Alexander Hamilton (9 page)

To understand this transitional moment in Hamilton’s life, we must introduce yet another figure into the convoluted saga of his early years: his first cousin Ann Lytton Venton, later Ann Mitchell. So incalculable was Hamilton’s debt to her that on the eve of his duel with Burr, as he contemplated his life, he instructed his wife: “Mrs. Mitchell is the person in the world to whom as a friend I am under the greatest obligations. I have [not] hitherto done my [duty] to her.”
¹⁷
Why this guiltridden homage to a figure who has lingered in the historical shadows?

Twelve years older than Hamilton, Ann Lytton Venton was the oldest daughter of Rachel’s sister, Ann. Like so many figures in Hamilton’s family, she led a checkered life. In her early teens, she married a poor Christiansted grocer, Thomas Hallwood, and promptly had a son. After one year of marriage, Hallwood died. In 1759, Ann married the somewhat more prosperous John Kirwan Venton, who bought a small sugar estate. By 1762, his business had failed, and their home and effects were seized by creditors. The couple decamped to New York, leaving an infant daughter with Ann’s parents. The Ventons evidently faltered in New York and were drawn back to St. Croix in 1770 after the suicide of Ann’s brother Peter and the death of her father, James Lytton. If John Kirwan Venton hoped to lay hands on Ann’s inheritance, he was foiled by the foresight of his father-in-law, who left two-sevenths of his estate to Ann but specifically excluded Venton from the money, calling him “unfortunate in his conduct.”

At this point, the Venton marriage dissolved in acrimony, with Ann and her daughter occupying Peter’s house in Christiansted while John took refuge in Frederiksted. After the hurricane, John Venton filed for bankruptcy again and posted a notice to his creditors. No less mean-spirited than Johann Michael Lavien, Venton also placed the following threatening ad in the
Gazette
of May 15, 1773: “JOHN KIRWAN VENTON forbids all masters of vessels from carrying Ann Venton, or her daughter Ann Lytton Venton off this island.”
¹⁸
Defying this warning, Ann Venton and her daughter fled to New York, a brave act that would have reminded Hamilton of his mother flouting the odious Lavien. To secure her inheritance, Ann entrusted the eighteen-year-old Hamilton with a power of attorney that allowed him to collect payments from her father’s estate due on May 3 and 26 and June 3, 1773. It may well have been after receipt of this money that he boarded a vessel bound for Boston, leaving the West Indies forever. Perhaps in gratitude for his assistance or else plain affection for her exceedingly bright cousin, Ann Lytton Venton repaid Hamilton by becoming a benefactor—quite likely the
principal
benefactor—of his voyage to North America and subsequent education. If so, Hamilton repaid the favor by aiding Ann financially in future years. He always felt under a more compelling obligation to her than to anyone else from his early years, and we may know only a fraction of the vital services that she rendered him.

What a world of scarred emotion and secret grief Alexander Hamilton bore with him on the boat to Boston. He took his unhappy boyhood, tucked it away in a mental closet, and never opened the door again. Beside the horrid memories, this young dynamo simply was not cut out for the drowsy, slow-paced life of slave owners on a tropical island, and he never evinced the least nostalgia for his West Indian boyhood or voiced any desire to return. He wrote two years later, “Men are generally too much attached to their native countries to leave it and dissolve all their connexions, unless they are driven to it by necessity.”
¹⁹
He chose a psychological strategy adopted by many orphans and immigrants: he decided to cut himself off from his past and forge a new identity. He would find a home where he would be accepted for what he did, not for who he was, and where he would no longer labor in the shadow of illegitimacy. His relentless drive, his wretched feelings of shame and degradation, and his precocious self-sufficiency combined to produce a young man with an insatiable craving for success. As a student of history, he knew the mutability of human fortune and later observed, “The changes in the human condition are uncertain and frequent. Many, on whom fortune has bestowed her favours, may trace their family to a more unprosperous station; and many who are now in obscurity, may look back upon the affluence and exalted rank of their ancestors.”
²⁰
He would be the former, his father no less unmistakably the latter.

As Alexander sailed north toward spectacular adventures, his father sank ever deeper into incurable poverty. Documents located in St. Vincent reveal that James Hamilton had wandered to the southern end of the Caribbean, almost to the coast of South America. On the tiny, secluded island of Bequia, located just south of St. Vincent, he had entered into a program set up by the British Crown to encourage impoverished settlers. Bequia is the northernmost of the Grenadine Islands, an isolated spot, seven square miles in size, of soft hills, jagged cliffs, and sandy beaches. On March 14, 1774, James Hamilton signed a contract that gave him twenty-five acres of free woodland property along the shore of Southeast Bay. In this lovely but menacing place, a stronghold of indigenous black and yellow Caribs and runaway slaves, James Hamilton chose a spot on public land reserved for a future fortification. Bequia was the sort of distant, godforsaken place that could have attracted only somebody who had exhausted all other options. The deed for James Hamilton’s land purchase tells its own tacit tale of woe; it made clear that his twenty-five acres were “not adapted for sugar plantations” and had been set aside “for the accommodations of poor settlers.”
²¹
Under the grant, James Hamilton didn’t have to pay a penny for the first four years but had to stay on the island for at least one year. A 1776 survey shows him sharing seventy acres with a man named Simple, and they are the only two people listed on the roster of poor residents. There must have been days when it was hard for James to believe that he was the fourth son of a Scottish laird and had grown up in a fogbound castle. The descent of his life had been as stunning and irrevocable as the rise of his son in America was to seem almost blessedly inevitable.
THREE

lexander Hamilton never needed to worry about leading a tedious, uneventful life. Drama shadowed his footsteps. When his ship caught fire during his three-week voyage to North America, crew members scrambled down ropes to the sea and scooped up seawater in buckets, extinguishing the blaze with some difficulty. The charred vessel managed to sail into Boston Harbor intact, and Hamilton proceeded straight to New York. This was a mandatory stop, since he had to pick up his allowance at Kortright and Company, which managed the subscription fund that financed his education. The New York firm owned seven vessels that shuttled between New York and the West Indies and employed Kortright and Cruger as its St. Croix representative. Periodically, the subscription fund was replenished by sugar barrels sent from St. Croix, with Hamilton pocketing a percentage of the proceeds from each shipment. Hence, the education of this future abolitionist was partly underwritten by sugarcane harvested by slaves.

When he came to New York, Hamilton was fortified with introductory letters from Hugh Knox but otherwise did not know a soul except Edward Stevens. Yet this young man from the tropics, who had probably never worn an overcoat or experienced a change of seasons, did not seem handicapped by his past and never struck people as a provincial bumpkin. He seemed to vault over the high hurdles of social status with ease. Smart, handsome, and outgoing, he marched with an erect military carriage, thrusting out his chest in an assertive manner. He had all the magnetic power of a mysterious foreigner and soon made his first friend: a fashionable tailor with the splendid name of Hercules Mulligan, whose brother was a junior partner at Kortright and Company. Born in Ireland in 1740, the colorful, garrulous Mulligan was one of the few tradesmen Hamilton ever befriended. He had a shop and home on Water Street, and Hamilton may have boarded with him briefly. With a sizable dollop of Irish blarney, Mulligan took full credit for introducing Hamilton into New York society: “Mr. H. used in the evenings to sit with my family and my brother’s family and write doggerel rhymes for their amusement; he was always amiable and cheerful and extremely attentive to his books.”
¹
These soirees may have featured some subversive political content, for Hercules Mulligan had reputedly been one of the “Liberty Boys” involved in a skirmish with British soldiers on Golden Hill (John Street) six weeks before frightened British troops gunned down fractious colonists in the 1770 Boston Massacre. Later, during the British occupation of wartime New York, Mulligan was to dabble in freelance espionage for George Washington, discreetly pumping his foppish clients, mostly Tories and British officers, for strategic information as he taped their measurements.

Hamilton’s early itinerary in America closely mirrored the connections of Hugh Knox. Through Knox, he came to know two of New York’s most eminent Presbyterian clergymen: Knox’s old mentor, Dr. John Rodgers—an imposing figure who strutted grandly down Wall Street en route to church, grasping a gold-headed cane and nodding to well-wishers—and the Reverend John M. Mason, whose son would end up attempting an authorized biography of Hamilton. Through another batch of Knox introductory letters, Hamilton ended up studying at a well-regarded preparatory school across the Hudson River, the Elizabethtown Academy. Like all autodidacts, Hamilton had some glaring deficiencies to correct and required cram courses in Latin, Greek, and advanced math to qualify for college.

Elizabethtown, New Jersey—today plain Elizabeth—was chartered by George II and ranked as the colony’s oldest English community. It was a small, idyllic village graced with orchards, two churches, a stone bridge arching over the Elizabeth River, and windmills dispersed among the salt meadows outside of town. Located on the grounds of the Presbyterian church, the Elizabethtown Academy occupied a twostory building topped by a cupola. Its headmaster, Francis Barber, was a recent graduate of the College of New Jersey (henceforth called Princeton, its much later name) and was only five years older than Hamilton. He was a dashing figure, with a high forehead, heavy eyebrows, and a small, prim mouth. Steeped in the classics and with reform-minded political sympathies, he was in many ways an ideal preceptor for Hamilton. He would see combat duty on the patriotic side during the Revolution and would find himself at Yorktown, in a startling inversion, under the direct command of his West Indian pupil.

Because the Elizabethtown Academy supplied many students to Princeton, we can deduce something about Hamilton’s preparatory studies from that college’s requirements. Princeton applicants had to know Virgil, Cicero’s orations, and Latin grammar and also had to be “so well acquainted with the Greek as to render any part of the four Evangelists in that language into Latin or English.”
²
Never tentative about tackling new things and buoyed by a preternatural self-confidence, Hamilton proved a fantastically quick study. He often worked past midnight, curled up in his blanket, then awoke at dawn and paced the nearby burial ground, mumbling to himself as he memorized his lessons. (Hamilton’s lifelong habit of talking sotto voce while pacing lent him an air of either inspiration or madness.) A copious note taker, he left behind, in a minute hand, an exercise book in which he jotted down passages from the
Iliad
in Greek, took extensive notes on geography and history, and compiled detailed chapter synopses from the books of Genesis and Revelation. As if wanting to pack every spare moment with achievement, he also found time to craft poetry and wrote the prologue and epilogue of an unspecified play performed by a local detachment of British soldiers.

Hamilton’s attendance at the Elizabethtown Academy brought him into the immediate vicinity of the younger Aaron Burr, who had attended the same school several years earlier. Burr’s brother-in-law, jurist Tapping Reeve, sat on the academy’s board of visitors and had been a vital force behind the school’s creation. By an extraordinary coincidence, Burr spent the summer of 1773 in Elizabethtown, right around the time Hamilton arrived. Hamilton might have seen this handsome, genial young man sauntering down the street, gliding by in a boat along the town’s many inlets, or hunting in the nearby woods. As we shall see, they probably also met in the drawing rooms of mutual friends.

Hamilton always displayed an unusual capacity for impressing older, influential men, and he gained his social footing in Elizabethtown with surpassing speed, crossing over an invisible divide into a privileged, patrician world in a way that would have been impossible in St. Croix. Thanks to the letters from Hugh Knox, he had instant access to men at the pinnacle of colonial society in New Jersey. He met William Livingston and Elias Boudinot, well-heeled lawyers and luminaries in the Presbyterian political world, who exposed him to the heterodox political currents of the day. They were both associated with the Whigs, who sought to curb royal power, boost parliamentary influence, and preserve civil liberties.

Unquestionably the most vivid figure in Hamilton’s new life was fifty-year-old Livingston, a born crusader, who had abandoned a contentious career in New York politics to assume the sedate life of a New Jersey country squire. As work proceeded on Liberty Hall, his 120-acre estate, Livingston took temporary quarters in town, and Hamilton may have lodged with him during this interlude. Livingston was the sort of contradictory figure that always enchanted the young Hamilton. A blueblooded rebel and scion of a powerful Hudson River clan, Livingston had spurned an easy life to write romantic poetry, crank out polemical essays, and plunge into controversial causes. Tall and lanky, nicknamed “the whipping post,” the voluble Livingston tilted lances with royal authorities with such self-righteous glee that one Tory newspaper anointed him “the Don Quixote of the Jerseys.”
³