Wall Street's First Black Millionaire

Curious Black History Book Reviews

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Recent works on the history of slavery and capitalism have enlightened the constellation of antebellum histories. We have a lot more to go on, and the debate over the influence of the wealthy Southern slaveholding elite on the development of American capitalism and vice versa rages on. The debate becomes more important in relation to the current rivalry between the United States and China; we are rightly anxious over how unfree systems can wield enormous power over the free market, our free market. Another way to examine the contradiction between domestic free market capitalism and concurrent policy of oppression is to look at how members of an oppressed group might find success, shocking success, in the market when faced with the most unfavorable of circumstances. Luckily, a book on the subject came out in 2015.

It makes me wonder how might the American business community have charted a different path from the one of exclusion and exploitation that characterized the Gilded Age? The story I’ll review seems fanciful, but it is true. What follows is the story of how a Black man in antebellum New York City, on the eve of the Civil War, became so wealthy that today he would be a centimillionaire — worth over one hundred million dollars — and how he was forgotten by American historians for a century and a half and then rediscovered by an Australian professor.

In this 2015 investigative biography, the Australian historian Professor Shane White of the University of Sydney examines the subject of capitalism and race in a narrative that forces a reexamination of the potential success of African Americans in the antebellum period. White begins by noting that the story of the first black millionaire should not be real: "Jerry Hamilton, better known as Jeremiah G. Hamilton, was a broker, a black man whose very existence flies in the face of our understanding of the way things were in nineteenth-century New York."

In accordance with what White believes to be scholarly ignorance and prejudice, Hamilton's life is missing from the major works of American historiography. As a result, The Prince of Darkness is as much a biography as it was a new development in the field of American financial history. Given the paucity of secondary sources, White had to investigate a historiographical phantom who left no known personal papers. Who was Jeremiah Hamilton?

The book could be read as a case study or history of New York City and Wall Street; crafting a biography of Hamilton required the use of the venue of New York and the New York establishment as intermediaries for interpreting his life. White had to figure out how New York worked in order to make sense of the story of how a Black man in the 1850s and 1860s ammased a fortune equalivent to something around $100 million dollars in 2025.

White attempts to challenge the success of segregation policies against African Americans by highlighting Hamilton: "Far too often, historians treat African Americans as if white segregationists had succeeded, as if blacks lived in their own separate world, physically and culturally removed from everyone else.” White makes a strong case for indicting historians who treat African Americans are peripheral to American history; however, he fails to make a case that segregation was not successful. It was, in fact, so successful that the life of Hamilton was an outlier whose existence as a rich Black man surrounded by white American prejudice and privilege, which White describes as a "schizophrenic way of living." Segregation was very effective and harmful, no need to treat it as if it was not in the service of a narrative of triumph. That some individuals became extremely successful despite segregation does not mean it did not accomplish what it was intended to do. More interesting is how Professor White had to unpack the story.

The monograph is an example of the value of newspaper archival research. The source limitations were staggering: "There are no letters to or from Hamilton, no diaries or ledgers concerning him in any of the repositories historians habitually haunt." While other historians failed to identify the significance of Hamilton's story or even his ethnic identity, White has successfully brought a notable figure into the scholarly debate. Newspapers and court records were the foundation of this study, and White's ability to craft a narrative from the sources is a worthy example for history students. However, White offers a frank warning of how even thorough archival research of public sources can be problematic without other sources to corroborate or contextualize the archive: "Sometimes imaginative reading of sources can be revelatory, although often, all that the historian can attempt is an indirect and imprecise teasing out of what happened." The thing is, the subject of the study, Mr. Hamilton, was litigious even for an American. White found him in court records, suing people like Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Ironic anecdotes fill the pages, as when an Irish immigrant tries to assault and rob the wealthiest African American only to discover the mark "was a lot quicker and stronger than he looked." The work provides a lens into the quick adoption of racialization against African American by European immigrants. Earlier violence driven by immigrant mobs targeted African Americans, and in the infamous New York City Draft Riots, the wealthiest African American was an obvious target. Furthermore, what is left unsaid speaks volumes about Hamilton; in the midst of the great Civil War, where enslaving African Americans was the primary matter of debate, the wealthiest African American did not feature as a participant in the travail. It appears he was not concerned, a warning about putting faith in oligarchs for your liberation.

The title "the Prince of Darkness" was meant as a negative epithet, which could refer in the case of Hamilton to the importance of his being Black to how white New Yorkers saw him or perhaps more directly to Milton's Paradise Lost, which gives that sobriquet to Satan; in the ecosystem of nineteenth-century American racism, it is debatable which was the worse association. Calling him “the Prince of Darkness” was also an allusion to the charges made against him by his white competitors that he used less than savory business practices to make his money. Likewise, what mention we do have of him in Black newspapers is not favorable either.

I would say that, moreover, the label was inappropriate; the Hamilton presented by White was not a prince at all because a prince requires a people, and Hamilton largely shunned other African Americans. He was a man on the make, on the move for himself. Hamilton was a wealthy stockjobber, no more, no less. This biography begs for a movie adaptation and a reminder that the collapse of Reconstruction and the failure to build a colorblind democracy and free market perhaps makes the America of Hamilton's era the real lost paradise. Hamilton’s success did not have to be singular. The revelation is a shame, not a triumph; Jeremiah G. Hamilton rose by embodying the self-centered individualism that typified white American callous disregard for exploiting nature and others; he was like many of his peers. But also unlike them. Hamilton embraced this mantra even as its primary adherents rejected him after hours. By choice, Hamilton was a man alone; he rejected the Black community, and white abolitionists did real work to help African Americans win their freedom. The symbolic nature of Hamilton’s wealth freed not one slave. Race provides no virtue. Professor White has written a biography that hopefully is the opening and not closing chapter in the study of the strange career of Jeremiah G. Hamilton.

The Prince of Darkness: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street's First Black Millionaire. By Shane White. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2015.)