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as if she could never be satisfied.”
four thousand slaves on Nevis outnumbered whites by a ratio of four to one,
The mortality rate of slaves hacking away at sugarcane under a pitiless tropical sun was simply staggering: three out of five died within five years of arrival, and slave owners needed to replenish their fields constantly with fresh victims.
That this abominable childhood produced such a strong, productive, self-reliant human being—that this fatherless adolescent could have ended up a founding father of a country he had not yet even seen—seems little short of miraculous.
Perhaps the true legacy of his boyhood was an equivocal one: he came to detest the tyranny embodied by the planters and their authoritarian rule, while also fearing the potential uprisings of the disaffected slaves. The twin specters of despotism and anarchy were to haunt him for the rest of his life.
garde;
prenez garde: take care
“The changes in the human condition are uncertain and frequent. Many, on whom fortune has bestowed her favours, may trace their family to a more unprosperous station; and many who are now in obscurity, may look back upon the affluence and exalted rank of their
Hence, the education of this future abolitionist was partly underwritten by sugarcane harvested by slaves.
These men wanted to modify the social order, not overturn it—a fair description of Hamilton’s future politics.
“When the political salvation of any community is depending, it is incumbent upon those who are set up as its guardians to embrace such measures as have justice, vigor, and a probability of success to recommend
The task of government was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good.
Of all the incidents in Hamilton’s early life in America, his spontaneous defense of Myles Cooper was probably the most telling. It showed that he could separate personal honor from political convictions and presaged a recurring theme of his career: the superiority of forgiveness over revolutionary vengeance.
On November 19, Sears gathered up a militia of nearly one hundred horsemen in Connecticut, kidnapped the Reverend Samuel Seabury, and terrorized his prisoner’s family in Westchester before parading his humiliated Tory trophy through New Haven.
In times of such commotion as the present, while the passions of men are worked up to an uncommon pitch, there is great danger of fatal extremes. The same state of the passions which fits the multitude, who have not a sufficient stock of reason and knowledge to guide them, for opposition to tyranny and oppression, very naturally leads them to a contempt and disregard of all authority. The due medium is hardly to be found among the more intelligent. It is almost impossible among the unthinking populace. When the minds of these are loosened from their attachment to ancient establishments and
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Alexander Hamilton to John Jay, 1774
some things were so blindingly self-evident to Hamilton that he was baffled when others didn’t grasp them quickly—an intellectual agility that could breed intolerance for less quick-witted mortals.
In politics, I am indifferent what side she may be of; I think I have arguments that will easily convert her to mine.
Schuyler urged Hamilton to respond emphatically to personal attacks. “A man’s character ought not to be sported with,” he once wrote, “and he that suffers stains to lay on it with impunity really deserves none nor will he long enjoy one.”
Where revolutions, by their nature, resisted excess government power, the opposite situation could be equally hazardous. “As too much power leads to despotism, too little leads to anarchy, and both eventually to the ruin of the people.”
“Every day confirms me in the intention of renouncing public life and devoting myself wholly to you. Let others waste their time and their tranquillity in a vain pursuit of power and glory. Be it my object to be happy in a quiet retreat with my better angel.”
Alexander to Elizabeth
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.
That July, Burr married Theodosia Prevost, the confidante of Peggy Shippen Arnold, in the Dutch Reformed Church
“The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people,” he told Morris. “In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fickleness, and folly.”
“Experience must convince us that our present establishments are utopian before we shall be ready to part with them for better,”
As Burr once warned his law clerk, “Things written remain.”25 This caution reflected Burr’s principal quality as a politician: he was a chameleon who evaded clear-cut positions on most issues and was a genius at studied ambiguity.
The Revolution had unified sharply disparate groups. Without the bonds of wartime comradeship, would the divisive pulls of class, region, and ideology tear the new country apart?
He thought America’s character would be defined by how it treated its vanquished enemies, and he wanted to graduate from bitter wartime grievances to the forgiving posture of peace.
He railed against the baleful precedent that would be set if the legislature exiled an entire category of people without hearings or trials. If that happened, “no man can be safe, nor know when he may be the innocent victim of a prevailing faction. The name of liberty applied to such a government would be a mockery of common sense.”
The most damning and hypocritical critiques of his allegedly aristocratic economic system emanated from the most aristocratic southern slaveholders, who deflected attention from their own nefarious deeds by posing as populist champions and assailing the northern financial and mercantile interests aligned with Hamilton.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
January 25, 1785, nineteen people gathered at the home of innkeeper John Simmons to form a society that would safeguard blacks who had already secured their freedom and try to win freedom for those still held in bondage. The group was called the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves.
Whether through luck, premeditation, or a knack for making things happen, Hamilton continued to demonstrate his unique flair for materializing at every major turning point in the early history of the republic.
Think of me with as much tenderness as I do of you and we cannot fail to be always happy.17
Alexander Hamilton to Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton
The fifty-five delegates representing twelve states—the renegade Rhode Island boycotted the convention—scarcely constituted a cross section of America. They were white, educated males and mostly affluent property owners.
Of all the founders, Hamilton probably had the gravest doubts about the wisdom of the masses and wanted elected leaders who would guide them. This was the great paradox of his career: his optimistic view of America’s potential coexisted with an essentially pessimistic view of human nature. His faith in Americans never quite matched his faith in America itself.
Franklin wanted a unicameral legislature and an executive council in lieu of a president. He also opposed a presidential veto on legislation, thinking it would lead to executive corruption “till it ends in monarchy.”
Hamilton, back by August 13, dove into a debate that passionately engaged him: immigration. He opposed any attempt to restrict membership in Congress to native-born Americans or to stipulate a residency period before immigrants could qualify for it.
In the end, nobody would do more than Alexander Hamilton to infuse life into this parchment and make it the working mandate of the American government.
Paranoid thinking seems to be a legacy of all revolutions, with purists searching for signs of heresy, and the American experience was no exception.
Both Hamilton and Madison were rational men who assumed that people often acted irrationally because of ambition and avarice. Madison wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
Hamilton warned that “a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.”
“liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power. . . . [T]he former rather than the latter is apparently most to be apprehended by the United States.”
He was especially intent that the federal judiciary check any legislative abuses. In number 78, Hamilton introduced an essential concept, never made explicit in the Constitution: that the Supreme Court should be able to review and overturn legislation as unconstitutional.
Hamilton said, “A nation without a national government is, in my view, an awful spectacle. The establishment of a constitution in [a] time of profound peace by the voluntary consent of a whole people is a prodigy, to the completion of which I look forward with trembling anxiety.”
In “the general course of things, the popular views and even prejudices will direct the action of the rulers.”
Hamilton believed that revolutions ended in tyranny because they glorified revolution as a permanent state of mind. A spirit of compromise and a concern with order were needed to balance the quest for liberty.
George Washington noted the hypocrisy of the many slaveholding antifederalists: “It is a little strange that the men of large property in the South should be more afraid that the Constitution will produce an aristocracy or a monarchy than the genuine, democratical people of the East.”
“In politics, as in war, the first blow is half the battle.”
In one letter, Hamilton differentiated between two types drawn to revolutions: those sincerely interested in the public good and “restless and turbulent spirits,” such as Clinton, who sought to exploit unrest to become despots.
That Hamilton could be so sensitive to criticisms of himself and so insensitive to the effect his words had on others was a central mystery of his psyche.
“It is best to be silent, for there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.”
playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, author of The School for Scandal, who once refused to satisfy his creditors on the grounds that “paying only encourages them.”
