A few sexual details slipped into Davis’s volume. The first of Burr’s many romantic conquests most likely dates from this year of liberation, when he was fifteen, and it is included, presumably, because it fits Davis’s thesis. As Davis tells the story, Burr seduced a young woman from Elizabethtown named Catherine Bullock and then cruelly abandoned her, leaving her to die, he says, of a “broken heart.” Of course, heartbreak is not a medical diagnosis, and later research has suggested that the cause of death was tuberculosis. And, in any case, heartbreak is born of eagerness, not disgust. It’s a fair guess that the relationship was brief and intense and ended by Burr, a statement that could apply to many of them. But that doesn’t mean it was “licentious.” Burr simply took his pleasure and then failed to give her enough in return.
His slight, chatty, Irish-born friend William Paterson, a Princeton graduate—and future Supreme Court justice—ten years older, wondered, like Davis, why Burr wasted so much time in Elizabethtown, when he could be improving himself at Princeton. Elizabethtown had always struck Paterson as too tempting, with so many delightful young ladies about. “Perhaps,” he told Burr, “the reason that I fear it, makes you like it. There is certainly something amorous in its air.” It was a scent that Burr could detect in any breeze. Paterson admits that he wasn’t immune, as he was himself just then hurrying to Philadelphia in pursuit of a certain “Miss ——,” whom Burr knew, and perhaps knew well. “Platonic love,” Paterson concluded, “is arrant nonsense.”
Burr tried writing a few orations that year of idleness, and one of the more memorable touched on the subject of “the passions,” which Burr considered the source of all action and feeling. “The passions give vivacity to all our operations,” he declared, “and render the enjoyments of life pleasing and agreeable.” He skipped over sexual passion, unsurprisingly, but may have alluded to it when he declared that no passions were inherently bad. Some were merely “unruly”—out of “balance”—and lacked “regulation.” In short, they were missing that “governor” his mother identified. They characterized the “savage tribes,” not “polished society.” They weren’t wrong, just out of place. He closed with a wish that no one fall victim to them. A wan wish, as it turned out, because he did.
Frisky and assertive, Burr became quite popular that last year. His fellow students called him “Little Burr,” and they meant it affectionately. He formed many attachments with the other rising young men in American politics, such as James Madison, Henry Brockholst Livingston of the New York political family, and the spirited Henry Lee III, better known later as Light-Horse Harry. Burr joined the Cliosophic Society, founded by his friend Paterson, a literary group where students gathered with a few chosen professors under the eaves of Nassau Hall to discuss poetry and practice orations like “Passions.”*
The Clio vied for intellectual supremacy with the American Whig Society, founded by Madison and the future poet Philip Freneau. Madison, always tin eared, derided the Clios as “screech owls, monkeys and baboons.” One of the professors was Dr. Samuel Smith, a dry stick whom Burr could not abide. Burr was Clio president, up in the big chair, slouching onto one chair arm, since he was too small to reach both simultaneously, when Professor Smith arrived an hour late to a meeting. Burr insisted that the professor stand before him while Burr scolded him, saying that the students expected a “different example” from him. Later president of the college, Smith must have quivered with indignation. The dressing-down became college legend.
When the time finally came to graduate, Burr delivered a commencement address on the topic of “Building Castles in the Air.” The text has been lost, but the thrust of it is evident—that a man needs to build a life on solid ground. This Burr did not do.
FOUR
The Prodictious Glare of Almost Perpetual Lightning
THE YOUNG ALEXANDER grew into a slim, narrow-shouldered boy with tender skin unsuited to the tropics; reddish brown hair that surely came from Rachel; and darting blue-violet eyes. As an illegitimate, or “outside,” child, Hamilton wasn’t allowed to attend school with the other children on Nevis, but he may have been tutored by a “Jewess,” one of the many who’d sought refuge on the islands for the same reason that Huguenots like Faucette did. Hamilton later claimed to have learned the Commandments in Hebrew. From Rachel, Hamilton came to appreciate the Anglican religion that drew her to church every Sunday, and he learned the French she’d learned from her father; he soon spoke it so fluently that he could later converse freely with the French diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Napoléon’s chief diplomatic aide. But the young Hamilton’s mind sponged up everything—historical facts, English poetry, mathematical principles, medical diagnoses. His true schooling came from a set of thirty-four leather-bound books, whose titles have to be guessed based on what he knew: the plays of Shakespeare, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Plutarch’s Lives, the poems of Alexander Pope. All of them shaped his understanding of the world and informed his writing too, giving it the forceful, rather impatient style of an adult well before he was one.
Strained by poverty, his parents’ relationship frayed over time from a constant bickering into open rages. Years later, Hamilton observed, “It’s a dog’s life when two dissonant tempers meet.” His own marriage would be placid, despite the disruptions he caused. When Alexander turned ten, his father left to collect a debt for a Saint Kitts client, and he never returned. Rachel took the boys across the water to neighboring Saint Croix, vaguely in the shape of the largemouth bass that could be found in abundance off its shores. It was a selfish move on James Hamilton’s part that brought his family nothing but woe. Still, ever after Hamilton was determined to be proud of his father. “You no doubt have understood that my father’s affairs at a very early day went to wreck, so as to have rendered his situation during the greatest part of his life far from eligible,” he later wrote a friend. “This state of things occasioned a separation between him and me, when I was very young.” It just happened; no one’s fault. But as the disappearance continued, the absence preyed on him. “What has become of our dear father?” he begged of his brother, James, more than a decade later, when his father had still not returned. He hated to think of him dying alone somewhere, untended, possibly starving. He’d send money—“to render the close of his life more happy than the progress of it”—if he only knew where.* His father had “too much pride and too large a portion of indolence,” he finally acknowledged, but nevertheless he clung tight to the notion that his father was worthy. As he put it: “His character was otherwise beyond reproach.”
In 1765, Rachel settled with her boys on the upper floor of a row house at 34 Company Street not far from the water in Christiansted, a sun-splashed town scented with salt air. She sold fish, flour, fruit, and other staples in a humble shop on the first floor. The store provided most of the family’s income, and much of their meals, supplemented by any milk Rachel could squeeze from the goat penned in back. Rachel had inherited five slave women from her father, and she rented them out for the brutal work in the sugar fields. By now, those five had produced four children, which were hers, too. One was a boy named Ajax, who became Alexander’s house slave, an uneasy relationship that spurred Hamilton’s abolitionism later.
In search of cheaper rent, Rachel shifted the family about a number of times, until 1767, when they came back to live at 34 Company Street once more. There, Rachel came down with one of the tropical fevers that swept across the island, and it soon infected twelve-year-old Alexander, too. Somehow she scraped up money for a physician, but his treatment was as harrowing as the disease—bloodletting, emetics, purgatives—and possibly more destructive, as it left them both exhausted, bathed in sweat, and oozing blood and excrement. Alexander rallied, but his mother continued to writhe on the bed, the fever burning her inside and out. Finally, on the night of February 19, 1768, Rachel lay still.
Alexander rallied to attend his mother’s funeral. The judge found public funds to
outfit him and his brother with proper shoes and black veils, but that was all. As the mother of illegitimate children, Rachel was not eligible for the graveyard of the Anglican church she’d loyally attended. Instead, she was buried up the hill at the Grange, alone, under some mahogany trees. With his mother dead and father gone, Hamilton was no less an orphan than Burr. But he had no family members to rescue him. Instead, he had a family stigma to pull him further down.
When officers of the probate court swept into their rooms to inventory Rachel’s estate, they made clear they were not securing it for her two penniless sons, Alexander and James, but for her legal heir, Peter Lavien, the son Rachel had borne her husband. In a final act of malice, Johann Lavien had seen to it that his son should get everything, even though, at the time of Rachel’s death, Peter lived in some comfort in Beaufort, South Carolina, and had not laid eyes on his mother in eighteen years. So the last remnants of James and Alexander’s mother disappeared—all except for those books, which Alexander’s kind uncle James Lytton bought back for him; he kept them for the rest of his life.
Lytton’s ne’er-do-well son, also named Peter, was appointed guardian for the two teenagers, and he proved a horror of his own. Recently widowed, he’d scandalized the island by taking a black mistress and having a mulatto child with her. When a series of businesses failed, landing him ever deeper in debt, he became so irregular in his habits that his brother had him declared insane. Not long after, he was found lying in a pool of blood in his bed, having either shot or stabbed himself to death. His will passed over the Hamilton boys too. John Lytton tried to do something for them, but he was struck down by a fever too, and died in his bed.
Hamilton avoided emotional details in his letters, and he recorded no reaction at the time, but many years later, in 1782, he wrote of his irritation that Peter Lavien had died in Beaufort without thinking of him in his will. “He dies rich, but has disposed of the bulk of his fortune to strangers,” Hamilton complained. He was eager for something of his mother’s legacy. “The amount is not very considerable, but, whatever it might be, I shall be glad to have it.” Nothing was forthcoming.
Known in town to be studious and quick-witted, Hamilton caught on with the New York trading firm, Beekman and Cruger, that had supplied some of the goods in his mother’s shop from its local office. Both partners were from established mercantile families in New York and would do much to widen Hamilton’s view of the world. He caught another break when, improbably, a respectable King Street merchant named Thomas Stevens offered to take in both brothers, introducing them to a world of comfort they must have found unimaginable. Stevens had a bright, eager young son, Ned, who was two years older, but, with his flashing blue eyes and reddish hair, looked far more like Alexander than his own brother, James, did. Alexander never commented on the resemblance, but many others did. Thirty years later, Hamilton’s friend Timothy Pickering could not believe the similarity between Hamilton and Ned Stevens, who later became a doctor in New York. “I thought they must be brothers,” he wrote. When he passed that along to Stevens’s brother-in-law, James Yard, Yard was unimpressed, as he’d heard that “a thousand times.”
Although Hamilton died believing he was descended from Scottish lairds, he was likely the son of his new patron, Thomas Stevens of Saint Croix. Paternity would explain not only the uncanny likeness, but also the extraordinary gesture of extending guardianship to a non-relation. Properly, Alexander Hamilton was likely not Alexander Hamilton at all, but Alexander Stevens.
If Rachel had indeed been unfaithful, that would explain Lavien’s outrage and his insistence she be thrown in prison—depriving her of the ability to marry again and thus making Hamilton legitimate. Still, Lavien hadn’t been the one to damage Hamilton’s reputation. Rachel had done that, and then bestowed on her son the name of the man she betrayed.
THE JOB THAT Beekman and Cruger had in mind would have crushed an experienced wholesaler, to say nothing of a twelve-year-old. The firm supplied the island with everything from timber and shingles to pork and black-eyed peas—hundreds of items altogether, virtually everything that islanders needed but could neither grow nor make on their own. And, as for the goods and produce the island could grow to excess, Beekman and Cruger would ship it out to dozens of ports around the world. All of this was overseen by Alexander Hamilton, starting at age twelve.
Shipping was a matter of records, orders, inventories, prices, and weights, and nothing crossed the seas, bound for Saint Croix, or from it, without the details passing through the Beekman and Cruger office at the corner of King and King’s Cross Streets, just up from the harbor in Christiansted, not far from the fort where Hamilton’s mother had been imprisoned. At first, Hamilton’s work was supervised by the owners, but then David Beekman quit the business and Nicholas Cruger returned to New York, leaving Hamilton to run the office largely by himself. He didn’t just keep track of the paperwork, but handled the negotiations, assigned the cargo, and examined the goods themselves, coming and going, to make sure they were up to standard. All weights and measures were carefully recorded and compared, the results noted and filed. Hamilton also had to determine the most expedient sea routes, sometimes over a thousand miles, and the right type of ship, keeping in mind the proclivities of the captain and crew, who ranged widely in talents and temperaments, none of which were very appealing, and had to work out the various payments in more than a dozen different currencies, from Dutch stivers to Spanish pieces of eight. All of the records had to be set down in faultless penmanship in the ledger book, backed by an occasional stinging letter to enforce the agreements. “Believe me, sir, I dun as hard as is proper,” he assured Cruger, who oversaw his activities from New York.
It was at that desk that the young Alexander Hamilton left his “obscene” childhood behind. If this transition was born of necessity, it was also a product of his desire to make himself exemplary, with circumstances to match. If Burr assumed his mantle, Hamilton created his.
Not that it was easy overseeing blustery men many times his age, and many more his weight, while he teetered on the edge of nervous exhaustion from the weight of his cares. “I am so unwell,” he confided to Cruger just a few weeks after starting in, “that it is with difficulty I make out to write these few lines.” Nonetheless, he let Cruger know that he’d sold “30 bbls. flour more.” He rode his captains hard, cautioning a Captain Newton, off in “Curracoa,” to be “very choice” in the mules he selected, and to beware of the pirates along the “Guarda Costa” on his return. “Remember,” he added. “You are to make three trips this Season & unless you are very diligent you will be too late—as our Crops will be early in.” Before Newton could return, another ship appeared with seventy mules, but Hamilton assured Cruger by letter that the other mules would never sell, since the rival concern was demanding hard cash, and “Cash of all kinds [is] scarce here.” Sure enough, the other mules didn’t sell—but Newton’s didn’t either, since many of them had sickened en route.
It was a heady experience for a boy, but one he detested for his knee-scraping subservience to distant owners who’d left him with grueling, around-the-clock pressures and little hope that he would ever improve his situation. As he peered out from his King Street office at the human chattel being unloaded from Africa, he must have thought he had more in common with the burdened slaves than with their whip-wielding masters. Adding to Hamilton’s frustrations, Thomas Stevens had sent his son Ned to New York to be educated at King’s College while Hamilton labored on. “I contemn the groveling condition of a clerk,” he wailed to Ned, “to which my fortune, etc. condemns me, and would willingly risk my life, though not my character to exalt my station” (that “though not my character” is pure Hamilton). He went on:
I’m confident, Ned, that my youth excludes me from any hopes of immediate preferment, nor do I desire it, but I mean to prepare the way for futurity. I’m no philosopher, you see, but I may be justly said to build castles in the air. My f
olly makes me ashamed and beg you’ll conceal it, yet Neddy we have seen such schemes successful when the projector is constant. I shall conclude [by] saying I wish there was a war.
The castles make for an interesting point of contrast. Hamilton admitted to building them when he wasn’t, and Burr decried doing it when he was.
And, of course, there would be a war.
FOR ALL OF Hamilton’s complaints, he did have time for a little frivolity, and he spent it much the same way Burr did: pursuing women. If Burr recorded his activities in boastful letters, Hamilton resorted to rhymed couplets, and subtly suggestive ones at that.
So stroking puss’s velvet paws
How well the jade conceals her claws
And purrs; but if at last
You have to squeeze her somewhat hard,
She spits—her back up—prenez garde;
Good faith she has you fast.
Not bad for sixteen, both for a style that anticipates Byron and for a knowing way with women’s sexual ardor that suggests that, even then, he had enough experience to detail the intricacies of love. He was a quick study, after all.
His literary skills proved his salvation, and quite unexpectedly. The island was savaged by one of the ferocious, drenching hurricanes that periodically roared in from the sea. Most of the islanders scurried indoors to safety, but Hamilton ventured outside with a notebook and, bracing himself, scribbled some notes for a letter to the island’s Royal Danish American Gazette. Hailing the storm as “the most dreadful hurricane that memory or records can trace,” he went at it with a literary force that nearly matched its subject. “The roaring of the sea and wind—fiery meteors flying about in the air—the prodictious glare of almost perpetual lightning—the crash of the falling houses—and the ear-piercing shrieks of the distressed, were sufficient to strike astonishment into Angels.” This wasn’t just a storm; it was a message from the heavens: Humans were “vile worm[s]” that could use some humility.
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 5
