The Extraordinary Life of Jeremiah Hamilton

Nathan Connolly: Now, remember Jeremiah Hamilton, one of the first African-American millionaires? We heard about his less than scrupulous business dealings in the insurance market and Wall Street earlier in the episode. He was so rich and famous by the time of his death, newspapers across the country published obituaries in his honor.

Speaker 16: Democrat and Weekly Sentinel, June 26th, 1875. “Mr. Jeremiah Hamilton, for many years passed one of the noted men of New York, died a few days since of pneumonia at the age of 62. He was a colored man but, from the circumstance of having worn a fine, black, long-haired wig, had somewhat the appearance of a Mexican or Spaniard. He had a peculiarly shrill voice and, without the slightest effort, always made himself heard, whether desirous of doing so or not. He was an intelligent, gentlemanly man, and is reputed to have left a fortune of $2 million to his two daughters, accomplished women and much respected.”

Nathan Connolly: What makes his life truly extraordinary is not necessarily how he amassed his fortune, but when. Historian Shane White explains the racial context in 19th century New York City.

Shane White: Slavery formally ends in New York state on July the 4th, 1827. I actually think there’s this incredible cultural convulsion because New York really is one of the first places in the world to have to cope with how do you work out race relations once slavery has ended. They’re pioneering, and, in New York City, they’re pioneering the development of free Black culture. There’s this aggressive pushing at the boundaries of now they’re no longer slaves, of what freedom meant.

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Shane White: There’s this incredible mixture, this bouncing backwards and forwards between Black and white, that’s going on. Talking about Jeremiah Hamilton in this context is sort of interesting because he distanced himself from these other African-Americans, but, whether he liked it or not, for almost all the New Yorkers, he was just another Black. He actually … The way he behaves on Wall Street is part of this, as I suggested, cultural convulsion that lasts for about 15 years in New York City.

Nathan Connolly: Give me an example, if you can, of this kind of personality, what you found to give you some sense of him as a character.

Shane White: I’m trying to remember the exact date, but it was in the 1830s, as he’s first establishing himself, some business rivals arrange to have him arrested. At this time, he’s actually living out near Bloomingdale, up near Columbia University, actually, outside the city, then the city in the 1830s. These business rivals arrange to have him arrested at 11:00 at night by the police for a trumped up charge so that he spends the night in prison. It’s too late for him to arrange bail. It’s vicious.

Shane White: A couple of weeks later, those same two white guys get arrested at 5:00 in the morning and bail gets set so high they can’t get out for a week or two. Again, you do it to me, and I’m going to come straight back at them.

Nathan Connolly: So he arranged that arrest, Jeremiah Hamilton?

Shane White: He … Well, I can’t actually connect it that he spoke to someone, but it very much looks … That’s what it looks like. That’s what happened, as far as I’m concerned, looking at the sources.

Shane White: He does that sort of thing continuously. He’s very, very, very clever. You’d love to meet him but you’d always keep your hand on your wallet because he had a very loose idea of what was right and what was wrong.

Nathan Connolly: Now, he’s not the only African-American in New York by a long way. Did he have any standing at all in the broader African-American community in the city?

Shane White: He has absolutely … As far as I can tell, he has absolutely nothing to do with any other African-American in the city. The other …

Nathan Connolly: Not one?

Shane White: It’s amazing. His … Tracing him through the census, his servants are white in his house in New York City.

Nathan Connolly: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane White: His friend Benjamin Days’ wife takes in charitable cases as part of reform type of impulse. So does Jeremiah Hamilton and his wife. Their charity cases are white, as well. They’re not African-American. To me, one of the most amazing images is in the mid-1840s. Jeremiah Hamilton, he … Several times, he tries to leave the city. In the mid-1840s, he buys an estate in New Jersey. It’s 250 acres, it’s a mansion, it’s got 10 bedrooms and a ballroom, it’s got a trout stream, it’s got quail and grouse hunting on it. The idea of a Black man standing on his terraces in New Jersey, looking down over his trout stream, is not the image that comes to mind when you think of African-Americans in the North in 1845.

Shane White: What was also typical of him was, when he bought that, he bought that estate from someone who actually didn’t have the legal right to sell it. He bought it on the cheap and was trying to leverage and do things in an underhand fashion. There’s a court case and he ends up losing it and gets turfed out of it, which means he moves back to New York City, to East 29th Street, where he buys a house, where he lives for the rest of his life.

Nathan Connolly: It’s the house on 29th Street that is attacked by a mob during the draft riots of 1863, yes?

Shane White: Yes, yes. All right, as I mentioned before, Jeremiah Hamilton, for 40 years, is this aggressive. Just to make things even worse, in the late 1830s, he actually gets … He would have been 28 or 29. He gets a 14-year-old white girl pregnant. Again, he breaks the stereotypes. These sorts of temporary liaisons are quite common, but this was the beginning of a marriage that lasted for 40 years. They had 10 children between the two of them.

Shane White: He’s married to a white woman, so that means that, every time he walks down the street with a white woman, there’s the chance of violence. What was threatened for 40 years finally happens in July 1863, on the second day of the draft riots, when a mob turns into East 29th Street. The mob is chanting, “68, 68, 68,” which was the number of his house. It’s targeted, his house.

Nathan Connolly: Oh, wow.

Shane White: They go to his house, they break in through the cellar door and rush up the stairs. His wife, his white wife is standing at the top of the stairs and she says, “What do you want?” The guy at the front of the mob says, “Your husband.” She says, “What are you going to do with him?” They say, “See that lamp post out the front there? We’re going to string him up from the lamp post.”

Shane White: Again, Jeremiah Hamilton was clever. He had heard them and he had jumped over the back fence and …

Nathan Connolly: They’re chanting his address halfway down the block.

Shane White: He was off. He wasn’t an idiot.

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Shane White: That was the threat that he had constantly. He was … To rip off Tom Wolf, in his day job on Wall Street, he was a master of the universe, but, as soon as that job finished and he was on the streets, he wasn’t even a second class citizen. He’s got that threat of violence.

Shane White: That was what attracted me to try and write a book about him, was that, this very weird, schizophrenic life he must have lived.

Nathan Connolly: Now, is there anything that we learn that’s new about the 19th century as a whole, looking at it through the lens of someone like Jeremiah Hamilton?

Shane White: If you think about the way American race relations has been organized, the point has been particularly to limit and keep down African-Americans, not to allow them to get ahead, not allow them to get educated, not allow them to get ahead in any way, shape, or form. This has led to very, very talented African-Americans going off in ways that often end up … Sometimes can end up being illegal. Running gambling, for example, in New York and Philly. I think there is a whole lot of things that, looked at now, I would label as Black achievement.

Shane White: I think there is a lot more nuance or a lot more stuff that you can put into African-American history to sort of change slightly the contours, or the way it’s often considered too simplistically to be a story of Black poverty in the city or Blacks being at the bottom of the heap in the city. Most were, but there are odd stories like Jeremiah Hamilton that I think can make our understanding of the past a bit more interesting.

Nathan Connolly: Shane White is the author of “Prince of Darkness: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street’s First Black Millionaire.”