The primary documents from Hamilton's early years — 1769 to 1783 — begin with a letter from a boy describing his circumstances on St. Croix and end with his resignation from the Continental Army after Yorktown. The archive is at Founders Online.
Alexander Hamilton was born in Charlestown, on the island of Nevis in the British West Indies. His baptismal record — held in Nevis — gives the year as 1755. Hamilton himself, in various documents, claimed 1757. The Founders Online editorial introduction to the Hamilton Papers addresses the discrepancy directly: the editors conclude that 1755 is the more likely birth year based on the baptismal record, but acknowledge that Hamilton's own testimony points to 1757. The archive documents the dispute. It does not resolve it.
Hamilton's father was James Hamilton, a Scottish merchant of modest means who abandoned the family when Alexander was young. His mother was Rachel Faucette Lavien, a woman of French Huguenot descent who had been married to another man before taking up with James Hamilton. Rachel died in 1768, leaving Hamilton and his brother James orphaned. Hamilton was taken in by a cousin, who died shortly after. He became a clerk at the trading firm of Beckman and Cruger on St. Croix at age eleven or thirteen — one of the youngest ages recorded for a clerk in the firm's history.
On November 11, 1769, Hamilton wrote to his childhood friend Edward Stevens, who had left St. Croix to study at King's College in New York. Hamilton was twelve or fourteen years old. He was working as a clerk. The letter describes his situation and his ambitions in direct terms. It is the earliest surviving Hamilton letter. It is at Founders Online.
Ned, my Ambition is prevalent that I contemn the grovelling and condition of a Clerk or the like, to which my Fortune &c. condemns me and would willingly risk my life tho' not my Character to exalt my Station. Im confident, Ned that my Youth excludes me from any hopes of immediate Preferment nor do I desire it, but I mean to prepare the way for futurity. I'm no Philosopher you see and may be jusly said to Build Castles in the Air. My Folly makes me ashamd and beg you'll Conceal it, yet Neddy we have seen such Schemes successfull when the Projector is Constant I shall Conclude saying I wish there was a War.
Three years later, a war had not yet come. But a hurricane had.
On August 31, 1772, a hurricane struck the island of St. Croix. Hamilton was fifteen or seventeen years old. He was still working as a clerk. He wrote a letter describing the storm — its sound, its destruction, and his own reflections on death and Providence. The letter was published in the Royal Danish American Gazette on October 3, 1772. The island's Presbyterian minister, Hugh Knox, read it and showed it to other leading figures on the island. A group of merchants subscribed a fund to send Hamilton to the North American colonies for education. He left St. Croix in the autumn of 1772 and never returned. The letter is at Founders Online.
It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place. The roaring of the sea and wind, fiery meteors flying about it 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. A great part of the buildings throughout the Island are levelled to the ground, almost all the rest very much shattered; several persons killed and numbers utterly ruined; whole families running about the streets, unknowing where to find a place of shelter; the sick exposed to the keeness of water and air without a bed to lye upon, or a dry covering to their bodies; and our harbours entirely bare.
The letter runs to several hundred words. The passage above documents what Hamilton saw. The full text at Founders Online also includes his theological reflections on suffering and Providence — themes he continued to engage with across his writing life.
Hamilton arrived in the colonies in late 1772. He prepared at a grammar school in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, then enrolled at King's College — now Columbia University — in New York in 1773. He was fifteen or seventeen years old. He compiled a list of books he intended to read in 1773. The list is at Founders Online and documents what he was studying: Demosthenes, Cicero, Bacon, Locke, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Hume, Blackstone, and Grotius.
Civil Law — Institutes of Justinian — Grotius on the Rights of War and Peace — Puffendorf's Law of Nature and Nations — Locke on Civil Government — Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws — Blackstone's Commentaries — Hume's Political Discourses — Hobbes's Dialogues on the Common Law — Bacon's Elements of the Common Laws of England
In December 1774, as the First Continental Congress had just concluded and colonial tensions with Britain were escalating, Hamilton published his first political pamphlet — A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress — at age seventeen or nineteen, defending the Congress against the Loyalist arguments of Samuel Seabury. He followed it in February 1775 with The Farmer Refuted. Both pamphlets were published anonymously. Both are at Founders Online.
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.
When the Revolution began in 1775, Hamilton left King's College without graduating and joined the Continental Army. He organized an artillery company and served as its captain during the battles of Long Island, White Plains, Trenton, and Princeton. His handling of the artillery at Trenton in December 1776 brought him to Washington's attention. In March 1777 Washington appointed him aide-de-camp with the rank of lieutenant colonel. Hamilton was twenty-one or twenty-two years old.
He served as Washington's aide-de-camp for four years — drafting letters, coordinating logistics, translating French dispatches, and managing Washington's correspondence. In February 1781 he resigned the position after a dispute with Washington over a delay in delivering a message. He described the dispute in a letter to his father-in-law Philip Schuyler. The letter is at Founders Online.
Two days ago The General and I passed each other on the stairs. He told me he wanted to speak to me. I answered that I would wait upon him immediately. I went below and delivered Mr. Tilghman a letter to be sent to The Commissary containing an order of a pressing and interesting nature. Returning to The General I was told that he had sent for me. I put the letter I had in my hands into The General's without saying a word. He told me I must be at his call and ordered me to his room. I wrote the General a letter in which I referred to what had passed, told him I thought it proper we should part.
Hamilton remained in the army after resigning as aide-de-camp. He repeatedly asked Washington for a field command. Washington gave it to him in July 1781. On October 14, 1781, Hamilton led the assault on Redoubt No. 10 at Yorktown — a nighttime bayonet charge against a British fortification that helped seal the siege. Cornwallis surrendered four days later. The war was effectively over. Hamilton's account of the Yorktown assault is in his letter to his wife Elizabeth, October 15–16, 1781, at Founders Online.
Two nights ago, my Eliza, my duty and my honor obliged me to take a step in which your happiness was too much risked. I commanded an attack upon one of the enemy's redoubts; we carried it in an instant, and with little loss. You will see the particulars in the Philadelphia papers. I have given up the pride and pleasures of the former situation and am happy in the thought of returning to you, and to repose from war.