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 .
It's totally political.
Let's see, if you go back about two million years ,,, (African Ancestry).
Man, we must be reading different editions of the same book. Nowhere did I see any suggestion that Rachel was Jewish though it was clearly implied that her first husband (though not Alexander's father) was likely Jewish based on his surname. I might be wrong and just plain missed something. If so, please point out the page(s) for me.
Thanks.
OP
I just now saw your post #73. What page did that appear on?
Never mind my post 85. Here's what I found on pages 8-9 of Ron Chernow's "Alexander Hamilton":
"The archives of St. George's Parish... record the marriage of John Faucette to a British woman, Mary Uppington on August 17, 1718...In all the Faucettes produced seven children; Hamilton's mother, Rachel, being the second youngest, born circa 1729."
I am presuming that Mr. Chernow did his homework. If so, it would seem to me that he would have said that Rachel's full name would have included "Levine" but that does not appear to be the case. I think the magazine article is picking up on the fact that Rachel had at one time been married to a person by the name of Lavien, who in all probability was Jewish, but that does not make her Jewish by blood.
Furthermore, Mr. Chernow refers to statements that Hamilton himself was partly black as "pure mythology" (page 9).
Thank you for posting this.
I am reading the book now and while Chernow discusses the possibility that Hamilton may have had some African blood in him, he dismisses it and says in fact Hamilton was not black.
Can the liberal news media get anything right?
Can the liberal news media get anything right?
*** No. Even if Hamilton has african blood, so what? Does that now make him a homeboy like 50 cent? No.
Perhaps someone should forward that info to this reporter.
I met a Jamaican once, his skin was very dark but his hair was reddish-brown and his eyes were green. Obviously of Scottish or Irish ancestry, in addition to African. I don;t think red hair proves much one way or the other.
-ccm
really? maybe he was just early for the time. maybe he was intelligent enough to realize that blacks and whites have the same potential if treated exactly the same. i don’t think hamilton was black...just cuz he was a strong abolitionist doesn’t have to mean he’s black! gosh you’re making all these stories, you the writer whoever you are.
youre descened from hamilton?!?!?! omg! you must know a lot about him then...
hey can you help me with my project?
(jkjk)
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Note: this topic is from 2004. Thanks Coleus. |
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The fundamental incompatibility of institutions of bondage with God-given, natural rights under the Constitution and Bill of Rights, was recognized from the beginning. State Constitutions recognized this incompatibility. It was recognized as the potential undoing of the new nation in writing by several Founders, including slaveholder and Virginian George Mason.
There was no satisfactory means of extricating the largely agrarian economies of southern States from the institution, however. So, it continued, despite this recognition from the earliest days of the Republic. Mason's predicted war occurred, and nearly tore the country apart.
The Constitution was trampled underfoot in the aftermath of that war, and so it's debatable whether Mason's Nation survived the conflict.
I grew up in the western reaches of the so-called “Plantation Belt” in NC, near many of the huge Hairston places along the Dan River, but also many others, including the Dalton, Golden, Goolsbee and Davis plantations. I have a third great uncle named after Peter Hairston; they were next door neighbors.
You’d be surprised at the human variety possible, in a biracial and even triracial population. There were “black” people with blonde hair and blue eyes, lighter than me. Redheads with freckles, albinos ... you could generally ascertain the surname from physical appearance.
The oldest triracial populations settled into the VA/NC border regions, and their communities were quiet old. They intermarried, and their physical appearance to this day is difficult to distinguish from Middle Eastern, with native, black and white ancestry, way back, eighteenth and seventeenth centuries.
As a side note, it is interesting that at the time of the RevWar the 4th largest concentration of Jews in the colonies were in Lancaster, PA (Philadelphia, NYC and Charleston, SC were 1, 2 and 3). Why Lancaster? Because it was the last stop for folks heading out to the wilds of western PA and that's where they provisioned up. Many of those merchants were Jewish.
Johnny and Edgar Winters are black too. Global warming.
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Note: this topic is from . Thanks Coleus.
Note: this topic is from . Thanks Coleus. A re-ping.
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