Early Life and Career
Hamilton Fish was born on August 3, 1808 at what is now known as the Stuyvesant–Fish House in Greenwich Village, New York City, to Nicholas Fish and Elizabeth Stuyvesant (a great-great-granddaughter of New Amsterdam's Peter Stuyvesant), and his parents named him after their friend Alexander Hamilton. Nicholas Fish (1758–1833) was a leading Federalist politician and notable figure of the American Revolutionary War. Col. Fish was active in the Yorktown Campaign that resulted in the surrender of Lord Cornwallis. Peter Stuyvesant was a prominent founder of New York, then a Dutch Colony, and his family owned much property in Manhattan.
Fish graduated from Columbia College of Columbia University in 1827 and was admitted to the New York bar in 1830, practicing briefly with William Beach Lawrence. At Columbia Fish became fluent in French, a language that would later help him as U.S. Secretary of State. He served as commissioner of deeds for the city and county of New York from 1832 through 1833, and was an unsuccessful Whig candidate for New York State Assembly in 1834.
Read more about this topic: Hamilton Fish
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“As I went forth early on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked like airy creatures of darkness caught napping; on this side huddled together, with their gray hairs streaming, in a secluded valley which the sun had not penetrated; on that, hurrying off in Indian file along some watercourse, while the shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies of the night, sought to hide their diminished heads in the snow.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“This death’s livery which walled its bearers from ordinary life was sign that they have sold their wills and bodies to the State: and contracted themselves into a service not the less abject for that its beginning was voluntary.”
—T.E. (Thomas Edward)
“The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)