He intentionally fired into the air, but his political rival, the sitting Vice-President Aaron Burr, took deadly aim and fatally shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel JULY 11, 1804.
Alexander Hamilton was born in the British West Indies on the Island of Nevis, 
either in the year 1755 or 1757, and grew up on the Island of St. Croix. Just a few years earlier, in 1751, 19-year-old George Washington had accompanied his older half-brother Lawrence on a trip to the nearby Island of Barbados. 
Since Alexander Hamilton’s parents were not legally married, he was not permitted to attend the Anglican academy, resulting in him being tutored at a private school by a Jewish headmistress. Hamilton worked for merchants till, at the age of 17, he sailed to Massachusetts in 1772 to attend Elizabethtown Academy. He was studying at Columbia College in New York when the Revolutionary War started.
Alexander Hamilton fought in the Battle of White Plains and the Battle of Trenton. He served four years as aide-de-camp to General George Washington. Promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, Alexander Hamilton led a bayonet attack at night capturing Redoubt No. 10 which helped the Continental Army win the Battle of Yorktown, October 19, 1781.
During the Revolution, Alexander Hamilton wrote “The Farmer Refuted,” February 23, 1775, stating: “The Supreme Being gave existence to man, together with the means of preserving and beautifying that existence … and invested him with an inviolable right to personal liberty and personal safety …”
Hamilton continued: “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the Hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power …”
Hamilton concluded: “Good and wise men, in all ages … have supposed that the Deity, from the relations we stand in to Himself, and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is indispensably obligatory upon all mankind … This is what is called the law of nature … dictated by God himself.”
In 1781, Hamilton helped Robert Morris start the Bank of North America, the first private commercial bank in the United States, to bring stability to the nation’s finances after the fiat Continental currency became worthless, as the saying went, “not worth a continental.”
Alexander Hamilton helped write the U.S. Constitution. He stated at the Constitutional Convention, June 22, 1787: “Take mankind as they are, and what are they governed by? Their passions. There may be in every government a few choice spirits, who may act from more worthy motives. One great error is that we suppose mankind is more honest that they are.”
After the Constitution was written, Hamilton helped convinced the States to ratify it by writing The Federalist Papers with James Madison and John Jay. Of the 85 Federalist Papers, Hamilton wrote 51.
Alexander Hamilton wrote of the Constitution in his Letters of Caesar, 1787: “Whether the New Constitution, if adopted, will prove adequate to such desirable ends, time, the mother of events, will show. For my own part, I sincerely esteem it a system, which, without the finger of God, never could have been suggested and agreed upon by such a diversity of interests.” (Ford, Paul L., Essays on the Constitution of the United States, Historical Printing Club, Brooklyn, 1892, pg 245).
In 1789, Alexander Hamilton became the first Secretary of the U.S. Treasury — his statue is at the south entrance of the Treasury building in Washington, DC.
In 1790, Hamilton proposed the The First Bank of the United States to assume the states’ Revolutionary War debt, to establish a mint and to impose a federal excise tax. In 1790, Hamilton pushed Congress to have ships, called Revenue Cutters, to collect revenue, confiscate contraband, and guard the coasts from piracy, thus beginning of the U.S. Coast Guard.
Opposed to slavery, Hamilton and John Jay founded the New York Manumission Society which successfully helped pass legislation in 1799 to end New York’s involvement in the slave trade. In 1799, after the death of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton served as Senior Officer of the United States Army during a threatened war with France.
Hamilton condemned the French Revolution’s attempt to overthrow Christianity: “(depriving) mankind of its best consolations and most animating hopes, and to make a gloomy desert of the universe … The praise of a civilized world is justly due to Christianity; — war, by the influence of the humane principles of that religion, has been stripped of half its horrors. The French renounce Christianity, and they relapse into barbarism;-war resumes the same hideous and savage form which it wore in the ages of Gothic and Roman violence.”
Hamilton wrote: “Facts, numerous and unequivocal, demonstrate that the present era is among the most extraordinary which have occurred in the history of human affairs. Opinions, for a long time, have been gradually gaining ground, which threaten the foundations of religion, morality, and society. An attack was first made upon the Christian revelation, for which natural religion was offered as the substitute. The Gospel was to be discarded as a gross imposture, but the being and attributes of god, the obligations of piety, even the doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments, were to be retained and cherished.” (Lodge, Henry Cabot, The Works of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 8, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1904, pg 425-426.)
Hamilton began organizing The Christian Constitutional Society, writing to James Bayard, April 16, 1802: “Let an association be formed to be denominated ‘The Christian Constitutional Society,’ its object to be first: The support of Christian religion; second: The support of the United States.”
Aaron Burr had fought in the Revolution, was elected to the New York State Assembly, 1784-1785, and was appointed New York State Attorney General. In 1791, Burr ran against Senator General Philip Schuyler, Hamilton’s father-in-law. When Burr won, it created a political rift with Hamilton.
Originally, in Presidential elections, the candidate receiving the most electoral votes was elected President, and the candidate receiving the second most votes was elected Vice-President. Federalists wanted a stronger centralized government to insure a stable currency and provide better national defense; and the anti-Federalist Democratic-Republicans wanted a weaker centralized government to prevent a repeat of the abuse of power experienced under King George III.
George Washington, in his Farewell Address, 1796, warned of the divisive “danger of Parties”: “And of fatal tendency … to put, in the place of the delegated will of the Nation, the will of a party; -often a small but artful and enterprising minority … by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the Power of the People and to usurp for the themselves the reins of Government; destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion … I have already intimated to you the danger of Parties in the State … Let me now … warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of Party, generally. This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its roots in the strongest passions of the human Mind … Domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissention … has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”
During the Presidential election of 1800, Alexander Hamilton’s shift of allegiance was instrumental in helping Thomas Jefferson be elected U.S. President over Aaron Burr, who then became Vice-President.
Aaron Burr was responsible for turning the social club Tammany Hall, named for the Lanape Indian Chief Tamanend, into the infamous New York political machine.
New York badly needed a clean water supply to prevent malaria outbreaks. Under the pretense of establishing a water company, Aaron Burr solicited investors but secretly changed the company’s charter to found the Bank of the Manhattan Company in 1799. The Bank was later absorbed into the JP Morgan Chase Manhattan Bank. In response, Alexander Hamilton founded the Bank of New York in 1784.
Considered the most famous duel in American history, they met on the morning of July 11, 1804, at the dueling grounds near Weehawken, New Jersey. After Hamilton intentionally fired into the air, Burr took deadly aim, then shot and mortally wounding Hamilton in the stomach.
Sadly, at that same place three years earlier, Alexander Hamilton’s son Philip Hamilton was killed in a duel with George Eacker, November 22, 1801. Philip was defending his father’s honor after Eacker, a supporter of Jefferson, had denigrated him in a speech at Columbia University. The two had run into each other outside a play at New York’s Park Theater, resulting in a hostile, screaming confrontation, and the challenge of a duel.