Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Abigail disparaged Hamilton as “the little cock sparrow general”

Hamilton was deaf to these warnings. An incomparable bureaucrat and master theoretician, he had no comparable gift for practical politics.

He shrank from the campaign rhetoric that flattered Americans as the most wonderful, enlightened people on earth and denied that they had anything to learn from European societies.

John Quincy Adams also explained Jefferson’s presidential triumph by saying that he had been “pimping to the popular passions.”

The situation was tailor-made for Jefferson, who specialized in subtle, roundabout action.

John Quincy Adams later observed of Jefferson that he had “a memory so pandering to the will that in deceiving others he seems to have begun by deceiving himself.”33 He now stuck by the serviceable fiction that he had refused to negotiate with the Federalists.

He liked to sing with the family and gather them in the gardens on Sunday mornings to read the Bible aloud.

Jefferson,

one of history’s most impressive image makers.

had contempt for his distant cousin, Jefferson, whom he mocked as “the great lama of the mountain.”28 Historian Henry Adams said of Marshall, “This excellent and amiable man clung to one rooted prejudice: he detested Thomas Jefferson.”

Marshall considered Hamilton and Washington the two indispensable founders,

During thirty-four years on the court, John Marshall, more than anyone else, perpetuated Hamilton’s vision of both vibrant markets and affirmative government.

“Probably before these remarks shall be read,” he concluded, the “Constitution will be no more! It will be numbered among the numerous victims of democratic frenzy.”

Hamilton and his friends to found a new Federalist paper, the New-York Evening Post, now the oldest continuously active paper in America.

“we disapprove of that spirit of dogmatism which lays exclusive claim to infallibility

“This newspaper is, beyond all comparison, the most elegant piece of workmanship that we have seen either in Europe or America.”

Rascal was a loaded word and often the prelude to a duel.

captious

While a member of Washington’s military family, he wrote that “there never was any mischief but had a priest or a woman at the bottom.”

Callender now referred to the Republicans as the “mulatto party.”

I have always considered General Hamilton’s argument in that cause as the greatest forensic effort that he ever made.

Hamilton’s adversary, Attorney General Spencer, lavished praise on Hamilton’s legal powers, calling him “the greatest man this country has produced.

John Quincy Adams observed that New York Federalists were now “a minority, and of that minority, only a minority were admirers and partisans of Mr. Hamilton.”64 Far more decisive in the outcome was President Jefferson.

disunion he could not hear of without impatience,”

Hamilton foresaw a civil war between north and south, a war that the north would ultimately win but at a terrible cost: “The result must be destructive to the present Constitution and eventually the establishment of separate governments framed on principles in their nature hostile to civil liberty.”

Hamilton continued to worry about the “bloody anarchy” and the overthrow of the Constitution that might result from Jefferson’s policies.

This private dinner on State Street triggered a chain of events that led inexorably to Hamilton’s duel with Burr.

“as a dangerous man and one who ought not to be trusted.”

But it was Cooper’s next assertion that pushed relations between Hamilton and Burr past the breaking point. Far from being irresponsible, said Cooper, he had been “unusually cautious” in recounting the dinner at Tayler’s, “for really, sir, I could detail to you a still more despicable opinion which General Hamilton has expressed of Mr. Burr.”5 This letter, which changed so many lives, appeared in the Albany Register on April 24, 1804.

During his feverish efforts to prevent Burr from becoming president during the 1801 election tie, Hamilton had called him profligate, bankrupt, corrupt, and unprincipled and had accused him of trying to cheat Jefferson out of the presidency.

Burr was now poised to exploit any pretext to strike at Hamilton. Their affair of honor was less about slurs and personal insults than politics and party leadership.

Thus, it was clearly a catalog of cumulative insults, rather than the Cooper letter alone, that had provoked Burr to action.

infra dig

Affairs of Honor, they often followed contested elections, as losers sought to recoup their standing.

By a spooky coincidence, in the last great speech of his career Hamilton eloquently denounced dueling.

King said that even though Hamilton had the “most capacious and discriminating” mind he had ever known, he rigidly followed the rules known as the “code duello.”

Aaron Burr, a superb marksman who had killed several enemy soldiers during the Revolution.

Hamilton told his son: “A prudent silence will frequently be taken for wisdom and a sentence or two cautiously thrown in will sometimes gain the palm of knowledge, while a man well informed but indiscreet and unreserved will not uncommonly talk himself out of all consideration and weight.”

The secession movement would provide no “relief to our real disease, which is democracy”—by which he meant unrestrained, disruptive popular rule.

The profligate Burr was more than short of cash: he was dead broke.

New Yorkers of the era never forgot the extravagant spectacle of sadness, the pervasive grief.

“there was as much or more lamentation as when General Washington died.”

Everybody in New York knew that the city had lost its most distinguished citizen.

Hamilton had set the city on the path to becoming “the throne of the western commercial world.”

Hamilton had never been guilty of modesty: “He was indiscreet, vain, and opinionated.

his legitimate doubts as to whether the Constitution could avert anarchy and despotism;

Hamilton was laid to rest with full honors in a martial style that would have gratified the most florid fantasies of the adolescent clerk on St. Croix who had once prayed for a war to prove his valor.

Thus ended the most dramatic and improbable life among the founding fathers.

had just taken the morning air. Made of indestructible stuff, the vice president of the United States was not one to be tormented by guilt or unduly disturbed by some bloodshed.

a young Connecticut relative dropped by Richmond Hill unannounced and found Burr in his library. Every inch the cordial host, Burr neglected to mention that he had shot Alexander Hamilton two hours earlier.