![]() It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place. Its impossible for me to describe or you to form any idea of it. Meanwhile the wind was shifting round to the South West point, from whence it returned with redoubled fury and continued so ’till near three o’clock in the morning. Then ensued a sudden and unexpected interval, which lasted about an hour. “It began about dusk, at North, and raged very violently till ten o’clock. “Honoured Sir,” Hamilton began the letter, “I take up my pen just to give you an imperfect account of one of the most dreadful Hurricanes that memory or any records whatever can trace, which happened here on the 31st ultimo at night.” It appeared in the October 3 edition, and Knox penned a forward of sorts, noting that the letter “fell by accident into the hands of a gentleman, who, being pleased with it himself, shewed it to others to whom it gave equal satisfaction, and who all agreed that it might not prove unentertaining to the Publick.” It was so late, Knox wrote, because of “The Author’s modesty in long refusing to submit it to Publick view.” He persuaded Hamilton-who had already written a few poems that had appeared, without a byline, in the paper-to publish the letter. He had a number of other careers, including a gig editing The Royal Danish American Gazette when its regular editor was out of town. Knox had studied divinity at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), and was ordained by the president of the institution-one Aaron Burr Sr. But when Hamilton showed Knox what he'd written, the minister had other ideas. Kitts after abandoning his illegitimate family (Alexander's mother, Rachel, was married to another man when she took up with James) more than six years earlier. He intended only to send it to his father, James A. Inspired, Hamilton picked up a pen and wrote of the hurricane's disastrous effects. Croix earlier that year and had taken the young man under his wing. As Ron Chernow writes in the biography Alexander Hamilton, the 17-year-old had just attended a sermon by Hugh Knox, a Presbyterian minister who had arrived in St. It was a week after the hurricane when the future secretary of the Treasury, who was working as a clerk on St. The resulting letter would inspire the residents of the island where Hamilton lived to pool their money for a scholarship to send him to the future United States of America … and into the history books. In August 1772, a hurricane ravaged the West Indies-and a young Alexander Hamilton picked up a pen to write about it.
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