In the company of George Washington, Hamilton left the state of New Jersey around September 16, 1780, and journeyed overland to a crucial meeting with a weight foreign ally along the banks of the Connecticut River on September 20, 1780.

The Count of Rochambeau, Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, had already been a seasoned war veteran for decades when he was put in charge of the French Expeditionary Force dispatched by King Louis XVI to aid the American separatists in their war against France’s perennial enemy, Great Britain. Rochambeau and the King’s initial plan was not to voyage to North America, but to invade England from the south—a strategy that they did not pursue for logistical reasons.

Washington met with Rochambeau and other high-ranking French military officers to discuss matters such as the number of French ships needed to achieve superiority in American waters, and whether or not an attempt to retake the British-occupied New York was the best avenue to victory. Washington spent much of the war dreaming of that, and it never came to pass.

Hartford was little more than an agricultural village on the road between Boston and New York. Its earliest English-speaking settlers were Puritans, as in much of the rest of New England.

Connecticut would remain a stronghold for Hamilton’s Federalist Party well into the future, even after the organization and its tenets fell out of favor with much of the country. New England Federalists went so far as to meet in Hartford and discuss options to secede from the United States during Thomas Jefferson’s administration, specifically Jefferson’s ban on foreign trade.

Hamilton also returned to Hartford in 1797, while legally respresenting the State of New York in the border dispute known as “The Connecticut Gore” controversy. See New Haven for background.