ersus Crown argued week after week at
Liberty Hall, and at the many New York houses where he dined of a Sunday
with his friends, Stevens, Troup, and Fish, he had persistently refused
to study the matter: there were older heads to settle it and there was
only one age for a man's education. Moreover, he had grown up with a
deep reverence for the British Constitution, and his strong aristocratic
prejudices inclined him to all the aloofness of the true conservative.
So while the patriots and royalists of King's were debating, ofttimes
concluding in sequestered nooks, Hamilton remained "The young West
Indian," an alien who cared for naught but book-learning, walking
abstractedly under the great green shade of Batteau Street while Liberty
Boys were shouting, and British soldiers swaggered with a sharp eye for
aggression. This period of philosophic repose in the midst of electric
fire darting from every point in turn and sometimes from all points at
once, endured from the October of his arrival to its decent burial in
Boston shortly after his seventeenth birthday.

Boston was sober and depressed, stonily awaiting the vengeance of the
crown for her dramatic defiance in the matter of tea. Even in that
rumbling interval, Hamilton learned, the Committee of Correspondence,
which had directed the momentous act, had been unexcited and methodical,
restraining the Mohawks day after day, hoping until the last moment that
the Collector of Customs would clear the ships and send the tea whence
it came. Hamilton heard the wrongs of the colonies discussed without any
of the excitement or pyrotechnical brilliancy to which he had become
accustomed. New York was not only the hot-bed of Toryism, but even such
ardent Republicans as William Livingston, George Clinton, and John Jay
were aristocrats, holding themselves fastidiously aloof from the rank
and file that marched and yelled under the name of Sons of Liberty. To
Hamilton the conflict had been spectacular rather than real, until he
met and moved with these sombre, undemonstrative, superficially
unpleasing men of Boston; then, almost in a flash, he realized that the
colonies were struggling, not to be relieved of this tax or that, but
for a principle; realized that three millions of people, a respectable
majority honourable, industrious, and educated, were being treated like
incapables, apprehensive of violence if they dared to protest for their
rights under the British Constitution. Hamilton