Edwin S. Grosvenor - The Best of American Heritage: Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton said little about his childhood.

His political enemies, on the other hand, said a good deal mostly under their breath and mostly unflattering, even scathing. An aging John Adams called Hamilton the bastard son of a Scots peddler.

Hamiltons supporters denied the scurrilous reports that, for example, he was born to unwed parents or that he grew up in poverty. One friendly author even concocted an inspiring tale of a blue blood rescued by wealthy relatives from the shame of his mothers marital scandal.

These well-intended but erroneous interpretations have enshrouded Hamiltons boyhood in a mix of legend and conjecture, denying the undeniable fact of his illegitimate birth. It isnt exactly clear why these stories persist: The English and Danish authorities of the islands where he lived as a boy kept meticulous records that reveal the essential facts a story of personal triumph over difficult circumstances.

This is the real story of Hamiltons boyhood and the journey that led him to become one of our countrys most influential leaders.

Truth is, despite rumors to the contrary, Hamiltons ancestry was British. His grandmother, records show, was an English widow named Mary Uppington. She married Englishman John Faucette at St. Georges parish church on the island of Nevis, British West Indies, on August 21, 1718.

By the time they married, Mary and Faucette already had two children, a daughter, Ann, and a son, John. Faucette was a sugar planter but an unsuccessful one. On an island where everyone else seemed to make a fortune in sugar, he slipped deeper into debt. He and Mary steadily lost acreage and owned only a dozen slaves - a small number when compared to owners of larger plantations. After bearing Faucette seven children, Mary left him, taking with her their youngest surviving child, Rachel, the girl who would one day be Alexander Hamiltons mother.

Amid the tropical, amoral life of the sugar islands, where the rich and successful played, Rachel blossomed into a beautiful young woman. Before the ambitious Mary left Faucette, she had steered their eldest daughter Ann into a marriage with the son of one of Neviss wealthiest families, the Lyttons. Now she sought to do the same for Rachel.

In leaving Faucette, Mary had given up her rights to her husbands income and his small plantation in exchange for a paltry annuity of . Upon his death in 1745, however, Rachel, at sixteen, inherited the entirety of her fathers modest estate. Taking the money, she and her mother moved from Nevis to St. Croix, some 140 miles west and north, where her sister Ann lived with her husband, James.

Through the Lyttons, Mary had met a Danish merchant named Johann Michael Lavien, an aristocratic and arrogant man thirteen years Rachels senior. Lavien was flashy, vain, and well-connected. Rachel found him repulsive. Nonetheless, in 1745, Rachel became, at her mothers insistence, Laviens unwilling bride.

All did not go well at the newlyweds plantation house in the hills of St. Croix. Laviens tastes were expensive and his income negligible. A year after their wedding, Rachel bore him a son they called Peter, but after his birth, Rachel wanted nothing more to do with her husband. In 1748, Lavien purchased a half-share in a second plantation, accumulating more debt and squandering what was left of his wifes meager inheritance.

Only five years into the marriage, Rachel had had enough. In 1750, she moved out of the house she shared with Lavien.

Furious and no doubt humiliated by his wifes departure, Lavien was eager to inflict a similar punishment on her. He stormed down to the town captain of Christiansted, Bertram Pieter de Nully, and bellowed: I want you to jail my wife!

Lavien was explicit in his charges against his wife. Rachel, he protested, was disobedient and rebellious. Not only did she reject his husbandly overtures, she was unseemly in her behavior with other men. He had disciplined her, but she had already run away once.

To prevent her from fleeing again, he swore out a warrant for her arrest. Fulfilling his duty, Captain De Nully went up to the house and seized her, then locked her in a cell in the fort on the Christiansted quay, the only time, records indicate, that a woman was ever jailed in the city for adultery.

Months later - at least three but maybe as many as five - De Nully came to Rachel and told her that her husband had agreed to have her released if she would promise to obey him and remain faithful. Certain his wife would have learned her lesson after being incarcerated in the deplorable conditions of the island prison, Lavien was willing to let bygones be bygones. But Rachel was not. She would not return to his house, or to his bed. She would never go back, she told De Nully.