Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow Page B

published in pamphlet form some weeks later. Hamilton must have attended and been inspired by Knox’s homily, for he went home and composed a long, feverish letter to his father, trying to convey the hurricane’s horror. (It is noteworthy that Hamilton was still in touch with his father more than six years after the latter’s departure from St. Croix. That James Hamilton resided outside the storm area suggests that he was in the southern Caribbean, possibly Grenada or Tobago.) In his melodramatic description of the hurricane, one sees the young Hamilton glorying in his verbal powers. He must have shown the letter to Knox, who persuaded him to publish it in the Royal Danish American Gazette, where it appeared on October 3. The prefatory note to the piece, presumably written by Knox, explained: “The following letter was written the week after the late hurricane, by a youth of this island, to his father; the copy of it fell by accident into the hands of a gentleman, who, being pleased with it himself, showed it to others to whom it gave equal satisfaction, and who all agreed that it might not prove unentertaining to the public.” Lest anyone suspect that an unfeeling Hamilton was capitalizing on mass misfortune, Knox noted that the anonymous author had at first declined to publish it—perhaps the last time in Alexander Hamilton’s life that he would prove bashful or hesitant about publication.
    Hamilton’s famous letter about the storm astounds the reader for two reasons. For all its bombastic excesses, it does seem wondrous that a seventeen-year-old selfeducated clerk could write with such verve and gusto. Clearly, Hamilton was highly literate and already had a considerable fund of verbal riches: “It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place. The roaring of the sea and wind, fiery meteors flying about it [ sic ] in the air, the prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning, the crash of the falling houses, and the ear-piercing shrieks of the distressed, were sufficient to strike astonishment into angels.”
    But the description was also notable for the way Hamilton viewed the hurricane as a divine rebuke to human vanity and pomposity. In what sounded like a cross between a tragic soliloquy and a fire-and-brimstone sermon, he exhorted his fellow mortals:
    Where now, oh! vile worm, is all thy boasted fortitude and resolution? What is become of thine arrogance and self sufficiency?...Death comes rushing on in triumph, veiled in a mantle of tenfold darkness. His unrelenting scythe, pointed and ready for the stroke . . . See thy wretched helpless state and learn to know thyself....Despise thyself and adore thy God....O ye who revel in affluence see the afflictions of humanity and bestow your superfluity to ease them....Succour the miserable and lay up a treasure in heaven. 14
    Gloomy thoughts for a teenage boy, even in the aftermath of a lethal hurricane. The dark spirit of the storm that he summons up, his apocalyptic sense of universal tumult and disorder, bespeak a somber view of the cosmos. He also shows a strain of youthful idealism as he admonishes the rich to share their wealth.
    Hamilton did not know it, but he had just written his way out of poverty. This natural calamity was to prove his salvation. His hurricane letter generated such a sensation—even the island’s governor inquired after the young author’s identity— that a subscription fund was taken up by local businessmen to send this promising youth to North America to be educated. This generosity was all the more remarkable given the island’s dismal state. The hurricane had flattened dwellings, shredded sugarcane, destroyed refineries, and threatened St. Croix with prolonged economic hardship. It would take many months, maybe years, for the island to recover.
    The chief sponsor of the subscription fund was likely the good-hearted Hugh Knox, who later told Hamilton, “I have always had a just and secret pride in having advised you