Free Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

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.” 2 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. 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