Born in the West Indies, Hamilton never developed the intense loyalty to a state that was common among Americans of the time. He understood banking and finance as none of the other founders did. Although Thomas Jefferson and his followers successfully painted Hamilton as an elitist defender of a deferential social order and an admirer of monarchical Britain, in fact Hamilton offered a remarkably modern economic vision based on investment, industry, and expanded commerce. Most strikingly, it was an economic vision with no place for slavery. Before the 1790s, the American economy, North and South, was tied to a transatlantic system of slavery. A member of New York's first antislavery society, Hamilton wanted to reorient the American economy away from slavery and trade with the slave colonies of the Caribbean.