Founding Leadership by Brent Taylor

Author:Brent Taylor [Dr. Brent Taylor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
Published: 2019-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

ALEXANDER HAMILTON

Executing The Vision

THE FORMER VICE PRESIDENT of the United States shoots and kills the former Secretary of the Treasury. While this may sound like the premise of a Tom Clancy novel, it actually occurred on July 11, 1804, ending the life of one of the most ambitious and unusual of the Founding Fathers.

Both of the non-presidents who appear on modern U.S. currency were self-made men. One was famous for his quips about thrift; the other for his financial leadership at the birth of the nation. One was born in the colonies and was slow to convert to the idea of independence; the other was born in the West Indies and was an early convert to the Patriot cause. Benjamin Franklin may be the better known of the two, but Alexander Hamilton played a larger role in shaping the federal government and steering the nation’s financial and economic institutions onto a progressive and sustainable course.

Born in the British West Indies in 1755 or 1757,1 Hamilton was the illegitimate son of Rachel Faucett Lavien and James A. Hamilton. His ignoble beginnings would haunt him all his days, and be used as a weapon against him in many political scrapes. Hamilton was abandoned by his father at a young age, and his mother died in 1768, leaving him, in essence, an orphan. Through a series of events and odd jobs, Hamilton ended up in the colonies, where he eventually enrolled in King’s College in Manhattan (present-day Columbia University).

During the Revolution, Hamilton was Washington’s aide-de- camp, which placed him at the epicenter of high-level military decisions, diplomacy, and negotiations. Eventually, he was given command of the New York light infantry battalion—a position that put him on the front lines at Yorktown, the battle that prompted the surrender of the British (and essentially ended the war).

Hamilton earned a living with his law practice and went on to serve the nation in Congress. Perhaps his greatest contribution to the nation, however, was his authorship of The Federalist Papers, still referenced today to shed light on the Founders’ intentions. Later, Washington named Hamilton as the first Secretary of the Treasury, a position he used to lay the foundations of our modern economy.

Though famous for his financial prowess, Hamilton’s greatest strength was his ability to translate his vision, and those of the other Founding Fathers, into reality. Above all, Hamilton was a practical idealist—a master of executing grand visions. He was not, unfortunately, a master of his own temper or his personal life. By July 1804 he had already participated in several duels, and Hamilton agreed to meet Aaron Burr on the same site in Weehawken, New Jersey, where his own son had been killed in a duel three years earlier. When the antagonists met, Hamilton fired over Burr’s head, but Burr’s shot hit Hamilton in the lower abdomen.2 Hamilton died the next afternoon.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.