The Hurricane's Divide: How One Storm Freed a Founding Father and Forgot the Unremembered | The African Gourmet
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The Hurricane's Divide: How One Storm Freed a Founding Father and Forgot the Unremembered
How a single event is remembered for one person’s benefit while the suffering of the majority is erased.
Alexander Hamilton, age 17, before the 1772 hurricane in St. Croix.
Two Worlds, One Storm
In September 1772, a hurricane of biblical fury tore through the Caribbean. It would become one of the most famous storms in history—not for the destruction it caused, but for the future it shaped. Out of the wreckage stepped a brilliant young man whose words would carry him to the American Revolution: Alexander Hamilton.
Yet for every Hamilton who found a door opening toward freedom and destiny, thousands of enslaved Africans met only loss, toil, and silence in the record. This is the story of that divide.
Hamilton’s Providence — The Storm as a Divine Launchpad
At just 17, Hamilton was a clerk in Christiansted, St. Croix, when the hurricane struck. He witnessed walls crumble, ships splinter, and lives swept away. Out of this chaos, he composed a vivid letter describing the terror of the storm and the lessons he drew from it.
Published on October 3, 1772, in the Royal Danish-American Gazette, the letter impressed local leaders with its eloquence. They raised funds to send the orphaned prodigy to New York—setting him on the path toward revolution and the founding of a nation.
“Good God! What horror and destruction… It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place.”
Hamilton closed with hope, seeing the storm not as punishment but as providence:
“’Tis done, the great mysterious work of Providence is finished; the portentous kind of the storm is changed into a beneficial gale.”
For Hamilton, the hurricane became a launchpad—a divine catalyst that gave him a voice and a destiny.
The Unseen Victims — The Storm as Another Layer of Trauma
But Hamilton’s storm was not the only storm. The majority of St. Croix’s people—enslaved Africans on sugar plantations—experienced it in ways his letter never acknowledged.
- No Shelter: Enslaved workers lived in fragile huts the winds tore apart, taking lives never recorded.
- No Reprieve: When skies cleared, they were forced back into the fields to clear debris and rebuild mills under the lash.
- No Providence: For them, there was no divine favor—only the endless labor of survival.
Where Hamilton’s storm opened a door, theirs deepened the chains.
The Irony of Providence — A Theology of Inequality
Hamilton saw Providence in the hurricane. But in colonial pulpits, “Providence” often justified inequality: Europeans as chosen masters, Africans as divinely destined for servitude. The same storm that lifted Hamilton toward liberty condemned thousands to silence.
The irony is searing. Their gods, their ancestors, their ways of reading nature’s fury—were all suppressed beneath the theology of empire.
Remembering the Unremembered
Hamilton’s hurricane has long been told as a classic American origin story: genius tested by nature, blessed by Providence, bound for greatness. But the fuller story is darker—and unmistakably Caribbean.
One storm, two realities: a Founding Father lifted up, thousands of Africans crushed down. To remember this storm fully is to widen the lens of history—not to diminish Hamilton’s brilliance, but to honor those whose resilience made his ascent possible.
Their endurance, though unrecorded, is its own kind of providence — one born not of privilege, but of perseverance.
Related Reading
- Before 1776: America and Africa’s Shared History
- Ancestral Authority: Myth and Memory in History
- Why History Forgets the African Sailors of the Atlantic
