[8] Rachel Faucette had been living on St. Kitts and Nevis for years at the time when Alexander was conceived, while Thomas Stevens lived on Antigua and St. Croix and James Hamilton Sr never disavowed his paternity, signing his letters to Alexander even in later years ”your very affectionate Father”.
Christiansted Historic Site Director did 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.
[11][12] Stevens graduated from King's College in 1774 and then sailed to Britain to study Medicine at the University of Edinburgh.
In adulthood, Hamilton tended to shun his turbulent adolescence, and Stevens was the only person from his childhood, including even his closest living family members, with whom he kept in regular contact.
[13] Stevens served as the United States consul-general in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti) from 1799 to 1800.
[13] John Adams sent Stevens to Saint-Domingue with instructions to establish a relationship with the de facto ruler of the colony, Toussaint Louverture, and express support his regime.
[19] Stevens's title of consul suggested a diplomat attached to a country and not a colony, reflecting the Adams administration's view of the situation in Saint-Domingue.
This was made difficult by the fact that Britain had occupied part of the colony from 1793 to 1798 in an attempt to capture Saint-Domingue and were also afraid of the Haitian Revolution leading to unrest among slaves in the British West Indies.
[21] On 13 June 1799, he signed a convention which led to an armistice among the three parties, giving protections to British and American ships from local privateers and allowing them to enter the colony and engage in free trade.
[22] Stevens's correspondence with Pickering, Adams, and Thomas Jefferson provide important insight into American geopolitics during the Haitian Revolution.
[13] In 1802, French botanist Pierre Antoine Poiteau named Stevensia, a genus of flowering plants from Haiti and the Dominican Republic which belong to the Rubiaceae family, in Stevens's honour.