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 .
-PJ
Thats what the other bio, (that I could have quoted,) said. Personally, I have to take your word on it, being relation and all. Just curious, but are you as black looking as she is?
Tony's...Zatarians...Louisiana...a couple whose names slip my memory...and even (forgive me)McCormicks. McCormicks also makes a seven-pepper blend that I like to use in place of ordinary table salt and pepper.
This is like the Theory of Evolution!! It's called a THEORY cause it's not a FACT!!! Idiots.
Tony's for french fries.
I take it then, that you are even more black looking than Heather, (if that is possible!)
"probably"???? geesh.....they can have him.
It makes a lot more sense that he's Jewish rather than African American!!
Louis Farrakahn alert....everyone is actually black and the all bear the number 19....ding ding ding...I need tin foil in aisle 45
Tell that to Nan Britton.
Here is the article I was thinking about--and one paragraph:
Hamilton was born January 11, 1755, on the island of Nevis in the West Indies, the illegitimate son of James Hamilton, a merchant from Scotland, and Rachel Fawcett Levine, a doctor’s daughter who was divorced from a plantation owner. His unmarried parents separated when Hamilton was 9, and he went to live with his mother, who taught him French and Hebrew and how to keep the accounts in a small dry goods shop by which she supported herself and Hamilton’s older brother, James. She died of yellow fever when Alexander was 13.
http://216.109.117.135/search/cache?p=Alexander+Hamilton+Smithsonian+Magazine&ei=UTF-8&n=20&fl=0&u=www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues03/jan03/hamilton.html&w=alexander+hamilton+smithsonian+magazine&d=CC9A7CA759&icp=1
I have no idea where the symbols on our money come from. The early Pilgrims studied Hebrew. In fact, they debated making it the official language of their settlement but found it lacked sufficient vocabulary. They also wanted their legal code to track the rules of the Old Testament. The motto of Yale, begun by their Congregationist heirs is in Hebrew and Harvard has one of the largest collections of old books written in Hebrew in the world.
LOL! --- of course I never saw much importance in embracing any roots --- or else it's better to embrace the melting pot roots of the USA --- just jump in and embrace Americanism and forget the past. For example -- if one of my ancestors who came from Ireland I thought somehow really came from some place else --- how does that affect who I am or what I do with my life here?
Thanks for the info!!
Your thread reminds me as to how skewed the racial construct in this country is. I am reminded of a story which was aired by 60 minutes some years ago of a woman in Louisiana whose racial classification was altered by the local county government when it was discovered that she had 1/32 black genealogical ancestry, but had been raised as culturally white all of her life by a white family. She had to sue to get the classification changed back to white.
The racial construct in this country, insofar as determining one's genealogical blackness, is also a political one, and has little to do with science. It is safe to assume that one of the primary reasons for racial segregation was to minimize the possibility that blacks and whites would intermix their gene pools.
to appreciate the singular distinction as to how most people consider what makes one black, cosider the manner in which we regard persons of other than Black-Caucasian ancestry, such as Keneau Reeves. It is very common for whites to advertise some small admixture of Indian ancestry, yet they regard themselves as and will be considered by most as Caucasian. Should a person reveal any admixture of Negroid ancestry been most in this society will consider them has entirely black. Those whites with racist inclinations want them identified as such as so has to continue an attempt to isolate them, and blacks do it so as to be able to enhance their strength in the population, and stake a group claim on those with a measure of celebrity such as Mariah Carey.
I firmly believe that race in this country, as understood in the popular sense is a cultural and political construct and not a scientific one.
ff
He was a bastard?
Does this mean that Clinton may soon appear on one of our denominations?
Who William Blythe? I certainly hope NOT!
Remember, the only nonwhite Vice President was a Republican, Charles Curtis, an American Indian who served as Herbert Hoovers Veep. Read about him here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Curtis
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