3

Messenger Boy

Outside the Schuyler Mansion

Albany, New York

November 1777

It wasn’t supposed to have been this way.

It was supposed to have been his triumph. After barely a year as General Washington’s aide-de-camp, he had persuaded his commander to send him to Albany on a matter of vital military importance. He was to confront General Horatio Gates, the man who had replaced General Schuyler as commander of the northern forces, and demand that he surrender three of his battalions to the Continental army under the direct command of General Washington. Following the success of the Québec campaign and the recapture of Saratoga, the war in the north was essentially a holding game, and troops were needed farther south to liberate the British-held New York City and stem the onslaught of British troops besieging the southern states, where they were burning the vast fields of cotton and tobacco.

Technically, all Alex was doing was delivering an order from the commander in chief of the American military forces. But the United States was an almost two-year-old country, and the toddler nation was reluctant to be bound by rules. General Gates, like General Washington and General Schuyler and indeed every other patrician patriot— Jefferson and Franklin and Adams and Madison—had one eye on the war, but the other was firmly focused on what would come after. The new country would need new leaders, and a heroic general could parlay victory on the battlefield to high political office: president perhaps, if that was the direction the new republic went.

There were some who said the American states needed to replace King George III with their own monarch, and there were those who said Horatio Gates’s autocratic style lent itself to a throne. Alex’s missive would be less of an order, then, and more a request: one that would have to be delivered diplomatically but also persuasively. Success would bring Alex greater prestige—possibly even his own battlefield command, which he had been agitating for since the beginning of the war—while failure could condemn countless patriots to death. Alex relished the opportunity of putting the imperious General Gates in his place without the older man even knowing what was happening.

But just before he’d left Morristown, New Jersey, where the Continental army was wintering, General Washington had called him into his office and charged him with a second duty. The Continental Congress wanted someone to blame for the debacle at Ticonderoga. If the fort hadn’t fallen in July 1777, the Continental army might have pushed as far north as Québec and brought eastern Canada into the United States as the fourteenth state. Instead the army had been forced to spend the past year simply to get back to where they started. The congress wanted to make an example of someone. And General Schuyler had been the commander at the time of the defeat.

General Washington rubbed his eyes in fatigue. “It appears the good general has been caught in the crosshairs of his own command.”

Alex protested, saying General Schuyler wasn’t even at Ticonderoga when it fell: He had been farther north, preparing the invasion of Québec. And the troops defending the fort had been vastly outnumbered and taken by surprise as well. There was nothing shameful in their defeat. There was, rather, much to be praised in the way they had acquitted themselves against overwhelming odds.

“Indeed, sir, if I may,” Alex pleaded. “How to put it? Punishing General Schuyler for the defeat is akin to punishing a mule for being a born a mule, when its parents were a horse and an ass: Some things were simply meant to be.”

The comparison brought a slight but much-needed smile to General Washington’s face.

“If this were purely a military matter,” he said when Alex had finished, “you and I would be advocating the same position. But, alas, there are military matters and there are political matters, and when the latter taints the former, the waters grow muddy. I am afraid General Schuyler must fall on his sword, if not for the sake of the army, then for the sake of his country.”

Alex had traveled north to Albany with a heavy heart. The entire time he was arguing General Gates into submission, the pending confrontation with General Schuyler loomed in his mind. He had not yet met the New York patrician, but had heard only sterling descriptions of his character and his family—both his ancestors, whose pedigree was impeccable, and his descendants, which is to say, his children. His daughters were reputed to be each more beautiful and charming than the last. Perhaps one of them would look past his lack of pedigree and bring him the name and connections that had been denied him at birth by his feckless father. But it seemed unlikely, to say the least, that he would be wooing any of the daughters of a man whose head he was about to serve up on a platter.

Look on the bright side, he kept telling himself. Maybe this will be another hurricane . . .

THE HURRICANE OF 1772 had no name, but if it had, it would have been one of the Furies, those Greek goddesses whose only desire was destruction.

Alex also didn’t have a name.

He called himself Hamilton, but he could have just as easily called himself Faucette, his mother’s maiden name, or Lavien, the name of her first husband, because she’d never married his father. She never married his father because she was already married to another man, whom she had left before Alex’s birth and refused to talk about, just as she refused to speak about Alex’s father after he abandoned the family when Alex was nine.

That man, James Hamilton, was the fourth son of a Scottish laird who claimed that he’d given up the family manse—Kerelaw Castle was its grand name—to make his fortune in the New World. No one knew if his story was true, but his attempts to make money were well known throughout the wealthy Caribbean islands of St. Kitts and Nevis and St. Croix, as were as his absolute failures to do so. Indeed, the only thing James Hamilton was good at was disappearing. Just as he’d deserted his family in Scotland, he similarly left his children and their mother on St. Croix. Though Alex wrote to his father regularly and occasionally heard back from him, he never saw him again, and after his mother died, when Alex was eleven, he found himself truly alone in the world. He and his older brother had no relatives to take them in. James was fostered to one family, and Alex was sent to another. It wasn’t an adoption. It was servitude. Alex had to earn his keep by working in the family’s shipping office, but even that was tenuous. When Alex’s foster family decided to leave St. Croix, they left him behind to fend for himself. He was barely in his teens.

His intelligence had already made itself known in the small island community, however, and he continued to clerk at the docks. On the one hand, it was dull work: counting inventory and keeping track of changing commodities’ prices and calculating net profits and losses. On the other hand, it was fascinating. The great wooden ships, each as big as a plantation house, docked in the harbor with crews from all over the globe. West Africa . . . Lisbon . . . the Canary Islands . . . London . . . New York . . . New Orleans . . . Savannah. The sailors told stories of the wide world that made Alex realize how tiny and isolated St. Croix was and gave him his first yearning to see beyond it.

The stories were captivating, but their cargo was rather less appealing, for the great majority of the ships that docked in St. Croix were loaded with a single cargo:

Slaves.

By law, the freighters were required to “off-load” that portion of their cargo that hadn’t survived the long passage over the Atlantic before they docked in the harbor, which is to say, the shippers were supposed to throw the bodies of any kidnapped Africans who had died in the holds into the ocean before the ships sailed into St. Croix. But there were always one or two dead in the gaunt parade of people who were marched or, often, carried off the great, dark, foul-smelling ships. Those who had survived the harrowing three-month journey chained to a splintery, rat- and lice-infested berth had muscles so atrophied that they could barely stand, their flesh pocked with sores.

It was their eyes that haunted Alex most, because even though they didn’t speak his language and he didn’t speak theirs, he could still read the knowledge of their cruel and unjust fate written there. Each tick he checked in the category of “live cargo” filled him with shame, because each one represented the length and breadth of a human life. A few hundred pounds that would change hands in the slave market, a few years of life in the cane fields before their abused body finally gave out from exhaustion.

St. Croix was part of the enormously rich Antilles, an archipelago of islands, whose plantations shipped endless amounts of sugar to satisfy Europe’s sweet tooth, and consumed endless amounts of enslaved workers to grow and process the cane. Such was the demand for sugar that the small handful of islands, whose total area was smaller than that of New York or Massachusetts or Virginia, generated a hundred times more wealth than all the northern colonies combined. But all that wealth was generated at the cost of untold thousands of lives, each of which had had its total worth recorded in a single black check cursorily made by a white hand.

So, five years ago, when a hurricane had loomed out of the Atlantic like a great dark wall, its storm-force winds pushing twenty- and thirty-foot waves before it like a child’s hand splashing drops across a pond, there was a part of Alex that hoped the storm would sweep away the entire island and cleanse it of its terrible deeds. Buildings collapsed like playing-card houses, hundred-year-old trees were blown away like dandelion fluff, and the ten-foot-tall cane stalks disappeared beneath floods that swept in with the ferocity of a pouncing lion. When the winds and floods retreated, carnage as far as the eye could see was left behind.

As a child of the Caribbean, Alex had weathered dozens of hurricanes, but this was like nothing he had ever seen or heard of. Struggling to make sense of the destruction, of the puniness of man’s desires against the fury of the natural world, he sketched out a description of the storm’s fury in a letter to his father. Before he mailed it, however, he showed it to Hugh Knox, his pastor, who had served as an intellectual mentor to Alex since his father’s desertion and his mother’s death. Alex had only been looking for an adult eye to make sure that he hadn’t misspelled any words, but, far from criticizing the letter or correcting any errors, Knox extolled its virtues and even asked Alex’s permission to publish a copy in the Royal Danish American Gazette, which carried news of the Caribbean to the wider world. Alex was flattered, and consented. Even then he wasn’t thinking of any benefit accruing to him from his missive. Yet, when Reverend Knox told him that a group of wealthy residents in the province of New York had been so impressed by his account that they’d taken up a collection to bring the young writer north so that he could further his education, Alex thought his pastor was toying with him. But the offer and, more to the point, the stipend and the first-class ticket were all real, and less than a month after the hurricane devastated St. Croix, Alex left the tropical islands of his youth for the cold northern lands. At the age of seventeen he saw snow for the very first time. It was as white as sugar and, to Alex, just as sweet.

The following years were a blur, as he enrolled in King’s College to pursue a career in the law and then dropped out of college to fight for the cause of independence. The patrons who sponsored his journey came from some of the northern colonies’ most respected families, above all, William Livingston, a scion of the great New York clan, who took Alex under his wing and, often, into his home. Livingston’s daughter Kitty was a beautiful, vivacious girl, fully aware of her good looks and good fortune, and unashamed to flaunt both. Though unspoken, Alex understood that Livingston’s patronage didn’t extend to bringing a nameless Caribbean immigrant into his own family. Like Alex, Livingston could trace his lineage back to the lesser line of a noble family, but unlike Alex’s father, Livingston had done his family proud and had no interest in diluting its blood with unknown stock. This was the New World, where men made their own names. Alex would have to make the name Hamilton carry its own weight, rather than ride on the coattails of the name Livingston.

It was from Kitty that Alex first heard the name Elizabeth Schuyler. The Livingston daughters and the Schuyler daughters were all acquainted (and even distantly related, as were most of the families of New York). Though Angelica and Peggy were temperamentally more similar to Kitty, she’d always been closer to Eliza—most likely because there is only room for one flirt in any group of girls, and Kitty occupied that spot with pride.

Kitty knew marrying poor, penniless Alex Hamilton was out of the question, but was more than happy to trade witty banter with him at table and dance quadrilles until four in the morning. But between dances Kitty sang the praises of her friend in distant Albany.

As he made his dreaded way to the grand Schuyler mansion, Alex remembered what Kitty had said, even as he had already forgotten Kitty herself.

“Eliza’s bookish, like you. She cares about fresh ideas. Independence. Democracy. Abolition, they say. I think she’d even marry a man with no name and no fortune, if he cared about the same ideas she did.”

Hmmm, thought Alex, a girl with a prestigious family name who might be open to marrying a man with no name of his own . . .