ALEXANDER HAMILTON.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON, whose life is deeply interwoven with the history of the American revolution, with the formation and adoption of the constitution of the United States, and with the civil administration of Washington, was born in the island of Nevis, in the British West Indies, January 11th, 1757. He was of Scottish descent. His paternal grandfather resided at the family seat of Grange in Ayrshire, in Scotland. His father was bred a merchant, and went to the West Indies in that character, where he became unsuccessful in business, and subsequently lived in a state of pecuniary dependence. His mother was of a French family, and possessed superior accomplishments of mind and person. She died when he was a child, and he received the rudiments of his early education in the island of St. Croix.

He was taught when young to speak and write the French language fluently, and he displayed an early and devoted attachment to literary pursuits. His studies were under the direction of the Rev. Dr. Knox, a respectable Presbyterian clergyman, who gave to his mind a strong religious bias, which was never eradicated, and which displayed itself strongly and with consoling influence on his death-bed, though it may have been checked and diverted during the ardor and engrossing scenes of his military and political life. In 1769, he was placed as a clerk in the counting-house of Mr. Nicholas Cruger, an opulent and highly respectable merchant of St. Croix. Young HAMILTON went through the details of his clerical duty with great assiduity and fidelity, and he manifested a capacity for business, which attracted the attention and confidence of his patron. He displayed, at that early age, the most aspiring ambition, and showed infallible symptoms of superior genius. "I contemn," said he in a letter to a confidential school fellow, "the grovelling condition of a clerk, to which my fortune con demns me, and would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station; I mean to prepare the way for futurity." This extraordinary feeling and determined purpose in a youth of twelve

years; this ardent love for fame, and the still stronger attachment to character, were felt and exhibited in every period of his after life.

While he was in Mr. Cruger's office, HAMILTON devoted all his leisure moments to study. Mathematics, chemistry, ethics, biography, knowledge of every kind, occupied his anxious researches. In 1772, he gave a precise and elegant description of the hurricane which had recently swept over some of the islands, and which was anonymously published in the island of St. Christopher, where it excited general attention, and contributed to give a happy direction to his future fortunes. When the author became known, his relations and patrons resolved to send him to the city of New York, for the purpose of a better education.

He arrived in New York in October, 1772, and was immediately placed at a grammar school, at Elizabethtown, in New Jersey, under the tuition of Mr. Francis Barber, who afterwards was distinguished as an accomplished officer in the American service. HAMILTON entered King's (now Columbia) College at the close of 1773, where he soon "gave extraordinary displays of richness of genius and energy of mind."

His active and penetrating mind was employed, even at college, in sustaining and defending the colonial opposition to the acts of the British parliament. In July 1774, while a youth of seventeen, he appeared as a speaker at a great public meeting of citizens in the fields, (now the park in front of the city hall,) and enforced the duty of resistance by an eloquent appeal to the good sense and patriotism of his auditors. He also vindicated the cause of the colonies with his pen in several anonymous publications. In December 1774, and February 1775, he was the author of some elaborate pamphlets in favor of the pacific measures of defence, recommended by congress. He suggested at that early day the policy of giving encouragement to domestic manufactures, as a sure means of lessening the need of external commerce. He anticipated ample resources at home, and, among other things, observed that several of the southern colonies were so favorable in their soil and climate to the growth of cotton, that such a staple alone, with due cultivation, in a year or two would afford products sufficient to clothe the whole continent. He insisted upon our unalienable right to the steady, uniform, unshaken security of constitutional freedom; to the enjoyment of trial by jury; and to the right of freedom from taxation, except by our own immediate representatives; and that colonial legislation was an inherent right, never to be abandoned or impaired.

In the course of this pamphlet controversy, HAMILTON became engaged, though unsuspected by his opponents, in an animated discussion with Dr. Cooper, principal of the college, and with wits and politicians of established character on the ministerial side of the question. The profound principles, able reasoning, and sound policy contained in the pamphlets, astonished his adversaries; and the principal of them held it to be absurd to suppose that so young a man as HAMILTON Could be the author. He was thenceforward cherished and revered by the whigs of New York as an oracle.

The war had now commenced in Massachusetts bay, and HAMILTON, young, ardent, and intrepid, was among the earliest of his fellowcitizens to turn his mind to the military service. In 1775, and while at college, he joined a volunteer corps of militia in the city of New York, studied the details of military tactics, and endeavored to reduce them to practice. And while he was most active in promoting measures of resistance, he was busy also in studying the science of political economy, relative to commerce, the balance of trade, and the circulating medium; and which were soon to become prominent topics of speculation under the new aspects of social and political organization, of which the elements were then forming. In checking the wild spirit of mobs, he showed himself equally the intrepid advocate of freedom, and the enemy of all popular misrule and licentiousness.

On the 14th March, 1776, HAMILTON was appointed captain of a provincial company of artillery, in the city of New York, and in that rank he was soon in active service, and brought up the rear of the army in the retreat from Long Island. He was in the action at White Plains, on the 28th of October, 1776, and by that time his character and conduct had attracted the observing eye of Washington. He was with his artillery company, firm and active, in the retreat through New Jersey, and resisted the progress of the British troops on the banks of the Raritan. He was with his command at Trenton and Princeton, and he continued in the army until the 1st of March, 1777, when he was appointed aid-de-camp to General Washington, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel.

Colonel HAMILTON remained in the family of the commander-inchief until February, 1781, and during that long and eventful period of the war, he was, in the language of Washington himself, "his principal and most confidential aid." In that auspicious station, and in the very general intercourse with the officers of the army and the principal men of the country which it created, he had ample opportunities to diffuse the knowledge of his talents and the influence of his