Nor does the mystery end with his birth. Pickering was half persuaded that the mother lived into the manhood of her son, but the church records at Saint Kitts bear out the claims of the family that she died in 1768. It is not easy to account for the rather morbid relations later between Hamilton and his father and brother. Both appear to have been a worthless sort. For years Hamilton was ignorant of his father’s whereabouts, which does not appear to have bothered him much.[100] Later there was some correspondence looking to a possible reunion in America, out of which nothing came.[101] At intervals money passed from the great man in America to the indigent old man in the West Indies,[102] but at no time does it appear that Hamilton had any thought of visiting his father in the isle of his childhood. It was a long cry from the squalid life in the West Indies to Mrs. Bingham’s drawing-room, and the genius turned his back upon the past.

II

There is nothing so inexplicable in this amazing man as the precocity of his genius. There is a suggestion of it in the younger Pitt, but he had sat from infancy at the feet of Chatham. To the easy-going natives of his natal isle this passionate, fiery-tempered, supersensitive boy, dreaming of power, must have seemed an exotic. As a mere child he appeared to sense that his field of conquest lay across the sea. He was planning a career while his companions were absorbed in childish games. His early range of knowledge and reading was remarkable. In his passion for literature he was unconsciously moulding one of the weapons for his successful assault on fame; through the pages of Plutarch he was lifting himself above the drab slothful surroundings to the companionship of the great.

Sometimes fate was serving his destiny when he felt himself a captive beating against his cage. Thus, in the counting-room at Santa Cruz he was mastering business methods and absorbing the commercial spirit on which he was later to predicate his philosophy of government.[103] The business letters he wrote were preparations for the framing of his ‘Report on the Public Credit.’ Even then it was a peculiarity of his genius that he could write on business matters without clipping the wings of his fancy. He seemed born with a mastery of words, a rare gift of expression. When a hurricane swept the islands the description he wrote for a paper became the talk of the West Indies. Only a little while before he was rebelling against the ‘groveling ambition of a clerk,’ and passionately writing that he ‘would willingly risk his life but not his character to elevate his station.’ These were the aspirings of a boy not yet thirteen. ‘I shall conclude by saying, I wish there was a war.’ Here we have a vivid light upon his character.[104]

The description of the hurricane made his fortune. Dreaming of rising by the sword, it was his pen that rallied friends who raised the money to send him to America for an education. Through all his days he was to aspire to glory through the sword, little knowing that he was winning immortality with his pen.

The Little Corsican touching the soil of France, the little West Indian landing in America—there is a striking analogy: both dreaming of martial glory in the land of strangers; both obsessed with a morbid ambition sustained by the rarest powers of application.

The records of the years preceding the Revolution are but vague, though we get glimpses of the genius forging his weapons in the boy at the grammar school at Elizabethtown poring over books till midnight, to rise at dawn to continue his studies in the quiet of a near-by cemetery; practicing prose composition; writing an elegy on the death of a lady; composing the prologue and the epilogue of a play,[105] and, at Kings College (Columbia), amazing his companions by the energy of his mind, and puzzling pedestrians by talking to himself as he walked for hours each day under the great trees of Batteau (Dey) Street.[106] Here, too, an occasional display of the eloquence of maturity, enriched by the glow of genius, set him apart.

Then came the Revolution. ‘I wish there was a war!’ cried the boy of thirteen. And war came to find the lad of nineteen as eager to seize its opportunities as was the Corsican youth when ordered to clear the streets of Paris.

III

The war was to prove his genius, not as a soldier, but as a writer and constructive thinker on governmental matters. He was a natural journalist and pamphleteer—one of the fathers of the American editorial. His perspicacity, penetration, powers of condensation, and clarity of expression were those of a premier editorial writer. These same qualities made him a pamphleteer without a peer. That he would have shone with equal luster in the reportorial room of a modern paper is shown in his description of the hurricane, and in his letter to Laurens picturing vividly the closing hours of Major André.[107] From the moment he created a sensation, with ‘A Farmer Refuted,’ in his eighteenth year, until, in the closing months of his life, he was meeting Coleman surreptitiously in the night to dictate vigorous editorials for the New York ‘Evening Post’ he had established,[108] he recognized his power. No man ever complained more bitterly of the attacks of the press; none ever used the press more liberally and relentlessly to attack.