1510 Hurricanes can bring new life

Some of the victims of Hurricane Katrina may be starting a new and more successful life in another state or city. It happened to Alexander Hamilton.

On August 31, 1772 a hurricane struck St. Croix where the orphaned teenage Alexander Hamilton lived and worked. He wrote a letter to his father (who had abandoned his family some years before) describing the devastation. Hugh Knox a Presbyterian minister and journalist printed it in the local newspaper. As Chernow says in his biography, “Hamilton did not know it, but he had just written his way out of poverty (p.37).“ Knox started a subscription fund to send Hamilton to the colonies for an education and the rest is history, our history. It reads, in part:

“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 leveled 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 keenness 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. A strong smell of gunpowder added somewhat to the terrors of the night; and it was observed that the rain was surprisingly salt. Indeed the water is so brackish and full of sulphur that there is hardly any drinking it. My reflections and feelings on this frightful and melancholy occasion, are set forth in the following self-discourse. Where now, oh! vile worm, is all thy boasted fortitude and resolution? What is become of thine arrogance and self-sufficiency? Why dost thou tremble and stand aghast? How humble, how helpless, how contemptible you now appear. And for why? The jarring of elements . the discord of clouds? Oh! impotent presumptuous fool! how durst thou offend that Omnipotence, whose nod alone were sufficient to quell the destruction that hovers over thee, or crush thee into atoms? . . .Death comes rushing on in triumph, veiled in a mantle of tenfold darkness. His unrelenting scythe, pointed and ready for the stroke. . . See thy wretched helpless state and learn to know thyself. . . Despise thyself and adore thy God. . . . O ye who revel in affluence see the afflictions of humanity and bestow your superfluity to ease them. . . Succour the miserable and lay up a treasure in heaven.” Royal Danish American Gazette, October 3, 1772

An so a homeless, illegitimate immigrant rides out a hurricane to be come the founding father of the United States government.