THREE
THE COLLEGIAN

A lexander Hamilton never needed to worry about leading a tedious, uneventful life. Drama shadowed his footsteps. When his ship caught fire during his three-week voyage to North America, crew members scrambled down ropes to the sea and scooped up seawater in buckets, extinguishing the blaze with some difficulty. The charred vessel managed to sail into Boston Harbor intact, and Hamilton proceeded straight to New York. This was a mandatory stop, since he had to pick up his allowance at Kortright and Company, which managed the subscription fund that financed his education. The New York firm owned seven vessels that shuttled between New York and the West Indies and employed Kortright and Cruger as its St. Croix representative. Periodically, the subscription fund was replenished by sugar barrels sent from St. Croix, with Hamilton pocketing a percentage of the proceeds from each shipment. Hence, the education of this future abolitionist was partly underwritten by sugarcane harvested by slaves.

When he came to New York, Hamilton was fortified with introductory letters from Hugh Knox but otherwise did not know a soul except Edward Stevens. Yet this young man from the tropics, who had probably never worn an overcoat or experienced a change of seasons, did not seem handicapped by his past and never struck people as a provincial bumpkin. He seemed to vault over the high hurdles of social status with ease. Smart, handsome, and outgoing, he marched with an erect military carriage, thrusting out his chest in an assertive manner. He had all the magnetic power of a mysterious foreigner and soon made his first friend: a fashionable tailor with the splendid name of Hercules Mulligan, whose brother was a junior partner at Kortright and Company. Born in Ireland in 1740, the colorful, garrulous Mulligan was one of the few tradesmen Hamilton ever befriended. He had a shop and home on Water Street, and Hamilton may have boarded with him briefly. With a sizable dollop of Irish blarney, Mulligan took full credit for introducing Hamilton into New York society: “Mr. H. used in the evenings to sit with my family and my brother's family and write doggerel rhymes for their amusement; he was always amiable and cheerful and extremely attentive to his books.” ¹ These soirees may have featured some subversive political content, for Hercules Mulligan had reputedly been one of the “Liberty Boys” involved in a skirmish with British soldiers on Golden Hill (John Street) six weeks before frightened British troops gunned down fractious colonists in the 1770 Boston Massacre. Later, during the British occupation of wartime New York, Mulligan was to dabble in freelance espionage for George Washington, discreetly pumping his foppish clients, mostly Tories and British officers, for strategic information as he taped their measurements.

Hamilton's early itinerary in America closely mirrored the connections of Hugh Knox. Through Knox, he came to know two of New York's most eminent Presbyterian clergymen: Knox's old mentor, Dr. John Rodgers—an imposing figure who strutted grandly down Wall Street en route to church, grasping a gold-headed cane and nodding to well-wishers—and the Reverend John M. Mason, whose son would end up attempting an authorized biography of Hamilton. Through another batch of Knox introductory letters, Hamilton ended up studying at a well-regarded preparatory school across the Hudson River, the Elizabethtown Academy. Like all autodidacts, Hamilton had some glaring deficiencies to correct and required cram courses in Latin, Greek, and advanced math to qualify for college.

Elizabethtown, New Jersey—today plain Elizabeth—was chartered by George II and ranked as the colony's oldest English community. It was a small, idyllic village graced with orchards, two churches, a stone bridge arching over the Elizabeth River, and windmills dispersed among the salt meadows outside of town. Located on the grounds of the Presbyterian church, the Elizabethtown Academy occupied a two-story building topped by a cupola. Its headmaster, Francis Barber, was a recent graduate of the College of New Jersey (henceforth called Princeton, its much later name) and was only five years older than Hamilton. He was a dashing figure, with a high forehead, heavy eyebrows, and a small, prim mouth. Steeped in the classics and with reform-minded political sympathies, he was in many ways an ideal preceptor for Hamilton. He would see combat duty on the patriotic side during the Revolution and would find himself at Yorktown, in a startling inversion, under the direct command of his West Indian pupil.

Because the Elizabethtown Academy supplied many students to Princeton, we can deduce something about Hamilton's preparatory studies from that college's requirements. Princeton applicants had to know Virgil, Cicero's orations, and Latin grammar and also had to be “so well acquainted with the Greek as to render any part of the four Evangelists in that language into Latin or English.” ² Never tentative about tackling new things and buoyed by a preternatural self-confidence, Hamilton proved a fantastically quick study. He often worked past midnight, curled up in his blanket, then awoke at dawn and paced the nearby burial ground, mumbling to himself as he memorized his lessons. (Hamilton's lifelong habit of talking sotto voce while pacing lent him an air of either inspiration or madness.) A copious note taker, he left behind, in a minute hand, an exercise book in which he jotted down passages from the Iliad in Greek, took extensive notes on geography and history, and compiled detailed chapter synopses from the books of Genesis and Revelation. As if wanting to pack every spare moment with achievement, he also found time to craft poetry and wrote the prologue and epilogue of an unspecified play performed by a local detachment of British soldiers.

Hamilton's attendance at the Elizabethtown Academy brought him into the immediate vicinity of the younger Aaron Burr, who had attended the same school several years earlier. Burr's brother-in-law, jurist Tapping Reeve, sat on the academy's board of visitors and had been a vital force behind the school's creation. By an extraordinary coincidence, Burr spent the summer of 1773 in Elizabethtown, right around the time Hamilton arrived. Hamilton might have seen this handsome, genial young man sauntering down the street, gliding by in a boat along the town's many inlets, or hunting in the nearby woods. As we shall see, they probably also met in the drawing rooms of mutual friends.

Hamilton always displayed an unusual capacity for impressing older, influential men, and he gained his social footing in Elizabethtown with surpassing speed, crossing over an invisible divide into a privileged, patrician world in a way that would have been impossible in St. Croix. Thanks to the letters from Hugh Knox, he had instant access to men at the pinnacle of colonial society in New Jersey. He met William Livingston and Elias Boudinot, well-heeled lawyers and luminaries in the Presbyterian political world, who exposed him to the heterodox political currents of the day. They were both associated with the Whigs, who sought to curb royal power, boost parliamentary influence, and preserve civil liberties.

Unquestionably the most vivid figure in Hamilton's new life was fifty-year-old Livingston, a born crusader, who had abandoned a contentious career in New York politics to assume the sedate life of a New Jersey country squire. As work proceeded on Liberty Hall, his 120-acre estate, Livingston took temporary quarters in town, and Hamilton may have lodged with him during this interlude. Livingston was the sort of contradictory figure that always enchanted the young Hamilton. A blue-blooded rebel and scion of a powerful Hudson River clan, Livingston had spurned an easy life to write romantic poetry, crank out polemical essays, and plunge into controversial causes. Tall and lanky, nicknamed “the whipping post,” the voluble Livingston tilted lances with royal authorities with such self-righteous glee that one Tory newspaper anointed him “the Don Quixote of the Jerseys.” ³

Like many Presbyterians, Livingston had gravitated to political dissent while opposing Tory efforts to entrench the Church of England in America. Two decades earlier, he had spearheaded a vitriolic campaign to block the establishment of an Anglican college in New York, which, he warned, would become “a contracted receptacle of bigotry” and an instrument of royal power. ⁴ After their campaign failed and the school received a royal charter as King's College in 1754, Livingston and his friends founded the New York Society Library to provide safe alternative reading matter for students. (Hamilton would take out books there.) An opponent of the Stamp Act and subsequent measures to saddle the colonies with oppressive taxes, Livingston was to attend the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention and become the first governor of an independent New Jersey in 1776.

A gregarious man, William Livingston conducted Hamilton into a much more glamorous society than the one he left behind. Though benefiting from Livingston largesse, Hamilton was never mistaken for the family help, and he befriended the Livingston children, including the cerebral Brockholst, who was later an eminent Supreme Court judge and already friendly with Aaron Burr. There were also dazzling Livingston daughters to ravish the eye. As one of Burr's friends observed of Elizabethtown at the time, “There is certainly something amorous in its very air.” ⁵ Hamilton observed the courtship of the beautiful, high-spirited Sarah Livingston by a young lawyer named John Jay. (So regal was Sarah Livingston's presence that when she later attended the opera in Paris, some audience members mistook her for the queen of France.) A special rapport sprang up between Hamilton and another Livingston daughter, Catharine, known as Kitty. She was the type of woman Hamilton found irresistible: pretty, coquettish, somewhat spoiled, and always ready for flirtatious banter. Judging from a letter Hamilton wrote to her during the Revolution, one suspects that Kitty was his first romantic conquest in America:

It is hard to imagine that Alexander Hamilton slept under the same roof as Kitty Livingston and didn't harbor impure thoughts.

In this sociable world, Hamilton also befriended Livingston's brother-in-law, William Alexander, a bluff, convivial man known as Lord Stirling because of his contested claim to a Scottish earldom. An extravagant spendthrift, he was already swamped with debt when he met Hamilton. A decade earlier, the handsome, round-faced Stirling had constructed a thousand-acre estate at Basking Ridge, adorned with stables, gardens, and a deer park in imitation of the country houses of British nobility. Like Livingston, Lord Stirling was a curious amalgam of reformer and self-styled aristocrat. He rode about in a coach emblazoned with the Stirling coat of arms and possessed a princely wardrobe of 31 coats, 58 vests, 43 pairs of breeches, 30 shirts, 27 cravats, and 14 pairs of shoes.

If Aaron Burr is to be trusted, Lord Stirling drank his way straight through the American Revolution as a brigadier general, plied by his aide-de-camp, James Monroe, who served as his faithful cupbearer: “Monroe's whole duty was to fill his lordship's tankard and hear, with indications of admiration, his lordship's long stories about himself.” ⁷ Burr's barbed commentary doesn't do justice to the bibulous Lord Stirling, who would win renown in the battle of Brooklyn. He was a literate man with eclectic interests, including mathematics and astronomy (he published a monograph on the transit of Venus), and a cofounder of the New York Society Library. Of special relevance to Hamilton's future, he was a leading proponent of American manufactures. He bred horses and cattle, grew grapes and made wine, and produced pig iron and hemp. Lord Stirling had one final attraction for Hamilton: he also had enchanting daughters, especially the charming Catharine, always called “Lady Kitty.” She was to marry William Duer, the most notorious friend in Hamilton's life.

The third and most enduring tie formed by Hamilton was with Elias Boudinot, a lawyer who later became president of the Continental Congress and who owned copper and sulfur mines. A balding man with a jowly face and a smile that radiated benign intelligence, Boudinot was an innkeeper's son and, like Hamilton, descended from French Huguenots. Such was his piety that he became the first president of the American Bible Society. As an organizer of the Elizabethtown Academy, he had pushed for the admission of “a number of free scholars in this town” and would have embraced heartily a poor but deserving youth such as Hamilton. ⁸

As a regular visitor to Boudinot's mansion, Boxwood Hall, Hamilton was exposed to a refined world of books, political debate, and high culture. Boudinot's wife, Annie, wrote verse that George Washington complimented as “elegant poetry,” and this bookish family gathered each evening to hear biographies and sacred histories read aloud. ⁹ Hamilton's friendship with the Boudinots was so intimate that when their infant daughter, Anna Maria, contracted a fatal illness in September 1774, Hamilton kept a vigil by the sickly child and composed an affecting elegy after she died. This poem highlights a notable capacity for empathy in Hamilton, who dared to write it in the voice of the grieving mother. Since Hamilton had at least one sibling who had died in infancy or childhood, the poem may have summoned up memories of his own mother's hardships:

Later on, friends would comment on the almost maternal solicitude that Hamilton showed for friends or family members in distress.

As a young man in a constant rush, scarcely pausing for breath, Hamilton did not dally in Elizabethtown for more than six months. Nevertheless, this fleeting period may have left its imprint on his politics. He hobnobbed with wealthy, accomplished men who lived like English nobility even as they agitated for change. These men wanted to modify the social order, not overturn it—a fair description of Hamilton's future politics. At this juncture, Hamilton's New Jersey patrons rejected national independence as a rash option, favored reconciliation, and repeatedly invoked their rights as English subjects. Far from wanting separation from the British empire, they favored fuller integration into it. Britain remained their beau ideal, if a somewhat faded one. Hamilton later admitted to having had a “strong prejudice” for the British viewpoint while at Elizabethtown and apparently leaned toward monarchism. Like his mentors, he would always be an uneasy and reluctant revolutionary who found it hard to jettison legal forms in favor of outright rebellion. ¹¹ Mingling with Presbyterians may also have influenced his politics. The denomination was associated with the Whig critique of the British Crown, while Anglicans tended to be Tories and more often supported British imperial policy toward the colonies and an established church.

As Hamilton contemplated his next educational step, there were only nine colleges in the colonies to consider. William Livingston and Elias Boudinot sat on Princeton's board of trustees—Livingston was such a trusted friend of the former president Aaron Burr that he had delivered his eulogy—and it would have been impolitic, not to say rude, for Hamilton to resist their entreaties to at least scout out the college. The school already had a contingent of West Indian students, and President John Witherspoon was so eager to augment their numbers (or tap the money of rich sugar planters for professorships) that he had issued a rousing newspaper appeal the previous year, an “Address to the Inhabitants of Jamaica and the Other West Indian Islands on Behalf of the College of New Jersey,” wherein he discoursed “on the advantages of his college for the education of West Indian youth.” ¹² Founded in 1746 as a counterweight to the Church of England's influence, Princeton was a hotbed of Presbyterian/Whig sentiment, preached religious freedom, and might have seemed a logical choice for Hamilton. Hercules Mulligan contends that Hamilton told him that “he preferred Princeton to King's College because it was more republican.” ¹³ Indeed, the school bubbled with such political ferment that it was denounced in Tory quarters as a nursery of political radicalism. President Witherspoon confessed that “the spirit of liberty” ran “high and strong” at Princeton. ¹⁴

Little more than a coach stop between New York and Philadelphia, the rural hamlet of Princeton was hemmed in by thick forests. For Presbyterians eager to produce new ministers to fill rapidly expanding pulpits, this isolation was a protective measure that shielded students from urban temptations. The school stood in the throes of a religious revival when Hamilton applied. Hercules Mulligan said that he accompanied his young friend to this rustic outpost and introduced him to Witherspoon, but William Livingston and Elias Boudinot, as trustees, would have provided any needed introductions.

An eminent theologian, born in Edinburgh, Witherspoon was a husky man with an oddly shaped head that narrowed at the top and bulged out in the middle. Garry Wills has called him “probably the most influential teacher in the history of American education,” and Princeton under his tutelage produced a bumper crop of politician alumni: a U.S. president, a vice president, twenty-one senators, twenty-nine congressmen, and twelve state governors. ¹⁵ He was to sign the Declaration of Independence and minister to the Continental Congress as its first clergyman. By no coincidence, Princeton outpaced all other colleges by sending nine alumni to the Constitutional Convention. Witherspoon could be intimidating on first encounter. Pugnacious and outspoken, he had an unsettling way of erupting in strange twitches and fidgets. Hamilton, with his rock-hard ego, held his ground with the college president. Witherspoon examined Hamilton orally and was impressed by his fully fledged intellect. Then Hamilton made an unconventional proposal. According to Hercules Mulligan, Hamilton informed Witherspoon that he wanted to enter the college and advance “with as much rapidity as his exertions would enable him to do. Dr. Witherspoon listened with great attention to so unusual a proposition from so young a person and replied that he had not the sole power to determine that but that he would submit the request to the trustees who would decide.” ¹⁶ One feels here the vastly accelerated tempo of Hamilton's life, which was likely due to the chronic impatience fostered by his belated start in life.

When Witherspoon had taken over at Princeton a few years earlier, he had set about to stiffen its lax admissions requirements and might have frowned on Hamilton's special timetable for that reason. Mulligan blamed the trustees for rebuffing the proposal, saying that two weeks later Hamilton received a letter from Witherspoon “stating that the request could not be complied with because it was contrary to the usage of the college and expressing his regret because he was convinced that the young gentleman would do honor to any seminary at which he should be educated.” ¹⁷ In fact, there had been a precedent for Hamilton's brash request: Aaron Burr had tried to enter Princeton at age eleven and was told he was too young. He had then crammed for two years and cheekily applied for admission to the junior class at age thirteen. In a compromise, he was admitted as a sophomore and graduated in 1772 at sixteen. Hamilton may have learned about this experience from Burr himself or through their mutual friend Brockholst Livingston.

In weighing Hamilton's demand, Witherspoon and his trustees may have been deterred by the recent experience of a young Virginia scholar who had entered as a sophomore in 1769 and worked himself into a state of nervous exhaustion by completing his bachelor's degree in two years instead of three. His name was James Madison, later Hamilton's illustrious collaborator on The Federalist Papers. Fond of Witherspoon and too weak to travel after graduation, Madison had lingered in Princeton for a year to study privately with “the old Doctor.” ¹⁸ When Madison finally returned to Virginia in the spring of 1772, he was still so debilitated from his intense studies that he feared for his health.

While applying to Princeton Hamilton may have decided to “correct” his real age and shed a couple of years. If he was born in 1755, he would have been applying to college at eighteen, when fourteen or fifteen was often the standard minimum age for entrance—a highly uncomfortable state of affairs for a wunderkind. (Gouverneur Morris had entered King's College at age twelve.) Prodigies aren't supposed to be overaged freshmen. To be sure, Madison had entered Princeton at eighteen, but he was considered slightly old for a newcomer and skipped to sophomore status. If Hamilton trimmed two years from his age, one can sympathize with him. After all, while Aaron Burr was delivering a commencement speech at Princeton the year before, Hamilton, a year older, was still trying to figure out an escape route from Cruger's countinghouse on St. Croix. For a precocious young man in his predicament, lying about his age would have been a pardonable lapse.

Spurned at Princeton, Hamilton ended up at King's College. He did not lack sponsors. Lord Stirling, who had inherited a town house on Broad Street in lower Manhattan, had long sat on the college's governing board and raised money for it. Hamilton's life was now set moving in a new direction. This nomadic, stateless boy found a home in the best possible city for a future treasury secretary, a city in which commerce always held an honored place. He was to be immersed in a heady world of business, law, and politics, and he made valuable contacts in the merchant community.

Had he gone to Princeton, Hamilton might well have been radicalized sooner in the revolt against Britain, but that is arguable. Instead of with Witherspoon, Hamilton studied under one of the most ardent Tories in the colonies, Dr. Myles Cooper, the president of King's. Attendance at King's placed Hamilton in a city with a vocal Tory population, the bastion of British colonial power. At the same time, being in New York was also to lead to firsthand contact with tremendous revolutionary ferment and exposure to some of the colonies' most eloquent agitators and outspoken newspapers. The virulent clash of Tories and Whigs in New York was to sharpen all of the conflicting feelings in Hamilton's nature, enabling him to sympathize with the views of both patriots and Loyalists. In fact, by rejecting Alexander Hamilton, President Witherspoon and his associates at Princeton unintentionally thrust the young West Indian straight into the thick of the combustible patriotic drama in a way that would have proved impossible in a sleepy New Jersey country town.

Set on an enormous tract of land that Trinity Church had received from Queen Anne early in the century, King's College stood on the northern fringe of the city, housed in a stately three-story building with a cupola that commanded a superb view of the Hudson River across a low, rambling meadow. This elevated campus is defined by today's West Broadway, Murray, Barclay, and Church Streets, a spot that one British visitor rhapsodized as the “most beautiful site for a college in the world.” ¹⁹ President Cooper tried gamely to segregate his students from unwholesome external influences. “The edifice is surrounded by a high fence,” he wrote, “which also encloses a large court and garden, and a porter constantly attends at the front gate, which is closed at ten o'clock each evening in the summer and at nine in the winter, after which hours, the names of all that come in are delivered weekly to the President.” ²⁰ This cloistered environment was modeled upon Oxford's and the students strode about in academic caps and gowns.

One reason that Cooper sought to sequester his students was that the college adjoined the infamous red-light district known as the Holy Ground, its name a satirical allusion to the fact that St. Paul's Chapel owned the land. As many as five hundred Dutch and English “ladies of pleasure” (equivalent to 2 percent of the city's entire population) patrolled these dusky lanes each evening, and the proximity of this haunt to susceptible young scholars troubled town elders. One dismayed Scot visitor wrote in 1774, “One circumstance I think is a little unlucky... is that the entrance to [King's College] is through one of the streets where the most noted prostitutes live.” ²¹ The college promulgated rules that “none of the pupils shall frequent houses of ill fame or keep company with any persons of known scandalous behavior.” ²² Women were strictly banned from the college grounds, along with cards, dice, and other subtle snares of the devil. In returning to the college before the curfew, did Hamilton sometimes linger in the Holy Ground to sample its profane pleasures?

In warding off outside temptations, President Cooper also looked askance at the political protests mounted nearby. King's College had evolved into the fortress of British orthodoxy that William Livingston and Presbyterian critics had feared, with the Anglican reverence for hierarchy and obedience breeding subservience to royal authority. (During the Revolution, the British Army was to take malicious pleasure in converting Presbyterian and Baptist churches into stables or barracks.) To President Cooper's consternation, King's College stood one block west of the Common (now City Hall Park), a popular spot for radicals to congregate in. During Hamilton's stay at the college, an eighty-foot pole towered over this grassy expanse, around the top of which spun a gilded weather vane with the single word LIBERTY on it. Hamilton's debut as a rabble-rousing orator was to take place in this very park.

With fewer than twenty-five thousand inhabitants, New York was already second in size among American colonial cities, behind Philadelphia but edging ahead of Boston. Founded as a commercial venture by the Dutch West India Company in 1623, the city already had a history as a raucous commercial hub, a boisterous port that blended many cultures and religions. Fourteen languages were spoken there by the time Hamilton arrived. Each year, its congested wharves absorbed thousands of new immigrants—mostly British, Scotch, and Irish—and Hamilton must have appreciated the city's acceptance of strangers carving out new lives. His friend Gouverneur Morris later observed that “to be born in America seems to be a matter of indifference at New York.” ²³

The settled portion of the city stretched from the Battery up to the Common. Shaded by poplars and elms, Broadway was the main thoroughfare, flanked by mazes of narrow, winding streets. There were sights galore to enthrall the young West Indian. Fetching ladies promenaded along Broadway, handsome coaches cruised the streets, and graceful church spires etched an incipient skyline. Rich merchants had colonized Wall Street and Hanover Square, and their weekend pleasure gardens extended north along the Hudson shore. On his way to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774, John Adams admired the city's painted brick buildings and praised its streets as “vastly more regular and elegant than those in Boston and the houses are more grand as well as neat.” ²⁴ At the same time, the inhabitants already conformed to the eventual stereotype of fast-talking, sharp-elbowed, money-mad strivers. “They talk very loud, very fast, and all together,” Adams protested. “If they ask you a question, before you can utter three words of your answer, they will break out upon you again and talk away.” ²⁵ The opulence made the poverty only more conspicuous. During the glacial winter of 1772–1773, the East River froze, and the municipal hospital was overrun with indigent patients. Crime was so pervasive that ground had recently been broken for Bridewell prison.

Hamilton must have entered King's in late 1773 or early 1774, because his stay overlapped with that of Edward Stevens, his St. Croix friend, and Robert Troup, both of whom graduated by the summer of 1774. President Cooper listed Hamilton among seventeen students who matriculated in 1774. Since the average King's student entered at fifteen, one again suspects that the nineteen-year-old Hamilton took the liberty of subtracting two years from his age. To gratify the youth's insistence upon rapid advancement, Cooper granted Hamilton status as a special student who took private tutorials and audited lectures but did not belong, at least initially, to any class. In September 1774, Hamilton contracted with Professor Robert Harpur to study math. Trained in Glasgow, Harpur probably introduced his new pupil to the writings of David Hume and other worthies of the Scottish Enlightenment. It took nine years for Hamilton to discharge his debt to Harpur, suggesting that even armed with his St. Croix subsidy Hamilton had to make do on a stringent budget and never quite forgot that he was a charity student.

There are no extant drawings of Hamilton at this age. From later descriptions, however, we know that he stood about five foot seven and had a fair complexion, auburn hair, rosy cheeks, and a wide, well-carved mouth. His nose, with its flaring nostrils and irregular line, was especially strong and striking, his jaw chiseled and combative. Slim and elegant, with thin shoulders and shapely legs, he walked with a buoyant lightness, and his observant, flashing eyes darted about with amusement. His later Federalist friend and ally Fisher Ames left some graphic impressions of Hamilton's appearance. Of his eyes, he said, “These were of a deep azure, eminently beautiful, without the slightest trace of hardness or severity, and beamed with higher expressions of intelligence and discernment than any others that I ever saw.” Ames often bumped into Hamilton on his daily walks and said “he displayed in his manners and movements a degree of refinement and grace which I never witnessed in any other man ... and I am quite confident that those who knew him intimately will cheerfully subscribe to my opinion that he was one of the most elegant of mortals... . It is impossible to conceive a loftier portion of easy, graceful, and polished movements than were exhibited in him.” ²⁶ Though Hamilton acquired greater urbanity later on, even as a young man, fresh from the islands, he had a dignified air of self-possession remarkable in a former clerk.

At first, Hamilton aspired to be a doctor and attended anatomy lectures given by Dr. Samuel Clossy, a pioneering surgeon from Dublin. Upon arriving in New York in 1767, Clossy had acquired quick notoriety as a practitioner of the black art of snatching cadavers from local cemeteries for dissection. (The practice was not outlawed until 1789, after it sparked a massive riot.) Clossy's lectures stayed firmly embedded in Hamilton's retentive memory. Years later, Hamilton's physician, Dr. David Hosack, recalled, “I have often heard him speak of the interest and ardour he felt when prosecuting the study of anatomy” under Clossy. He further remarked of Hamilton that “few men knew more of the structure of the human frame and its functions.” ²⁷

Though not an outstanding school, King's offered a solid classical curriculum of Greek and Latin literature, rhetoric, geography, history, philosophy, math, and science. Hamilton at once proved himself a student of incomparable energy, racing through his studies with characteristic speed. “I cannot make everybody else as rapid as myself,” he was to one day write laughingly to his wife. “This you know by experience.” ²⁸ From his college essays, we can tell that he ransacked the library, poring over the works of Locke, Montesquieu, Hobbes, and Hume, as well as those of such reigning legal sages as Sir William Blackstone, Hugo Grotius, and Samuel von Pufendorf. He was especially taken with the jurist Emmerich de Vattel, whom he lauded as “the most accurate and approved of the writers on the laws of nations.” ²⁹ His education supplemented by voracious reading, Hamilton was able to compensate for his childhood deficiencies. After King's, he could rattle off the classical allusions and exhibit the erudition that formed parts of the intellectual equipment of all the founding fathers. Also, he would be able to draw freely on a stock of lore about Greek and Roman antiquity, providing essential material for the unending debates about the fate of republican government in America.

Hamilton was often spotted shortly after dawn, chattering to himself, as if unable to contain the contents of his bursting brain. He paced the Hudson River bank and rehearsed his lessons or walked along tree-shaded Batteau Street (later Dey Street). Based on a schedule that Hamilton later drew up for his son, we can surmise that he followed a tight daily regimen, rising by six and budgeting most of his available time for work but also allocating time for pleasure. His life was a case study in the profitable use of time. Hamilton showed little interest in student pranks and pratfalls, and his name does not appear in the college's Black Book, which recorded infractions against Myles Cooper's rules. Offending students were forced to memorize lines from Horace or translate essays from The Spectator into Latin.

When Hamilton was at King's, his friends were struck by his religious nature, though some of this may have stemmed from the school's requirements. There was obligatory chapel before breakfast, and bells chimed after dinner for evening prayers; on Sunday, students had to attend church twice. His chum at King's, Robert Troup, was convinced that Hamilton's religious practice was driven by more than duty. He “was attentive to public worship and in the habit of praying on his knees night and morning... . I have often been powerfully affected by the fervor and eloquence of his prayers. He had read many of the polemical writers on religious subjects and he was a zealous believer in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.” ³⁰

The vivacious Hamilton never had trouble making friends; Troup, the son of a sea captain, was soon his warmest companion. At King's, Troup wrote, “they occupied the same room and slept in the same bed” and continued to live together for a time after Troup graduated. ³¹ Born in Elizabethtown in 1757, Troup had also become an orphan, his father having died in 1768 (the year Hamilton's mother died) and his mother the following year. As with Hamilton, some friends took responsibility for Troup's welfare. Adolescent hardship instilled in Troup a lasting sense of financial insecurity, and he was amazed that Hamilton worried so little about money. “I have often said that your friends would be obliged to bury you at their own expence,” Troup wrote to Hamilton in later years, a statement that was to prove queasily prophetic. ³²

Was it pure happenstance that Troup and Hamilton roomed together, or did Myles Cooper guess that they would forge a secret bond among the more affluent boys? Where early sorrow had toughened Hamilton, hardening his self-reliance, it made Troup insecure and prone to hero worship. Bright and jovial, favored with an easy laugh, he idolized his gifted friends and came to enjoy the odd distinction of being a confidant of both Hamilton and Burr. In one letter, Burr referred to Troup fondly as “that great fat fellow” and said another time, “He is a better antidote for the spleen than a ton of drugs.” ³³ Both Hamilton and Burr were prey to depression and appear to have been buoyed by Troup's exuberant humor.

In Hamilton's first months at King's, he and Troup formed a club that gathered weekly to hone debating, writing, and speaking skills. The other members—Nicholas Fish, Edward Stevens, and Samuel and Henry Nicoll—rounded out Hamilton's first circle of intimates. Small literary societies were then a staple of college life, their members composing papers and reading them aloud for comment. Hamilton was the undisputed star. “In all the performances of the club,” Troup said, Hamilton “made extraordinary displays of richness of genius and energy of mind.” ³⁴ As tension with England worsened, many discussions hinged on the question of royal-colonial relations. At first, Hamilton didn't differ much from the Loyalist views espoused by Myles Cooper and was “originally a monarchist,” Troup asserted. “He was versed in the history of England and well acquainted with the principles of the English constitution, which he admired.” ³⁵ As Hamilton's views evolved, however, and he began to publish the outspoken anti-British pieces that made his reputation, he used the debating club at King's to preview his essays.

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The colonial struggle against the Crown took a dramatic turn on the moonlit night of December 16, 1773, around the time that Hamilton entered King's College. A mob of two hundred men with soot-darkened faces, roughly costumed as Mohawk Indians, crept aboard three ships in Boston harbor, used tomahawks to smash open 342 chests of tea, and pitched the contents overboard. Another two thousand townspeople urged them on from the docks. “This is the most magnificent moment of all,” John Adams cheered from Braintree, Massachusetts. ³⁶ The Boston Tea Party expressed patriotic disgust at both violated principles and eroded profits. For a time, the colonists had acquiesced to a tea tax because they had been able to smuggle in contraband tea from Holland. After Parliament manipulated duties to grant a de facto tea monopoly to the East India Company in 1773, the smugglers were thwarted and rich Boston merchants—at least those not selected as company agents—suddenly decided to make common cause with the town radicals and protest the parliamentary measures.

Four days later, Paul Revere galloped breathlessly into New York with news of the Boston uprising. Troup contended that Hamilton rushed off to Boston to engage in firsthand reportage. This seems unlikely for a new student, but he may well have rushed into print. As a former clerk acquainted with import duties, contraband goods, and European trade policies, Hamilton was handed a tailor-made issue that wasn't entirely new to him: the West Indian islands had felt the distant repercussions of the Stamp Act protests and other thwarted attempts by Britain to tax the colonists. “The first political piece which [Hamilton] wrote,” recalled Troup, “was on the destruction of the tea at Boston in which he aimed to show that the destruction was both necessary and politic.” ³⁷ This anonymous salvo may have been the “Defence and Destruction of the Tea” published in John Holt's New-York Journal. In Troup's telling, Hamilton assuaged the keen anxieties of merchants alarmed by the assault on property. Such reassurance was especially timely after New York hosted its own “tea party” on April 22, 1774, when a group of sea captains, led by Alexander McDougall and decked out in Mohawk dress, stormed the British ship London and chucked its tea chests into the deep.

The enraged British lost all patience with their American brethren after the Boston Tea Party and enacted punitive measures. One especially irate member of Parliament, Charles Van, said Boston should be obliterated like Carthage: “I am of the opinion you will never meet with that proper obedience to the laws of this country until you have destroyed that nest of locusts.” ³⁸ By May 1774, news arrived that England had retaliated with the Coercive or “Intolerable” Acts. These draconian measures shut down Boston's port until the colonists paid for the spilled tea.

They also curbed popular assemblies, restricted trial by jury, subjected Massachusetts to ham-handed military rule, and guaranteed that the Boston streets would be blanketed with British troops in an overpowering show of force. On May 13, General Thomas Gage, the new military commander, arrived in Boston with four regiments to enforce these acts, which dealt a crippling blow to the free-spirited maritime town. The British response triggered a still tenuous unity among colonists who balked at the notion that Parliament could impose taxes without their consent. Until this point, the colonies had been tantamount to separate countries, joined by little sense of common mission or identity. Now committees of correspondence in each colony began to communicate with one another, issuing calls for a trade embargo against British goods and summoning a Continental Congress in Philadelphia in September.

Even in rabidly Anglophile New York, the political atmosphere by late spring was “as full of uproar as if it was besieged by a foreign force,” said one observer. ³⁹ These were stirring days for Hamilton, who must have been constantly distracted from his studies by rallies, petitions, broadsides, and handbills. In choosing New York's delegates for the first Continental Congress, a feud arose between hard-line protesters, who favored a boycott of British goods, and moderate burghers who criticized such measures as overly provocative and self-defeating. To beat the drum for a boycott, the militant Sons of Liberty, members of a secret society first convened to flout the Stamp Act, gathered a mass meeting on the afternoon of July 6, 1774. It took place at the grassy Common near King's College, sometimes called The Fields, in the shadow of the towering liberty pole.

Alexander McDougall chaired the meeting and introduced resolutions condemning British sanctions against Massachusetts. The rich folklore surrounding this pivotal event in Hamilton's life suggests that his speech came about spontaneously, possibly prompted by somebody in the crowd. After mounting the platform, the slight, boyish speaker started out haltingly, then caught fire in a burst of oratory. If true to his later style, Hamilton gained energy as he spoke. He endorsed the Boston Tea Party, deplored the closure of Boston's port, endorsed colonial unity against unfair taxation, and came down foursquare for a boycott of British goods. In his triumphant peroration, he said such actions “will prove the salvation of North America and her liberties”; otherwise “fraud, power, and the most odious oppression will rise triumphant over right, justice, social happiness, and freedom.” ⁴⁰

When his speech ended, the crowd stood transfixed in silence, staring at this spellbinding young orator before it erupted in a sustained ovation. “It is a collegian!” people whispered to one another. “It is a collegian!” ⁴¹ Hamilton, nineteen, looked young for his age, which made his performance seem even more inspired. From that moment on, he was treated as a youthful hero of the cause and recognized as such by Alexander McDougall, John Lamb, Marinus Willett, and other chieftains of the Sons of Liberty. It is worth remarking that at this juncture Hamilton sided with the radical camp, along with the artisans and mechanics, rather than with the more circumspect merchant class he later led. Hamilton had immigrated to North America to gratify his ambition and successfully seized the opportunity to distinguish himself. Both then and forever after, the poor boy from the West Indies commanded attention with the force and fervor of his words. Once Hamilton was initiated into the cause of American liberty, his life acquired an even more headlong pace that never slackened.

As rumors of the militant commotion at the Common filtered back to the college, Dr. Myles Cooper must have been appalled that the orphan whom he had treated so indulgently was now fraternizing with disreputable elements. Cooper maligned the Sons of Liberty as the “sons of licentiousness, faction, and confusion.” ⁴² The situation was an awkward one for Cooper, who was tugging his forelock at royal authority while Hamilton was thumbing his nose at it. Exactly three months before, the college president had published an obsequious open letter to William Tryon, the departing royal governor, that was a classic of unctuous prose and that concluded, “We can only say, that as long as the society shall have any existence and wherever its voice can extend, the name of TRYON will be celebrated among the worthiest of its benefactors.” ⁴³

Hamilton contended that he was “greatly attached” to Cooper, and in ordinary times he might have been a fond disciple. ⁴⁴ Cooper was a witty published poet, a Greek and Latin scholar, and a worldly bachelor with epicurean tastes. In a portrait by John Singleton Copley, he has a smooth, well-fed face and stares sideways at the viewer in a smug, self-assured manner. On the tiny King's faculty, it was Cooper who likely tutored Hamilton in Latin, Greek, theology, and moral philosophy.

Cooper had been recommended for the King's presidency by the archbishop of Canterbury and was in many respects an outstanding choice. In little more than a decade, he had inaugurated a medical school, enlarged the library, added professors, and even launched an art collection. Like John Witherspoon, he boasted a roster of distinguished pupils, including John Jay, Robert R. Livingston, Gouverneur Morris, Benjamin Moore, and Hamilton. In 1774, Cooper had intensified the overriding quest of his presidency, for a charter that would convert King's College into a royal university. Then the Revolution blasted his hopes. He found the revolt at first an irritant, then an outrage, then a mortal threat to his ambitions. He could not afford to be a neutral bystander and began to flay the protesters in caustic essays, claiming that the tea tax was exceedingly mild. “The people of Boston are a crooked and perverse generation... and deserve to forfeit their charter,” he wrote. ⁴⁵ With such retrograde views, he became one of New York's most despised Loyalists and was increasingly assailed by his students. Samuel Clossy also grew disgusted with the turmoil and returned to the British Isles.

Colonial resistance began to assume a more organized shape. By late August 1774, all the colonies save Georgia had picked their delegates to the First Continental Congress. The New York delegates, among them John Jay and James Duane, departed for Philadelphia amid stirring fanfare. One newspaper reported, “They were accompanied to the place of their departure by a number of the inhabitants, with colours flying and music playing and loud huzzas at the end of each street.” ⁴⁶ It was not an assembly of dogmatic extremists who sat in Windsor chairs for six weeks in the red-and-black brick structure known as Carpenters' Hall. Far from being bent on fighting for independence, these law-abiding delegates offered up a public prayer that war might be averted. They reaffirmed their loyalty as British subjects, hoped for a peaceful accommodation with London, and scrupulously honored legal forms. Yet there were limits to their patience. The congress formed a Continental Association to enforce a total trade embargo—no exports, no imports, not even consumption of British wares—until the Coercive Acts were repealed. Every community was instructed to assemble committees to police the ban, and when New York chose its members that November, many of Hamilton's friends, including Hercules Mulligan, appeared among their numbers.

Even though John Adams had found Jay and Duane far too timid for his tastes, the Continental Congress's actions stunned Tory sentiment in New York. For Myles Cooper, the meeting had been a satanic den of sedition, which he acidly condemned in two widely read pamphlets. He informed the startled colonists that “subjects of Great Britain are the happiest people on earth.” ⁴⁷ Far from criticizing Parliament, he maintained that “the behavior of the colonies has been intolerable.” ⁴⁸ He then poured vitriol on the congress's initiatives: “To think of succeeding by force of arms or by starving the nation into compliance is a proof of shameful ignorance, pride, and stupidity.” ⁴⁹ Like many people, he scorned the notion that the colonies could ever defeat Britain's invincible military. “To believe America able to withstand England is a dreadful infatuation.” ⁵⁰

Myles Cooper was not the only Anglican clergyman in New York to rail against the Continental Congress. He formed part of a Loyalist literary clique that included Charles Inglis, later rector of Trinity Church, and Samuel Seabury, the Anglican rector of the town of Westchester. Seabury was a redoubtable man of massive physique and learned mind. Educated at Yale and Oxford, he was very pompous and wrote prose that bristled with energetic intelligence. Because Westchester had been granted special privileges by a royal charter, local farmers felt especially threatened by the trade embargo. So after the Continental Congress adjourned, Seabury, with the full knowledge of Myles Cooper, launched a series of pamphlets under the pseudonym “A Westchester Farmer.” (The title cunningly echoed John Dickinson's famous polemic against parliamentary taxation, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. ) Seabury's blistering essays reviled the officers of the new Continental Association as “a venomous brood of scorpions” who would “sting us to death,” and he suggested that they be greeted with hickory sticks. ⁵¹ He appealed cleverly to farmers by warning that they would be the major casualties of any trade boycott against Britain. If merchants could not import goods from Britain, would they not then hike their prices to farmers? As he wrote, “From the day the exports from this province are stopped, the farmers may date the commencement of their ruin. Can you live without money?” ⁵²

After the first installment of Seabury's invective was published by James Rivington in the New-York Gazetteer, the paper reported a febrile patriotic response, especially among Hamilton's newfound companions: “We can assure the public that at a late meeting of exotics, styled the Sons of Liberty,” the “Farmer” essay was introduced, “and after a few pages being read to the company, they agreed... to commit it to the flames, without the benefit of clergy, though many, very many indeed, could neither write nor read.” ⁵³ To drive home the point, some copies were tarred and feathered and slapped on whipping posts. Nonetheless, the essay made a huge popular impression and demonstrated that the patriots were being outgunned by Tory pamphleteers and needed a literary champion of their own.

Seabury gave Hamilton what he always needed for his best work: a hard, strong position to contest. The young man gravitated to controversy, indeed gloried in it. In taking on Seabury, Hamilton might have suspected—and may well have enjoyed —the little secret that he was combating an Anglican cleric in Myles Cooper's inner circle. He had to tread stealthily and keep his name out of print. (Most political essays at the time were published anonymously anyway.) Eager to make his mark, Hamilton was motivated by a form of ambition much esteemed in the eighteenth century—what he later extolled as the “love of fame, the ruling passion of the noblest minds, which would prompt a man to plan and undertake extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit.” ⁵⁴ Ambition was reckless if inspired by purely selfish motives but laudable if guided by great principles. In this, his first great performance in print, Hamilton placed his ambition at the service of lofty ideals.

On December 15, 1774, the New-York Gazetteer ran an advertisement for a newly published pamphlet entitled “A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress” that promised to answer “The Westchester Farmer.” The farmer's sophistry would be “exposed, his cavils confuted, his artifices detected, and his wit ridiculed.” ⁵⁵ This thirty-five-page essay had been written in two or three weeks by Hamilton, as he entered the fray with all the grandiloquence and learning at his disposal. He showed himself proficient at elegant insults, an essential literary talent at the time, and possessing a precocious knowledge of history, philosophy, politics, economics, and law. In retrospect, it was clear that he had found his calling as a fearless, swashbuckling intellectual warrior who excelled in bare-knuckled controversy.

By the time of “A Full Vindication,” Hamilton had clearly assumed the coloring of his environment. Few immigrants have renounced their past more unequivocally or adopted their new country more wholeheartedly. “I am neither merchant, nor farmer,” he now wrote, just a year and a half after leaving St. Croix. “I address you because I wish well to my country”: New York. ⁵⁶ Hamilton reviewed the Boston Tea Party and the punitive measures that had ensued in Boston, including “license [of] the murder of its inhabitants” by British troops. ⁵⁷ Hamilton supported the Tea Party culprits and faulted the British for punishing the whole province instead of just the perpetrators. He voiced the increasingly popular complaints about taxation without representation and defended the trade embargo, insisting that England would suffer drastic harm. Sounding more like the later Jefferson than the later Hamilton, he evoked an England burdened by debt and taxes and corrupted by luxuries.

In many places, “A Full Vindication” was verbose and repetitive. What foreshadowed Hamilton's mature style was the lawyerly fashion in which he grounded his argument in natural law, colonial charters, and the British constitution. He already showed little patience with halfway measures that prolonged problems instead of solving them crisply. “When the political salvation of any community is depending, it is incumbent upon those who are set up as its guardians to embrace such measures as have justice, vigor, and a probability of success to recommend them.” ⁵⁸ Most impressive was Hamilton's shrewd insight into the psychology of power. Of the British prime minister, Lord North, he wrote with exceptional acuity:

After Seabury rebutted “A Full Vindication,” Hamilton struck back with “The Farmer Refuted,” an eighty-page tour de force that Rivington brought out on February 23, 1775. More than twice the length of its predecessor, this second essay betrayed a surer grasp of politics and economics. Seabury had mocked Hamilton's maiden performance and now suffered the consequences. “Such is my opinion of your abilities as a critic,” Hamilton addressed him directly, “that I very much prefer your disapprobation to your applause.” ⁶⁰ As if Seabury were the young upstart and not vice versa, Hamilton taunted his riposte as “puerile and fallacious” and stated that “I will venture to pronounce it one of the most ludicrous performances which has been exhibited to public view during all the present controversy.” ⁶¹ This slashing style of attack would make Hamilton the most feared polemicist in America, but it won him enemies as well as admirers. Unlike Franklin or Jefferson, he never learned to subdue his opponents with a light touch or a sly, artful, understated turn of phrase.

Like most colonists, Hamilton still hoped for amity with England and complained that the colonists were being denied the full liberties of British subjects. In justifying American defiance of British taxation, he elaborated the fashionable argument that the colonies owed their allegiance to the British king, not to Parliament. The point was critical, for if the colonies were linked only to the king, they could, theoretically, wriggle free from parliamentary control while creating some form of commonwealth status in the British empire. Indeed, Hamilton cast himself as “a warm advocate for limited monarchy and an unfeigned well-wisher to the present royal family.” ⁶² In what became his trademark style, he displayed exhaustive research, tracing royal charters for North America back to Queen Elizabeth and showing that no powers had been reserved to Parliament. In one glowing passage, Hamilton invoked the colonists' natural rights: “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of the divinity itself and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.” ⁶³ These lines echo John Dickinson, who had written that the essential rights to happiness are bestowed by God, not man. “They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals.” ⁶⁴ Hamilton added beauty and rhythm to the expression.

Clearly, Hamilton was reading the skeptical Scottish philosopher David Hume, and he quoted his view that in framing a government “ every man ought to be supposed a knave and to have no other end in all his actions but private interests. ” The task of government was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good. In starting to outline the contours of his own vision of government, Hamilton was spurred by Hume's dark vision of human nature, which corresponded to his own. At one point, while talking about the advantages that England derived from colonial trade, he said, “And let me tell you, in this selfish, rapacious world, a little discretion is, at worst, only a venial sin.” ⁶⁵ That chilling aside—a “selfish, rapacious world”—speaks volumes about the darkness of Hamilton's upbringing.

With “The Farmer Refuted,” the West Indian student became an eloquent booster of his chosen country and asserted the need for unity to resist British oppression. “If the sword of oppression be permitted to lop off one limb without opposition, reiterated strokes will soon dismember the whole body.” ⁶⁶ He already took the long view of American destiny, seeing that the colonies would someday overtake the mother country in economic power. “If we look forward to a period not far distant, we shall perceive that the productions of our country will infinitely exceed the demands, which Great Britain and her connections can possibly have for them. And as we shall then be greatly advanced in population, our wants will be proportionably increased.” ⁶⁷ Here, in embryonic form, is his vision of the vast, diversified economy that was to emerge after independence.

“The Farmer Refuted” was a bravura performance, flashing with prophetic insights. While the British disputed that America could win a war of independence, Hamilton accurately predicted that France and Spain would aid the colonies. The twenty-year-old student anticipated the scrappy, opportunistic military strategy that would defeat the British:

This was Washington's strategy, compressed into a nutshell and articulated even before the fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord. This was more than just precocious knowledge: this was intuitive judgment of the highest order.

As rumors went around that Hamilton had authored the two “Farmer” essays, many New Yorkers, Myles Cooper included, dismissed the notion as preposterous. “I remember that in a conversation I once had with Dr. Cooper,” said Robert Troup, “he insisted that Mr. Jay must be the author[,]... it being absurd to imagine [that] so young a man” as Hamilton could have written it. ⁶⁹ Others attributed the pieces to much more established figures, such as William Livingston. Hamilton must have been flattered by the fuss and his literary club deeply amused. In a city with a dearth of republican pamphleteers, Hamilton represented an important recruit to the cause. He had demonstrated inimitable speed (the two “Farmer” essays totaled sixty thousand words), supreme confidence in his views, and an easy, sophisticated grasp of the issues. He was to be a true child of the Revolution, growing up along with his new country and gaining in strength and wisdom as the hostilities mounted. LNHgvenT6bfzLQLRsB7hV6a9YjbWj53fzuWNsQwY+8hk12Z/psa1xNgNv63TfwtN