ON AUGUST, 31, 1772, A HURRICANE PUMMELED THE WEST INDIES AND CHANGED ALEXANDER’S LIFE.
ON THE LAST NIGHT OF August in 1772, as twilight descended on the island of Saint Croix, Alexander Hamilton thought he was going to die. He was still a boy, and he wanted to become so much more. He wanted to matter to the world. He wanted to be a man of courage and honor. He wanted to love and be loved. Instead, bracing himself against the winds of a hurricane, he waited for the blow that would end it all.
The storm tore homes and buildings off their foundations and sent wooden beams flying. It tossed huge stones a hundred yards and leveled a three-foot-thick wall around the storehouse of the king. And it wasn’t just the wind. There were waves, too, huge ones more than seventy feet above their normal size. They flung ships a hundred yards ashore. Thunder boomed, and lightning lashed the sky, which spattered Alexander with torrents of salty rain. The air itself reeked of gunpowder and sulfur.
When the storm’s eye opened over the island, the wind let up, but in an hour it returned with a vengeance from the southwest. The storm felt otherworldly in its power, as if Death himself had wrapped a cloak around the sun and pounded the planet off its axis with his scythe. All around Alexander, entire families ran screaming through the streets. Earthquakes and tidal waves punished the surrounding islands. No one had seen anything like it.
Alexander expected that he and everything around him would be obliterated at any moment.
Even after the storm ended, the suffering did not. Mangled bodies lay all around. Many survivors had grievous injuries. Homes and businesses had gone to wreck, and hungry children clung to the knees of their weeping mothers. There was no food. No shelter. There wasn’t even good water to drink; the storm had made it too salty. Alexander’s heart bled for these women he could not help. But what did he have to offer? He was poor himself. Fixing this was beyond his abilities.
He sought comfort in church a week after the storm, and a man named Hugh Knox stood to give a sermon. Alexander knew Knox well. He’d helped Alexander publish his first poems and had given him access to his library. Now, inside the church, Knox’s words about God soothed and inspired Alexander. On the wings of this divine energy, Alexander picked up his pen and wrote his heart out to his father, describing the destruction and the aftermath, and what these things signified for humanity.
IT BECAME A TURNING POINT IN A LIFE THAT HAD BEEN UNLUCKY FROM THE START.
Even if it wasn’t enough to bring back his father, the letter was the best thing he’d ever written. It became a turning point in a life that had been unlucky from the start.
SEVENTEEN YEARS EARLIER, ALEXANDER HAD been born on Nevis, a steeply canted volcanic island not far from Saint Croix. His birth was so unremarkable that no record survived. But it took place on January 11, 1755, in a house on the main street of Charlestown, the island’s capital. The house gave his family a view of the blue-green Caribbean Sea pounding sandy beaches made of pulverized coral and volcanic rock, along with all the commotion of trade in the harbor.
NAMED “LAND OF BEAUTIFUL WATERS” BY INDIGENOUS INHABITANTS, NEVIS IS A SMALL, VOLCANIC ISLAND WITH SANDY BEACHES MADE OF CORAL AND PULVERIZED LAVA.
NEVIS WAS A HARD PLACE FOR ALEXANDER TO GROW UP.
Nevis was one of the sugar islands of the West Indies, which during Alexander’s time played a major role in the world’s economy. Everybody wanted sugar. Fortunes were made trading it. A lot of people grew to depend on it, and the sugar from Nevis was the sweetest of all, even as it required the work and suffering of vast numbers of enslaved Africans.
Nevis was a hard place for Alexander to grow up. The slave trade was grotesque, brutal, and deadly. Alexander hated it. And while he didn’t have the catastrophic misfortune of being born or forced into slavery, his parents weren’t married to each other. So, his mother was the subject of gossip, he and his brother were called names, and Alexander couldn’t go to the church school, as other children did.
The subject of his birth humiliated him. One man was largely to blame for Alexander’s suffering on this front. Johann Michael Lavien was a merchant who’d come to Saint Croix dressed in silk clothing with gold buttons and dreaming of making a fortune as a sugar plantation owner. He took a liking to Alexander’s mother, Rachel Fawcett, who was on Saint Croix visiting wealthy relatives who lived a mile and a half southwest of the island’s capital, Christiansted.
Rachel’s mother, fooled by the glitter, thought Lavien would make a good match for her daughter, Alexander later said. Rachel hadn’t wanted to marry Lavien. She was a teenager: beautiful, brilliant, and in possession of a small fortune she’d inherited from her father.
Their marriage was miserable. Lavien was at least twelve years older, and he’d been nothing more than a fortune hunter. A poor businessman, he ran through Rachel’s money. By 1750, Rachel had left Lavien and their son, Peter. Lavien was furious. She’d left him to the work and expense of raising their son, and she’d moved on with other men.
THEIR MARRIAGE WAS MISERABLE.
To punish her, he turned to the legal system. Danish law said a woman who’d twice committed adultery could be jailed. Rachel, found guilty, was thrown into a 130-square-foot cell with a floor made of brick. It wasn’t the dungeon authorities forced enslaved people into, but it was a dismal spot nonetheless, mostly inhabited by drunks, thieves, and other lowlifes. For months, she lived in that tiny room, surviving on boiled cornmeal mush and fish, with nothing more than a glimpse of the wharf and the eastern end of cobblestoned King Street through the bars on her windows.
Lavien still held out hope that this punishment would force her back into submission. Instead, she fled to the nearby island of Saint Kitts. She supported herself by sewing and hiring out the labor of the enslaved people she’d inherited from her father. It was a drop down from the comfortable spot she’d had as the daughter of a doctor, but she was resourceful and smart, and she managed.
Before long, she paired off with a thirty-two-year-old Scotsman named James Hamilton. His upbringing was the stuff of fairy tales. He’d grown up in a Scottish castle called the Grange, southwest of Glasgow. His father was a laird whose estate was large and beautiful. As the fourth son, though, James wasn’t in any position to inherit. Instead, he had to make his own way in the world.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t all that smart—nor was he a particularly diligent worker. After he failed to distinguish himself in a textile apprenticeship set up by an older brother, he went to Nevis, thinking he could make a fortune in sugar. Returning triumphant from abroad, some of Europe’s upper crust had bought splendid estates of their own. Of course, many people who had hoped to turn sugar into gold were crushed by failure and debt. Some never made it home again.
JAMES AND RACHEL FELL IN LOVE IN THE EARLY 1750s, when he worked for a mercantile firm on Saint Kitts. They had two sons together, James Jr. and then Alexander, who was named for his paternal grandfather. Where they could, James and Rachel passed themselves off as a married couple, and for a while, the family lived on Nevis, surrounded by blue water rich with lobster and other delicacies. Alexander and his brother could climb through lush jungles that rose up the steep slopes of the volcano, surrounded by snowy egrets, monkeys, mongooses, and other tropical creatures.
UNLIKE MOST OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS, ALEXANDER WAS BORN POOR TO PARENTS WHO WEREN’T MARRIED TO EACH OTHER. HE MOVED FROM THIS HOUSE ON NEVIS, PICTURED, TO SAINT CROIX.
It wasn’t quite paradise, though. In many ways, the landscape itself was a reminder that nothing was solid underfoot. The terrain was pimpled with sulfurous, undrinkable hot springs and steaming fumaroles. Earthquakes, tidal waves, and massive storms could strike at random. It could be rough in other ways, too. Pirates and privateers caroused at night in taverns and brothels. And sometimes there were bloody duels, fought by outlaws and would-be aristocrats alike.
THEY WERE FIGHTS FOR HONOR, AND HONOR WAS EVERYTHING.
The smallest insult could put a man in a mood for a deadly challenge. One famous duel happened after the victim called his shooter “an impertinent puppy.” These duels fascinated Alexander. They were fights for honor, and honor was everything.
That was the sort of man Alexander decided to be—one with honor worth defending. He’d also be educated, even if he couldn’t go to a regular school. It didn’t matter if people made fun of him for being a good student, or for being skinny and small. He’d show everyone what he was really made of.
From his mother, he learned fluent French. He also took lessons from Jewish people from Spain and Portugal, starting young enough that he had to stand on the table next to his teacher when he recited the Ten Commandments in Hebrew. He had thirty-four books, a huge collection, which most likely included titles by Machiavelli, Plutarch, and Alexander Pope. From these, he learned political philosophy, history, and the art of writing.
When he was still a teenager, he published his first poems, which were about girls and the glories of heaven, and were inspired by the work of Alexander Pope. Here are two stanzas of “The Soul ascending into Bliss, In humble imitation of Popes Dying Christian to his Soul,” which ran in the Royal Danish American Gazette in 1772.
HARK! HARK! A VOICE FROM YONDER SKY,
METHINKS I HEAR MY SAVIOUR CRY,
COME GENTLE SPIRIT COME AWAY,
COME TO THY LORD WITHOUT DELAY;
FOR THEE THE GATES OF BLISS UNBAR’D
THY CONSTANT VIRTUE TO REWARD.
I COME OH LORD! I MOUNT, I FLY,
ON RAPID WINGS I CLEAVE THE SKY;
STRETCH OUT THINE ARM AND AID MY FLIGHT;
FOR OH! I LONG TO GAIN THAT HEIGHT,
WHERE ALL CELESTIAL BEINGS SING
ETERNAL PRAISES TO THEIR KING.
AS MUCH AS HE ENJOYED WRITING ABOUT heaven, he’d seen plenty of its opposite. If you weren’t a rich plantation owner, life in the sugar islands could be brutal, especially for the enslaved people who’d been stolen from their homes, crammed into the bellies of overcrowded ships, and then displayed in marketplaces for buyers to examine as though they were animals or pieces of furniture.
His own grandfather had been a physician inspecting the human wares at those auctions, and Alexander witnessed the brutality of these markets regularly. Even though he and his brother were masters themselves of a boy named Ajax, Alexander grew up hating slavery. Enslaved Africans worked naked in the fields under a scorching sun, trying to coax cane out of the volcanic slopes. They also worked in boiling-hot sugar factories, where their lives and limbs were constantly at risk. To be enslaved in the sugar islands was essentially a death sentence, and millions of human beings suffered it.
On Nevis, enslaved people outnumbered white people by at least eight to one. On other islands, the ratio was even higher. Alexander and the rest of the white population lived in constant fear of uprisings, and many tried to terrorize enslaved people into submission through brutal punishments for small infractions—and worse for larger acts of resistance.
Alexander crossed paths with enslaved people throughout his childhood. As an older boy, he lived a half block from the Sunday market in Christiansted, where enslaved people came each week, spread their wares beneath trees, and sold a variety of food, candles, scarves, and cloth to each other.
HIS SPOT OF RELATIVE PRIVILEGE OFFERED ONLY SO MUCH PROTECTION.
His spot of relative privilege offered only so much protection. Life was difficult and could turn disastrous at any moment, as it did when Alexander was four. His mother’s estranged husband, Johann Lavien, had continued to founder as a businessman. Moneylenders had seized his plantation, and he was reduced to being the overseer of someone else’s. He had to rent out his enslaved people to get by. But romance had found him, and he was living with a woman who wanted him to marry her. To do this, he’d need a formal divorce from Rachel. This was expensive and hard to get, which is why they’d never pursued one.
Lavien sent a court summons that went to an address on Saint Croix, where Rachel hadn’t lived for nine years. She never received it and wasn’t there to defend herself against the charges.
HE CALLED THEM “WHORE-CHILDREN.”
The court papers were scorching. “She has shown herself to be shameless, rude, and ungodly, as she has completely forgotten her duty and let husband and child alone, and instead given herself up to whoring with everyone, which things the plaintiff says are so well known that her own family and friends must hate her for it.”
Lavien didn’t soften the language for Alexander and his brother James. He called them “whore-children.”
Rachel was found at fault. As part of the divorce decree, Lavien could marry again. It didn’t matter that he was living with another woman himself and was therefore guilty of the same things Rachel was. She was forbidden to remarry. This restriction wasn’t from spite alone; it was also about money. It meant Alexander and James were officially branded as illegitimate, so that when Rachel died, all of the few things their mother had would go to their half brother, Peter—her one legitimate child under the law.
James, Rachel, and the boys moved back to Christiansted in May 1765. James had found work, but it was a terrible place for Rachel to live. She was known there as a bigamist and an adulterer. Under the weight of this shame, their long-term relationship collapsed. By July, James and Rachel had separated. In January 1766, Alexander’s father went to Saint Kitts to collect a debt.
HE NEVER CAME BACK.
He never came back. Nor did he send money to support the boys. Alexander charitably figured his father could not afford to support them after his business dealings failed.
Family members helped where they could. Rachel’s sister, Ann Lytton, had a wealthy husband, who pitched in on rent for Rachel and the boys. He even bought the family six walnut chairs with leather seats.
But there was only so much the Lyttons could do. Their son James Jr. had botched a business venture in 1764. Rather than face the consequences, he’d stolen twenty-two enslaved people and the family schooner and escaped to the Carolinas to start over. His devastated parents had sold their large stone house, which was called the Grange, just like James Hamilton’s ancestral home. Gone were the sugar mill, the boiling house that produced molasses and brown sugar, and the quarters for the enslaved people who worked the land. The only thing they kept from the Grange was a small bit of earth that held the bones of their ancestors. The next year, Ann Lytton died.
Alexander, his mother, and his brother moved into a two-story wood-and-stone building on Company Street. The family occupied the top floor; on the lower one, Rachel ran a small grocery that provided supplies to plantations: pork, beef, salted fish, rice, flour, and apples. Alexander, always great at math, kept the books for his mother.
His work impressed her suppliers at a trading company called Beekman and Cruger. Thanks to Alexander, the family managed. They didn’t have much: a half dozen silver spoons, seven silver teaspoons, fourteen porcelain plates, two porcelain bowls, a bed covered with a feather comforter, and the chairs from Uncle James. But, along with Alexander’s treasured books, it was enough.
In February 1768, though, just after Alexander turned thirteen, Rachel grew violently ill, probably with yellow fever, an often-deadly virus that affects the liver and kidneys and makes the skin and eyes turn yellow from jaundice. After a week, they summoned a doctor, who bled her veins and applied an alcohol compress for her headache, medicine that made her vomit, and provided an herb called valerian that caused terrible gas. Alexander got sick, too. The doctor drained some of Alexander’s blood and forced fluid into his lower bowel through the rectum. For the rest of his life, he suffered kidney ailments.
ALEXANDER AND HIS MOTHER STRUGGLED SIDE BY SIDE IN THE FAMILY’S ONLY BED.
Alexander and his mother struggled side by side in the family’s only bed. He was next to her when she died on the nineteenth of February. And even though it was nine in the evening when she passed away, the financial vultures arrived an hour later, locking away her assets to ensure they would go to her legal heir. They left only a few things unsealed so they could be used to prepare her for burial: the chairs, two tables, and two bowls for washing.
Alexander and his brother were effectively orphans, and so poor that a judge in town gave them money to buy shoes and black veils to wear to their mother’s funeral. She was buried the next day in the family cemetery.
Then came the bills, including ones for the unhelpful medical care. The probate court—the officers of which had swooped in the night of her death—decided to consider three possible heirs to inherit her meager belongings. Two were Alexander and his brother. The third was their half brother, Peter. The process dragged on for a year. The court gave the entire estate—including Alexander’s precious books—to Peter. The paperwork called Alexander and James “obscene children” born into “whoredom.”
In November 1769, Peter Lavien returned to Saint Croix to pick up his things. Even though he was a grown man and a church warden in South Carolina, he left his young half brothers with nothing. He didn’t even want the books. In one small mercy, Alexander’s cousin Peter bought them back at an auction.
Alexander and his brother went to live with Peter Lytton, his girlfriend, and their son. Soon after the boys moved in, their cousin grew distraught about his finances and killed himself in his own bed. His death was bloody and traumatic, and in his will, he left everything to his girlfriend and their boy.
Alexander and his brother, left out again, went to live with their uncle James. And then their uncle James died. His will, which had been updated five days before his death, also left the boys nothing.
By then, James was sixteen and Alexander was fourteen. They’d lost their father. Their mother. Two guardians. They’d been branded as obscene whore-children. And now they were alone in the world, without a home, without money, and without any assurance of a future. It was a devastating series of blows, enough to fill anyone with doubt and despair. But Alexander and his brother persevered, even as their paths in life diverged.
James was apprenticed to a carpenter. For a while, he lived with Alexander in the home of a wealthy merchant named Thomas Stevens, his wife, Ann, and their five children. But he did not have Alexander’s intellectual fire or ambition, and soon the brothers would part ways for good.
One of the Stevens boys—Edward—had meanwhile become Alexander’s closest friend.
THEY WERE BOTH BRILLIANT.
Ned Stevens and Alexander had much in common. They were both brilliant. Both worked hard at their studies. Both spoke fluent French and had an interest in medicine and classical history, and an aversion to slavery. They had something else in common: they looked alike to an astonishing degree. Pale skin, bright blue eyes, reddish hair, slight builds. Many people noticed, and even when the men were grown, some people thought they were brothers by blood and not circumstance.
Alexander found a job as a clerk at Beekman and Cruger—the same trading company that had supplied his mother’s store and admired his talent when he was keeping her books. Beekman and Cruger imported building materials, equipment for plantations, livestock, furniture, food, drink, and other necessities, as well as luxuries like crystal, porcelain, and silver for the island’s upper crust. The company also exported sugar and its derivatives, molasses and rum, as well as hardwoods and cotton.
Alexander was so good at his job that he temporarily ran the company for a few months in 1771 to cover for his sick boss, Nicholas Cruger, a pale-eyed man with unruly eyebrows and a swoop of short dark hair. Alexander was just sixteen at the time.
The job gave him a front-row seat onto the emerging economy of the day: international trade that pitted countries against one another in a race for power and wealth, and the territorial grabs that enhanced both. This thinking drove wars and revolutions and, over time, thrust Europe and later the American colonies into the beginnings of a modern age. Alexander soaked up vast amounts of knowledge about finance and commerce.
His math skills came in handy when he had to track freight and calculate sums in different currencies: Danish ducats, Dutch stivers, British pounds, Spanish pieces of eight, Portuguese reis. His French also proved useful.
THE WISH WOULD COME TRUE.
He learned the ins and outs of both legal trade and smuggling, what kind and how many guns a ship needed to keep it safe from pirates, and how supply chains kept businesses and communities alive exchanging everything from foodstuffs to building materials to livestock.
He also learned how to take charge of people and situations, even though most of the men he worked with were much older. He once scolded a ship’s captain for not treating a shipment of forty-one mules with sufficient care in 1772. Then he let his boss know all about it. He’d never seen a worse parcel of mules:
“I sent all that were able to walk to pasture, in Number 33. The other 8 could hardly stand for 2 Minutes together & in spite of the greatest care 4 of them are now in Limbo. The Surviving 4 I think are out of Danger, and shall likewise be shortly sent to pasture.”
He paid close attention to minute details. He knew what these signified, and he knew how to proceed in difficult conditions. The world could be a cruel place. He had little control over most things. But where he could influence situations with his sharp mind and tireless hands, he did.
DATED JANUARY 11, 1773, THIS MINIATURE WATERCOLOR-AND-INK PORTRAIT SHOWS A YOUNG ALEXANDER AS HE FACED HIS FIRST WINTER IN NEW YORK CITY.
As great as he was as a clerk, he hated the job. Tasks like checking flour for worms were demeaning. There was no future in such work, no way for him to truly change the world as he knew he could. When he was fourteen, he wrote Ned—who was studying in New York—a letter fretting about his lot. He wanted to be a great man like the ones he read about in Plutarch, and he was willing to trade his life—but not his character—for the chance.
“I wish there was a War,” he told Ned.
The wish would come true. In the meantime, thanks to the hurricane, he’d impressed more than just his bosses. Hugh Knox, the man who had delivered the inspirational sermon after the storm, thought Alexander’s letter to his father was so stirring that he had it printed anonymously in the Gazette. Alexander’s words read, in part,
It began about dusk, at North, and raged very violently till ten o’clock. Then ensued a sudden and unexpected interval, which lasted about an hour… . 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 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.
Alexander’s words struck astonishment into his readers. They couldn’t believe the author was only seventeen. Everyone—even the governor—wanted to know who Alexander was. Once people learned who’d written the account of the storm, they wanted to help. Nicholas Cruger set up a scholarship fund that meant Alexander could become a student in New York City.
That fall, Alexander set out on a three-week journey by boat. Bad luck found him once more when the ship that carried him caught fire. Alexander and the rest of the passengers scrambled to scoop buckets of seawater to put out the blaze. It was a desperate situation. If they failed, the ship would sink, and they would die. But they managed to quench the flames. The damaged ship made it to Boston, and from there, Alexander traveled to New York.
ALEXANDER’S WORDS STRUCK ASTONISHMENT INTO HIS READERS.
When he stepped off the dock and into an entirely new world, he knew only one person in town: Ned Stevens. That was about to change. Even more, Alexander was about to change New York—and the world beyond.
