In the summer of 1782 Hamilton was admitted to the bar in Albany, but soon afterward settled in New York City, where he seems to have come into practice and into fame by defending the rights of Tories. For four years after the war ended, the treatment of British sympathisers was the dominant political issue in New York. Governor Clinton advocated disfranchisement and banishment, and the Legislature enacted into law what he advised; so that when the British troops, under the peace treaty, evacuated New York, in November, 1783, loyalists who had thus far escaped the wrath of this patriot Governor, flocked to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick like birds seeking a more congenial clime, recalling the flight of the Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes one hundred years earlier. It is not easy to estimate the number who fled before this savage and violent action of the Legislature. Sir Guy Carleton, in command at New York, fixes the emigration at one hundred thousand souls. For many years the "Landing of the Loyalists" was annually commemorated at St. John, and in the cemeteries of England and Scotland are found the tombstones of these unfortunate devotees of the mother country. It is likely Clinton was too intolerant, but it was the intolerance that follows revolution. Hamilton, on the other hand, became an early advocate of amnesty and oblivion, and, although public sentiment and the Legislature were against him, he finally succeeded in modifying the one and changing the other. "Nothing is more common," he observed, "than for a free people in times of heat and violence to gratify momentary passions by letting in principles and precedents which afterwards prove fatal to themselves. If the Legislature can disfranchise at pleasure, it may soon confine all the votes to a small number of partisans, and establish an aristocracy or an oligarchy; if it may banish at discretion, without hearing or trial, no man can be safe. The name of liberty applied to such a government would be a mockery of common sense."[22] [Footnote 22: _Hamilton's Works_ (Lodge), Vol. 3, p. 450.] The differences between Congress and the Legislature respecting the collection of duties also brought Clinton and Hamilton into conflict. As early as 1776 Hamilton had considered the question whether Congress ought not to collect its own taxes by its own agents,[23] and, when a member of Congress in 1783, he urged it[24] as one of the cardinal features of an adequate federal system. In 1787 he was a member of the Legislature. Here he insisted upon having the federal revenue system adopted by the State. His argument was an extended exposition of the facts which made such action important.[25] Under the lead of Clinton, however, New York was willing to surrender the money, but not the power of collection to Congress. [Footnote 23: _Republic_, Vol. 1, p. 122.] [Footnote 24: _Madison Papers_, Vol. 1, pp. 288, 291, 380.] [Footnote 25: _Works_, Vol. 2, p. 16.]