Posted on 07/23/2004 1:57:16 PM PDT by Coleus
Theory of a founding father's African ancestry
Friday, July 23, 2004
AS MUCH as I thought I knew about Alexander Hamilton, the first treasury secretary, nobody ever told me he was black. Yes. You heard it here first, folks.
And you'll think about it from now on every time you take out a $10 bill.
Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow is the latest one to explore the theory.
I was totally blown away by that information when a friend casually mentioned Hamilton's link to two significant anniversaries - the 250th anniversary of Columbia University, originally Kings College where he was schooled, and the 200th anniversary this month of the duel in Weehawken with Aaron Burr that claimed his life.
Hamilton was black? It was in none of the historical accounts I'd read.
Knowing if it's true would help explain why Hamilton and John Jay worked on legal strategies after the Revolution to keep former slaves and freedmen from being snatched back into slavery. They called it the New York Manumission Society.
"He was a passionate and consistent abolitionist," Chernow told me. "What he says about blacks is very sympathetic."
Hamilton wrote a letter to John Jay objecting to his reasons for rejecting slaves and free blacks as soldiers.
"Their natural faculties are probably as good as ours," Hamilton wrote.
Chernow says having been born and raised in two slave-dominant Caribbean cultures - Nevis, a British Island, and St. Croix, under Danish rule - might explain Hamilton's feelings about improving the lot of blacks in America.
In "Alexander Hamilton," Chernow, the author of the newly released Penguin Press biography quotes him: "The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor in experience."
Chernow says Hamilton never talked about his background, but everybody else - especially his enemies - knew he was born illegitimate and that, with no "family," he had risen fast after arriving on the continent. They called him names - immigrant, foreigner, Creole — punctuated with "bastard."
News accounts of the day called his mother Creole, but Chernow says there's been no proof that he was racially mixed.
Folklore, anonymous statements in the newspaper by political enemies, and the fact that African slaves dominated St. Croix demographics about 14 to one all add to what Chernow calls the "presumption" of blackness in Hamilton's bloodlines. It didn't help that his mother had a less than stellar reputation, having borne him and his brother James after leaving her husband and son on St. Croix and hooking up with her new man on Nevis.
Chernow says there was a "presumption" that his mother was part black, but there's no proof.
"From the time he started to become politically controversial, reports started to occur in the press that he was Creole," Chernow says.
"It does not come from friendly sources. It comes from people who wanted to discredit him." Chernow found a lock of Hamilton's hair, but says geneticists told him race could not be proven definitively using that hair.
William Cissel, a U.S. Park Service historian working on St. Croix, said his mother Rachel Fawcett Levien was listed as white on several census and church burial documents.
Hamilton's blackness is supported only by circumstantial argument.
I say let's dig him up and run some genetic tests on his DNA. It's been done with older bones than his, and we know where he's buried in the Trinity Church churchyard. Why not? A whole cemetery, the African Burial Grounds, was excavated in lower Manhattan and the bones scattered so the foundation of a new federal building could be poured.
Inquiring minds want to know if the Caribbean foreigner responsible for our banking structure and establishing manufacturing in Paterson was of African descent.
One school of thought says color shouldn't matter as long as he did a good job. But it would be a good idea to pin it down for sure to expand our knowledge of colonial history... and to reinforce in African-Americans a sense of "belonging" beyond their slave history.
The message for black youngsters is that African-Americans were present at every stage of the United States' development, and that one of the founding fathers was in fact an African-American.
If nothing else, Hamilton's rise to power and prominence from beginnings that could only be described as Dickensian, is a lesson in overcoming adversity.
Lawrence Aaron is a Record columnist. Contact him at aaron@northjersey.com . Send comments about this column to oped@northjersey.com .
People should just appreciate American history for what it is, instead of grasping at straws and self esteem builders. Living in the US with the wealth of available information should be esteem enough.
her first husband was jewish, and it is believed that she was as well. Since his mother never divorced her first husband in the Church, the Anglican church viewed her as still married and Alexander as a basteradr. He there for was unable to attend the anglican school on Nevis, the caribean island he was born on, so he attended a school in a synagoge on Nevis as a child, but he himself had no other known affiliation with judism
The question of Alexander Hamilton's relationship to Judaism is a fascinating one, probably doomed to be forever mysterious. His mother, Rachel Fawcett (sometimes spelled "Faucett") Lavien (sometimes spelled "Lavine" or even "Levine") may have been Jewish herself, from a Danish-Jewish mercantile family. It is fairly certain that her first husband, John Michal Lavien (or Lavine or Levine), was Jewish, probably originally from Copenhagen, Denmark. After her separation from her husband John, Rachel lived out of wedlock with a Scotsman, James Hamilton, in Nevis and gave birth to Alexander. Alexander was enrolled in a private Jewish school on Nevis taught by a Jewish headmistress and "became fluent in Hebrew and French." "His teacher liked to stand him on a table and have him recite the Decalogue in Hebrew." Rachel and her son Alexander moved to the island of St. Croix after the Jewish headmistress left the school in Nevis, and some historians state that a Jewish tutor was specifically engaged for Alexander on St. Croix "prior to his thirteenth birthday." This sounds suiously like a Jewish lad being tutored for his Bar Mitzvah. After his mother died when he was in his early teens, Alexander became a store clerk on St. Croix. His extraordinary intellect was recognized, and he was sponsored to further his education in the American colonies by several leading men of St. Croix (including a local Protestant minister, whose theology was distinctly non-Calvinist - parts of which may have rubbed off on the young Alexander). The rest is well-known history - his education at Kings College (now Columbia University) in New York, his service in the American Revolution, his work on the writing and adoption of the U.S. Constitution, his creation of the American banking and monetary system, his service as Secretary of the Treasury, and - in general - his towering role as one of the Founding Fathers of the American Republic. How much of his Jewishness lingered into his later life is not clear. He married a Cristian, and his children were all raised as Christians. But on his deathbed, he was specifically refused Christian rites, perhaps because he was a Jew by birth. And, curiously, he is known to have often boasted to George Washington and Benjamin Franklin that he knew a fair amount of Hebrew, and could (even late in life) still flawlessly recite the Decalogue in Hebrew. Benjamin Franklin - having been born and educated in the still heavily Puritan-influenced Boston - also knew some Hebrew, and some historians state that Hamilton and Franklin sometimes tried to best each other in their knowledge of that language. Hamilton and Judaism? A curous and mysterious business. Probably never to be fully resolved. http://classicals.com/federalist/TheFoundingFathershall/messages/69.html
I think this was also in a recent National Geographic or Smithsonian Magazine,
One of the earliest settlements in York (Yoik) Pennsylvania consisted of Smolt Saami from Pechenga Piek (Pike's Peak) which is now within the Russian borders, just West of Murmansk.
When the border was drawn in the early 1820s almost all of them hopped on their tiny fishing boats and fled to their American colony thereby boosting the (our) local population's numbers substantially. There was also a drought with famine in 1810-1813 in the area, and that served to precipitate Saami evacuation to more Southerly areas within Scandinavia and the Baltics.
These are the Saami who really don't look all that much like the Norse who populate most of the rest of Europe.
I've found many frontier Midwestern records where your basic Smolt/Scots/Iriquois or Susquehanna blend folk were identified by locals as "colored". No doubt this would get any particular family so identified the appellation "tri-racial isolate" by the ethnologists. Toss in a bit of Romany or Traveler, and you have Bill Clinton's people.
Odds are Heather is part of this early clan.
In most dictionaries, the first definition of "creole" is something along the lines of "a person of European descent, esp. French or Spanish, born in Central or South America, the West Indies, or the United States Gulf region."
The definition involving mixed race ancestry is usually 4th or 5th.
Yes, because everyone knows that every white man at the time was a racist and would never go out of his way to help a black man.
Exactly! But to many today-like, I believe, the author-the terms are hopelessly confused with the obsolete mulatto/quadroon/octoroon/marinkey racial classifications. (For that matter, most people think 'creole' and 'cajun' are synonymous terms-not quite, though I suppose for culinary purposes that's become true.)
I noticed that in the article as well.
Creole and Cajun has more to do with French ancestry than African.
I am descended from Hamilton. Ugh. I am going to be keeping an eye on this story. Thanks for posting it!
This whole talk is racist. Other than for historical accuracy, I could not care less WHAT racial mix the founding fathers were. It is irrelevant IMHO.
Yes, I have always wanted Jackson off the $20. I absolutely positively despise the man.
Put Reagan on there. It would make my trip to the ATM much more pleasant. And annoy the liberals to death.
Was Hamilton a good dancer? That's a dead giveaway. Not many white guys like to dance. From his portrait there I'd have to say yes.
You'd be surprised. It depends on how far back you have to go to get to his nearest pure-African ancestor.
My family is all blue-eyed blonds and brunettes, but imagine our surprise when genealogical study showed the only man on a Rhode Island census of 1774 with the same name as my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Valentine Brown, was listed as 'colored'.
We knew he was born in Rhode Island in 1755 and served as a Revolutionary War soldier in an unknown Rhode Island regiment-- but he turned up in Saratoga, New York, after the war, and we know this is the site at which one of the Negro regiments from Rhode Island was demobilized after the war.
We had always wondered about this man, as centuries of family tradition held that he was part of the well-known Brown family of Rhode Island, and yet we could find out nothing about his parents. This is the same family that started Brown University, and its members for many generations have been well-documented genealogically. They were also major slave traders, running the triangle route-- rum was traded to Africans for slaves, the slaves were traded for molasses in the Caribbean, and the molasses was used to make more rum in Providence.
In Saratoga, he married a young widow with children, and ever since then, their descendants have passed for white and never considered themselves anything else. I have pictures of this man's grandson and great-grandson (my great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather) from the late 1800s. They show men of Mediterranean appearance, with dark curly hair and dark eyes, but otherwise clearly Caucasian.
Our conjecture is that old Valentine was one-half or one-quarter African blood, probably the illegitimate son of a scion of the Brown family who forced himself on a slave girl. In Saratoga, which was on the fringes of civilization in those days, few would have noticed or cared if he took up with a white widow with hungry children and few options. Such situations were more common than we think, and in the 1700s in the North, there was not the same social stigma and prejudice as in the South.
It's hard to prove such things conclusively at a distance of two hundred and fifty years, but it is certainly plausible and likely. A hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have caused my ancestors considerable consternation if this were widely known, but in today's world it is just a mild curiosity, another thread in the great American tapestry.
-ccm
I agree with you.
I wanted him on the $20 anyway!
It would tickle me to see him on the paper money.
I don't want RR to be on the change I throw in the piggy bank!
Does this make you eligible for minority entitlements??
Just kidding. You're right, after generations of being watered down, a certain racial look can easily begin to fade.
More likely it is a testament of his genius. He had extraordinary talents and used them to propell himself.
It should be no strange thing that a man who grew up around blacks in a different setting and observed their abilities would be able to argue for other blacks in a different setting.
This is just silliness. Hamilton's mother was involved in an irregular relationship, mostly because under the law at the time she couldn't divorce her actual husband, who had abandoned her. She was the daughter of a French Huguenot doctor, anyhow, and neither black nor Jewish. Both her father and mother are accounted for . . . and the idea that she would have been acknowledged as a legitimate child in 18th century Nevis if she had been black is just not reasonable. If it had been a French island, possibly . . . but not on a British island.
"Creole" is French direct from France. "Cajun" is French by way of Acadia in Canada. Acadian = 'Cadian = Cajun.
Some time I gotta sit yo' down an' 'splain the difference between gumbo and boeuf bourgignon . . . and between a fais-do-do and a balle masque . . . ;-)
He doesn't look black to me either --- but any black ancestry is considered to make someone black and I know a black woman who looks black -- she was married to a white guy and had half-white black kids and they married white girls --- the woman's grandchildren look white --- but under traditional rules of who is black, they'd be considered black. Of course those traditional rules are kind of silly.
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