Doctor on Horseback

GENTLEMAN'S PROGRESS (267 pp.)--Dr. Alexander Hamilton, edited by Carl Bridenbaugh--Chapel Hill ($4).

This is the story of another Alexander Hamilton, a mildly libertine Scottish physician who left Maryland in 1744 on horseback, with his Negro slave Dromo, on a trip around the colonies. He hoped thereby to regain his failing health. In four months he covered 1,624 miles by horse and by sloop, got northeast as far as what is now York, Maine and northwest as far as Schenectady. During the journey he kept an Itinerarium, which, except for a collectors' limited edition in 1907, is now published for the first time.

Hamilton's Itinerarium is one of the most candid and engaging travel diaries to come down from a colonial American. It is casual to the point of slightness, a bit snobbish and of little historical importance. But it brings the speech of the time and the look of town & country to the reader in a way historians rarely do. Hamilton was contemptuous .of "aggrandized upstarts" who put on social airs, and he frankly looked down on anyone who was not a "gentleman." He loved good company, drank with relish but not to excess (the capacity of New York City's "toapers" astonished and disgusted him), and never missed a pretty face or a stayless figure. If anyone could rile him more thoroughly than a long-winded bore, it was a religious fanatic, and the inns of colonial America seemed to be cluttered with both types.

Penance in Albany. Hamilton was quick to note the prevailing temper and character of the towns he visited. Philadelphia, with its preponderance of Quaker businessmen, he found dull: "I never was in a place so populous where the gout for publick gay diversions prevailed so little . . . Some Virginia gentlemen . . . were desirous of having a ball but could find none of the feemale sex in a humour for it." New York (pop. 11,000) pleased him better, especially the conversation and the women, but in Albany the local custom of asking strangers to kiss the women "might almost pass for a pennance, for the generality of the women here, both old and young, are remarkably ugly."

Boston, whose 16,258 population made it the largest town in North America, seemed to him the most civilized in the colonies. Even so, he found that "The middling sort of people here are to a degree dissingenuous and dissembling, which appears even in their common conversation in which their indirect and dubious answers to the plainest and fairest questions show their suspicions of one another." But the women, added Hamilton, were "for the most part, free and affable as well as pritty. I saw not one prude while I was here."

Chicanery in Rhode Island. Rhode Island struck him as "the most delightful spot of ground I have seen in America . . . For rural scenes and pritty, frank girls, I found it the most agreeable place I had been in thro' all my peregrinations." To Chronicler Hamilton the American character in Rhode Island seemed no more admirable than elsewhere: "I am sorry to say that the people in their dealings one with another, and even with strangers, in matters of truck or bargain, have as bad a character for chicane and disingenuity as any of our American colonys."

He could tell when he had got back home to Maryland's climate, "for every House was an infirmary." But in spite of fever and "vapourish qualms" he stuck it out, was elected to the legislature and married the daughter of Daniel Dulany the elder, one of Maryland's richest men. Wrote one member of Hamilton's ribald Tuesday Club to a fellow member then in England: "Poor Hamilton is gone--not dead, but married."

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