Hamilton, by contrast [to the other Founding Fathers], was a penniless immigrant from the West Indies; like so many New Yorkers, he had come here from elsewhere, seeking his fortune.
And he wasn’t just penniless. “My birth,” as he delicately put it, “is the subject of the most humiliating criticism” — for he was, in John Adams’s acidulous taunt, “the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar.” Nevertheless, as a prime exemplar of that American opportunity and enterprise he so fervently promoted, he rose to be the country’s second most powerful man. As Ron Chernow puts it in his indispensable biography, he served in effect as George Washington’s prime minister and head of government, directing his administration’s policy and molding the enduring institutions it created.
It’s hard to exaggerate the moral squalor of the future Treasury secretary’s childhood. A much older man, flashy and feckless, wed his mother when she was 16 for her beauty and “snug fortune,” as Hamilton called it; she abandoned him and their baby five years later. The outraged husband had her jailed in St. Croix, as its law allowed, for purportedly “whoring with everyone.” Instead of returning to him chastened, as he expected, she fled, soon settling on the tiny British island of Nevis with James Hamilton, a dashing younger son of a Scottish laird. She bore two more sons, James, Jr. and, on January 11, 1755, Alexander. The couple lived as man and wife; though her husband finally got a divorce from her in 1759, its terms forbade her remarriage.
The black sheep of a well-off family, James Hamilton had come to the sugar isles in search of riches like so many hard-up adventurers, but he had “too much pride and too large a portion of indolence,” Hamilton recalled much later, so his “affairs at a very early day went to wreck” and he sank into the crowd of failures and lowlifes who overran the West Indies. When Hamilton was ten, James decamped, drifting until he washed up, old and dying, near the southern Caribbean speck where Defoe shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe.
Hamilton’s intelligent, enterprising mother, who’d returned to St. Croix, started a grocery store. But when Hamilton was 12, one of the tropical fevers that plagued European fortune hunters felled her, and a sea of troubles engulfed her two boys. The cousin who took them in killed himself two years later, leaving the boys destitute; their mother’s little estate — nine slaves, chiefly — had gone to her one legitimate son, who had swooped down to snatch it away from her two “obscene children.” All Hamilton had left were her 34 books, including the Plutarch and Pope that had been his childhood companions, which his cousin had kindly bought for him in the auction of her household effects.
Then, like Mr. Brownlow rescuing Oliver Twist from Fagin, fairy-tale magic descended. A rich St. Croix merchant, Thomas Stevens, took Hamilton into his nurturing household, where he became lifelong friends with Stevens’s son Ned, a year older and remarkably similar in tastes and talents. And why did Stevens take in Alexander, leaving his brother James, Jr. to become a carpenter’s apprentice? Years later, when Secretary of State Timothy Pickering first met Ned Stevens, he was flabbergasted by his “extraordinary similitude” to Hamilton. “I thought they must be brothers,” Pickering wrote — an observation that one of Ned’s relatives later told him “had been made a thousand times.” So was Hamilton doubly illegitimate? Pickering thought so; perhaps someday the DNA sleuths will say for sure.
Some months before the Stevenses took him in, Hamilton, without realizing it, had already linked up to the great world beyond his little island. Though remote, St. Croix was integral to the eighteenth century’s economic dynamo, the triangle trade that (to oversimplify) brought slaves from Africa to work the West Indian sugar estates, carried the sugar and molasses to New England to make into rum, and returned to Africa to trade rum for more slaves, generally with a stop in England to sell sugar and rum for manufactures. At 13, Hamilton had begun clerking for the island outpost of Beekman and Cruger, a New York trading firm owned by two of the city’s great Dutch mercantile families, key players in that business for generations. As he took his modest place in world commerce, he also launched himself onto a tributary that flowed into the heart of Gotham’s mainstream.
His stint at Beekman and Cruger, he later told his son John, was “the most useful part of his education,” teaching him the facts of global economic life, from commodity prices, cash flow, and exchange rates to bill collecting and smuggling. When his boss, Nicholas Cruger, fell ill and went home to Gotham (where his uncle was mayor), he left his luminously gifted 16-year-old clerk in charge. The adolescent took to management with gusto: his vivid letter to young Cruger about how he fattened up a cargo of starving mules from the firm’s sloop Thunderbolt is a marvel of self-confident energy.
On his countinghouse stool, Hamilton dreamt big. At 14, he wrote to Ned Stevens, in his earliest surviving letter, “my Ambition is 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. . . . I mean to prepare the way for futurity. . . . [I] may be jusly said to Build Castles in the Air . . . , yet Neddy we have seen such Schemes successful when the Projector is Constant I shall Conclude saying I wish there was a War.”
But the upheaval that first exalted Hamilton’s station wasn’t a war; it was a hurricane that ripped through St. Croix in August 1772. When Hamilton’s muscular account of the storm’s ferocity, its aftermath of death and desolation, and his own fears and religious hopes appeared in the local newspaper, its brio amazed readers, some of whom, led by Hamilton’s employers and a kindly clergyman, raised funds to send the teenage prodigy off to college in North America. When Princeton declined to let him plow through its B.A. requirements as fast as he could rather than take the usual three years, the young-man-in-a-hurry enrolled instead at King’s College (renamed Columbia after the Revolution) in late 1773 or early 1774 and became a Manhattanite.
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