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Alexander Hamilton and the Creation of the United States

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Letter from Hamilton to Edward Stevens, 1769 (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

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As a young orphan, clerking for trader Nicholas Cruger in St. Croix, Hamilton wrote this, his earliest surviving letter, to his friend Edward Stevens, who was studying at King's College in New York: "My Ambition is so prevalent that I contemn the grov'ling condition of a Clerk. . . I wish there was a War." By 1773, Hamilton himself had gone to New York and was studying at King's College (now Columbia University).


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