Alexander Hamilton's Grave

Behind the iron fence on your right, in the churchyard beside Trinity Church, lies the grave of Alexander Hamilton, a tall white marble monument marking the spot where New York buried its first treasury secretary in eighteen oh four.

Hamilton died only blocks from where you are now. On the morning of July eleventh, eighteen oh four, he crossed the Hudson River to Weehawken, New Jersey, to face Vice President Aaron Burr in a duel born of years of political rivalry and a final insult Hamilton refused to retract. Burr's shot struck Hamilton above the right hip and tore through his liver. He was carried back across the river and died the next afternoon at a friend's home in Greenwich Village, not yet fifty years old.

By then Hamilton had already done the work that still shapes the ground beneath this intersection of Wall Street and Broadway. As the nation's first treasury secretary, he had argued that the federal government should assume the states' Revolutionary War debts, pushed through the creation of the first Bank of the United States, and built the customs and tax systems that let a bankrupt young country start paying its bills. Much of that planning happened in meetings and law offices not far from here, in the financial district his policies helped invent.

The church itself long predates him. Trinity's parish was founded in sixteen ninety seven, though the Gothic Revival building standing here today, with its spire once visible from across the harbor, was completed in eighteen forty six, decades after Hamilton was buried. His grave remains one of the most visited stops in the churchyard, a reminder that the man who built America's financial system never lived to see the Wall Street that grew up around his tombstone.