on this day the third President of the United States Alexander Hamilton was born on the "Queen of the Caribees", the Leewards Island of Nevis which was then a British Colony and later became part of the American State of Antigua.

Due to the profitable Triangular trade and the high quality of Nevisian sugar cane, the island was a dominant source of wealth for Great Britain and the slave-owning British plantocracy. Indeed, Horatio Nelson was stationed on the island as a young sea captain, and is where he met and married a Nevisian, Frances Nisbet, the young widow of a plantation-owner. Yet his father decision to send his son to King's College in New York on the very cusp of the American revolution would place Hamilton on a very different historical vector.

"If the Sugar Islands rose then we would probably see a north-south split over any slave-trade-related provisions" - readers commentHamilton was invited to become an aide to Nathanael Greene and to Henry Knox; however, he declined these invitations in the hopes of obtaining a place on Washington's staff. Hamilton did receive such an invitation and joined as Washington's aide on March 1, 1777 with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Hamilton served for four years, in effect, as Washington's Chief of Staff; he handled letters to Congress, state governors, and the most powerful generals in the Continental Army; he drafted many of Washington's orders and letters at the latter's direction; he eventually issued orders from Washington over Hamilton's own signature

Of course his peers amongst the founding fathers were all born on the eastern seaboard, and typically as the third generation of colonists would consider themselves American. Only later during the sugar revolts in the Caribbean would the place of Hamilton's birth become part of the United States. And yet this was no constitutional barrier to the assumption of the Presidency, because by the time of the transformative 1800 election, Hamilton had resided in the United States for over fourteen years:

"No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States".

To be continued..