In 1765, abandoned by James Hamilton, Rachel moved with their two sons to 34 Company Street, where the three scratched out a meager subsistence operating a small dry goods store that sold provisions like rice, flour and salted fish. Though the home has long since disappeared, replaced by the garden of a Catholic church - a structure at 23 Company street, where the family briefly resided in 1767, is also gone - the area retains a faded colonial charm.
In 1768, Rachel succumbed to a vicious fever and died here, leaving her sons essentially orphaned. Eighteen months later, their guardian cousin committed suicide. Penniless and alone, the brothers separated；James became an apprentice to a carpenter, and Alexander found himself living in the Christiansted home of a wealthy merchant's family and working for the import-export firm Beekman and Cruger.
“Christiansted was Hamilton's venue,” said William Cissel, a St. Croix historian and former park ranger at Fort Christiansvaern. “It was this busy, bustling, vibrant place filled with ships of various nationalities. A great deal of what he later propounded, he absorbed from his time here.”
On Stately King Street, I found the site of Beekman and Cruger's office, where Hamilton, laboring diligently as a young clerk, absorbed the principles of international trade, credit and foreign exchange. A few blocks away, the Customs House sprawled in neoclassical grandeur, a monument to the wealth that once fueled the West Indies. A few yards beyond stretched a dainty wharf - shockingly small by modern standards - where Hamilton would have inspected cargo for his employers. They imported all of the necessities for a planter's daily life (cider, bricks, lumber, corn and other staples), while exporting just a few products made from sugar cane - sugar, rum and molasses；that single-crop reliance may have led Hamilton to favor a diversified marketplace.
My stroll ended at the Danish West India and Guinea Company Warehouse, a stocky two-story building. A staircase extends into the enclosed courtyard, replacing the long platform where slaves were once auctioned. While it's unclear if he was a regular attendee, Hamilton almost certainly witnessed some of these brutal transactions；his boyhood exposure to plantation culture left him with a lifelong antipathy toward slavery.
“These were basically killing fields for the people who worked there,” said George Tyson, another St. Croix historian.
We were on the lush grounds of Estate Cane Garden - a former sugar plantation owned today by the financier Richard Jenrette - gazing at the 18th-century ruins of sugar cane mills and other farm buildings. Though it was barely midmorning, the sun beat down with a merciless heat, lending a particular inhumanity to Mr. Tyson's descriptions of the grueling sugar-making process. “Ninety percent of the population was black slave labor,” he said. “Hamilton saw himself caught up in those social dynamics. He had no future here because of his background. Perhaps he felt some solidarity with other marginalized people.”
Fortune brought him first a hurricane.
In 1772, a fierce storm devastated St. Croix. Hamilton described to his father the “prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning, the crash of the falling houses, and the ear-piercing shrieks of the distressed”：it was a letter of such marked literary skill that it was published by the local newspaper, The Royal Danish American Gazette, where it attracted the attention of several prominent businessmen. They began a subscription fund for his education, and a few months later Hamilton was on a ship bound for Boston.
“Men are generally too much attached to their native countries to leave it and dissolve all their connections, unless they are driven to it by necessity,” Hamilton wrote in 1775. By the time he wrote these words, he was a student at King's College in New York and an ardent supporter of the American cause, he ignominious West Indian beginnings so far behind him that they had almost become a source of shame. He had managed to escape his past - and he never look back.
In 1768, Rachel succumbed to a vicious fever and died here, leaving her sons essentially orphaned. Eighteen months later, their guardian cousin committed suicide. Penniless and alone, the brothers separated；James became an apprentice to a carpenter, and Alexander found himself living in the Christiansted home of a wealthy merchant's family and working for the import-export firm Beekman and Cruger.
“Christiansted was Hamilton's venue,” said William Cissel, a St. Croix historian and former park ranger at Fort Christiansvaern. “It was this busy, bustling, vibrant place filled with ships of various nationalities. A great deal of what he later propounded, he absorbed from his time here.”
On Stately King Street, I found the site of Beekman and Cruger's office, where Hamilton, laboring diligently as a young clerk, absorbed the principles of international trade, credit and foreign exchange. A few blocks away, the Customs House sprawled in neoclassical grandeur, a monument to the wealth that once fueled the West Indies. A few yards beyond stretched a dainty wharf - shockingly small by modern standards - where Hamilton would have inspected cargo for his employers. They imported all of the necessities for a planter's daily life (cider, bricks, lumber, corn and other staples), while exporting just a few products made from sugar cane - sugar, rum and molasses；that single-crop reliance may have led Hamilton to favor a diversified marketplace.
My stroll ended at the Danish West India and Guinea Company Warehouse, a stocky two-story building. A staircase extends into the enclosed courtyard, replacing the long platform where slaves were once auctioned. While it's unclear if he was a regular attendee, Hamilton almost certainly witnessed some of these brutal transactions；his boyhood exposure to plantation culture left him with a lifelong antipathy toward slavery.
“These were basically killing fields for the people who worked there,” said George Tyson, another St. Croix historian.
We were on the lush grounds of Estate Cane Garden - a former sugar plantation owned today by the financier Richard Jenrette - gazing at the 18th-century ruins of sugar cane mills and other farm buildings. Though it was barely midmorning, the sun beat down with a merciless heat, lending a particular inhumanity to Mr. Tyson's descriptions of the grueling sugar-making process. “Ninety percent of the population was black slave labor,” he said. “Hamilton saw himself caught up in those social dynamics. He had no future here because of his background. Perhaps he felt some solidarity with other marginalized people.”
Fortune brought him first a hurricane.
In 1772, a fierce storm devastated St. Croix. Hamilton described to his father the “prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning, the crash of the falling houses, and the ear-piercing shrieks of the distressed”：it was a letter of such marked literary skill that it was published by the local newspaper, The Royal Danish American Gazette, where it attracted the attention of several prominent businessmen. They began a subscription fund for his education, and a few months later Hamilton was on a ship bound for Boston.
“Men are generally too much attached to their native countries to leave it and dissolve all their connections, unless they are driven to it by necessity,” Hamilton wrote in 1775. By the time he wrote these words, he was a student at King's College in New York and an ardent supporter of the American cause, he ignominious West Indian beginnings so far behind him that they had almost become a source of shame. He had managed to escape his past - and he never look back.
