Hamilton is not known to have ever owned slaves, although members of his family were slave owners. At the time of her death, Hamilton's mother owned two slaves named Christian and Ajax, and she had written a will leaving them to her sons; however, due to their illegitimacy, Hamilton and his brother were held ineligible to inherit her property, and never took ownership of the slaves.^[284]: 17 Later, as a youth in St. Croix, Hamilton worked for a company trading in commodities that included slaves.^[284]: 17 During his career, Hamilton did occasionally handle financial transactions involving slaves as the legal representative of his own family members, and one of Hamilton's grandsons interpreted some of these journal entries as being purchases for himself.^[285][286] His son John Church Hamilton maintained the converse in the 1840 biography of his father: “He never owned a slave; but on the contrary, having learned that a domestic whom he had hired was about to be sold by her master, he immediately purchased her freedom.”^[287]

By the time of Hamilton's early participation in the American Revolution, his abolitionist sensibilities had become evident. Hamilton was active during the Revolutionary War in trying to raise black troops for the army, with the promise of freedom. In the 1780s and 1790s, he generally opposed pro-slavery southern interests, which he saw as hypocritical to the values of the American Revolution. In 1785, he joined his close associate John Jay in founding the New-York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, and Protecting Such of Them as Have Been, or May be Liberated, the main anti-slavery organization in New York. The society successfully promoted the abolition of the international slave trade in New York City and passed a state law to end slavery in New York through a decades-long process of emancipation, with a final end to slavery in the state on July 4, 1827.^[284]

At a time when most white leaders doubted the capacity of blacks, Hamilton believed slavery was morally wrong and wrote that "their natural faculties are as good as ours."^[288] Unlike contemporaries such as Jefferson, who considered the removal of freed slaves (to a western territory, the West Indies, or Africa) to be essential to any plan for emancipation, Hamilton pressed for emancipation with no such provisions.^[284]: 22 Hamilton and other Federalists supported Toussaint Louverture's revolution against France in Haiti, which had originated as a slave revolt.^[284]: 23 Hamilton's suggestions helped shape the Haitian constitution. In 1804, when Haiti became the Western Hemisphere's first independent state with a majority Black population, Hamilton urged closer economic and diplomatic ties.^[284]: 23

On economics

Hamilton has been portrayed as the "patron saint"^{[citation needed]} of the American School of economic philosophy that, according to one historian, dominated economic policy after 1861.^[289] His ideas and work influenced the 18th century German economist Friedrich List,^[290] and Abraham Lincoln's chief economic advisor Henry C. Carey, among others.

Hamilton firmly supported government intervention in favor of business, after the manner of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, as early as the fall of 1781.^{[291][292][293]} In contrast to the British policy of international mercantilism, which he believed skewed benefits to colonial and imperial powers, Hamilton was a pioneering advocate of protectionism.^[294] He is credited with the idea that industrialization would only be possible with tariffs to protect the "infant industries" of an emerging nation.^[143]

Political theorists credit Hamilton with the creation of the modern administrative state, citing his arguments in favor of a strong executive, linked to the support of the people, as the linchpin of an administrative republic.^[295][296] The dominance of executive leadership in the formulation and carrying out of policy was, in his view, essential to resist the deterioration of republican government.^[297] Some scholars point to similarities between Hamiltonian recommendations and the development of Meiji Japan after 1860 as evidence of the global influence of Hamilton's theory.^[29