Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Drawing on this material, 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.’”

The Aurora responded similarly when it paraphrased Hamilton as saying, “I have been grossly . . . charged with . . . being a speculator, whereas I am only an adulterer. I have not broken the eighth commandment. . . . It is only the seventh which I have violated.”

As David Cobb, a Federalist judge from Massachusetts, told Henry Knox, “Hamilton is fallen for the present, but if he fornicates with every female in the cities of New York and Philadelphia, he will rise again, for purity of character after a period of political existence is not necessary for public patronage.”

As a result of this and other dealings with him, Burr came away with a lower opinion of Monroe. When Monroe’s name later surfaced as a possible presidential candidate, Burr jotted down this scathing assessment of him: Naturally dull and stupid; extremely illiterate; indecisive to a degree that would be incredible to one who did not know him; pusillanimous and, of course, hypocritical; has no opinion on any subject and will be always under the government of the worst men; pretends, as I am told, to some knowledge of military matters, but never commanded a platoon nor was ever fit to command one. . . . As a lawyer, Monroe was far below mediocrity.84

Hosack later described Hamilton’s return as one of his most gratifying moments as a physician: In the course of the night, General Hamilton arrived at his home under the full expectation that his son was no more. But to his great joy he still lived. When the father knew what had been done and the means that had been employed . . . he immediately came to my room where I was sleeping, and although I was then personally unknown to him, awakened me and taking me by the hand, his eyes suffused with tears of joy, he observed, “My dear Sir, I could not remain in my own house without first tendering to you my grateful acknowledgment for the valuable services you have rendered my family in the preservation of my child.”

After Hamilton returned to New York, Talleyrand was en route to a dinner party one night when he glimpsed Hamilton toiling by candlelight in his law office. “I have seen a man who made the fortune of a nation laboring all night to support his family,” he said, shocked.

Jefferson’s conviction that the XYZ Affair was a Federalist hoax only grew with time. The whole brouhaha was “a dish cooked up by [John] Marshall, where the swindlers are made to appear as the French government.”29 Nor did the XYZ Affair lead Madison to reevaluate the French Revolution. After hearing of Talleyrand’s conduct toward the American envoys, Madison could not believe that the French minister had behaved so stupidly. He thought President Adams, not the Directory, “the great obstacle to accommodation” and accused the Federalists of resorting to “vile insults and calumnies” to foment war with France.30

Hamilton’s indignation with Jefferson was warranted, but the idea that he wanted to reduce the United States to a French province or that his ideas were criminal was cruelly overblown and reminiscent of the most malicious nonsense heaved at Hamilton himself.

Jefferson accuses hamilton of wanting to establish british monarchy in america. Hamilton accuses jefferson of trying to make america french province. Absurd! Both democrats and republicans do the same thing today, exaggerating the others views. Twitter is best example of that.

At the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry had bawdily likened standing armies to a tumescent penis: “An excellent assurance of domestic tranquillity, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.”

Gerry had jokes

In Madison’s view, “War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies and debts and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

When Eliza went off to Albany in early June 1798, leaving him with the older boys, Hamilton seemed incurably lonesome. “I always feel how necessary you are to me,” he wrote to her. “But when you are absent, I become still more sensible of it and look around in vain for that satisfaction which you alone can bestow.”

On military matters, John Adams was often adrift. For all his dogged committee work in the Continental Congress and sturdy promotion of an American fleet, he had not experienced combat and perhaps felt deprived of some essential glory. “Oh, that I was a soldier!” he had written in 1775. “I will be. I am reading military books. Everybody must and will and shall be a soldier.”

Everybody wants glory

The Aurora loudly ridiculed Adams’s religion and morality in promoting the self-confessed lover of Maria Reynolds: “He has appointed Alexander Hamilton inspector general of the army, the same Hamilton who published a book to prove that he is AN ADULTERER. . . . Mr. Adams ought hereafter to be silent about French principles.”

The president daubed him in demonic colors: 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 and, I believe, has not resided longer, at least not much longer, in North America than Albert Gallatin. His rank in the late army was comparatively very low. His merits with a party are the merits of John Calvin— “Some think on Calvin heaven’s own spirit fell, While others deem him [an] instrument of hell.” I know that Knox has no popular character, even in Massachusetts. I know, too, that Hamilton has no popular character in any part of America.

What he actually wrote to James McHenry was: “Inclosed are the commissions for the three generals signed and all dated on the same day.”70 It was a victory for Hamilton and a humiliating surrender for Adams, who later griped, “I was no more at liberty than a man in prison.”

Aware of bad blood between him and Washington, Hamilton asked Burr whether he could serve faithfully under the general. Burr unhesitatingly replied that “he despised Washington as a man of no talents and one who could not spell a sentence of common English.”

Washington refused, pulling no punches: “By all that I have known and heard, Colonel Burr is a brave and able officer, but the question is whether he has not equal talents at intrigue?”

“How shall I describe to you my sensations and reflections at that moment. [Washington] had compelled me to promote over the heads of Lincoln, Clinton, Gates, Knox, and others and even over Pinckney . . . 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 and now dreaded an intriguer in a poor brigadier.”

Contrary to many of his compatriots, Hamilton thought America had much to learn from Europe about military affairs. “Self-sufficiency and a contempt of the science and experience of others are too prevailing traits of character in this country,” he wailed to John Jay.

(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.)

“I do not know whether to laugh or weep,” Adams said of the intended scheme. “Miranda’s project is as visionary, though far less innocent, than . . . an excursion to the moon in a cart drawn by geese.”

The indiscriminate use of pejorative labels—“Jacobins” for Republicans, “Anglomen” for Federalists—reflected the rancorously unfair emotions. During this melancholy time, the founding fathers appeared as all-too-fallible mortals.

Like todays hurling of the words fascist and communist

Federalists wanted to curb an influx of Irish immigrants, who were usually pro-French and thus natural adherents to the Republican cause.

“My opinion is that the mass [of aliens] ought to be obliged to leave the country”—a disappointing stance from America’s most famous foreign-born citizen and once an influential voice for immigration.

The Alien and Sedition Acts unified the Republican party while unchecked warfare between the Adams and Hamilton wings of the Federalist party was inwardly eroding its strength.

In the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, Jefferson and Madison set forth a radical doctrine of states’ rights that effectively undermined the Constitution.

would “dissolve the union or produce coercion.”26 The influence of the doctrine of states’ rights, especially in the version promulgated by Jefferson, reverberated right up to the Civil War and beyond. At the close of that war, James Garfield of Ohio, the future president, wrote that the Kentucky Resolutions “contained the germ of nullification and secession, and we are today reaping the fruits.”

The most outlandish case involved the prosecution of Luther Baldwin of New Jersey, who, under the spell of strong drink, wished that the ceremonial cannon fire greeting President Adams had landed in his backside. Five of the six most influential Republican papers were ultimately prosecuted under the new laws by a Federalist-dominated judiciary.

Adams worried increasingly about the militaristic tendencies and authoritarian side that had emerged in the frustrated, restless Hamilton’s behavior. He justly observed, “Mr. Hamilton’s imagination was always haunted by that hideous monster or phantom so often called a crisis and which so often produces imprudent measures.”

Like many self-invented immigrants, Hamilton had totally and irrevocably repudiated his past. He never evinced the slightest desire to revisit the haunts of his early life, and his upbringing remained a taboo topic.

Even a rugged soldier’s life, once his sovereign remedy for all ills, no longer possessed its curative powers. “I discover more and more that I am spoiled for a military man,” he told Eliza. “My health and comfort require that I should be at home—at that home where I am always sure to find a sweet asylum from care and pain in your bosom.”

That Hamilton had communed with a fallen comrade attracted exceptional attention in New York society, so much so that he had to admit that it was all a hoax he had cooked up with Philip Church and Niemcewicz “to frighten the family for amusement and that it was never intended to be made public.”

Perhaps the least of Aaron Burr’s sins in organizing the Manhattan Company was his having gulled Hamilton and state legislators into granting a bank charter under false pretenses. Far more grievous were the fraudulent claims he had made for a water company.

Not only had Burr’s plan failed to provide pure water but it had thwarted other sound plans afoot, including those for a municipal water company.

The Holland Company felt hobbled by restrictions placed on New York land owned by foreigners and retained Burr as a lobbyist to deal with this impediment. Never one to idealize human nature, Burr recommended to his client that it sprinkle five thousand dollars around the state legislature to brighten the prospects for corrective legislation. The money worked wonders, and the consequent Alien Landowners Act removed the legal obstacles. On the Holland Company’s ledgers, the payment to Burr appeared not as a bribe but as an unpaid loan.

Gerry was a notoriously cranky personality. Small, squint-eyed, and argumentative, hindered by a stutter in debate, he had a talent for both offending and mystifying people. (He favored two capitals, for instance, with a dazed Congress shuttling between them.)

their proper sphere in making the enquiry.”11 Theodore Sedgwick and the president ended up shouting at each other, with Sedgwick attributing Adams’s decision to “the wild and irregular starts of a vain, jealous, and half frantic mind.”12 After these wounding confrontations, Adams beat a hasty retreat to Quincy and stayed there for seven months, sometimes buried in the collected works of Frederick the Great. Federalist Robert G. Harper of South Carolina said that he hoped that, en route to Quincy, the president’s horses might run wild and break their master’s neck.

He worried that Napoleon might attempt a sneak attack on an American port and that the country would be caught off guard. He got bogged down in bickering about petty details, telling McHenry that he was “disappointed and distressed” by a shipment of cocked hats ordered for one regiment. He lectured him pedantically that cocked hats must be cocked on all three sides: “But the hats received are only capable of being cocked on one side and the brim is otherwise so narrow as to consult neither good appearance nor utility. They are also without cockades and loops.”

Adams could not bear to be hectored by Hamilton, who could not bear to be patronized by Adams. These two vain, ambitious men seemed to bring out the worst in each other.

Formerly skeptical about aspects of the Alien and Sedition Acts, he now gave them full-throated support and ranted about the need to punish people, especially the foreign born who libeled government officials: “Renegade aliens conduct more than one of the most incendiary presses in the U[nited] States and yet in open contempt and defiance of the laws they are permitted to continue their destructive labours. Why are they not sent away?”

It is difficult to separate this dark, vengeful letter from the setbacks in Hamilton’s recent political life. Under President Washington, he had grown accustomed to great power and deference. President Adams had destroyed this sense of entitlement, and Hamilton never forgave him.

His vision now appeared to be so steeped in gloom that one wonders how much depression warped his judgment in later years. The ebullient hopefulness of his early days as treasury secretary seemed to be in eclipse.

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.

Hamilton knew that Washington’s death could destroy the unstable Federalist coalition: “The irreparable loss of an inestimable man removes a control which was felt and was very salutary.”

Hamilton tried to keep up a brave face, but he was heartbroken over his ill-fated corps. He told Eliza that he had to play “the game of good spirits but . . . it is a most artificial game and at the bottom of my soul there is a more than usual gloom.”

Unlike other contemporary politicians, Burr enjoyed the nitty-gritty of such campaigns and embraced the electioneering they disdained. No other member of the founding generation would have explained his fondness for elections by stating that they provided “a great deal of fun and honor and profit.”

Burr took justifiable pride in his triumph, explaining to one downcast Federalist that “we have beat[en] you by superior management.”

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.

the Aurora noted that “when it was urged that it might lead to a civil war . . . a person present observed that a civil war would be preferable to having Jefferson.”

For years, McHenry licked his wounds. Later on, upon reading Adams’s defense of his administration, he commented to Pickering, “Still in his own opinion the greatest man of the age, I see [Adams] will carry with him to the grave his vanity, his weaknesses, and follies, specimens of which we have so often witnessed and always endeavored to veil them from the public.”