Hamilton : the energetic founder
(Book)

Hardcover

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Alexander Hamilton traced a long, intricate journey, from his birth in the mid-1750s on the Caribbean island of Nevis to his burial at New York City's Trinity Church in 1804. Controversy swirls around the exact year (sometime between 1754 and 1758) whenhe was born, though we know that his birthday was January 11. A scholarly consensus has fixed his birth year as 1755, based on a Dutch probate record; the latest major biographer questions that choice, however, opting for 1757, the year that Hamilton himself believed was right. Hamilton's mother, Rachael Fawcett (Anglicized from Faucette) Lavien, was a French Huguenot Protestant who had abandoned her marriage to the Dutch merchant Johann Michael Lavien (by whom she had had a legitimate son, Peter). Rachael first had an affair with the mapmaker Johan Jacob Cronenberg on St. Croix and then formed a relationship on St. Kitts with James Hamilton. The fourth son of Alexander Hamilton, Lord of the Grange in Ayrshire, in Scotland, James had a lineage better thanhis prospects. Sometime in the mid-1750s, James and Rachael had two sons out of wedlock on Nevis - James Jr. and Alexander. In 1759, Johann Lavien divorced Rachael for desertion and adultery; the divorce, granted under Dutch law, blamed the marriage's failure on Rachael, barring her from marrying anyone else. In that year, Rachael, James, and their two sons returned to St. Croix; soon afterward, James left Rachael, for reasons unknown to posterity. Rachael sought to earn a living by setting up a small general store, and for a time she succeeded, but within a year of launching her business she and her younger son fell ill with fever. Alexander survived, but Rachel died, aged thirty-nine. After her death, a Dutch probate court awarded her scanty estate toher sole legitimate child, Peter Lavien. Disinherited because of their illegitimacy, James and Alexander were sent to live with Robert Lytton, an adult cousin from their mother's family, but that arrangement ended when Lytton hanged himself. James and Alexander were old enough to learn trades. James was apprenticed to be a carpenter (he apparently died in 1785 or 1786 in the West Indies). After a period of education at a Hebrew school on Charlestown Alexander was apprenticed as a clerk to Nicholas Cruger,a partner with David Beekman in the mercantile firm of Beekman & Cruger, which had business connections to the colony of New York. Though barely in his teens, Hamilton soon became Cruger's agent, dealing as an equal with adult ship captains"--,Provided by publisher.