Although he was regarded primarily as a nationalist, Alexander Hamilton was indeed a New Yorker. The trading post in his native Caribbean in which he clerked as a lad was an offshoot of New York merchant families, the Crugers and Kortrights. When his friends in St. Croix sent him to the continent for education they consigned him, as it were, to business patrons in New York. After attending King's College (Columbia), he was firmly identified with New York, city and state. His first choice was to attend the College of New Jersey (Princeton). His intellectual sponsor in St. Croix, Reverend Hugh Knox, was a Princeton graduate, as was Francis Barber, master of the academy in Elizabethtown where Alexander had his preparatory year. In Elizabethtown he was befriended by William Livingston and Elias Boudinot, and President John Witherspoon found him eligible for entrance to Princeton. But Hamilton's was the rare case in which the candidate imposed conditions: as he was older than other beginning students, would he be allowed to complete the course as rapidly as he could pass examinations, without respect to the conventional four-year program? The academic authorities regretfully said no, and Hamilton entered King's College on his own terms.