James Hamilton was born in Scotland in 1763 and became a merchant in Charleston, South Carolina, owning shares in several ships and conducting business with other merchants in the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe. Around 1793, Hamilton moved to St. Simons Island, Georgia, with his friend John Couper (or Cowper), where he became a successful cotton farmer. He retired to Philadelphia around the early 1820s and died in April 1829. He and his wife, Nancy Isabella Steedman (b. 1780), had one surviving daughter, Agnes Rebecca, whose husband, Francis P. Corbin (1798-1876), inherited Hamilton's Georgia plantation and later relocated to France.
From the guide to the James Hamilton papers, Hamilton, James papers, 1784-1866, 1784-1816, (William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan)
