by Ron Chernow
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, sharpelbowed, 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 e
verybody 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.
... 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 littl
e 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