Early Life and Education
Hamilton was born in New York City, New York, on April 14, 1788, the third son of American founding father Alexander Hamilton and Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton.
Hamilton later wrote of his childhood:
-
- Hamilton's gentle nature rendered his house a joyous one to his children...His intercourse with his children was always affectionate and confiding, which excited in them a corresponding confidence and devotion. I distinctly recollect the scene at breakfast in the front room of the house in Broadway. My dear mother, seated as was her wont at the head of the table with a napkin in her lap, cutting slices of bread and spreading them with butter for the younger boys...When the lessons were finished the father and the elder children were called to breakfast, after which the boys were packed off to school.
When he was sixteen, his father was killed in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr. Along with his mother and siblings, Hamilton was present in the room, sitting at his father's bedside, when he died just hours after the duel.
Hamilton graduated from Columbia University in 1805 at the age of seventeen. He later studied law, and in 1809, he was admitted to the bar, and practiced law for a year in Waterford, New York.
Read more about this topic: James Alexander Hamilton
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall
But they are gone to early death, who late in school
Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.”
—Richard Eberhart (b. 1904)
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him ages of education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)