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Mephistopheles,
Noah Webster contended that Hamilton’s “ambition, pride, and overbearing temper” had destined him “to be the evil genius of this country.”
this brilliant figure, to Europeans the most interesting in the early history of the Republic,
Theodore Roosevelt took up the cudgels and declared Hamilton “the most brilliant American statesman who ever lived, possessing the loftiest and keenest intellect of his time.”7
abolitionist,
Bank of New York founder,
patron saint of the New-York Evening Post,
anticipating
In 1727, the minister of a local Anglican church, aching for some glimmer of spirituality, regretted that the slaves were inclined to “laziness, stealing, stubbornness, murmuring, treachery, lying, drunkenness and the like.” But he reserved his most scathing strictures for a rowdy white populace composed of “whole shiploads of pickpockets, whores, rogues, vagrants, thieves, sodomites, and other filth and cutthroats of society.”
Divorce
he was comfortably bilingual and later was more at ease in French than Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and other American diplomats who had spent years struggling to master the tongue in Paris.
Hamilton harbored a lifelong reverence for Jews.
As in the American south, an exaggerated sense of romantic honor may have been an unconscious way for slaveholders to flaunt their moral superiority, purge pent-up guilt, and cloak the brutish nature of their trade.
Violence was commonplace in Nevis, as in all the slave-ridden sugar islands.
The Caribbean sugar economy was a system of inimitable savagery, making the tobacco and cotton plantations of the American south seem almost genteel by comparison.
If Rachel thought
the curse that seemed to afflict everyone around Alexander Hamilton.
bankrupt
Hamilton, who would be conspicuous among the founding fathers for his fierce abolitionism.
Though house slaves donned shirts and skirts, it wasn’t unusual for one or two hundred slaves to toil naked in a steaming field beneath the towering sugar stalks.
By night, the whitewashed town of Christiansted, laid out in a formal grid by Danish authorities, erupted into a roaring, licentious bedlam of boisterous taverns and open brothels overflowing with rebels, sailors, and outlaws from many countries.
a mystifying ambivalence that Hamilton always felt about regular church attendance, despite a pronounced religious bent.
Thomas Stevens,
Both were exceedingly quick and clever, disciplined and persevering, fluent in French, versed in classical history, outraged by slavery, and mesmerized by medicine.
Hamilton’s delicate health.52
their physical resemblance bordered on the uncanny,
Pickering, who finally concluded that Hamilton and Stevens were brothers.
the notion that Alexander was the biological son of Thomas Stevens instead of James Hamilton would clarify many oddities in Hamilton’s biography. It might identify one of the adulterous lovers who had so appalled Lavien that he had hurled Rachel into prison. It would also explain why Thomas Stevens sheltered Hamilton soon after Rachel’s death but made no comparable gesture to his brother, James. (In the eighteenth century, illegitimate children frequently masqueraded as orphaned relatives of the lord or lady of the house—a polite fiction understood and accepted by visitors.) This parentage
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the Spanish Main (South America’s northwestern coast),
peremptory
business was often obstructed by scarce cash or credit
reserved his highest praise for minds that created “schemes or systems of truth.”11
the education of this future abolitionist was partly underwritten by sugarcane harvested by slaves.
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.”
(Hamilton’s lifelong habit of talking sotto voce while pacing lent him an air of either inspiration or madness.)
the Whigs, who sought to curb royal power, boost parliamentary influence, and preserve civil liberties.
Like many Presbyterians, Livingston had gravitated to political dissent while opposing Tory efforts to entrench the Church of England in America.
bibulous
William Duer, the most notorious friend in Hamilton’s life.
Hamilton, descended from French Huguenots.
These men wanted to modify the social order, not overturn it—a fair description of Hamilton’s future politics.
the College of New Jersey,”
Founded in 1746 as a counterweight to the Church of England’s influence, Princeton was a hotbed of Presbyterian/Whig sentiment, preached religious freedom, and might have seemed a logical choice for Hamilton.
Witherspoon was a husky man with an oddly shaped head that narrowed at the top and bulged out in the middle.
“probably the most influential teacher in the history of American education,”
Pugnacious and outspoken, he had an unsettling way of erupting in strange twitches and fidgets.
With fewer than twenty-five thousand inhabitants, New York was already second in size among American colonial cities, behind Philadelphia but edging ahead of Boston.
David Hume
From his college essays, we can tell that he ransacked the library, poring over the works of Locke, Montesquieu, Hobbes, and Hume, as well as those of such reigning legal sages as Sir William Blackstone, Hugo Grotius, and Samuel von Pufendorf.
Both Hamilton and Burr were prey to depression
