Dates: May 25, 2018 — March 3, 2019
Born out of wedlock on the small British Caribbean island of Nevis in 1755, Alexander Hamilton was deserted by his father at age eleven and raised by a luckless mother who died when he was thirteen. He went to St. Croix and clerked in the office of a New York trading company, where his employers recognized his intellect and raised money to send him to America for a college education. Shortly after his arrival the long-simmering tensions between Great Britain and her North American colonies erupted into open war. Hamilton committed to the revolution; he and America would sink or swim together.
In the two hundred and fifteen years since his untimely death in a duel with the vice president at age forty-nine, Hamilton has become an American icon. Stamps, money, movies, television miniseries, and now a Broadway musical commemorate his meteoric rise and his sweeping vision for America’s future, aspects of which are still with us today.
Acknowledgements
DONORS
- Douglas and Kathrin Mattox
- Mystic Stamp Company
LENDERS
- United States Postal Service, Postmaster General’s Collection
- JPMorgan Chase Corporate History Program
- National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
- The National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
- Smithsonian Libraries
- The Society of the Cincinnati
- Wade E. Saadi
- Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
