Jefferson vs. Hamilton: Confrontations That Shaped a Nation

April 13, 1743 Albemarle County in the English colony of Virginia was the start of an American historical giant. Thomas Jefferson was born in affluence to his father, Peter Jefferson, a rising young planter in the Virginia colony, and his mother, Jane Randolph, who held a high status within the colony as well. Due to his father’s prosperity Jefferson was afforded the absolute best in the ways of education, starting with private tutors at the age of five, then moving on to learn how to read Greek and Roman in there original text and finally taking his studies to the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg which he would say is “…what probably fixed the destinies of my life…” pg 5. On the other side of the spectrum, a few years later another huge American historical figure is born. Presumably on January 11, 1755, Alexander Hamilton the bastard son of his father, James Hamilton, a Scotsman of a well-known family but never flourished on his own, and his mother, Rachel Fawcett Lavien, who had left her husband, John Lavien, to live with James Hamilton. There is very little said about Hamilton’s early life just that his father “drifted away” and his mother passed in 1768. Lacking wealth, Hamilton’s educational opportunities in his young life were nonexistent, this is not to say though that his youth was wasted it was here that he gained a vast knowledge of business and finance that he would later use in his service to President George Washington. Even in their early lives it was easy to see the great dissimilarities between these two patriarchs, now I will discuss further more issues that Jefferson and Hamilton shared some differences of opinions.

During the Philadelphia convention of 1787, which we now refer to as the Constitutional Convention, James Madison, representative from Virginia, in his notes of Hamilton’s lengthy speech on June 18, 1787 he writes, “Mr. Hamilton, had been hitherto silent on the business before the Convention…” pg 17 Madison had