By the third week of October 1772, seventeen-year-old Alexander Hamilton had survived a fire at sea and landed safely in Boston. He had been lowered over the side of the sailing ship with a bucket to pass up water to help extinguish the blaze. Landing at Long Wharf, shaken after a dangerous three-week ocean voyage-only a few weeks before he arrived, a ship on the same run had been boarded and robbed by a French privateer—he hoisted his trunk crammed with books to his shoulder and stepped down the gangway, eager to explore the crowded, hilly New England port town. His first task was to place a plea for disaster relief for hurricane-ravaged St. Croix in the Boston Gazette for October 26. Then he had time on his hands. He had to wait nearly a week before the biweekly stagecoach to New York City, and he used it to meander through the busy port where he had sent so many cargoes and letters in the past few years. Everything was fresh to him. October days along Back Bay were cold and blustery; he had never seen autumn leaves.
Hamilton was stunned to find Boston an armed camp with red-coated British soldiers everywhere and townspeople seething with resentment at their treatment as a captive, conquered people. In the seventh year of chronic protests against tightening British control, the town of ten thousand was occupied by some two thousand Redcoats. A deepening confrontation between colonists and Crown-appointed officials had been punctuated by riots and mass meetings that had spread down the Atlantic Coast through all the mainland American colonies. The spark that had ignited the tinder in Boston was a seemingly trivial stamp tax. The hated stamps had to be affixed to newspapers, all legal documents, licenses, ships’ papers, almanacs, pamphlets, insurance policies, diplomas, even playing cards and dice. It was the first direct tax ever imposed on English colonists in America by a Parliament far away in London. Historically, each colony had raised its own revenues to pay for its government and defense, each colony’s elective assembly deciding how and whom to pay.
A loose network of protesters who styled themselves the Sons of Liberty had sprung up in virtually every English-American town since 1765, but in few places were the protests more violent than in Boston. The stamp tax had been repealed, but only one year later, Bostonians had taken to the streets again when Parliament imposed new customs duties on glass, lead, paper, paint, and tea to defray “the charge of the administration of justice and the support of civil government.” Bostonians howled that this violated their royal charter, which guaranteed them the power of the purse to wield against unpopular officials. Boston’s merchants now joined forces with artisans, lawyers, and consumers to boycott all British imports until the new duties were repealed. In retaliation, Parliament established an American Board of Commissioners of the Customs with headquarters at Boston—for the first time moving customs collections onto American soil and enforcing them with naval warships.
More new laws turning the appointment and pay of colonial officials over to the British home government appeared imminent even as young immigrant Alexander Hamilton landed in Boston. He watched as Bostonians, demanding they be allowed to continue to choose their own governor and judges, marched in protest to Faneuil Hall for a special town meeting. Letters of protest had appeared in the Boston Gazette on October 12. The newspaper was posted broadside in chophouses and taverns where young Hamilton could easily read it. During Hamilton’s brief maiden visit to Boston, “a mob of upwards [of] a thousand people,” its anger fanned by the indignant speeches at Faneuil Hall, surged through the streets, caught a customs informer, tarred and feathered him, and dragged him in agony around the town in a cart.1
Yet the observant young Hamilton could also see that not all Bostonians were ready to abandon unqualified devotion to royal government. On October 25, Hamilton’s last full day in Boston, Colonel John Hancock donned his gold-braided red militia uniform and led His Excellency’s Company of Cadets as it marched ahead of the colony’s royal Train Band of Artillery on the Commons in a parade that celebrated the thirteenth anniversary of King George III’s accession to the British throne. The Gazette for November 2 reported
The company being under arms and in uniform dress made a very fine and respectable appearance…They were exercised on the Common until noon and, having refreshed themselves at the Colonel’s, they marched into King Street where, after firing three volleys, they performed a variety of evolutions.2
It was the first time Hamilton had seen either British redcoats or American militia. He could see clearly that, as they faced off in the spreading imperial confrontation, both were wearing the same uniform.
BOARDING THE biweekly Boston-New York stagecoach on October 26, 1772, Hamilton bumped along the Post Road in “the first stage coach that ever was improved on this road” for a full week before he reached New York City. Getting a glimpse of the towns and terrain where he would spend so much of the rest of his life, he arrived, sore but exhilarated, at the southern tip of Manhattan Island on November 2. Among his first stops was King’s College, perched on a bluff overlooking the Hudson between Barclay and Murray Streets. There his closest friend, Neddy Stevens, was a premedical student. They had not seen each other since Neddy’s last home visit nearly three years earlier.
Neddy saw, beaming before him, a freckled, ruddy-faced, sandy-haired young Hamilton, his violet-blue eyes flashing with happiness. While Hamilton would later mourn that “I am not handsome,” his air of self-confidence in his own intelligence added an acuity that enhanced mere physical appeal. He had no singularly good feature. His forehead was high but sloped to eyes almost too close set, crowding the pinched bridge of his nose. His mouth was small, his cheekbones high, his chin almost bulbous and protruding. His shoulders were uncommonly narrow, his frame light, giving the deceptive appearance that he was shorter than he really was. At five-foot-seven, he was taller than the average for his time. But it was his overall avidity and brightness that created the aura of a charismatic figure.3
His intelligence, energy, enthusiasm, and wit obliterated any trace of the suffering, loss and hardship he had so abundantly endured. And people just liked to have him around. Stevens was overjoyed to see him, to show him the college. So was his favorite cousin, Ann Lytton Venton, who lived in the city. Hamilton had already done her many favors, getting her advances against her father’s estate, and now she was eager to help him to get an education.
Hamilton carried a letter of recommendation to Kortright and Company, the firm that had helped underwrite his scholarship and that was to sell the consignments of St. Croix sugar earmarked to help pay Hamilton’s expenses. Presenting himself at their countinghouse, he was ushered in to meet the senior partner, Lawrence Kortright. Kortright, in turn, introduced Hamilton to his partner’s younger brother, the aptly named Hercules Mulligan. A jovial, thirty-two-year-old giant, Hercules Mulligan was to act as Hamilton’s guardian, manage his funds, and smooth his way for him. The two hit it off immediately.
Formerly a clerk at his father’s countinghouse, Hercules Mulligan, born in County Antrim, Ireland, had set up in business for himself as a custom tailor and haberdasher catering to New York’s wealthiest. His home on Water Street adjoined Philip Rhinelander’s china store on the edge of the East River wharves. Mulligan, a graduate of King’s College, was a bachelor engaged to marry Elizabeth Sanders, a member of the elite Livingston clan. An elegant walking advertisement for his wares, Mulligan prided himself on his shopful of finery, including “gold and silver lace with some half laces for hats,” as well as “gold and silver buttons and loops” and “gold and silver treble French chain.” One day he would furnish President Washington with the “resplendent black velvet suit” that he wore for diplomatic and state receptions. New York City’s society haberdasher was to become Hamilton’s surrogate father for the next several years. Mulligan summoned his carriage, took Hamilton home with him, and showed him to his room. The bustle and noise of a nearby waterfront were familiar to Hamilton, and he happily began to blend into the Mulligan household.4
For the next several days, Mulligan escorted Hamilton around a town larger than any he had ever seen. Rapidly challenging Philadelphia as the largest seaport in America, New York had a population of twenty thousand, greater than all of St. Croix. Mulligan introduced him to Hugh Knox’s circle of churchmen, to whom Hamilton presented Knox’s glowing letters of recommendation. Over the years, Mulligan would prove to be one of Hamilton’s most durable friends. An organizer and leader of New York’s radical Sons of Liberty, as he showed his young ward around the town’s tree-lined streets Mulligan had much to tell him about his own exploits in the turbulent world of New York pre-Revolutionary politics.
In the shadow of Fort George, the British Army’s headquarters for all mainland America, New York was sharply divided over the proper reaction to England’s tightening grip on its trade. Five times Mulligan had joined the crowds of the Sons of Liberty as they erected Liberty Poles on the Bowling Green; five times out-of-uniform British soldiers, sailors, and pro-government Loyalist civilians had chopped them down. When the British Parliament in London demanded that New York build barracks for the redcoats at taxpayers’ expenses, the New York Assembly, pressured by Sons of Liberty in the streets, had refused. Parliament indignantly dissolved the assembly and ordered new elections. Backing down, the newly elected New York Assembly acceded to British demands and built the barracks. Fresh outcries came from the Sons of Liberty. The stocky haberdasher took young Hamilton to meet his close friend Alexander McDougall, founder of New York’s Sons of Liberty, who had just papered the town with a broadside addressed, “To the Betrayed Inhabitants of the City and Colony of New York” and signed by “A Son of Liberty.” While the Loyalist-dominated New York Assembly fumed, soldiers and Sons of Liberty clashed.
The Liberty Pole on the common became the scene for repeated nighttime brawls. On the Saturday night of January 13, 1770, Mulligan and the Sons were caught off-guard when redcoats swarmed out of Fort George and attempted to blow up the Liberty Pole with a large charge of gunpowder. The pole refused to fall, so the soldiers took out their frustration by attacking Montayne’s Tavern, headquarters of the Liberty Boys on the West Side waterfront. The soldiers tried again to dislodge the pole two nights later, again failing. On the third attempt, they succeeded in cutting up the pole and stacking it in the form of a pile of firewood at Montayne’s front door. That led, on Friday night, January 19, 1770, to the so-called Battle of Golden Hill. Isaac Sears led the Sons of Liberty (this time made up not only of angry merchants like Mulligan but sailors brandishing cutlasses and workingmen swinging clubs) into combat with forty bayonet-wielding out-of-uniform British soldiers on Golden Hill, a wheatfield at the crest of John Street near William. The first head-on clash of the American Revolution left many men on both sides badly injured and one seaman dead, run through by a bayonet. Officers managed to order the troops back into barracks but scuffles continued for days, leading to another large-scale clash before the city council restored order. Hercules Mulligan, recounting the events to an admiring Hamilton, made it clear he had emerged as one of the conspicuous heroes of the encounters. The youth’s meeting with McDougall, organizer of the New York Sons, led to Hamilton’s determination to one day join their ranks, if only secretly. Hamilton’s admiration for the rough-cut McDougall grew when he learned that McDougall had been arrested and charged with seditious libel for writing the broadside that had triggered the riot. Refusing to post bond, McDougall had remained in jail for three months. Finally released on bail, he was rearrested, tried by the New York Assembly for contempt, and jailed for another five months.
The next man Knox had singled out to arrange Hamilton’s schooling was the Reverend John Rodgers, the very preacher Hugh Knox had mocked in a Delaware tavern so long ago. Hamilton and Mulligan rode around to meet Dr. Rodgers at the Wall Street Presbyterian Church, where he was pastor. This zealous New Light preacher, trained in the classics at Harvard, had worked in Virginia as a missionary until that colony’s House of Burgesses, at the request of Church of England clergy, had him expelled. Rodgers had long ago forgiven the mocking Knox and recommended him for graduate studies. In his turn, Knox was now asking Rodgers for a Princeton recommendation, this time for Alexander Hamilton.
Hugh Knox had made it clear in his letter to Rodgers that Hamilton’s sponsors on St. Croix wanted him to go through Princeton, the college founded in 1748 by the burgeoning Presbyterian Church in America. Few people could help Hamilton better than Rodgers, who had been instrumental in choosing Princeton’s current president, but he worried that Hamilton would fail Princeton’s rigorous entrance examination. The youth, he discovered, had never had any formal schooling, never studied the requisite classical Greek or Latin, and his knowledge of mathematics did not go beyond arithmetic and keeping accounts. He would need, Rodgers opined, to be sent first to a preparatory school, one where he would be allowed to take accelerated studies instead of slogging along with boys several years his junior for the normal three to four years, consuming all his scholarship funds before he reached college. In his letter, Knox argued that Hamilton was a quick study. The simplest course would have been to hire private tutors, but Hamilton’s meager fund came sporadically and unpredictably. King’s College, Hamilton’s choice, had a preparatory program, but it took three years, and Hamilton could not afford to live in New York City for even a year of tutoring. Rodgers decided that Hamilton must attend the one school able to tailor its teaching to Hamilton’s needs and still pass muster with Princeton. He wrote Hamilton letters of recommendation to the Presbyterian-run Eliza-bethtown Academy, across the bay in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, one of colonial America’s best schools and, in effect, the preparatory school for the College of New Jersey. Hamilton already carried letters of introduction to two of Hugh Knox’s friends who happened to be on this school’s board of trustees.
Sailing with Mulligan from the Battery to Elizabethtown Point, Hamilton got his first glimpse of the prosperous village of some eight hundred, already a century old and one of New Jersey’s oldest towns. Except for a few houses of brick or stone, its 150 solid, trim houses wore weathered gray cedar shingles on their sides and roofs and were arranged on split rail fenced plots along five shade tree-lined streets. Embellishing each house was a large garden and an apple orchard. A New England town plunked down in northern New Jersey, it had grown up around two conflicting churches, the tall-steepled, redbrick St. John’s Anglican Church and the wooden First Presbyterian Church, Hamilton’s destination that raw November day. Both churches boasted fine bells that competed in clangor, echoing over the water and the surrounding countryside. Swedish botanist Peter Kalm, a recent visitor, wrote that “in and about the town are many gardens and orchards, and it might be said that Elizabethtown is situated in a garden.”5
As the stagecoach passed the wharves where merchants moored their sloops and ferries, young Hamilton jounced across the Old Stone Bridge, passed the belfried courthouse and the militia’s parade ground. He debarked at the house of Francis Barber, headmaster of Elizabethtown Academy and its Greek master. A strong friendship bloomed that day between Hamilton and Barber, only five years his senior, that lasted until Barber’s tragic death ten years later. At Barber’s side, Hamilton got his first look at the place where he would spend at least the next year; at his side, he would one day storm a British redoubt at Yorktown. The likable young West Indian immigrant was rapidly making lifelong friendships in a new land where no one knew of his shadowy origins.
Hamilton could not have had better or more radical sponsors than his New York and Elizabethtown wards, and they exerted a decisive influence over him. Mulligan took him around to meet Mulligan’s soon-to-be in-law William Livingston. The scion of New York’s wealthiest family, Livingston had just retired from his New York law practice to build a sprawling mansion called Liberty Hall on the outskirts of Elizabethtown and devote full time to radical politics. They then crossed the street to meet Elias Boudinot, a wealthy member of the academy’s board of trustees who had recently endowed the academy with financial aid for “a number of free scholars.” Both men eventually contributed personally to Hamilton’s schooling and became lifelong political supporters. While young Hamilton paid the requisite fees for tuition, room, and board at the school, in effect he became the long-term houseguest of these two generous sponsors, spending most of a year living room-and-board free at Boudinot’s commodious house. As a result, Livingston and Boudinot, only a few years later the leaders of New Jersey in the American Revolution, molded young Hamilton and made him their protégé.
It would turn out that his Elizabethtown mentors and their kin could not have given him more important connections in colonial America. Livingston was the third son of the proprietor of the vast Livingston Manor on the Hudson, a forest empire that included thousands of acres between Poughkeepsie and Albany. A natural conservative forced into radical politics by his convictions, this leader of the land-rich Livingston clan had used his Yale education and his skill as a writer to attack the other powerful family faction in New York politics, the DeLanceys. Livingston had helped to launch a radical weekly newspaper, the Independent Reflector, in New York City in the 1750s. He regularly assailed the DeLancey-led Anglican party in the New York legislature in the biting English journalistic style of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Using his quill and his talents as a behind-the-scenes political organizer, Livingston emerged as the chief advocate of the separation of church and state. This put him squarely at odds with New York’s Anglican establishment, which was using the support of the royal government and the colonial assembly to raise funds to build King’s College as an adjunct to New York City’s Trinity Church, the unofficial cathedral of the Church of England in America. Writing under the pseudonyms “American Whig,” “Sentinel” and “Watch Tower,” Livingston outspokenly defended American religious liberty, becoming the major Presbyterian supporter of religious pluralism.
By the time the lucky young immigrant was ushered into his unfinished new parlor, Livingston was openly rejecting all British efforts to strip the American colonies of their independent legislatures and make them over into economic and financial provinces subordinate to the British Parliament. He warned that King’s College would serve as the base for establishing Anglican bishops over America who in turn would be de facto members of the House of Lords and, as such, America’s only and unelected representatives in Parliament. Although his fears were legitimate, Livingston’s years of emotional, highly charged attacks on his political and religious enemies had drained him. Because of his retirement to Elizabethtown, his Liberty Hall was to become the unofficial Revolutionary capital of New Jersey, and when the Revolutionary War broke out, he became the first governor of the new state. His political support of Hamilton proved a key to Hamilton’s success in national politics.
While Hamilton spent his leisure hours with his wealthy new patrons, he gave over most of his days to the command of schoolmaster Barber, his first real teacher. Born on a farm in Princeton, Barber had attended Elizabethtown Academy and then gone on to Princeton, where he earned a master’s degree in the classics. An expert on meeting Princeton’s entrance requirements, he founded a Latin school at Newbridge near Hackensack, teaching there three years before his alma mater, Elizabethtown Academy, hired him. The school’s wealthy Presbyterian backers had built the two-story cedar-shingled frame academy, surmounted with cupola and schoolbell, at the “upper end of the burial yard lot” (the southwest corner of Broad Street and Caldwell Place), and attracted many promising students, including, only a few years before Hamilton, Aaron Burr, son and grandson of Princeton presidents.
The academy’s Board of Visitors advertised for students in the New York Gazette, touting Barber’s performance as teacher and headmaster:
The Visitors have been well informed that those of his pupils who have been sent to our colleges were found well fitted…From the experience they have already had of his abilities and attention to business, they cannot but look upon this school to be now under as great advantages as it has ever enjoyed. To render the education here more extensively useful, peculiar attention will be paid to reading and pronouncing English.
Teaching Scots-Irish pupils to pronounce English properly, the school also required them to learn writing, English literature, geography, arithmetic, Latin, Greek, “epistolary composition in which they are duly instructed, particularly as to orthography [and] punctuation, acquirements in which too many grown scholars are notoriously deficient.”6
Two members of the Board of Visitors, pastors of the town’s churches, supervised two full-time teachers and tutored students for an hour on alternating days and every quarter administered oral and written examinations. One Visitor was Anglican theologian Thomas Bradbury Chandler, who became a leading Loyalist pamphleteer in the Revolution. The other, the Presbyterian, who was to become Chandler’s mortal enemy, was the Reverend James Caldwell. An emotional preacher who often brought tears to the eyes of his listeners with his powerful sermons, Caldwell became famous as the “Fighting Parson” after a British grenadier shot and killed his wife. Tearing up hymnals from his church to make wadding to steady the lead balls in their muskets, in the Battle of Springfield he ordered militiamen to “Give ‘em Watts, boys.”
Alexander Hamilton was several years older and more mature than most of Elizabethtown’s students. He was not expected to take the usual three to four years’ course to prepare for college. He was free to concentrate on his deficiencies, mathematics and classical languages. To gain entrance to the College of New Jersey, he would need to pass rigorous written and oral examinations in Latin prose, be able to sight-translate Virgil, Cicero, and the Greek gospels and demonstrate a thorough grounding in Latin and Greek grammar. He was lucky to have Barber, a noted Greek scholar, as his teacher. All through the winter of 1772 and spring of 1773, Barber drilled Hamilton on his conjugations, vocabulary, and his prose style.
Setting to work with his usual verve, seventeen-year-old Hamilton was up early. He became a familiar sight in the early mornings as he leaned against a headstone in the graveyard next door reading a book or pacing, as he recited and memorized, conspicuously riveting his lessons into his memory by saying them aloud. All the rest of his life, he would stroll and read or recite aloud, eventually annoying a great number of people. For now, he only impressed his teachers and sponsors with his diligence as he crammed from six in the morning until midnight. In one year, he covered the work of three, demonstrating what Barber called his “genius” during examinations by the Visitors in February, May, and August 1773.
While he was to become adept at business, Hamilton, the man who was to found America’s financial system, as a schoolboy had to struggle with mathematics. Elizabethtown’s mathematics teacher, James Conn, taught Hamilton accounting according to the Italian double-entry system. Conn, who built on Hamilton’s natural practicality, gave instructions not only in mathematics but geography, navigation, and drawing. Fifteen years later, Hamilton would use a study he began at Elizabethtown of the geography of North and South America in an important law case in New York City. Conn also taught Hamilton how to draw maps and charts “either plain, merca-tor, spherical or conical.” What money Hamilton was able to save by accepting invitations to dinner, he appears to have spent on tutoring and books. He studied the Bible with Reverend Caldwell, who visited the school regularly. He learned by writing commentaries on the Books of Genesis and Revelations, the first and last things.
It was away from the schoolhouse that Hamilton made his deepest impression. He became a fixture at the home of lanky, long-nosed William Livingston. As Hamilton fell in with the local Whig circle, he caught the eyes of Livingston’s lively daughters. When the Livingstons moved into Liberty Hall, Hamilton joined their busy social circle. It included not only many members of the burgeoning Scots-American aristocracy centered around Livingston Manor on the Hudson, but members of the Beekman family of New York City—business partners of the Crugers—and the Schuylers of Albany, next to the Livingstons and the DeLanceys the wealthiest of fourteen river-baron clans who virtually owned the Hudson Valley from New York City to Lake Champlain. It was here at Liberty Hall that Hamilton met many of the people who would become his staunch supporters in his meteoric political career. They included John Jay, one day to be the first chief justice of the United States; Benjamin Rush, America’s foremost physician and a Revolutionary leader; and Livingston’s brother-in-law, William Alexander, the manufacturer of illegal iron who styled himself Lord Stirling. It was here, too, that Hamilton began to flirt with the daughters of America’s aristocrats. Realizing that by chance he’d had the unbelievable luck to stumble into the inner sanction of the middle colonies’ greatest concentration of money, power and influence, he learned quickly to mine it to his advantage.
From the Livingstons, Hamilton got good meals and important introductions; at Boxwood Hall, the nearby spread-eagled mansion of portly philanthropist Elias Boudinot, he found riches of another sort. A deeply yet bearably spiritual man, Boudinot could not help making money and friends. He was part of a Huguenot refugee network that had married into New York and New Jersey’s leading families—the Stocktons of Princeton, the Rushes of Philadelphia, the Sylvesters of Shelter Island, and the L’Hommedieus of Long Island. By the time Hamilton became part of Boudinot’s intimate fireside family, Boudinot was an influential member of Princeton’s trustees, a leader of the Presbyterian Church in America, and an early abolitionist, using his lawyer’s skills to defend slaves in court without fee. His sister, Annis, had married Boudinot’s former law preceptor, Richard Stockton, who would sign the Declaration of Independence. Boudinot shared a family love of poetry. In years to come, while Boudinot presided over the Continental Congress, his sister would write flirtatious letters to George Washington and strew flowers in his path as he rode to his inauguration as America’s first president. Hamilton frequently amused the couple with doggerel he composed and recited at their family gatherings. He also became terribly fond of the Boudinots’ daughter, Anna Maria, seven months old when he began to dandle her on his knee. In long evenings at Boxwood Hall, a few minutes’ walk over from the academy, Hamilton gave and received affection for the first time in many years.
Among other frequent guests at the two manor houses who became Hamilton’s friends he met Livingston’s former law partner, William Peartree Smith, who lived across the street from the Boudinots. Also a Visitor to the academy, Smith became one of many fathers beginning to think of a match of a daughter with this newly arrived islander of mysterious but highborn origins. Smith encouraged Hamilton to keep company with his fifteen-year-old daughter, Caty. On Saturday nights, they could go to a play put on by the British officers at the Elizabeth town barracks. While Hamilton was still a student at the academy, he wrote a verse prologue and an epilogue and heard English officers recite them. On Sundays, after three-hour sermons at the Presbyterian church, Hamilton found ample distractions. In the winter, there was sledding or skating on frozen ponds or on the river. The laughing, rosy-faced Hamilton took sleigh rides in the bitter cold with the Boudinots over to their farm at Basking Ridge where they visited Lord Stirling’s palatial estate and his flirtatious daughters. In spring and summer, Hamilton went along on horseback rides out to Liberty Hall on the outskirts of town to see the Livingstons’ new house and their gardens being set out. There he could lose himself in the five-hundred-volume library or go fishing or watch Livingston building wren houses in his workshop or planting exotic varieties of seeds sent to him from all over the world or go for rides with one of Stirling’s vibrant daughters.
It was in William Livingston’s lively drawing room that Hamilton met so many of the young people who would become important to him. There he first experienced unattainable love. At seventeen, he fell helplessly in love with Catherine Livingston—”Lady Kitty”—the twenty-three-year-old daughter of his host, worshipping her unrequited. At the dinner table, around the fire, at picnics and on sleighing parties, he idolized her unnoticed, surrounded by the Livingstons’ ever-expanding tribe of cousins and in-laws constantly visiting Liberty Hall from New York and New Jersey. At Liberty Hall, he met John Jay, who was courting Livingston’s daughter Sarah. Jay found he had much in common with the ten-years-younger Hamilton. Both were descendants of French Huguenot refugees. Jay’s grandfather had escaped imprisonment in the fortress at St. Malo and hidden on a ship to America. Young John Jay became a pious Presbyterian who distrusted both the Catholic Church and the French aristocracy that had persecuted his grandfather. By wealth, power and politics he was a natural ally of the Livingstons. Jay’s mother was Mary Van Cortlandt. The Jays, Van Cortlandts, and Livingstons formed a phalanx of New York aristocrats who became Revolutionaries along with the Schuylers, another clan of Hudson Valley land barons who frequently visited Liberty Hall. It was at Liberty Hall during the Schuylers’ summer visit in 1773 that Hamilton first met his future wife. Amiable yet shy, dark-eyed, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth was the daughter of General Philip Schuyler, a hero of the French and Indian Wars.
In this heady company, Alexander Hamilton saw and grasped the wealth and power of the American country gentry before most other Americans were aware of its existence. His first year in America had a profound impact on him and made him yearn for membership in this new aristocracy. The company of the rich, the convivial, the witty, and the well-educated only whetted his ambition. Determined to complete his schooling as fast as possible, Hamilton developed the lifelong capacity to plow through great amounts of work quickly. Turning eighteen, he plunged into his studies of the Bible, mathematics, elocution, Greek, and Latin. He sailed through Homer’s Iliad, translating the Greek into English and making detailed notes on the geography of the eastern Mediterranean. Several times a week he trooped to the gray-shingled Presbyterian meetinghouse to hear rousing sermons and join in the stirring hymn singing. His willing subjection in his little spare time to the pious preoccupation of Elias Boudinot with the Bible and with doing good works for the slave, the Indian, and the orphan all make it obvious that Hamilton was sincere at this stage in his zealous embrace of radical fundamentalist Presbyterianism.
If he had an open mind on religion, as few devout young people do, it was because across from Elizabethtown’s imposing Presbyterian church stood the handsome redbrick Anglican Church of St. John, with brilliant controversialist Thomas Bradbury Chandler in its pulpit. Chandler was, in every way, a fascinating contrast to Reverend Caldwell, the dour Scottish pastor of Elizabethtown’s Presbyterian church. Born a Connecticut Puritan, Chandler had gone, like Livingston, to Yale, but he had come out facing the opposite direction. Embracing the Church of England, in print and in sermons he campaigned tirelessly for the creation of bishops for the American colonies. Eventually, after the Revolution, after fleeing the newborn United States, he would be appointed the first bishop of Nova Scotia.
From his Loyalist point of view, Chandler believed that there had to be Anglican bishops in America to stem the growth of anti-Episcopal—and therefore anti-English—sects like his neighbors, the Scottish Presbyterians. After he decided to become a priest, Chandler had served for years as a missionary at St. John’s in Elizabethtown, saving up the money to sail to London to take holy orders: there was no bishop in America to ordain him. He was one of 332 Anglican missionaries the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts sent to the American colonies to make inroads against other Protestant sects. The number had become so large and conspicuous that it alarmed American Dissenters like William Livingston. Even more disturbing was the fact that Chandler and other leading Anglican clergymen denied there was any barrier between church and state. To Anglicans, the established Church of England was part of the English state and therefore inseparable from it. Any other church was a potential enemy of the state.
Years of violent contention that ended only with the Revolution fostered in pastoral New Jersey a climate of riot and menace which bred in young Alexander Hamilton a lifelong dread of the mob. The Sons of Liberty became especially strong in Elizabethtown. They erected a gallows near the Essex County courthouse to intimidate anyone opposing them. Reverend Chandler tried to reason again and again with his parishioners and with other townspeople to avert violence. At the same time, in his letters to church officials and the British home government in England, he advised leniency in enforcement of British laws in the American colonies. But by now there were few moderates left on either side of the Atlantic. “Such an opinion of oppression prevails throughout the colonies as I believe was scarcely ever seen on any occasion in any country on Earth,” he warned. Zealous in any cause, no matter how unpopular, Chandler, like Hugh Knox, strongly influenced young Hamilton through his eloquent sermons and his biweekly lectures at the academy. But in Elizabethtown, where both were outsiders, Hamilton heard much denunciation of Chandler from people he otherwise admired. Receiving a doctor’s degree from Oxford University for his campaign for an American bishopric, Chandler assembled at Elizabethtown some forty Anglican clergymen from Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Soon their essays began to appear in newspapers throughout the colonies, thoroughly alarming anti-Episcopal Presbyterians such as William Livingston, who counterattacked in print.7
It was this same controversy over Anglican bishops that brought America the most vehemently anti-Episcopal clergyman in all Great Britain, the bombastic head of the Popular Party in Scotland, the Reverend John Witherspoon. For years, he had been distinguished in the Kirk of Scotland for fiery sermons attacking Anglican churchmen for meddling in politics. In Edinburgh, he had the reputation of opposing stage plays or nearly any other source of pleasure. Witherspoon quickly turned Princeton into a mecca for strict anti-English Presbyterians from all over North America. At the same time, he made the college an un-English university. He introduced the lecture to replace tutorials. He himself introduced a new course called moral philosophy, which included science and, among other things, duplicated Benjamin Franklin’s scientific experiments. By the time of Hamilton’s arrival in New Jersey, as the pace of Revolutionary protests quickened, students at Princeton, undoubtedly with Wither-spoon’s knowledge and quite likely with his consent, took the forefront in open resistance to British policies. They burned in effigy merchants, royal governors, and members of Parliament. With royal Governor William Franklin, ex officio member of the board of trustees, sitting on the dais, to dramatize their embargo of British goods they showed up for graduation in homespun American garb instead of the customary imported (and boycotted) English academic gowns. Even valedictory addresses, delivered in Latin, became defiant displays of American patriotism. Witherspoon counted among his devoted alumni young lawyers, teachers, and Presbyterian clergymen who were at the core of the radical movement in America.
In his position as president of the one college in colonial America that served several regions, Witherspoon exerted powerful influence. He traveled and preached widely. Recruiting students from the South and from the West Indies, he quickly doubled the college’s endowment. Rivaling Yale in the last five years before the Revolution, Princeton produced more graduates (about twenty-five a year) than in its entire earlier history. Some seventy-seven were graduated between 1769 and 1776 and became chaplains in Revolutionary regiments. Only two graduates took the British side. Witherspoon’s fire-and-brimstone evangelical preaching and his successful linkage of anti-Episcopal Presbyterianism with republican liberties unified the New and Old Lights in the middle colonies and put Witherspoon at the pinnacle of a united Presbyterian Church in America. This, in turn, propelled him into the Continental Congress when the Revolution came, where he cast the tie-breaking vote for independence.
IN EVENINGS at Liberty Hall, William Livingston’s son, Princeton student Brockhulst Livingston, and his classmate Belcher Smith regaled their young friend Hamilton with recitations of Reverend Witherspoon’s radical lectures. Hamilton had crammed three years’ studies into one, reading voraciously. He could now boast twenty-seven books on ancient and medieval history and philosophy in his personal library, his list roughly corresponding with gifts from his cousin, Ann Lytton. On May 3, May 26, and June 3, she drew a total of 75 rigsdalers, the proceeds of selling fifteen hogsheads of sugar from her Lytton inheritance, to help her favorite cousin with his expenses. Twenty years later, Hamilton would repay her with his personal loyalty and support her when she was old, alone, and ill. As soon as Hamilton successfully passed his final quarterly examinations, he boarded the ferry for Manhattan and told Mulligan he wanted to apply at the last minute to enter the College of New Jersey that fall of 1773: Mulligan was a graduate of the Anglican-supported King’s College, its bitter rival. He said he preferred that Hamilton attend King’s nearby and live with him. But Hamilton persuasively argued with him, Mulligan wrote forty years later:
Before he had been there [at Elizabethtown] one year, he told me—and I was also informed of the same by a letter from the teacher [Francis Barber], that he was prepared to enter college. He came to New York and told me he preferred Princeton to King’s College because it was more republican.
Hamilton certainly knew what he was talking about. Since opening in 1754 with eight students over the objections of William Livingston and other radical New Yorkers—and after a long and bitter legislative battle—King’s College had come to represent the extension of royal power into America and the ascendancy of the Church of England over the colonies. With a faculty of Anglican clergy, it, too, was attracting students from distant colonies. Among its other early graduates was Hamilton’s friend John Jay.
Hamilton marshaled solid reasons for insisting on Princeton. His mentor Hugh Knox and his masters at Elizabethtown were Princeton graduates. Boudinot was a Princeton trustee. William Livingston and his collaborator on the radical Independent Reflector, William Peartree Smith, were also on Princeton’s board. So was Knox’s mentor, the Reverend Rodgers, the man who had steered Hamilton to Elizabeth-town Prep. The entire raison d’être of Elizabethtown Academy and of Hamilton’s acceptance into the elite Presbyterian society of the town was the school’s connection with the Presbyterian holy-of-holies at Princeton. And Hamilton could point to a growing percentage of West Indies boys among Princeton’s eighty-five students: his sponsors were, after all, influential in the islands. Who would dare oppose him? Under the persuasive younger man’s barrage, the good-natured Mulligan acquiesced.
ROLLING DOWN the King’s Highway toward Princeton one day late in summer 1773, Hamilton and Mulligan could make out the college on a rise in the distance above the low-lying slash pine and scrub oak forest. The largest single building in the British American colonies, its main brownstone building (now called Nassau Hall), was 176 by 50 feet with a domed central pavilion. The two visitors probably dismounted at the Hudibras Tavern at the southeast corner of present-day Nassau Street and Washington Road. The tavern was the haunt of Princeton’s students, faculty, and townspeople—and the only place they could get a drink or a good meal at the Presbyterian college. The Scottish president, Witherspoon, was notorious for providing meals heavy on turnips raised in his own garden while he pocketed the high charge to parents for more generous meals. Many students ran up considerable tabs for meals at the nearby Hudibras, which, a short time after Hamilton’s visit, burned in a mysterious fire that destroyed all records of their indebtedness.
Hercules Mulligan had agreed to take Hamilton to his examination by President Witherspoon, “with whom I was well acquainted.” Since Mulligan was Hamilton’s guardian and bursar of his scholarship funds, his company was more than a courtesy. The two men walked up the pathway past young sycamore trees planted in 1769 to celebrate the repeal of the Stamp Act and knocked at the door of the president’s house—now the residence of the college’s dean. The beetle-browed Dr. Witherspoon ushered them into his study. “Introduced Mr. Hamilton to him and proposed to him to examine the young gentleman,” Mulligan recalled, “which the Doctor did to his entire satisfaction.” Hamilton, now eighteen, was accepted to Princeton on the spot. To Witherspoon, the only question now was at what level, first or second year. There were students who had prepared at Princeton’s own Latin school but were a year or two younger. Benjamin Rush had entered the college at age thirteen. But the decision was entirely up to President Witherspoon, who was not noted for being flexible with students. But Alexander Hamilton had heard only accolades from Witherspoon’s admirers. He had no reason for caution, now that Witherspoon had examined him. With characteristic audacity, Hamilton applied a condition to his acceptance of Princeton. Hercules Mulligan still remembered the scene, some thirty years later, after Hamilton’s death:
Mr. Hamilton then stated that he wished to enter either of the two classes to which his attainments would entitle him but with the understanding that he should be permitted to advance from class to class 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 but that he would submit the request to the trustees, who would decide.
To Hamilton, the request did not seem as brash as it did to Witherspoon. Hamilton had, after all, been allowed this same dispensation at Elizabethtown Academy. He not only was older than most of his would-be peers but had nearly five years’ experience in business and several published pieces of writing to his credit. More mature, Hamilton was impatient to complete his studies and might have been anxious about the continued generosity of his benefactors, who had fitfully provided only enough support to last for four years of study. Four years of Princeton after the expensive year behind him at Elizabethtown gave Hamilton sufficient grounds for anxiety.
But he completely misgauged Dr. Witherspoon, who was not unduly impressed by Hamilton’s intellect or willing to be completely candid in his response. It was entirely up to Witherspoon whether he granted Hamilton’s request. The college actually had no policy that prevented accelerated study. After all, Benjamin Rush, who personally had recruited Witherspoon in Scotland, had been allowed to complete his undergraduate studies in one year. More recently, so had James Madison, who was personally admitted by Witherspoon after his Virginia fund-raising tour. Madison had just completed his studies in only two years. There must have been something about Hamilton that Witherspoon did not like, something that made him unwilling to accept the pushy protégé of so many Princeton graduates and trustees. To refuse on the spot would have irked too many prominent Princetonians. Witherspoon stalled—and then refused Hamilton in writing. Whether he ever polled his board of trustees cannot be known. If there ever was a record, it has disappeared. But Wither-spoon at least had given Mulligan the impression he came away with, that Hamilton’s acceptance “was done” before they left that day.
Two weeks later, Witherspoon wrote to Hamilton, informing him the trustees had turned him down. Mulligan wrote:
About a fortnight after, a letter was received from the President 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.8
Hamilton could easily learn, from Boudinots and Livingstons and other friends, that Witherspoon was shading the truth. After all, Benjamin Rush was a Livingston in-law and a frequent visitor to Liberty Hall.
More than thirty years later, the question still lingered. Mulligan, writing his memoirs shortly after Hamilton’s death, apparently felt compelled, out of all the important events of Hamilton’s life, to explain why Witherspoon had rejected Hamilton. What does not appear in Mulligan’s account can only be deduced from a more careful scrutiny of Witherspoon’s own prejudices than Mulligan was able or prepared to make. Witherspoon may have simply believed that he should not make exceptions to the Scottish Presbyterian belief that bastards should be denied Holy Communion. At this very moment, Witherspoon was the implacable foe of the royal governor of New Jersey, William Franklin, who was, as was well known, the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin. In only a few years, Witherspoon would order Governor Franklin’s arrest and imprisonment. At the hearing of a Revolutionary tribunal, Witherspoon personally slurred Benjamin Franklin’s bastard son to his face for his “distinguished birth.” Like all colleges of the time, Princeton required its students to attend chapel services. The question is whether Witherspoon had any way of knowing about the circumstances of Hamilton’s birth. It is entirely possible that his illegitimacy had become the subject of gossip in the small community of New Jersey’s Presbyterian elite. It may have arrived in the now-lost letters of recommendation Mulligan provided him. It is also a tantalizing fact, that, when John Witherspoon had been a radical young preacher in Scotland, vehemently attacking pro-English Scottish aristocrats, his first parish assignment had been near the Hamilton family seat in Ayrshire. In any event, stunned by his first major rejection, Alexander Hamilton understandably felt betrayed. He turned his back on Princeton and headed for the enemy camp. He applied at once to King’s College, where he took the same risk, proposing accelerated study. This time, his proposal was accepted. Four years later, he would come back to Princeton—with cannon.9