Jeremiah G. Hamilton

Jeremiah G. Hamilton was born in 1807 — the exact date and the parents not recorded — at an unknown location in the West Indies. He was at the time of his entry into the New York public record at twenty-one already a free man of light complexion, of literate English education and of working knowledge of accounting practice.

He arrived at New York in May 1828 from the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, where he had served the closing year of the French commercial blockade of Haitian independence as a counterfeit-coin operative on behalf of the Haitian-Boyer government. He was deported from Port-au-Prince in 1828 under a one-thousand-dollar bounty notice issued by the Haitian Treasury and a death warrant on his head should he return.

He took up at New York in 1828 the dry-goods commission business at 47 Walker Street. He moved by 1834 to the Manhattan insurance underwriting market and operated through the closing years of the 1830s and the 1840s as a principal underwriter at the New York Wall Street office at 24 Beaver Street.

He took advantage of the December 1835 Great Fire of New York — which destroyed seventeen city blocks of the financial district of the New York Lower East Side at over twenty million dollars in property loss — by extending advance loans against the burnt-out warehouse inventories at fifteen-cent-to-the-dollar rates. The Great Fire transactions established the Hamilton fortune.

He was the principal Black underwriter at the New York Stock & Exchange Board in the 1840s and the 1850s and was the only Black member of the Board at the time of his death. He was barred from the floor itself but transacted through white front intermediaries at standard fee rates.

He accumulated by 1860 a personal fortune in excess of two million dollars — the rough equivalent of sixty-five million dollars in the dollars of the current period — and was at the time the wealthiest Black man in the United States and the only Black millionaire on Wall Street.

He was driven from his Murray Hill Manhattan residence at 154 East 29th Street during the New York City Draft Riots of July 1863 by an anti-Black mob — an episode he survived only by reverse-stealth flight through the rear servants’ door — but recovered the principal portion of his fortune across the post-war Reconstruction expansion of the New York markets.

He died at his Manhattan residence at 4 East 29th Street on the nineteenth of May 1875 of complications of stroke, at sixty-seven.

He is honored here as the first Black millionaire of Wall Street.