Alexander Hamilton the Lawyer. When the Colonial Commander-in-Chief became the National Chief, the old aide-de camp became, as it were, a civilian aide, as Secretary of the Treasury, and took his facile pen into the cabinet, to accentuate a President's message, to indite a marvelous funding scheme, to outline the first protec tive tariff, and to draft a currency scheme that still attracts the admiration of that financial world which, although ever quar relling within itself, has no jealousy of Ham ilton's fiscal plans. Was he not in all these matters really studying and practising the art of the con veyancer, who in Hamilton's day and gener ation was placed at the head of the profes sion, even beyond the barrister? Through all his career, whether as clerk studying lex mercatoria or the law of charter-party, of prizes and prize money, and of the then cal low insurance law; or whether practically studying the law of war and international codes; the rights and wrongs of personal liberty and of government under the Consti tution, was not Hamilton — what no earnest lawyer ever ceases to be — a law-student? When, quitting public life at the national capital, he returned to New York, it was to pick up the dropped threads of legal prac tice, and with them work the loom of litiga tion. Of this resumption of legal pursuits it is recorded in the memoirs of Talleyrand, who during his exile in America became intimate with and an admirer of Hamilton, that walking late one night apast the small brick house in Garden Street, where Hamilton had resumed his law chambers, Talleyrand saw Hamilton's shadow on the office curtain, busily working at his desk. On the next day he remarked, " Last night I saw one of the wonders of the world, — a man laboring at midnight for the support of his family, who had made the fortune of a nation." His reputation as a lawyer had now be come commensurate with his fame as soldier and statesman; for it was to him that, when
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John Jay, the first Chief-Justice, retired to diplomacy, the vacant post was offered. That high post which fell for only one year to puisne Justice John Rutledge, of South Carolina, and next to Oliver Ellsworth, of Connecticut, for six years, who made way for the American Mansfield, John Marshall. But Hamilton declined the appointment, feeling that as a jurist his forte was the bar and not the bench. Although he never entered the court as judge, yet for years he seemed part of the court, for every incum bent of that post had occasion at each suc ceeding term to construe the constitutional work of the man who declined that office. Although never a judge, he lives under judi cial decisions as a creator of constitutional law within every volume of the reports of the Supreme Court. But early in this century the Reporter came into duty in the New York courts, and his collation of cases show Hamilton busily engaged before bench and jury, and oftentimes meeting at the bar Aaron Burr, his very opposite in integrity, rectitude and loyalty, and in freedom from chicanery. Veterans of that period have left on record that it was not alone jealousy politically of Hamilton that inspired Burr's deadly hatred, but also jealousy of him at the bar. There is fortunately preserved an eulogy of Hamilton the lawyer, made by his early contemporary at the bar, James Kent, who in 1836, when Chancellor, in the course of an oration made before the Law Association of New York, said, "Among his brethren Hamilton was indisputably pre-eminent. He at once rose to the loftiest professional eminence by his profound penetration, his power of analysis, the comprehensive grasp and strength of his understanding, and the frankness, firmness and integrity of his char acter. In reference to his associates, we may say of him as was said of Papinian, omnes longo post se intervallo reliquerit. I have always regarded Mr. Hamilton's argu ment, near the close of his life, in the cele
