If Cæsar, fighting the battles of Rome on the frontier of Germany, and kept from party quarrels at home, and Napoleon, born outside of France and free by his campaign in Egypt from the compromising intrigues of Parisian politics, were preëminently fitted by these accidents to transmute the spirit of revolution from chaos into order, Hamilton stood in somewhat the same position in America. Born in the little island of Nevis in the West Indies (January 11, 1757), he came to the United States when his mind was already mature, in spite of his fifteen years. He came without the local prejudices or state pride which influenced so many of the Revolutionary leaders, and was therefore peculiarly qualified to fasten his eyes steadfastly upon the single end of the creation of a nation rather than the ascendency of any single state. He was so free from local attachments that he even hesitated at first on which side he should cast his lot,--whether with the imperial government of Great Britain, which appealed strongly to his love of system and organized power, or with the struggling revolutionists, with their poor and undisciplined army and uncertain future. The possibility of winning distinction in the service of Great Britain must have attracted him, but the justice of the colonial cause spoke more strongly to his sense of right and his well-ordered mind.
The great services of Hamilton were nearly all performed before he was forty years of age. His precocity was partly derived from his birth in the tropics and partly, perhaps, from the unfortunate conditions of his early life. A mystery hangs over his birth and parentage, which repeated inquiries have failed to clear away. He is believed to have been the son of James Hamilton, a Scottish merchant of Nevis, and a lady of French Hugenot descent, the divorced wife of a Dane named Lavine. But the history of his parents and their marriage is shrouded in much obscurity. The father, although reduced to poverty, lived nearly if not quite as long as his illustrious son, but the mother was reported to have died while Hamilton was only a child, leaving the memory of her beauty and charm in one of the chambers of his infant mind. Hamilton sought in his later years to establish regular communication with his father, and he had a brother in the West Indies with whom he corresponded; but the fact that all these relatives remained so much in the background gave some color to the slanders of his enemies concerning his birth.