Alexander Hamilton Read Online Free Page B

luxuriant natural beauty.
    On both his maternal and paternal sides, Hamilton’s family clung to the insecure middle rung of West Indian life, squeezed between plantation aristocrats above and street rabble and unruly slaves below. Taunted as a bastard throughout his life, Hamilton was understandably reluctant to chat about his childhood—“my birth is the subject of the most humiliating criticism,” he wrote in one pained confession— and he turned his early family history into a taboo topic, alluded to in only a couple of cryptic letters. 4 He described his maternal grandfather, the physician John Faucette, as “a French Huguenot who emigrated to the West Indies in consequence of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and settled in the island of Nevis and there acquired a pretty fortune. [Revoked in 1685 by Louis XIV, the Edict of Nantes had guaranteed religious toleration for French Protestants.] I have been assured by persons who knew him that he was a man of letters and much of a gentleman.” 5 Born ten years after his grandfather’s death, Hamilton may have embellished the sketch with a touch of gentility. In the slave-based economy, physicians often attended the auctions, checking the teeth of the human chattel and making them run, leap, and jump to test whatever strength remained after the grueling middle passage. No white in the sugar islands was entirely exempt from the pervasive taint of slavery.
    The archives of St. George’s Parish in the fertile, mountainous Gingerland section of Nevis record the marriage of John Faucette to a British woman, Mary Uppington, on August 21, 1718. By that point, they already had two children: a daughter, Ann, and a son, John, the latter arriving two months before the wedding. In all likelihood, lulled by the casual mores of the tropics, the Faucettes decided to formalize their link after the birth of their second child, having lived until then as a common-law couple—an expedient adopted by Hamilton’s own parents. In all, the Faucettes produced seven children, Hamilton’s mother, Rachel, being the second youngest, born circa 1729.
    A persistent mythology in the Caribbean asserts that Rachel was partly black, making Alexander Hamilton a quadroon or an octoroon. In this obsessively raceconscious society, however, Rachel was invariably listed among the whites on local tax rolls. Her identification as someone of mixed race has no basis in verifiable fact. (See pages 734–35.) The folklore that Hamilton was mulatto probably arose from the incontestable truth that many, if not most, illegitimate children in the West Indies bore mixed blood. At the time of Rachel’s birth, the four thousand slaves on Nevis outnumbered whites by a ratio of four to one, making inequitable carnal relations between black slaves and white masters a dreadful commonplace.
    Occupying a house in the southern Nevis foothills, the Faucettes owned a small sugar plantation and had at least seven slaves—pretty typical for the petite bourgeoisie. That Nevis later had a small black village named Fawcett, an anglicized version of the family name, confirms their ownership of slaves who later assumed their surname. The sugar islands were visited so regularly by epidemics of almost biblical proportions—malaria, dysentery, and yellow fever being the worst offenders— that five Faucette children perished in infancy or childhood, leaving only Rachel and her much older sister, Ann, as survivors. Even aided by slaves, small planters found it a tough existence. Skirting the volcanic cone, the Nevis hills were so steep and rocky that, even when terraced, they proved troublesome for sugar cultivation. The island steadily lost its economic eminence, especially after a mysterious plant disease, aggravated by drought, slowly crept across Nevis in 1737 and denuded it of much of its lush vegetation. This prompted a mass exodus of refugees, including Ann Faucette, who had married a well-to-do planter named James Lytton.