Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton was born on January 11, 1755 and spent part of the early part of his childhood in Charlestown, the capital of the island of Nevis in the British Leeward Islands. Hamilton and his older brother James Jr. were born out of wedlock to Rachel Faucette, a married woman of half-British and half-French Huguenot descent, and James A. Hamilton, a Scotsman who was the fourth son of Alexander Hamilton, the laird of Grange, Ayrshire.

Hamilton's mother was married previously on Saint Croix, then ruled by Denmark, to Johann Michael Lavien, a merchant of Danish or German descent. They had one son, Peter Lavien. In 1750, Faucette left her husband and first son before travelling to Saint Kitts, where she met James Hamilton. Hamilton and Faucette moved together to Nevis, her birthplace, where she had inherited a seaside lot in town from her father. The Church of England denied membership and education to Alexander and James Jr. because their parents were not legally married. While their mother was living, they received individual tutoring and classes in a private school led by a Jewish headmistress. Alexander supplemented his education with a family library of 34 books. 

James Hamilton later abandoned Rachel Faucette and their two sons, allegedly to "spar [her] a charge of bigamy...after finding out that her first husband intend to divorce her under Danish law on grounds of adultery and desertion." Rachel then moved with her two children to Saint Croix, where she supported them by managing a small store in Christiansted. She contracted yellow fever and died on February 19, 1768, leaving Hamilton orphaned. This may have had a severe emotional impact on Hamilton, even by the standards of an 18th-century childhood. In probate court, Faucette's "first husband seized her estate" and obtained the few valuables that she had owned, including some household silver. Many items were auctioned off, but a friend purchased the family's books and returned them to Hamilton. 

The brothers were briefly taken in by their cousin Peter Lytton. However, Lytton took his own life in July 1769, leaving his property to his mistress and their son, and the Hamilton brothers were subsequently separated. James Jr. apprenticed with a local carpenter, while Alexander was given a home by Thomas Stevens, a merchant from Nevis. 

Hamilton became a clerk at Beekman and Cruger, a local import-export firm that traded with the Province of New York and New England. Despite being only a teenager, Hamilton proved capable enough as a trader to be left in charge of the firm for five months in 1771 while the owner was at sea. He remained an avid reader, and later developed an interest in writing and a life outside Saint Kitts, where he lived. He wrote a detailed letter to his father regarding a hurricane that devastated Christiansted on August 30, 1772. The Presbyterian Reverend Hugh Knox, a tutor and mentor to Hamilton, submitted the letter for publication in the Royal Danish-American Gazette. Biographer Ron Chernow found the letter astounding because "for all its bombastic excesses, it does seem wondrous [that a] self-educated clerk could write with such verve and gusto" and that a teenage boy produced an apocalyptic "fire-and-brimstone sermon" viewing the hurricane as a "divine rebuke to human vanity and pomposity." The essay impressed community leaders, who collected a fund to send Hamilton to the North American colonies for his education. 

In October 1772, Hamilton arrived by ship in Boston and proceeded from there to New York City, where he took lodgings with the Irish-born Hercules Mulligan, brother of a trader known to Hamilton's benefactors, who assisted Hamilton in selling cargo that was used to pay for his education and support. Later that year, in preparation for college, Hamilton began to fill gaps in his education at the Elizabethtown Academy, a preparatory school run by Francis Barber in Elizabeth, New Jersey. While there, he came under the influence of William Livingston, a local leading intellectual and revolutionary with whom he lived for a time.

Hamilton entered Mulligan's alma mater King's College, now Columbia University, in New York City in the autumn of 1773 as a private student, while again boarding with Mulligan until officially matriculating in May 1774. His college roommate and lifelong friend Robert Troup spoke glowingly of Hamilton's clarity in concisely explaining the patriots' case against the British in what is credited as Hamilton's first public appearance on July 6, 1773. Hamilton, Troup, and four other undergraduates formed an unnamed literary society that is regarded as a precursor of the Philolexian Society.

Church of England clergyman Samuel Seabury published a series of pamphlets promoting the Loyalist cause in 1774, to which Hamilton responded anonymously with his first published political writings, A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress and The Farmer Refuted. Seabury essentially tried to provoke fear in the colonies with an objective of preventing the colonies from uniting against the British.[40] Hamilton published two additional pieces attacking the Quebec Act, and may have also authored the 15 anonymous installments of "The Monitor" for Holt's New York Journal. Hamilton was a supporter of the Revolutionary cause before the war began, although he did not approve of mob reprisals against Loyalists. On May 10, 1775, Hamilton won credit for saving his college's president, Loyalist Myles Cooper, from an angry mob by speaking to the crowd long enough to allow Cooper to escape. Hamilton was forced to discontinue his studies before graduating when the college closed its doors during the British occupation of the city.