"Of all the Founding Fathers and Framers, Alexander Hamilton remains the most controversial, mysterious, and darkly fascinating. Few men in history born so low have soared so high - and then been destroyed (or destroyed themselves) so fast. Appointed first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States at age 32 by George Washington, Hamilton was one of the "little band of patriots" who had helped Washington survive lost battles, Conway's cabal, Lee's retreat, Arnold's treason, army mutinies, and hostile congresses to yoke the states into an enduring union at the Constitutional convention of 1787. He agitated to free the slaves, to establish judicial supremacy, to found a national central bank, and to create a prime credit rating for American borrowing abroad at 4.5 percent for a currency that had not been "worth a continental" when he took office. He founded the first New York bank, the first conglomerate corporation, and the oldest continuously published newspaper in the United States; he fought for freedom of the press that had libeled him to self-destruction and, in "The Federalist Papers", he explicated the meaning of the Constitution for all American freedom's time to come. Desperately busy creating the public credit of America, Hamilton allowed his private credit to fall hostage to his affair with Maria Reynolds. There followed questionable payments to her sinister husband James; Congressional impeachment; stoning by a Wall Street mob; nervous derangement; manic defenses; a half-crazy attack on President John Adams; derision by Noah Webster as the "evil genius of this country"; the death of his beloved son Philip in a duel; the madness of his daughter Angelica; and his own unflinching death in the duel at the age of 47 from Aaron Burr's bullet."
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