Among the throng of replies which burst forth from the press in opposition to the tremendous pamphlets of the “Westchester Farmer,” were two which immediately towered into chief prominence: _A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress_, and _The Farmer Refuted_. The extraordinary ability of these two pamphlets--their fulness in constitutional learning, their acumen, their affluence in statement, their cleverness in controversial repartee, their apparent wealth in the fruits of an actual acquaintance with public business--led both the “Westchester Farmer” and the public in general to attribute them to some American writer of mature years and of ripe experience--to some member of the late Congress, for example--particularly to John Jay or to William Livingston. It is not easy to overstate the astonishment and the incredulity with which the public soon heard the rumour that these elaborate and shattering literary assaults on the argumentative position of the Loyalists were, in reality, the work of a writer who was then both a stripling in years and a stranger in the country--one Alexander Hamilton, a West Indian by birth, a Franco-Scotsman by parentage, an undergraduate of King’s College by occupation, a resident within the Thirteen Colonies but little more than two years, and at the time of the publication of his first pamphlet only seventeen years of age. In the exposition of his views touching the several vast fields of thought here brought under consideration,--constitutional law, municipal law, the long line of colonial charters, colonial laws and precedents, international polity as affecting the chief nations of Christendom, justice in the abstract and justice in the concrete, human rights both natural and conventional, the physical and metaphysical conditions underlying the great conflict then impending,--it must be confessed that this beardless philosopher, this statesman not yet out of school, this military strategist scarcely rid of his roundabout, exhibits a range and precision of knowledge, a ripeness of judgment, a serenity, a justice, a massiveness both of thought and of style, which would perhaps make incredible the theory of his authorship of these pamphlets, were not this theory confirmed by his undoubted exhibition in other ways, at about the same period of his life, of the same astonishing qualities.