In February 1768, on the Danish-ruled Caribbean island of St. Croix, yellow fever came, as it did every year, to the narrow streets of bright-roofed houses in Christiansted, the colony’s capital. It came from miasmic patches of undrained land, from recesses in the lush green sugarcane-coated hills, from pools and puddles where the larvae of mosquitoes bloomed in the splendid sunlight. Nobody understood yet that the dreaded deadly fevers came on their almost invisible wings, not, as they thought, on the hundreds of ships that plied the Caribbean, bringing slaves in chains from Africa to work and die in the brutal canebrakes. That winter, more than a century before anyone knew what caused it or what to do to prevent it, yellow fever invaded the small two-story rented house at No. 34 Company’s Lane, where Rachel Hamilton lived with her two teenage sons, James, fifteen, and Alexander, thirteen. There, Rachel supported her small family by running a store, selling provisions to nearby sugar plantations.
At first, for about a week, Rachel, who had little money, tried to recover with only the aid of a nurse midwife. But when her fever raged unabated, Rachel finally summoned a physician, one Dr. Heering, on February 17. Following the accepted practice of the time, Dr. Heering bled Rachel, cutting into her with a double-bladed razor that punched holes deep in her delicate white arm, producing a dark red current that quickly filled the doctor’s pan before he tightened a tourniquet to staunch it. Dr. Heering then made Rachel drink his favorite fever nostrum.
But this did no good. The next morning, he came back. This time, he administered an emetic. He gave both Rachel and her son Alexander, who had now also contracted the illness, the favored medicine. Burning with a high fever, Rachel became dehydrated as she continued to vomit and perspire in the hot, close bedchamber. She grew weaker with each visit of the doctor. Her attempt to eat—the doctor ordered a chicken from her landlord and had the nurse-midwife reduce it to broth—helped her to rally briefly. The nurse also gave frail, pale Alexander his first nourishment in days, draining some of the fire from his cheeks. The next day, on his third visit, Dr. Heering gave Rachel a different fever medicine, this time containing valerian root, with a glass of alcohol to relieve her headache. Then he bled Alexander and gave him an enema. That evening, around nine o’clock, before Dr. Heering could return, thirty-nine-year-old Rachel Fawcett Levine Hamilton died.1
It was less than one hour later, even as the midwife was washing Rachel’s corpse before laying out her body in a shift, that the town judge knocked at the shop door. He was accompanied by the bailiff and two probate court officials, and, acting as witnesses, the landlord and his clerk. There in the crowded parlor, at ten o’clock at night in feebly guttering candlelight, as the feverish Alexander Hamilton listened nearby, the hastily summoned probate court sealed up Rachel’s belongings. They applied hot wax to her trunks, her bedroom, attic doors, and two outbuildings, “after which there was nothing more to seal up except some pots and other small things.” The court record showed that the few things “which remained unsealed for use in preparing the body for burial,” included “6 chairs, 2 tables and 2 wash-bowls.” In the storehouse out back, the magistrates found eight salted porks, three firkins of butter, a considerable amount of flour, and the remnants of another, better household, including six leather chairs, three tables, eleven cups and saucers, three stoneware platters, two candleholders, and a mirror. There also was a goat: Rachel was of French descent and, like any good French housewife, probably made her own chèvre.
Three days later, the magistrate and the court recorder were back to take a more exacting inventory. The first things they listed were Rachel’s children, three of them. The court officials had learned in the past few days that Rachel had an older son named Peter Levine, “about 22 years old,” who lived in South Carolina, and that Rachel was divorced from this son’s father. The two younger sons, the recorder noted, were “illegitimate children born after the decedent’s separation” from Johann Michael Levine, a German Jewish sometime planter, sometime peddler, on the island. It had not been hard to learn the legal details: the beautiful, dark-haired Rachel’s marriage to the much older planter and their subsequent divorce had titillated Christiansted’s whispering gossips for nearly a decade.2
Even as Rachel’s sister and brother-in-law went around the small port city of Christiansted for the next few days arranging for her funeral, buying new shoes for the boys and black veils to hide the shame of their tears, the probate court officials busily gathered more testimony. They discovered that Rachel had inherited nine slaves, five women she rented out for income and four slave boys who had acted as her house servants. She had given two of the slave boys to her sons, one boy, Ajax, to Alexander, another, Christian, to his older brother, James. Her personal effects, it turned out, were quite scanty for a daughter of one of the island’s principal families: six silver spoons, seven silver teaspoons and a pair of sugar tongs that enabled her to serve a respectable tea, a pair of chests, and a bed with a well-worn feather comforter. Evidently, the boys slept with her. Most strikingly, there were some thirty-four leather-bound books, a sizable library for the time and place. And her wardrobe was surprisingly meager: four dresses, one red skirt, one white shirt, a black silk sun hat. She left no cash but no bills more than a year old, which was considered unusual. There may have been more than this: the court noted that a seal on one of the outbuildings had been broken since the first late-night hearing.
Rachel’s brother-in-law, James Lytton, a wealthy retired sugar planter, took charge of the funeral arrangements, buying eleven yards of expensive black cloth to drape the coffin. The town judge advanced the money for the boys’ shoes and veils until he could reimburse himself from the proceeds of the estate auction. The landlord unsnapped his purse and bought eggs, bread, and cakes for the funeral. Young Alexander, his face even more florid than usual, recovered sufficiently to join his brother and their relatives for the bone-rattling two-mile carriage ride behind the hearse out to the Lyttons’ plantation, Grange No. 9. There, on a hilltop behind Rachel’s family home, under ancient mahogany trees in the burial yard overlooking the azure Caribbean, Alexander Hamilton heard the local Church of England curate intone the matter-of-fact Anglican formula: “Man that is born of woman has a short time to live and is full of misery.”
Rachel died intestate. A few days later her belongings were auctioned in the yard behind 34 Company’s Lane. Alexander’s uncle bought Rachel’s books and gave them to the youth. Her slaves, silver, and furniture fetched a considerable 1,700 rigsdalers, but this was little more than enough to cover her 1,067 rigsdalers in suppliers’ bills. Because she had no will, Rachel had every reason to expect that everything would go to her two younger sons. But their small inheritance soon vanished. The Danish court left the probate open for six months to allow claims to be entered. On August 3, 1768, shortly before the probate expired, Rachel’s former husband appeared. Brandishing his Danish divorce decree, he filed a claim for his ex-wife’s entire estate. Under the terms of their rare Danish divorce, Rachel had been forbidden to remarry. Her second and third sons, therefore, were considered illegitimate under Danish law. Her entire, however insignificant, estate, the court ruled, went at once to her firstborn and only legitimate son, her child by Levine. Under Danish law, Alexander and James—”born in whoredom” were the words of Levine’s petition—received nothing. They were left not only publicly humiliated and orphaned but penniless. As Alexander Hamilton put it some thirty years later in a long letter to his Scottish uncle, the fifth Laird Hamilton, his mother’s death “threw me upon the bounty of my mother’s relations.” But, within little more than a year, they, too, were dead.3