On-screen text: Part One, An Obsession With Honor
Narrator: Alexander Hamilton was unique among the Founding Fathers. He was an outsider -- born in 1755, not in the American colonies but on Nevis, a tiny tropical island in the Caribbean.
He came into this world at the very bottom of the social order. He was a bastard -- illegitimate, because his mother, as a divorced woman, was not legally married to his father. As a bastard, Hamilton was prohibited from attending a Christian school, and had no rights of inheritance.
Ron Chernow, Biographer: It's hard for us to transport ourselves back to a time in the eighteenth century when everything revolved around birth and breeding and pedigree. I think that the illegitimacy had the most profound effect, psychologically, on Hamilton. It was considered the most dishonored state, and I think that it produced in Hamilton a lifelong obsession with honor.
Narrator: When Alexander is ten, his family moves some hundred miles to St. Croix, where hundreds of plantations -- worked by slaves -- produce sugar and coffee for export.
Hamilton's father was descended from Scottish nobility. He had come to the West Indies to make his fortune in the sugar trade, but he was never successful.
Soon after they arrive on St. Croix, James Hamilton abandons the family. Alexander will never see his father again.
Willard Sterne Randall, Writer: Everything went wrong for Alexander Hamilton in a very short time, around the age of thirteen. His mother died of yellow fever. His father had already left two years before. He then had no protector. He had an uncle who tried to save Alexander's estate, small as it was, but his mother's first husband got everything.
Ron Chernow, Biographer: He was then farmed out to a first cousin who committed suicide a year later. So, it's like calamities of Biblical proportions descend on this young man. I think that these experiences would have shattered a lesser individual. But all of these misfortunes actually toughen this spirit of self-reliance. He realized that his great asset was his intelligence, which he would have to do everything to develop.
Willard Sterne Randall, Writer: The one thing Hamilton grasped out of his mother's very modest estate was the books. Nobody wanted them. His uncle said, you get the books. And he pored over them and he pored over them.
Karl F. Walling, Historian: He reads and reads and reads, and above all he reads the stories of the great statesmen of ancient Greece and Rome, as they're revealed in the works of Livy and Plutarch and others. And this is very important for understanding his love of fame, his love of honor.
Narrator: Alexander's youthful imagination is captured by tales of conquering heroes, and of statesmen who built the glorious Roman Empire.
Thomas Fleming, Biographer: Hamilton was in love with fame, there's no doubt about that. But his understanding of fame is totally different from our understanding of fame. To be famous now is to be well known by everybody in the world, you're a celebrity. But that wasn't true in the eighteenth century. Fame was an achievement that a man created in the course of his life. He had to do something remarkable, he had to found a country or an empire.
Narrator: On a tiny, remote island, illegitimate and without family, Alexander Hamilton seems in an unlikely position to achieve fame.
At the age of fourteen, he is employed as a clerk for the firm of Beekman and Cruger, an important American trading company on St. Croix.
Willard Sterne Randall, Writer: Hamilton, as a teenager, had to become a master of international currencies. There was no one currency. He had to know the exchange rates: Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, French, English, et cetera. He had to be an evaluator, an appraiser, a moneychanger. And so he learned a great deal about trade in a very short time.
Narrator: His employer gets sick, and young Hamilton is left in charge of the company.
Willard Sterne Randall, Writer: And so he saved the business by taking over for six months. This little, skinny kid was bossing around surly, brutal ship captains three times his age.
Teenage Alexander Hamilton (voice over by actor): To Nicholas Cruger, January 10, 1772. Sir, the 101 barrels of superfine flour from Philadelphia have landed. I have already sold forty, at eleven and a half pieces-of-eight a barrel -- but, as there are fewer delivered, I will insist on twelve for the rest. As I am very hurried just now, I beg you will accept this brief account. I remain, with the closest attention to your interests dear Sir, Alexander Hamilton.
Narrator: The buying and selling of slaves to work the sugar cane fields is a major part of business in the West Indies. Hamilton, daily, witnesses scenes of incredible brutality. He comes to see slavery not just as appalling degradation, but as a senseless waste of human talent. He feels that his own talents too are being squandered in this rigidly hierarchical world.
He writes to his friend Edward Stevens --
Teenage Alexander Hamilton (voice over by actor): To confess my weakness, Ned, my ambition is so prevalent that I disdain the groveling conditions of a clerk to which my fortune condemns me. I would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station. My folly makes me ashamed, yet Neddy, we know that such schemes can triumph when the schemer is resolute. Oh, how I wish there was a war!
Joanne B. Freeman, Historian: What a remarkable statement! You know, he's fourteen years old. And he does, ultimately, willingly sacrifice his life but not his character -- again and again and again.
Narrator: By 1772, the teenager is not only running a major shipping company, but also writing articles for the island's newspaper, and publishing poetry and sermons.
Influential people on the island are struck by his brilliance and ability. They establish a fund for the young prodigy. Hamilton will go to the American colonies to be educated.
Ron Chernow, Biographer: I think that he felt that fate had handed him an opportunity to reinvent himself and to start life over. But I don't think that he ever fully left the world of his childhood behind him. He was poor, he was illegitimate, he was ashamed of all of those things. And even though he tried so hard to escape, on some level he was always trapped back in the darkness of that boyhood.