Sometime before his mother’s death, probably at age thirteen when his father sequestered himself from his family, Alexander Hamilton went to work as a clerk in the Christiansted office of the New York-based import-export house of Beekman and Cruger. His boss was young Nicholas Cruger, junior partner in a prominent mercantile family whose operations included ships, countinghouses and warehouses in England, New York, and throughout the Caribbean. Their business interests linked all the European colonies in the New World. Young Hamilton eagerly plunged into commerce. Even though he came to hate being a lowly clerk, at first it was an exciting environment for a young boy, and he thrived.
His experiences over the next few years at this crossroad of international trade gave him a priceless grounding in business management and marked him as a prodigy. Young Hamilton was able to make himself invaluable to the Crugers’ burgeoning Caribbean operations by the age of seventeen even as, once again, his family failed him. James Lytton, the wealthy uncle and patriarch of a planter family whose influence had helped procure Alexander’s job, died eighteen months after Alexander’s mother. The steady decline of the Lytton dynasty, once one of St. Croix’s wealthiest, had gone on for four years. After Rachel Hamilton’s sister, Ann—Alexander’s aunt—died during a visit to Nevis in 1765, her husband, James Lytton, had sold his plantation there and ensconced himself in their luxurious St. Croix apartment. Retiring as a planter, Lytton still had substantial investments in trading firms, slaves, and ships when Rachel died. Then Lytton’s son, Peter, to whom young Alexander was closer than any other family member, committed suicide. Peter had married an aged widow, sold off her plantations, speculated wildly, fled his creditors, and killed himself. Attempting to bequeath his estate to his black mistress and their mulatto son, he left nothing to Alexander.
This left Alexander only his fifteen-year-old brother and a slightly older cousin, Ann, who had married a luckless planter who also had gone bankrupt. James Lytton’s death was an especial blow. Alexander’s guardian died suddenly before he could change his will to provide anything for Hamilton, if he ever intended to. The only morsel of good fortune left for Alexander was that, at his mother’s death, he had gone to live in Christiansted with the family of his two-years-older friend Edward Stevens, whose father was a partner in a mercantile firm trading with New York. Hamilton’s formal schooling came to a halt, to all appearances permanently.
But his education was never to be confined to a classroom. After long hours on a stool in a countinghouse each day, young Hamilton dipped into the trove of his only inheritance, his mother’s small library. He loved to read Alexander Pope’s antimonarchical rhyming couplets and Plutarch’s hero-worshipping comparisons of Greek and Roman leaders. His studies and his knowledge soon surpassed those of most of the island’s full-time students. In his small room at the Stevenses, with the help of his friend Neddy, he learned mathematics and chemistry. Both boys dreamed of becoming physicians. But his real schooling, what he was to tell his children was “the most useful part of his education,” was his apprenticeship on the waterfront. In the warehouses, in the ship’s holds, and on the high stool of Beek-man and Cruger’s countinghouse in Christiansted, he learned, he said, to be at ease with financial affairs and with giving orders.
Young Hamilton’s first order of business as a merchant’s clerk was to learn St. Croix intimately. The nineteen-mile-long island, five miles at its widest, was crammed to the hilltops with 381 plantations mostly producing sugar but some cotton and coffee on thirty thousand precious acres. Accurate knowledge of the status of each crop became essential for Hamilton to decide when to buy and sell mules to help in the harvest, what grain to buy to bake for the slave labor force. Slaves outnumbered whites on the plantations twenty to one. He needed an intimate knowledge of Christiansted (population thirty-five hundred—three fourths slave), its merchants, bankers, lawyers, ship captains, solvent planters, and deadbeats. While the Danes officially controlled the government waterfront, faraway Dutch bankers and New York brokers like the Crugers controlled Christiansted’s commerce. Seventy letters survive from Hamilton’s St. Croix years. They reveal that he flourished on this bustling little island. He became thoroughly familiar with Christiansted’s twenty thronged streets lined with six hundred or so seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Danish-style houses. Their gaily painted yellow, raspberry, buff, or salmon-colored overhanging balconies shaded him as he hurried along its tile-inlaid sidewalks on his master’s errands.
By law, young Hamilton also had to become part of St. Croix’s militia. He was required to be prepared to help stifle any slave insurrection among Christiansted’s blacks. In case of revolt, each trading company’s warehouse also served as a well-stocked fort. Every white male was required to be equipped with a gun, sixteen cartridges with balls, a sword or cutlass, and a lantern. When an alarm gun went off in the fort or prearranged drumbeats pounded, every white man was to race into field or street with his gun and, at night, his lighted lantern.
Young Hamilton also had to learn about tides, storms, wind, and sea, when it was safe to send precious cargoes from Christiansted’s shallow harbor over the coral reef one mile offshore and when it was more prudent to send them around to smaller Fredericksted at the island’s western tip. He had to learn the capacities and capabilities of each of the beamy barks, schooners, and sleek sloops that lined the great wharf, how to load and unload them. He also had to learn accounting, bookkeeping, and the art of writing all sorts of business letters.
When young Hamilton went to work for the firm of Beekman and Cruger, it was St. Croix’s most important exporter of sugar and molasses to the American mainland. It was also the most reliable provider of food and supplies for its plantations. So valuable was Caribbean land for sugar cultivation that little acreage had been set aside for growing food. There were seldom enough provisions to last six months. Food and clothing for its twenty-four thousand people had to be imported constantly. With their own new sloop, Beekman and Cruger hoped to provide cargoes for other shipping firms and to arrange passage for mail and passengers among the islands and to New York. They advertised their ships’ arrivals and departures in the local newspaper, the Royal Danish-American Gazette.
Hamilton toiled on the second floor of the firm’s large building at Nos. 56-57 King’s Street across from present-day Government House and next to the town’s main wharf. Downstairs behind the store was a large enclosed yard where newly arrived slaves were auctioned. Buyers were kept out until the slaves were rubbed down with oil “in order to make them look sleek and handsome.” The slaves then curled one another’s hair, braiding it into ropes. But, as Alexander saw, little could be done to improve the appearance of the battered and half-starved slaves. In 1772, when he was seventeen, it was Hamilton’s job to help sell a cargo of slaves consigned to Cruger from the Gold Coast aboard the Dutch East Indiaman Venus. Cruger described the 250 slaves crowding into his yard as “very indifferent indeed, sickly and thin,” fetching on the average 30 pounds, less than the cost of a good Spanish mule, as Hamilton dutifully recorded the transaction. In one 1771 advertisement, the firm announced the sale “at said Cruger’s Yard,” of three hundred “prime slaves.” The next year, the manager reported to his New York City partner, Henry Cruger, Jr., “We have a Danish Guinea man [slaving ship] just arrived with 250 Gold Coast slaves. They will sell all for half produce and half cash or bills [of exchange].” Sometimes it was Alexander Hamilton who wrote out these advertisements. In his early life especially, Hamilton benefited from the Caribbean’s slave-based economy. He learned to trade and socialize with its richest benefactors, who included not only his own relatives but all his business colleagues. Much later, Hamilton was to become a vocal public enemy of slavery. But on St. Croix, as a teenage boy, he was learning to despise the gulf between the island’s white aristocrats who insisted on their fine mahogany furniture, their silks, and their imported cheeses, and the horrible living and working conditions of the vast slave majority.1
His patron and employer, the man who taught him the import-export business, was Nicholas Cruger, only twenty-five years old when he hired the thirteen-year-old Hamilton. A scion of one of colonial America’s leading mercantile families, Cruger was also engaged to marry the daughter of Christiansted’s town captain, Pieter De Nully (whose father had once released Hamilton’s mother from the fort’s dungeon). The New York-born Cruger was a third-generation American merchant. His grandfather had emigrated from Germany, become mayor of New York City, and with his sons established the Cruger firm on the Caribbean islands of St. Croix, Curacao, St. Kitts, St. Eustatius, and Jamaica, as well as in England. The New York branch had its own Manhattan wharf jutting from Pearl Street into the East River. There it shipped and received cargoes from its English and Caribbean factors. English navigation laws and chilly foreign relations made it impossible for British-American colonies to trade directly between England or its colonies and islands belonging to its commercial rivals, France and Spain. But trade could move through the neutral Dutch and Danish ports and the Cruger warehouses on Dutch Curacao, Danish St. Croix, and British Jamaica. The St. Croix branch also imported and distributed slaves from West Africa and smuggled mules from the Spanish Main colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico to work in the sugarcane harvest. Nicholas Cruger, Hamilton’s young boss, had inherited his uncle John’s St. Croix business interests. Rachel Hamilton’s tragic death inadvertently cemented her son’s connection with one of colonial America’s most enterprising families.
HAMILTON’S BOYHOOD friendship with Edward Stevens and his generous family had helped him to survive a four-year ordeal of family disasters. But then in 1770, two years after Hamilton’s mother died, his best friend traveled fifteen hundred miles to New York City to attend a preparatory school before taking premedical studies at King’s College (present-day Columbia University), a prospect that Hamilton now thought beyond his possibilities. As they parted, Stevens later recalled, they renewed “those vows of eternal friendship which we have so often mutually exchanged.” In what may have been his first letter to anyone other than his errant father, the fourteen-year-old Hamilton responded to a letter from Stevens that announced that he would soon be coming home to St. Croix for a visit. Stevens’s father and sister had just sailed for New York to meet him—”for whose safe arrival I now pray”—and he no doubt meant it literally.
In stilted adolescent prose, Hamilton told his friend he truly “wished for an accomplishment of your hopes” of “having soon the happiness of seeing us all.” He missed his erstwhile playmate, yet he was nervous about his return. Had his friend, soon to enter college, become too grand to still be the companion of a mere countinghouse clerk? Hamilton did not know whether he could “still be present” in the Stevens household. “To confess my weakness,” he confided, “I [despise] the groveling and condition of a clerk to which my fortune condemns me.” He vowed that he “would willingly risk my life” if he could only “exalt my station:”
I’m confident, Ned, that though my youth excludes me from any hopes of immediate preferment, nor do I desire it, but I mean to prepare the way for my futurity. I’m no philosopher, you see, and may be justly said to build castles in the air. My folly makes me ashamed, and [I] beg you’ll conceal it yet, Neddy, we have seen such schemes successful when the projector is constant. I shall conclude [by] saying, I wish there was a war.
Frustrated by his indefinite sentence as a lowly clerk, fearing that his loss of social status, in a place and time when that was all-important, would preclude any further education or possibility of advancement, young Hamilton was determined to find an opening for his ambition. He refused to be a stoic about his lot—”I am no philosopher.” He refused to accept the fact, as many others would have, that the deaths of his mother and cousins and his father’s desertion of him might permanently reduce him to a career on a stool in a warehouse. He was all youthful optimism, but he also was striking a chord that he would play again and again until his dying day. He believed that, by boldness and courage, if by no other avenue, he could benefit from combat. This was not too farfetched a notion in the contentious eighteenth century. There rarely had been a long interval of peace among the European colonial powers.2
Unwilling to await an opportunity for advancement to come his way, Hamilton instinctively set out to attract public attention. Once again, he exaggerated his age when he began to submit attempts at poetry to the Gazette. Stating that he was “about seventeen” and admitting that his efforts were “presumptuous,” he nevertheless submitted two poems. The first was a pastoral, employing as a poetic device shepherd boy meets shepherd girl and extolling marriage as a means to gain more abundant sexual pleasure. Both poems were bolder and franker than the forms he imitated. He signed them “A.H.” Years later, a middle-aged Hamilton was still proud of his early effusions, boasting to his children that he had “always had a strong propensity to literary pursuits.” He stepped into the public eye for the first time at age sixteen with such lines as these:
In yonder mead my love I found
Beside a murm’ring brook reclin’d:
Her pretty lambkins dancing ‘round
Secure in harmless bliss.
I bade the waters gently glide
And vainly hushed the heedless wind,
Then, softly kneeling by her side
I stole a silent kiss.
In a racy companion piece, Hamilton displayed a playful ribald wit:
Coelia’s an artful little slut;
Be fond, she’ll kiss, et cetera—but
She must have all her will;
For, do but rub her ‘gainst the grain
Behold a storm, blow winds and rain,
Go bid the waves be still.3
Young Hamilton enjoyed his newfound notoriety. He plunged back into print with another, more serious submission for the next week’s Gazette. Called “Rules for Statesman,” this effort purportedly was penned by a correspondent in London to the Christiansted newspaper. So precocious, Hamilton was introducing what was to become the major theme in so many of his later works: the need for centralized public responsibility. In a small-town royalist Danish-American newspaper, the author praised the British system of governing by cabinet ministers under the control of “a prime minister like a commander in chief. I think this wise regulation a wholesome restraint on the people, [whose] turbulence, at times, requires a dictator.” Hamilton had obviously been reading the writings of Machiavelli. Donning the mantle of the mature scholar, he cited “some years of gleaning from Machiavelli.” He advised his readers to consider “by what means a premier may act most to the honor of his Prince and the enlargement of his own power.” If, indeed, young Hamilton did write these lines, he could not have more succinctly prophesied his own turbulent struggle for power or the political philosophy that underpinned it. After so much disappointment, Alexander Hamilton was learning not to rely on people. So many people had already let him down. He was on his way to a belief in institutions, in the need to create them and to imbue them with sufficient power and then to depend on them more than on their constituents. He groomed his first beliefs in the practical school of a Caribbean countinghouse.4
IN OCTOBER 1771, Alexander Hamilton’s employer, Nicholas Cruger, became seriously ill and had to go home to New York suddenly. He felt confident in turning over management of the firm’s St. Croix operations to his sixteen-year-old clerk. Hamilton had long since graduated from the clerical stage of making copies of outgoing letters. For some time, Cruger had entrusted delicate errands to his youthful apprentice, who was widely known on the island as “Cruger’s young man.” But now, the slight, five-foot-seven, red-haired youth with milk-white complexion and ruddy cheeks must have amused ships’ captains and waterfront toughs when he began giving them orders and writing commanding letters. Hamilton quickly made it clear that he was unimpressed by the merchants and mariners around him. Skillfully, smoothly, maturely he appropriated to himself Cruger’s authority. Only once in the five months of Cruger’s absence did Hamilton appeal for assistance to another merchant who held Cruger’s power of attorney.
As soon as Cruger sailed, Hamilton began to assert himself. He sent off a letter to an agent to New York, instructing him to collect a debt in “joes” (Johannes, a Portuguese coin worth about $200 in modern times). Learning firsthand how to deal with money at an early age, Hamilton could see that the American colonies were hamstrung for lack of their own currencies. With each ship’s sailing for New York, Hamilton sent off a letter recounting in detail his activities to Nicholas Cruger. He wrote Cruger as often as every five days at first, even when the letters contained no news. But the letters grew less frequent—eight days passed, then fifteen. As winter sailings to New York became more treacherous, Hamilton did not write Cruger for more than six weeks. He sent Cruger no letter at all in December 1771.
He also lost no opportunity to remind other members of the Cruger trading network that he was the diligent young gentleman busy at his crucial St. Croix post during this family emergency. He wrote to Jacob Walton, a prominent New York merchant and Nicholas Cruger’s brother-in-law; he fired off letters to John Harris Cruger on Jamaica. Thomas Willing, the leading merchant in Philadelphia, was among those who learned the name of Hamilton.
Strangely, it was fully a month before Hamilton informed Nicholas’s brother on Curacao that Nicholas had gone home sick. Hamilton was at his most formal and pretentious in this November 16, 1771, letter in which he introduced not only himself but Thunderbolt, the sluggish new sloop built by Cruger’s partners:
She has on board a parcel of lumber for yourself, sundry articles on account of her owners as per enclosed bill of lading and, when you have disposed of them, you’ll please to credit each party for one third of the proceeds.
Hamilton worried to the verge of obsession in his letters about obtaining a cargo of mules in time to help with the harvest. Routinely, the Crugers smuggled the animals from the Spanish Main. The Spanish Guarda Costa, Hamilton reported, “swarm upon the coast.” Hamilton took it upon himself to order Thunderbolt’s captain, William Newton, to arm the vessel at St. Croix. Then, to Nicholas Cruger’s brother, he criticized the family’s choice of a ship’s captain:
Give me leave to hint to you that you cannot be too particular in your instructions to him. I think he seems rather to want experience in such voyages.
He also faulted the ship’s captain for the careless way he had loaded the ship. A cargo of barrel staves “are stowed promiscuously among other things.” This meant time wasted in sorting, unloading, and reloading the ship.5
To the ship’s captain, sixteen-year-old Hamilton was stern and patronizing. In his letter of instruction for the Curacao run, he ordered the older man to “proceed immediately” and even follow directions on shore: “You must follow [them] in every respect”:
You know it is intended that you shall go from thence to the [Spanish] Main for a load of mules and I must beg if you do, you’ll be very choice in quality of your mules and bring as many as your vessel can conveniently contain.…Remember, you are to make three trips this season and unless you are very diligent, you will be too late, as our crops will be early in. Take care to avoid the Guarda Costas.6
As the weeks passed, Hamilton made bold decisions. Thunderbolt would have lost precious sailing time if he had followed the Crugers’ instructions. He ordered Captain Newton to unload quickly:
She landed here only
23 hogsheads Indian [corn] meal
6469 staves
20 barrels apples
300 boards—inch & half
21 kegs bread [water biscuits]
646 ropes onions.
“All the rest of her cargo,” he wrote to the senior New York partner, “I think must turn out better at Curacao than here, or at any rate not worse.” He would have liked to unload the “superfine flour” but the captain had stowed it “so promiscuously” at Philadelphia “that to get at it would take some time.”7
In self-serving and increasingly infrequent reports to the ailing Nicholas Cruger, Hamilton showed he was not afraid to criticize his superiors. “Your Philadelphia flour is really very bad.” It was “swarthy” and “very intractable.” Opening several barrels, “I have observed a kind of worm very common in flour about the surface, which is an indication of age…It could not have been new when ‘twas shipped.” The Christiansted market was overstocked with flour so Hamilton on his own authority decided to mark the price down. He designated the weevily flour for consumption by slaves.8
Six weeks later, when the next cargo arrived from New York City, it carried presents from Cruger for Hamilton to deliver: china plates and silk stockings for Cruger’s fiancée, wheels of cheese for her mother and for a fellow merchant. Cruger sent Hamilton a gift of apples and cheese for himself. By now, one day short of seventeen years old, Hamilton was so confident that he had become an expert in the Caribbean market that he assured Cruger the entire cargo would sell for high prices. So cocky had Hamilton become that he wrote to his employer, “I am a good deal hurried just now” and promised a letter with “more minute detail” at some later time. He assured Cruger he was keeping pressure on creditors—”Believe me, Sir, I dun as hard as is proper.”9
When the vessel again lagged into Christiansted, Hamilton wrote with disgust that it carried only forty-one starving mules fit only to be put out to pasture. Furious, Hamilton wrote a blistering letter of instruction to Captain Newton:
Reflect continually on the unfortunate voyage you have just made and endeavor to make up for the considerable loss.…Furnish the vessel with four guns…This is all I think needful to say so.…10
The self-assured teenager left his employer’s brothers speechless with his highhandedness. To Henry Cruger in New York he complained, “Your mahogany is of the very worst kind.” The ship’s captain carrying this letter of rebuke also came in for a knuckle-rapping. “His cargo was stowed very hickledy-pickledy.” One of Cruger’s partners hadn’t been able to raise his share of the cash required for a cargo “and God knows when I shall be able to receive Mr. Burling’s who is so long winded.”11
In spite of a brief bout of illness, Hamilton managed Nicholas Cruger’s interests from October 1771 to early March 1772, when Cruger returned from New York. Upholding all Hamilton’s dealings, Cruger was especially pleased that his youthful deputy’s bullying of Captain Newton had resulted in healthier cargoes. Thunderbolt sailed one last time that winter to New York loaded with fresh-harvested sugar and cotton, bringing a solid profit to the firm. Hamilton had held the frayed network together. Their Caribbean operations would have been seriously damaged without his Herculean efforts, which the family never forgot. Once again sent back to his stool as Cruger’s assistant, Hamilton watched Cruger cheat the Danish customs authorities, instructing one agent to enter highly taxed rye flour on his books as low-dutied corn meal, “and give the [tide] waiter a fee, which hint you must give the Captain.” Hamilton would remember such bribery and deception years later when he became the first Continental collector of customs for the Port of New York and then founder of the United States Customs Service.12
AFTER MONTHS of round-the-clock responsibility, Hamilton now found time for a new interest. At exactly this propitious moment, a learned clergyman landed on St. Croix. In the Reverend Hugh Knox, the newly hired forty-seven-year-old minister of Christiansted’s first Presbyterian church, Hamilton finally found someone who recognized his intellectual promise. A warmhearted man who had undergone a rocky journey before washing ashore on St. Croix that spring, Knox was to play a pivotal role in launching Hamilton’s career. Son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister from Northern Ireland, Knox had been classically educated in Scotland. He arrived in America in 1751 and earned an undergraduate degree from Yale College.
“Remarkably prepossessing [in] personal appearance and manners,” Knox then founded a small academy in Delaware and preached in churches at St. George’s and Middletown. A popular schoolmaster, he thought it judicious to flee his post after he mimicked the Sunday sermon of a noted clergyman in a tavern. Enrolling for postgraduate study at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), he studied theology with its founder and first president, the Reverend Aaron Burr, grandfather of the third vice president of the United States. Considered a radical, he was called by only one church, the Dutch Reformed Church on the trackless island of Saba, five miles south of St. Maarten in the Dutch West Indies. Knox arrived on the island by surfboat, married the daughter of its governor, and lived for seventeen years in the crater of an extinct volcano. Ministering to Saba’s eighteen hundred inhabitants, he conducted a voluminous correspondence with churchmen in Europe and America. While many of his sermons were published and kept in print for decades, except for the fine library of books he accumulated, he was intellectually about as isolated as he could possibly be. After visiting St. Croix twice in the autumn of 1771, he was offered his own church and a handsome raise.13
Soon after Reverend Knox’s arrival, he met young Hamilton, who became a regular at Knox’s evangelical revival services. Hamilton may have heard him when he spellbound listeners with his fiery fundamentalism during his first visit. After years of loss and rapid change, at seventeen Alexander Hamilton may have undergone a powerful religious conversion. At least that is the impression he gave that spring, as the Great Awakening swooped down on St. Croix.
All over English America, young people were joining evangelical churches where, a few years before, only gray hair could be seen from the pulpits. The revival movement known as the Great Awakening mixed fire and brimstone with a revolutionary new doctrine of free will that discredited the old Puritan notion of predestination. The Great Awakening was America’s first youth movement. Older, more conservative clergymen worked hard to suppress it, pressing colonial legislatures to ban its street and open-field preaching. For the first time, Americans turned out in crowds to hear unofficial, unsanctioned, antiestablishment speakers. The style of preaching Hamilton heard for the first time,
seems not so much to inform men’s judgments as to terrify and affright their imaginations and, by awful words and frightful representations, to lift the congregation into hideous shrieks and outcries…In every place where they come, they represent that God is doing extraordinary things in other places and that they are some of the last hardened wretches that stand out; that this is the last call they are likely to have, that they are now hanging over the pit of eternal damnation and just ready this moment to fall into it, that Hellfire now flashes in their faces and that the Devil now stands just ready to seize them and carry them to Hell. They oftentimes repeat the awful words, “Damned! Damned! Damned! Damned!” This frequently frightens their tender mothers and sets them to screaming, and by degrees spreads over the congregation…And all screaming together make such an awful and hideous noise as will make a man’s hair stand on end!14
This religious revolution led to major political changes that split communities and colonies. The awakened, many of them young and poor like Hamilton, broke with officially established religions to form separatist churches that called themselves New Lights. The New Lights believed that to oppose their religious revival movement was to fight against God. Gradually, New Light political factions emerged in several colonies. They objected to every measure they felt commingled church and state. When the Reverend Knox brought the Great Awakening to the Caribbean, he instantly won over young Alexander Hamilton to its born-again ranks.
Hamilton’s potential seemed at once obvious to Knox, who gave him the run of his extensive library. (There is no surviving record of what Knox owned or Hamilton read.) Knox prided himself, in his often-published sermons, on his special calling to spot and encourage youthful talent. In one sermon, he praised Maecenus, the patron of Virgil, Horace, and Livy, for “drawing these incomparable geniuses out of obscurity.” To Knox goes the credit for discovering Hamilton amid the money-grubbing opulence of St. Croix’s sugar planters, liveried slaves, and fashionable shops.15
As a youngster, Hamilton had been surrounded by extremes of great wealth and hardscrabble struggle in islands full of slaves and wealthy masters, merchants and lawyers, litigation, speculation, and ruin. He had never seen or heard a man of Knox’s erudition before, never sat enthralled by the classically grounded rhetoric of a gentleman-scholar. Young Hamilton reveled in the world of ideas Reverend Knox brought to the island. Knox initiated Hamilton into the egalitarian thinking of the Scottish Enlightenment that was spreading from Edinburgh to America, fueled by the revolutionary political writings of John Locke. Hamilton was especially swayed by Knox’s belief that free will had replaced predestination as the central tenet of evangelical Presbyterianism. Young Hamilton had been exposed to three versions of Calvinism so far—the Scottish through his father, who no doubt believed that, because he was of noble birth, he was among the elect and predestined for salvation, no matter his misdeeds; the French, through his Huguenot mother; and the Dutch, through his employer, Nicholas Cruger. Hugh Knox embodied the two cardinal beliefs of evangelical Calvinism—the virtue of hard work, and the ability to rise through education. Knox told him that his destiny was in his own hands. Rejecting his father’s decadent way of life, Hamilton embraced the charming man of letters.
Few people in Hamilton’s lifetime matched Knox’s influence over this precocious—and rudderless—young man. Knox probably gave Hamilton bound volumes of his printed sermons to read, infusing him with piety and exposing him to strong religious arguments against the slavery and alcoholism of his father’s generation, all around him. Some of Hamilton’s later government policies, such as imposing federal excise taxes on whiskey, may be traced to this seed time. There are also echoes of Knox’s prose in Hamilton’s early writings. Knox’s felicitous line, “Our duty is written, as it were, with sun beams,” contains the germ of one of Hamilton’s mighty lines he wrote three years later in his first Revolutionary pamphlet, The Farmer Refuted:
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments…They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of Divinity itself.
Some of Knox’s writings seemed pointed right at the brash young Hamilton. In writing to another clergman, Knox urged him to
instill into the opening mind the principles of piety [and] integrity…Who can conceive the good of which such a child may be made the instrument, or the degrees of happiness and of glory to which it may be advanced?
Knox never tired of urging education on young men like Hamilton:
The mind is as much delighted by the discoveries of knowledge and truth as the body is with animal refreshments.
But Knox realized that there was a limit to how much he could help his student. Young Hamilton must leave the islands to get a thorough education.16
FIVE MONTHS after Nicholas Cruger’s return to St. Croix, Alexander Hamilton was hard at his Knox-directed after-hours studies on Monday night, August 31, 1772, when the worst hurricane in the island’s history struck. Except for one brief lull, it blew wildly for six hours. Tides fourteen feet higher than normal swamped Christiansted, tearing loose all the ships in the harbor and dashing them onshore. The Gazette listed only the white casualties: thirty killed, many more badly injured. All the island’s crops were uprooted: losses were estimated at close to $40 million in today’s currency. Hamilton attended a public meeting the Sunday following the storm where he heard Knox recount his own experiences and exhort the crowd to take the tempest as a divine comment on the islanders’ morals. Deeply moved, Hamilton went home and wrote his own account. A few days later, Alexander Hamilton wrote a letter describing the maelstrom to his father on St. Kitts, then showed a copy to the Reverend Knox.
On October 3, the Gazette carried Hamilton’s letter with an introduction by Reverend Knox:
The following letter was written by a youth of this island to his father; the copy of it fell by accident into the hands of a gentleman who, being pleased with it himself, showed it to others to whom it gave equal satisfaction and who all agreed that it might not prove unentertaining to the public. The author’s modesty in long refusing to submit it to public view is the reason of its making its appearance as late as it does now.
What Knox depicted as modesty may be explained by the fact that, as well as being powerfully written, the letter was self-revealing. It could be read by people who knew his family’s stormy recent history as a young man who, buffeted by his fate, was lashing out at his absent father. Addressed “Honoured Sir,” the letter, young Hamilton wrote, recounted “one of the most dreadful hurricanes that memory or any records can trace”:
It began at dusk, at North, and raged very violently ‘till ten o’clock. Then ensued a sudden and unexpected interval, which lasted about an hour. Meanwhile the wind was shifting ‘round to the southwest…it returned with redoubled fury and continued so ‘till near three o’clock in the morning. Good God! What horror and destruction. It’s impossible for me to describe or you to form any idea of it. It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place. The roaring of the sea and wind, fiery meteors flying about it in the air, the prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning, the crash of the falling houses, and the ear-piercing shrieks of the distressed were sufficient to strike astonishment into angels.
A great part of the buildings throughout the island are leveled to the ground, almost all the rest very much shattered, several persons killed and numbers utterly ruined, whole families running about the streets unknowing where to find a place of shelter; the sick exposed to the keenness of the water and air without a bed to lie upon or a dry covering to their bodies; and our harbors entirely bare. In a word, misery, in all its hideous shapes, spread over the whole face of the country…
Then Hamilton added “my reflections and feelings on this frightful and melancholy occasion.” His “self-discourse” echoed Knox’s born-again rhetoric. This segment of the letter was unmistakably angry. It could be read as pointing an accusatory finger at his “honoured father.”
Where now, oh! vile worm, is all thy boasted fortitude and resolution? What is become of thine arrogance and self-sufficiency? Why dost thou tremble and stand aghast? How humble, how helpless, how contemptible you now appear. And for why? The jarring of elements—the discord of clouds? Oh! impotent presumptuous fool!…Death comes rushing on in triumph, veiled in a mantle of tenfold darkness…On his right hand sits destruction, hurling the winds and belching forth flames: calamity on his left threatening famine, disease and distress of all kinds. And oh! thou wretch, look still a little further. See the gulf of eternal misery open. There mayest thou shortly plunge—the just reward of thy vileness. Alas! whither canst thou fly? Where hide thyself?
Then young Hamilton hurled a parting shaft at the entire planter class of St. Croix, “ye who revel in affluence.”17
This letter, Hamilton’s longest youthful literary production, proved to be one of his more fruitful efforts. It liberated him from the devastated island. Knox found Hamilton’s display of youthful piety beneficial to his own efforts to rally public generosity to help hurricane victims. But he also set to work arranging a scholarship to send Hamilton to New York City for an education. Knox wrote to his protégé a dozen years later, at the end of the American Revolution, that “I have always had a just and secret pride in having advised you to go to America and in having recommended you to some of my old friends there.” Wealthy merchants who had observed Hamilton’s business acumen now pledged contributions. Among donors were Nicholas Cruger and Cruger’s associate, Cornelius Kortright, the St. Croix partner of Kortright and Company of New York, to whom the Crugers agreed to consign four annual “cargoes of West India produce” to be “sold and appropriated to the support of Hamilton.” In three years’ time, this was to amount to two consignments of sugar. Among other contributors were the father of his young friend Edward Stevens, the probate judge who had seized Rachel Hamilton’s effects, and the town captain whose father had locked up Hamilton’s mother. In all, Knox arranged pledges of 400 pounds, his estimate of the cost of four years’ tuition, board, and transportation to mainland America.18
Hamilton’s sponsors probably had differing expectations of this young man. Knox, also a licensed physician and apothecary, expected Hamilton, like his friend Neddy Stevens, to take premedical studies before going on to study at Edinburgh, the best medical school in the British Empire. Hamilton’s grandfather had, after all, been a physician, and Hamilton had watched helplessly as a poorly trained doctor had bled and purged his dying mother. But Knox also could see from Hamilton’s writing that there was something more to the boy, and he wrote strong letters of recommendation to close friends in New York and New Jersey.
Alexander Hamilton had little time to make up his mind. The last safe sailing to the North Atlantic was imminent; on the American mainland, the school year was starting. His opportunity would be lost for a year, if not forever. The pledges of tuition had come so quickly, but he must decide at once or they might melt away. He penned one more poem that would not appear in the Gazette until after he sailed: “Ah! whither, whither am I flown A wandering guest in worlds unknown?” But he did not hesitate. He was eager to go, to be “translated to this happy place,” which must be happier, wherever it was, than the one he was leaving behind. He lugged his books and his best clothes aboard ship and left St. Croix. In early October 1772, only a few days after Hamilton’s vivid portrait of hurricane and self-portrait of his personal conversion appeared in St. Croix’s newspaper, but weeks after Knox had taken it around to Hamilton’s admirers, the youth’s benefactors saw him off for the long ocean voyage to America. He never saw his father, his brother, or, for that matter, Hugh Knox again. He did not return, and he never expressed a wish to see the searing beauty of the Caribbean again.19