THINKER'S ALMANAC - August 6

 How did a Caribbean hurricane contribute to the founding of the United States?

Subject:  Writing - Hamilton’s Hurricane Letter

Event:  The Broadway musical Hamilton opens, 2015

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time–proof that humans can work magic. -Carl Sagan

In 2008, the American songwriter and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda was on vacation in Mexico.  Looking for something to read, he walked into a bookstore and picked out a book at random.  It was a biography of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow.

Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay

Miranda became mesmerized by Hamilton’s story.  He was born out of wedlock on January 11, 1755, on Nevis, a British island in the Caribbean.  When Alexander was 11 years old his father abandoned his family and just two years later his mother died.   Despite his orphan status, Hamilton was a bright, self-taught young man, and when he was 13 years old, he was given a job at the Beekman and Cruger mercantile house on the Dutch island of St. Croix.

Working for the mercantile house was an education for the young Hamilton.  He learned to write well, to manage money, and to track and inventory large quantities of cargo.  Despite Hamilton’s initiative and industriousness, he might have remained just another hardworking orphan with no formal education.  But then something happened that changed his life (1).

On the night of August 31, 1772, a massive hurricane hit St. Croix.  A few days after the storm had receded, Hamilton wrote a letter with a detailed account of the hurricane: 

Good God! what horror and destruction. Its impossible for me to describe or you to form any idea of it. 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 lie upon, or a dry covering to their bodies; and our harbours entirely bare. In a word, misery, in all its most hideous shapes, spread over the whole face of the country. (2)

After he wrote the letter, the 17-year-old Hamilton showed it to a Presbyterian minister named Hugh Knox.  Impressed, Knox encouraged him to publish it in the Royal Danish American Gazette where it appeared on September 6, 1772.  

Others in St. Croix were also impressed by the letter.  Despite the fact that the islanders were clawing their way back from the hurricane’s destruction, local businessmen put together a subscription fund.  There was no denying the fact that Hamilton was a young man of such promise that he deserved a shot at getting a formal education in North America.  In the words of Hamilton’s biographer Ron Chernow, “. . .  he had just written his way out of poverty.”  In October 1772, Hamilton set sail for North America where he would soon attend King’s College in New York City (1).

Miranda was not only captivated by Hamilton’s origin story but also by the rest of his life, which contributed so much to the founding of the United States of America. In fact, Miranda was so inspired that he transformed Hamilton’s biography into the Broadway musical Hamilton.  More than just a musical, however, Hamilton was written with hip-hop music and lyrics and performed by black and Latino actors.  As Miranda explains, his music is the story of  "America then, as told by America now."  

After Hamilton opened on this day in 2015, it went on to be nominated for a record 16 Tony Awards, winning eleven, including Best Musical.  It also was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  How did Alexander Hamilton write himself out of poverty?

Challenge - The Mighty Pen:  As demonstrated by both Hamilton and Miranda, writing has the power to bring ideas to life and the power to move people to action.  Beyond just writing to get good grades in school, what are three reasons that writing is such a powerful skill as well as a powerful tool for making a better life?

Sources:

-Chernow, Ron.  Alexander Hamilton.  New York:  Penguin Books, 2004.

-Founders Online. From Alexander Hamilton to The Royal Danish American Gazette, 6 September 1772