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Both Washington and Hamilton came to think in terms of the general welfare, while many other officers and politicians got bogged down in parochial squabbles.
One thing grew crystal clear at Morristown: Hamilton was girl crazy and brimming with libido. Throughout his career, at unlikely moments, he tended to grow flirtatious, almost giddy, with women.
In his response to Livingston, Hamilton made clear that some family members thought he was excessively preoccupied by the opposite sex. “I exercise [my pen] at the [risk] of being anathematized by grave censors for dedicating so much of my time to so trifling and insignificant a toy as—woman.” Though Livingston, apparently, had spurned his advances—he chides her apathy—he concludes philosophically that “I shall probably be in a fine way” and tells her that “ALL FOR LOVE is my motto.”
As in his first boyish love poems in St. Croix, Hamilton could fancy young women as chaste goddesses or naughty little vixens.
It is worth noting here, however, how frequently people used the word feminine to describe Hamilton—the more surprising given his military bearing and virile exploits.
In all thirteen colonies, sodomy had been a capital offense, so if Hamilton and Laurens did become lovers—and it is impossible to say this with any certainty—they would have taken extraordinary precautions. At the very least, we can say that Hamilton developed something like an adolescent crush on his friend.
The marquis de Lafayette, nineteen, was a stylish, ebullient young aristocrat inflamed by republican ideals and eager to serve the revolutionary cause.
Only 19!
son George Washington Lafayette. Lafayette always had his quota of critics, who regarded him as vain, suspicious, and self-seeking. Thomas Jefferson pinpointed one especially flagrant fault: “His foible is a canine appetite for popularity and fame.”53 For all his love of Lafayette, even Hamilton mocked the “thousand little whims” to which the marquis was prey.54 Whatever his flaws, however, Lafayette proved to be a valiant officer of surprisingly mature judgment and more than rewarded the faith of his admirers.
The broader point is that Alexander Hamilton, the outsider from the West Indies, had a rare capacity for friendship and was already attracting a circle of devoted, well-placed people who were to help to propel him to the highest political plateau.
For Hamilton, his encounters with the two obdurate generals strengthened his preference for strict hierarchy and centralized command as the only way to accomplish things—a view that was to find its political equivalent in his preference for concentrated federal power instead of authority dispersed among the states.
Hamilton made no secret of his contempt for the new brigadier general: “There does not exist a more villainous calumniator or incendiary,” he wrote.86
Hamilton never forgot Gates’s attempt to blacken his reputation: “I am his enemy personally,” he wrote two years later, “for unjust and unprovoked attacks upon my character.”90
In the last analysis, Washington’s popularity was unassailable, and the blatant scheming of his foes only solidified his reputation for integrity.
Hamilton began to meditate on the deeper causes of the surrounding misery. Because the colonies had been forced to rely on England for textiles, the patriots lacked clothing. Because the colonies had relied on England for munitions, they lacked weapons. Hamilton also saw in graphic terms the inflationary dangers of printing too much paper money.
The republican partiality for state militias in lieu of a strong central army threatened to undermine the entire Revolution.
Hamilton, just turned twenty-three, was already spouting civics lessons to state governors.
An extremely bold and confident figure
Hamilton fit the type of the self-improving autodidact, employing all his spare time to better himself. He aspired to the eighteenth-century aristocratic ideal of the versatile man conversant in every area of knowledge.
Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never saw the creation of America as a magical leap across a chasm to an entirely new landscape, and he always thought the New World had much to learn from the Old.
For anyone studying Hamilton’s pay book, it would come as no surprise that he would someday emerge as a first-rate constitutional scholar, an unsurpassed treasury secretary, and the protagonist of the first great sex scandal in American political history.
Many people were struck by Hamilton’s behavior at Monmouth, which showed more than mere courage. There was an element of ecstatic defiance, an indifference toward danger, that reflected his youthful fantasies of an illustrious death in battle.
The first “Publius” letter pointed out that greed can corrupt a state and that a public official who betrays his trust “ought to feel the utmost rigor of public resentment and be detested as a traitor of the worst and most dangerous kind.”
In the second letter, Hamilton lapsed into gratuitous calumny against Chase. “Had you not struck out a new line of prostitution for yourself, you might still have remained unnoticed and contemptible,” he hectored Chase. “It is your lot to have the peculiar privilege of being universally despised.”52
France had also decided to wage war on Britain for reasons having to do less with ideological solidarity with America—it scarcely behooved Louis XVI to encourage revolts against royal authority—than with a desire to subvert Britain and even the score after losing the French and Indian War. The French also sought better access to Caribbean sugar islands and North American ports. This early lesson in Realpolitik—that countries follow their interests, not their sympathies—was engraved in Hamilton’s memory, and he often reminded Jeffersonians later on that the French had fought for their own
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In a typical Hamiltonian manner, he placed political realism at the service of a larger ethical framework, stressing that both humanity and self-interest argued for the Laurens proposal: The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience; and an unwillingness to part with property of so valuable a kind will furnish a thousand arguments to show the impracticability or pernicious tendency of a scheme which requires such a sacrifice. But it should be considered that if we do not make use of them in this way,
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The northern states were not about to override their southern brethren on the slavery issue. All along, the American Revolution had been premised on a tacit bargain that regional conflicts would be subordinated to the need for unity among the states. This understanding dictated that slavery would remain a taboo subject. There was also the ticklish matter that many slave owners had joined the Revolution precisely to retain slavery. In
“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?” Samuel Johnson protested from London.66 Horace Walpole echoed this sentiment: “I should think the souls of the Africans would sit heavily on the swords of the Americans.”67
Many on the patriot side recognized the hypocrisy of the American position. Even before the Declaration of Independence, Abigail Adams had bewailed the situation: “It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me—to fight for ourselves for what we are robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”
The defeat of the Laurens plan left Hamilton utterly dejected. “I wish its success,” he wrote to Laurens later in the year, “but my hopes are very feeble. Prejudice and private interest will be antagonists too powerful for public spirit and public good.”
People would assume that Hamilton, as an “outsider” or “foreigner,” could not possibly be motivated by patriotic impulses. Hence, he must be power mad and governed by a secret agenda. In response, Hamilton would display a deep insecurity that he normally kept well hidden behind his confident demeanor. If struck, he tended to hit back hard.
“Every [hope] of this kind my friend is an idle dream,” he warned Laurens in a despairing tone that was to crop up throughout his life. He added, “There is no virtue [in] America. That commerce which preside[d over] the birth and education of these states has [fitted] their inhabitants for the chain and . . . the only condition they sincerely desire is that it may be a golden one.”
Hamilton once told a friend that a soldier should have no wife other than the military, yet he began to contemplate marriage in the spring of 1779,
He knew that once the war ended, he had no family.
much of it was thoughtful, showing that Hamilton had given serious consideration to the elements of a stable marriage. She must be young, handsome (I lay most stress upon a good shape), sensible (a little learning will do), well-bred (but she must have an aversion to the word ton), chaste and tender (I am an enthusiast in my notions of fidelity and fondness), of some good nature, a great deal of generosity (she must neither love money nor scolding, for I dislike equally a termagant and an economist). In politics, I am indifferent what side she may be of; I think I have arguments that will
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In describing his ideal wife, Hamilton sketches something of a self-portrait
And instead of a sex goddess or a nubile coquette—types that had always titillated him—he opts for a solid, sensible, reasonably attractive wife.
In January, when Washington didn’t allow Hamilton to join Laurens for a combat command in the south, Hamilton tumbled into the darkness of depression. “I am chagrined and unhappy, but I submit,” he wrote to Laurens. “In short, Laurens, I am disgusted with everything in this world but yourself and very few more honest fellows and I have no other wish than as soon as possible to make a brilliant exit. ’Tis a weakness, but I feel I am not fit for this terrestrial country.”4 It was not the first time that Hamilton had glancingly alluded to suicide or emigration or suggested that he was miscast on
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Strong emotions
Colonel Samuel B. Webb even wrote a humorous verse, mocking how the young conqueror had himself been conquered: “Now [Hamilton] feels the inexorable dart / And yields Cornelia all his heart!”5 The fickle Hamilton soon moved on to a young woman named Polly.
Hamilton, twenty-five, was instantly smitten with Schuyler, twenty-two. Fellow aide Tench Tilghman reported: “Hamilton is a gone man.”
His letters to her reflected not a single moment of pique, irritation, or disappointment.
On one picnic excursion, Tilghman watched her laughingly clamber up a steep hillside while less plucky girls required male assistance.
He even composed a romantic sonnet entitled “Answer to the Inquiry Why I Sighed.” Its couplets included these lines: “Before no mortal ever knew / A love like mine so tender, true . . . No joy unmixed my bosom warms / But when my angel’s in my arms.”
He had a way with words
Lest Laurens experience a jealous pang, Hamilton added a few months later: “In spite of Schuyler’s black eyes, I have still a part for the public and another for you,” and he promised he would be no less devoted to his friend after marriage than before.24
He saw that inflation had originated with wartime shortages, which had led, in turn, to the waning value of money. Over time, the inflation had acquired a self-reinforcing momentum.
“The quantity of money in circulation is certainly a chief cause of its decline. But we find it is depreciated more than five times as much as it ought to be. . . . The excess is derived from opinion, a want of confidence.”
Some people thought he was “a friend to military pretensions, however exorbitant,” while others chided him for not being militant enough in defending army power: “The truth is I am an unlucky honest man that speaks my sentiments to all and with emphasis. I say this to you because you know it and will not charge me with vanity. I hate congress—I hate the army—I hate the world—I hate myself. The whole is a mass of fools and knaves. I could almost except you and [Richard Kidder] Meade. Adieu. A. Hamilton.”
Hamilton’s description shows his abiding fascination with a beautiful, noble death. “I am aware that a man of real merit is never seen in so favourable a light as seen through the medium of adversity,” he concluded in his letter to Laurens. “The clouds that surround him are shades that set off his good qualities.”
It was a peculiar outburst: Hamilton was expressing envy for a man who had just been executed. Only in such passages do we see that Hamilton, for all his phenomenal success in the Continental Army, still felt unlucky and unlovely, still cursed by his past.
He then made a confession: “I was once determined to let my existence and American liberty end together. My Betsey has given me a motive to outlive my pride.”66 The sweet, retiring Schuyler would rescue him from the self-destructive fantasies that had long held sway over his imagination.
We are full of vices. They are full of weaknesses[,] . . . and though I am satisfied whenever I trust my senses and my judgment that you are one of the exceptions, I cannot forbear having moments when I feel a disposition to make a more perfect discovery of your temper and character. . . . Do not, however, I entreat you, suppose that I entertain an ill opinion of all your sex. I have a much worse [opinion] of my own.71
When Hamilton rode off to Albany in late November 1780 for the wedding, it was the first vacation he had taken in nearly five years of warfare.
