1MEET ALEXANDER HAMILTON
JOHN ADAMS ONCE MOCKED Alexander Hamilton’s birthplace as a remote speck on the map. That was preposterous. When Hamilton was born on the island of Nevis, a continuous movement of cargo to and from Europe’s ports made Britain’s Caribbean colonies more important than all of the Atlantic thirteen put together. The roar of commerce enveloped him even before he could think.
He was born a colonial citizen of the British Empire because, just for one thing, the leaves of the tea plant fed caffeine addiction in Europe and its colonies. The British had introduced tea, indigenous to China, into India at great scale and made drinking it a British Isles ritual. The nice, hot cup might be enhanced by sweetening it with lumps cut from cones of sugar refined from a cane plant, indigenous to the eastern tropics, introduced by Europeans into the western tropics, and raised and processed in the Caribbean, also at great scale. Everywhere in the world Britain called British, the lumps were stirred into steaming cupfuls of tea, West meeting East, East meeting West, sip after sip soaking billions of taste buds in the global reach of empire.
So sugar moved a lot of people. Among them was James Hamilton, a younger son of a Scottish noble line. He was drawn to Britain’s Leeward Islands colony in 1741 by the chance to get rich quick. It might have looked easy. Fashionable Europe was already reacting to tea’s commonness by seeking new buzzes in bitter drinks that really wanted sugar: coffee from Java and Mocha, Caribbean cocoa. Then there was molasses, the Indies’ black cane syrup beloved in the Atlantic colonies. From molasses came rum, distilled best in New England, doled out in rations to thousands of able seamen and hapless soldiers all over the world whose hard, often forced, labor, disciplined with punishment, transported and guarded the empire’s cargoes, some of it human and subject to more awful punishment. British colonials in the Caribbean, making more and more money exporting more and more sugar, could afford to import more and more products of British industry, increasing the wealth of industrialists and stockholders who invested profits in the Bank of England, which extended the Crown loans that enabled the global expansion, and that was a boom. When James Hamilton arrived in St. Kitts, the bigger Leeward island, the colony was on its way to becoming Britain’s richest. He was one of many hoping for a taste.
But he didn’t get rich quick. He didn’t get rich at all.
It wasn’t as easy as it might have looked. This trade was by no means a free trade. Free labor didn’t plant, chop, pack, and boil the cane. The boom depended on the arrival in the Caribbean of ships with lower holds crammed with men, women, and children taken from Africa, made chattel—enslaved for life, and heritable—and subjected first to the horrors of the ocean passage and then to the toil and brutality of the shimmering fields and the boiling facilities, raising and processing cane until they died. By the time James Hamilton began his career in the Leeward Islands, the original inhabitants were all but eradicated, only a tenth of the population was white, and the whole operation was peaking on a sugar high fueled by the toil of enslaved black people.
Capital wasn’t free either. Enslaved people and some raw and semi-processed product could be shipped directly from one colony to another, but much of the product had to go back to Britain to be processed or finished there, marked up and sold to middlemen, and then sold to retailers and wholesalers in markets at home and abroad. “Abroad” was key. A purpose of empire was to maintain far-flung markets for home goods. Because British colonials were by and large forced by law to sell to Britain and buy British, they had to import even products made from the raw materials they exported home. Growers, shippers, and investors had to analyze, comply with, and find ways of eluding various acts of Parliament that incentivized, disincentivized, and outright restricted commercial decision-making.
Sugar men faced existential challenges too. With its twelve-month growing season, the Caribbean might at first have seemed to Europeans a new Eden, but now it was a sweltering, always-on industrial hellscape, running on the mass violence inextricable from forced labor. Adventurers like James Hamilton naturally hoped to make their piles fast and get out. Cut off from home norms, pursuing a commerce grounded in brutality, many lived alcoholic, self-immolating lives and died young right there.
James Hamilton may not have had what it took to get rich in sugar. But he didn’t get out and didn’t die young. In St. Kitts, Rachel Hamilton gave birth to James Hamilton, Jr.
She and James Sr. weren’t married, but people called her Mrs. Hamilton anyway. Out-of-wedlock families lived openly and without stigma, not only in the Caribbean but throughout the British colonies and in Britain itself. The family’s real trouble was money. James held an administrative job at the St. Kitts port and maintained some solvency with handouts from relatives back home, but to dodge prosecution for debt, after their son was born the Hamiltons moved from St. Kitts to St. Eustatius, a Dutch colony. Then they moved back to the British colony, where Rachel had inherited a house in Charlestown, the port of the smaller Leeward island, Nevis, which had lagged behind the big island economically but was rebounding in the boom. There, in 1754, Rachel gave birth to Alexander Hamilton.
Soon the family moved back to St. Eustatius. Dutch and Danish empires placed fewer restrictions on trade; British subjects pursued commerce in those colonies, and in St. Eustatius the Hamiltons conformed to the hyper-British ways that British colonials far from home often adopted, worshipping in the Anglican Communion and socializing with other British colonials. Still their troubles mounted. James worked for a time as head clerk for a tobacco-shipping business but remained in financial straits. When the boys were seven and five, Rachel’s wedlock husband sued her for divorce. She’d left him in the Dutch colony of St. Croix, with their son; the divorce complaint excoriated her sexual conduct. In 1765, the family moved yet again, this time to St. Croix, and from there, the boys’ father took off.
In St. Croix, Rachel was known by her maiden name and sometimes by her former husband’s. The Hamilton brothers entered adolescence having lost their father and becoming conscious of their mother’s precarious situation, but she worked hard to prevent any descent into squalor and depression and did quite well, opening a store in Christiansted, the port town. The family home above the store, neatly kept, featured trappings of solidity: a feather bed, silver spoons, porcelain plates, books. Having inherited enslaved laborers, she hired out the adults and used their children as house servants for her sons. Rachel, it turned out, was the enterprising Hamilton parent.
But less than two years after James left, she died, and while the boys would have inherited her inventory, enslaved people, and household items, her former husband sued to disinherit her children by James Hamilton, calling them obscene. After a year of probate, their half brother by the former husband was awarded everything they would have had. Effectively parentless, the Hamilton boys were assigned a guardian, but he soon killed himself.
There was no choice. They had to get jobs.
James was apprenticed to a carpenter, by no means the worst business to get into, and Alexander did better. At fifteen, he moved in with a rich Christiansted merchant and was hired as a clerk for a firm owned by David Beekman and Nicholas Cruger, recently arrived from the up-and-coming port of the British Atlantic colony New York; both of their families had long been in the trade there. At Beekman and Cruger, the adolescent Alexander Hamilton began learning by doing.
Bright, diligent, placed in hour-by-hour intimacy with the merchant firms’ pivotal place in a busy imperial endeavor, he did a lot, so he learned a lot. The British Crown entrusted overall operations to a few big companies, intermingling them with government by royal charters that made it a crime to compete with them. The most famous, the British East India Company, had staggering scope, with a monopoly on all imports from the East; by now that meant not only India but China too. A group of London merchants had a similar monopoly on all imports from the Caribbean.
Yet as Hamilton quickly grasped, the multitude of smaller firms like Beekman and Cruger, operating as agents for the big monopolies and one another, conducted the day-to-day buying and selling, the carrying and warehousing, the advertising and marketing, the borrowing and lending that enabled the imperial giant to import and export Caribbean sugar, tobacco, and coffee; Indian raw cotton and cotton textiles, opium, and tea; Chinese tea, rice, silk, and porcelain; Atlantic fur, lumber, rice, indigo, tobacco, wheat, and rum; and African people. From Christiansted to Boston, from Bristol to Delhi, on wharves and at auctions, in taverns, coffeehouses, warehouses, and countinghouses, the merchants and their employees made promises and extended credit, issued and took out insurance policies, gave breaks to steady customers, charged premiums to the less trustworthy, reinvested profits big or small, and sustained losses ranging from the manageable to the disastrous. Merchants had to be wary yet form tight alliances, cautious yet bold at the right moment. They had to be creative yet punctilious.
Hamilton showed the qualities necessary for success in the trade. He crossed every t and dotted every i in the never-ending flurry of contracts, manifests, invoices, and bills of lading that drove the business. By the dawn of the 1770s he’d become a surprisingly clear commercial thinker, even a demanding boss in the making. At seventeen, left briefly in charge of the shop, he strode right into the supervisory mode that would mark his later career, writing a stern letter to a ship’s captain and advising his bosses’ partners on measures he deemed indispensable to ensuring the safety of cargo. If the self-confidence was a bit startling, the judgment was good.
But while his job was demanding, its day-to-day limitations insulted his dreams. Restless, a close reader of classics and military strategy and a writer of poetry, young Hamilton pined for romance and action and especially for the glory to be gained in armed combat. Rising to merchant status wouldn’t have been impossible. His potential seemed to him and others to be of another order.
And so a path to more exciting things was rolled out for him. His bosses and other adults saw the clerk as a bright and capable young man likely to benefit from the formal education not easily gained amid the Caribbean’s all-work harshness. While the best education might be had in Britain, Beekman and Cruger were well-connected in their native city, and in the course of business Hamilton had gotten to know some New York merchants. A fund was started to send him to college there. In 1774, he sailed for Boston to travel to New Jersey and ultimately New York.
He wouldn’t be a merchant. But it was the merchants who made him, and by the time he went in search of higher learning, he’d already had his hands deep in the guts of a commerce fueled by government and operating on the grandest scale. He would always say that his time at Beekman and Cruger gave him the most useful part of his education.
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Hamilton fit right into New York and started moving up fast. His gifts were evident, his ambition and focus intense, and the barriers, for the likes of him, low. Caribbean origins only meant he’d come from one of the trade’s hottest spots to a hustling competitor port. His out-of-wedlock birth, if known or rumored, posed no impediment to progress in the colonial American elite, which had seen that before. In the Dutch and Danish colonies, he’d been living as a kind of immigrant; now this son of a British subject, born in a British colony, of noble lineage at that, was back in a British colony, as much a citizen of empire as anybody else in town and, as a gentleman with the wherewithal to go to school and spend freely, living a far easier life than the overwhelming majority of those born there.
He was a bit too old to prep for college. Already nothing if not decisive, he made that problem go away by changing his birthdate to 1757, shedding three of his twenty years and becoming something of a wunderkind. In 1774, he entered New York’s King’s College. The institution was governed by the city’s biggest operators in sugar, tobacco, and slavery. Good-looking and brimming with ambition and self-confidence, he naturally attracted well-connected friends there.
Then came a great stroke of luck. Thirteen of Britain’s Atlantic colonies were joining in a confrontation with the mother country. At issue were parliamentary restrictions on the colonies’ trade, and many of the New York merchants, Hamilton’s kind of people, were joining in the resistance. Jumping on the emerging crisis with all of his pent-up desire for adventure, Hamilton began by publishing some political pamphlets. They showed notable facility in the established modes of orotundity and snark, and his passing for only eighteen made the mastery all the more impressive.
Far more important for his future, his martial dreams came true. With classmates, he crammed the basics of soldiery and artillery and formed a volunteer drill company. New York, improvising wildly under the pressure of a probable British invasion, issued him a captain’s commission for an artillery company, and in July 1776, even as American independence was adopted in Philadelphia, by a delegated body calling itself the Continental Congress, making Hamilton’s home no longer a province but an independent state, the British invaded. New York City was where they landed.
The opportunity was priceless. Hamilton had no military experience. Neither did many of the other lower officers in the state’s forces. Even many high officers in what was known as the Continental Army were just armchair strategists playing catch-up against one of the most fearsome military machines ever. Things didn’t go well for the United States, but they went well for Hamilton. His unit took a minor part in the American defeat in the Battle of New York and then, under General George Washington, the Continental Army’s commander, a more important part in the more disastrous defeat at Harlem Heights. With Washington’s troops fleeing across New Jersey, the British occupied New York City.
The general in retreat was by no means the august figure he would soon become. A big Virginia operator in the slavery-driven production of agricultural product for the imperial trade, George Washington was first and foremost a politically well-connected businessman. He’d been early to identify and relentless in trying to monopolize a vast financial speculation in white development of the fertile woodlands west of the Blue Ridge Mountain, lands used and inhabited by Shawnee, Miami, Delaware, and other nations. He’d always had military leanings; he’d coveted a commission as a British army officer. But when Britain started restricting Americans’ freelance efforts to buy the western nations’ territory, Washington joined the interstate resistance to British policies in America.
His military experience was thus strictly limited. In 1754, having led a militia to the Ohio headwaters to scare the French out of the region, the young Washington had become notorious in Britain for a series of blunders that started the global conflict known as the Seven Years’ War, the first true world war. During that war, also near the Ohio headwaters, he led troops in the retreat of the British general Edward Braddock, routed by the French and Shawnee. Washington was commanding the Continental Army now thanks mainly to authoritative physical presence in uniform, a notable regard for his own integrity, and the lack of any feasible alternative. Some of the British officers disdained him as a mere Virginia “land-jobber”—a hustler in real estate—whose leadership pretensions were absurd. And by late 1776, the general’s prospects against the British army did look grim.
After the flight from New York across New Jersey, Hamilton got his biggest break yet when Washington, headquartered at Morristown, invited him to serve on his staff. Hamilton joined the Continental Army in March of 1777 with the rank of lieutenant colonel and got busy doing what he knew how to do. To military administration, he brought the attention to detail, the powers of analysis, and the comfort with supervising others that he’d learned so young at Beekman and Cruger. Over the next three years, as the army began to have success in the field, Washington came to depend on Hamilton as an administrative right hand. If the young man wasn’t the staff’s de facto chief, he was unabashed about acting like it.
In April 1780, he hit another benchmark of manly achievement: getting engaged to marry up. If the best part of Hamilton’s education came at Beekman and Cruger, his entry into New York’s upper class, via engagement to Elizabeth Schuyler, honed that education to exciting new purposes.
His in-laws-to-be, Philip and Catherine Van Rensselaer Schuyler, came from old colonial families in the Dutch-descended landlord class of New York’s Hudson Valley, where millions of acres had long produced tobacco and grain for the imperial trade. The Schuyler couple was fabulously rich and getting richer; they were also showy. Big agriculture for export involved fierce competition. Displaying success was critical to maintaining success. Landlords lived large and pursued dynasty. Schuylers and Van Rensselaers had been intermarrying for years.
Still, like his son-in-law-to-be, Philip Schuyler had married notably well. When he and Catherine began courting, Philip was more or less comfortably landed, with a couple of thousand acres; her family had some 150,000 and would end up with about a million. It was an abrupt lift for his fortunes when, one day, serving in western New York in the Seven Years’ War, he was ordered home on a leave he hadn’t applied for and then ordered, on arrival, by Catherine’s father, to prepare for marriage. Five months after their wedding, she bore their first child.
The couple built a mansion in Albany. The house featured not only the biggest room in the city but also the second-biggest, with wallpaper in the entrance hall imported from England and costing thirteen times the average annual rent paid by the tenant families who labored on the Schuylers’ great acreages. The grounds had formal gardens. The fields rolled down to the Hudson. There were Madeira wines, fine clothing, beautiful color schemes, hundreds of books. There were enslaved black people in bright livery: the Schulyers were among the biggest enslavers in Albany, and Elizabeth would bring slaves to her marriage. Hamilton was already starting to have big ideas about the future of an independent United States that would make him an opponent of the institution. Later, he would join an anti-slavery organization. But he owned and dealt in people too.
By the time Hamilton began moving in their orbit and noting the priorities of their type, the Schuylers had become at least as relentless as George Washington and everybody else in the colonial, now revolutionary, elite in pursuing and defending personal interests. That quality informed ideas that Hamilton was quickly developing about the country as a whole.
The relentlessness could amount to ruthlessness. When the Schuylers’ second son, John, sexually assaulted a woman named Mary Carpenter, Philip paid her a lifetime annuity on condition she decline to testify, relocate to Quebec, and never come back. In the 1760s and ’70s, when new British laws started giving New York’s tenant farmers protections from abuses by judges appointed by the landlords, Schuyler joined others throughout the colonies in protesting what they called illegal mother-country interference in American commerce. As those tensions mounted toward civil war, many New York tenants and other poorer people saw a better bet in sticking with the British than with their landlords. Schuyler built spy networks with sophisticated ciphering systems, identified loyalists and defectors, drew up lists, and started surveilling, arresting, and interrogating them. When civil war became the War of Independence, he got inside, no-bid supply deals, submitting to the Continental Army after-the-fact invoices for gigantic purchases he’d made, as a general, of his own oysters and ferry services.
Ruthlessness extended to military strategy. As power broker for the colony, Schuyler had gained the trust of the Six Nations of the Iroquois as a good-faith negotiator. In 1779, he proposed to Washington a total-war program for burning the towns and food supplies of the five British-allied Iroquois nations, advising Washington that once the nations had gathered their whole strength for attack, their villages would “be left with only their old men, women and children … Should we be so fortunate as to take a considerable number of the women and children of the Indians, I conceive that we should then have the means of preventing them hereafter from acting hostilely against us.” Washington took the advice, ordering “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible.”
Both men were thinking about victory in the war—and about their long game in land speculation. Burned out, the enemy’s soil would have a deeply depressed value. Claimed personally by men who had officially ordered it destroyed and depopulated, it would recover naturally over time and gain high value in what would become, with victory in the war, a land-investment bubble. When Elizabeth Schuyler accepted Alexander Hamilton’s proposal, her father was one of the richest, wiliest, and most powerful and aggressive men in revolutionary New York, with much to show the younger man about the ways of the class he typified.
Thus affianced, Hamilton began attracting the approval of New York high society in general. Handsome and unusually trim, if not tall, with a somewhat swashbuckling air and in good moods a charmer, he was known as a fluid and creative problem-solver who could accommodate rafts of facts, break down intricate concepts, turn data to persuasive purposes, cross every t, dot every i. Mental agility and punctiliousness went hand in hand with impatience with others not so gifted, even when they agreed with him, and pretty frank disdain for anyone who disagreed with or tried to obstruct him.
Personal touchiness was common, even stylish, in men of his type. Yet Hamilton seemed at once gifted and cursed with an unusually stubborn confidence in the rightness of his own judgment and the necessity of being free to act on it. Arrogance and defensiveness were perhaps to be expected in one wafted so quickly and easily up from clerkdom, but while he would get better at the politics—somewhat, sometimes—he wouldn’t age out of the attitude.
It worried his father-in-law. Nobody appreciated better than Schuyler the importance of curating friendly connections with the right people. Attitude had begun to roil Hamilton’s relationship with the most important connection of all, Washington, by now the one person in the United States it might have seemed fatally foolish to offend. Hamilton evinced no concern about being at odds with his mighty boss. Overwhelmingly concerned, like others of his kind, with his own honor, the lieutenant colonel considered it necessary to his honor to command troops in the field. The general, overwhelmingly concerned with winning the war, took no interest in what people under him considered necessary to their honor. Hamilton had gone out of his way to make himself an indispensable administrator. Field command would take him away from the staff. He couldn’t be spared. Discussion over.
Or so the general might have thought. The frustrated subordinate kept bringing it up.
Copyright © 2024 by William Hogeland