Alexander Hamilton (8 page)

It is hard to grasp Hamilton’s later politics without contemplating the raw cruelty that he witnessed as a boy and that later deprived him of the hopefulness so contagious in the American milieu. On the most obvious level, the slave trade of St. Croix generated a permanent detestation of the system and resulted in his later abolitionist efforts. But something deeper may have seeped into his consciousness. In this hierarchical world, skittish planters lived in constant dread of slave revolts and fortified their garrison state to avert them. Even when he left for America, Hamilton carried a heavy dread of anarchy and disorder that always struggled with his no less active love of liberty. Perhaps the true legacy of his boyhood was an equivocal one: he came to detest the tyranny embodied by the planters and their authoritarian rule, while also fearing the potential uprisings of the disaffected slaves. The twin specters of despotism and anarchy were to haunt him for the rest of his life.

Like Ben Franklin, Hamilton was mostly self-taught and probably snatched every spare moment to read. The young clerk aimed to be a man of letters. He may already have had a premonition that his facility with words would someday free him from his humble berth and place him on a par with the most powerful men of his age. The West Indies boasted few stores that sold books, which had to be ordered by special subscription. For that reason, it must have been a godsend to the culturestarved Hamilton when the
Royal Danish American Gazette
launched publication in 1770. The paper had a pronounced Anglophile slant, reflecting the fact that King Christian VII of Denmark was both first cousin and brother-in-law to King George III of England. Each issue carried reverential excerpts from parliamentary debates in London, showcasing William Pitt the Elder and other distinguished orators, and retailed gossipy, fawning snippets about the royal household.

Having a potential place to publish, Hamilton began to scribble poetry. Once his verbal fountain began to flow, it became a geyser that never ceased. The refined wit and pithy maxims of Alexander Pope mesmerized the young clerk, and just as Pope wrote youthful imitations of the classical poets so Hamilton penned imitations of Pope. On April 6, 1771, he published a pair of poems in the
Gazette
that he introduced with a diffident note to the editor: “Sir, I am a youth about seventeen, and consequently such an attempt as this must be presumptuous; but if, upon perusal, you think the following piece worthy of a place in your paper, by inserting it you’ll much oblige Your obedient servant, A. H.” The two amorous poems that follow are schizophrenic in their contrasting visions of love. In the first, the dreamy poet steals upon his virgin love, who is reclining by a brook as “lambkins” gambol around her. He kneels and awakens her with an ecstatic kiss before sweeping her up in his arms and carrying her off to marital bliss, intoning, “Believe me love is doubly sweet / In wedlock’s holy bands.”
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In the next poem, Hamilton has suddenly metamorphosed into a jaded rake, who begins with a shocking, Swiftian opening line: “Celia’s an artful little slut.” This launches a portrait of a manipulative, feline woman that concludes:

So, stroking puss’s velvet paws,
How well the jade conceals her claws And purrs; but if at last
You hap to squeeze her somewhat hard She spits—her back up—
prenez garde;
Good faith she has you fast.

The first poem seems to have been composed by a sheltered adolescent with an idealized view of women and the second by a world-weary young philanderer who has already tasted many amorous sweets and shed any illusions about female virtue. In fact, this apparent attraction to two opposite types of women—the pure and angelic versus the earthy and flirtatious—ran straight through Hamilton’s life, a contradiction he never resolved and that was to lead to scandalous consequences.

The next year, Hamilton published two more poems in the paper, now recreating himself as a somber religious poet. The change in heart can almost certainly be attributed to the advent in St. Croix of a Presbyterian minister named Hugh Knox. Born in northern Ireland of Scottish ancestry, the handsome young Knox migrated to America and became a schoolteacher in Delaware. As a raffish young man, he exhibited a lukewarm piety until a strange incident transformed his life. One Saturday at a local tavern where he was a regular, Knox amused his tipsy companions with a mocking imitation of a sermon delivered by his patron, the Reverend John Rodgers. Afterward, Knox sat down, shaken by his own impiety but also moved by the sermon that still reverberated in his mind. He decided to study divinity at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) under its president, Aaron Burr, an eminent divine and father of the man who became Hamilton’s nemesis. It was almost certainly from Knox’s lips that Alexander Hamilton first heard the name of Aaron Burr.

Ordained by Burr in 1755, Knox decided to propagate the gospel and was sent to Saba in the Dutch West Indies. This tiny island near Nevis measured five square miles, had no beaches, and was solitary enough to try the fortitude of the most determined missionary. Rough seas girded Saba’s rocky shores, making it hazardous for ships to land there. As the sole clergyman, Knox resided in a settlement known as the Bottom, sunk in the elevated crater of an extinct volcano; it could be reached only by climbing up a stony path. Knox left a bleak picture of the heedless sinners he was assigned to save. “Young fellows and married men, not only without any symptoms of serious religion ...but keepers of negro wenches...rakes, night rioters, drunkards, gamesters, Sabbath breakers, church neglecters, common swearers, unjust dealers etc.”
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An erudite man with a classical education, Knox was starved for both intellectual companionship and money. In 1771, he visited St. Croix and was received warmly by the local Presbyterians, who enticed him to move there. In May 1772, he became pastor at the Scotch Presbyterian church at a salary considerably beyond what he had earned inside his old crater.

After the lonely years in Saba, the forty-five-year-old Knox felt rejuvenated in St. Croix. Humane and tolerant, politically liberal (he was to fervently support American independence), opposed to slavery (though he owned some slaves), and later author of several volumes of sermons, he held a number of views that would have attracted Hamilton. In his earliest surviving letter, he defended his confirmed belief that illegitimate children should be baptized and argued that clergymen should rescue them from their parents instead of rejecting them. He departed from a strict Calvinist belief in predestination. Instead of a darkly punitive God, Knox favored a sunny, fair-minded one. He also saw human nature as insatiably curious and reserved his highest praise for minds that created “
schemes
or
systems
of truth.”
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Then an illegitimate young clerk with an uncommon knack for systematic thinking stepped into his life. Knox must have marveled at his tremendous luck in discovering Hamilton. We do not know exactly how they met, but Knox threw open his library to this prodigious youth, encouraged him to write verse, and prodded him toward scholarship. An avuncular man with a droll wit, Knox worried that Hamilton was too driven and prone to overwork, too eager to compensate for lost time—a failing, if it was one, that he never outgrew. In later years, Knox liked to remind Hamilton that he had been “rather delicate & frail,” with an “ambition to excel,” and had tended to “strain every nerve” to be the very best at what he was doing.
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Knox had an accurate intuition that this exceptional adolescent was fated to accomplish great deeds, although he later confessed that Alexander Hamilton had outstripped even his loftiest expectations.

Among his other gifts, the versatile Hugh Knox was a self-taught doctor and apothecary and a part-time journalist who occasionally filled in for the editor of the
Royal Danish American Gazette.
It may have been at the newspaper office, not at the church, that he first ran into Hamilton. That Knox moonlighted as a journalist proved highly consequential for Hamilton when a massive hurricane tore through St. Croix on the night of August 31, 1772, and carved a wide swath of destruction through nearby islands.

By all accounts, the storm struck with unprecedented fury, the
Gazette
reporting that it was the “most dreadful hurricane known in the memory of man.” Starting at sundown, the gales blew “like great guns, for about six hours, save for half an hour’s intermission....The face of this once beautiful island is now so calamitous and disfigured, as it would beggar all description.”
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The tremendous winds uprooted tall trees, smashed homes to splinters, and swept up boats in foaming billows and flung them far inland. Detailed reports of the storm in Nevis, where the destruction was comparable—huge sugar barrels were tossed four hundred yards, furniture landed two miles away—confirm its terrifying power. Nevis had also been struck by a severe earthquake that afternoon, and it seems probable that Nevis, St. Kitts, St. Croix, and neighboring islands were deluged by a tidal wave up to fifteen feet high. The devastation was so widespread that an appeal for food was launched in the North American colonies to avert an anticipated famine.

On September 6, Hugh Knox gathered the jittery faithful at his church and delivered a consoling sermon that was published in pamphlet form some weeks later. Hamilton must have attended and been inspired by Knox’s homily, for he went home and composed a long, feverish letter to his father, trying to convey the hurricane’s horror. (It is noteworthy that Hamilton was still in touch with his father more than six years after the latter’s departure from St. Croix. That James Hamilton resided outside the storm area suggests that he was in the southern Caribbean, possibly Grenada or Tobago.) In his melodramatic description of the hurricane, one sees the young Hamilton glorying in his verbal powers. He must have shown the letter to Knox, who persuaded him to publish it in the
Royal Danish American Gazette,
where it appeared on October 3. The prefatory note to the piece, presumably written by Knox, explained: “The following letter was written the week after the late hurricane, 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.” Lest anyone suspect that an unfeeling Hamilton was capitalizing on mass misfortune, Knox noted that the anonymous author had at first declined to publish it—perhaps the last time in Alexander Hamilton’s life that he would prove bashful or hesitant about publication.

Hamilton’s famous letter about the storm astounds the reader for two reasons. For all its bombastic excesses, it does seem wondrous that a seventeen-year-old selfeducated clerk could write with such verve and gusto. Clearly, Hamilton was highly literate and already had a considerable fund of verbal riches: “It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place. The roaring of the sea and wind, fiery meteors flying about it [
sic
] 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.”

But the description was also notable for the way Hamilton viewed the hurricane as a divine rebuke to human vanity and pomposity. In what sounded like a cross between a tragic soliloquy and a fire-and-brimstone sermon, he exhorted his fellow mortals:

Where now, oh! vile worm, is all thy boasted fortitude and resolution? What is become of thine arrogance and self sufficiency?...Death comes rushing on in triumph, veiled in a mantle of tenfold darkness. His unrelenting scythe, pointed and ready for the stroke . . . See thy wretched helpless state and learn to know thyself....Despise thyself and adore thy God....O ye who revel in affluence see the afflictions of humanity and bestow your superfluity to ease them....Succour the miserable and lay up a treasure in heaven.
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Gloomy thoughts for a teenage boy, even in the aftermath of a lethal hurricane. The dark spirit of the storm that he summons up, his apocalyptic sense of universal tumult and disorder, bespeak a somber view of the cosmos. He also shows a strain of youthful idealism as he admonishes the rich to share their wealth.

Hamilton did not know it, but he had just written his way out of poverty. This natural calamity was to prove his salvation. His hurricane letter generated such a sensation—even the island’s governor inquired after the young author’s identity— that a subscription fund was taken up by local businessmen to send this promising youth to North America to be educated. This generosity was all the more remarkable given the island’s dismal state. The hurricane had flattened dwellings, shredded sugarcane, destroyed refineries, and threatened St. Croix with prolonged economic hardship. It would take many months, maybe years, for the island to recover.

The chief sponsor of the subscription fund was likely the good-hearted Hugh Knox, who later told Hamilton, “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.”
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The chief donors were probably Hamilton’s past and present bosses—Nicholas Cruger, Cornelius Kortright, and David Beekman—plus his guardian, Thomas Stevens, and his first cousin, Ann Lytton Venton. Possibly aware of Hamilton’s early (indeed, abiding) interest in medicine, the business community may have hoped to train a doctor who would return and treat the many tropical diseases endemic to the island. Doctors were perpetually scarce in the Caribbean, and Edward Stevens was already in New York preparing for such a career.

In the standard telling of his life, Hamilton boards a ship in October 1772 and sails off to North America forever. Yet a close study of the
Royal Danish American Gazette
and other documents raises questions about this usual chronology. Hamilton may have been the “Juvenis” who published a poem, “The Melancholy Hour,” in the
Gazette
of October 11, 1772. This brooding work—“Why hangs this gloomy damp upon my mind / Why heaves my bosom with the struggling sigh”—reprises the theme of the hurricane as heavenly retribution upon a fallen world. On October 17, the
Gazette
ran an unsigned hymn in imitation of Pope that incontestably came from Hamilton’s pen and was later cherished by his wife as proof of her husband’s religious devotion. Entitled “The Soul Ascending into Bliss,” it is a lovely, mystical meditation in which Hamilton envisions his soul soaring heavenward. “Hark! Hark! A voice from yonder sky / Methinks I hear my Saviour cry....I come oh Lord, I mount, I fly / On rapid wings I cleave the sky.” There is a third poem by Hamilton that has been overlooked and that appeared in the
Gazette
of February 3, 1773, under the heading: “Christiansted. A Character. By A. H.” In this short, disillusioned verse, Hamilton evokes a sharp-witted fellow named Eugenio who manages inadvertently to antagonize all of his friends. The poem concludes: “Wit not well govern’d rankles into vice / He to his Jest his Friend will sacrifice!”
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The discovery of this poem, possibly influenced by an event in the life of Molière, bolsters the supposition that Hamilton spent the winter of 1772–1773 in St. Croix, although he could have mailed Hugh Knox the verse from North America.