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All during these times of turmoil and upheavals, a 14-year old apprentice boy sat at his desk on the island of St. Croix in the West Indies, praying to be delivered from the prospect of life as a merchant.  Alexander Hamilton was a small and slender boy with no expectations of the glory he so craved.  His beautiful mother Rachel had been charged with adultery and abandoned by her husband at a young age; after a few years, while Rachel was still in her early twenties, she met James Hamilton, the handsome son of a Scottish laird, who had come to make his fortune on the island.  Hamilton lived with Rachel long enough to give her two sons and fritter away her small inheritance.  He, too, finally drifted away, but Rachel remained an attractive and popular woman despite her fatherless children.  She opened a small store, and Alexander helped her run it until her death five year later.  Rachel’s family did what they could for the boys, and Alexander was eventually apprenticed to a thriving island merchant.

At school, Alexander had enjoyed a brief exposure to the classics.  He spoke French well and went regularly to a Jewish school mistress who taught him Hebrew.  He wanted to become a great captain of war, but it seemed that he would be stuck forever behind a desk.  In a letter to a friend who had gone to New York to study medicine, the teen-aged Alexander poured out his frustrations:  “. . . I contemn the groveling condition of a clerk, or the like, to which the future condemns me and would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station.”  Almost as an afterthought, he added: “I shall conclude by saying, I wish there was a war.”

Alexander Hamilton could not have known it, but he would soon get the chance to fulfill all his dreams.  He would even get the chance to risk his life, for within a few months time events in Boston had taken another giant step toward that war for which young Alexander so fervently wished.