King's College

'King's College was the name for the institution that was reinstated as Columbia College after the American Revolution. It was opened with the granting of a Royal Charter by King George II in 1754.

The college's first president was Samuel Johnson. When he retired, Myles Cooper took the helm. First located in the Trinity Church schoolhouse, it moved to its own grounds near City Hall Park, where College Hall was completed in 1760.

Among the students educated at King's were Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Gouvernor Morris, Robert Livingston, and other eminent figures in what would become the early United States. John Parke Custis, the stepson of George Washington, spent a semester there. In 1774, King's graduated its first Jewish student, Isaac Abrahams.

When the British occupied New York City in 1776, they turned College Hall into a military hospital, ejecting the college. Many of its students had disbanded anyway, fighting on either side of the conflict. A patriotic battallion, the Hearts of Oak, comprised a number of King's College students. The disruption caused by the war was so great that proposals to continue instruction in private quarters on Wall Street were never taken up.

When the war ended, loyal college students, among them Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, argued for the reopening of the school. It was forced to shed its overtly monarchist name, and reopened in College Hall as Columbia College in 1784.