Hamilton was a musical, it along with movies etc. do not have to be ethnically correct. However, there is no evidence that Alexander Hamilton was Black. Alexander Hamilton has a large number of descendants, some of whom have done DNA tests and found none within the last 10 generations. However, in the case of my 5 children with my wife, I can assure that they are biracial; my wife was Asian and somewhat dark. In fact, a couple of my grandchildren have some Black ancestry. Here is a good discussion on Quora:
www.quora.com/Was-Alexander-Hamilton-blackAnd here is what I consider the most extensive (best) answer:
Brady Postma
Brady Postma, I read U.S. history books for fun.
Updated Oct 1 · Upvoted by Donald Mcarthur, M.A. History of Europe & History of the United States of America, Northern Illinois University (199…
What is black? Hamilton's skin was not dark, nor was that of his mother or his father. His peers and contemporaries treated him as a white man in a society that made that distinction very strictly. Lee Hamilton's answer suggests that genetic tests on Hamilton's descendants show no sign of recent African ancestry.
In segregation times, some discriminated against blacks as defined by the “one-drop rule” — the idea that even a single ancestor of sub-Saharan-African ancestry, even “one drop of black blood,” classifies one as black. This rule was not yet described nor in use during Hamilton's lifetime, and modern archeology and genetic studies suggest that every living person has some sub-Saharan-African ancestry. Therefore, it makes little sense to use that unreal standard of perfect racial purity.
But does Alexander Hamilton have any recent ancestry that were from sub-Saharan Africa?
His mother was named Rachel Faucette at birth, the child of a French Huguenot (Calvinist protestant) father and an Anglo (white protestant) mother. As a teen, she was married off to Johann Michael Lavien, a 30-year-old Anglo man, in a loveless marriage. That mess ended with his having her jailed for adultery. After she had served her time, Rachel Faucette Lavien left her husband, his surname, and a young son to escape to the anonymity of the West Indies. The marriage was never legally dissolved.
She lived in the West Indies for a few years (some claim as a prostitute, though there is no proof; Ron Chernow's acclaimed biography calls the accusation “absurd”) until she met a Scottish gentleman, James A. Hamilton, the fourth son of Laird (Scottish for Lord) Alexander Hamilton of Grange, Ayrshire. This man's Scottish heritage is beyond question.
They held a marriage ceremony, and she bore him two sons, James, Jr. and that Alexander Hamilton whose ancestry we are contemplating. The legality of this marriage is dubious at best, since she was still married to Johan Lavien legally and in the Church records. Contemporaries and modern historians agree, Alexander Hamilton was born out of wedlock, which was a great disgrace in those days.
Rachel's race was listed in tax records from the West Indies, and invariably list her as white. If her skin or that of either of her parents had been dark, that would not have been the case. She was already white or passing as white, with no evidence known to historians suggesting the latter.
There are rumors that Rachel may have been mixed race from her Huguenot side, as French Huguenots had less of a stigma against interracial marriage than did other European societies of that time. French colonies in Africa tended to be Catholic, but not every colonist was. Also, Dutch Calvinists had some presence in South Africa and had some cultural exchange with their French co-religionists. Though there is no evidence saying it is so, it is possible that some white French Huguenot converted a black African to Calvinism and brought them or their offspring back to France to father Rachel, or that a South African convert to the Dutch Reformed Church joined with a French Huguenot to produce Rachel's father.
These baseless speculations would hypothetically result in an Alexander Hamilton who was either 3/4ths or 7/8ths white, but 1/4th or 1/8th black. In the venacular of the time, such a person would be called a quadroon or an octoroon respectively. These speculations become more compatible with her Huguenot surname and the times if the African ancestor was a black woman who took on a white Frenchman's name upon marriage and bore a son who fathered Rachel, moving the hypothetical black ancestor another generation back into Rachel's ancestry and shrinking Alexander Hamilton's alleged black fraction by half. It's also possible for a black Calvinist convert to take on a Huguenot Christian name at baptism or when moving to France, though.
Even if these speculations were so, the standards contemporary to Alexander Hamilton's time tended to classify quadroons and octoroons as white. If Rachel's Huguenot parent was half-black, Alexander Hamilton would still have been white by the standards of his time, meeting the 7/8ths standard, the strictest in America in his time. If Rachel's Huguenot parent had been fully black, a direct immigrant and a rare Calvinist convert from some French colony in Africa, still Alexander Hamilton would meet the more lenient 3/4ths standard applied in many parts of the United States. He wouldn't even be passing as white, but officially white under the law of his day.
Another theory says that Rachel continued her alleged prostitution after her marriage to James Hamilton, and some john of African heritage is Alexander's true father. The historical record gives no evidence of her ever engaging in prostitution or of any lover of African heritage, but gossip continues without regard for falsifiablity.
The most common standard of his time, though, would be to look at his milky pink features, hear the famously Scottish nobility of his surname, and never bother to question his whiteness. Those wishing to apply a different standard are looking to remove Hamilton from the context of his time and judge him by standards foreign to his culture, either to condemn him with segregation-era racism or extole him as a multicultural exemplar of modern standards of diversity. Either option distances one's conclusions from the contemporary identity of the man and from the evidence we possess about his ancestry.
He is portrayed in the play Hamilton originally and primarily by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who has precisely one black grandparent and who describes his ancestry as mostly Puerto Rican and a quarter Mexican. The race/ethnicity of the actors portraying characters in that play are not intended to suggest anything about the race/ethnicity of the historical figures