head and centre of resistance to the crown, that she had led the colonies in aggressiveness since the first Stamp Act of 1765 had shocked them from passive subjects into dangerous critics.  He had letters which admitted him to clubs and homes, and he discussed but one subject during his visit.  There were no velvet coats and lace ruffles here, except in the small group which formed the Governor’s court.  The men wore dun-coloured garments, and the women were not much livelier.  It was, perhaps, as well that he did not see John Hancock, that ornamental head-piece of patriotic New England, or the harmony of the impression might have been disturbed; but, as it was, every time he saw these men together, whether sitting undemonstratively in Faneuil Hall while one of their number spoke, or in church, or in groups on Boston Common, it was as if he saw men of iron, not of flesh and blood.  Every word they uttered seemed to have been weighed first, and it was impossible to consider such men giving their time and thought, making ready to offer up their lives, to any cause which should not merit the attention of all men.  Although Hamilton met many of them, they made no individual impression on him; he saw them only as a mighty brain, capable of solving a mighty question, and of a stern and bitter courage.

He returned to New York filled with an intense indignation against the country which he had believed too ancient and too firm in her highest principles to make a colossal mistake, and a hot sympathy for the colonists which was not long resolving itself into as burning a patriotism as any in the land.  It was not in him to do anything by halves, it is doubtful if he ever realized the half-hearted tendency of the greater part of mankind.  He studied the question from the first Stamp Act to the Tea Party.  The day he was convinced, he ceased to be a West Indian.  The time was not yet come to draw the sword in behalf of the country for which he conceived a romantic passion, which satisfied other wants of his soul, but he began at once on a course of reading which should be of use to her when she was free to avail herself of patriotic thinkers.  He also joined the debating club of the college.  His abrupt advent into this body, with his fiery eloquence and remarkable logic, was electrical.  In a day he became the leader of the patriot students.  There were many royalists in King’s, and the president, Dr. Myles Cooper, was a famous old Tory.  He looked upon this influential addition to the wrong side with deep disfavour, and when he discovered that the most caustic writer of Holt’s Whig newspaper, who had carved him to the quick and broken his controversial lances again and again, was none other than his youngest and most revolutionary pupil, his wrath knew no bounds.

With the news of the order to close the port of Boston, the wave of indignation in the colonies rose so high that even the infatuated clergy wriggled.  Philadelphia went so far as to toll her muffled bells for a day, and as for New York, then as now, the nerve-knot of the country, she exploded.  The Sons of Liberty, who had reorganized after the final attempt of England to force tea on the colonies, paraded all day and most of the night, but were, as yet, more orderly than the masses, who stormed through the streets with lighted torches, shrieking and yelling and burning the king and his ministers in effigy.