The case I am about to examine is one of the most impressive and shameless manipulations of public opinion in our country’s entire history.
Alexander Hamilton was a figure of significant importance to our nation. He left behind an extensive body of writings that have been studied in detail by his biographers. However, he was very careful in his autobiographical accounts, providing only vague details, especially about his mother. He left only a few brief, but deeply affectionate and sorrowful remarks about her, showing his deep admiration for her strength and virtue, as well as his compassion for the difficult circumstances in which she “was left with no choice but to struggle against the world.”1
He never explained what kind of struggle she actually endured. Since 1939, when biographer H. U. Ramsing discovered the divorce petition filed by her husband, in which she was called “a whore”, this characterization spread widely and shaped public opinion, which persists today.2
Even though twenty-first-century biographers such as Ron Chernow3 and Michael E. Newton4 generally reject the slander against Rachel, attributing it to a misogynistic society, what they actually do is merely soften the accusations rather than fully disprove or dismantle them.
They don’t clearly say "she was not"; instead, they suggest that she may have been, but society was simply not ready to accept such behavior from a woman. This kind of half-measure leaves room for numerous new publications repeating the slander. The time has come to fully reverse this narrative, to end the misinformation and uncover the truth.
But first, let’s briefly revisit the story behind this complex tale.
The Mystery of Rachel and Mary
Rachel Faucette, Hamilton’s mother, was born on Nevis, a British colony. The year of her birth is disputed; some biographers claim 1729, while burial records state 1736. If the latter date were correct, this would mean she gave birth to her first child at the age of nine, which is implausible. Yet the year 1736 remains engraved on her tombstone.
Some sources suggest that Rachel’s father, John Faucette, was a prosperous plantation owner, while others describe him as a kind-hearted doctor of modest means who treated enslaved Africans and lived with his family in Charlestown, Nevis. Regardless, he provided Rachel with a stable upbringing and financial support. He died on Nevis in early 1745, leaving her his entire estate, as stated by all biographers.
However, immediately after his death, Rachel and her mother, Mary, abandoned their wealth—or what they were supposed to have had—and moved from British Nevis to Danish St. Croix, where they were financially supported by Ann, Faucette's daughter from his first marriage, and her husband, James Lytton.
On St. Croix, Rachel married John Michael Lavien, whose identity and background remain shrouded in mystery. Was he Johann Michael Lavien, John Lewine, Jean Lavinne, or Jon Lewin? Was he German, Swedish, Belgian, or Danish? Was he a landowner, a planter, or an impoverished immigrant? With no concrete facts, biographers have resorted to speculation. Some even suggested he might have been Jewish, given that the last name "Lavien" sounds like "Levin." Such speculative methods in historical analysis are both shameless and unsubstantiated.
In 1746, the couple had a son, Peter Lavien. In 1749, Lavien accused Rachel of adultery. Although Lavien did not name her alleged lover, a court raid on the plantation of Johann Cronenberg, the island’s land surveyor, resulted in his arrest, alongside Rachel, for adultery. Both were imprisoned.
However, Cronenberg's estate—auctioned off after his incarceration—revealed only three slaves and two horses. No house, no plantation. In 1750, Cronenberg was released, and his attorney appealed the conviction, claiming he had been falsely accused and defamed. The court rejected the appeal.
Rachel was freed in May 1750, but instead of returning home to her husband and child, she fled to Dutch St. Eustatius to stay with Jemima, another of Faucette's daughters from his first marriage.
There, she met James Hamilton. They began living together as an unmarried couple, as Rachel was still legally bound to Lavien. The couple later moved back to Nevis, where, according to some biographers, Rachel was expected to inherit her father’s estate. However, she never received her inheritance, and the family faced financial struggles.
In 1759, Lavien filed for divorce, calling Rachel a "whore" who had "fornicated with many men." The divorce was granted under Danish law, which strictly forbade a divorced woman from remarrying. However, if Rachel and James Hamilton had wished to marry, they could have done so in Nevis or St. Eustatius, where British or Dutch law did not impose such a restriction. This would have made sense, especially if they wanted their two sons, James Jr. and Alexander, to attend school. But they did not marry.
In 1765, they chose to move to Danish St. Croix, where not only could they not marry, but their sons could not attend school, and Rachel risked arrest for cohabiting with James. As a result, they rented separate homes: Rachel lived with her sons at one address, while James resided at another.
Some biographers speculate that they moved to St. Croix to finalize Rachel’s divorce and marry. However, the divorce had already been finalized, and marital property had been awarded to Lavien, who raised their son alone. Therefore, they could have easily obtained a court certificate by mail.
After several months, James abruptly left. Some historians claim he left because "his affairs went to wreck." But if that were the case, why did he completely disappear from his sons' lives, and all attempts to contact him failed? Historian Richard Brookhiser speculates that James left to spare Rachel from bigamy charges, but this theory makes little sense. They had lived unmarried in Nevis for about 15 years. If legality was the concern, they could have easily married there.
No, James’s departure was a dramatic and tragic breakup—one that ended very badly. A responsible father, who cared about his children, would not have abandoned them without a word.
Rachel’s mother, Mary, has a similarly mysterious history. Some sources say Mary was born in England in 1703, while others claim she was born in Nevis in 1707 to undocumented parents. She married John Faucette, a physician, on August 21, 1725—though some records state it was in 1718 in Bermuda, which would imply an even earlier birth year. In 1737, their marriage ended in peaceful separation, though they never legally divorced.
The number of their children remains disputed. Chernow lists only Rachel, while others, like Michael E. Newton, suggest they had at least five children. Genealogical records from FamilySearch suggest seven. Among them were:
Peter (born 1721 – died 1736)
Frances (born 1723 – died 1736)
Rachel (Hamilton’s mother; birthdate uncertain – died 1767)
Elizabeth (died 1736)
Lilly (or Lillystone) (born 1737 – date of death unknown)
In 1723, Mary and her husband fought a legal battle over the inheritance of the Clay Gutt plantation against Mary’s older sister, Margaret Uppington. The High Court of Chancery ruled in Mary’s favor, granting her ownership of half the plantation. John Faucette subsequently merged this half with his own plantation in St. George Gingerland Parish. After John Faucette’s death in 1745, Mary and her children should have inherited the entire estate, but for some unknown reason, it was transferred to a government official, John Dasent, without any record of purchase.
This court case reveals several important details:
Mary’s parents, the Uppingtons, were planters on Nevis, suggesting she was likely born there, rather than in England.
Mary may not have been the biological daughter of her parents. Otherwise, why would her older sister inherit the plantation, and why was Mary initially excluded from the inheritance?
Rachel’s parents, John Faucette and Mary Uppington-Faucette, were wealthy, owning one and a half plantations, along with dwelling houses and outbuildings.
After John’s death in 1745, Mary and Rachel moved between Danish St. Croix, Dutch St. Eustatius, and British Nevis, essentially moving between three different legal systems. Even Mary’s death occurred on the road: she drowned during a boat trip from Nevis to St. Eustatius. By then, all her children had died, except for Rachel. But what happened to the youngest, Lilly? There is no information at all.
Family matters are often complicated. So, why should Hamilton’s biographers stop speculating and start paying closer attention to his family’s events? Is it worth uncovering the names of his grandmother’s parents, the number and fate of all her children, her financial status, and the reasons for her constant movement between three different legal systems? Will solving this puzzle yield meaningful insights into U.S. history?
I believe it will.
A strange encounter I had in 2007 in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, shed new light on these lingering mysteries, showing just how important it is to stop spreading outdated lies and misinformation and accept the truth.
And that is where we’ll go next.
Part 2: Where the Past Still Breathes
Schleswig-Holstein is Germany’s northernmost state, bordering Denmark and lying across the Baltic Sea from Sweden and Russia. Throughout its history, this beautiful region has been the subject of conflicts between much stronger neighbors, and from time to time, it belonged to Denmark, Sweden, and briefly, when the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein became the Czar of Russia in 1762, it even became a Russian territory. The life of this Duke was, at that time, the subject of my investigations, which resulted in the publication of the book *Peter III: The Duke of Holstein*.
For a fleeting six months, the Duke ruled the world’s largest empire. It was a hard and dangerous period. The Duke, therefore, requested that a regiment of Holstein soldiers be brought from Schleswig-Holstein to St. Petersburg to serve as his personal guard. They arrived too late. His wife, Catherine—soon to be Catherine the Great—had him overthrown. The Holstein soldiers were disbanded. Some perished, some wandered, and most vanished without a trace.
In dusty archives and crumbling letters, I began to follow the fates of those soldiers. One such fate led me to a house in the village of Nortorf. The matriarch was an elderly woman named Frau Trienke Wittkowsky, and she told me the story of her seventh great-grandfather, Hans Peter Lavien—a Holstein soldier from Nortorf who had gone east with his Duke and never returned.
“My people were Frisians—stubborn, sea-worn, and slow to forget,” she concluded. “I was named after Hans’s sister—Trienke Lavien, born 1730. See, when she married, the Lavien name died. But we kept the name ‘Trienke’ for our firstborn daughters. It’s a Frisian version of Kathrine. That was how we remembered her—through the names we gave our girls.”
Then her voice dropped, almost to a whisper.
“There was another brother, though,” she continued. “Johann Michael Lavien.”
Like many in Schleswig-Holstein after the Treaty of Copenhagen transferred Nortorf to Danish control, Johann answered the call of the Danish West India Company. These young recruits were encouraged to work for the benefit of Denmark on its ships, which were involved in the transatlantic slave trade. From time to time, letters from Johann would arrive, which his mother carefully preserved. A few pages have survived, revealing that Johann was unable to work on the ships for long due to poor health. He ended up on the island of St. Croix, where, with the small earnings he had made from voyages to the African coast, he purchased a piece of a sugarcane plantation. He attempted to develop this business and boasted in his letters that he had married a wealthy local heiress. He wrote to his mother with the joyful news that she had a grandson, whom he named Peter after his father, as he had promised when they parted.
But the dream life collapsed after his wife bore a dark-skinned child. Johann sued her for adultery. From that point on, Johann lived alone, raising Peter by himself. Family tradition holds that Peter, too, had children—some of whom were unmistakably of African descent.
The revelation devastated the Lavien family. For generations, they had been proud, insular, Nordic, Frisian. The discovery that they had Black relatives—that their bloodline carried the mark of empire and enslavement—was buried beneath layers of silence. And yet, not all was lost.
Some of Johann’s letters survived—perhaps only because his mother hid them from a stranger’s eye in a forgotten book.
Mrs. Wittkowsky called to her grandson, and he returned with a worn volume. Between its pages were three delicate sheets of paper, browned by time, edges curled like dry leaves, covered in ornate script so faded it was almost ghostly.
I was astounded. However, at that time, the Caribbean, with its history of slavery and ongoing racial conflicts, was so far removed from my area of interest that I filed the information away in the back of my mind. I had no idea that what I held in my hands was the key to a missing heartbeat of a story about a woman named Rachel Lavien, who would spend her short and tragic life running from what these letters had just confirmed: the birth of a dark-skinned child in the cruel era of slavery.
Of course, we can continue clinging to the authority of biographers and assume that Alexander Hamilton’s mother was a whore, unfaithful to her husband with an enslaved man. After all, that’s what everyone believed for the past two centuries.
But unlike them, we understand genetics. We’ve endured the social trauma of slavery. We know how enslaved women were raped, how their children—and their children’s children—inherited not only their status but also the shame imposed by others. And we don’t judge those for whom silence became the only defense until slavery was finally abolished, segregation outlawed, and people in the Northern Hemisphere were granted equal rights, regardless of skin color.
So why don’t we, now that silence is no longer an issue, stop pretending that by honestly acknowledging the inaccuracies in information, we can shield ourselves from the charge of spreading falsehoods?
Let us place the birth of a dark-skinned child at the heart of Rachel’s story—and her mother Mary’s before her—and we will see how everything falls into place. The secrecy. The relentless fleeing. The lies that became a necessity. The names that changed. The marriages that unraveled. The properties shamelessly seized. The records imprudently manipulated. The court cases blatantly fabricated. The fathers hiding their kinship with their children. The children hiding their kinship with their mothers. And a son who would become a great statesman, shaped as much by what he could not say as by what he could.
Here, then, is that story—undimmed by time, unsanitized by myth, and no longer hidden.
Are you ready to face the music?
The Blood That Stained the Roots
Around the year 1700, a nameless African girl was torn from her homeland and chained in the belly of a British slave ship. Her screams, like those of thousands before her, were swallowed by the Atlantic. She arrived on Nevis, a small Caribbean island, and was sold like livestock to the Clay Gutt sugar plantation. Her name was never recorded. Her language, lost. Her lineage, stolen.
Like many other enslaved women, she was raped by her owner, Mr. Uppington. When she gave birth to a light-skinned daughter, the Uppington family took the baby, Mary, into their home and raised her alongside their biological daughter, Margaret. Had they not done so, the law would have required the child to live as an enslaved person. Her pale complexion, however, gave Uppington a way to quietly rescue his daughter from that fate, and he took it.
In 1706, a French invasion of Nevis brought destruction and chaos. Many public records were lost in the fires. This erasure proved advantageous for the Uppingtons, who now had no legal obstacles to claiming the child of the enslaved woman as their own. Legally white. Inheritable. Clean. But no blaze could silence the whispers.
Mary Uppington was sent to England, as planter families often did with their daughters. There, she received an extraordinary education. But while she was away, both her parents died. When she returned, the doors of the family home were closed to her—the older sister Margaret had inherited everything and wanted nothing to do with the girl the island still remembered as “the one who came from the enslaved woman.”
Alone and unwelcome, Mary found an ally in a neighbor: John Faucette, a widowed planter and physician. They married, and with his backing, Mary pursued a legal claim to her inheritance. Without surviving records to prove otherwise, she was accepted as a legitimate Uppington heir and became the rightful owner of half of Clay Gutt. It was joined to Faucette's plantation, and they became wealthy.
Mary and John lived happily for the next 15 years and had four children. But in 1736, smallpox swept through their home, claiming lives of three. Only one daughter, Rachel, survived. A year later, Mary gave birth to her last child, a girl named Lilly—or Lillystone—whose dark skin could not be explained away.
John and Mary could not live together anymore, as this would lead to severe social consequences for the entire family. John, who was also a doctor, would no longer be able to practice medicine. Rachel, who was born with fair skin and accepted by society, would be expelled from school and become an object of hatred and persecution from her peers. Thus, the couple made the only possible decision—they separated. John Faucette moved downtown, where he continued practicing medicine. Mary and the children remained on the plantation, where she could easily present Lilly as the child of one of their enslaved persons. John, of course, took financial care of the family—quietly, from a distance.
Following John’s death in 1745, Mary and Rachel became vulnerable. Gossip regarding Mary’s African heritage and the reason for her separation from John Faucette continued to circulate, making it impossible for her to own the plantation. Subsequently it was seized by the state.
Mary took Rachel and fled to St. Croix, where the Danish crown held sway, and where Mary hoped that their wealthier relatives, the Lyttons, would help them start a new life.
Mary could never rid herself of the fear that the truth about their African heritage would catch up with them even in the new place. Thus, Rachel, who was only 16 years old, was quickly married off, practically to obtain a new identity. The groom was Johann Michael Lavien—a planter of modest means who owned a piece of land close to the Lytton plantation. German by blood, Danish by law, he was no prize, but he was white, and that was enough. The Lyttons approved the match without hesitation.
Rachel and Johann’s first child, Peter, was born white. But their next child was not. To Johann, the birth of a dark-skinned baby meant that Rachel had been unfaithful—with an enslaved man. He brought formal charges of fornication—without ethnic clarification of her alleged lover, though.
The situation became dangerous and was on the brink of spiraling out of control. To protect Rachel and their own status, the Lyttons intervened. They convinced Johann to suppress the truth about the baby. If he accused Rachel publicly of fornication with a Black man, the truth about Rachel’s and her mother’s ethnicity would also eventually be exposed, meaning Johann’s beloved son Peter would also be revealed to have African ancestry, thus ruining his future. Johann agreed. Consequently, the story of Rachel’s affair with - a government employee, an island land surveyor, Johann Cronenberg was fabricated, meaning Rachel had been unfaithful, yes, but with a white man. Why did the Lyttons choose exactly this man as their scapegoat? There must have been some conflict between them—the wealthy and powerful landowners—and this man whose job was land surveying. His accusation and subsequent withdrawal from his official position benefited the Lyttons.Thus, Lytton successfully fought his own enemy and simultaneously rescued the family reputation.
Under eighteenth-century Danish law, Cronenberg’s case was an anomaly. While the law did indeed impose harsh penalties on a married woman for infidelity, it was highly unusual for her lover to face such severe punishment. Danish law only required exile for an unmarried man involved in fornication—no imprisonment and no deprivation of all property. The scandal was well-planned, efficiently executed, and carefully buried—like all good lies.
Returning to Rachel: after her release, she and Mary ran away from Danish St. Croix to the Dutch-controlled St. Eustatius, once again attempting to rebuild their lives.
There, Rachel met James Hamilton. Their decision to move back to Nevis, along with Mary, was likely based on the idea that Hamilton could help them regain the Faucette-Uppington plantation—a noble gentleman with a highly regarded European pedigree would be treated with the appropriate respect that had once been denied to Mary. Unfortunately, they failed.
As a result, the family faced financial struggles, and James Hamilton engaged in various businesses to support Rachel and their two sons, Alexander and James Jr., both of whom were born white and marked by a secret they could not see.
When James traveled to St. Croix on business, Rachel followed, likely fearing that he would hear the rumors about her dark-skinned child. She was right to worry.
When Hamilton confronted her, Rachel faced an impossible choice. She could let him believe the official story—that she had betrayed her husband with an enslaved man. Or she could tell him the truth: that the child was her own, that the blood of an African woman still flowed through her veins—and through the veins of Hamilton’s sons.
Proud and honest, she chose the truth. But the consequences were worse than she expected. James could not bear it. Imagine—a man raised in the pride of Scottish lineage suddenly discovering that both his sons bore the stain of slavery!
Unable to cope, he walked away from Rachel, from the sons he had fathered, and from the family he had built. No letters. No money. No goodbyes. No sign of fatherly empathy. He vanished from their lives as if they had never existed.
Rachel, morally devastated, stopped running. Now a single mother, she stayed on St. Croix and opened a small store selling imported goods supplied by merchant Nicolas Cruger.
The rest of the story we know.
While there is no definitive proof that Alexander Hamilton reconnected with his Black relatives, there are compelling reasons to believe he at least knew about their existence. He must have known. Here is why: While working for Nicolas Cruger, he became very close with Ann Lytton, his cousin—the daughter of his mother’s half-sister Ann and her husband James Lytton. Ann Lytton—bright, open-minded, and well-educated—undoubtedly knew the family history, and through her, Alexander might have pieced together the truth about his African heritage.
I firmly believe that his decision to study in America and become a lawyer was driven not only by talent but also by a deep desire to seek justice—for his mother, her legacy, and likely by a naive desire to fight for his relatives’ freedom. However, upon his arrival, he likely discovered that such aspirations were unattainable in the time of slavery's cruelty. This was the limit he had to acknowledge in order to prevail. But until his final breath, he believed that one day justice for his mother—a remarkable, highly intelligent, strong, and proud woman, a granddaughter of the enslaved—would finally be served.