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brother’s creditors to mask his role, cautioning one creditor in 1749, “My brother does not know I am engaged for him.” 24 From John Hamilton’s letters, one senses that James was distant, even estranged, from his family. “The last letter his mother had from him was some time ago, where he writes he had bills but at that time they were not due,” John disclosed in one letter to a business associate. 25 Perhaps embarrassed by his perennial bungling, James seems to have concealed the scope of his financial troubles.
    That James Hamilton’s career likely lay in ruins before Rachel Faucette Lavien materialized is suggested by the minutes of the St. Kitts Council meeting of July 15, 1748, which reported that he had taken the oath of either a watchman or a weigh man (insects have unfortunately eaten the middle letters) for the port of Basseterre, the island’s capital. 26 So if his stint in the tropics was meant to be a fleeting, moneymaking interlude, it had begun to turn into a permanent trap instead. Many young European fortune seekers, expecting to return home, would take a temporary black or mulatto mistress and defer marriage until safely back on native soil. That his plans had drastically miscarried would have made James Hamilton more receptive to a romantic liaison with a separated European woman, now that he knew he was not going to see Scotland again any time soon.
    By the time Rachel met James Hamilton for sure in St. Kitts in the early 1750s, a certain symmetry had shaped their lives. They were both scarred by early setbacks, had suffered a vertiginous descent in social standing, and had grappled with the terrors of downward economic mobility. Each would have been excluded from the more rarefied society of the British West Indies and tempted to choose a mate from the limited population of working whites. Their liaison was the sort of match that could easily produce a son hypersensitive about class and status and painfully conscious that social hierarchies ruled the world.
    Divorce was a novelty in the eighteenth century. To obtain one in the Crown colonies was an expensive, tortuous affair, and this deprived James and Rachel of any chance to legitimize their match. Putting the best face on the embarrassing situation, Alexander sometimes pretended that his parents had married. Of Rachel’s flight from St. Croix, he declared, “My mother afterwards went to St. Kitts, became acquainted with my father and a marriage between them ensued, followed by many years cohabitation and several children.” 27 Since the relationship may have lasted fifteen years, it presumably took on the trappings of a marriage, enabling Alexander to maintain that his illegitimacy was a mere legal technicality and had nothing to do with negligent or profligate parents. Indeed, Hamilton’s parents, though a common-law couple, presented themselves as James and Rachel Hamilton. They had two sons: James, Jr., and, two years later, Alexander. (Since Hamilton spoke of his mother’s bearing “several children,” other siblings may have died in childhood.)
    The personalities of James and Rachel Hamilton evoked by Alexander’s descendants have a slightly unreal, even sanitized, quality. Hamilton’s own son John conjured up Rachel as “a woman of superior intellect, elevated sentiment, and unusual grace of person and manner. To her he was indebted for his genius.” 28 Perhaps no less fanciful was the paternal portrait daubed by Hamilton’s grandson Allan McLane Hamilton: “Hamilton’s father does not appear to have been successful in any pursuit, but in many ways was a great deal of a dreamer, and something of a student, whose chief happiness seemed to be in the society of his beautiful and talented wife, who was in every way intellectually his superior.” 29 Is this cozy domestic scene based on credible oral history or family public relations? The documentary record is, alas, mute. The one inescapable impression we have is that