Glimpses of Alexander Hamilton

March 8, 1933. President Franklin Roosevelt has gone to visit Oliver Wendell Holmes on the occasion of the retired Justice’s 92nd birthday.

Once everyone had found a seat in the library and Mary Donellan, the Irish waitress and parlormaid, had poured the tea, the conversation was genial and scattered. The President and the Justice talked of boxing—Holmes had watched the rise of “the Boston Strong Boy,” John L. Sullivan, with great interest.

Two handsome old swords hung above the fireplace and FDR asked about them. They had belonged to his grandfather, Holmes said; he had used them in the French and Indian War.

“Well, my grandmother goes back as far as the Revolutionary War,” FDR said, “but not as far as the Indian wars.” (In fact, neither of Roosevelt’s grandmothers had been born until after the Revolution ended.)

Holmes was led to another story: “I remember that my governor [his father, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes] told me that he was having lunch as a young student, and his father came home from lunch … with a friend. And the friend said, ‘You know, I saw that little West Indian bastard downtown today,’ referring, of course, to Alexander Hamilton.”

FDR was delighted. He may have mentioned his own mother’s warm memory of the Justice’s father; when Sara Delano Roosevelt was a little girl visiting her grandparents while suffering from whooping cough, Dr. Holmes had calmed her mother’s concern and suggested remedies.

Ian Frazier, writing about George W. S. Trow in The New Yorker, March 2, 2025:

The Trows had been in New York City for generations. When I came from Ohio, in 1974, I knew nothing about the city and had no connection to it except as a destination for ambition. In the nineteenth century, an ancestor of George’s had published what was known as “Trow’s Guide,” an early directory of the city’s residents and their addresses. Another ancestor had been on the Hudson River, in 1804, when Alexander Hamilton was being rowed back to Manhattan after his duel with Aaron Burr. George’s ancestor looked at the boat through a telescope and said, “My God, they’ve shot Alex Hamilton!” 

More in our Glimpses series:

• Abraham Lincoln
• RFK Sr.
• The Beatles