Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow Page B

formed by Hamilton was with Elias Boudinot, a lawyer who later became president of the Continental Congress and who owned copper and sulfur mines. A balding man with a jowly face and a smile that radiated benign intelligence, Boudinot was an innkeeper’s son and, like Hamilton, descended from French Huguenots. Such was his piety that he became the first president of the American Bible Society. As an organizer of the Elizabethtown Academy, he had pushed for the admission of “a number of free scholars in this town” and would have embraced heartily a poor but deserving youth such as Hamilton. 8
    As a regular visitor to Boudinot’s mansion, Boxwood Hall, Hamilton was exposed to a refined world of books, political debate, and high culture. Boudinot’s wife, Annie, wrote verse that George Washington complimented as “elegant poetry,” and this bookish family gathered each evening to hear biographies and sacred histories read aloud. 9 Hamilton’s friendship with the Boudinots was so intimate that when their infant daughter, Anna Maria, contracted a fatal illness in September 1774, Hamilton kept a vigil by the sickly child and composed an affecting elegy after she died. This poem highlights a notable capacity for empathy in Hamilton, who dared to write it in the voice of the grieving mother. Since Hamilton had at least one sibling who had died in infancy or childhood, the poem may have summoned up memories of his own mother’s hardships:
    For the sweet babe, my doting heart
    Did all a mother’s fondness feel;
    Careful to act each tender part
    And guard from every threatening ill.
    But what alas! availed my care?
    The unrelenting hand of death,
    Regardless of a parent’s prayer
    Has stopped my lovely infant’s breath— 10
    Later on, friends would comment on the almost maternal solicitude that Hamilton showed for friends or family members in distress.
    As a young man in a constant rush, scarcely pausing for breath, Hamilton did not dally in Elizabethtown for more than six months. Nevertheless, this fleeting period may have left its imprint on his politics. He hobnobbed with wealthy, accomplished men who lived like English nobility even as they agitated for change. These men wanted to modify the social order, not overturn it—a fair description of Hamilton’s future politics. At this juncture, Hamilton’s New Jersey patrons rejected national independence as a rash option, favored reconciliation, and repeatedly invoked their rights as English subjects. Far from wanting separation from the British empire, they favored fuller integration into it. Britain remained their beau ideal, if a somewhat faded one. Hamilton later admitted to having had a “strong prejudice” for the British viewpoint while at Elizabethtown and apparently leaned toward monarchism. Like his mentors, he would always be an uneasy and reluctant revolutionary who found it hard to jettison legal forms in favor of outright rebellion. 11 Mingling with Presbyterians may also have influenced his politics. The denomination was associated with the Whig critique of the British Crown, while Anglicans tended to be Tories and more often supported British imperial policy toward the colonies and an established church.
    As Hamilton contemplated his next educational step, there were only nine colleges in the colonies to consider. William Livingston and Elias Boudinot sat on Princeton’s board of trustees—Livingston was such a trusted friend of the former president Aaron Burr that he had delivered his eulogy—and it would have been impolitic, not to say rude, for Hamilton to resist their entreaties to at least scout out the college. The school already had a contingent of West Indian students, and President John Witherspoon was so eager to augment their numbers (or tap the money of rich sugar planters for professorships) that he had issued a rousing newspaper appeal the previous year, an “Address to the Inhabitants of Jamaica and the Other West Indian Islands on