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THE NEW-YORK JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY ALEXANDER HAMILTON: SLAVERY AND RACE INA REVOLUTIONARY GENERATION James OLrver Horton LEXANDER HAMILTON WAS BORN in the West Indies in 1757 amid lush sugar plantations on the island of Nevis—a place where black slaves outnumbered white residents twelve to one. Pena Hamilton was not from a wealthy plantation- owning family, however. His mother, Rachel é . Fawcett Lavien, had married and subsequently divorced, but because the courts refused to make divorce legal, Alexander and his older brother James, products of her second union, were legally born out of wedlock. Then James Hamilton Sr. aban- doned the family, leaving them to live on the margins of that beautiful island’s society, which was made rich by the labor of slaves. During the 1760s, Rachel, with her sons, moved to the much larger island of St. Croix, where she received some assistance from her older sister and opened a small store in the main town of Christiansted, Although its population was more than twice the size of that on Nevis, the racial composition on St. Croix was comparable. Of the twenty-four thousand residents on the island, twenty-two thousand were black slaves. Again Alexander and James were growing up in a slave society and observing its daily practice, an experience that would shape Alexander's attitudes about race and slavery for the rest of his life. While planters lived in luxury, Alexander and James lived more like plantation laborers. Both boys worked to help support the family. Then in 1768, Rachel died, leaving her young sons virtually orphaned. Although never affluent, she had acquired some property, for among her possessions, listed with the pots and pans, six chairs and two 
