Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Upon arriving in New York in 1767, Clossy had acquired quick notoriety as a practitioner of the black art of snatching cadavers from local cemeteries for dissection. (The practice was not outlawed until 1789, after it sparked a massive riot.)

“I cannot make everybody else as rapid as myself,” he was to one day write laughingly to his wife. “This you know by experience.”

His life was a case study in the profitable use of time.

Adolescent hardship instilled in Troup a lasting sense of financial insecurity, and he was amazed that Hamilton worried so little about money. “I have often said that your friends would be obliged to bury you at their own expence,” Troup wrote to Hamilton in later years, a statement that was to prove queasily prophetic.

As Hamilton’s views evolved, however, and he began to publish the outspoken anti-British pieces that made his reputation, he used the debating club at King’s to preview his essays.

“The first political piece which [Hamilton] wrote,” recalled Troup, “was on the destruction of the tea at Boston in which he aimed to show that the destruction was both necessary and politic.”

New York hosted its own “tea party” on April 22, 1774, when a group of sea captains, led by Alexander McDougall and decked out in Mohawk dress, stormed the British ship London and chucked its tea chests into the deep.

They also curbed popular assemblies, restricted trial by jury, subjected Massachusetts to ham-handed military rule, and guaranteed that the Boston streets would be blanketed with British troops in an overpowering show of force.

Roots of bill of rights

Until this point, the colonies had been tantamount to separate countries, joined by little sense of common mission or identity. Now committees of correspondence in each colony began to communicate with one another, issuing calls for a trade embargo against British goods and summoning a Continental Congress in Philadelphia in September.

When his speech ended, the crowd stood transfixed in silence, staring at this spellbinding young orator before it erupted in a sustained ovation. “It is a collegian!” people whispered to one another. “It is a collegian!”41 Hamilton, nineteen, looked young for his age, which made his performance seem even more inspired. From that moment on, he was treated as a youthful hero of the cause and recognized as such by Alexander McDougall, John Lamb, Marinus Willett, and other chieftains of the Sons of Liberty.

Only 19

The situation was an awkward one for Cooper, who was tugging his forelock at royal authority while Hamilton was thumbing his nose at it. Exactly three months before, the college president had published an obsequious open letter to William Tryon, the departing royal governor, that was a classic of unctuous prose and that concluded, “We can only say, that as long as the society shall have any existence and wherever its voice can extend, the name of TRYON will be celebrated among the worthiest of its benefactors.”

He could not afford to be a neutral bystander and began to flay the protesters in caustic essays, claiming that the tea tax was exceedingly mild. “The people of Boston are a crooked and perverse generation . . . and deserve to forfeit their charter,” he wrote.45 With such retrograde views, he became one of New York’s most despised Loyalists and was increasingly assailed by his students.

Cancel culture?

The young man gravitated to controversy, indeed gloried in it.

Eager to make his mark, Hamilton was motivated by a form of ambition much esteemed in the eighteenth century—what he later extolled as the “love of fame, the ruling passion of the noblest minds, which would prompt a man to plan and undertake extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit.”

Hamilton had clearly assumed the coloring of his environment. Few immigrants have renounced their past more unequivocally or adopted their new country more wholeheartedly.

To this we may add that disappointment and opposition inflame the minds of men and attach them still more to their mistakes.

After Seabury rebutted “A Full Vindication,” Hamilton struck back with “The Farmer Refuted,” an eighty-page tour de force that Rivington brought out on February 23, 1775.

“And let me tell you, in this selfish, rapacious world, a little discretion is, at worst, only a venial sin.”

He already took the long view of American destiny, seeing that the colonies would someday overtake the mother country in economic power. “If we look forward to a period not far distant, we shall perceive that the productions of our country will infinitely exceed the demands, which Great Britain and her connections can possibly have for them. And as we shall then be greatly advanced in population, our wants will be proportionably increased.”67 Here, in embryonic form, is his vision of the vast, diversified economy that was to emerge after independence.

“I remember that in a conversation I once had with Dr. Cooper,” said Robert Troup, “he insisted that Mr. Jay must be the author[,] . . . it being absurd to imagine [that] so young a man” as Hamilton could have written it.69

He had demonstrated inimitable speed (the two “Farmer” essays totaled sixty thousand words), supreme confidence in his views, and an easy, sophisticated grasp of the issues.

The newly emboldened Sons of Liberty streamed down to the East River docks, pilfered ships bound for British troops in Boston, then emptied the City Hall arsenal of its muskets, bayonets, and cartridge boxes, grabbing one thousand weapons in all.2

Property damage

Hamilton was that singular intellectual who picked up a musket as fast as a pen.

Hamilton approached this daily routine with the same perfectionist ardor that he exhibited in his studies. Robert Troup stressed the “military spirit” infused into Hamilton and noted that he was “constant in his attendance and very ambitious of improvement.”

The next day, an anonymous handbill blamed Myles Cooper and four other “obnoxious gentlemen” for the patriotic deaths in Massachusetts and said the moment had passed for symbolic gestures, such as burning Tories in effigy.

Fighting words

“The injury you have done to your country cannot admit of reparation,” these five Loyalists were warned. “Fly for your lives or anticipate your doom by becoming your own executioners.” This blatant death threat was signed, “Three Millions.”5 A defiant Myles Cooper stuck to his college post.

After the mob knocked down the gate and surged toward the residence, Hamilton launched into an impassioned speech, telling the vociferous protesters that their conduct, instead of promoting their cause, would “disgrace and injure the glorious cause of liberty.”8 One account has the slightly deaf Cooper poking his head from an upper-story window and observing Hamilton gesticulating on the stoop below. He mistakenly thought that his pupil was inciting the crowd instead of pacifying them and shouted, “Don’t mind what he says. He’s crazy!”9 Another account has Cooper shouting at the ruffians: “Don’t believe anything Hamilton says. He’s a little fool!”10 The more plausible version is that Cooper had long since vanished, having scampered away in his nightgown on Ogden’s warning.

One congressman said that George Washington was “no harum-scarum, ranting, swearing fellow, but sober, steady, and calm.”

If Hamilton displayed some atavistic Huguenot fear of popery, he also sounded a theme that was to resonate straight through the Revolution and beyond: that the best government posture toward religion was one of passive tolerance, not active promotion of an established church.

Hamilton, joined by fifteen other King’s College volunteers, signed up for a hazardous operation to drag the heavy artillery to safety under the liberty pole on the Common. (College lore later claimed that two of the salvaged cannon were buried under the campus green.)

After Hamilton disposed of his ordnance, he ran into Mulligan again and asked for his musket back, only to be told that the tailor had left it down at the Battery—the spot most exposed to fierce shelling from the Asia. “I told him where I had left it,” Mulligan continued, “and he went for it notwithstanding [that] the firing continued, with as much unconcern as if the vessel had not been there.”20

Hickey waived the presence of a chaplain, explaining that “they are all cutthroats.”

Now, for reasons both symbolic and practical, the crowd pulled George III down from his pedestal, decapitating him in the process. The four thousand pounds of gilded lead was rushed off to Litchfield, Connecticut, where it was melted down to make 42,088 musket bullets. One wit predicted that the king’s soldiers “will probably have melted majesty fired at them.”

However, crushed by the incident, he quickly learned that war was a filthy business.

typical of the British command, Lord Howe’s secretary, Ambrose Serle, snickered at the rebel forces as “the strangest that was ever collected: old men of 60, boys of 14, and blacks of all ages and ragged for the most part, compose the motley crew.”

Though Washington was famous for his composure, his infrequent wrath was something to behold, and he cursed the panic-stricken troops and flailed at incompetent officers with his riding crop. Finally, he flung his hat on the ground in disgust and fumed, “Are these the men with whom I am to defend America?”

After the humiliating loss of New York, Washington thought the craggy, wooded area of Harlem Heights would shelter his army as a natural fortress. He nearly yielded to despair as he bemoaned the drunkenness, looting, desertions in the ranks, and short-term enlistments.

According to Washington’s adopted grandson, the commander “was charmed by the brilliant courage and admirable skill” Hamilton displayed as he “directed a battery against the enemy’s advanced columns that pressed upon the Americans in their retreat by the ford.”

Both brave, physically capable, and intelligent. Street smart and book smart so to speak.

“Well do I recollect the day when Hamilton’s company marched into Princeton,” said a friend. “It was a model of discipline. At their head was a boy and I wondered at his youth, but what was my surprise when that slight figure . . . was pointed out to me as that Hamilton of whom we had already heard so much.”

Like Hamilton, the young Washington saw military fame as his vehicle for ascending in the world. By age twenty-two, he was already a precocious lieutenant colonel in the Virginia militia, showing a brash courage during the French and Indian War. “I have heard the bullets whistle,” he said after experiencing battle, “and believe me there is something charming in the sound.”

Early disappointments with people left Washington with a residual cynicism that was to jibe well with Hamilton’s views.

Washington proved an excellent businessman, first as a canny speculator in western lands, then as lord of Mount Vernon. Sometimes buying human cargo directly from the holds of slave ships, he came to own more than one hundred slaves by the Revolution and expanded his estate until it encompassed thirteen square miles.

In fact, Washington wasn’t nonchalant and could be exacting and quick to take offense. While he had a dry wit, his mirth was restrained and seldom expressed in laughter. He did not encourage familiarity, fearing it would encourage laxity in subordinates, and held himself aloof with a grave sobriety that gave him power over other people. In addition, over time he became such a prisoner of his own celebrity that people couldn’t relax in his presence.

The notion that Hamilton was a surrogate son to Washington has some superficial merit but fails to capture fully the psychological interplay between them. If Hamilton was a surrogate son, some suppressed Oedipal rage entered into the mix.

Hamilton was so brilliant, so coldly critical, that he detected flaws in Washington less visible to other aides.

It was temperamentally hard for Alexander Hamilton to subordinate himself to anyone, even someone with the extraordinary stature of George Washington.

He had the deepest admiration for Washington, even if he didn’t wallow in hero worship.

Having hitched his star to Washington, Hamilton struck a bargain with himself that he honored for the remainder of his career: he would never openly criticize Washington, whose image had to be upheld to unify the country.

Washington knew that he lacked verbal flow, once writing, “With me it has always been a maxim rather to let my designs appear from my works than by my expressions.”