Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

There was a pause. Some difficulty in resuming our question.

that for that cause he retired; that his intention was to wait events, then enter the field and run for the plate; that if future events did not prove the correctness of this view of his character, he [Hamilton] would forfeit all title to a knowledge of mankind.

Washington told Hamilton that “not a day has elapsed since my retirement from public life in which I have not thought of that conversation. Every event has proved the truth of your view of his character. You foretold what has happened with the spirit of prophecy.”25 The story’s likely veracity is bolstered by the fact that Jefferson exchanged no letters with Washington during the last three and a half years of the general’s life.

When Federalists suggested that it was high time America had its own navy to combat the plunder of American shipping by Barbary pirates, Madison suggested, in all seriousness, that the United States hire the Portuguese navy instead.

As usual, the mere mention of his name sent Federalists into shivers of ecstasy: “Who but Hamilton would perfectly satisfy all our wishes?” asked Ames.

The Republican press clung to the malicious fantasy that Jay would negotiate the sale of America back to the British monarchy.

This prompted one Republican wag to opine that the royal family should adopt Alexander Hamilton to sire a new line in America. With Hamilton’s well-known attraction to the ladies, the British monarchy would never need to worry about a shortage of heirs in America.

Mirabeau, the French revolutionary politician, once observed of Talleyrand that he “would sell his soul for money and he would be right, for he would be exchanging dung for gold.”

Napoleon expressed this sentiment more concisely, calling Talleyrand “a pile of shit in a silk stocking.”

Talleyrand cherished his time with Hamilton and left some remarkable tributes for posterity: “I consider Napoleon, Fox, and Hamilton the three greatest men of our epoch and, if I were forced to decide between the three, I would give without hesitation the first place to Hamilton. He divined Europe.”

Often, he roamed the camp after dark, surprising sentries at their posts. Finding one wealthy young sentry seated lazily with his musket by his side, Hamilton reproached his laxity. After the youth complained of a soldier’s hard life, “Hamilton shouldered the musket, and pacing to and fro, remained on guard until relieved,” John Church Hamilton later wrote.

Washington, unfazed, sent this screed to Hamilton, who replied that “it is long since I have learnt to hold popular opinion of no value.”37

Findley, who had been born in Ireland, found it scandalous that Hamilton of all people should object to his immigrant background: “I say for secretary Hamilton to object to such a man as a foreigner must be astonishing to those who have any knowledge of his own history.”

The letter shows why Washington tended to discount the Jeffersonian invective against Hamilton. Both as general and president, Washington had numberless chances to observe Hamilton and had seen only competence, dedication, and integrity.

Hamilton’s response had been disproportionate to the threat and showed a depressive streak, a chronic tendency to magnify problems. For a man so involved in public life, he was curiously unable to develop a self-protective shell.

If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.

If Hamilton had a vice, it was clearly a craving for power, not money, and he left public office much poorer than he entered it.

Because such indebtedness did not square with Jeffersonian orthodoxy, it had to be denied. After Hamilton resigned, Madison wrote to Jefferson, saying peevishly of Hamilton, “It is pompously announced in the newspaper that poverty drives him back to the bar for a livelihood.”

Hamilton then picked up a slim volume on the table and turned it over in his hands. “Ah, this is the constitution,” he said. “Now, mark my words. So long as we are a young and virtuous people, this instrument will bind us together in mutual interests, mutual welfare, and mutual happiness. But when we become old and corrupt, it will bind us no longer.”

Couldnt bind the nation for even 100 years

Jay was attacked with peculiar venom. Near his New York home, the walls of a building were defaced with the gigantic words, “Damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won’t damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won’t put up lights in the windows and sit up all night damning John Jay.”

Hamilton then stepped forward,” Edward Livingston later said, “declaring that if the parties were to contend in a personal way, he was ready, that he would fight the whole party one by one. I was just beginning to speak to him on the subject [of] this imprudent declaration when he turned from me, threw up his arm and declared that he was ready to fight the whole ‘detestable faction’ one by one.”

Hamilton was prepared to descend into outright fisticuffs in the streets with his opponents, as if he were a common ruffian.

He had shown a grievous lack of judgment in allowing free rein to his combative instincts.

When it came to intensely personal conflicts, New York’s most famous lawyer still turned instinctively not to the courtroom, but to the dueling ground.

In all, Hamilton poured forth nearly one hundred thousand words even as he kept up a full-time legal practice.

The president heard rumors that Jefferson was leading a whispering campaign that portrayed him as a senile old bumbler and easy prey for Hamilton and his monarchist conspirators. Jefferson kept denying to Washington that he was the source of such offensive remarks. Joseph Ellis has commented, however, “The historical record makes it perfectly clear, to be sure, that Jefferson was orchestrating the campaign of vilification,

Politics is a dirty game

The decision in Hylton v. United States not only endorsed Hamilton’s broad view of federal taxing power but represented the first time the Supreme Court ever ruled on the constitutionality of an act of Congress.

He was chronically overworked and increasingly absentminded. Months after leaving office, he wrote to the Bank of the United States and admitted that he did not know his account balance because he had lost his bank book—this from the man who had created the bank.

If Lafayette ever needed asylum in America, he would receive a cordial reception: “The only thing in which our parties agree is to love you.”10 Alexander Hamilton seldom used the word love three times in one letter.

He surrendered power in a world where leaders had always grabbed for more. Stepping down was the most majestic democratic response he could have flung at his Republican critics.

Eliza cherished the memory of strolling down Broadway with her husband when an old soldier accosted them and tried to sell them a copy. After buying one, Hamilton said laughingly to Eliza, “That man does not know he has asked me to purchase my own work.”

The Phocion essays contain the most withering critique that Hamilton ever leveled at Jefferson as a slaveholder, and they hint heavily at knowledge of the Sally Hemings affair.

Hamilton was trying to have it both ways. As an abolitionist, he wanted to expose Jefferson’s disingenuous sympathy for the slaves. As a Federalist, he wanted to frighten slaveholders into thinking that Jefferson might act on that sympathy and emancipate their slaves.

Nonetheless, one wonders whether there was not a subtle strategy here to sabotage Adams. Hamilton knew that if he could prompt southern slaveholders to desert Jefferson over emancipation, they would opt not for Adams, an abolitionist, but for Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina. There was no way that invoking the slavery issue could assist Adams in the south, where he needed the votes.

Deep strategy

It was ironic that John Adams, like Hamilton, was denigrated as a monarchist, because he grew up without the patrician comforts enjoyed by Jefferson and Madison, who were the quickest to apply the epithet against him.

Much of his life’s drama arose from the intense, often fitful, sometimes tormenting struggle to measure up to his own impossibly high standards, and he never entirely made peace with his own craving for fame and recognition.

Adams could not match their social graces and was “quite out of his element,” fretted his friend Jonathan Sewall: “He cannot dance, drink, game, flatter, promise, dress, swear with the gentlemen, and talk small talk or flirt with the ladies.”

Franklin himself captured Adams with a penetrating epigram: “He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”

Bernard Bailyn later observed of Adams: “Sensitive to insults, imaginary and real, he felt the world was generally hostile, to himself and to the American cause, which was the greatest passion of his life. There were enemies on all sides.”

From some underlying insecurity, he spent inordinate time brooding about his place in history. He worried that rivals would overshadow him or steal credit that he deserved. This vanity made him feel unappreciated.

Biographer Joseph Ellis has observed of Adams, “Lurking in his heart was a frantic and uncontrollable craving for personal vindication, a lust for fame that was so obsessive, and so poisoned by his accurate awareness that history would not do him justice, that he often appeared less like a worthy member of the American gallery of greats than a beleaguered and pathetic madman.”

Consider this statement from Adams: “Popularity was never my mistress, nor was I ever or shall I ever be a popular man. . . . But one thing I know: a man must be sensible of the errors of the people and upon his guard against them and must run the risk of their displeasure sometimes or he will never do them any good in the long run.”26 This was Hamilton’s credo as well.

Adams ended up regarding Hamilton as someone “in a delirium of ambition. He had been blown up with vanity by the Tories, had fixed his eye on the highest station in America, and he hated every man young or old who stood in his way.”

In his last years, he informed a friend, with a straight face, “I have been told by Parson Montague of Dedham, though I will not vouch for the truth of it, that General Hamilton never wrote or spoke at the bar or elsewhere in public without a bit of opium in his mouth.”

Adams had spent most of his vice presidency exiled in the Senate, casting a record thirty-one tiebreaking votes. Of the number-two post, he said wearily but indelibly that it was “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”

During his presidency, Adams was often stranded between the Federalists and the Republicans and accepted by neither. It was to prove a rare case in American history of the president hesitating to function as the de facto party leader.

The two Virginians were shrewd men with an imperviously close bond and an impressive degree of patience and self-control. Meanwhile, the Federalists, united for two terms under Washington, were about to degenerate into a fractured party, led by two brilliant and unstoppable windbags, Adams and Hamilton, who cordially detested each other. Both were hasty, erratic, impulsive men and capable of atrocious judgment. And both had blazing gifts for invective, which they eventually turned against each other.

Yet readers of the pamphlet must have wondered why, instead of settling for a brief apology and a convincing mea culpa, Hamilton insisted upon telling the story in almost picaresque detail.

Hamilton was incapable of a wise silence.

Noah Webster wondered why someone of Hamilton’s stature would “publish a history of his private intrigues, degrade himself in the estimation of all good men, and scandalize a family to clear himself of charges which no man believed.”50 Small wonder that Hamilton’s family later tried to buy up and destroy all copies of the pamphlet left on the market.