1. Scholars differ on the year of H’s arrival in the North American colonies and the dates of his schooling there. These notes, and those which follow, were presumably made while H attended the school of Francis Barber in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. Evidence (Mitchell, Hamilton description begins Broadus Mitchell, Alexander Hamilton, Youth to Maturity, 1755–1788 (New York, 1957). description ends , I, 37, 54–55) indicates that he came to the North American colonies in October, 1772, and began his studies at King’s College in the autumn of 1773. He must have attended Francis Barber’s academy, therefore, in the winter and spring of 1773.

There are also in the Hamilton Papers in the Library of Congress in H’s writing a set of notes on the geography of North America and another set on the geography of South America. Scholars have inferred that these were made at the same time as the notes printed above. The notes on the geography of North and South America were, however, used as a basis for a brief H prepared for the State of New York in a land controversy between New York and Massachusetts in December, 1786.