states, a brilliant newspaper description of a hurricane that decided his career at the age of fifteen. He was then an orphan, of romantic parentage, living in one of the West Indian islands; this bit of writing led the principal people of the island to decide that he ought to have a larger career than Santa Cruz afforded and, in accordance with his wishes, he was sent to New York to be educated. He early distinguished himself on the side of the patriotic cause as an orator and conversationalist; almost from the time he arrived in America he was a contributor, especially on political subjects, to the New York Gazette, and later to the other journals.
It is for the essays that Hamilton wrote with Madison and Jay under the title of the "Federalist" that the journalism of the period is noteworthy. They have, from the influence that they gave to the press of the time, been likened to the letters of Junius, which, appearing in the Public Advertiser of London during the year 1765, went far to counteract the feeling in England that everything connected with journalism was superficial and ephemeral.
The first of these essays, afterward to be famous as the most profound treatises on government, was written by Hamilton in the cabin of a sloop as he came down the Hudson. It was first published in the Independent Journal of New York, on October 27, 1787, and not in the Independent Gazetteer, which was edited by Colonel Eleazer Oswald, a friend of Greenleaf; a man unlikely to be made a confidant by Hamilton—their differences, in fact, leading Oswald to challenge Hamilton to a duel in 1798.[1]
- ↑ This error is made by Professor McMaster in his History of the People of the United States, i, 583, and repeated by John Fiske, Critical Period of American History, 341.
Not only did Oswald and his paper oppose Hamilton and his political theories, but toward the English, with whom Hamilton sympathized, Oswald carried his opposition so far that he had been called
