Alexander Hamilton (12 page)

The colonial struggle against the Crown took a dramatic turn on the moonlit night of December 16, 1773, around the time that Hamilton entered King’s College. A mob of two hundred men with soot-darkened faces, roughly costumed as Mohawk Indians, crept aboard three ships in Boston harbor, used tomahawks to smash open 342 chests of tea, and pitched the contents overboard. Another two thousand townspeople urged them on from the docks. “This is the most magnificent moment of all,” John Adams cheered from Braintree, Massachusetts.
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The Boston Tea Party expressed patriotic disgust at both violated principles and eroded profits. For a time, the colonists had acquiesced to a tea tax because they had been able to smuggle in contraband tea from Holland. After Parliament manipulated duties to grant a de facto tea monopoly to the East India Company in 1773, the smugglers were thwarted and rich Boston merchants—at least those not selected as company agents—suddenly decided to make common cause with the town radicals and protest the parliamentary measures.

Four days later, Paul Revere galloped breathlessly into New York with news of the Boston uprising. Troup contended that Hamilton rushed off to Boston to engage in firsthand reportage. This seems unlikely for a new student, but he may well have rushed into print. As a former clerk acquainted with import duties, contraband goods, and European trade policies, Hamilton was handed a tailor-made issue that wasn’t entirely new to him: the West Indian islands had felt the distant repercussions of the Stamp Act protests and other thwarted attempts by Britain to tax the colonists. “The first political piece which [Hamilton] wrote,” recalled Troup, “was on the destruction of the tea at Boston in which he aimed to show that the destruction was both necessary and politic.”
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This anonymous salvo may have been the “Defence and Destruction of the Tea” published in John Holt’s
New-York Journal.
In Troup’s telling, Hamilton assuaged the keen anxieties of merchants alarmed by the assault on property. Such reassurance was especially timely after New York hosted its own “tea party” on April 22, 1774, when a group of sea captains, led by Alexander McDougall and decked out in Mohawk dress, stormed the British ship
London
and chucked its tea chests into the deep.

The enraged British lost all patience with their American brethren after the Boston Tea Party and enacted punitive measures. One especially irate member of Parliament, Charles Van, said Boston should be obliterated like Carthage: “I am of the opinion you will never meet with that proper obedience to the laws of this country until you have destroyed that nest of locusts.”
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By May 1774, news arrived that England had retaliated with the Coercive or “Intolerable” Acts. These draconian measures shut down Boston’s port until the colonists paid for the spilled tea. They also curbed popular assemblies, restricted trial by jury, subjected Massachusetts to ham-handed military rule, and guaranteed that the Boston streets would be blanketed with British troops in an overpowering show of force. On May 13, General Thomas Gage, the new military commander, arrived in Boston with four regiments to enforce these acts, which dealt a crippling blow to the free-spirited maritime town. The British response triggered a still tenuous unity among colonists who balked at the notion that Parliament could impose taxes without their consent. Until this point, the colonies had been tantamount to separate countries, joined by little sense of common mission or identity. Now committees of correspondence in each colony began to communicate with one another, issuing calls for a trade embargo against British goods and summoning a Continental Congress in Philadelphia in September.

Even in rabidly Anglophile New York, the political atmosphere by late spring was “as full of uproar as if it was besieged by a foreign force,” said one observer.
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These were stirring days for Hamilton, who must have been constantly distracted from his studies by rallies, petitions, broadsides, and handbills. In choosing New York’s delegates for the first Continental Congress, a feud arose between hard-line protesters, who favored a boycott of British goods, and moderate burghers who criticized such measures as overly provocative and self-defeating. To beat the drum for a boycott, the militant Sons of Liberty, members of a secret society first convened to flout the Stamp Act, gathered a mass meeting on the afternoon of July 6, 1774. It took place at the grassy Common near King’s College, sometimes called The Fields, in the shadow of the towering liberty pole.

Alexander McDougall chaired the meeting and introduced resolutions condemning British sanctions against Massachusetts. The rich folklore surrounding this pivotal event in Hamilton’s life suggests that his speech came about spontaneously, possibly prompted by somebody in the crowd. After mounting the platform, the slight, boyish speaker started out haltingly, then caught fire in a burst of oratory. If true to his later style, Hamilton gained energy as he spoke. He endorsed the Boston Tea Party, deplored the closure of Boston’s port, endorsed colonial unity against unfair taxation, and came down foursquare for a boycott of British goods. In his triumphant peroration, he said such actions “will prove the salvation of North America and her liberties”; otherwise “fraud, power, and the most odious oppression will rise triumphant over right, justice, social happiness, and freedom.”
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When his speech ended, the crowd stood transfixed in silence, staring at this spellbinding young orator before it erupted in a sustained ovation. “It is a collegian!” people whispered to one another. “It is a collegian!”
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Hamilton, nineteen, looked young for his age, which made his performance seem even more inspired. From that moment on, he was treated as a youthful hero of the cause and recognized as such by Alexander McDougall, John Lamb, Marinus Willett, and other chieftains of the Sons of Liberty. It is worth remarking that at this juncture Hamilton sided with the radical camp, along with the artisans and mechanics, rather than with the more circumspect merchant class he later led. Hamilton had immigrated to North America to gratify his ambition and successfully seized the opportunity to distinguish himself. Both then and forever after, the poor boy from the West Indies commanded attention with the force and fervor of his words. Once Hamilton was initiated into the cause of American liberty, his life acquired an even more headlong pace that never slackened.

As rumors of the militant commotion at the Common filtered back to the college, Dr. Myles Cooper must have been appalled that the orphan whom he had treated so indulgently was now fraternizing with disreputable elements. Cooper maligned the Sons of Liberty as the “sons of licentiousness, faction, and confusion.”
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The situation was an awkward one for Cooper, who was tugging his forelock at royal authority while Hamilton was thumbing his nose at it. Exactly three months before, the college president had published an obsequious open letter to William Tryon, the departing royal governor, that was a classic of unctuous prose and that concluded, “We can only say, that as long as the society shall have any existence and wherever its voice can extend, the name of TRYON will be celebrated among the worthiest of its benefactors.”
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Hamilton contended that he was “greatly attached” to Cooper, and in ordinary times he might have been a fond disciple.
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Cooper was a witty published poet, a Greek and Latin scholar, and a worldly bachelor with epicurean tastes. In a portrait by John Singleton Copley, he has a smooth, well-fed face and stares sideways at the viewer in a smug, self-assured manner. On the tiny King’s faculty, it was Cooper who likely tutored Hamilton in Latin, Greek, theology, and moral philosophy.

Cooper had been recommended for the King’s presidency by the archbishop of Canterbury and was in many respects an outstanding choice. In little more than a decade, he had inaugurated a medical school, enlarged the library, added professors, and even launched an art collection. Like John Witherspoon, he boasted a roster of distinguished pupils, including John Jay, Robert R. Livingston, Gouverneur Morris, Benjamin Moore, and Hamilton. In 1774, Cooper had intensified the overriding quest of his presidency, for a charter that would convert King’s College into a royal university. Then the Revolution blasted his hopes. He found the revolt at first an irritant, then an outrage, then a mortal threat to his ambitions. He could not afford to be a neutral bystander and began to flay the protesters in caustic essays, claiming that the tea tax was exceedingly mild. “The people of Boston are a crooked and perverse generation... and deserve to forfeit their charter,” he wrote.
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With such retrograde views, he became one of New York’s most despised Loyalists and was increasingly assailed by his students. Samuel Clossy also grew disgusted with the turmoil and returned to the British Isles.

Colonial resistance began to assume a more organized shape. By late August 1774, all the colonies save Georgia had picked their delegates to the First Continental Congress. The New York delegates, among them John Jay and James Duane, departed for Philadelphia amid stirring fanfare. One newspaper reported, “They were accompanied to the place of their departure by a number of the inhabitants, with colours flying and music playing and loud huzzas at the end of each street.”
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It was not an assembly of dogmatic extremists who sat in Windsor chairs for six weeks in the red-and-black brick structure known as Carpenters’ Hall. Far from being bent on fighting for independence, these law-abiding delegates offered up a public prayer that war might be averted. They reaffirmed their loyalty as British subjects, hoped for a peaceful accommodation with London, and scrupulously honored legal forms. Yet there were limits to their patience. The congress formed a Continental Association to enforce a total trade embargo—no exports, no imports, not even consumption of British wares—until the Coercive Acts were repealed. Every community was instructed to assemble committees to police the ban, and when New York chose its members that November, many of Hamilton’s friends, including Hercules Mulligan, appeared among their numbers.

Even though John Adams had found Jay and Duane far too timid for his tastes, the Continental Congress’s actions stunned Tory sentiment in New York. For Myles Cooper, the meeting had been a satanic den of sedition, which he acidly condemned in two widely read pamphlets. He informed the startled colonists that “subjects of Great Britain are the happiest people on earth.”
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Far from criticizing Parliament, he maintained that “the behavior of the colonies has been intolerable.”
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He then poured vitriol on the congress’s initiatives: “To think of succeeding by force of arms or by starving the nation into compliance is a proof of shameful ignorance, pride, and stupidity.”
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Like many people, he scorned the notion that the colonies could ever defeat Britain’s invincible military. “To believe America able to withstand England is a dreadful infatuation.”
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Myles Cooper was not the only Anglican clergyman in New York to rail against the Continental Congress. He formed part of a Loyalist literary clique that included Charles Inglis, later rector of Trinity Church, and Samuel Seabury, the Anglican rector of the town of Westchester. Seabury was a redoubtable man of massive physique and learned mind. Educated at Yale and Oxford, he was very pompous and wrote prose that bristled with energetic intelligence. Because Westchester had been granted special privileges by a royal charter, local farmers felt especially threatened by the trade embargo. So after the Continental Congress adjourned, Seabury, with the full knowledge of Myles Cooper, launched a series of pamphlets under the pseudonym “A Westchester Farmer.” (The title cunningly echoed John Dickinson’s famous polemic against parliamentary taxation,
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania.
) Seabury’s blistering essays reviled the officers of the new Continental Association as “a venomous brood of scorpions” who would “sting us to death,” and he suggested that they be greeted with hickory sticks.
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He appealed cleverly to farmers by warning that they would be the major casualties of any trade boycott against Britain. If merchants could not import goods from Britain, would they not then hike their prices to farmers? As he wrote, “From the day the exports from this province are stopped, the farmers may date the commencement of their ruin. Can you live without money?”
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After the first installment of Seabury’s invective was published by James Rivington in the
New-York Gazetteer,
the paper reported a febrile patriotic response, especially among Hamilton’s newfound companions: “We can assure the public that at a late meeting of exotics, styled the Sons of Liberty,” the “Farmer” essay was introduced, “and after a few pages being read to the company, they agreed ...to commit it to the flames, without the benefit of clergy, though many, very many indeed, could neither write nor read.”
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To drive home the point, some copies were tarred and feathered and slapped on whipping posts. Nonetheless, the essay made a huge popular impression and demonstrated that the patriots were being outgunned by Tory pamphleteers and needed a literary champion of their own.

Seabury gave Hamilton what he always needed for his best work: a hard, strong position to contest. The young man gravitated to controversy, indeed gloried in it. In taking on Seabury, Hamilton might have suspected—and may well have
enjoyed
—the little secret that he was combating an Anglican cleric in Myles Cooper’s inner circle. He had to tread stealthily and keep his name out of print. (Most political essays at the time were published anonymously anyway.) Eager to make his mark, Hamilton was motivated by a form of ambition much esteemed in the eighteenth century—what he later extolled as the “love of fame, the ruling passion of the noblest minds, which would prompt a man to plan and undertake extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit.”
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Ambition was reckless if inspired by purely selfish motives but laudable if guided by great principles. In this, his first great performance in print, Hamilton placed his ambition at the service of lofty ideals.