Alexander Hamilton 1783

Alexander Hamilton arrived in America from the West Indies as a poor immigrant orphan in 1772, talked his way into King's College in New York the next year, and joined the Continental Army as a young artillery captain in 1776. Two years later he was Washington's aide-de-camp — the position that made his career — and four years after that he led the assault on Redoubt 10 at Yorktown, the action that effectively ended the war. By 1783, the year of this figure, he was in his mid-twenties, just out of uniform, married into one of New York's most prominent families, and already planning the financial and political architecture he would build into the United States Treasury Department a decade later. He died young — killed in the duel with Aaron Burr in 1804 — but in twenty-five years of public life he wrote fifty-one of the Federalist Papers, founded the Bank of the United States, created the U.S. Mint and the customs service, and effectively invented the federal government's executive branch as a working institution.

This figure shows Hamilton in the dress uniform of a Continental Army staff officer of the 1780s — dark blue coat with buff facings and gold epaulettes, white waistcoat, buff breeches, black knee boots, tricorne with white plume, the red sash of officer's rank across his chest. The pose is the confident young officer, hand on hip, the staff officer rather than the man in combat. He pairs with the other founding-era figures Breagans carries — General Washington Mounted, Marquis de Lafayette 1783, and Thomas Jefferson No.2, Hamilton's lifelong political rival — and sits in the W. Britain Museum Collection of named historical individuals.

1/30 scale (60mm), matte-painted, single figure boxed. Catalog number 10060. As with the rest of the W. Britain modern range, the painting is photographic-quality detail intended to read well in dioramas and display cases.