The Tuesday Club was founded in Annapolis, Maryland in 1745 by Dr. Alexander Hamilton (September 26, 1712 – May 11, 1756), a Scottish-born doctor and writer who lived and worked in Annapolis in 18th-century colonial Maryland.

During the colonial era, Annapolis was one of the larger cities in North America, and was home to an organization called the Tuesday Club, which documented musical activity in the city in more detail than any other record of its kind. The club was founded in 1745 by Dr. Alexander Hamilton in imitation of similar clubs in Edinburgh, specifically the Whin-Bush Club. Music was not initially the major focus of the group, but it soon came to specialize in musical activities at biweekly meetings known as sederunts. Both original vocal and instrumental material and published compositions were a part of the Tuesday Club's repertoire, including Scottish and English folksongs, and English theatrical pieces. Among the club's members was Jonas Green, printer of the Maryland Gazette and publisher of music books, and Thomas Bacon, the club's most renowned composer whose works were very much in the European model. No compositions from the club gained significant acclaim outside of the city.

The music of the Tuesday Club was expressly and purposely European in character, as the members wished to emulate the acknowledged masters of the Western classical music tradition. However, unlike classical music, performances were recreational in nature rather than artistic, the music composed by members of the Club being entirely casual, and probably never intended for outside consumption. The corpus of the club's output constitutes the earliest known American secular music. Instrumentation included the French horn, flute, cello, viola and harpsichord.

Hamilton wrote a humorous account of the club's history in 1755, in which he gave its members comical pseudonyms and included caricatures and illustrations of memorable events; Hamilton even christened himself as Loquacious Scribble. Called The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club: From the Earliest Ages Down to This Present Year, it was not published during Hamilton's lifetime.

Biographical information adapted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Hamilton_(Maryland_doctor), and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Annapolis#Tuesday_Club, accessed 2018 February 23.