Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

They inveighed against the concentrated wealth of northern merchants when southern slave plantations clearly represented the most heinous form of concentrated wealth. Throughout the 1790s, planters posed as the tribunes of small farmers and denounced the depravity of stocks, bonds, banks, and manufacturing—the whole wicked apparatus of Hamiltonian capitalism.

Then casting his eyes on the visitors’ gallery—since it was packed with pretty ladies, he supposed Hamilton sat among them—he blasted the treasury secretary in language that crossed the boundaries of political decorum: “In the face of this Assembly and in the presence of this gallery . . . I give the lie to Col. Hamilton.”63 This blatant affront was so shocking that congressmen interrupted Burke’s outburst with loud calls for order.

Hamilton still inhabited two worlds: the modern world of constitutional law and the old feudal order based on honor and dignity. Unless retracted, any direct challenge to one’s honor had to be settled outside the legal realm on the field of honor—the dueling ground.

This supreme rationalist, who feared the passions of the mob more than any other founder, was himself a man of deep and often ungovernable emotions.

Like Hamilton, Jefferson was a fanatic for self-improvement. He rose before dawn each morning and employed every hour profitably, studying up to fifteen hours per day. Extremely systematic in his habits, Jefferson enjoyed retreating into the sheltered tranquillity of his books, and the spectrum of his interests was vast. He told his daughter, “It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.”

This pampered life rested on a foundation of slavery. Jefferson’s earliest memory was of being carried on a pillow by a slave on horseback.

However much Jefferson deplored the “moral and political depravity” of slavery, his own slaves remained in bondage to his career and his incorrigibly spendthrift ways.10 When he commissioned his mountaintop home at Monticello, he seemed oblivious of the toll this would exact on his slaves, who had to hoist the building materials to such a height.

Like many Virginia plantation owners, Jefferson was land rich but cash poor and chronically indebted to British creditors.

And the more rabidly antiaristocratic he became, the more he was habituated to aristocratic pleasures. Jefferson fancied himself a mere child of nature, a simple, unaffected man, rather than what he really was: a grandee, a gourmet, a hedonist, and a clever, ambitious politician.

Both Hamilton and Jefferson came to see each other as hypocritical libertines, and this fed a mutual cynicism. Hamilton offered testimony of his own inexcusable lapses in this area, while the sphinxlike Jefferson was a man of such unshakable reticence that it took two centuries of sedulous detective work to provide partial corroboration of the story of his sexual liaison with Sally Hemings.

“The notion that between 1789 and 1791, France basked in some sort of liberal pleasure garden before the erection of the guillotine is a complete fantasy.”

Most of all, Jefferson wished to preserve state sovereignty against federal infringement. Since Hamilton’s agenda was to strengthen the central government, bolster the executive branch at the expense of the legislature, and subordinate the states, it embodied everything Jefferson abhorred.

He suited his words to the occasion and catered to listeners’ prejudices, saying what they wanted to hear. This kept his own views secret while encouraging others to speak. Hamilton—opinionated, almost recklessly candid—was incapable of this type of circumspection.

For Hamilton, unable to govern his tongue or his pen, his habit of self-exposure eventually placed him at the mercy of the tightly controlled Jefferson.

Nobody was more offended than William Maclay. In his journal, he castigated Hamilton as “his Holiness” and on another occasion called him “a damnable villain.”62 (Hamilton got off easy: John Adams reminded Maclay of “a monkey just put into breeches.”)

In this tussle, New York was a controversial choice. It was becoming so associated with Hamilton that his enemies branded it “Hamiltonopolis.”

Jefferson long remembered the sour mood that hung like a miasma over New York that spring: “Congress met and adjourned from day to day without doing anything, the parties being too much out of temper to do business together.”

“Whoever considers the nature of our government with discernment will see that though obstacles and delays will frequently stand in the way of the adoption of good measures, yet when once adopted, they are likely to be stable and permanent. It will be far more difficult to undo than to do.”

Apparently in deep contemplation, and his lips moving as rapidly as if he was in conversation with some person, he entered the store [and] tendered a fifty-dollar bill to be exchanged. Rodgers refused to change it. The gentleman [Hamilton] retired. A person in the store asked Rodgers if the bill was counterfeited. He replied in the negative. Why, then, did you not oblige the gentleman by exchanging it? Because, said Rodgers, the poor gentleman has lost his reason. But, said the other, he appeared perfectly natural. That may be, said Rodgers, he probably has his lucid intervals. But I have seen him walk before my door for half an hour, sometimes stopping, but always talking to himself. And if I had changed the money and he had lost it, I might have received blame.

Hamilton never actually visited the school, but his sponsorship was significant enough that the school was christened Hamilton College when it received a broad new charter in 1812.

Swollen by the Customs Service, the Treasury Department payroll ballooned to more than five hundred employees under Hamilton, while Henry Knox had a mere dozen civilian employees in the War Department and Jefferson a paltry six at State, along with two chargés d’affaires in Europe.

This towering intellect scrawled more mundane letters about lighthouse construction than about any other single topic. This preoccupation seems peculiar until it is recalled that import duties accounted for 90 percent of government revenues: no customs revenue, no government programs—hence Hamilton’s unceasing vigilance about everything pertaining to trade.

Jefferson did not exaggerate Hamilton’s canny capacity to clothe political objectives in technical garb. There were hidden agendas buried inside Hamilton’s economic program, agendas that he tended to share with high-level colleagues but not always with the public.

“Holding banking to be no more than the prostitution of money for illicit gain,” historian John C. Miller has written, “one Virginia planter swore that he would no more be caught going into a bank than into a house of ill fame.”

Hamilton turned to article 1, section 8, the catchall clause giving Congress the right to pass any legislation deemed “necessary and proper” to exercise its listed powers.

Afraid that the agile Hamilton would dream up limitless activities and then rationalize them as “necessary and proper,” Madison re-created himself as a strict constructionist of the Constitution.

“No axiom is more clearly established in law or in reason than wherever the end is required, the means are authorized; wherever a general power to do a thing is given, every particular power for doing it is included.”26 Hamilton probably tipped off his old friend that Madison had written these incriminating words.

Almost all congressmen from north of the Potomac had stood foursquare behind him, while their southern counterparts had almost all opposed him.

Hamilton, in contrast, envisioned the executive branch as the main engine of government, the sole branch that could give force and direction to its policies, and time has abundantly vindicated his view.

Taking literally the Constitution’s recitation of congressional powers, he prophesied that “to take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn . . . is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.”

Henry Cabot Lodge later referred to the doctrine of implied powers enunciated by Hamilton as “the most formidable weapon in the armory of the Constitution . . . capable of conferring on the federal government powers of almost any extent.”

historian Clinton Rossiter insisted that Hamilton’s “works and words have been more consequential than those of any other American in shaping the Constitution under which we live.”

South Sea Bubble of 1720.

Instead, in one of history’s most mystifying cases of bad judgment, he entered into a sordid affair with a married woman named Maria Reynolds that, if it did not blacken his name forever, certainly sullied it.

Such descriptions, though hyperbolic, may have contained a grain of truth: Hamilton was susceptible to the charms of beautiful women.

Whenever he dealt with women, Hamilton shed his bureaucratic manner and reverted to the whimsy of bygone days.

In the evening, I put a bank bill in my pocket and went to the house. I inquired for Mrs. Reynolds and was shown upstairs, at the head of which she met me and conducted me into a bedroom. I took the bill out of my pocket and gave it to her. Some conversation ensued from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable.

It is baffling that Hamilton, having worked to achieve a spotless reputation as treasury secretary, did not see that he was now courting danger and would be susceptible to blackmail.

As often is the case with addictions, the fanciful notion of a “gradual discontinuance” only provided a comforting pretext for more sustained indulgence.

He could never make up his mind whether it had started honestly on her side and then turned to blackmail or whether she had conspired with James Reynolds all along.

The man accused by his enemies of bottomless craft could be a most credulous dupe.

After leaving the Folwell residence, Maria and James Reynolds lived on North Grant Street, where they occupied separate beds (or even rooms) while Maria dabbled in prostitution. Gentlemen left letters in her entryway, Folwell said, and “at night she would fly off as was supposed to answer their contents.”

Since she despised her husband, she may have nourished fantasies that Hamilton would rescue her even as she preyed upon him. Fact and fiction may have blended imperceptibly in her mind. Hamilton later concluded of his paramour, “The variety of shapes which this woman could assume was endless.”

As mirrored in his earliest adolescent poems, Hamilton seemed to need two distinct types of love: love of the faithful, domestic kind and love of the more forbidden, exotic variety.

In the end, his desire to spare Eliza led him only to hurt her the more.

That he inserted these trysts into such a tight schedule only strengthens the impression that Hamilton was ensnared by a sexual obsession.

Briefly, he ceased all contact with Maria. This frightened James Reynolds, who saw future income fast fading away. On January 17, 1792, he wrote to Hamilton and urged him to visit the house and regard his wife as a “friend.” Suddenly, he was no longer the wronged spouse but a philanthropist concerned with his wife’s welfare, not a grief-stricken husband but a shameless pimp for his wife.

The treasury secretary intuited that the future strength of nation-states would be proportionate to their industrial prowess, and he celebrated the early growth of American industry, whether it was entrepreneurs making wool hats or glass in Pennsylvania or watchmakers in Connecticut.

It was Hamilton’s vision of America as a manufacturing behemoth, not Jefferson’s of a society of yeomen farmers, that threatened the British.

Clearly, the U.S. government condoned something that, in modern phraseology, could be termed industrial espionage. Building upon this precedent, Hamilton put the full authority of the Treasury behind the piracy of British trade secrets.

Ends justify means mentality