Their captain, later described by another officer as “a mere stripling, small, slender, almost delicate … with a cocked hat pulled down over his eyes,” danced from gun to gun, occasionally patting a barrel “as if it were a favorite horse.” Captain Alexander Hamilton, the son of a wandering Scottish wastrel and a sugar islands harlot jailed for adultery, had escaped a dreary St. Croix boyhood when benefactors sent him to New York for an education. “I wish there was a war,” Hamilton had written as an ambitious teenager. Now he had his wish.
