Alexander Hamilton Papers

Matricula of King’s College, [1774]

Matricula of King’s College1

[New York, 1774]

Admissions anno 1774.

David Clarkson.

Schuyler Lupton.

Jacob Shaw.

John Gaine.

John Whitaker. Left College 2d. Year.

Samuel Deall.

Horatio Smith.

Paul Randall.

John Brickell.

Daniel Moore.

Edward Cornwallis Moncrieffe. Left College 2d. Year.

James Stiles. Left the College in His 2d. Year.

James Depeyster.

Tristrim Lowther

Thomas Attwood.

Alexander Hamilton.

Nicholas Romeyn, S. M.2

D, Columbia University Libraries. This document is on page 18 of a manuscript volume entitled “The Matricula or Register of Admissions & of Graduations & of Officers employed in King’s College at New-York.”

1Although this document is not an H document, it is printed here because it is the only extant MS record of H as a student at King’s College.

This document unfortunately does not answer the question of when H actually attended King’s College. According to Hercules Mulligan, H entered King’s College “in the spring of 75 in the Sophomore Class” (“Narrative of Hercules Mulligan of the City of New York,” Hamilton Papers, Library of Congress). Robert Troup, on the other hand, recalled that he had become “acquainted with the General in the year 1773 at Kings, now Columbia College, in New York, where I was a student.… When the General entered College, he did it as a private student, and not by annexing himself to a particular class” (Robert Troup to John Mason, March 22, 1810, Hamilton Papers, Library of Congress). In referring to the class list on which H’s name appears, Mitchell writes: “The list of this class and others … may have been written in the book at a later time, not when the class entered or graduated, which would make room for error. The official roster was carelessly kept; Hamilton was doubtless at King’s ‘as a private student,’ as Troup said, in the academic year 1773–1774, and then formally entered, as per the Matricula, in 1774, perhaps ‘in the Sophomore Class’ as Mulligan remembered” (Mitchell, Hamilton description begins Broadus Mitchell, Alexander Hamilton, Youth to Maturity, 1755–1788 (New York, 1957). description ends , I, 55).

2“S. M.” is the abbreviation for student of medicine.

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