![[HAMILTON, ALEXANDER] The Examination of the President's Message at the Opening of Congress December 7, 1801. Revised and Corrected.](/sites/default/files/styles/auction_slider/public/images/lots/671/1526671.jpg?itok=sBB7Wu7a)
Lot Details
Lot 23
[HAMILTON, ALEXANDER] The Examination of the President's Message at the Opening of Congress December 7, 1801. Revised and Corrected.
New York: New-York Evening Post, 1802. The first separate edition, previously having appeared in newspapers only (hence the "revised and corrected"). Modern quarter red morocco. 8 3/8 x 5 inches (21 x 12.75 cm); 127, [1] pp. Generally a sound example, some pencil annotations. James Kent's copy, with his name at the head of the title and his noted purchase price of 4 dollars. Another hand has noted the author as "General Hamilton" on the title (Hamilton was a Major-General as of July 1798).
A significant association copy. James Kent was part of the same legal elite in New York as Alexander Hamilton, and he was an ardent Federalist and admirer of Hamilton and Jay. At this time of the present publication (an analysis of Jefferson's Address to Congress) he sat on the bench of the New York Supreme Court, where he was shortly to become chief judge. He wrote admiringly of Hamilton "He was blessed with a very amiable, generous, tender, and charitable disposition, and he had the most artless simplicity of any man I ever knew. It was impossible not to love as well as respect and admire him. ... He was perfectly disinterested. The selfish principle, that infirmity too often of great as well as of little minds, seemed never to have reached him. ... He was a most faithful friend to the cause of civil liberty throughout the world, but he was a still greater friend to truth and justice." (James Kent, 1832)
C
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