Chernow starts Hamilton's story in the Caribbean, indicating how this fatherless child, conceived in 1755 and orphaned at age thirteen, stepped toward turning into a self-made individual. Next, we are told about a crucial event in Hamilton's life as a child, where a typhoon crushed the island of St. Croix, and how Hamilton wrote a paper on the devastation of that hurricane. Then, Chernow guides us through Hamilton's school years in New York, which overlapped the early phases of the Revolutionary War. Here we see a testing of Hamilton's rhetoric aptitudes, including a look at his first speech against the British sanctions in Massachusetts. Soon after the war broke out, Hamilton organized, and lead a volunteer gathering of understudies
