Free Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

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.” 2 On November 11, 1769, in his earliest surviving letter, the fourteen-year-old 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. 3
    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.” 4 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.” 5 When the ship docked with forty-one skeletal, drooping mules, Hamilton