Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Hamilton did not equate child or female labor with exploitation.

But in a community situated like that of the United States, the public purse must supply the deficiency of private resources.”

This historic Buttonwood Agreement set a minimum for brokers’ commissions and laid the foundations for what became the New York Stock Exchange.

A year later, trading in government bonds grew so brisk that the Buttonwood group adjourned to an upstairs room of the new Tontine Coffee House, a three-story brick structure at Wall and Water Streets,

Henceforth, Wall Street would signal much more than a short, narrow lane in lower Manhattan. It would symbolize an industry, a sector of the economy, a state of mind, and it became synonymous with American finance itself.

The financial turmoil on Wall Street and the William Duer debacle pointed up a glaring defect in Hamilton’s political theory: the rich could put their own interests above the national interest.

But he was so often worried about abuses committed against the rich that he sometimes minimized the skulduggery that might be committed by the rich.

By early 1792, any pose of civility between the two secretaries disappeared, and Jefferson remembered them “daily pitted in the cabinet like two cocks.” By the end of their tenure, the two adversaries could scarcely stand each other’s presence.

The Federalists saw themselves as saving America from anarchy, while Republicans believed they were rescuing America from counterrevolution.

Finally, no sense yet existed of a loyal opposition to the government in power. As the party spirit grew more acrimonious, Hamilton and Washington regarded much of the criticism fired at their administration as disloyal, even treasonous, in nature.

Only loosely united by ideology and sectional loyalties, they can seem to modern eyes more like amorphous personality cults. It was as if the parties were projections of individual politicians—Washington, Hamilton, and then John Adams on the Federalist side, Jefferson, Madison, and then James Monroe on the Republican side—rather

Hamilton observed of Jefferson, “He knows how to put a man in a situation calculated to produce all the effects he desires without the gross and awkward formality of telling him, ‘Sir I mean to hire you for the purpose.’”

By now, monarchy and aristocracy were standard code words for Hamilton and the Federalists.

On the afternoon of February 28, 1792, Jefferson sat down with Washington, ostensibly to discuss the post office. The real purpose was Jefferson’s intention to warn Washington that Hamilton’s Treasury Department was threatening to devour the government.

“Madison tended to think that those who opposed what seemed to him the obvious truth must have evil motives.”

In early May, he taunted Hamilton with this verse: “Public debts are public curses / In soldiers’ hands! then nothing worse is! / In speculators’ hands increasing, / Public debt’s a public blessing!”

If he had wanted to impose a monarchy upon America, Hamilton said, he would follow the classic path of a populist demagogue: “I would mount the hobbyhorse of popularity, I would cry out usurpation, danger to liberty etc. etc. I would endeavour to prostrate the national government, raise a ferment, and then ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm.”

By 1792, both political parties saw their opponents as mortal threats to the heritage of the Revolution.

After the tenuous unity of 1776 and 1787, they had become wildly competitive and sometimes jealous of one another. It is no accident that our most scathing portraits of them come from their own pens.

Freneau’s National Gazette continued to lambaste the Federalists as the “monarchical party,” the “monied aristocracy,” and “monocrats”—none of this likely to induce a mood of remorse in Hamilton.

The furious exchanges between Hamilton and Jefferson had hardened into a mutual vendetta that Washington was powerless to stop.

Again and again in his career, Hamilton committed the same political error: he never knew when to stop, and the resulting excesses led him into irremediable indiscretions.

Hamilton had flowered in office and found his identity there, while Jefferson hated the paperwork, had wearied of contesting administration policies, and daydreamed about a return to more peaceful pursuits at Monticello.

There was no longer any point in trying to convert George Washington. Alexander Hamilton had won.

Despite this vulnerability, he continued his affair with Maria Reynolds and went on paying hush money to James Reynolds. His moral laxity and absurd willingness to risk exposure at such a moment remain a baffling conundrum.

One can only imagine Hamilton’s cold sweats and unremitting horror at the thought of discovery by Eliza, who was now pregnant with their fifth child.

12 It is strange and almost inconceivable that a man of Hamilton’s cynical worldliness should have taken so long to fathom this danger.

Sadly, it was the perceived threat to his career, not regret over his pregnant wife, that restored Hamilton to his senses.

Incredibly, he had allowed this affair, enacted in the heart of the nation’s capital, to proceed for almost a year.

For the rest of his time as treasury secretary, he was shadowed by the awareness that determined enemies had access to defamatory material about his private life.

This sword of Damocles, perpetually dangling above his head, may provide one explanation of why he never made a serious bid to succeed Washington as president.

’Tis to be regretted that there are persons among us who appear to have a passion for a foreign mistress, as violent as it is irregular—and who, in the paroxysms of their love seem, perhaps without being themselves sensible of it, too ready to sacrifice the real welfare of the political family to their partiality for the object of their tenderness.

The Reynolds affair was a sad and inexcusable lapse on Hamilton’s part, made only the more reprehensible by his high office, his self-proclaimed morality, his frequently missed chances to end the liaison, and the love and loyalty of his pregnant wife.

Afraid to adulterate his own party, Hamilton spiked this coalition and became an immovable obstacle in the path of Aaron Burr’s ambitions—a position he was to occupy so frequently in future years that it finally drove Burr into a frenzy.

In fact, I take it he is for or against nothing but as it suits his interest or ambition. He is determined, as I conceive, to make his way to be the head of the popular party and to climb . . . to the highest honors of the state and as much higher as circumstances may permit. . . . I am mistaken if it be not his object to play the game of confusion and I feel it a religious duty to oppose his career.

HAMILTON on burr

Burr’s abiding sin was a total lack of principles, which Hamilton could not forgive.

One mordant irony of this obstinate blindness was that while Republicans rejoiced in the French Revolution and cited the sacred debt owed to French officers who had fought in the American Revolution, those same officers were being victimized by revolutionary violence.

As early as March 1792, Jefferson groused in his “Anas” about Washington’s “want of confidence in the event of the French revolution. . . . I remember when I received the news of the king’s flight and capture, I first told him of it at his assembly. I never saw him so much dejected by any event in my life.”

No American was to expend more prophetic verbiage in denouncing the French Revolution than Alexander Hamilton.

The American Revolution had succeeded because it was “a free, regular and deliberate act of the nation” and had been conducted with “a spirit of justice and humanity.”22 It was, in fact, a revolution written in parchment and defined by documents, petitions, and other forms of law.

For Hamilton, the utopian revolutionaries in France had emphasized liberty to the exclusion of order, morality, religion, and property rights. They had singled out for persecution bankers and businessmen—people Hamilton regarded as agents of progressive change.

His conclusion was categorical: “If there be anything solid in virtue, the time must come when it will have been a disgrace to have advocated the revolution of France in its late stages.”

With the Neutrality Proclamation, Hamilton continued to define his views on American foreign policy: that it should be based on self-interest, not emotional attachment; that the supposed altruism of nations often masked baser motives; that individuals sometimes acted benevolently, but nations seldom did.

he would be known to history, in the fraternal style popularized by the French Revolution, as Citizen Genêt.

Hamilton condemned this mischief as “the height of arrogance” and divined its true intent: “Genêt came to this country with the affectation of not desiring to embark us in the war and yet he did all in his power by indirect means to drag us into it.”

One Federalist writer could not believe the adoration heaped on Genêt: “It is beyond the power of figures or words to express the hugs and kisses [they] lavished on him. . . . [V]ery few parts, if any, of the Citizen’s body, escaped a salute.”

“You certainly never felt the terrorism excited by Genêt in 1793,” Adams chided Jefferson years later, “when ten thousand people in the streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his house and effect a revolution in the government or compel it to declare war in favor of the French Revolution and against England.”

At this point, Genêt again showed his inimitable cheek. Only ten days after Jefferson’s warning, he began to transform a captured British merchant ship, the Little Sarah, into an armed privateer renamed La Petite démocrate.

That summer, Jefferson found Hamilton both insupportable and inescapable. Besides his Treasury job, Hamilton conducted a full-time career as an anonymous journalist.

by God he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation; that he had rather be on his farm than to be made emperor of the world; and yet they were charging him with wanting to be a king.

Washington