The Battery. The bottom edge of Manhattan, the harbor opening out in front of you, salt air and ferry engines and a horizon full of water.
Everyone will tell you Alexander Hamilton stepped off a boat right here. He didn't. The ship out of Saint Croix put him ashore in Boston, and he came down to New York afterward like an ordinary person with luggage. What happened on this ground three years later is the better story anyway.
By seventeen seventy-five Hamilton was a student at King's College, a few blocks north of here, and he'd joined a volunteer militia company. Then more or less taken it over. They called themselves the Hearts of Oak. Green coats, leather caps stamped with the words LIBERTY OR DEATH, and drill at dawn in a churchyard before morning classes.
College students. In matching outfits. Practicing among the graves. Then going to lecture.
On the night of August twenty-third, that student militia got handed an actual military assignment. Twenty-four British cannons were si
tting on the Battery, right about here, and the Americans wanted them. So a few dozen men came down in the dark with ropes to drag them away by hand.
Anchored out in the harbor was H-M-S Asia. Sixty-four guns. She noticed.
The Asia opened fire on the waterfront while these men were standing in the open hauling artillery. They got twenty-one of the twenty-four cannons off the Battery under a live
