Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton was born out of wedlock in 1755 on the island of Nevis and raised in St. Croix, where he worked as a clerk for a trading house. A fund raised by local merchants sent him to New York to study, and he was still a student when he began writing pamphlets defending the American cause.

He served as Washington's aide-de-camp during the Revolution and afterward practiced law and argued for a strong central government. With Madison and John Jay he wrote the Federalist Papers, and at the Constitutional Convention he pressed for an energetic executive and a consolidated nation.

As the first secretary of the treasury he assumed the states' war debts, chartered a national bank, and put the country's credit on a firm footing, laying the ground of the Federalist party. He died in 1804 from a wound suffered in a duel with Aaron Burr.

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