Alexander Hamilton and Provincial America: Expanding the Orbit of Scottish Culture (review)

Migration to early America often held the promise of new possibilities, primarily economic, that would, in turn, lead to new opportunities. In Elaine G. Breslaw’s Dr. Alexander Hamilton and Provincial America: Expanding the Orbit of Scottish Culture, an immigrant’s optimism is checked as Hamilton relocated in 1739–40 from Edinburgh, Scotland, a thriving city of 40,000, to Annapolis, Maryland, a colonial town of 800. Hamilton’s adaptation was a work-in-progress, if not a source of bemusement, as he reconciled his enlightened Scottish background with his new surroundings while confronting a starkly different cultural scene: “Nowhere was there a university, circulating library, literary club, or scientific society” (2). Drawing expertly upon primary sources, such as letters, gazettes, and court records, Breslaw vividly reconstructs this encounter between an expectant newcomer and an emerging culture. For readers who are discovering Hamilton, this book will introduce a unique character and bring the immigrant’s experience into sharper focus by showing how one individual navigated these dramatic changes, for, as Breslaw notes, “Dr. Hamilton’s story illustrates the metamorphosis of an early American immigrant into a citizen sharing a new, but as yet unrecognized, national identity. . . . This story of Dr. Alexander Hamilton is not just the biography of one man; it is the story of how a piece of Scotland’s intellectual world and its own germinating Enlightenment was transplanted into new soil, took root, and was molded by a new social and economic environment” (x). For readers familiar with Hamilton, this study will expand and deepen his biography, especially regarding his early life and education. The book follows Hamilton’s life chronologically and is organized in four parts: “The Scottish Scene”; “Adapting to a New World”; “Settling Down”; and “Closing Years.” Throughout, Breslaw provides extensive contextualizing of issues and events, such as ongoing developments in medicine, conflicts over taxation and importation, the contradictions of slavery, and the intricacies of gender and class relations, and makes excellent use of family correspondence to illustrate Dr. Alexander Hamilton’s state of mind and his eighteenth-century milieu.

The turning point in Hamilton’s attitude toward colonial America coincided, perhaps ironically, with his decision to return to Scotland. Hamilton even “issued a public notice of his intent to leave the province.” Breslaw elaborates: “In a broadside dated September 29, 1743, he urged his patients to pay their medical bills and, in accordance with local law, informed his creditors of their need to present their bills to him before he left” (105). Yet, before going through with this plan, Hamilton left Annapolis on May 30, 1744, accompanied by his slave, Dromo, for a four-month round-trip journey to York, Maine, to improve his health and to tour the northern colonies. Although he maintained his superior attitude toward the colonial “rusticks,” Hamilton’s detailed descriptions and witty characterizations speak to his fascination with America: “Hamilton kept a diary during the trip filled with pointed and amusing observations on the manners, morals, religious proclivities, and occupations of the people he met. Historians are in debt to his comments on geographic peculiarities, tavern entertainments, the medical profession, and the clothing, physical appearance, ethnic peculiarities, and mental quirks of people he met” (115). In Breslaw’s discussion of Hamilton’s journey, readers will recognize some familiar sites and names as Hamilton passes through Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, the latter where he visited with Justice Samuel Sewall and found Boston itself to have “excelled all towns for politeness and urbanity” (131). Hamilton returned on September 27, 1744, having traveled 1,624 miles, refreshed and inspired: “He would refashion Annapolis social life with Edinburgh and Boston as models” (152). Along these lines, Hamilton founded the Tuesday Club of Annapolis on May 14, 1745, whose activities included composing and reciting; singing, eating, and drinking; and the occasional parade. In verse, satire, and song, humor was a key element. In fact, “one of the...