The
Vol. VII.
No. 12.
Green
BOSTON.
Bag.
December, 1895.
ALEXANDER HAMILTON THE LAWYER. By A. Oakey Hall. SKETCHES innumerable and several bi ographies of Alexander Hamilton have made his statesmanship familiar to the Ameri can people. George Ticknor Curtis's His tory of the Constitution; Hamilton's Life, by one of his sons, issued in 1840; and a recent volume by the late Chief-Justice George Shea of New York, entitled "The Life and Epoch of Alexander Hamilton," may in such con nection be notably referred to. Bancroft and Hildreth in their respective histories of the United States and Lossing in his Pictorial Field-book of the Revolution have further commemorated Colonel Alexander Hamilton as aide-de-camp on General Washington's staff during the colonial war with Great Brit ain. But neither his biographers nor the historians have fully sketched Alexander Hamilton the lawyer, or made other than cursory allusions to his professional exis tence. It is the intention of this article to attempt to supply that deficiency and to dwell mainly upon those incidents of his life that bear upon his long unconscious prepa ration for his very brief yet illustrious career as a lawyer during the last twenty-two years of his mortality. He was born eleven days after the new year of 1757 began; when George Wash ington, twenty-five years old, was a surveyor, as unconscious of his future greatness as was Ulysses S. Grant when tanning skins in Illinois. The father, James Hamilton — a Scotchman — emigrated while a bachelor to a West India island as a merchant, where he married a French Huguenot widow who im parted her beauty, grace and sweetness of
temper to Alexander, her youngest son; while the latter inherited Scotch tenacity of purpose, thrift, and a fine constitution from his sire. The mother died while Alexander was a child, and he thus missed juvenile at trition with her marked intellectual attain ments; and her father was a carefully edu cated French physician. Alexander's life battle began early, for when he was only thirteen years old, the French war brought to his father such business reverses as com pelled the boy to enter as a clerk the store of Nicholas Cruger, whose descendants now live in New York City, opulent and socially distinguished. Alexander's education had been limited; yet he had not altogether re quired teachers, for he early evinced a thirst for knowledge that was not only assuaged by the few books that came in his way, but by an early developed power of observation and thought. He was forced to that proper study of mankind which becomes more val uable to the lawyer than ready accession to books. At fourteen years of age Hamilton was found as restless and ambitious as if he were a Yankee boy. The proof lies in this extract from a letter that he wrote to a young comrade who had emigrated to New York City : — "Dear Ned : I confess a weakness. My ambition is so prevalent that I contemn the grovelling condition of a clerk to which my fortune condemns me, and would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to ex alt my station." That juvenile letter, by its choice of Saxon words, seems to show that he had undoubt 537
