A great deal of what he later propounded, he absorbed from his time here.” “It was this busy, bustling, vibrant place filled with ships of various nationalities. Croix historian and former park ranger at Fort Christiansvaern. “Christiansted was Hamilton’s venue,” said William Cissel, a St. Penniless and alone, the brothers separated James became an apprentice to a carpenter and, in an operatic twist, Alexander found himself living in the Christiansted home of a wealthy merchant’s family, and working for the import-export firm Beekman and Cruger.Īlexander Hamilton, the first United States Treasury secretary, was deeply influenced by what he saw and lived through on St. Eighteen months later, their guardian cousin committed suicide. In 1768, Rachel succumbed to a vicious fever and died here, leaving her sons essentially orphaned. 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 with bilingual English-Danish street signs and low buildings with pastel columns.Īs I lingered on the sidewalk, a rooster’s crow pierced the heat-induced lethargy of midday and cast a melancholy air. 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. Here in this cramped space, Rachel Lavien spent several squalid months, with only a narrow window offering paltry light and air, and a slivered view of the water. In the west wing, I paused inside a cell to examine a small exhibition devoted to Hamilton and his family. Though primarily used as military barracks and storage, the fort also served as the colony’s prison for runaway slaves and criminals. I repressed a shiver as I wandered alone through its labyrinth of whitewashed rooms. A furious Lavien accused her of adultery and invoked Danish law to have her thrown into a cell at Fort Christiansvaern, the thick-wall stronghold that served as both military post and prison for the town of Christiansted.Ĭompleted in 1749, Fort Christiansvaern is a national historic site today, an impenetrable yellow structure overlooking the glittering turquoise waters of Gallows Bay. The union, unhappy from the start, bore a son before she left the home around 1750. With her mother “captivated by the glitter” of Lavien, the 16-year-old Rachel quickly found herself pressed into “a hated marriage” that would cast the rest of her life in misery. He met the beautiful and spirited Rachel Faucette Lavien and the two embarked on an ill-fated romance. His father, James Hamilton, the dissolute fourth son of a Scottish laird, had washed up on the island of St. (Lost documents and his own subterfuge have obscured the true date, but historians generally agree on 1755.) While he was not quite “the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar” - as John Adams once acidly described him - the circumstances surrounding his out-of-wedlock birth were certainly infelicitous. Croix and the ghosts that haunted a deeply ambitious, flawed and brilliant man.Īlexander Hamilton was born on Nevis, an island in the British West Indies about 140 miles southeast of St. As I discovered during a visit last summer, retracing Hamilton’s footsteps on the island illuminates both the complex and tarnished history of St.
But beyond the windswept beaches and luxurious resorts lurk the vestiges of a dark, sugar-fueled 18th-century heyday. Visible evidence of his history with the island is minimal the airport, which once honored him, was renamed in 1996 for the Tuskeegee airman Henry E.
Residents speak of Hamilton’s West Indian roots with passing affection, as a tidbit of trivia. Croix, the largest of the United States Virgin Islands, are mostly in search of a tropical vacation. Though he left as a teenager - and never returned - Hamilton’s tragic West Indian childhood informed his entire life, shaping his views on government, economics, slavery and much more. Before he achieved Revolutionary War glory, or became a founding father and an author of the Federalist Papers before he established a sophisticated financial system, served as the nation’s first Treasury secretary or engaged in the type of petty political feud that would lead to his death in a duel at 49 before the $10 bill immortalized his beaked profile and over two and a half centuries before a Broadway musical about his life would weave itself into the cultural spirit of the early 21st century, Alexander Hamilton was an orphan struggling to survive on the Caribbean island of St.
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