![]() ![]() Accounting, communication, dispatches, and all other aspects of bureaucracy were the province of midlevel clerks, sometimes called “pen pushers” or “quill drivers.” Think of Bartleby the Scrivener, the character from the Herman Melville story, who is overwhelmed by paperwork, or the law clerks in Dickens novels, staying up late into the night dipping their quill pens into ink. While working at Beekman and Cruger, Hamilton learned how to write in, as biographer Ron Chernow puts it, what was then considered a “beautiful, clear, flowing hand.”Ĭhernow notes that Hamilton “must have produced the maximum number of words that a human being can scratch out in 49 years.” Dozens of volumes of his letters and papers have been published, and archives around the country contain more still. ![]() ![]() In the 18 th century, being a clerk primarily meant doing one thing: writing. We don’t know how Hamilton was taught to write-historians believe he was privately tutored in Nevis where he grew up. At age 14, he became a clerk at Beekman and Cruger, an import/export trading house. Hamilton similarly parlayed his facility with loops and strokes to success. Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern explains how Poggio Bracciolini’s good handwriting helped him ascend from modest beginnings to papal secretary. For striving men in the pre-typewriter era, having good handwriting could be key to your rise in rank. ![]()
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