Please note: we are updating this post as we learn more. Most recent update: March 11, 2025.

Assistant Curator Amy Brooks and Curator Jessy Randall write:

A mystery is unfolding in Special Collections. We recently discovered we have a letter, signed “Alex Hamilton,” dated December 23, 1778. Is it an original? A draft? A copy? If it’s a copy, is it contemporary with Hamilton, or later? Could it be a forgery?

Here’s the story:

On Monday, February 17, Anna Malczyk of the University of Oxford sent a research request, and we pulled out the Josiah Holmes Papers, a modest archival box of materials, gifted to Special Collections in 1963. Malczyk had discovered (through the library catalog) that the papers included two letters written by Alexander Hamilton’s close friend John Laurens. When we looked in the folder, we found the Laurens letters and — much to our surprise — an uncataloged 3-page manuscript letter signed “Alex Hamilton” and “Evan Edwards.”

Here’s a PDF of all three letters in Ms 17, Box 1, Folder 1:

The first thing we did was read the Hamilton/Evans letter. It’s a narrative describing a duel fought on December 23, 1778, between John Laurens and Major General Charles Lee. Yes, THAT Laurens and Lee, from the musical!

The second thing we did was look up whether Alexander Hamilton ever signed himself just “Alex.” Yes, he did, and we learned that the Library of Congress (LOC) has a very similar letter to ours, dated one day later, December 24, 1778, also signed “Alex Hamilton.”

A transcription of the LOC letter is available from the National Archives. Our letter and the LOC letter have almost the same text. Both look like drafts, with cross-outs and changes. Some examples: our three-page letter has an asterisk at the bottom of page 2 after “He said every man,” leading to a note on page 3, whereas the five-page LOC letter has the note incorporated into the text on page 4; our letter has “sentiment” in one place where LOC has “opinion”; and there are several differences in abbreviations of “Colonel” and “General.”

To our eyes, the handwriting of our letter and that of the LOC version seem similar, but Malczyk, who knows a lot more about it, does not believe Hamilton wrote the letter at CC. She points out Hamilton’s use of the long “s” in the word “Wednesday” in the LOC version:

In another place, though, the word “politeness” in both the LOC and CC copies have the long “s”:

Malczyk says the letter at CC’s “handwriting style, paper and ink are not typical of the 18th century.” Papermaker Jillian Sico, however, visited Special Collections and took a close, in-person look at the paper, and believes it could be from 1780.

On the advice of CC history professor Amy Kohout, we contacted Hamilton scholar Joanne Freeman to ask for her thoughts. She responded: “Given the importance of the two seconds in a duel coming up with a mutually agreeable account of the duel after it happened, I think that your copy — dated the day of the duel — might be a first draft (with that asterisked addition) which was then put in final form in the copy at the Library of Congress.  It was relatively common for the two seconds to jointly compose a final account of a duel — which was important because it would serve as the final account of ‘honor being satisfied.’ ” So we now postulate that our December 23 letter could be a first draft of the LOC’s December 24 letter, perhaps in Evans’s hand rather than Hamilton’s. (We haven’t been able to find an example of Evans’s handwriting.)

Now let’s go back to those Laurens letters, dated December 3 and 7, in which Laurens challenges Lee. Malczyk summarized the context for us:

“Major General Charles Lee was court-martialled after the battle of Monmouth in 1778 on account of his supposedly cowardly, disrespectful and insubordinate conduct [toward General George Washington]. Col Laurens was a witness against him at the trial, and when Lee subsequently continued to speak negatively of Washington, Laurens challenged him to a duel to defend Washington’s honour – quite an unusual thing to do, as generally men fought their own duels. Regardless, Laurens and Lee arranged the encounter; we see from the letters here that an original date was set, but was then postponed on account of unavoidable military business. Cols Hamilton and Edwards served respectively as their seconds, and the duel was fought on 23 December 1778. Both men fired, Laurens lightly wounded Lee, and the affair was put to an end. Typically of the time – to indemnify against future disputes – the seconds wrote an account of what happened and both signed it.”

Malczyk does not believe the letter we have at CC is in Laurens’s hand. “Perhaps one needs to have been staring at his handwriting for years, but the differences jump out at me right away,” she says.

(To add to the uncertainty, it’s widely known that Laurens sometimes wrote with his left hand and sometimes with his right. See this tumblr for examples. But neither the left nor right handwriting matches what we have.)

Malczyk points out, too, that letters written a few days apart would not both be on a single sheet of paper. When we asked if they could be drafts, she said this would be unlikely, as people don’t usually sign their drafts — and that in general, Laurens wasn’t known for making or keeping drafts. Papermaker Jillian Sico took a close-up look at this letter, too, and recognized the paper as bleached, a 19th century process. So this letter is likely a copy made decades after the original. There’s a partly-missing blind stamp at the top of the Laurens letter that looks like this when we unfold the sheet:

We think it says “ine” at the top right and “ote” at the bottom right. Likely an ownership stamp, but whose? Tantalizingly, it is only partly removed, not completely — why?

All that said, Malczyk thinks “the content itself, the ‘voice’ of the letters, and the structure certainly do fit Laurens, so my suspicion is that somebody made this copy directly from the original, preserving the content and layout. This is especially important as I’m not sure the location of the original is known, or if it even exists anymore – so this remains a valuable historical record.” Indeed, as far as we can tell, the original Laurens letter is nowhere to be found, so our copy may be the only one extant. Until recently, Dianne Durante’s incredibly thorough blog post on the Lee-Laurens duel stated “John Laurens issued a challenge to Lee (we don’t have it).” Her post now additionally directs readers to the post you are reading right now.

Multiple print sources quote Laurens’s challenge to Lee. The earliest we’ve found is Memoirs of the Life of the Late Charles Lee, Esq. Second in Command in the Service of the United States of America During the Revolution, published 1792. In it, Lee quotes, or paraphrases, the letter he received from Laurens (Lee uses quotation marks but has changed the point of view to third person): “…that in contempt of decency and truth, he [Lee] had publicly abused General Washington, in the grossest terms … the relation in which he [Laurens] stood to him [Washington], forbade him to pass such conduct unnoticed; he therefore demanded the satisfaction he was entitled to, and desired, that as soon as General Lee should think himself at liberty, he would appoint time and place, and name his weapons” (p. 47). Versions of this phrasing appear in multiple print sources for two centuries, either without citation or citing previous print sources. The only citation we have found to an actual autograph letter is in Gregory D. Massey’s John Laurens and the American Revolution, published in 2000. Massey cites … wait for it … the copy here at Colorado College. (See chapter 6, note 59, page 264.)

We have lingering questions. How did the Hamilton/Evans and Laurens letters end up with the Holmes family in the first place? Was the family connected to these Revolutionary War personages? We’ve looked at biographies of Hamilton, Evans, Laurens, Lee, and Washington, and cannot find a Holmes connection. And yet as far as we can tell, the Holmes family weren’t autograph collectors – all other materials in the collection are related to the family, including an 1832 letter from John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) to Josiah Holmes (1790-1860). So, if any of the letters are forgeries, deliberately intended to trick a buyer, who benefitted?

Whatever they are, the letters are a fine recounting of a dramatic (and thankfully non-lethal) duel. Maybe a historian and/or Hamilton super-fan will shed additional light on our mystery in the future.

Dorothy Mierow (1920-2000) was the daughter of CC president Charles Mierow. She served as Curator of the CC Museum from 1956 to 1962, and then was part of the first Peace Corps group to travel to Nepal. She is the author of several books, including Thirty Years in Pokhara, This Beautiful Nepal, and Himalayan Birds and Flowers. We have a collection of her papers, Ms 383.

Just look at these pages from her 1973 sketchbook. Just look at them!

by Clare Trissel Davis, Colorado College Project Archivist

As Archivist for the three-year grant-funded History of CC Project, I have had the opportunity to unearth important protest stories from our institutional memory. The Office of the Dean of Faculty records that I’ve acquired from the basement of Armstrong include information about a student group called Commitment, assembled on campus in the early 60s, that opposed nuclear armament. Pictured below are students from Commitment attending a peace rally in Washington D.C. on February 16, 1962.

In its statement of purpose, Commitment claimed that “as young people living under the threat of nuclear war, we are deeply concerned for the survival of civilization. We are not protesting our armed forces, but we seriously question the moral and practical value of nuclear arms as a means of deterring war and securing peace. We are campaigning for Life, not only for ourselves, but for all Beings which possess this gift.” The group sought to challenge the Springs community to accept responsibility for “supporting alternatives to the arms race” and hosted three follow-up meetings to the College’s 1962 Symposium: “War or Peace in the Sixties: The Issue of Survival in the Nuclear Age” including a talk by Dr. Glenn Snyder on “Deterrence and Defense in Nato Strategy.”

Both Dean Lloyd E. Worner and President Louis T. Benezet supported the group. Benezet acknowledged that some of the 15 “idealistic” students on campus were the brightest and most talented in the student body. Though the group was heckled and challenged by other students on campus, the administration defended the legitimacy of their perspective.

Guest post by Hongli Zeng, CC class of 2024.

Today, with approximately 20 students per class, Chinese students make up the largest international student community at Colorado College. Their story dates back to as early as the late 1910s.

In the summer of 2022, CC History Major Hongli Zeng conducted primary-source research with the abundant archives provided by the Special Collection. By looking at documents ranging from the Colorado College Yearbook (Pikes Peak Nugget), the college newspaper (The Tiger, now named The Catalyst), Registrar records, local gazetteers, and personal memoirs, the research attempts to reconstruct details of the lived experience of this special community on campus a hundred years ago.

A total of ten students were enrolled at Colorado College in the academic year 1923-1924, making the “largest Oriental Club the city ever had”.

Recipients of the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship facilitated by both the American and Chinese governments, those students were welcomed by both the college and community in Colorado Springs with hospitality and curiosity. Chinese students were often invited to give speeches addressing the cultural mutual understanding of both countries. Occasional events such as “The Celebration of the founding of the Chinese Republic” and the Exhibition of Ancient Chinese Arts were also held on campus, attracting attentions from the President and students.

Some, however, also experienced unpleasant encounters of orientalism and racism, only a few decades after the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and the atrocity of Denver’s Anti-Chinese Riots in 1880. A centerpiece of this episode that highlighted tensions of Chinese students’ identity as racial minority on campus was probably the “poem debate” between an American student and their two Chinese classmates. With a “provocative” poem posted on The Tiger in March 1924 calling the Chinese “Chinee” and expressing despise for Chinese cultures, two Chinese students majoring in English literature and Arts respectively soon replied with poems that demonstrated not only their cultural pride but also extraordinary literary cultivation as non-native speakers.

This dramatic anecdote was only tip of the iceberg of a more comprehensive image of the lived experience of the very first group of Chinese students in the history of CC. Their foreign-study journey started at Colorado College, but didn’t end here. Pursuing graduate degrees at the most prestigious institutions on the east coast including Harvard and Columbia University, many of them became well accomplished in their respective fields in later lives. That American student who wrote a rather childish poem probably didn’t expect replies from two Chinese peers who would later stand on the list of the most influential Chinese literates and intellectuals of the 20th century, one who single-handedly translated the complete works of Shakespeare into Chinese and another remembered today for his unbounded patriotism and leftist romanticism in both poem and politics.

A more detailed research paper on this subject is now available in Special Collection for public view (in Colorado College Information Files, Students – Chinese). If you are interested in discussing this topic further with the researcher, feel free to reach out to h_zeng@coloradocollege.edu.