Synopsis
Book by Brookhiser Richard
Extrait
Chapter One
St. Croix/Manhattan
In the late eighteenth century, Bryan Edwards, a Jamaican author, inserted this description into a reference work on the West Indies. "The nights" in summer "are transcendantally beautiful. The clearness of the heavens, the serenity of the air, and the soft tranquility in which Nature reposes contribute to harmonize the mind, and produce the most calm and delightful sensations. The moon too in these climates displays far greater radiance than in Europe: the smallest print is legible by her light; and in the moon's absence her function is not ill-supplied by the brightness of the milky-way, and that glorious planet Venus, which appears here like a little moon...cast[ing] a shade from trees."
When Alexander Hamilton was born, the Caribbean was as enchanting as it is now. It was also richer, thanks to sugar. At the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, when the British victors considered restoring some of their conquests to France, they seriously debated whether to return Canada, or the island of Guadeloupe. One sugar island weighed evenly in the balance with half of North America. Some West Indian planters made fortunes. They lived high in the islands, and when they returned to the old country. "Such eating and drinking I never saw," wrote a visitor to Jamaica. "Such loads of all sorts of high, rich and seasoned things and really gallons of wine and mixed liquors. They eat a late breakfast as if they had never eaten before. It is as disgusting as it is astonishing." "There was no such thing as a [seat in Parliament] to be had now," an English lord wrote in 1767; rich West Indians "had secured them all at the rate of 3,000 pounds at least, but many at four thousand pounds, and two or three that he knew at five thousand pounds".
If war, disease, and hurricanes spared them, sugar planters could do well indeed. But there was little else to do in the West Indies. The sugar islands were floating agricultural factories, with few small farms, and small service populations in their ports. When young George Washington of Virginia (hardly an egalitarian society) took a trip to Barbados in 1751, he was struck by the material disparity he saw there. "There are few who may be called middling people. They are either very rich or very poor."
Beneath the poor whites were the slaves. Sugar farming was labor intensive; on plantations, slaves outnumbered their white masters by twenty to one. Their life was harsh. In I755, Denmark decreed that masters in the Danish Virgin Islands could not punish their slaves by mutilating them, or putting them on the rack, though they might shackle and flog them. In spite of this lenience, the slaves of St. Croix planned a revolt in 1759. The free black man who revealed the plot ahead of time committed suicide, after which his body was hung, then burned at the stake. Slaves found riding or walking the streets of Christiansted, the main town, after eight o'clock at night were given 150 lashes at the fort, "at no expense to the owner." Edwards, describing the British island of Nevis as a "beautiful little spot," added that the population was 600 whites and 10,000 blacks: "a disproportion which necessarily converts all such white men as are not exempted by age and decrepitude into a well-regulated militia." In the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, the "well-regulated militia" would be a force for freedom. In the West Indies, it was a force for keeping the labor force in line.
Hamilton, who grew up in Nevis and St. Croix, never wrote a fond word about the Caribbean, and never made the slightest effort to return for a visit as an adult. The prosperity of the West Indies existed chiefly in its balance sheets, and made little use of human capital apart from muscle. With its barren riches and its lack of opportunity, it was a place to leave behind, and a model for what a happy country should avoid.
Hamilton's early life and the lives of his family were set in the small islands -- the Leeward and the Virgin Islands -- that rim the northeast corner of the Caribbean. Hamilton's mother, Rachel Faucett, was born on Nevis, but went to St. Croix, a twenty-hour sail with the trade winds, as a teenager. She followed one of her sisters, who had married a St. Croix planter named James Lytton. About 1745, Rachel married another planter, John Lavien, and a year later she bore him a son. Like many whites in the Caribbean, the families were a mix of nationalities, who had settled without regard to the islands' formal owners: the Faucetts were Huguenots and the Lyttons English; Lavien was probably German.
Hamilton family tradition held that Rachel had "witnessed...family quarrels" as a gift. If so, she found a new set of them in her marriage to Lavien. They settled on a cotton plantation he owned, ironically named Contentment, but in 1750, he had her jailed in the town fort in Christiansted -- the same place where curfew-breaking slaves were lashed -- for refusing to live with him. When she got out, she returned to the British West Indies, where she met James Hamilton.
James Hamilton, the fourth son of a Scottish laird, had come to the Caribbean to make his fortune as a merchant. Fifty years later, Alexander Hamilton wrote a friend that "I have better pretensions than most of those who in this Country plume themselves on Ancestry." This was an unusually defensive tone for him: Hamilton characteristically expected people to endorse his ideas and his actions because he had shown how right they were, not because he had a good pedigree. He went on to admit that his birth was "not free from blemish," for Rachel had two sons with James Hamilton -- James Junior and Alexander -- without getting a divorce from John Lavien.
Illegitimacy may not have had quite the stigma in that century that it acquired under the Victorians in the next, but it was still shameful. A dozen years later, when Benjamin Franklin arranged for his illegitimate son William to be named royal governor of New Jersey, John Adams called it an "Insult to the Morals of America." Rachel and James Senior seem to have tried to avoid the stigma: Alexander believed that his mother had gotten a second marriage, and the records of a christening on the Dutch island of St. Eustatius mention the presence of James Hamilton and "Rachel Hamilton his wife." In the Danish Virgin Islands, however, Rachel was still Rachel Lavien -- until 1759, when John Lavien divorced her for her "ungodly mode of life." Since Rachel was the party at fault, Danish law did not allow her to remarry. Presumably, James Senior discovered this state of affairs when he moved with his family to St. Croix in 1765. A year later, he left them, never to return.
To support herself, Rachel opened a provision store in Christiansted. Alexander went to work as a clerk in a merchant house; his older brother worked for a carpenter. In 1768, Alexander and Rachel came down with a fever. The son recovered; the mother died.
These, and a few other dry details, reflected in scattered church and legal documents, are virtually all we know of Hamilton's earliest childhood. They leave several puzzles. One is the year of his birth. Hamilton indicated, and descendants of his who wrote biographies of him stated flatly, that he was born in 1757, which would mean that he began working in a merchant house at the age of nine. But in settling Rachel's estate in 1768, the probate court listed her illegitimate sons' ages as fifteen and thirteen, which would mean that Alexander had been born in 1755. Biographers in thrall to documents tend to accept 1755; defenders of the later date point out that the clerk was not perfect, for he misspelled the name Lavien. The desire to add two years to Alexander's age may also reflect an impulse, encouraged by the practice of assigning schoolchildren to grades, to discount the abilities of the gifted. Without being a Mozart, Alexander Hamilton was a very bright boy -- and he was hardly unique. Benjamin Franklin was apprenticed to a printer at the age of twelve, and published his first journalism when he was sixteen. The future theologian Jonathan Edwards wrote an eloquent and observant essay on flying spiders when he was twelve, and entered Yale College a year later. One of the supporters of an "older" Hamilton inconsistently argues that his responsibilities as a clerk were not that great. If they were not, then it is all the more likely that a younger boy could have fulfilled them. Recognizing that even a younger Hamilton would not have been miraculous, and believing that a man is more likely to know his own birthday than a clerk in a probate court, I will accept 1757.
A more important question is the character of his parents. Since Hamilton's relations with women played an important role in his public career, it would be interesting to know more about his mother. Hamilton described her to his children as a woman of "superior intellect," "elevated and generous sentiments," and "unusual elegance of person and manner." John Lavien accused her in his divorce papers of "whoring with everyone." Neither man was an objective witness. What is clear is that Rachel was a good businesswoman; when she died, the accounts of her store were in order, and she had only a few short-term debts.
It is also clear that James Hamilton, Sr., was a bum. He had other qualities -- his surviving letter shows charm, and his decision to move from Scotland to the Caribbean suggests that he had a stock of youthful enterprise, or at least hope -- but he was a bum nevertheless, and this would have been clear to his sons. When he left his family, he did not disappear, but went back to the Leeward Islands, where he lived a long and uneventful life. He and his famous son made sporadic efforts to keep in touch. In 1783, Alexander wrote to his older brother, who had asked him for money: "But what has become of our dear father?...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." Ten years later, James wrote the secretary of the treasury from St. Vincent that he would take "the first ship that sails for Philadelphia." But two years after that, Alexander wrote a friend that though he had "pressed" his father to come, James had decided not to, on account of his health. Perhaps he was reluctant to be so directly helped by the son he had abandoned. In 1799, the old man died. Afterward, Alexander wrote that his father had "too much pride and too large a portion of indolence -- but his character was otherwise beyond reproach." This was more generous than accurate. Pride and indolence are faults (Alexander inherited the first, though not the second). But they were not James's only faults. If he had vanished, his lover and his children could have consoled themselves with romantic, even tragic, speculations about his character and his fate. But he simply moved over a few islands. James Hamilton walked away from a complicated situation, and made it plain that that was what he had done. When Alexander Hamilton became a husband and father, he dedicated himself (sometimes with very mixed results) to behaving differently.
Rachel left a modest estate -- nine slaves, thirteen silver spoons, and thirty-four books. James Junior and Alexander received none of it. John Lavien appeared before the probate court and claimed everything for his and Rachel's legitimate son. The Lytton family, into which Rachel's sister had married, gave the Hamilton boys some help, buying back the thirty-four books at an auction. But the Lyttons were coming to grief too. Two of Alexander's Lytton cousins had left the island as bankrupts; a third killed himself. James Lytton, their father, died a month later. Alexander was practically alone in a small world.
A year later, age twelve, he wrote his first letter that survives, to Edward Stevens, an older boy who had been sent to New York to attend King's College, now Columbia University. "[T]o confess my weakness, Ned, my Ambition is so prevalent that I contemn the grov'ling and condition of a Clerk or the like, to which my Fortune &c. condemns me and would willingly risk my life tho' not my Character to exalt my Station....Im no Philosopher, you see, and may be justly said to Build Castles in the Air....yet Neddy we have seen such Schemes successfull when the Projector is Constant I shall Conclude saying I wish there was a War." St. Croix was a bigger island than Nevis, with more than twice the population -- 24,000, of which 2,000 were white -- and as a merchant's clerk, Alexander could observe its traffic with a wider world. But in the normal course of things, a local boy without a family could not expect to see the world, still less to exalt his station. Neddy Stevens might get away; not him.
Three factors altered the course of things. In 1771, the Reverend Hugh Knox, a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian minister, moved to Christiansted and noticed the ambitious boy. Knox was interested in education, and he had plans to teach the local slaves. He himself had been educated at the College of New Jersey in Princeton, at that time the finest school in the Thirteen Colonies. Jonathan Edwards had served briefly as president; Knox had studied with Edwards's son-in-law, Aaron Burr. Knox could introduce Alexander to two new worlds -- learning, and North America.
Hamilton's employer, Nicholas Cruger, had even more extensive connections on the mainland, which would propel Alexander in that direction. The Crugers, originally a German family, had been New York merchants for three generations. Nicholas's uncle had been the first president of the New York Chamber of Commerce. Nicholas and his three brothers were dispatched by the family to different centers of business: St. Croix, Jamaica, Curasao, and Bristol, England. (The brother who went to Bristol ultimately became mayor, and a member of Parliament.) In Christiansted, Nicholas Cruger owned ships, warehouses, a general store, and a counting house, where Hamilton worked, on Kongensgade, or King Street. Cruger and other New Yorkers began trading in St. Croix at mid-century for its sugar, delivering it to the refineries of old New York families like the Roosevelts. In return, they brought the islanders the staples that were not produced locally. One of Cruger's handbills advertised Albany white pine, pork, codfish, Madeira, and mules from Puerto Rico. Cruger was not a regular slave-trader, though in 1771 he did auction three hundred "first class slaves...just in from Africa." In Virgin Islands dialect today, the phrase "the City," when used without qualification, means New York, or America (the two are assumed to be interchangeable). There was no United States when Hamilton was Cruger's clerk, but Cruger's hometown had already become a pivot for the Virgin Islands' dealings with North America, and the world.
The third factor in Hamilton's change of fortune was the impression his abilities made on these men. In the fall of 1771, Cruger left St. Croix for four months on account of bad health, leaving his fourteen-year-old clerk to mind the store. In the letters he sent out during this period, Hamilton passed judgment on loads of flour ("realy very bad"), apples ("in every respect very indifferent"...
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