Jeremiah G. Hamilton

Jeremiah G. Hamilton was born about 1807, though he cultivated mystery around his origins and the exact date and his parents were never recorded. His birthplace remains genuinely uncertain: the West Indies is named on his death certificate, while contemporary accounts held that he was born to free parents in Virginia. What is not in dispute is that he lived his life as a free man of African descent in a nation still bound to slavery, and that he rose to a height no other Black American of his era reached.

He first entered the historical record in early 1828, when, barely twenty, he was caught distributing counterfeit coins in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in a scheme backed by white American merchants. A bounty and a death sentence forced him to flee to New York City, where he reinvented himself. By the 1830s he was speculating in real estate — famously buying up land after the Great Fire of 1835 — and building a fortune on Wall Street.

Over four decades Hamilton operated as a broker, real-estate investor, and railroad and stock speculator, and was known for maritime-insurance dealings and hard-edged litigation. He sued Cornelius Vanderbilt's Accessory Transit Company and was later remembered as one of the few men who ever "fought the Commodore." Contemporaries, including physician James McCune Smith, called him the only Black millionaire in New York; at his death his estate was reckoned near two million dollars.

He married Eliza Jane Morris, a white woman, and raised a family on East Twenty-Ninth Street; during the 1863 Draft Riots a mob came for him and he narrowly escaped. He died of pneumonia in 1875 and was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. In a country that denied his people even their freedom, Jeremiah G. Hamilton claimed the citadel of American money and would not be moved — and we honor the audacity of a life that refused every limit set against it.