A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress, Part I: Context

            Much to my surprise – and to some extent my delight – recent months have witnessed the stunning success and popularity of a piece of musical theatre based on the life of one of America’s Founding Fathers. I confess I have not seen it myself and may never – owing more to circumstances than inclination – but all the same I find myself both fascinated and unsettled. That any of the Founders should have proven themselves suitable fodder for such a lavish form of artistic expression would, I have no doubt, been a source of puzzlement for the men in question. Farmers, lawyers, merchants, and printers toiling on the ragged frontier of a vast empire, they seemed far less sensible of their own significance than that of the endeavor they were collectively engaged in. I find that I too am similarly perplexed. Having worked for what seems like many more years than is truly the case in this little corner of American history, to find a subject that I have spent a not inconsiderable amount of time and resources grappling with suddenly embraced by the popular imagination is a sensation fraught with distinctly mixed emotions. I am pleased that a man who has, in spite of his great importance, been ill-known by the general public is now having the story of his life retold night after night before packed audiences. And I am also hopeful that this production, by allowing Americans to connect with the experiences of one of the founders of their nation on a personal, relatable level, will help promote a deeper and more complex appreciation of the American Founding among the general population.

            Yet I am also sensible – perhaps unnecessarily – that by repackaging the life experiences of a member of the Founding Generation in an entertaining fashion, and in a form that takes on a reasonable length, certain details and nuances may effectively be lost. With all due credit to the creator of the show, who has gone to significant lengths to portray many specific incidents from the life of his subject, it may just be that musical theatre is not the ideal forum for discussions of philosophy, banking, or constitutional theory. With this in mind, I find I cannot shake the apprehension that some audience members may come away from a performance with an altogether incomplete idea of the man and his world. Additionally, and in a far more shameful admission, I must confess to feeling a degree of territoriality. Reams of scholarship have been written on the subject of the production in question, by some of the most incisive minds of their respective generations. I have, in the course of my formal studies, become acquainted with more than a few such works, and it rather pains me to think that most of them will remain on shelves collecting dust while the general public absorbs their history through song and dance numbers. I will own that most academic histories are dry, repetitive, and dense, and would almost certainly bore the average person into a state of unconsciousness were they forced to read them. And I will also freely acknowledge that popular theatre is a perfectly legitimate forum for communicating about very important topics. Call it academic jealousy. This thing that I felt some ownership over has appeared to slip beyond my grasp, and I cannot help but feel that it will be misunderstood by those not adequately informed. I should give people more credit, I know.

As I’m sure my “clever” attempt to talk around the subject of this post has grown tiresome, I might as well state outright that what follows will be in part inspired by the success of the musical Hamilton, written and headlined by the incomparable Lin-Manuel Miranda. While I must again confess a degree of disbelief that the production has been so successful thus far, I simultaneously cannot deny that the enigmatic and ambitious Alexander Hamilton makes for a very intriguing protagonist. With that in mind, and in the spirit of embracing the resulting public interest in the man, I’d like to take the next few weeks to dig into another piece of Hamilton’s written work. The piece in question, titled A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress, was first published in New York City in December, 1774 when Hamilton, then a mere stripling at 17, was a student at King’s College (now Columbia University). Written in response to the pro-British pamphlets of Anglican minister and Loyalist Samuel Seabury (1729-1796), A Full Vindication represents the first foray into political discourse of a young immigrant from the Caribbean who would, through hard work, ambition, talent, and luck, go on to play an instrumental role in reshaping the future of the continent and the lives of untold millions.

In spite of his youth and the fact that he had arrived in America only two years previously – in the autumn of 1772 – Hamilton’s first ever partisan publication is surprisingly structured and makes use of a highly coherent style of argument that would seem to presage his later development as a lawyer, pamphleteer, legislator, and government minister. Also worth noting is his use of rhetoric, both subtle and otherwise, as a means of shifting or manipulating the terms of the debate at hand in a favorable direction. As with his love of structure, this early example of Hamilton’s fondness for appealing to the emotions or prejudices of his audience would seem to foreshadow the skilled debater and essayist he would become. That being said, the Hamilton that penned A Full Vindication, while obviously sympathetic to the Revolutionary cause, had yet to fully embrace either its more radical implications or the role he would shortly thereafter determine to play. The document in question thus serves as a record the political awakening of one of the luminaries of the Founding Generation.

Hamilton’s background has been delved into once before during this series, and so the need to establish the proper context for the discussion to follow will perhaps best be served by reiterating some basic biographical information while also drawing attention to certain specific facts or incidents. To that end, it ought first to be recollected that Hamilton was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis (now part of the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis) in either 1755 or 1757. His parents, a woman of French Huguenot stock named Rachel Faucette and a perennially unlucky Scottish merchant named James Hamilton, were not married at the time of his birth. This fact drastically effected how young Alexander was treated by the community and eventually led to James’ departure at some point in the 1760s. After relocating with his mother and elder brother to the St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, then a Danish colony, Hamilton was then twice orphaned by the death of Rachel Faucette in 1768 and the suicide of his legal guardian and cousin Peter Lytton in 1769. Alexander, then fourteen, was subsequently adopted by Nevis merchant Thomas Stevens and taken on as his apprentice. After serving under Stevens for a little less than three years, and growing very close to his son Edward, the bastard orphan Hamilton became the beneficiary of a scholarship fund established by community leaders in Christiansted who had been impressed by an essay of his that was published in the Royal Danish-American Gazette. He thereafter departed the Caribbean and arrived in New Jersey in October, 1772. In the fall of 1773 he began his studies at King’s College, and formally matriculated the following spring.  

From within this brief recitation of names and dates a few points of interest ought to be expanded upon. One should first endeavor to shake the image of Hamilton’s Caribbean upbringing, tragic though it seemed in the main, as having taken place against a sleepy, obscure, or idyllic backdrop. Though Nevis and St. Croix may now appear to be little more than calm tropical backwaters, they were, in the 18^th century, at the centre of one of the most contested regions in the Great Power struggle for territory and resources. Sugar was the cash-crop of choice on Nevis – amounting to 20% of total British production in 1700 – and this afforded the island a value far in excess of all of Britain’s North American possessions combined. The Royal Navy was therefore a permanent fixture, along with merchant fleets, hordes of sailors, and representatives of some of the wealthiest trading firms in the British Empire. Being raised in an environment thus saturated with palpable symbols of global trade and colonial power-brokering, a young man of modest means like Alexander Hamilton might have very easily and very quickly gained a practical appreciation for the ruthlessly acquisitive dimension of 18^th century statecraft. This tangible sense of his community’s place in the large world of European imperialism was no doubt also molded by the social and economic disposition of his fellow islanders.     

With the cultivation of sugar on Nevis came the inevitable importation of cheap labor to fill the needs of the island’s small number of wealthy planters. Initially this resulted in the 17^th century resettlement of whatever vagrants and petty criminals British authorities managed to coral and deport from cities like London. White, poor, and selectively moral, these hardscrabble early residents were mainly employed as indentured servants or plantation overseers. As demand for sugar in Europe increased and planters struggled to keep pace, slaves imported from either Africa or neighboring Caribbean islands like Jamaica or Antigua began increasingly to dominate the Nevis labour market. By the time of Hamilton’s birth in the 1750s the island was accordingly host to approximately 1000 White residents and 4000 Black slaves. The White population was in turn divided between the wealthy planter elite and a marginal community of former indentured servants and their middling offspring. Hamilton’s family was a part of the former cohort, though their means much more resembled the latter. His mother was the child of a physician and minor plantation owner named John Faucette who, upon his death in 1745, left her the whole of his modest wealth and property. This inheritance, hardly a grand endowment to begin with, was subsequently frittered away by Rachel’s first husband, Danish merchant and aspiring planter Johann Michael Lavien. Blessed with more ambition than talent, Lavien was one of many European fortune seekers who came to the Caribbean with dreams of easy wealth in the sugar trade; Hamilton’s father was another.

In spite of his notable parentage – he was the fourth of eleven children born to a member of Scotland’s minor nobility – and comfortable upbringing, James Hamilton’s limited personal ambitions were time and again stymied by poor judgement and worse luck. Having languished under an apprenticeship to one of his elder brother’s merchant friends, he became enchanted by the tales of easy wealth which accompanied the shiploads of raw sugar then pouring into the port of Glasgow and set out for the island of St. Kitts sometime after 1741. Seeking to establish himself as a trader in supplies to and sugar from the local plantation owners, James soon ran afoul of the razor thin margins that accompanied the life of a Caribbean merchant and began a steady downward spiral of capital and social standing. By the time he met Rachel Faucette on St. Kitts in the early 1750s she had been the victim of a similar series of setbacks; accused of adultery, she suffered a brief period of imprisonment, and then left her husband and their child behind on St. Croix. Because of the respective disgraces they carried – hers social, his financial – James and Rachel were effectively exiled from the rarefied company of the planter elite. The birth of their two children – out of wedlock and to a woman still married to man she had left behind – in many ways further compounded the stigma the pair already suffered under. As a consequence their sons were forced to endure the sting of illegitimacy, and in a community whose only means of social support for the underprivileged White community was an established church that did not look kindly upon adulterous unions. Alexander and his brother James were therefore refused enrolment in the Anglican-run school and received their education from whatever tutors the family could arrange.

In light of the circumstances and experiences described above, it seems likely that the perspective Alexander Hamilton brought with him to King’s College in 1774 was unlike that of many of his American contemporaries. In contrast to those who professed themselves loyal to the Crown and waxed poetic on the many and various ways that citizenship in the British Empire was a measure of prosperity and civilization, Hamilton had seen the machinery of imperialism firsthand. There was nothing noble in the rapacious method by which the planter elite of the British West Indies traded the lives of their slaves for the increasingly profitable sugar harvests that made their prosperity possible. Nor was their much to be grateful for in the social conditions that this insatiable striving for ever-greater yields engendered. Granting that the thousands of enslaved Africans suffered under the worst conditions, poor Whites and middling merchants fared only marginally better. Fortunes could turn on a dime, particularly for those naïve Europeans who believed a short stint in the Caribbean would provide a gateway to wealth and prosperity at home, and destitution and disgrace never seemed much farther than one bad harvest or tropical storm away. Hamilton’s parents were both victims of these precarious conditions, and the experiences of his early life were the direct result of their combined loss of social and financial capital. It would thus seem quite natural for him to have developed an understanding of the British Empire, its priorities, and its supposed virtues that was far less sympathetic than that which residents of New York, Massachusetts, or Virginia might have cultivated.

It seems at once unlikely, however, that Hamilton would have come away from his time in the Caribbean with entirely the same appreciation for Enlightenment philosophy, natural law, and “the rights of Englishmen” that his later Patriot colleagues would go on to profess. Even in an environment dominated by slave-based plantation agriculture, it was possible for a resident of 18^th century Virginia – like Thomas Jefferson or George Washington – to develop a political and philosophical outlook that was rooted in concepts like liberty, equality, and the preservation of certain fundamental rights. Likely this was a consequence of education, the perpetuation of inherited social behaviours, and the existence of an elected legislature whose operation cultivated certain philosophical norms (i.e. that people had a role to play in government, that political representation was a basic right, and that public service was a virtue to be sought after). People so conditioned could be expected to respond to perceived violations of their accustomed rights by reiterating what they believed those rights and their philosophical foundations to be. Unlike Virginia, however, or New York, or Massachusetts, or Pennsylvania, the corner of the British Caribbean from which Hamilton originated was defined by a fundamentally different social and political order.

The purpose of Nevis, or St. Kitts, or Saint Croix, was to supply its European overlords with as much of a given commodity as possible. The planter elite owned all the land that was fit to cultivate, leaving only the narrowest economic niche for landless Whites to fill. The threat of raids by stateless pirates or foreign powers ensured a constant military presence, and the lack of access to higher education prevented the emergence of a local political class. Commerce was the governing principle of places like this, a lesson which Hamilton doubtless learned at a young age while clerking for Thomas Stevens in the early 1770s. Slaves were imported, sugar was exported, men and woman won and lost fortunes, and profit was the one true measure of a person’s success. Having spent the first decade-and-a-half of his life in a social environment so defined, it would seem logical for Alexander Hamilton to have developed an understanding of the world that was hardnosed, utilitarian, and rigorously pragmatic. The experiences of his benighted parents, the effects of his unstable youth, and the constant presence of merchants and traders attempting to carve out a living amidst the ruthlessness of European Great Power economics doubtless wrought their effects on the young man from Charlestown. Among the lessons his time in the Caribbean likely taught him, the most obvious would seem to be that social hierarchies were rigid, failure was always an option, and the only refuge from destitution and death was sound finances.

I’ll grant that I'm perhaps reading too much into the surface conditions of life in the 18^th century British West Indies and drawing connections to Hamilton’s later live that simply aren't borne out by the facts. History being in many ways an interpretive discipline, one always runs this risk. That being said, it would seem extraordinarily coincidental that one of the most rigorous and innovative financial minds of his generation grew up in one of the most economically cutthroat regions of the British Empire without it having affected him. Massachusetts and Virginia most certainly left their stamp on John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and to say otherwise of Alexander Hamilton and his home country would make for a rather odd exception. More to the point, however, this brief examination of some of the specific circumstances of Hamilton’s upbringing is meant to weigh on a discussion of one of his early political writings rather than on his later life and career. The man who helped craft the United States Constitution, campaigned for its ratification, and served as chief financial officer of the resulting government had enjoyed an eventful existence in America, between marriage, the military, and practicing at the bar. The young man – and barely that – who put pen to paper in an effort to respond to the declarations of someone twice his age was conversely but a few short years removed from his time in the tropics. However subsequent experiences served to transform Alexander Hamilton into an American, at the time A Full Vindication was published in 1774 he was still a low-born immigrant from the West Indies whose existence had been defined by the precarious economics of his homeland.