Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

For all the merriment and high spirits, few guests could have overlooked the mortifying contrast between the enormous Schuyler clan, with their Van Cortlandt and Van Rensselaer relatives, and the lonely groom, who didn’t have a single family member in attendance.

These disappointments only buttressed his belief in meritocracy, not aristocracy, as the best system for government appointments.

The rupture with Washington highlights Hamilton’s egotism, outsize pride, and quick temper and is perhaps the first of many curious lapses of judgment and timing that detracted from an otherwise stellar career.

Hamilton exhibited the recklessness of youth and a disquieting touch of folie de grandeur.

A few days later, Washington departed for what he called “my dreary quarters at New Windsor,” and Hamilton headed off to the Schuyler mansion in Albany.1 One of the most brilliant, productive partnerships of the Revolution had ended.

Hamilton was fully prepared to become a pest. In mid-April, he found quarters for himself and Eliza in a brick-and-stone Dutch dwelling at De Peyster’s Point on the east bank of the Hudson, by no coincidence opposite Washington’s headquarters at New Windsor. He even ordered “a little boat which two people can manage” so that he could scoot back and forth on short notice.

America could defeat the British in the bond market more readily than on the battlefield.

England. In the letter’s finale, he contended that America should imitate British methods and exploit the power of borrowing: “A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing. It will be powerful cement of our union.”12

Vernon Parrington later observed of Hamilton, “Singularly precocious, he matured early; before his twenty-fifth year he seems to have developed every main principle of his political and economic philosophy, and thereafter he never hesitated or swerved from his path.”

In a poetic conceit that he often played with but never acted upon, he toyed with abandoning worldly pursuits to luxuriate in her company:

Like other founders and Enlightenment politicians, Hamilton could never quite admit the depth of his ambition, lest it cast doubts on his revolutionary purity.

Completion of the second trench snuffed out the last remnants of resistance among the British. Cornwallis had grown so desperate that he infected blacks with smallpox and forced them to wander toward enemy lines in an attempt to sicken the opposing forces.

The American Revolution transformed Hamilton from an insecure outsider to a consummate insider who was married to the daughter of General Schuyler and stood on easy terms with the leaders of the Continental Army.

For Hamilton, the law arose as the shortest route to political power—the profession claimed thirty-four delegates at the Constitutional Convention—and it would enable him to make a tolerable, even lucrative, living.

Later the source of famous proclamations about the law’s majesty, Hamilton could also be quite waspish about his chosen profession, telling Lafayette that he was busy “rocking the cradle and studying the art of fleecing my neighbours.”

This essay makes clear that, in the Revolution’s waning days, Hamilton had to combat the utopian notion that America could dispense with taxes altogether: “It is of importance to unmask this delusion and open the eyes of the people to the truth. It is paying too great a tribute to the idol of popularity to flatter so injurious and so visionary an expectation.”13

Despite a large circle of admirers, Hamilton did not form deep friendships easily and never again

After the death of John Laurens, Hamilton shut off some compartment of his emotions and never reopened it.

any of my limbs,” he complained.59 So primitive were the Princeton lodgings that one month later Congress, like a French medieval court in the hunting season, packed up again and moved to Annapolis, followed by Trenton one year later, then New York City in 1785. Of this runaway Congress, hounded from its home, Benjamin Rush said that it was “abused, laughed at, and cursed in every company.”

The Philadelphia mutiny had major repercussions in American history, for it gave rise to the notion that the national capital should be housed in a special federal district where it would never stand at the mercy of state governments.

Yet with the war ending, many advocates of state sovereignty wanted Congress dismantled as a permanent body. They thought the current Congress was too strong. “The constant session of Congress cannot be necessary in times of peace,” said Thomas Jefferson, who wanted to replace it with a committee.64 Slowly but inexorably, the future battle lines were being drawn between those who wanted an energetic central government and those who wanted rights to revert to the states.

This last sentence was a gross understatement. That Alexander Hamilton opted to purchase land in the far northern woods and bungled the chance to buy dirt-cheap Manhattan real estate must certainly count as one of his few conspicuous failures of economic judgment.

“The lack of interest in money, rare anywhere, but even rarer in America, is one of the most universally recognized traits of Mr. Hamilton, although his current practice is quite lucrative. I’ve heard his clients say that their sole quibble with him is the modesty of the fees that he asks.”

He had an incorrigible weakness for aiding women in need.

Unlike many modern lawyers, Hamilton represented clients only if he believed in their innocence.

A no less glowing encomium came from Joseph Story, a later Supreme Court justice: “I have heard Samuel Dexter, John Marshall, and Chancellor [Robert R.] Livingston say that Hamilton’s reach of thought was so far beyond theirs that by his side they were schoolboys—rush tapers before the sun at noonday.”15

Hamilton had the most durable pair of lungs in the New York bar and could speak extemporaneously in perfectly formed paragraphs for hours.

Robert Troup complained that the prolix Hamilton never knew when to stop: “I used to tell him that he was not content with knocking [his opponent] in the head, but that he persisted until he had banished every little insect that buzzed around his ears.”

Hamilton was easy to ruffle, whereas Burr hid his feelings behind an enigmatic facade. When faced with confessions of wrongdoing, Burr said coolly, “No apologies or explanations. I hate them.”22 Unlike Hamilton, he could store up silent grievances over extended periods.

“Burr’s habits have been never to trust himself on paper, if he could avoid it, and when he wrote, it was with great caution.”24 As Burr once warned his law clerk, “Things written remain.”

Where Hamilton was often more interested in policy than politics, Burr seemed interested only in politics.

Hamilton asked rhetorically about Burr, “Is it a recommendation to have no theory? Can that man be a systematic or able statesman who has none? I believe not.”

his sometimes windy bombast. He also said that anyone who tried to compete with Hamilton on paper was lost.

Their modes of argument were very different. . . . I used to say of them, when they were rivals at the bar, that Burr would say as much in half an hour as Hamilton in two hours. Burr was terse and convincing, while Hamilton was flowing and rapturous.”32

Hamilton venerated the law, while Burr often seemed mildly bored and cynical about it. “The law is whatever is successfully argued and plausibly maintained,” he stated.

Considering how much American law has changed since independence, it seems that Burr was right

By early 1784, the city had erupted in a wave of reprisals against Tories, who were tarred and feathered.

An anonymous poem appeared in the papers that lampooned Hamilton as “Lysander, once most hopeful child of fame.” The writer, a former admirer, lamented that after gallant wartime service Hamilton had stooped to become a lackey for the Loyalists:

Wilt thou LYSANDER, at this well earn’d height, Forget thy merits and thy thirst of fame; Descend to learn of law, her arts and slight, And for a job to damn your honor’d name!

But he was not intimidated into silence. The feisty Hamilton always reacted to controversy with stubborn grit and a certain perverse delight in his own iconoclasm. He never shrank from a good fight.

In urging the court to invalidate the Trespass Act, Hamilton expounded the all-important doctrine of judicial review—the notion that high courts had a right to scrutinize laws and if necessary declare them void. To appreciate the originality of this argument, we must recall that the country still lacked a federal judiciary. The state legislatures had been deemed the most perfect expression of the popular will and were supposed to possess supreme power.

At bottom, Rutgers v. Waddington addressed fundamental questions of political power in the new country. Would a treaty ratified by Congress trump state law? Could the judiciary override the legislature? And would America function as a true country or a loose federation of states? Hamilton left no doubt that states should bow to a central government: “It must be conceded that the legislature of one state cannot repeal the law of the United States.”

Hamilton knew the case would be a boon to his legal practice, which went full throttle in defending Tories. During the next three years, he handled forty-five cases under the Trespass Act and another twenty under the Confiscation and Citation Acts.

The radical press fulminated against him for giving aid to “the most abandoned . . . scoundrels in the universe,” and rumors floated about of a cabal intent upon assassinating him.

Ironically, he held in his own name only a single share of the bank that was long to be associated with his memory.

Snatching an interval of leisure during the next three weeks, Hamilton drafted, singlehandedly, a constitution for the new institution—the sort of herculean feat that seems almost commonplace in his life.

As a triple power at the new bank—a director, the author of its constitution, and its attorney—Hamilton straddled a critical nexus of economic power.

Clinton distrusted corporations as shady plots against the populace, foreshadowing the Jeffersonian revulsion against Hamilton’s economic programs.

That Eliza married one orphan, adopted another, and cofounded an orphanage points up a special compassion for abandoned children that might explain, beyond his obvious merits, her initial attraction to Hamilton.

Like Martha Washington, Eliza was never politically outspoken and did not spur her husband’s ambitions. At the same time, she never deviated from his beliefs, identified implicitly with his causes, and came to regard his political enemies as her own.

Nominally Episcopalian, he was not clearly affiliated with the denomination and did not seem to attend church regularly or take communion. Like Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson, Hamilton had probably fallen under the sway of deism, which sought to substitute reason for revelation and dropped the notion of an active God who intervened in human affairs. At the same time, he never doubted God’s existence, embracing Christianity as a system of morality and cosmic justice.