whatagrump:

“Who could have imagined, my friend, a man of your size, your delicate constitution, and your peace would have shone as, and in so little time, in the Champ de Mars, you did. I assure you sir that I am greatly tormented about your health, which has always been very dear to me since the beginning of our acquaintance. I do not know how you can support the difficulty and the hardships of a winter campaign in America. Surely your constitution would never have supported such severity without the assistance of something very extraordinary.”

—

Edward Stevens to Alexander Hamilton, 1778

“a man of your size.” lmfao this is the worst thing, stevens is like “damn ham, you’re so fucking fragile and small the only way you could’ve survived the winter campaign is if god literally intervened to save your tiny ass”

publius-esquire:

runawayforthesummer:

People did think Alexander Hamilton and Ned Stevens looked remarkably alike and that it was awfully nice for Hamilton to be taken in by the Stevens’ family after his cousin died.

If people want to speculate about his paternity based on that, then they can, I guess.

At first I thought Timothy Pickering (Hamilton’s friend) was the first to propose this theory, but John Adams (not Hamilton’s friend) was already throwing around allegations that Edward Stevens was Hamilton’s half-brother as early as 1800, which leads me to believe that theories were probably going around shortly after Stevens came to America. I imagine they have to have heard they were similar looking before, since Stevens’s brother-in-law James Yard said the comment had been made “thousands of times.”

The problem then becomes whether or not either Rachel was in St. Croix or Thomas Stevens in Nevis in 1754/1756, and well I’ve never found any evidence in available tax records that they were together at any point during those years. (I mean it’s possible that one could have visited the island of another without staying long enough to be put on a tax record.) 

After Rachel’s death, after the suicide of their cousin and death of their uncle, the Hamilton boys pretty much didn’t have much family left to take them, and the local government wasn’t going to have a couple of unsupervised white boys running around, so it’s likely Thomas Stevens volunteered to take them in – by this point Alexander was already friends with Edward, who had just been sent to America for college by the time of Peter Lytton’s death, so it’s possible Stevens saw it as taking in the friend of his son.

William Cissel does find possible evidence that Thomas Stevens did initially take both Hamilton boys in, not just Alexander, as in 1769 the registers read that the household had two “white male servants” that hadn’t been listed before. By the 1772 register the “white male servants” are gone (Hamilton may have been upgraded), and James, Jr., had gone to live elsewhere. 

So that’s pretty much all we know. I mean, it’s possible Stevens could have been the baby daddy, but eh until DNA evidence finally compares Hamilton’s line with the Stevens line we’ll never know.