A Founding Father Who Came Up From Poverty

It seems a shame to me that today's young people do not have the opportunity to study all of America's Founding Fathers. Most will know Georgia Washington as the first president. Some will recognize the name Thomas Jefferson, and with luck John Adams. This year marks the 200`h anniversary of the death in a duel of one of our Founding Fathers ... the one often referred to as the Founding Father of the American economy. Here's a clue that somebody along the way thought he was among the very highest leaders who founded this nation: his picture is on the $10 bill.

And while most of our founders came from well-connected and reasonably wellto-do families, at least one came up from poverty, from nowhere, in fact as an orphan from a Caribbean Island. Adams once referred to him as the "bastard brat of a Scots peddler, and when a benefactor recognized his brilliance and agreed to pay his way to college, Princeton would not accept him. Kings College, now Columbia university, did.

If you haven't guessed by now, we are talking about Alexander Hamilton, who, along with Madison and Jay wrote the Federalist papers, the foundation documents of the American Revolution. But primarily, it was Hamilton who gave us an amazing financial system and the economic base for our free enterprise system. He was killed in a duel 200 years ago, but in my book any American kid who doesn't study about him is missing something important. Alexander Hamilton was living proof that anybody, from any walk of life, can make it big in America.

This is Gordon Sawyer from a window on historic Green Street.