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If Men Were Angels

Richard Nisley
Great on line book by my friend Richard Nisley. It really brings the beginning of our national government to life.




"If Men Were Angels - Chapter 4: Untrodden Ground" 

History - Early American Released - Feb 11, 2013
"GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE FIRST CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES"

"CHAPTER 4: UNTRODDEN GROUND"

"While Madison and Jefferson were born into the Virginia aristocracy, Alexander Hamilton was born on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean, in near poverty. His was a tale right out of Horatio Alger, the poor boy who works hard and rises to middle-class respectability, or in Hamilton’s case, upper-class respectability.
Adding further resistance to Hamilton’s climb was that he was born out of wedlock. His father and mother never married. His father disappeared when he was nine and his mother died when he was eleven. His mother taught him to read, and the books she owned--some 30 in all--constituted his sole inheritance. Not yet a teen, Hamilton went to work clerking for a wealthy merchant on the nearby island of St. Croix. The merchant thought so highly of him that when he became ill and went to New York to recuperate, he put Hamilton in charge of his business. Hamilton was 14 and kept the business running smoothly until the merchant’s return. At 16, Hamilton was sent to America by his Scottish tutor Hugh Knox, a Princeton graduate who was the first to recognize his genius."








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