Shane White is the Challis Professor of History and an Australian Professorial Fellow in the History Department at the University of Sydney specializing in African American history. He has authored or co-authored five books and collaborated in the construction of the website Digital Harlem. In his latest book, PRINCE OF DARKNESS: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street's First Black Millionaire, the eminent historian reveals the larger-than-life story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, an African American man who wheeled and dealed in the lily white business world and defied every convention of his time. Here, White talks about the shocking headline that initially drew him to Hamilton’s story, and how Hamilton defied the odds to become one of the most successful African American men of his time.
One day, four or five years ago now, I was sitting in the New-York Historical Society library reading newspapers, collecting material for my long-term project of trying to understand what freedom meant for African Americans in New York City. The staff hardly encourages reading fragile originals if there is an alternative, but I had been unable to decipher their old microfilm, and I am a familiar enough figure, having visited regularly for three decades now, so the newspaper curator had kindly brought out from the stacks the two hefty bound volumes of the New York Herald from 1843.
Reading old documents and newspapers --- reveling in their feel, smell and appearance --- is one of the pleasures of being a historian. Another is discovering traces of an important story that has remained forgotten or hidden for over a century and a half. As I turned over the front page of the issue of August 5th, my eyes were drawn to the caption, in bold, atop the day’s main article:
Extraordinary Charge of Conspiracy to Defraud the
Atlantic Insurance Company --- Arrest of “N*gger”
Hamilton, and James Bergen, a Notary Public ---
Wall Street in an Uproar --- Committal for Trial ---
Letter from Bergen to the Editor of the Herald ---
Impudent Letter of “N*gger” Hamilton to the Editor
of the Herald --- Attempt to Suppress the Publication
of the Proceedings by Bribery and Threats.
The article was long --- over 2,500 words --- and told a complicated story of shipwreck, mistaken identity and alleged fraud against a New York insurance company. Although intriguingly exotic, the case seemed to have little to do with my interests. After all, it was set on Wall Street, involved $50,000, or more than 10 million of today’s dollars, and the unusual scare marks around “N*gger” alongside the name “Hamilton” suggested nothing so much as some financier with a retrograde nickname --- I assumed without too much thought that only whites were implicated in this supposed scam. However, when I returned to Sydney and checked through my files from 30 years of reading New York newspapers and archives, I found that I had already collected material describing other incidents in the life of Jeremiah G. Hamilton --- and there was not a skerrick of doubt that he was an African American.
On subsequent research trips, aware now of his existence, I kept on stumbling across the various doings of Jeremiah Hamilton --- and then began to pursue him actively, spending countless hours ferreting through New York’s newspapers and court records. I soon established that from the mid-1830s he was a Wall Street broker, habitually making deals involving millions of dollars in today’s currency, and, judging by the number of his court appearances, as careless with the niceties of the law as any of the first generation of American tycoons then making their names and fortunes.
What intrigued me most about Hamilton was that his very existence as a black man in such a milieu flies in the face of our understanding of the way things usually were in New York City in the middle third of the 19th century. Hamilton was a pioneer, but, far from being a novice feeling his way around the economy’s periphery, he was a Wall Street adept, a skilled and innovative financial manipulator who never took his eye off the main chance. He cut a swathe through the New York business world of mid-19th century, an entirely white domain where his depredations secured him the designation of the “Prince of Darkness.”
Perhaps the central issue raised by Hamilton’s life, and certainly the one that most drove me to want to write about him, was the startling disjuncture between the financial world, where the black broker relished his predatory role, pursuing aggressively whatever edge he could find in his dealings with white businessmen, and his everyday existence on New York streets ruled by an unforgiving and demeaning racial etiquette. At work Hamilton was, to borrow Tom Wolfe’s term, a Master of the Universe, but for the rest of the day and night he was barely a second-class citizen. Ironically, for all the distance Hamilton put between himself and all the other African Americans living in the city, to white New Yorkers seeing him about town, he remained just another “n*gger.” It was an impossibly schizophrenic way of living.
When the 67-year-old Jeremiah Hamilton died of pneumonia on May 19, 1875, many of the small obituaries that ran in innumerable white newspapers from all over the United States were captioned: “The Richest Colored Man in the Country.” One of them began with what I consider to be a truly astonishing sentence: “The notorious colored capitalist long identified with commercial enterprises in this city is dead and buried.” Has there ever been another occasion when someone has considered an African American to be synonymous with New York commerce?
Jeremiah Hamilton was a remarkable man, who lived out the American nightmare of race in his own distinctive fashion, and it would be some time before New York City would see his like again. Perhaps it never has.
