TODAY IN HISTORY
Marysville office
1530 Ellis Lake Drive
Business Hours:
Monday - Friday
9:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Newsroom Main Number
................ 749-6552
Reporters
Robert Summa ...... 749-4767 Jeff Larson ........... 749-4786 Michaela Harris ..... 749-4779 Shamaya Sutton ... 749-4780
............................. 749-8390
Alexander Hamilton, the first treasury secretary of the United States, was born on January 11 in either 1755 or 1757, on the Caribbean island of Nevis in the British West Indies. Hamilton claimed 1757 as his birth year, but probate papers recorded shortly after his mother’s death indicate that 1755 is the correct year. Hamilton was born out of wedlock and his father abandoned the family in 1765. His mother died in 1768, leaving him an orphan at a young age.
Despite his impoverished childhood, Hamilton was hardworking and dreamed of military glory. In 1769, while employed as a clerk at a trading company on St. Croix, Hamilton wrote a letter to his friend Edward Stevens that captures his restless drive and ambition:
…my Ambition is prevalent that I contemn the grov’ling and condition of a Clerk or the like, to which my Fortune
&c. condemns me and would willingly risk my life tho’ not my Character to exalt my Station…. I wish there was a War.
Hamilton’s life changed forever when his account of a destructive hurricane was published in St. Croix’s Royal Danish American Gazette in 1772. Impressed by Hamilton’s writing talents, the local business community raised money to send him to America to be educated.
In 1773, Hamilton studied at the Elizabethtown Academy, a college preparatory school in New Jersey, and then enrolled at King’s College (now Columbia University). As a student he became involved in the revolutionary cause and spoke out against British rule at rallies. He also published two influential pamphlets: A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress and The Farmer Refuted.
Hamilton left school before graduating and was appointed captain in a New York artillery company in 1776. The following year he was appointed aidede-camp to George Washington with the rank of lieutenant colonel, and became one of Washington’s most trusted aides throughout the Revolutionary War. Still, Hamilton dreamed of glory on the battlefield and resigned his staff position in 1781. Later that year he was finally rewarded by Washington with a field command at the Battle of Yorktown, where he led a heroic assault on a British redoubt.
After serving for a year as a delegate in the Continental Congress, he resigned in 1783 and, having trained himself in the law, opened a successful law practice in New York City.
Frustrated by the weak central government under the Articles of Confederation, Hamilton attended the Annapolis Convention in 1786, which led to the Constitutional Convention the following year in Philadelphia. Hamilton went on to serve as a New York delegate to the Constitutional Convention, where he delivered a six-hour speech in favor of a strong national government. After the convention, he joined forces with James Madison and John Jay to write a series of essays urging ratification of the Constitution. Known as the Federalist Papers or The Federalist, these 85 essays are considered one of the most important sources for understanding and interpreting the original intent of the Constitution.
After the formation of the new government in 1789, President George Washington selected Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury. Confirmed by the Senate on September 11, 1789, Hamilton made his first order of business the creation of a financial plan for the nation. He proposed that the federal government assume state debts incurred during the American Revolution. This proposal led to a contentious debate in Congress, until a compromise was worked out with Congressman James Madison and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. In exchange for locating the new capital on the Potomac River, Madison agreed not to block Hamilton’s debt plan.
Hamilton’s proposal for a national bank also caused sharp disagreements within President Washington’s Cabinet. Hamilton argued that the implied powers granted by the Constitution allowed for the bank’s creation. In opposition, Jefferson believed that creating a national bank exceeded the powers of the federal government as expressed in the Constitution. Washington eventually sided with Hamilton’s position and the First Bank of the United States was chartered on February 25, 1791.
Alice Paul, chief strategist for the militant wing of the suffrage movement and author of the Equal Rights Amendment, was born on January 11, 1885 in Moorestown, New Jersey. The product of an upper middleclass Quaker family, Paul attended Swarthmore College and earned a doctorate in social work from the University of Pennsylvania.
Alice Paul joined the woman suffrage movement while pursuing graduate studies in England. There, she was schooled in the militant tactics of Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union. Upon her return to the United States in 1910, Paul found the suffrage movement in need of new ways to capture public and press interest. In November 1912 Paul attended the annual convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and offered her services. NAWSA accepted her offer and made her chairman of their Congressional Committee.
Charged with maintaining NAWSA’S presence in Washington, D.C., her first task was organizing a parade and pageant designed to draw attention to the suffrage movement. Timed to coincide with festivities surrounding the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, the event resulted in a near riot as crowds surrounded and at times engulfed parade participants. Nonetheless, the parade on March 3, 1913 highlighted the suffrage cause at a time when the issue was falling from public consciousness.
In 1913, Alice Paul, Lucy
Burns, Crystal Eastman, and others organized the Congressional Union (CU), later known as the National Woman’s Party (NWP). The group’s goal was ratification of a suffrage amendment to the United States Constitution. Until the late 1910s, NAWSA mainly worked on the state level, urging each state to pass legislation permitting women to vote.
Sensing the Congressional Union was moving in a more radical direction, NAWSA ousted the CU almost immediately following its formation. Over the next seven years, Paul and her followers relentlessly pursued a Constitutional Amendment. Their policy of holding the party in power responsible for the Amendment’s success contrasted sharply with NAWSA’S commitment to political neutrality. In the 1916 election, for example, the National Woman’s Party campaigned against Wilson’s Democrats in states where women could vote.
Source: Library of Congress