Mental Maps of the Founders by Michael Barone

Author:Michael Barone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books

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New York with its polyglot population and its varied lineages, in contrast to colonial ports like Boston and Charleston with their long-established and interconnected elites, provided newcomers with plenty of avenues in which to rise. But its diverse cultures also made it a cockpit of argument, and on no issue more than whether to protest and sever links with Britain. As the British military historian Piers Mackesy observes, the colonies were split on ethnic lines. “The [Loyalist] Tories were weakest where the colonists were of the purest English stock. In New England they may have been scarcely a tenth of the population; in the South a quarter or third; but in the Middle Colonies including New York perhaps a half.”30 So if Hamilton encountered “tremendous revolutionary ferment” and “some of the colonies’ most eloquent agitators and outspoken newspapers” in the city’s two square miles south of King’s College, he was also exposed to “a vocal Tory population” in which, as he remembered later, “near one half of them were avowed more attached to Great Britain than to their liberty.31

Hamilton left no doubt which side he was on. In “the virulent clash of Tories and Whigs” he unstintingly opposed the former and supported the latter, as in his pamphlet denigrating Seabury and denouncing his theories.32 In April 1775, after news of the armed clashes at Lexington and Concord reached New York, he joined a Patriot militia and intensively studied military drills, tactics, technology, and strategy. Yet in May 1775, when a group of Patriots tried to seize the college’s staunchly Loyalist president, Myles Cooper, Hamilton stood outside his door while Cooper escaped to the waterfront, where he fled in a Britain-bound ship. Hamilton had shown himself as “a committed revolutionary with a profound dread that popular sentiment would boil over into dangerous excess.”33 In June 1775, Hamilton witnessed George Washington’s arrival in New York on his way from the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia to his military command in Massachusetts. Through the next six months, he continued his studies at King’s, his drills in the militia, his frequent anonymous pamphleteering, and his dispatches to the Royal Danish American Gazette. In February 1776, he stepped up to become a captain in a New York artillery unit authorized by the Continental Congress, and drilled his soldiers before General Washington during his brief and disastrous campaigning in and around New York. Even as the army was defeated and came close to annihilation, Hamilton had come to Washington’s attention, receiving favorable notice as artillery commander during the retreat across New Jersey and then during Washington’s Christmas and New Year’s attacks in Trenton and Princeton. In January 1777, Washington asked Hamilton to join his staff as an aide-de-camp. “In fewer than five years,” summarizes Chernow, “the twenty-two-year-old Alexander Hamilton had risen from despondent clerk in St. Croix to one of the aides of America’s most eminent man.”34

As Washington’s chief aide from March 1777 to February 1781, Hamilton was a front-row witness not only to

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