George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 7, 4th edition.

[79] a great majority, and the committee nominated Philip

Chap. VI.} 1774. July.

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 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 Macdougall 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 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,’