|
Some two hundred years ago there was
born on Nevis in the British islands a somewhat
 small, frail and intense
boy with blue eyes and red hair. He was the son of an impecunious third
son of a Scottish Laird, and of Rachel Lavien. The date of his birth is
now set at 1755 by newly discovered Danish documents. This makes Alexander
Hamilton two years older than was thought.
His mother, Rachel, had been married some
years before in St. Croix at Estate Grange to a
much older and cruel husband, John Michael Lavien, who owned a small sugar
plantation here. After five years of marriage and the bearing of one son
to Lavien, Rachel left him when she was 21. With her mother she moved
back to her old home on Nevis where she met James Hamilton. The two fell
in love and moved to St. Kitts to live together. Lavien refused Rachel a
divorce.
Times were bad financially in parts of the
Caribbean and James Hamilton found it hard to make a living for his
family. He was sent to St. Croix on a legal mission and Rachel came with him, bringing their two sons.
After some months, Hamilton
returned to the British islands and Rachel stayed on here with relatives,
opening a small shop where the boy Alexander helped-out.
 When Alexander was eleven he was recognized
as being unusually precocious despite lack of much schooling, and he was
given work by a hardware merchant, Nicholas Cruger, in his store.
Meanwhile, Lavien had divorced Rachel but
Danish law forbade her to remarry. She died on St. Croix when Alexander was thirteen and her gravestone can be visited today at
Estate Grange. All her property was claimed by her divorced husband.
Alexander worked hard and read incessantly.
He taught himself French, which came in handy later when as aide-de-camp
to George Washington he became friends with Generals Lafayette and
Rochambeau.
St. Croix was devastated by a major hurricane which destroyed or damaged some 500
buildings in 1772 and Alexander wrote a long and vivid letter to his
father on St. Vincent island
describing the horror. The letter was published in the Royal
Danish-American Gazette, and so impressed friends and others that they
scraped together enough money to send him on his way to school in the
British Colonies in North America.
Young Hamilton left in mid-summer for
Boston on the ship 'Thunderbolt" enroute for New York. On the way the
ship caught fire and he helped to battle it for twenty-four hours until it
was under control. On his arrival, Alexander went to a boarding school
for one year and then entered the already famous King's College (now
Columbia University) which at the time had a faculty of only three
persons.
 In a few short years the ambitious boy
became a leader in the Revolution and played a major part in the formation
of the original thirteen United States of which he became the first
Secretary of the Treasury.
Following are excerpts from the long
description of the hurricane which gave Alexander Hamilton his start
toward fame. |
It began about dusk, at North, and raged
very violently till ten o'clock. Then ensued a sudden and unexpected
interval, which lasted about an hour. Meanwhile, the wind was shifting
round to the South West point, from whence it returned with redoubled
fury and continued so till near three o'clock in the morning. Good God!
what horror and destruction - it's impossible for me to describe - or you
to form any idea of it. It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature
was taking place. The roaring of the sea and wind-fiery meteors flying
about in the air - the prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning -
the crash of the falling houses - and the earpiercing shrieks of the
distressed, were sufficient to strike astonishment into Angels. A great
part of the buildings throughout the Island are leveled to the ground -
almost all the rest was very shattered - several persons killed and
numbers utterly ruined - whole families running about the streets
unknowing where to find a place of shelter - the sick exposed to the
keenness of water and air - without a bed to lie upon - or a dry covering
to their bodies - our harbour is entirely bare. In a word, misery in all
its most hideous shapes spread over the whole face of the country - a
strong smell of gunpowder added somewhat to the terrors of the night; and
it was observed that the rain was surprisingly salt. Indeed, the water is
so brackish and full of sulphur that there is hardly any drinking it.