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Celebrating a Lesser-Known Role of Hamilton: Father of the Coast Guard

Cadets aboard the Eagle, an 80-year-old ship that serves as an at-sea classroom for the United States Coast Guard Academy.Credit...George Etheredge/The New York Times

It was the morning rush in New York Harbor on Thursday when the Eagle, a majestic, 295-foot, three-masted Coast Guard ship, set sail from beneath the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. On the Eagle’s starboard side, a Staten Island Ferry chugged toward Lower Manhattan, while on its port side, a Fire Department fireboat shot plumes of water in front of the Statue of Liberty.

Standing on the deck among the ship’s crew and its guests were Sydney James Harcourt and Kamille Upshaw, two cast members from “Hamilton,” the popular Broadway musical about the nation’s first secretary of the Treasury and, not incidentally, the father of the United States Coast Guard. They were there to celebrate Coast Guard Day, observed every Aug. 4 to commemorate the founding of the maritime service branch.

“Heave,” called a group of senior cadets, or cadre, from the Coast Guard Academy, who were holding the ropes leading up to the towering masts. “Ho,” yelled some 30 first-year cadets, known as swabs, as they tugged in unison.

With that, the Eagle, the Coast Guard’s training ship, began its silent glide north toward Pier 86 on the West Side of Manhattan, next to the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, where it will be open to the public through Sunday.

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Sydney James Harcourt and Kamille Upshaw, cast members of the musical “Hamilton,” made videos on their way to the Eagle on Thursday.Credit...George Etheredge/The New York Times

“This is amazing,” Ms. Upshaw said, gazing at the rigging. Her uncle Anthony Upshaw had trained on the ship in 1982, she said, one of the relatively few African-Americans in the Coast Guard at the time.

As an architect of the young nation’s economic policies, Alexander Hamilton understood the value of a “Revenue Marine” that could insure the payment of tariffs by ships, while also deterring smuggling.

“A few armed vessels, judiciously stationed at the entrances of our ports, might at a small expense be made useful sentinels of the laws,” he wrote, and on Aug. 4, 1790, the first Congress signed an act employing 10 cutters “for the protection of the revenue.”

Today, the mission of the Coast Guard — which has about 40,000 members and is the only branch of the armed forces under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security — has vastly expanded to include search and rescue, law enforcement, port security and environmental protection.

But the principles laid out by Hamilton in a 1791 “Letter of Instruction to the Commanding Officers of the Revenue Cutters” still define the Coast Guard’s values.

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The Eagle was built in 1936 in Hamburg, Germany, and used by the Nazis to train cadets for their navy. It was given to the United States in reparation after World War II.Credit...George Etheredge/The New York Times

“While I recommend that all officers be active, vigilant and firm, they must also be prudent, moderate and good tempered,” the letter, in a version edited by the Coast Guard, says. “These last qualities are as important as the former, and will ensure the success of the Service.”

“Officers,” Hamilton continued, “will always keep in mind that their fellow citizens are free, and, as such are impatient of anything that bears the least mark of a domineering spirit. They should carefully refrain from anything resembling arrogance, rudeness or insult.”

“They will strive,” he added, “to overcome difficulties by a cool and even-tempered perseverance in their duty — using conversation and moderation, rather than anger or violence.”

Those watchwords are just as relevant today, said Capt. E. J. Marohn, the chief of external affairs for the First Coast Guard District in New England. “When we go onboard, we don’t go on with heavy-handedness or rudeness,” he said. “That’s at the core of why we are respected the way we are.”

That emphasis on restraint guided the decision of Kermit Heiser, a second-class cadet from Birmingham, Ala., to enroll in the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn. “I wanted to serve my country but had no interest in guns or weaponry,” he said. “I was drawn in because of the Coast Guard’s humanitarian aspects.”

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Ms. Upshaw posing aboard the Eagle next to a portrait of Alexander Hamilton, the founder of the Coast Guard.Credit...George Etheredge/The New York Times

Built in 1936 by the Blohm and Voss Shipyard in Hamburg, Germany, and used by the Nazis to train cadets for their navy, the Eagle was given to the United States as reparation after World War II.

In 1946, a Coast Guard crew sailed the Eagle — steel-hulled with a teak deck and a speed on the open seas of up to 17 and a half knots — from Bremerhaven, Germany, to New York and eventually to its new home port in New London. Since then, it has served as an at-sea classroom for cadets and future officers, who handle 23 sails totaling 22,000 square feet, five miles of rigging and a pair of anchors weighing over 3,500 pounds each. Teams of six or even nine, depending on the weather, handle the three wheels on the helm.

“We were climbing the ropes of the mast in the middle of the night, swaying in the dark, and it was definitely challenging, but I loved it,” Alice Nguyen, a swab from Fairfax, Va., said of her first midnight watch. “And then we got to climb down and look up at the stars while lying on the deck of a square-sail ship.” (Women make up 38 percent of this year’s incoming class at the Coast Guard Academy, the largest female enrollment ever at any of the country’s military academies.)

Walking below deck, Ms. Upshaw, a member of the ensemble in “Hamilton,” and Mr. Harcourt, who plays James Reynolds, Philip Schuyler and occasionally George Washington, took a Snapchat video with Capt. Matt Meilstrup, the Eagle’s commander, in front of a portrait of Hamilton.

“A-L-E-X-A-N-D-E-R — we are — meant to be,” they rapped, a line from the song “My Shot.”

“I’m in awe when I look at this symbol of what he accomplished,” Mr. Harcourt said, referring to Hamilton, “and how he — and through him, we — are touching so many lives.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 24 of the New York edition with the headline: Celebrating a Lesser-Known Role of Hamilton: The Father of the Coast Guard. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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