Rachel met and married a planter on the island of St. Croix named John Michael Levien and bore his one child, but fled the marriage and returned to Nevis. There she met James Hamilton and, since her previous marriage was still not legally terminated, she did not marry, but lived an man and wife, bearing him two sons: James and Alexander. Although she dies when Alexander was between eleven and thirteen years old she installed in her son a value for education and taught him to speak fluent French. When James left she became a tenant merchant and Alexander got a job working for the West Indies branch of a New York mercantile farm. .
James Sr. abandoned the family in 1765 but not before he greatly influences the mind and life of his youngest son. James Sr. was the son of a "Scottish laind decended from a ducal line, who married the daughter of an "ancient Baronet" (F.M., pg. 7)." Despite his father;s inability to be a proper father he nevertheless instilled in the boy "a pride of ancestry, and as a man of fine Celtic imagination he doubless aroused in his son a high level of expectations (F.M., pg. 7).
Alexander essentially became a pre-teen orphan despite the fact that his father was still alive. Fate would have it that two of Hamilton's maternal aunts took him in and, so impressed by his vast intelligence, sent his to preparatory school in New Jersey and later to King's College in New York (now Colombia University). At school Hamilton was a sharp, bright pupil and during his time in college he wrote three notable pamphlets.
Insight into his college years can be found in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton I: 1768-1778 (A.H.). This compilation provides personal detail lending the reader Hamilton's notes on Homer's Iliad and the Book of Genesis to name a few (A.H., pgs. 41-42). The collection also supplies a "list of Books" Hamilton used at King's College giving a look into the brilliant mind of the young scholar.
