PAGE 131.  “The Fields” was the old name for the City Hall Park.

PAGE 133.  I have inferred that the speech Hamilton made on this occasion was a spontaneous outburst of the same thought which he elaborated a few weeks later in his history-making pamphlets.  Wherever it has been possible, I have used his own words, for he must have talked much as he wrote.

PAGE 136.  “Indeed he was the first to perceive and develop the idea of a real union of the people of the United States”—­“History of the Constitution of the United States” by George Ticknor Curtis, who also comments at length upon his having been the chief force in bringing the discontent of the colonists to a head and precipitating the Revolution.

PAGE 145.  There is space only for Hamilton’s share in these battles.  I am obliged to assume that the reader knows his Revolutionary history.

PAGE 165.  Nothing can be told here of Laurens’s private history beyond the statements that his too sensitive mind held him responsible for the accidental death of a younger brother, and that he had married a woman in England, whom he had left at the altar, to join, with all possible haste, the fighting forces in America, and whom he never saw again.  If this meets the eye of his family and they care to trust me with the necessary papers, I shall be glad to write a life of Laurens.

PAGE 196.  This verse was found in a little bag on Mrs. Hamilton’s neck when she died at the age of ninety-seven.

PAGE 208.  “At the age of three and twenty he had already formed well-defined, profound, and comprehensive views on the situation and wants of these states.  He had clearly discerned the practicability of forming a confederated government and adapting it to their peculiar condition, resources, and exigencies.  He had wrought out for himself a political system, far in advance of the conceptions of his contemporaries, and one which in the case of those who most opposed him in life, became, when he was laid in a premature grave, the basis on which this government was consolidated; on which to the present day it has been administered; and on which, alone, it can safely rest in that future which seems to stretch out its unending glories before us.”—­GEORGE TICKNOR CURTIS.

PAGE 209.  This letter from Hamilton to Elizabeth Schuyler, from which this extract is taken, was first published in Martha Lamb’s “History of New York,” A.S.  Barnes & Co., New York.

PAGE 226.  Burr was aide-de-camp to Washington for six weeks, beginning the last week in May, 1776.  He hated the work and left abruptly, incurring Washington’s contempt and dislike.  The charge of his friends that Hamilton poisoned the Chief’s mind against him is wholly unfounded.  Washington made up his own mind about men, and there is no evidence that the two young men met except in the most casual manner before this spring of 1782.  Of course it is possible that a diligent reading of obscure correspondence