As Alexander Hamilton put it late in his life, shortly after he helped create the United States, his bloodline entitled him to “better pretensions than most of those who, in this country, plume themselves on ancestry.” But Hamilton’s ancestry never gave him emotional stability or financial security. From the moment of his birth, he was surrounded by conflict—affection and abandonment, beauty and brutality, refinement and savagery.1
There could have been few more beautiful and romantic settings in which to begin life than the volcanic British island colony of Nevis. The bright green island took its name from one of the many fortunate mistakes of its European discoverer, Christopher Columbus, who thought a cloud hanging over its 3,596-foot-high conical peak was filled with snow and named the island Las Nieves, snow in Spanish.
Wrenched away from the Spanish by the British, the island, renamed Nevis, became a haven for French Huguenots fleeing Catholic persecution under Louis XIV. That is why Jean Faucette, renaming himself John Fawcett, sailed there in 1678 and took up the life of a sugar planter, establishing himself on an estate, Gingerland, in St. George’s Parish on the southeast side of the island. At the time Fawcett arrived, Nevis, nine miles long and five miles wide at most, had ten thousand white settlers and twenty thousand black slaves, more than three times its modern population. In his 1793 History of the West Indies, Bryan Edwards, a Jamaican, recorded that the white settlers of Nevis lived “amidst the beauties of an eternal spring beneath a sky serene and unclouded” in surroundings “inexpressibly beautiful for it is enlivened by a variety of the most enchanting prospects in the world in the numerous islands which surround it.”2
One English visitor in 1745 described “a kind of perpetual spring.” On the hilly shoulders that sloped off toward the sea, orange and lemon trees and pepper plants “exhibited at one and the same time fruit that were full grown, half-grown, a quarter grown and even flowers and buds and, as for vegetables of all sorts, they were ever fresh and blooming.” Sugar exports had fallen from one hundred thousand hundred-pound barrels in 1707 to fewer than 25,000 barrels in 1755, the year Hamilton was born. By 1751, another visiting English official reported that, far from a paradise, Nevis actually had become an unhealthy, unpleasant place. By this time there were only nine hundred whites left on the island to drive sixty-five hundred slaves.3
Thirty years after John Fawcett arrived from France, a Nevis census listed his son, John Fawcett IV, as a physician as well as a sugar planter living with two white females, three black males, and four black females. The maternal grandfather of Alexander Hamilton lived with Mary Uppington, Hamilton’s English maternal grandmother, at common law for at least four years before he married her. According to the Common Records of Nevis, they received a deed to property as John and Mary Fawcett in 1714. Yet the parish register of St. George’s lists, under marriages, “Mr. John Faussett and Mrs. Mary Uppington” but not until August 21, 1718. The term “Mrs.” did not necessarily mean Mary had been married before but was the contraction for “Mistress,” a term of respect for her gentry status. Alexander Hamilton’s grandmother Mary Fawcett gave birth to seven children. Only two of them survived. The older daughter, Ann, married a wealthy planter, James Lytton, about 1730, meaning that she probably was the second white female living under Dr. Fawcett’s roof during the Nevis census before her parents married. The second and legitimate daughter, Rachel, born in 1729, was Alexander Hamilton’s mother.4
The Fawcett plantation sat on Nevis’s red clay south slope in a house that overlooked sugary-white beaches along the dark blue Atlantic and faced nearby Montserrat’s volcanic peak. The Fawcetts, like most planters, seem to have divided their time between the plantation, with its scores of slaves cultivating then hacking down the sugarcane, and the colony’s capital of Charlestown, where on the principal street they maintained a solid stone house overlooking the sea. A garden wall blocked the view of anything ugly in the town’s teeming, slave-filled streets. In this beautiful place, tall, dark-haired Rachel Fawcett learned from her parents what usually was reserved for boys: French literature and the ancient classics of Greece and Rome.
But her father was much older than her mother, and her parents had an increasingly unhappy marriage. In 1741, when Rachel was eleven, her mother won a Leeward Islands agreement of separate maintenance exceedingly rare for a time when divorce was impossible in the British Empire. Because she had brought a dowry to the marriage, Mary Fawcett won custody of her daughter, Rachel, an annual income of 53 pounds a year, and her share of her husband’s real estate and real property, including slaves. Mary had been eager to leave Nevis since a terrifying hurricane had devastated most of the island, including her older daughter Ann’s plantation. Her sister and her brother-in-law had already sailed away to St. Croix, capital of the Danish Caribbean islands, where, after her separation from Dr. Fawcett, Mary and Rachel Fawcett joined them. The arrival of a single woman with an eleven-year-old daughter did not create much of a stir in the small society of Christiansted, where Mary and Rachel lived for the next five years.
In 1745, John Fawcett IV died. He left all his money, property, and slaves to his sixteen-year-old daughter, Rachel. Practically speaking, that was leaving it all, at least until Rachel married or turned twenty-one, to his ex-wife. Mary Fawcett was now free to remarry, and she set about spending her daughter’s inheritance freely to attract a new husband for herself. But a woman with a beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter in tow found it difficult to gain a new husband. So the ambitious and manipulative Mary Fawcett decided to concentrate on making a match for her young daughter, already on her way to earning Alexander Hamilton’s description of “a woman of great beauty, brilliancy and accomplishment.”5
Rachel was still only sixteen when Johann Michael Levine, a German Jewish merchant who had just sold his clothing-and-housewares business on Nevis, arrived on St. Croix, bought a small sugar plantation and a bright red suit, and went looking for a bride. Mary Fawcett soon introduced him to the beautiful young Rachel. More accurately, her mother, seeing an obviously well-to-do planter in a fancy suit, shoved her young daughter at the thirty-eight-year-old Levine. Levine sold his plantation, taking a quick profit, then bought a cotton plantation that he named Contentment. The plantation was on the southwest edge of Christiansted, conveniently only a mile or so from Rachel and her family at Grange No. 9. Levine’s flashy apparel and business connections, which included Rachel’s uncle, dazzled Rachel’s mother. She thought he was rich. Levine, himself seeking a rich young wife, eagerly responded. In the same year that her father had died, Rachel married the much-older Levine and rode away with him. Contentment, she found, sat in a depression away from town and had no view of the sea. Her mother stayed close, settling in at Rachel’s sister’s plantation. Soon, Rachel gave birth to a son, Peter.
When Alexander Hamilton’s own son John sat down to write his by-then-famous father’s biography, he noted that his father “rarely” talked about his own mother, only saying that Levine had been “attracted by her beauty and, recommended to her mother by his wealth, received her hand against her [Rachel’s] inclination.” Later, when Rachel’s firstborn son, Peter Levine, died, Alexander Hamilton wrote to his own wife that he grieved little at his half brother’s death because “you know the circumstances that abate my distress.” He was to learn that Peter left him nothing: “He dies rich, but has disposed of the bulk of his fortune to strangers.”
Rachel’s marriage to Levine was unhappy from the outset, made only worse as he spent his way through her inheritance, now at his disposal by right of marriage, and deeply into debt. Like most West Indies sugar planters, he lived on credit far beyond his income. Before the first year of the Levines’ marriage was over, he owed the Danish West India Company 1,930 rigsdalers, twice what the plantation was worth. He went on ordering provisions for the slaves who worked his cotton fields, riding into Christiansted in his carriage with his bride and liveried servants, and on credit buying furniture and luxuries for his house in the expensive shops of the capital. The next year, while he managed to add 2,432 rigsdalers to his pile of debts, he no longer had enough credit even to stock a merchant’s small store. He had to sell Contentment. Slipping in status, he became a plantation manager, then an overseer, a brutal job of personally whipping and driving his own African slaves to work harder under the broiling tropical sun. No longer was Levine the plantation owner with the big house and servants, but a renter. Each step down the social ladder meant less money, a smaller and less elegant house. There apparently was nothing left of Rachel’s dowry by this time.6
Five years after they married, Levine apparently abused his wife both emotionally and physically until she tried to run away from him. Under Danish law, her husband could have her jailed. Years later, when he needed grounds for a divorce, Levine alleged that Rachel had “twice been guilty of adultery.” What is more likely is that Rachel refused any longer to keep up the sham of their marriage and that, when she threatened to take their child and move out, Levine had her arrested. The language Levine used in court papers nearly ten years later when he wanted to remarry draws a picture of their tempestuous relationship: Rachel had “shown herself to be shameless, rude and ungodly” and had “completely forgotten her duty,” the common phrase for no longer having sexual relations with him. He had her locked up in jail. A short stretch in St. Croix’s miserable military dungeon was supposed to make Rachel repent her “ungodly mode of life” and, when she was released, make her “live with him as was meet and fitting.” After her mother appealed to him, the fort’s commandant, Captain Bertram Pieter De Nully, freed Rachel. But instead of running home chastened to her heavy-handed husband, Rachel, released to the custody of the island’s highestranking officer, went to live with him on his own plantation. Yet, under Danish law, Levine had sole custody of their four-year-old son. Soon a shattered Rachel sailed back to Nevis with her mother. She never saw her firstborn child again.7
As beautiful as it was, Nevis was, as Rachel already knew, anything but an island paradise for the Africans who had come to the island as slaves of the English. Few white workers could be induced to leave England and brave the searing heat, the fatal fevers, the heavy labor. English farmers flocked to cooler climates like New England or, seeking riches in the tobacco trade, settled in Virginia.
LARGELY IN fear of revolts by the slaves they had imported, sugar planters in the Leeward Islands who could afford to do so moved their families to England, becoming absentee landlords. Many planters did not want their children in close contact with slaves fresh from the jungles of Africa. Among the imported slaves were Koromantyns from the Gold Coast. Coveted for their powerful constitutions and their ability to endure the hardships of slave labor, they were also feared by whites such as Alexander Hamilton’s family because of these same qualities. Only the hardiest of slaves survived five years of the brutal heat, tropical disease, and hard labor. Because few African women were imported, the slave workforce had to be restocked almost annually. As the successful planters deserted their homes in the islands and moved back to England, they hired agents and overseers, often brutal and of dubious ability as managers, who cheated them or ate up their profits. The planters, going ever deeper into debt, often lost their estates. Only owners of large-scale operations could afford to leave the islands and live in England. Impoverished small-time planters left behind settled into a culture of debt.
But the fortune seekers, merchants, importers, and exporters who bought and sold everything the planters needed and produced, still came. Shortly after Rachel Levine fled her first husband and sailed back to Nevis in 1750, she met one of these merchants, James Hamilton, who was to become Alexander Hamilton’s father. Born in Stevenson Parish, Ayrshire, he came from a lesser branch of a ducal Scottish family. He was the fourth of nine sons of wealthy landowner Alexander Hamilton. His great-grandfather had purchased medieval Sheni-stone Castle in 1685 and renamed it The Grange. Here, Alexander Hamilton’s father had grown up. Forty years later, Hamilton would choose the same name for his New York manor house. Alexander Hamilton’s father grew up in this romantic ruin, its thick stone walls, covered with ivy, only allowing shafts of light to penetrate through thin slits that had been pierced for defense. Inside the walls, for private view only, were flower gardens and high, delicate Gothic windows. One Ayrshire historian claimed that “no other castle of the 13th or 14th Century has such beautiful windows.”8
Alexander Hamilton’s grandfather had married Elizabeth Pollock, the daughter of an “ancient baronet,” as Hamilton put it. Sir Robert Pollock had been created baronet of Nova Scotia in 1702. Elizabeth Pollock’s family had been prominent in Scottish politics for six centuries and were staunch defenders of English monarchy. In modern terms, Alexander’s grandfather collected about $250,000 a year in rents for his sheep-grazing lands. His wife brought a stunning 41,000-pound dowry (about $1.6 million in today’s currency) to their marriage. But, under the English laws of primogeniture and entail, a fourth son could not expect to inherit anything at all unless all three of his older brothers died without issue. With no prospects in Scotland, James Hamilton apparently underwent some sort of countinghouse apprenticeship, probably in nearby Glasgow, before being packed off to the West Indies to support himself as a merchant as best he could.
James Hamilton seems never to have had any of the qualities necessary for success in business. He was lazy to the point of indolence, generous, and according to some of his famous son’s biographers, fond of drinking. “You no doubt have understood,” Alexander Hamilton wrote back to the laird of the family manor in Scotland in 1797, “that my father’s affairs at a very early date went to wreck, so as to have rendered his situation during the greatest part of his life far from eligible.” His choice of cash-poor Nevis as a place to establish a business only confirms his unsound business judgment. But James Hamilton was handsome and warm and undemanding, attributes that certainly attracted Rachel Levine after she moved back to Nevis to escape her menacing husband.9
Shortly after her arrival in Charlestown, Rachel and James began living together. Hamilton was eleven years older than Rachel, who was still only twenty-one. They lived as husband and wife for fifteen years. Their informal marital arrangement, while technically adulterous at first, was not unusual in the islands. The Hamiltons, as they became known, were considered an exemplary couple, living together longer as husband and wife than many of their legally married neighbors. Under English law, seven years’ cohabitation would have entitled them to be considered married at common law, were Rachel free to marry. At least that seems how the couple considered themselves. As they traveled to other islands, they introduced themselves as husband and wife. On October 1, 1758, for example, as “James Hamilton and Rachel Hamilton his wife,” they stood as godfather and godmother at a christening on St. Eustatius.10
By this time, they had two sons of their own. According to the probate court record made on St. Croix when Rachel died, their first child, James, was born in 1753. On January 11, 1755, their second son, Alexander Hamilton, was born. According to local historians, he was born in a large house opposite St. Paul’s Anglican Church on Main Street in Charlestown, which now houses Nevis’s historical society on the first floor and the Nevis House of Assembly on the second. Many years later, Hamilton, in an attempt to make himself appear more the prodigy, insisted that he had not been born until 1757. But Rachel’s brother-in-law, James Lytton, testified at the probate hearing about Hamilton’s age. One of the most responsible men on the island, he had no reason to shade the truth. Since the orphaned Hamilton boys were about to become his charges, he was scrupulous in the testimony he gave to a court noted for its legal precision.
Even though Rachel had tried to help her consort, James Hamilton, by rolling up her sleeves, minding the store, and keeping the books, he was unable to make a go of his own business and went bankrupt. Insolvent, James, like Rachel’s first husband, took jobs as a manager or chief clerk on plantations or in countinghouses on one island after another. Fortunately, Rachel had already learned accounting, like many young ladies in the islands, in a private school as a young girl. She believed in education and, by the time he was five, Alexander Hamilton was attending a small Hebrew school on Nevis. Local histories say that he was barred from any other school on the island because he was a bastard. Learning to read and write precisely in French from his mother and grandmother (who probably spoke French with him at home), he also picked up some Hebrew. He impressed neighbors when his teacher asked him, standing by her side on a table and holding her hand, to recite the Decalogue in Hebrew.
Alexander Hamilton grew up surrounded by the whirling windmills that crushed the sugarcane. His boyhood was filled with the fragrance of fields where gingerroot and cinnamon, nutmeg and avocados grew. Hikes along goat paths took him past giant aloes and fields that yielded yams and sweet potatoes to feast on with fresh fish and smoked hams. He was also learning to love the romantic lore of, to him, exotic, faraway Scotland as his father reconstructed family castles in the air, filling young Hamilton with yearning for an aristocratic heritage he would never be allowed to share.11
In the spring of 1765, when Alexander Hamilton was ten, his father took Rachel, their two sons, and their slaves on a journey from St. Kitts, where James Hamilton was now head clerk in the mercantile house of Archibald Ingram, to Christiansted, the capital of the Danish island of St. Croix. There, he was supposed to collect 807 pounds owed his employer. Christiansted court records show that the debtor refused to pay the claim and that James Hamilton had to remain on the Danish-held island until the next Court for Strangers convened several months later. It must have been at this time that James and Rachel learned that Johann Levine had sued her for divorce in St. Croix in 1759, six years earlier, and nearly ten years after she had left him. The petition in the matrimonial court, dated February 26, 1759, alleged that she had “shown herself to be shameless, rude and ungodly,” had “completely forgotten her duty and let husband and child alone and instead gave herself up to whoring with everyone.” Such a charge against Rachel exists only in this self-serving divorce document and has never been corroborated or substantiated. Levine had sued at such a late date because he wanted to marry again and he learned that when Rachel returned to St. Croix she had two sons. If Levine died, Rachel, as his widow, could claim for her two younger sons all of their son Peter’s inheritance. At the time she was summoned to the hearing, the summons was served at the Christiansted town fort and to its commandant’s house where she had last stayed on the island. But Rachel, drifting from island to island with James Hamilton, never received the St. Croix summons, and thus she never got to testify. The court ruled that her absent silence proved the case against her and dissolved the marriage. Rachel was to have “no rights whatsoever as to wife to either [Levine’s] person or means.” Rachel’s “illegitimate” children by Hamilton were denied “all rights or pretensions” to Levine’s possessions. Levine was free to marry again, which he did, but Rachel was not.12
Communications among the islands were poor. Each island was, in effect, a separate country, remote fragments of rival European empires. Only by returning to St. Croix did Rachel ever learn the full force of Levine’s wrath. She and Hamilton may have, at some point, formalized their living arrangements in a wedding ceremony. But the question remains whether James Hamilton knew of her earlier marriage. Levine’s decree not only made her a bigamist and an adulterer but also deprived her younger sons of all inheritance rights and formally declared them bastards. The shock of this discovery seems to have been the final blow to Rachel and James Hamilton’s relationship. He had never been successful, never been able to provide well for his common-law wife. In 1765, when he returned to his clerk’s desk on distant St. Kitts, he left his family behind on St. Croix. But it was hardly a case of child abandonment, as some historians have made it. Rachel would no longer submit to raising her children in the shabby quarters provided for a plantation clerk. Whatever James and Rachel told their sons, ten-year-old Alexander thought his father would rejoin them soon. Late in life, he still wrote feelingly of the “separation between him and me when I was very young.” But Alexander Hamilton never saw his father again.13
IN THE last three years of Rachel Fawcett Levine Hamilton’s life, James Hamilton stayed away while she struggled to set up her own business and raise their children. James, the older son, like his father, seems to have had little aptitude for business, but Alexander thrived as his mother’s companion, shopkeeper’s assistant, and part-time clerk, learning the merchant’s business, how to mind the store and to keep the accounts and the inventory. Rachel was a better provider than James Hamilton ever had been, but she never rose above a subsistence level. When, two years after James left, Rachel’s mother died, Rachel was left with nine slaves but no money to feed them. She rented out as domestic servants the five women slaves she had inherited. With this modicum of security, she rented a small house at No. 34 Company’s Lane next to St. John’s Anglican Church and opened up a small store. She bought salt pork, butter and flour from Dipnall, her landlord, and resold them as provisions for planters and ship’s captains from the New York import-export firm of Beekman and Cruger. She settled her accounts promptly, kept proper books, and refused the help of her wealthy relatives nearby, although their presence must have helped her to obtain credit and customers. She was just beginning to furnish her house—her brother-in-law, James Lytton, gave her six handsome handmade oak chairs so that she could entertain again—when, at age thirty-nine, she died.
James Hamilton did not learn of her death until long after the funeral and then he did not come to reclaim his sons. He continued his drinking and drifting from job to job, island to island. For seven years, Alexander continued to write him regularly, and for the rest of his life, he spoke of him affectionately. In 1771, when he was sixteen, he read in the Christiansted newspaper that his father had been seriously wounded during a slave revolt on Tobago. Thirty Koromantyn slaves had set out to destroy all the island’s white inhabitants. According to the Royal Danish-American Gazette for January 23, 1771, the slaves “attacked Mr. Hamilton’s house” and “wounded three white men desperately, two of whom are since dead…Mr. Hamilton was shot through the thigh but is recovering.”14
For long periods for the rest of his father’s life, Alexander Hamilton did not know of his whereabouts or his welfare, but on the surface at least, he never seemed to be bitter about it. As his own fortunes soared, he was troubled that his father might be living in poverty. At the end of the Revolution, in 1783, Hamilton wrote to his brother James, who never left the islands, inquiring,
What has become of our dear father? It is an age since I have heard from him. Perhaps, alas! he is no more, and I shall not have the pleasing opportunity of contributing to render the close of his life more happy than the progress of it. My heart bleeds at the recollection of his misfortunes and embarrassments.
And when he reopened his correspondence with his father, he urged him to come to New York and live with him. He paid all his father’s debts and sent him several thousand dollars that supported him in his old age. Yet it continued to haunt Alexander Hamilton that, as he grew wealthy, his feckless faraway father remained indigent.15