Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Hamilton’s strategy was simple: he was prepared to sacrifice his private reputation to preserve his public honor.

the Reynolds pamphlet.

Noah Webster wondered why someone of Hamilton’s stature would “publish a history of his private intrigues, degrade himself in the estimation of all good men, and scandalize a family to clear himself of charges which no man believed.”

Callender wrote mockingly that the “whole proof in this pamphlet rests upon an illusion. ‘I am a rake and for that reason I cannot be a swindler.’”

have been grossly . . . charged with . . . being a speculator, whereas I am only an adulterer.

Alexander Hamilton was the most controversial public figure of his era.

Washington, who knew Hamilton better than any other public figure.

Monroe consented to have Hamilton come to his lodgings at ten o’clock the next morning. It was to be one of the most emotional encounters of Hamilton’s tumultuous life.

Monroe was a plodding speaker and a middling intellect.

The two Virginians shared a belief that emancipation should be postponed,

As a lawyer, Monroe was far below mediocrity.

the most convincing proof of all was the undying hatred that she bore for James Monroe.

a premonition that the United States might soon be at war with an imperious France.

Vice President Jefferson, by contrast, was already in the thick of a secret campaign to sabotage Adams in French eyes.

gasconading

“I have seen a man who made the fortune of a nation laboring all night to support his family,” he said, shocked.

When the XYZ papers were published, they proved a bonanza for the Federalists, and John Adams attained the zenith of his popularity as president.

the new navy he envisioned: six ships of the line, twelve frigates, and twenty small vessels.

Before McHenry returned to Philadelphia, Washington slipped him a sheet naming the three men he wished to see as his major generals, listed in order: Alexander Hamilton, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and Henry Knox.

John Quincy Adams later identified the feud over this list as the “first decisive symptom” of a schism in the Federalist party.

Adams had made the classic mistake of committing his presidential prestige to a fight he could not win. He could not accept that most observers, from Washington to Jay, thought Hamilton the most highly qualified man for the job.

Dusting off an old proverb, Pickering said, “Mr. Adams has always thought his own geese swans.”

Burr unhesitatingly replied that “he despised Washington as a man of no talents and one who could not spell a sentence of common English.”86

Hamilton could not resist government service but could never quite reconcile himself to the pecuniary sacrifice.

Republicans had long viewed Hamilton as a potential despot,

the epithets that Abigail Adams pinned to him: “Little Mars” and “a second Bonaparty.”

Like the Reynolds pamphlet, these clandestine messages signal a further deterioration in Hamilton’s judgment once he no longer worked under Washington’s wise auspices and was left purely to his own devices.

John Randolph of Roanoke called Wilkinson “the mammoth of iniquity. . . . [T]he only man I ever saw who was from the bark to the very core a villain.”

The period of John Adams’s presidency declined into a time of political savagery with few parallels in American history, a season of paranoia in which the two parties surrendered all trust in each other.

Congress enacted four infamous laws designed to muzzle dissent and browbeat the Republicans into submission. They were known as the Alien and Sedition Acts.

The Naturalization Act, passed on June 18,

The Alien Act of June 25

The Alien Enemies Act of July 6

the Sedition Act of July 14,

perfervid

Of course, the supreme bugaboo of Republican scribes was Alexander Hamilton.

Neither

Jefferson watched Hamilton warily, telling one ally that “our Bonaparte” might “step in to give us political salvation in his own way.”

The violent resistance to federal law foreseen by Hamilton cropped up in eastern Pennsylvania instead of Virginia.

Believing, as always, that psychology was half the battle, Hamilton decided to stage a tremendous show of force.

On June

quondam

this pivotal moment between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton,

Elbridge Gerry,

Gerry was a notoriously cranky personality.

plenipotentiary

On December 12, 1799, Washington sent Hamilton a letter applauding his outline for an American military academy: “The establishment of an institution of this kind . . . has ever been considered by me as an object of primary importance to this country.”44 It was the last letter George Washington ever wrote.

Of the nine American presidents who owned slaves—a list that includes his fellow Virginians Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—only Washington set free all of his slaves.

that most dexterous opportunist, Aaron Burr,

“If we must have an enemy at the head of the government, let it be one whom we can oppose and for whom we are not responsible.”