Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow Page A

any symptoms of serious religion ...but keepers of negro wenches...rakes, night rioters, drunkards, gamesters, Sabbath breakers, church neglecters, common swearers, unjust dealers etc.” 10 An erudite man with a classical education, Knox was starved for both intellectual companionship and money. In 1771, he visited St. Croix and was received warmly by the local Presbyterians, who enticed him to move there. In May 1772, he became pastor at the Scotch Presbyterian church at a salary considerably beyond what he had earned inside his old crater.
    After the lonely years in Saba, the forty-five-year-old Knox felt rejuvenated in St. Croix. Humane and tolerant, politically liberal (he was to fervently support American independence), opposed to slavery (though he owned some slaves), and later author of several volumes of sermons, he held a number of views that would have attracted Hamilton. In his earliest surviving letter, he defended his confirmed belief that illegitimate children should be baptized and argued that clergymen should rescue them from their parents instead of rejecting them. He departed from a strict Calvinist belief in predestination. Instead of a darkly punitive God, Knox favored a sunny, fair-minded one. He also saw human nature as insatiably curious and reserved his highest praise for minds that created “ schemes or systems of truth.” 11
    Then an illegitimate young clerk with an uncommon knack for systematic thinking stepped into his life. Knox must have marveled at his tremendous luck in discovering Hamilton. We do not know exactly how they met, but Knox threw open his library to this prodigious youth, encouraged him to write verse, and prodded him toward scholarship. An avuncular man with a droll wit, Knox worried that Hamilton was too driven and prone to overwork, too eager to compensate for lost time—a failing, if it was one, that he never outgrew. In later years, Knox liked to remind Hamilton that he had been “rather delicate & frail,” with an “ambition to excel,” and had tended to “strain every nerve” to be the very best at what he was doing. 12 Knox had an accurate intuition that this exceptional adolescent was fated to accomplish great deeds, although he later confessed that Alexander Hamilton had outstripped even his loftiest expectations.
    Among his other gifts, the versatile Hugh Knox was a self-taught doctor and apothecary and a part-time journalist who occasionally filled in for the editor of the Royal Danish American Gazette. It may have been at the newspaper office, not at the church, that he first ran into Hamilton. That Knox moonlighted as a journalist proved highly consequential for Hamilton when a massive hurricane tore through St. Croix on the night of August 31, 1772, and carved a wide swath of destruction through nearby islands.
    By all accounts, the storm struck with unprecedented fury, the Gazette reporting that it was the “most dreadful hurricane known in the memory of man.” Starting at sundown, the gales blew “like great guns, for about six hours, save for half an hour’s intermission....The face of this once beautiful island is now so calamitous and disfigured, as it would beggar all description.” 13 The tremendous winds uprooted tall trees, smashed homes to splinters, and swept up boats in foaming billows and flung them far inland. Detailed reports of the storm in Nevis, where the destruction was comparable—huge sugar barrels were tossed four hundred yards, furniture landed two miles away—confirm its terrifying power. Nevis had also been struck by a severe earthquake that afternoon, and it seems probable that Nevis, St. Kitts, St. Croix, and neighboring islands were deluged by a tidal wave up to fifteen feet high. The devastation was so widespread that an appeal for food was launched in the North American colonies to avert an anticipated famine.
    On September 6, Hugh Knox gathered the jittery faithful at his church and delivered a consoling sermon that was