Alexander Hamilton

On January 11, 1755, in Charlestown on Nevis, Alexander Hamilton was born in the British West Indies and entered Atlantic commerce as a teenage clerk. Local patrons sent him to New York in 1772, where he studied at King's College and began publishing polemics against imperial policy. By 1776 he was commanding artillery in the Continental Army and had become one of George Washington's most trusted aides.

Hamilton argued at the Annapolis Convention in 1786 for a stronger union and played a decisive role at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and in The Federalist during ratification. As secretary of the treasury from 1789 to 1795, he wrote the Reports on Public Credit, a National Bank, and Manufactures, turning federal finance into the core of national power. Those measures produced the First Bank of the United States, federal assumption of state debts, and a durable contest over the scope of constitutional authority.

Hamilton's reading of implied powers resurfaced in McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819, when the Supreme Court upheld Congress's authority to charter a national bank. His fiscal system also anchored the Treasury Department, the customs service, and the party conflicts that defined the 1790s.