Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow Page A

safe alternative reading matter for students. (Hamilton would take out books there.) An opponent of the Stamp Act and subsequent measures to saddle the colonies with oppressive taxes, Livingston was to attend the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention and become the first governor of an independent New Jersey in 1776.
    A gregarious man, William Livingston conducted Hamilton into a much more glamorous society than the one he left behind. Though benefiting from Livingston largesse, Hamilton was never mistaken for the family help, and he befriended the Livingston children, including the cerebral Brockholst, who was later an eminent Supreme Court judge and already friendly with Aaron Burr. There were also dazzling Livingston daughters to ravish the eye. As one of Burr’s friends observed of Elizabethtown at the time, “There is certainly something amorous in its very air.” 5 Hamilton observed the courtship of the beautiful, high-spirited Sarah Livingston by a young lawyer named John Jay. (So regal was Sarah Livingston’s presence that when she later attended the opera in Paris, some audience members mistook her for the queen of France.) A special rapport sprang up between Hamilton and another Livingston daughter, Catharine, known as Kitty. She was the type of woman Hamilton found irresistible: pretty, coquettish, somewhat spoiled, and always ready for flirtatious banter. Judging from a letter Hamilton wrote to her during the Revolution, one suspects that Kitty was his first romantic conquest in America:
    I challenge you to meet me in whatever path you dare. And, if you have no objection, for variety and amusement, we will even make excursions in the flowery walks and roseate bowers of Cupid. You know I am renowned for gallantry and shall always be able to entertain you with a choice collection of the prettiest things imaginable…. You shall be one of the graces, or Diana, or Venus, or something surpassing them all. 6
    It is hard to imagine that Alexander Hamilton slept under the same roof as Kitty Livingston and didn’t harbor impure thoughts.
    In this sociable world, Hamilton also befriended Livingston’s brother-in-law, William Alexander, a bluff, convivial man known as Lord Stirling because of his contested claim to a Scottish earldom. An extravagant spendthrift, he was already swamped with debt when he met Hamilton. A decade earlier, the handsome, round-faced Stirling had constructed a thousand-acre estate at Basking Ridge, adorned with stables, gardens, and a deer park in imitation of the country houses of British nobility. Like Livingston, Lord Stirling was a curious amalgam of reformer and self-styled aristocrat. He rode about in a coach emblazoned with the Stirling coat of arms and possessed a princely wardrobe of 31 coats, 58 vests, 43 pairs of breeches, 30 shirts, 27 cravats, and 14 pairs of shoes.
    If Aaron Burr is to be trusted, Lord Stirling drank his way straight through the American Revolution as a brigadier general, plied by his aide-de-camp, James Monroe, who served as his faithful cupbearer: “Monroe’s whole duty was to fill his lordship’s tankard and hear, with indications of admiration, his lordship’s long stories about himself.” 7 Burr’s barbed commentary doesn’t do justice to the bibulous Lord Stirling, who would win renown in the battle of Brooklyn. He was a literate man with eclectic interests, including mathematics and astronomy (he published a monograph on the transit of Venus), and a cofounder of the New York Society Library. Of special relevance to Hamilton’s future, he was a leading proponent of American manufactures. He bred horses and cattle, grew grapes and made wine, and produced pig iron and hemp. Lord Stirling had one final attraction for Hamilton: he also had enchanting daughters, especially the charming Catharine, always called “Lady Kitty.” She was to marry William Duer, the most notorious friend in Hamilton’s life.
    The third and most enduring tie