Alexander Hamilton: The Founding Father's Boyhood on the Island of St. Croix

By Robert Hoffman

Hamilton lived a troubled but remarkable youth in what was then the Danish West Indies. His mother Rachel, who died when he was in his early teens, was a brilliant and beautiful woman with a controversial past. At about 17, the boy was sent to the American Colonies for his education. The rest is, literally, history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Hoffman
• Release date: Nov 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9780615484778

Book preview

Alexander Hamilton:

The Founding Father's Boyhood on St. Croix

Robert Hoffman

Copyright © 2009 by Robert Hoffman

All rights reserved

Published by Southern Cross Publications

2726 Gables Drive

Eustis, FL 32726

[e-mail]

Second edition: 2022

Published in the United States of America

No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose without the express written consent of the author, his heirs or estate.

Other books by the author:

Annals of the Big Island: An Unauthorized Portrait of St. Croix

Sir Allen & Me: An Insider’s Look

at R. Allen Stanford and the Island of Antigua

For more information:

[e-mail]

Contents

Other books by the Author

Introduction

1: Rachel Redux

2: Reading and Writing

3: The Preacher

4: A Day in the Life

5: Looking for America

Epilogue

A Brief History

Bibliography

Introduction

History, especially biographical history, is to a certain degree guesswork. Famous people are seldom famous as children, and exhaustive records are not kept of the details of a youngster like Alexander Hamilton as they might be on hereditary royalty. Tracing the youth of most celebrated people involves detective work and, perforce, assumptions from working with scant clues and maybe a few eyewitness accounts that survive the years. Facts are collected and conclusions reached, often dressed up a little with the biographer’s creative colorings.

Alexander Hamilton is an especially difficult historical figure. He was born and raised in two foreign lands – Nevis (British) and St. Croix (Danish). Moreover, both were small insular colonies. The bureaucrats posted to keep records in these places were not, it can be presumed, the best and brightest, at least not during the misty 18th century Hamilton grew up in. Even the Founder’s birth date is in dispute. Hamilton (upon his arrival in the American Colonies) is said to have claimed he was born in 1757, but most historians dismiss this as Hamilton’s attempt to portray himself as even more of a child prodigy than he was. Maybe. But if 1757 is wrong, it is still the date Hamilton himself thought correct throughout his life. Danish court records from St. Croix (in evidence introduced after his mother died intestate) show his birth date as 1755, and this has become the accepted, or at any rate the most cited, year of his birth.

As far back as 1952, a United States Army historian, Harold Larsen, who had recently served as Special Assistant to the Governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands, penned an essay for the William and Mary Quarterly in which he despaired that the conflation of fact and legend about Hamilton’s youth had become almost irretrievably muddled. Even a century and a half after his death in 1804, Larsen wrote, current biographers still tell much the same strange story of his early years, one in which truth and legend are hopelessly intermingled. Old errors continue to be repeated, and new ones added. In the absence of definite data, the reader is frequently faced with sheer speculation as to Hamilton’s West Indian background.

Hamilton was no help either. He was remarkably taciturn about his youth, and his political rivals took every opportunity to make hay of his illegitimate birth and his lowly former status as a mere clerk in a merchant house. After all, most of the Founders were patricians – aristocrats of means and men of extensive formal education: Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Madison, Monroe, Jay and so on. Hamilton was poor, relatively unschooled and an alien to boot. John Adams called him a bastard brat of a Scottish peddler. Yet Hamilton was superior in pure intellectual muscle to most of his fellow revolutionaries and all of his political detractors.

Like many of Hamilton’s early biographers, his son John Church Hamilton tried to burnish away the patina of scandal on his father’s personal life and provenance in his 1857 History of the Republic of the United States of America, going so far as to claim that Hamilton was not a bastard at all but of legitimate birth. This was, for all the doubt and mysteries about Hamilton’s youth, a brazen bit of tale-weaving. Later historians used the son’s outlandish claim to adduce the dubiousness of most of the rest of his book, including John’s quoting his father’s description of Alexander’s mother as a woman of exceeding intelligence and vaunted morals. Thus Rachel Faucette Lavien has been handled rudely by almost