper the further confused the taxpayers you had The Gazette of the United States and the United States Gazette the editor of one was paid from a slush fund of the Secretary of State and the other the salary of the other came from placing advertisements Treasury bond notices in his newspaper so we haven't invented much the skullduggery the rivalries began at the beginning but Hamilton's dream of making the United States solvent and creditworthy succeeded in only one year and by the time he wrote his final report the report on manufacturing it was his idea that America could grow and prosper most if it attracted working people from Europe and capital to start industries in America he believed for the United States to spread and to thrive you needed free men not slavery factory workers he believed would quote flock from Europe to the United States his prophecy of course came true between 1840 and 1913 10% of the population of Europe migrated to the United States to take part in its industrial revolution to get the industrial revolution going that he foresaw he launched some s um the Society for establishing useful manufacturers the first sizable industrial undertaking in the United States helping to build a new textile making town called Paterson New Jersey along the way in his five years as Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton also created the Coast Guard the US Navy we had none in the revolution only state navies and here on Lake Champlain it took Benedict Arnold a general to build a navy that was part of the army to fight against the British it wasn't until France and England both started capturing American ships in the Napoleonic war of the 1790s that Hamilton this time coming back as a Major General Inspector General of the army as second command to George Washington organized a sailing fleet that augmented the Coast Guard and the army he also radically increased the size of the army to 10,000 men but he clashed repeatedly with his fellow government officials if he was so successful in forging all these institutions and ideas wouldn't it seem that he was a shoe-in eventually to become president but his genius antagonized even terrified his rivals especially he was at loggerheads with Jefferson who with his friend Madison Madison who had helped Hamilton write the Federalist Papers together Jefferson and Madison broke with Hamilton informed the democratic-republicans forerunner of the Democratic Party of today in response Hamilton formed the Federalist Party a predecessor of today's republican party then he repeatedly worked to undermine the Federalist candidate John Adams now one of the things that you get after studying these founding fathers for a while is the idea that they didn't get along with each other and even if they didn't show it in public they went off and wrote the memoirs which biographers have to struggle with and then you get a quite different picture of John Adams who could only say nasty things about Alexander Hamilton and private including calling him the baseborn brat of a Scots peddler well baseborn was the way they said bastard in those days and the scots peddler part well that's a bit of an exaggeration Alexander Hamilton's father was the fourth son of one of the wealthiest Lords in Scotland Laird Hamilton but only the oldest son could inherit in those days so Hamilton's father had had to do that detestable thing for any of her Scottish Lord which was to work and so he had learned the merchants trade gone off to the Caribbean gone bankrupt several times fallen in with Hamilton's mother who didn't know that she had been that she was still married to her first husband until her first husband filed for divorce without serving her with papers and when the two of them found out about it Hamilton's father sailed away and he never saw him again rather than be indicted for bigamy he left the family so to telescope all that into the baseborn brat of a scotch peddler has a little bit too economical it took more than party loyalty or rivalry to keep America's Merlin from becoming president Martha Washington had it right if you remember the cat after his marriage of opportunity to Betsy Schuyler many children little love Hamilton almost certainly began a long affair with her sister and this is one of the things that is very hard to document but by studying Hamilton's account books as a lawyer you'll see large amounts of money disappear in a short period when he said his sister-in-law up in an apartment in New York City rented a carriage paid the moving men rented a piano a few other things totally out of character and ended up with no cash at all at the end of the summer her father his father-in-law actually had to write to her and tell her get back to your husband stop this and she sailed for England but they kept up their correspondence and that's how we can trace how long this went on full of yearning and clever secrets Hamilton could shift a period or a comma in a letter that he showed his wife that indicated his love in a code that only he and his sister-in-law quite understood as long as he kept it secret but he couldn't keep his amore secret one summer while Betsy was visiting her father with the kids in Schuylerville Hamilton had a visit from the wife of a minor official in the Treasury Department named Maria Reynolds Maria was a very beautiful woman many men had thought so what Hamilton did not realize was that husband and wife were swindlers and blackmailers and before the affair became very well-known Thomas Jefferson's Secretary of State James Monroe member of Congress were staking out Hamilton's apartment night after night watching Maria Reynolds come and go and eventually Hamilton took depositions and the husband fled when he returned he started demanding money $1,000 $1,500 we're talking about their money we're talking about 40,000 60,000 and our money Hamilton couldn't keep up with the demands but those letters to survive when it was all over Monroe Jefferson and Aaron Burr who showed up as the lawyer for the wife and the husband decided that he would have to go public to avoid the scandal of peculation with Treasury funds the threat was to expose him for dipping into the till instead Hamilton in a long long overly detailed confession which he paid to publish himself in a New York newspaper actually destroyed his chances ever becoming president when a boom began to make Hamilton the nominee after Adams very unpopular first term it was very quickly scaled squelched America would not accept an adulterer and in fact on the streets of New York people knew of the two affairs and at one point when Hamilton and his friends went out to a rally Alexander Hamilton who had once been in the mob at the beginning of the revolution now himself was stoned by the crowd Hamilton turned back to law to New York politics more and more he became the personal rival of Aaron Burr and that affair ended probably one of the other things we know about Hamilton if we know very little is the famous duel between Burr and Hamilton but if we stop to think about it here is the great financial genius at the founding of the country out in the dawn in the blaring Sun on a cliff off New Jersey having a shootout the Vice President of the United States and the founder our financial system it's as if Dick Cheney went out and shot it out with Greenspan I'm sure there are moments when they would like to do it but it was that shocking to Americans it actually ended dueling in this country New York indicted burr for murder burr with incredible nerve fled New Jersey went to Washington and continued to preside over the United States Senate eventually however after all his possessions were impounded and auctioned off in New York he fled to Europe where he became the inspiration for the man without a country he came back and lived a long life as a New York lawyer paramour of many a lady Hamilton died 36 hours after being shot in the side with a 55 caliber ball from specially made pistols dueling pistols with a foot long barrel fired at 30 feet the pistols are interesting they were specially made for John Church the husband of Hamilton's paramour his sister-in-law he provided him first to Hamilton's oldest son who had died in a duel three years earlier again Hamilton used them they had specially made hair triggers Hamilton wrote that he had no intention of killing burr he just wanted an affair of Honor he probably intended to fire in the air Aaron Burr had no such intention he set the hair triggers he fired first the hair trigger works with the slightest pressure it takes more force to pull the trigger without it burr is shot was deadly Hamilton's broke a tweak in a tree and that was the end of Alexander Hamilton 36 hours later his wife and his mistress at his bedside the man who founded our financial system died he was only 49 years old thank you very much I hope we have some questions I'm not disappointed sir would you wait for the microphone to be brought up we have someone bringing the mic up the center aisle yeah on the subject of the duel and I can't remember where I read it I thought I read in the boat on the way back Alexander Hamilton said be careful my gun not been fired yet so there was some speculation that he didn't even think he fired his gun is is that something you read about her I think his exact words were be careful the hair trigger is set so he thought it hadn't been fired and that the hair trigger was on it I think from reading the accounts of the seconds on both sides that he was hit so hard so quickly that he didn't know whether he had fired or not as best I can tell but he had they went back later and they actually climbed the tree and found the broken bow and then traced where the bullet had gone so he had fired but it was like this after he was struck by burrs bullet I'm from Saratoga Springs New York I grew up there and I spent a lot of time in Schuylerville in that surrounding area what what happened afterwards through the Schuyler family is his former wife sister-in-law her family have you done any research on that that's a very good question Betsy Schuyler lived another 50 years 50 years spending about 35 years trying to find the ideal biographer somebody who would tell the story pretty much the way she wanted and told she also destroyed any of her letters to Hamilton we would love to see the other side of that correspondence they had a rough time most of the Schuyler land was most of Schuyler money was in land which was not the great treasure of Americans at the time there was just too much of it for sale so there wasn't much income there wasn't much cash the tenants weren't paying so as it turned out Hamilton wasn't worth anything as much as he thought there wasn't much to leave to Betsy and Betsy had slow income from her own rental properties she had slave labor on her property Hamilton had never owned slaves he had grown up in the Sugar islands of the Caribbean surrounded by them and he detested that institution and he's really caught on the horns between slavery and women's rights he can't tell her to get rid of her property her slaves so she went on using slave labor immigrant labor she managed to make a living and she made the house a shrine the home that he had built a shrine with a magnificent bust of Hamilton right in the drawing room the Schuyler family generally had more land than money from that time on but she held on her son John John Church Hamilton whom Hamilton had named after the man who provided the pistols ultimately wrote a biography that was very one-sided very Pro Hamilton so she protected his image ironically she's the one that made him the hero after his duplicity with her and years later there's a wonderful scene where ex-president now former President James Monroe comes through Schuylerville and stops to pay a social call on Betsy Schuyler Hamilton and she wouldn't receive him she wouldn't let him sit down even she said after the part you played with my husband you do not even stay he was the man in the carriage he was the man taking the notes on the Maria Reynolds scandal so she was a tough lady and she held on for another 50 years safeguarding his reputation by the way his reputation used to be much greater than it is now and I think what happened to that was the Great Depression Americans looking for a scapegoat for the collapse of the stock market blamed the man who had created it but as long as she was alive she safeguarded his reputation sir he was he was supposed to be actually of course he um fascitis um of course he was it was apparently supposed to have been very brilliant very fast learner you came up from from a humble background till as you said of course they were to be at twenty was he was really in charge to allow very responsible person with me well education was pretty irregular in those days at best but Hamilton sort of broke all records first of all on the in the islands especially on st. croix where his mother went to raise him and his younger brother and run a store to support him he was not allowed to go to the government school st. croix was in the Danish West Indies which were reformed Calvinist Protestant and no illegitimate children were allowed either in the schools or a church or communion so he actually went to a small private school where the other group that was not allowed into public school Jewish children and so by the age of five he could recite the Decalogue in Hebrew while holding his mother's hand at our recital he had no formal schooling after that but his mother taught him French his mother was a French Huguenot her father was a Huguenot refugee from France so he learned in addition to some Hebrew a lot of French which would come in very handy as the main interpreter between Washington and the French officers during the revolution his French was impeccable it also made him the closest friend of marquis de lafayette so whatever he did he did well he had he had a very interesting tick he learned to memorize by saying everything out loud so when he got his scholarship for helping out as employers business he got a scholarship to New Jersey he was sent to Elizabethtown Academy which was the prep school for Princeton at the time and he already had enough Latin and Greek to sail through but he would go out in the graveyard behind the church in the school every morning with his cards with the grammar words and the syntax and he would recite them out loud as he paced back and forth and people remembered that when the revolution came because he was the only one of Washington's staff who was walking around reciting the letter that he just wrote but he would consign things to memory that way I think this helps to explain the the incredible output that the man had he could hold those facts for years he studied geography when he was 20 that he put to work when he was Secretary of Treasury 20 years later and he could write prodigiously not only beautifully but prodigiously Washington the way Washington ran his cabinet was each week to give them a problem his cabinet members and they had seven or ten or fifteen days depending on the complexity of the task to turn in a written report well when Hamilton wanted his bank Jefferson opposed it Jefferson was no slouch as a writer Jefferson finished on time and turned his report in Washington as a courtesy said mr. Hamilton why don't you cast your eye over this and see what do you think well he paced and muttered and paced and muttered for a week and then in three days he wrote 15,000 words the report on the bank which is the foundation of a financial system it blew Jefferson away the back there huh this makes him someone of a bland question but you said about to get the money nowadays what it was worth then are you factored by 41 I had finished the Washington biography and every time you converted money it didn't seem like very much because Washington seemed like he was such like a wealthy known as a wealthy individual and maybe because of his land but it seemed like something was missing maybe it was because of a because of the money wasn't just distributed the distribution of wealth wasn't so much that the case because nothing seemed he didn't seem as wealthy as so nowadays a famous well-known man of power that's certainly not a bland question and one of the hard parts about doing books like these is to try to find out the value of things first of all Washington's wealth was in land as a boy he had found his father's surveying tools in a shed after his father died another orphan and learned to do surveying and for the rest of his life wherever he went and no matter who was paying him he picked out the prime land until he owned 35,000 acres of riverfront land including the entire town of Charleston West Virginia which is named after his brother Charles 10 miles of the Potomac now that's worth a little something 10 miles above the Potomac where he built Mount Vernon his wealth was in land the other thing we had a barter economy clergymen were paid in firewood and chickens so were school teachers just firewood farmers knew how to buy things without leaving a paper trail even then for tax purposes smuggling was the chief industry in Vermont even when Jefferson declared an embargo that's why we have Smuggler's notch so you're not going to find as much wealth on the record but even if you could the average income of an American in 1789 the average was only four hundred and thirty-seven dollars something like a very poor third world country today if you factor that out is still only about six thousand dollars our money that was the big problem that Hamilton faced with the national debt the other thing is only about 20 percent of the people could vote and were full citizens and pay taxes so out of two and a half million people when the country began only a hundred and sixty thousand had the vote the problem is takes 76 million dollars their money divided by 160,000 and you have this two or three times what the vast majority of Americans made to pay off and that's why his scheme of attracting foreign investment was so brilliant but the numbers seem very small but then the other thing to remember is the disparity between what workers and farmers make now and what CEOs pay themselves is far greater than any other country in the world at any other time and that's a very recent phenomenon it used to be maybe thirty to one in Japan it's only twenty to one not a thousand to one so wealth was not as lavish the rewards were not as lavish at that time as they are now Chris hi well getting back famous dinner table conversation between Jefferson and Hamilton where Hamilton offered the capital of Washington for the relinquish enough ond's how widely were those bonds held by a limited number of people or many people how widely were the bonds held at the beginning that's been a subject of a lot of political controversy over the years very widely not just by speculators in New York and New Jersey who had held the bonds before the funding of the national debt but for example loyalists like Benedict Arnold's wife in England the French bought in very heavily even though they hadn't been paid their debts or even the officers their pensions this was seen as a great investment opportunity so anybody who had cash could buy into that and it was pretty generally held very very quickly the stock market was at first only on a curb was known as the curbside market in front of a Tavern on Wall Street but it couldn't handle the volume pretty soon you had stock exchanges in New York Philadelphia Baltimore so it rapidly expanded we have a question back here with sue Miller thank you I was a little confused about your description of his being stoned in New York was it the city of New York at that time Oh were they not mostly farmers around that and living in that area over there trades people how can you describe a little who stoned him and I would think you know that that he would have a lot of sympathetic understanding among some of the wealthier people well that's a very good question but the city of New York in 1800 still mostly had unpaved streets with pigs running through until somebody who had the job caught them and and butchered them it was small probably thirty five thousand people hardly deserves the name of city but it had no police force no town or city in America had a police force and when a crowd got together and got an idea into its head it usually did what it wanted Hamilton had been on the side that had thrown stones even though he hadn't personally I think at the beginning of the revolution but he now had become establishment he had become the government he had become the voice of money and burrs people were the artisans the dock workers the the whole situation had turned around until when he went to a rally during an election with just a few of his Federalist friends very well-dressed gentleman and stood in the doorway listening to the political speeches he was instantly recognized and the crowd turned around and began yelling things at him personally and stoned him and actually somebody hit him with a rock in the head and opened quite a cut and he decided was a good time to get out of there so it wasn't a ritual stoning for adultery as might happen in some countries at the time or even now but he was so unpopular that he became the light for popular protest sir we have you mentioned that he author of some of the Federalist Papers with he a large factor in the framing of the Constitution he was a larger factor in the ratification of it than the framing he was the delegate one of three delegates from New York to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia but the other two were appointed by Governor George Clinton of New York who was an anti federalists and who was opposed to central government opposed to a new Constitution wanted to keep the Articles of Confederation and the power in the state and so he packed the delegation with rivals of Hamilton's Hamilton tried to get his father-in-law to go with him but that was defeated in the New York Senate so he was outvoted the voting was by state by block and so Hamilton knew that whatever he did it wouldn't make a difference in the vote because it wouldn't be counted but he couldn't stay quiet he sat there and first he got himself on this committee then he got himself on another committee till he was controlling the agenda he only spoke once when he could take it no more without voting he stood up and without any notes he expounded for six hours in the summer heat of Philadelphia might have made him a few more enemies but for six hours his note sat on the table the notes survived in his papers and it's really the outline of the government of the United States it's all in their checks and balances executive branch legislative branch federal judiciary which still didn't exist no federal judges sounded off and went home and discussed well they brought him back in time for the signing and he decided at that point that he would go out and champion the cause so he and Madison and John Jay decided together to write letters to the New York press in defense of the Constitution I wrote a few and then got sick and sort of fluffed off Madison concentrated on theory of government especially from the writings of Montesquieu and the French philosophers whereas Hamilton went right to the core of could the country survive without a strong central government what would it take and he did two-thirds of the letters himself putting aside his law practice that's the thing here's the man surrounded by all this money and he died really poor heavily in debt not all from philandering by a long shot not taking any money from his father-in-law going off for months or years on these Crusades in Congress or the Constitutional Convention without taking any money so yes he was a strong factor in its survival but not in its actual writing Madison was the voice the father of it if somebody in the back row I was curious when you mentioned about his smuggling as a young younger man when he was starting the I ns and the other arms of those governments customs and such how effective were they and based on takes one to know one perhaps and how different may have been from other countries or places that were establishing those types of systems I think it was the cliche would be more of Fox in charge of the henhouse he knew all the tricks and he appointed customs collectors in America had hundreds of small ports at the time and it was a sieve for goods coming in or out that's what kept the revolution alive huge amounts of war materials being brought in by the French and he knew about that too so what he did was set up a reporting system that every one of his Customs collectors had to report to him in writing every week and he gave them detailed questions I mean it was it may have been a political plumb to begin with but it was an anvil around your neck after a while but he gathered data that supported the laws that he got passed by Congress to tighten the controls decided after that there was need for a Coast Guard decided that there was need for lighthouses one purpose is not to prevent shipwrecks but to watch smugglers he knew the tricks and he set up a very effective net against smuggling because all of the revenue of the United States in the beginning was from customs duties he couldn't get any other taxes through he tried to put a tax on whiskey and he wound up with the whiskey rebellion because people on the frontier knew that the cheapest way to transport liquor was either in a barrel or inside yourself the grain was too heavy so there was almost a war over that so he went back to the idea of promoting trade enabling trade protecting the importer and the exporter with court cases that he took on himself and then from them gathering the revenue for the new country well sir no more questions thank you very much for coming out on such a cold night Willard Stern Randall is author of Alexander Hamilton a life it's published by HarperCollins on the web at HarperCollins com

Channel: The Film Archives

Views: 112,403

Rating: 4.8308158 out of 5

Keywords: history, americas, united states, revolution, founding, biography, memoir, historical, presidents, american

Id: PvR5M4qbhWM

Length: 57min 35sec (3455 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 24 2016