Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Miss McIvers showed up at one of Martha Washington’s receptions sporting an enormous headdress of ostrich feathers. When this fashion accessory caught fire from the chandelier, Major William Jackson, then an aide to the president, leaped to her side and extinguished the blaze by clapping the feathers between his hands.

During his second day in office, he issued a circular to all customs collectors, demanding exact figures of the duties accumulated in each state. When they sent back suspiciously low numbers, Hamilton, who knew something about smuggling from St. Croix, suspected that it must be rife along the eastern seaboard, leading him to the next logical step. “I have under consideration the business of establishing guard boats,” he told one correspondent in perhaps the first recorded allusion to what would turn into the Coast Guard.

Hamilton stole the moral high ground from opponents and established the legal and moral basis for securities trading in America: the notion that securities are freely transferable and that buyers assume all rights to profit or loss in transactions.

“ardently wishes to see it incorporated as a fundamental maxim in the system of public credit of the United States that the creation of debt should always be accompanied with the means of extinguishment.”

The sinking fund would retire about 5 percent of the debt each year until it was paid off.

He couldn’t be both the supreme nationalist and the supreme abolitionist.

Jefferson was convinced that France, following America’s lead, would cast off the shackles of despotism.

In November 1788, Jefferson wrote to Washington of a France buoyant with hope: “The nation has been awakened by our revolution, they feel their strength, they are enlightened, their lights are spreading, and they will not retrograde.”

“I know Hamilton likes the beautiful in every way,” Angelica Church once told Eliza. “The beauties of nature and of art are not lost on him.”

Hamilton was not the master builder of the Constitution: the laurels surely go to James Madison. He was, however, its foremost interpreter, starting with The Federalist and continuing with his Treasury tenure, when he had to expound constitutional doctrines to accomplish his goals. He lived, in theory and practice, every syllable of the Constitution. For that reason, historian Clinton Rossiter insisted that Hamilton’s “works and words have been more consequential than those of any other American in shaping the Constitution under which we live.”

Building upon this precedent, Hamilton put the full authority of the Treasury behind the piracy of British trade secrets.

One day during the Revolution, he, Washington, and Lafayette had picnicked by the falls, enjoying a “modest repast” of cold ham, tongue, and biscuits in a sylvan setting that momentarily banished thoughts of war.

“In countries where there is great private wealth much may be effected by the voluntary contributions of patriotic individuals. But in a community situated like that of the United States, the public purse must supply the deficiency of private resources.”58

These papers tended to be short on facts—there was little “spot news” reporting—and long on opinion. They more closely resembled journals of opinion than daily newspapers. Often scurrilous and inaccurate, they had few qualms about hinting that a certain nameless official was embezzling money or colluding with a foreign power. “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper,” Jefferson later said. “Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”29

“Madison tended to think that those who opposed what seemed to him the obvious truth must have evil motives.”

Jefferson concluded grumpily that the president’s brain must be enfeebled by age and that his opinions showed “a willingness to let others act and even think for him.”

Hamilton continued to define his views on American foreign policy: that it should be based on self-interest, not emotional attachment; that the supposed altruism of nations often masked baser motives; that individuals sometimes acted benevolently, but nations seldom did.

Adams chided Jefferson years later, “when ten thousand people in the streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his house and effect a revolution in the government or compel it to declare war in favor of the French Revolution and against England.”

Henry Knox happened to mention a tasteless satirical broadside called “The Funeral Dirge of George Washington,” in which Washington, like Louis XVI, was executed by guillotine.

Not only did Hamilton have yellow fever, but he had shown outstanding valor during the Revolution while Jefferson, as Virginia governor, had cravenly fled into the woods before the advancing British troops.

So when Hamilton lauded Stevens’s yellow-fever treatment as superior to the “standard” method, Rush was perhaps predisposed to take offense.

Though Benjamin Rush blamed Alexander Hamilton for yellow-fever deaths, the public ended up blaming Rush.

The Constitution, he told Washington, allowed Congress to meet elsewhere only for specific, extraordinary purposes and “a contagion wouldn’t qualify.”

“no character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated attacks, however false.” If a charge was made often enough, people assumed in the end “that a person so often accused cannot be entirely innocent.”

the British fleet captured more than 250 American merchant ships, impounding more than half of them as war prizes. Britain also boarded American vessels at sea and dragged off sailors, claiming they were British seamen who had deserted.

Madison suggested, in all seriousness, that the United States hire the Portuguese navy instead.

Washington gave orders to construct six frigates—the birth of the U.S. Navy—and Hamilton negotiated contracts for many naval components: cannon, shot and shells, iron ballast, sailcloth, live oak and cedar, and saltpeter for gunpowder.

“If the laws are to be trampled upon with impunity,” he said, “and a minority is to dictate to the majority, there is an end put at one stroke to republican government.”

If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.

On the Fourth of July, Jay was burned in effigy in so many cities that he said he could have walked the length of America by the glow from his own flaming figure.

That Republicans could swallow such nonsense as gospel truth suggests that Hamilton did not entirely dream up the conspiracies ranged against him.

That nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave”—he

“Men who have been intimate all their lives cross the street to avoid meeting and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch hats.”

Even though Hamilton had tendered more than twenty years of outstanding service to his country, he was still blackballed in Adams’s eyes for being foreign born.

If I should consent to the appointment of Hamilton as a second in rank, I should consider it as the most [ir]responsible action of my whole life and the most difficult to justify. He is not a native of the United States, but a foreigner

. the most restless, impatient, artful, indefatigable, and unprincipled intriguer in the United States, if not in the world, to be second in command under himself

“Self-sufficiency and a contempt of the science and experience of others are too prevailing traits of character in this country,”

(This attitude was of a piece with his dismay over the Jeffersonian faith that Americans had much to teach the world but little to learn from it.)

Hamilton also devised plans for military hospitals and something very like a veterans’ administration that would tend men wounded in battle and their families:

The son of a Maryland planter, the hard-drinking Wilkinson was always ready for any mayhem.

[T]he only man I ever saw who was from the bark to the very core a villain.”115 The plump, ruddy Wilkinson made a showy appearance, wearing medals and gold buttons on his braided uniform. Even in the backwoods, he rode around in gold stirrups and spurs while seated on a leopard saddlecloth.

When Griswold then taunted Lyon for alleged cowardice during the Revolution, Lyon spat right in his face. Griswold got a hickory cane and proceeded to thrash Lyon, who retaliated by taking up fire tongs and attacking Griswold. The two members of Congress ended up fighting on the floor like common ruffians. “Party animosities have raised a wall of separation between those who differ in political sentiments,”

Another editor earned eighteen months behind bars for daring to print the heresy that the government allowed the wealthy to benefit at the expense of commoners.

Hamilton felt demeaned, ignored, and unappreciated during his military service under Adams.

It has become part of Hamiltonian legend that when Croucher testified, Hamilton placed candles on both sides of his face, giving his features a sinister glow.

Those present were so petrified at the thought of Jefferson as president that they considered desperate measures. Led by Hamilton, they decided to appeal to Governor Jay and have him convene the outgoing state legislature to impose new rules for choosing presidential electors. They now wanted the electors chosen through popular voting by district. Most shocking of all, they wanted this new system applied retroactively, to overturn the recent election.

Adams was “liable to gusts of passion little short of frenzy, which drive him beyond the control of any rational reflection.

Jefferson recalled how Adams shouted profanities at his cabinet while storming around the room and “dashing and trampling his wig on the floor.”

If forced to choose, Hamilton preferred a man with wrong principles to one devoid of any.

“He is sanguine enough to hope everything, daring enough to attempt everything, wicked enough to scruple nothing,”