he always subjected to his sense of right, he would have seemed formed for study and retirement. 1774. July. On Monday the fourth of July, it was carried in the committee of fifty-one that delegates should be selected to serve in the general congress. Sears, who was still foremost in the confidence of the mechanics, seconded by Peter van Brugh Livingston, a man of great intelligence, proposed John Morin Scott and Alexander Macdougall. Fitter candidates could not have been found; but they were both passed over by a great majority, and the committee nominated Philip Livingston, Alsop, Low, Duane, and Jay for the approval of the people. Of these five, Livingston as yet dreaded the thought of independence; Alsop was incompetent; Low was at heart a tory, as at a later day he avowed; Duane, justly eminent as a lawyer, was embarrassed by large speculations in Vermont lands, from which no profit could be derived but through the power of the crown. The mass of the inhabitants resolved to defeat this selection. On Wednesday the sixth of July, many of them, especially mechanics, assembled in the Fields; and, with Macdougall in the chair, they recommended the Boston policy of suspending trade, as well as approved a general congress, to which, after the example of Virginia, they proposed to elect representatives by a colonial convention. It has been kept in memory that on this occasion a young man from abroad, so small and delicate in his organization that he appeared to be much younger than perhaps he really was, took part in the debate before the crowd. They asked one another the name of the gifted stranger, who shone like a star first seen above a haze, of whose rising no one had taken note. He proved to be Alexander Hamilton, a West Indian. His mother, while he was yet a child, had left him an orphan and poor. A father's care he seems never to have known. The first written trace of his existence is in 1766, when his name occurs as witness to a legal paper executed in the Danish island of Santa Cruz. Three years later, when he had become " a youth," he "contemned the grovelling condition of a clerk," fretted at the narrow bounds of his island cage, and to a friend of his own years confessed his ambition. "I would willingly risk my life," said he, "though not my character, to exalt my station. I mean to prepare the way for futurity; we have seen such schemes successful when the projector is constant." That way he prepared by integrity of conduct, diligence, and study. After an education as a merchant, during which he once at least conducted a voyage, and once had the charge of his employer's business, he found himself able to repair to New York, where he entered the college before the end of 1773. Trained from childhood to take care of himself, he possessed a manly self-reliance. His first sympathies in the contest had been on the British side against the 1774. July. Americans, but he soon changed his opinions; and in July, 1774, cosmopolitan New York, where he had neither father nor mother, nor sister nor brother, nor one person in whose veins ran the same blood as his own, adopted the volunteer from the tropics as its son. The committee of fifty-one, with some of whom Hamilton was to be bound by the closest political ties, keeping steadily in view the hope of conciliation with England, disavowed the meeting in the Fields. A minority of nine, Sears, Macdougall, Van Brugh Livingston being of the number, in their turn disavowed the committee from which they withdrew. The conservative party, on their side, offered resolutions which Jay had drafted, and which seemed to question the conduct of Boston in destroying the tea; but the people, moved by the eloquence of John Morin Scott, rejected the whole series, as wanting in vigor, sense, and integrity, and tending to disunion. Thus began the conflict of two parties which were to increase in importance and spread throughout the country. The one held to what was established, and made changes only from necessity; the other welcomed reform, and went out to meet it. The one anchored on men of property; the other on the mass of the people: the one, mildly loving liberty, was ever anxious for order; the other, firmly attached to order which it never doubted its power to maintain, was anxious only for freedom: the one distrusted the multitude as capable of rashness; the other suspected the few as at heart the enemies to popular power. July. During this strife in New York, the inhabitants of 1774. South Carolina held in Charleston a meeting which continued through three days. The merchants, among whom were factors for British houses, agreed with the planters in the necessity of a congress, to which both parties, by way of compromise, referred the regulation of commerce. As the election of deputies was to be contested, the name of each voter was registered, and the ballot kept open till midnight on the seventh. It then appeared that the planters had carried Gadsden, Lynch, and John Rutledge, the boldest members of the congress of 1765, with Edward Rutledge and Middleton. The delegates elect were empowered to agree to a suspension of exports as well as imports. Besides this, there was appointed a general committee of ninety-nine, of whom the disproportionate number of thirty were taken from Charleston, and nearly all the rest from the parishes near the sea. In due time, the house of assembly, meeting at eight in the morning, just half an hour before the governor sent to prorogue them, confirmed these proceedings and ratified the choice of delegates to congress. The The convention of Pennsylvania, which, with Thomas Willing for its president, was but an echo of the opinion of Dickinson, recommended an indemnity to the East India company, dissuaded from suspending trade, and advised the gentler method of a firm and decent claim of redress. idea of independence they disowned and utterly abhorred. If Britain would repeal the obnoxious acts, they were ready to engage their obedience to the acts of navigation, and also to settle an annual revenue on the king, subject to the control of parliament. Instead of electing delegates themselves, they referred the choice to the proprietary assembly, in which Quakers and royalists had a majority; for Dickinson from the first resolved to maintain the proprietary government and charter. These views, which were intended as instructions from the people to the men who might be chosen to represent them in congress, Dickinson accompanied with a most ela borate argument, in which with chilling erudition the rights of the colonies were confirmed by citations from a long train of lawyers, philosophers, poets, statesmen, and divines, from the times of Sophocles and Aristotle to Beccaria and Blackstone. Tenderly susceptible to the ideas of justice and right, he refused to believe that a British ministry or king could be deaf to his appeals; and he shrunk from perilling the fortunes and lives of millions. His success in allaying the impassioned enthusiasm of patriotism went beyond his intentions. The assembly of Pennsylvania, July. which was suddenly called together on the eighteenth 1774. of July, passed him over in electing their delegates to the continental congress, and preferred Galloway, their speaker, whose loyalty to the king admitted of no question, and who was suffered to draw up his own instructions. In New Jersey, Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister, president of Princeton College, and "as high a Son of Liberty as any man in America," met the committee at New Brunswick; and with William Livingston labored to instruct their delegates that the tea should not be paid for. The matter was left to the general congress, to which William Livingston was chosen. In New Hampshire, the members of its convention brought with them little stocks of money, contributed by the several towns to defray the expenses of a representation in congress. The inhabitants of that province also solemnized their action by keeping a day of fasting and public prayer. Massachusetts did the same; and Gage, who looked with stupid indifference on the spectacle of thirteen colonies organizing themselves as one people, on occasion of the fast issued a proclamation against "hypocrisy and sedition." Meantime, New York had grown weary of dissensions. The persons nominated for congress gave in writing a satisfactory profession of their zeal for liberty; and, on the twenty-seventh of July, the nomination was unanimously ratified by the inhabitants. Yet the delegation was luke. warm and divided, leaving Virginia to give the example of energy and courage. Dunmore had issued writs for an assembly; but the dele gates from the counties of Virginia none the less came together in convention. Illness detained Jefferson on the road, but he sent for inspection a paper which foreshadowed the declaration of independence. It was presented by Peyton Randolph, and printed by some of the delegates. Enumerating the grievances which affected all the colonies, it made a special complaint of a wrong to Virginia. "For the most trifling reasons," said he, " and sometimes for no conceivable reason at all, his majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary tendency. The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But, previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa; yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty's negative; thus preferring the immediate advantage of a few British corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice." Of these words every heart acknowledged the justice. Moreover, the Fairfax resolves, in which George Mason and Washington had given their solemn judgment against the slave-trade, were brought by the Fairfax delegates before the convention; and, in August, that body came to the unanimous vote: "After the first day of November next, we will neither ourselves import nor purchase any slave or slaves imported by any other person, either from Africa, the West Indies, or any other place." 1774. Aug. On the affairs of Massachusetts, the temper of the Virginians ran exceedingly high. "An innate spirit of freedom," such were the words of Washington, "tells me that the measures which the administration are most violently pursuing are opposed to every principle of natural justice." He was certain that it was neither the wish nor the interest of any government on the continent, separately or collectively, to set up independence; but he rejected indignantly the claim of parliament, and saw no "reason to expect any |