…and finally came out of it completely victorious

So the other day I got all excited over receiving a scan of Hamilton’s February 4th, 1781 letter to Laurens. While I can’t share the entire thing, I at least feel comfortable to share this small part which gained all of my attention. Words in brackets are ones that are lost due to the edge of the page being burned:

Adieu [my] beloved friend. Do justice to my [page burned off] for you. Assure yourself that [it is] impossible more ardently to w[ish for your?] health safety pleasure and success [than] I do. God send you speedily back to us.

There is so much I want to say, but I’ll start with the first elephant in the room: notice how none of this passage is edited by Hamilton in any way? How fluid and crammed his writing is—much like in his “I wish there was a War” letter to Stevens?

Source: Alexander Hamilton to Edward Stevens, November 11, 1769, Library of Congress.

Just like when writing “I wish there was a War,” Hamilton really meant what he said to Laurens. The nature of his handwriting saying that there was too little room for all he wanted to say, and thus did not second-guess himself. This is very openly affectionate.

To the second elephant in the room: “Do justice to my” what? We don’t know as this portion of the page is burned off. However each page of this letter has burn spots on the edges just as you see above, so I do not think this was intentional by any means.

When transcribing Hamilton’s papers, the editors of The Papers of Alexander Hamilton assume the word to be regard (“Do justice to my (regard) for you” XX ), however realistically speaking, the word could be a number of things. Regard, esteem, respect, even love, or my particular favorite: partiality.

Partiality appears four times throughout the Hamilton/Laurens correspondence, used in Hamilton’s letters. While I am not going to quote every single example, I will say that in each, the word is used in the possessive (“my self byassed by my partiality for you….,” “However your partiality…”, etc). Another thing to note: it is a common practice that two of a thing is simply coincidental, whereas three or more of a thing—whatever it may be—is indicative of a pattern. As “partiality” appears four times within Hamilton’s letters to one individual, it is clear this is a pattern. This becomes more notable when considering that partiality is a synonym of love, and that these words share other synonyms throughout these letters (particularly “affection”/“affectionate,” “inclination,” and “attachments.”) Further, all of these words are synonymous with each other—ie: they all mean more or less the same thing.

With all of this in mind, I decided to play around and see if partiality could fit within the burned space, using the word as seen in the manuscript of the June 30th 1780 letter:

Adjusting the cropped word to be the same size as the other writing, and to be as close to how crammed and tall it is here, we can see that the word would indeed fit. Note however that this is very rough and could be done better, I just don’t have the software to test this further. What is very interesting to note, going back to the possibility of a pattern, is that “my partiality for you” is actually seen in the June 30th letter. Considering things, and that these phrases match up almost exactly, it’s not a stretch to say that repetition occurred.