Monday, January 11, 2010

AS SEEN ON TV: ALEXANDER HAMILTON

On this date in 1755 – Alexander Hamilton, 1st United States Secretary of the Treasury (d. 1804) was born....


ALEXANDER HAMILTON


AS SEEN IN:
"Swing Out, Sweet Land"

AS PLAYED BY:
Ross Martin

From Wikipedia:

Alexander Hamilton (January 11, 1757 – July 12, 1804) was the first United States Secretary of the Treasury, a Founding Father, economist, and political philosopher. The chief of staff to General George Washington during the American Revolution, he was a leader of nationalist forces calling for a new Constitution; he was one of America's first lawyers, and wrote half of the Federalist Papers, a primary source for Constitutional interpretation. He was more influential than the other three members of Washington's Cabinet, and the financial expert; the Federalist Party formed to support his policies.

Alexander Hamilton with:
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams
(played respectively by Lorne Greene, Hugh O'Brian, and William Shatner)

Hamilton's opposition to his fellow Federalist John Adams hurt the party in the 1800 elections. When Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied in the electoral college, Hamilton helped defeat his bitter personal enemy Burr and elect Jefferson as president. With his party's defeat, Hamilton's nationalist and industrialization ideas lost their former national prominence. Hamilton's intense rivalry with Burr resulted in a duel, in which Hamilton was mortally wounded.

Hamilton was always denounced by the Jeffersonians and later the Jacksonians, but his economic ideas, especially support for a protective tariff and a national bank, were promoted by the Whig Party and after the 1850s by the newly created Republican Party, which hailed him as the nation's greatest Secretary of the Treasury.
BCnU!

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