The Examination of the President’s Message at the Opening of Congress December 7, 1801.

HAMILTON, Alexander. [James Kent].

$28,000.00

Item Number: 131843

Printed and Published at the Office of the New York Evening Post: New York, 1802.

First separate edition of Hamilton’s analysis of Jefferson’s first Annual Message to Congress which first appeared in the Evening Post, under the signature of Lucius Crassus. Howes H112. Octavo, bound in quarter morocco. Association copy, from the library of American jurist James Kent with his ownership signature to the title page. American jurist, New York legislator and legal scholar James Kent was part of the same legal elite in New York as Hamilton, and an ardent Federalist and admirer of both Hamilton and Jay. At the time of the present publication, 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). In near fine condition. A significant association copy.

Thomas Jefferson presented his first Annual Message to Congress in writing by way of a clerk on December 8, 1801. He did not speak it to the 7th United States Congress, because he thought that would make him seem like a king, remarking "Whilst we devoutly return thanks to the beneficent Being who has been pleased to breathe into them the spirit of conciliation and forgiveness, we are bound with peculiar gratitude to be thankful to Him that our own peace has been preserved through so perilous a season, and ourselves permitted quietly to cultivate the earth and to practice and improve those arts which tend to increase our comforts."