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The archives of St. George’s Parish in the fertile, mountainous Gingerland section of Nevis record the marriage of John Faucette to a British woman, Mary Uppington, on August 21, 1718. By that point, they already had two children: a daughter, Ann, and a son, John, the latter arriving two months before the wedding.
In all, the Faucettes produced seven children, Hamilton’s mother, Rachel, being the second youngest, born circa 1729.
five Faucette children perished in infancy or childhood, leaving only Rachel and her much older sister, Ann, as survivors.
mass exodus of refugees, including Ann Faucette, who had married a well-to-do planter named James Lytton. They decamped to the Danish island of St. Croix,
back-to-back deaths of two of their children in 1736
1740 settlement, the Faucettes agreed to “live separately and apart for the rest of their lives,”
sixteen-year-old Rachel Faucette achieved the sudden glow of a minor heiress in 1745 when her father died and left her all his property.
Rachel and her mother decided to start anew on St. Croix, where James and Ann Lytton had prospered, building a substantial estate outside the capital, Christiansted, called the Grange.
a Dane named Johann Michael Lavien,
the sixteeen-year-old Rachel agreed to marry the older Lavien, her senior by at least a dozen years.7 In Hamilton’s blunt estimation, it was “a hated marriage,” as the daughter of one unhappy union was rushed straight into another.8 In 1745, the ill-fated wedding took place at the Grange.
The marriage deteriorated to the point where the headstrong wife simply abandoned the house around 1750.
James Hamilton, had also been bedeviled by misfortune in the islands. Born around 1718, he was the fourth of eleven children (nine sons, two daughters) of Alexander Hamilton, the laird of Grange in Stevenston Parish in Ayrshire, Scotland, southwest of Glasgow. In 1711, that Alexander Hamilton, the fourteenth laird in the so-called Cambuskeith line of Hamiltons, married Elizabeth Pollock, the daughter of a baronet.
Cambuskeith Hamiltons possessed a coat of arms and for centuries had owned a castle near Kilmarnock called the Grange. Indeed, that lineage can be traced back to the fourteenth century
Rachel met James Hamilton for sure in St. Kitts in the early 1750s,
Hamilton’s parents, though a common-law couple, presented themselves as James and Rachel Hamilton. They had two sons: James, Jr., and, two years later, Alexander. (Since Hamilton spoke of his mother’s bearing “several children,” other siblings may have died in childhood.)
Hamilton’s grandson Allan McLane Hamilton:
several cogent pieces of evidence from his Caribbean period have caused many recent historians to opt for 1755. In 1766, Hamilton affixed his signature as the witness to a legal document, a dubious honor if he was only nine. In 1768, a probate court in St. Croix reported his age as thirteen—highly compelling evidence, since it did not rely on his testimony but came from his uncle. When Alexander published a poem in a St. Croix newspaper in 1771, the aspiring bard informed the editor, “Sir, I am a youth about seventeen”—an adolescent’s way of stating that he was sixteen, which would also tally
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In 1756, one year after Hamilton was born, his grandmother, Mary Faucette, now residing on the Dutch island of St. Eustatius, made out her final will and left “my three dear slaves, Rebecca, Flora and Esther” to her daughter Rachel.31
an official divorce summons from Rachel on February 26, 1759.
the resulting lawsuit was to drone on until January 1766.
James Hamilton scored an apparent victory in the Moir case, then left St. Croix and deserted his family forever.
James, Jr., twelve, and Alexander, ten, had attained an age where they could assist Rachel, James, Sr., may have believed that he could wash his hands of paternal duties without undue pangs of guilt.
Father and son never entirely lost touch with each other, but a curious detachment, an estrangement as much psychological as geographical, separated them.
Ann and James’s second son, James Lytton, Jr., had formed a partnership with one Robert Holliday. This business venture failed so abysmally that one summer night in 1764, the bankrupt James, Jr., and his wife climbed aboard the family schooner, herded twenty-two stolen slaves on board, and cast off for the Carolinas, while the less quick-witted Holliday was captured and jailed for nearly two years. Shattered by this scandal, James and Ann Lytton sold the Grange and in late 1765 moved back to Nevis, just months after Rachel and her two boys arrived in St. Croix from there. Within one year, Ann
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In late 1767, Rachel, thirty-eight, uprooted her family and hustled them down the block to 23 Company Street. Then, right after New Year’s Day, she dragged them back to number 34 and succumbed to a raging fever. For a week, a woman named Ann McDonnell tended Rachel before summoning a Dr. Heering on February 17; by that point, Alexander, too, had contracted the unspecified disease. Dr. Heering subjected mother and child to the medieval purgatives so popular in eighteenth-century medicine. Rachel had to endure an emetic and a medicinal herb called valerian, which expelled gas from the alimentary
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In a little more than two years, they had suffered their father’s disappearance and their mother’s death, reducing them to orphans and throwing them upon the mercy of friends, family, and community. The town judge gave James, Jr., money to buy shoes for the funeral and bought black veils for both boys. Their landlord, Thomas Dipnall, donated white bread, eggs, and cakes for the mourners, while cousin Peter Lytton contributed eleven yards of black material to drape the coffin.
Alexander and James Hamilton were disinherited, and the whole estate was awarded to Peter Lavien. In November 1769, no less implacably vengeful than his father, Peter Lavien returned to St. Croix and took possession of his small inheritance—an injustice that rankled Alexander for many years.
After Rachel died, her sons were placed under the legal guardianship of their thirty-two-year-old first cousin Peter Lytton.
On July 16, 1769, just when the Hamilton boys must have imagined that fate couldn’t dole out more horrors, Peter Lytton was found dead in his bed, soaked in a pool of blood. According to court records, he had committed suicide and either “stabbed or shot himself to death.”50 For the Hamilton boys, the sequel was equally mortifying. Peter had drafted a will that provided for Ledja and their mulatto child but didn’t bother to acknowledge Alexander or James with even a token bequest.
On August 12, 1769, less than one month after Peter’s death, the heartbroken James Lytton died as well. Five days earlier, he had drafted a new will, which also made no provision for his nephews Alexander and James, who must have felt jinxed.
Let us pause briefly to tally the grim catalog of disasters that had befallen these two boys between 1765 and 1769: their father had vanished, their mother had died, their cousin and supposed protector had committed bloody suicide, and their aunt, uncle, and grandmother had all died. James, sixteen, and Alexander, fourteen, were now left alone, largely friendless and penniless.
Peter Lytton’s death marked a fork in the road for Alexander and James, who henceforth branched off on separate paths. The latter was apprenticed to an aging Christiansted carpenter, Thomas McNobeny, which tells us much about his limited abilities.
While James went off to train with the elderly carpenter, Hamilton, in a dreamlike transition worthy of a Dickens novel, was whisked off to the King Street home of Thomas Stevens, a well-respected merchant, and his wife, Ann.
That Knox moonlighted as a journalist proved highly consequential for Hamilton when a massive hurricane tore through St. Croix on the night of August 31, 1772, and carved a wide swath of destruction through nearby islands.
Where now, oh! vile worm, is all thy boasted fortitude and resolution? What is become of thine arrogance and self sufficiency?
Hamilton boards a ship in October 1772 and sails off to North America forever.
The discovery of this poem, possibly influenced by an event in the life of Molière, bolsters the supposition that Hamilton spent the winter of 1772–1773 in St. Croix, although he could have mailed Hugh Knox the verse from North America.
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:
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.
Livingston was to attend the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention and become the first governor of an independent New Jersey in 1776.
Hamilton must have entered King’s in late 1773 or early 1774,
The colonial struggle against the Crown took a dramatic turn on the moonlit night of December 16, 1773,
A mob of two hundred men with soot-darkened faces, roughly costumed as Mohawk Indians, crept aboard three ships in Boston harbor, used tomahawks to smash open 342 chests of tea, and pitched the contents overboard. Another two thousand townspeople urged them on from the docks.
Four days later, Paul Revere galloped breathlessly into New York with news of the Boston uprising. Troup contended that Hamilton rushed off to Boston to engage in firsthand reportage.
New York hosted its own “tea party” on April 22, 1774, when a group of sea captains, led by Alexander McDougall and decked out in Mohawk dress, stormed the British ship London and chucked its tea chests into the deep.
By May 1774, news arrived that England had retaliated with the Coercive or “Intolerable” Acts. These draconian measures shut down Boston’s port until the colonists paid for the spilled tea.
They also curbed popular assemblies, restricted trial by jury, subjected Massachusetts to ham-handed military rule, and guaranteed that the Boston streets would be blanketed with British troops in an overpowering show of force. On May 13, General Thomas Gage, the new military commander, arrived in Boston with four regiments to enforce these acts, which dealt a crippling blow to the free-spirited maritime town.
To beat the drum for a boycott, the militant Sons of Liberty, members of a secret society first convened to flout the Stamp Act, gathered a mass meeting on the afternoon of July 6, 1774. It took place at the grassy Common near King’s College, sometimes called The Fields, in the shadow of the towering liberty pole.
When his speech ended, the crowd stood transfixed in silence, staring at this spellbinding young orator before it erupted in a sustained ovation. “It is a collegian!” people whispered to one another. “It is a collegian!”41 Hamilton, nineteen, looked young for his age, which made his performance seem even more inspired. From that moment on, he was treated as a youthful hero of the cause and recognized as such by Alexander McDougall, John Lamb, Marinus Willett, and other chieftains of the Sons of Liberty.
By late August 1774, all the colonies save Georgia had picked their delegates to the First Continental Congress. The New York delegates, among them John Jay and James Duane, departed for Philadelphia amid stirring fanfare.
