John Jay

Saving King’s College: Hamilton and Columbia University

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Columbia University is one of the most distinguished educational institutions in the world.  US News ranks it as one of the top colleges in the country and it has a stellar reputation for academics and research.  (Not to mention, my little brother Sid graduated from Columbia a few years ago!) King’s College held a special place in Hamilton’s affections.  His two year experience as a student was a catalyst for his revolutionary ideas and the basis for some of the most important and long-lasting friendships, including his friendship with Robert Troup.  King’s College was a fundamentally Tory institution, and during Hamilton’s time there, college president Myles Cooper was vehemently opposed to the revolutionary sentiment in New York.

In fact, as David C. Humphrey writes in From King’s College to Columbia, 1746-1800:

“Probably half or more of all the King’s College students and alumni living in 1776 became loyalists.  so did Myles Cooper, four of the five other men who taught liberal arts at King’s between 1770 and 1777, and more than two-thirds of the governors who participated in policy making during the early 1770s.  The college leaders conceived of their institution as a bulwark of the established order, not as its critic.  On the very eve of the Revolution they sought to strengthen the college’s ties to the Crown.”

In Stand, Columbia: a History of Columbia University in the City of New York, 1754-2004, Robert McCaughey writes that “Tory loyalities and eight years out of operation had nearly consigned” King’s College to the “dustbin of history.”

James Duane, the first postwar mayor of New York City, who had come under scrutiny for siding with Hamilton in the Rutgers v. Waddington case and limiting the application of the Trespass Act of 1783, was a major advocate for saving the college.  Duane, along with George Clinton, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton, spearheaded an effort to reopen the college under the auspices of the New York state legislature.  In early 1784, Duane initiated a discussion in the New York Senate, and “on March 24, 1784, the senate received a ‘Petition of Governors of King’s College’ urging adoption of Duane’s proposal.”

The Columbia website states:

“In 1784, Hamilton and fellow state legislator John Jay (Kings College 1764) were instrumental in reviving King’s College as Columbia College. Hamilton served as a regent of Columbia from 1784 to 1787, and as a trustee from 1787 until his death on July 11, 1804, when he was shot in a duel by his political rival Aaron Burr. Hamilton is buried in the Trinity Church cemetery. The Alexander Hamilton Medal, presented each year by the Columbia College Alumni Association, is the highest tribute awarded to a member of the Columbia College community. Winners include Columbia president Dwight D. Eisenhower and alumni Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.”

On April 13, 1787, Hamilton, Duane, and Jay’s efforts paid off and the New York Legislature approved a new charter that allowed the college more freedom and self-government than the more restrictive 1784 charter.   Robert A. McCaughey writes:

“In point of fact, the 1787 charter made the college substantially more private than King’s College under the 1754 charter or Columbia College under the 1784 charter.  None of its twenty-four trustees were to be state officeholders serving as ex officio members, and all replacements for future trustees were to be elected by incumbents.  The board was henceforth to be wholly self-perpetuating, as it would remain until 1908, when provisions were first made for alumni nominations to the board.  No less important in terms of the institution’s future identity, the charter explicitly linked for the first time governance and locale by its prepositional designation of ‘the Trustees of Columbia College in the City of New York..'”

This 1787 charter was the foundation upon which Columbia College was built, and which allowed the college to grow over time as an institution.

Hamilton’s Views on Race and Slavery: Jay’s Treaty and the Camillus Letters

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One of the most unpopular positions that Hamilton took in his political career was his outspoken defense of the Jay Treaty. The provisions of the treaty were made public in the spring of 1795, and chaos erupted in response.   Jeffersonians took up the cry: “Damn John Jay! Damn every one that won’t damn John Jay!  Damn every one that won’t put lights in his windows and sit up all night damning John Jay!!!”

Hamilton risked his popularity, and even his safety to defend Jay’s Treaty.  He was the sole voice to publicly support the treaty amidst a flood of negative sentiment.  In fact, a mob attempted to stone Hamilton at a public meeting in New York for his defense of the treaty.

One specific aspect of Hamilton’s Camillus letters deals with the issue of slavery and natural law.  During the Revolution, the British had issued Lord Dunmore’s proclamation, offering freedom to slaves who left their masters and joined the British army.  According to Michael D. Chan, the actions of the British “infuriated southern slaveholders, especially because many of them were groaning under the weight of debts owed to British citizens.”  These Southerners insisted that any treaty with Britain include a provision for either returning the slaves or compensating the slaveowners for their loss.

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However, as Colleen A. Sheehan states: “The Jay Treaty provided for neither restoration of nor compensation for the slaves carried away.  This was a bitter pill for many Americans not only because of financial loss, but because of how the matter had been handled by the British from the state.”

Hamilton addressed the issue in his Camillus letters as follows:

  • IV.—The stipulation relates to “negroes or other property of the American inhabitants”; putting negroes on the same footing with any other article. The characteristic of the subject of the stipulation being property of American inhabitants, whatever had lost that character could not be the object of the stipulation. But the negroes in question, by the laws of war, had lost that character; they were therefore not within the stipulation.Why did not the United States demand the surrender of captured vessels, and of all other movables, which had fallen into the hands of the enemy? The answer is, because common sense would have revolted against such a construction. No one could believe that an indefinite surrender of all the spoils or booty of a seven-years’ war was ever intended to be stipulated; and yet the demand for a horse, or an ox, or a piece of furniture, would have been as completely within the terms “negroes and other property,” as a negro; consequently, the reasoning which proves that one is not included, excludes the other.The silence of the United States as to every other article is therefore a virtual abandonment of that sense of the stipulation which requires the surrender of negroes.
  • V.—In the interpretation of treaties, things odious or immoral are not to be presumed. The abandonment of negroes, who had been induced to quit their masters on the faith of official proclamation, promising them liberty, to fall again under the yoke of their masters, and into slavery, is as odious and immoral a thing as can be conceived. It is odious, not only as it imposes an act of perfidy on one of the contracting parties, but as it tends to bring back to servitude men once made free. The general interests of humanity conspire with the obligation which Great Britain had contracted towards the negroes, to repel this construction of the treaty, if another can be found.

Hamilton’s response to the issue of the British freeing of slaves during the war was nothing short of radical.   Using the framework of the laws of war, Hamilton put forth salient and controversial points relating to the morality of slavery.  Hamilton challenged the idea that freed slaves could be properly grouped with other types of “property” referred to in the treaty.  Additionally, Hamilton called the idea of returning freed slaves to slavery “odious” and “immoral,” despite the fact that slavery was prevalent throughout the Union.

Hamilton’s fearless defense of a treaty he believed in, even at the height of its unpopularity, demonstrates to me Hamilton’s commitment to stand for something, no matter what the personal or political cost.

Read the full Camillus letters here.

Hamilton’s Views on Race and Slavery: Enlisting Black Soldiers in the Continental Army

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In a March 14, 1779 letter to John Jay, then-president of the Continental Congress, Hamilton advocated a proposal to raise three or four battalions of black soldiers.  This was a project that Hamilton and his friend and fellow abolitionist John Laurens came up with together, and John Laurens delivered the letter to Jay.  In the letter, Hamilton stated:

The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks, makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience; and an unwillingness to part with property of so valuable a kind will furnish a thousand arguments to show the impracticability or pernicious tendency of a scheme which requires such a sacrifice. But it should be considered, that if we do not make use of them in this way, the enemy probably will; and that the best way to counteract the temptations they will hold out will be to offer them ourselves. An essential part of the plan is to give them their freedom with their muskets. This will secure their fidelity, animate their courage, and I believe will have a good influence upon those who remain, by opening a door to their emancipation. This circumstance, I confess, has no small weight in inducing me to wish the success of the project; for the dictates of humanity and true policy equally interest me in favour of this unfortunate class of men.

In the book Black Patriots and Loyalists, Alan Gilbert describes the role of black soldiers in both the Loyalist and patriot cause.  The British actively recruited black soldiers, with Lord Dunmore’s November 1775 proclamation.  The proclamation stated that all indentured servants and slaves “free” who were “able and willing to wear arms.”  While black soldiers had been part of the colonial militias, Washington had refused to accept them into the official Continental Army.  However, Lord Dunmore’s proclamation prompted Washington’s decision to finally accept black soldiers in the army on December 31, 1775.  In 1781, during the Battle of Yorktown, when Hamilton was commanding a battalion of troops under Lafayette, Lieutenant Colonel de Gimat’s battalion was composed of a majority of black soldiers.

According to the Freedom Trail Foundation:

By 1779, 15% of the Continental Army and colonial militias were made of men of African decent. They saw action in every single major battle including Ticonderoga, Monmouth, Valley Forge, Princeton, and Washington’s Delaware crossing.

Despite the opposition of his contemporaries, and Washington’s initial refusal, Hamilton and Laurens persisted in advocating for the acceptance of black soldiers into the Continental Army.  Hamilton’s responses to the racist views of his contemporaries foreshadowed his lifelong commitment to the cause of abolition.  In sharp contrast to the blatant racism of “Enlightenment” thinker Jefferson, Hamilton never wavered on his philosophical opposition to slavery.