Alexander Hamilton (7 page)

Before considering his first commercial experience, we must ponder another startling enigma in Hamilton’s boyhood. 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. Of the five Stevens children, Edward, born a year before Alexander, became his closest friend, “an intimate acquaintance begun in early youth,” as Hamilton described their relationship.
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As they matured, they often seemed to display parallel personalities. Both were exceedingly quick and clever, disciplined and persevering, fluent in French, versed in classical history, outraged by slavery, and mesmerized by medicine. In future years, Edward Stevens was wont to remind Hamilton of “those vows of eternal friendship, which we have so often mutually exchanged,” and he often fretted about Hamilton’s delicate health.
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If their personalities exhibited unusual compatibility, their physical resemblance bordered on the uncanny, often stopping people cold. Thirty years later, when Hamilton’s close friend Timothy Pickering, then secretary of state, first set eyes on Edward Stevens, he was bowled over by the likeness. “At the first glance,” recalled Pickering, “I was struck with the extraordinary similitude of his and General Hamilton’s faces—I thought they must be
brothers.
” When Pickering confided his amazement to Stevens’s brother-in-law, James Yard of St. Croix, the latter “informed me that the remark had been made a thousand times.”
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This mystery began to obsess the inquisitive Pickering, who finally concluded that Hamilton and Stevens
were
brothers. In notes assembled for a projected biography of Hamilton, Pickering wrote that “it was generally understood that Hamilton was an illegitimate son of a gentleman of [the] name” of Stevens.
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This scuttlebutt resonated through the nineteenth century, so that in 1882 Henry Cabot Lodge could write that “every student of the period [is] familiar with the story, which oral tradition had handed down, that Hamilton was the illegitimate son of a rich West Indian planter or merchant, generally supposed to have been Mr. Stevens, the father of Hamilton’s early friend and school-fellow.”
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What to make of this extraordinary speculation? No extant picture of Edward Stevens enables us to probe any family resemblance. Nevertheless, in the absence of direct proof, 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 would also explain why Hamilton formed an infinitely more enduring bond with Edward Stevens than with his own brother. It might suggest why James Hamilton, Sr., left his family behind, assumed no further responsibility for them, and took no evident delight in Alexander’s later career. Most of all, it would account for the peculiar distance that later held Hamilton apart from both his father and his brother. As will be seen, Alexander Hamilton was an intensely loyal person, endowed with a deep streak of family responsibility. There is something telltale about the way that he, his father, and his brother let relations abruptly lapse, as if the three of them were in headlong flight from some harrowing shared secret.
TWO

ven in the languorous tropics, Hamilton, while clerking at Beekman and Cruger, was schooled in a fast-paced modern world of trading ships and fluctuating markets. Whatever his frustrations, he did not operate in an obscure corner of the world, and his first job afforded him valuable insights into global commerce and the maneuvers of imperial powers. Working on an island first developed by a trading company, he was exposed early on to the mercantilist policies that governed European economies.

Beekman and Cruger engaged in an export-import business that provided an excellent training ground for Hamilton, who had to monitor a bewildering inventory of goods. The firm dealt in every conceivable commodity required by planters: timber, bread, flour, rice, lard, pork, beef, fish, black-eyed peas, corn, porter, cider, pine, oak, hoops, shingles, iron, lime, rope, lampblack, bricks, mules, and cattle. “Amid his various engagements in later years,” John C. Hamilton said of his father, “he adverted to [this time] as the most useful part of his education.”
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He learned to write in a beautiful, clear, flowing hand. He had to mind money, chart courses for ships, keep track of freight, and compute prices in an exotic blend of currencies, including Portuguese coins, Spanish pieces of eight, British pounds, Danish ducats, and Dutch stivers. If Hamilton seemed very knowing about business as a young adult, it can partly be traced to these formative years.

Located above the harbor at the elevated intersection of King and King’s Cross Streets, Beekman and Cruger ran a shop and an adjoining warehouse. A pleasant stroll down the sloping main street would have brought Hamilton, freshened by sea breezes, to the hectic wharf area, where the firm maintained its own dock and ship. While the clerk inspected incoming merchandise, some of it contraband, the air was thick with the sweet fragrances of sugar, rum, and molasses, hauled in barrels by horse-drawn wagons and ready for shipment to North America in exchange for grain, flour, timber, and sundry other staples. The neutral Danish island served as a transit point to the French West Indies, converting Hamilton’s ease in French into a critical business asset. As a rule, the merchants of St. Croix were natives of the British Isles, so that English, not Danish, functioned as the island’s lingua franca.

Beekman and Cruger furnished Hamilton with a direct link to his future home in New York, which carried on extensive trade with St. Croix. Many Manhattan trading firms dispatched young family members to the islands as local agents, and Nicholas Cruger was a prime example. He came from one of colonial New York’s most distinguished families. His father, Henry, was a wealthy merchant, shipowner, and member of His Majesty’s Royal Council for the province. His uncle, John Cruger, had been a long-standing mayor and a member of the Stamp Act Congress. While this blue-blooded clan had distinct Anglophile tendencies, time was to expose a split. Nicholas’s brother, also Henry, based in Britain, was elected a member of Parliament from Bristol beside no less august a personage than Edmund Burke. Nicholas himself was to side with the rebel colonists and revere George Washington. One wonders whether he functioned as Hamilton’s first political tutor. He also exposed Hamilton to a prosperous, civic-minded breed of New York businessmen, who stood as models for the elite brand of Federalism he later espoused.

From the outset, the young Hamilton had phenomenal stamina for sustained work: ambitious, orphaned boys do not enjoy the option of idleness. Even before starting work, he must have developed unusual autonomy for a thirteen-year-old, and Beekman and Cruger would only have toughened his moral fiber. Hamilton exuded an air of crisp efficiency and cool self-command. While his peers squandered their time on frivolities, Hamilton led a much more strenuous, urgent life that was to liberate him from St. Croix. He was a proud and sensitive boy, caught in the lower reaches of a rigid class society with small chance for social mobility. His friend Nathaniel Pendleton later said of his clerkship that Hamilton “conceived so strong an aversion to it as to be induced to abandon altogether the pursuits of commerce.”
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On November 11, 1769, in his earliest surviving letter, the fourteen-yearold Hamilton vented the blackest pent-up despair. Written in elegant penmanship, the letter shows that the young clerk felt demeaned by his lowly social station and chafed with excess energy. Already he sought psychic relief in extravagant fantasies of fame and faraway glory. The recipient was his dear friend and lookalike Edward Stevens, who had recently begun his studies at King’s College in New York:

To confess my weakness, Ned, my ambition is [so] prevalent that I contemn the grovelling and conditions of a clerk or the like to which my fortune &c. condemns me and would willingly risk my life, tho’ not my character, to exalt my station. 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, and may be jus[t]ly said to build castles in the air. My folly 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. Alex. Hamilton.
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What prophetic aspirations Hamilton telescoped into this short letter! The boy hankering for heroism and martial glory was to find his war soon enough. He betrayed a stinging sense of shame that the adult Hamilton would studiously cloak behind an air of bravado. Of special interest are his intuitive fear that his outsized ambition might corrupt him and his insistence that he would never endanger his ethics to conquer the world. Despite some awkwardness in the writing, he appears surprisingly mature for fourteen and springs full-blown into the historical record.

He had ample opportunities to exercise his many talents. In 1769, David Beekman quit the business and was replaced by Cornelius Kortright—another New Yorker with another prestigious name—and the firm was reconstituted as Kortright and Cruger. In October 1771, for medical reasons, Nicholas Cruger returned to New York for a five-month stint and left his precocious clerk in charge.

A sheaf of revealing business letters drafted by Hamilton shows him, for the first time, in the take-charge mode that was to characterize his tumultuous career. With peculiar zeal, he collected money owed to the firm. “Believe me Sir,” he assured the absent Cruger, “I dun as hard as is proper.”
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The bulk of the correspondence concerns a sloop called the
Thunderbolt,
partly owned by the Crugers, that carried several dozen miserable mules through churning seas in early 1772. Hamilton had to direct this cargo safely along the Spanish Main (South America’s northwestern coast), then brimming with hostile vessels. Hamilton did not hesitate to advise his bosses that they should arm the ship with four guns. He said flatly to Tileman Cruger, who oversaw family operations in Curaçao, “It would be undoubtedly a great pity that such a vessel should be lost for the want of them.”
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When the ship docked with forty-one skeletal, drooping mules, Hamilton lectured the vessel’s skipper in a peremptory tone that someday would be familiar to legions of respectful subordinates: “Reflect continually on the unfortunate voyage you have just made and endeavour to make up for the considerable loss therefrom accruing to your owners.”
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The adolescent clerk had a capacity for quick decisions and showed no qualms about giving a tongue-lashing to a veteran sea captain. So proficient and eager to lead was he that he must have been slightly deflated when Nicholas Cruger returned to St. Croix in March 1772.

Hamilton’s apprenticeship provided many benefits. He developed an intimate knowledge of traders and smugglers that later aided his establishment of the U.S. Coast Guard and Customs Service. He saw that business was often obstructed by scarce cash or credit and learned the value of a uniform currency in stimulating trade. Finally, he was forced to ponder the paradox that the West Indian islands, with all their fertile soil, traded at a disadvantage with the rest of the world because of their reliance on only the sugar crop—a conundrum to which he was to return in his celebrated “Report on Manufactures.” It may be that Hamilton’s preference for a diversified economy of manufacturing and agriculture originated in his youthful reflections on the avoidable poverty he had witnessed in the Caribbean.

While Kortright and Cruger mostly brokered foodstuffs and dry goods, at least once a year the firm handled a large shipment of far more perishable cargo: slaves. On the slave ships, hundreds of Africans were chained and stuffed in fetid holds, where many suffocated. So vile were the conditions on these noisome ships that people onshore could smell their foul effluvia even miles away. On January 23, 1771, during Hamilton’s tenure, his firm ran a notice atop the front page of the local bilingual paper, the
Royal Danish American Gazette:
“Just imported from the Windward Coast of Africa, and to be sold on Monday next, by Messrs. Kortright & Cruger, At said Cruger’s yard, Three Hundred Prime SLAVES.”
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The following year, Nicholas Cruger imported 250 more slaves from Africa’s Gold Coast and complained that they were “very indifferent indeed, sickly and thin.”
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One can only imagine the inhuman scenes that Hamilton observed as he helped to inspect, house, groom, and price the slaves about to be auctioned. To enhance their appearance, their bodies were shaved and rubbed with palm oil until their muscles glistened in the sunlight. Some buyers came armed with branding irons to imprint their initials on their newly purchased property. From the frequency with which Nicholas Cruger placed newspaper notices to catch runaway slaves, it seems clear that the traffic in human beings formed a substantial portion of his business.

By the time Hamilton arrived on St. Croix, the burgeoning slave population had doubled in just a decade, and the planters banded together to guard against uprisings or mass escapes to nearby Puerto Rico, where slaves could secure their freedom under Spanish rule. In this fearful environment, no white enjoyed the luxury of being a neutral spectator: either he was an accomplice of the slave system or he left the island. To remove any ambiguity in the matter, the government in Copenhagen issued a booklet, “The St. Croixian Pocket Companion,” which spelled out the duties of every white on the island—duties that would have applied to Hamilton starting in 1771. Every male over sixteen was obligated to serve in the militia and attend monthly drills with his arms and ammunition at the ready. If the fort fired its guns twice in a row, all white males had to grab their muskets and flock there instantly. On days when renegade slaves were executed at Christiansvaern, the white men formed a ring around the fort to prevent other slaves from interfering. Any slave who attacked a white person faced certain death by hanging or decapitation—death that probably came as a blessed relief after first being prodded with red-hot pokers and castrated. Punishments were designed to be hellish so as to terrorize the rest of the captive population into submission. If a slave lifted a hand in resistance, it would promptly be chopped off. Any runaway who returned within a three-month period would have one foot lopped off. If he then ran away a second time, the other foot was amputated. Recidivists might also have their necks fitted with grisly iron collars of sharp, inward-pointing spikes that made it impossible to crawl away through the dense underbrush without slashing their own throats in the effort.