| Existing comment:
Hamilton's stance on slavery, which may seem ambivalent to a modern audience, was not unusual at the time. Hamilton spent his adolescence in St. Croix, a Caribbean island where enslaved blacks working on sugar plantations vastly outnumbered white residents. Hamilton's neighbors included free blacks and people of mixed race, but his mother owned slaves -- a young boy named Ajax was Hamilton's personal house servant. The trading company Hamilton worked for bought and sold slaves and the products of slave labor. |