Alexander Hamilton is one of the least understood, most important, and most impassioned and inspiring of the founding fathers. At last Hamilton has found a modern biographer who can bring him to full-blooded life; Richard Brookhiser. In these pages, Alexander Hamilton sheds his skewed image as the "bastard brat of a Scotch peddler," sex scandal survivor, and notoriously doomed dueling partner of Aaron Burr. Examined up close, throughout his meteoric and ever-fascinating (if tragically brief) life, Hamilton can at last be seen as one of the most crucial of the founders. Here, thanks to Brookhiser's accustomed wit and grace, this quintessential American lives again. James Grant The Wall Street Journal [A] wonderful portrait....Mr. Brookhiser has put his own intelligent stamp on the life of a great man. Orlando Patterson National Review Richard Brookhiser's splendid biography...succeeds in doing what no other work has quite done before: provide a portrait of Hamilton that brings out the true genius of the man in a volume that is both elegantly written and accessible to a mass audience. Gary H. Rawlins USA Today A pithy and entertaining biography....In this bold reinterpretive study that throws down the gauntlet to Jefferson's disciples, Brookhiser ably pleads Hamilton's case before the bar of history....The author's achievement is to capture the full nature of a great but flawed man. Michael R. Beschloss The New York Times Book Review A dramatic, compact biography that fairly gallops through Hamilton's picaresque life. Alexander Hamilton, American brilliantly succeeds in arguing that Hamilton deserves greater credit than he usually gets for his brainpower, idealism, and vision. Richard Brookhiser is the author of Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington and The Way of the WASP. He has also edited and annotated Washington's Rules of Civility. He is a Senior Editor at National Review and a New York Observer columnist. He lives in New York City. Chapter One St. Croix/Manhattan In the late eighteenth century, Bryan Edwards, a Jamaican author, inserted this description into a reference work on the West Indies. "The nights" in summer "are transcendantally beautiful. The clearness of the heavens, the serenity of the air, and the soft tranquility in which Nature reposes contribute to harmonize the mind, and produce the most calm and delightful sensations. The moon too in these climates displays far greater radiance than in Europe: the smallest print is legible by her light; and in the moon's absence her function is not ill-supplied by the brightness of the milky-way, and that glorious planet Venus, which appears here like a little moon...cast[ing] a shade from trees." When Alexander Hamilton was born, the Caribbean was as enchanting as it is now. It was also richer, thanks to sugar. At the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, when the British victors considered restoring some of their conquests to France, they seriously debated whether to return Canada, or the island of Guadeloupe. One sugar island weighed evenly in the balance with half of North America. Some West Indian planters made fortunes. They lived high in the islands, and when they returned to the old country. "Such eating and drinking I never saw," wrote a visitor to Jamaica. "Such loads of all sorts of high, rich and seasoned things and really gallons of wine and mixed liquors. They eat a late breakfast as if they had never eaten before. It is as disgusting as it is astonishing." "There was no such thing as a [seat in Parliament] to be had now," an English lord wrote in 1767; rich West Indians "had secured them all at the rate of 3,000 pounds at least, but many at four thousand pounds, and two or three that he knew at five thousand pounds". If war, disease, and hurricanes spared them, sugar planters could do well indeed. But there was little else to do in the West Indies. The sugar islands were floating agricultural factories, with few small farms, and small service populations in their ports. When young George Washington of Virginia (hardly an egalitarian society) took a trip to Barbados in 1751, he was struck by the material disparity he saw there. "There are few who may be called middling people. They are either very rich or very poor." Beneath the poor whites were the slaves. Sugar farming was labor intensive; on plantations, slaves outnumbered their white masters by twenty to one. Their life was harsh. In I755, Denmark decreed that masters in the Danish Virgin Islands could not punish their slaves by mutilating them, or putting them on the rack, though they might shackle and flog them. In spite of this lenience, the slaves of St. Croix planned a revolt in 1759. The free black man who revealed the plot ahead of time committed suicide, after which his body was hung, then burned at the stake. Slaves found riding or walking the streets of Christiansted, the main town, after eight o'clock at night were given 150 lashe