On this day in 1772, a letter providing an “account of one of the most dreadful Hurricanes that memory or any records whatever can trace” appeared in St. Croix’s The Royal Danish American Gazette. The letter, written weeks earlier by a “Youth of this Island” to his father, who lived beyond the storm’s reach, caused such a stir when it was published in the Gazette that it forever lifted the fortunes of its writer—and arguably changed the course of American history.
The “Youth” who authored the letter was a 17-year-old clerk named Alexander Hamilton. As described in a recent article in the Washington Post—not to mention a 2016 Mental Floss article and Ron Chernow’s biography of Hamilton (Chapter Two: “Hurricane”)—the letter prompted businessmen on the island to raise funds to send the young, promising Hamilton to North America, where he made his name. And, I’d be remiss not to note that Chernow’s description of how Hamilton had “written his way out of poverty” inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton.
Since the circumstances surrounding Hamilton’s letter and his rise in fortune have been well recounted in the sources mentioned above, I won’t attempt my own summary. Instead, I thought it would be more useful and interesting to share an image of the letter—one of Hamilton’s first attempts at stretching his literary muscles—as it appeared in the Gazette (the original letter appears to be lost). I came across the letter while researching a recent blog post on Alexander Hamilton’s poetry, and as with Hamilton’s poetry, I’ve found few images of the letter elsewhere on the Web:
Alexander Hamilton’s hurricane letter. Royal Danish American Gazette, October 3, 1772, p. 2.
Here is the full page on which the letter appears, and an image of the issue’s first page. Both were scanned from the Library’s microfilm copy of the paper, which resides in our Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room. A transcript of the letter appears on the Founders Online website.
Interested in exploring other From the Catbird Seat posts that delve into the Library’s unparalleled newspaper collections? Here’s a selection of posts to get you started.
August 25, 2022 at 3:30 pm
Hello from the island of Saba. I am the Founding Director of Sea & Learn Foundation on the island of Saba. Our mission is to enhance environmental awareness and protect Saba’s cultural heritage. We have embarked upon a new project called Adopt-A-Box. Electrical distribution boxes around the island will have doors installed and be fronted with storyboards relative to the island’s history and nature. One of the boxes will be the story of the Great Hurricane of 1772. Of course, we are lacking images for this storyboard but would like to include that this storm is what propelled Alexander Hamilton to leave St. Croix to head to the USA. I was happy to find your site has an image of the original newspaper article. As the story board will be approximately 48 inches wide by 60 inches high, having high resolution images is essential. Is there a way we can obtain a high resolution image of the original newspaper article (or anything relative to that occurrence)? We are certainly willing to sign a contract that we would only use the image once for this purpose. We are a non-profit foundation and will absolutely provide any credit due where it is appropriate. seaandlearn.org is the website of our foundation where you will find more information about our foundation and the Adopt-A-Box project.
Thank you in advance for replying to me.
October 31, 2022 at 9:09 am
Dear Lynn,
Thank you for your message, and our apologies for not replying sooner. The image of Hamilton’s hurricane letter that appears in this post was scanned from the Library’s microfilm copy of the paper, which resides in our Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room. Given this, I’ve added your question into our Ask a Librarian system and have referred it to the staff in our Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room so they can describe your best options for obtaining a higher-quality copy of the image than appears on the blog.
Sincerely,
Peter
Best wishes,
Peter