July. CHAP. selves strenuously to secure the management of affairs VI. to men of property. For this end they relied on 1774 the ability of John Jay, a young lawyer of New York, whose name now first appears conspicuously in the annals of his country. Descended from Huguenot refugees, educated in the city at its college, of the severest purity of morals, a hard student, an able writer, a ready speaker; recently connected with the family of Livingston by marriage; his superior endowments, his activity and his zeal for liberty, tempered by a love for order, made him for a quarter of a century distinguished in his native state. At that time he joined the dignity of manhood to the energy of youth. He was both shy and proud, and his pride, though it became less visible, suffered no diminution from time. Tenacious of his purposes and his opinions, sensitive to indignities and prone to sudden resentments, not remarkable for self-possession, with a countenance not trained to concealment, neither easy of access, nor quick in his advances, gifted with no deep insight into character, he had neither talents nor inclination for intrigue; and but for his ambition, in which none exceeded him, he would have seemed formed for study and retire ment. On Monday, the fourth day 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 MacDougal. Fitter candidates could not have been found; but they were both passed over by VI. 1774. July. a great majority, and the committee nominated Philip CHAP. Livingston, Alsop, Low, Duane, and Jay for the ap proval 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 he could derive no profit 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 MacDougal in the chair, they recommended the Boston policy of suspending trade, and 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 appears 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," 66 July. CHAP. fretted at the narrow bounds of his island cage, and VI. to a friend of his own years confessed his ambition. 1774. "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 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, MacDougal, 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. VI. Thus began the conflict of two parties which CHAP. were to increase in importance and spread throughout the country. The one held to what was estab- 1774. July. lished, 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. During this strife in New York, the inhabitants of 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 faithful 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. In due time the house of assembly, meeting at eight in the morning, just half an hour before the governor could send to prorogue them, confirmed these proceedings and ratified the choice of delegates. "Don't pay for an ounce of the tea," was the reiterated message from South Carolina, CHAP. 1774. July. The convention of Pennsylvania, which 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. The idea of independence they disowned and utterly abhorred. If Britain on her side 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. 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 elaborate 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 suceptible to the ideas of justice and right, he refused to believe that a British ministry or king could be deaf to his appeals. Willing to sacrifice himself and his own estate, he shrunk only 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, which was suddenly called together on the eighteenth of July, passed him over in electing their delegates to the continental congress, and preferred Galloway their speaker, whose loyalty was unsuspected. In New Jersey, Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister, president of Princeton college, and "as high |