Autograph Letter Signed as Academy Cadet, West Point, New York, March 20, 1843.3pp.+ address leaf. To his sister, Miss Sylvia Hamilton, Attica, NY.
A long letter by a 21 year-old romantic about Academy events and his black horse, “Sultan” (“the noblest steed we have”), with personal, philosophic – and literary - comments. He defends “my favorite”, Byron, against his sister’s objection that the poet had “no moral tendency”. But “as to Dickens, whose simplicity you so much admire, his writings are mostly agreeable, but he has shown himself unworthy of American respect. A man who criticizes National character and selects for his criterion the most degraded portion of every class cannot be actuated by motives of impartiality and seeks only to give vent to his prejudice…”
A year earlier, Charles Dickens had made his first trip to the United States, where he was lionized. But his 1842 “American Notes for General Circulation”, strongly condemned Southern slavery and lampooned the coarse manners of Yankees he met, from a Black stage-driver to white fellow passengers on a canal boat. Young critic Hamilton was not, in fact, pro-slavery, but rather a stalwart defender of American “National character”; he later fought for the Union during the Civil War.
Born in New York, Hamilton, after being wounded in the Mexican conflict, was a farmer in Wisconsin until the War, when he became a Union Brigadier General, commanding a Division in the Peninsula campaign, where he ran afoul of General McClellan, who relieved him of command – over the mild objections of President Lincoln. Transferred to Mississippi, Hamilton made more powerful enemies of his superiors, including General Grant, who happily accepted his resignation in April 1863. Hamilton never returned to the Army, becoming a paper manufacturer in Milwaukee, where he died some thirty years later.