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Political life in the young republic now presented a strange spectacle. The intellectual caliber of the leading figures surpassed that of any future political leadership in American history. On the other hand, their animosity toward one another has seldom been exceeded either.
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 again used Julius Caesar as an example of the worst sort of tyrant, not as history’s greatest man.
Sadly, it was the perceived threat to his career, not regret over his pregnant wife, that restored Hamilton to his senses.
The marriage of Alexander and Eliza Hamilton survived the affair but the marriage between James and Maria Reynolds did not. In May 1793, Maria, reverting to Mary, filed for divorce in New York and hired as her lawyer, of all people, Aaron Burr.
I fear the other gentleman [i.e., Burr] is unprincipled both as a public and private man. When the constitution was in deliberation . . . his conduct was equivocal. . . . In fact, I take it he is for or against nothing but as it suits his interest or ambition.
But if Jefferson was a man of fanatical principles, he had principles all the same—which Hamilton could forgive. Burr’s abiding sin was a total lack of principles, which Hamilton could not forgive.
Thomas Jefferson did something extraordinary: he drew up a series of resolutions censuring Hamilton and quietly slipped them to William Branch Giles. Jefferson now functioned as de facto leader of the Republican party. The great irony was that the man who repeatedly accused Hamilton of meddling with Congress and violating the separation of powers was now secretly scrawling congressional resolutions directed against a member of his own administration.
In one unpublished essay, he railed against the Jeffersonians as “wily hypocrites” and “crafty and abandoned imposters.”36 He now viewed “hypocrisy and treachery” as “the most successful commodities in the political market. It seems to be the destined lot of nations to mistake their foes for their friends, their flatterers for their faithful servants.”37 He believed that he had made a huge but thankless sacrifice for his country.
The Parisian streets, he warned, “literally are red with blood.”4 Short described to Hamilton mobs breaking into the royal palace and jailing King Louis XVI. In late August, a guillotine was erected near the Tuileries as Robespierre and Marat launched a wholesale roundup of priests, royalists, editors, judges, tramps, prostitutes—anyone deemed an enemy of the state. When 1,400 political prisoners were slaughtered in the so-called September Massacres, an intoxicated Robespierre pronounced it “the most beautiful revolution that has ever honored humanity.”5 “Let the blood of traitors flow,”
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On January 21, 1793, more grisly events forced a reappraisal of the notion that the French Revolution was a romantic Gallic variant of the American Revolution. Louis XVI—who had aided the American Revolution and whose birthday had long been celebrated by American patriots—was guillotined for plotting against the Revolution.
The death of Louis Capet—he had lost his royal title—was drenched in gore: schoolboys cheered, threw their hats aloft, and licked the king’s blood, while one executioner did a thriving business selling snippets of royal hair and clothing. The king’s decapitated head was wedged between his lifeless legs, then stowed in a basket. The remains were buried in an unvarnished box.
Gouverneur Morris, now U.S. minister to France, informed Hamilton after the king’s execution, “It has so happened that a very great proportion of the French officers who served in America have been either opposed to the Revolution at an early day or felt themselves obliged at a later period to abandon it. Some of them are now in a state of banishment and their property confiscated.”16 With the monarchy’s fall, the marquis de Lafayette was denounced as a traitor. He fled to Belgium, only to be captured by the Austrians and shunted among various prisons for five years. Tossed into solitary
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Washington was indeed sickened by the bloodshed in France, and this widened the breach between him and Jefferson.
No American was to expend more prophetic verbiage in denouncing the French Revolution than Alexander Hamilton. The suspension of the monarchy and the September Massacres, Hamilton later told Lafayette, had “cured me of my goodwill for the French Revolution.”
“A struggle for liberty is in itself respectable and glorious,” he opined. “When conducted with magnanimity, justice, and humanity, it ought to command the admiration of every friend to human nature. But if sullied by crimes and extravagancies, it loses its respectability.”
“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.”42 Though vice president, Adams felt so vulnerable to attack that he had a cache of arms smuggled through back lanes from the war office to his home so that he could defend his family, friends, and servants.
The instigator of many articles against his own administration, Jefferson knew that they were upsetting Washington. He felt sympathy for the president but also believed he was getting his just deserts.
Jefferson inwardly reviled Hamilton as a traitor to republican government. “What a fatal stroke at the cause of liberty; et tu Brute,” he wrote in his diary.
Thomas Jefferson’s resignation as secretary of state on December 31, 1793. The Virginian had failed to eject Hamilton from the cabinet and had lost the contest for Washington’s favor.
Long before Napoleon came on the scene, he predicted that after “wading through seas of blood . . . France may find herself at length the slave of some victorious . . . Caesar.”
Washington decided to choose a Republican to succeed Gouverneur Morris as American minister to France and settled on James Monroe. Aaron Burr and some Republican colleagues suspected that Hamilton had induced Washington to veto Burr; for Burr, this was another of many times that Hamilton spiked his aspirations for office.
The burgeoning atheism of the French Revolution reawakened in him religious feelings that had lain dormant since King’s College days. “The very existence of a Deity has been questioned and in some instances denied,” he wrote in alarm about French attacks on Christianity. “The duty of piety has been ridiculed, the perishable nature of man asserted, and his hopes bounded to the short span of his earthly state. Death has been proclaimed an eternal sleep.”
For Hamilton, the French Revolution had become a compendium of heretical doctrines, including the notion that morality could exist without religion or that human nature could be so refined by revolution that “government itself will become useless and society will subsist and flourish free from its shackles.”
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.”32 Napoleon expressed this sentiment more concisely, calling Talleyrand “a pile of shit in a silk stocking.”
During his two-year sojourn in America, 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.”
I have a letter, my dear Eliza, from my worthy friend M. de Talleyrand, who expresses to me his gratitude for an introduction to you and my Amiable. By my Amiable, you know that I mean your husband, for I love him very much and, if you were as generous as the old Romans, you would lend him to me for a little while.
The mostly Scotch-Irish frontiersmen of western Pennsylvania, who regarded liquor as a beloved refreshment, had the highest per-capita concentration of homemade stills in America. In places, whiskey was so ubiquitous that it doubled as money.
Regarding the uprising as a direct threat to constitutional order, Washington asked Supreme Court Justice James Wilson to declare a state of anarchy around Pittsburgh.
By September 9, Washington had had enough. “If the laws are to be trampled upon with impunity,” he said, “and a minority is to dictate to the majority, there is an end put at one stroke to republican government.”
instead. Hamilton was in constant motion as he bore the burdens of both the Treasury and War Departments. With his inexhaustible capacity for work, he outfitted an entire army, ordering shoes, blankets, shirts, coats, medicine chests, kettles, rifles, and muskets.
Hamilton’s experience with this amateurish militia reinforced his long-held conviction that the central government needed a standing army. “In the expedition against the western insurgents,” he later said, “I trembled every moment lest a great part of the militia should take it into their heads to return home rather than go forward.”
Public opinion applauded the way Washington balanced firmness and clemency in suppressing the Whiskey Rebellion. There had been very few deaths. Washington and Hamilton had brought new prestige to the government and shown how a democratic society could handle popular disorder without resort to despotic methods. Contrary to European wisdom, democracies did not necessarily degenerate into lawlessness.
Madison fumed.45 He saw the Whiskey Rebellion as the prelude to the establishment of a standing army that would constrain American liberties.
Jefferson’s pledge to repeal the tax did much to boost his popularity: “So it may be said, with undoubted truth, that the whiskey drinkers made Mr. Jefferson the President of the United States.”
Both as general and president, Washington had numberless chances to observe Hamilton and had seen only competence, dedication, and integrity.
He had prevailed in almost every major program he had sponsored—whether the bank, assumption, funding the public debt, the tax system, the Customs Service, or the Coast Guard—despite years of complaints and bitter smears.
Bankrupt when Hamilton took office, the United States now enjoyed a credit rating equal to that of any European nation. He had laid the groundwork for both liberal democracy and capitalism and helped to transform the role of the president from passive administrator to active policy maker, creating the institutional scaffolding for America’s future emergence as a great power.
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.
Hamilton feared that the terrors of the French Revolution might soon be visited upon America, guillotines and all, and that he himself might be condemned by a revolutionary tribunal. “The game to be played may be a most important one,” he told Troup. “It may be for nothing less than true liberty, property, order, religion and, of course, heads. I will try Troup, if possible, to guard yours and mine.”
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, which had its chief base of operations in Virginia and its headquarters at Monticello.”
The Republican demonizing of Alexander Hamilton only intensified after he left the Treasury Department. To opponents, he seemed able to manipulate the government from New York. That Hamilton came to exercise profound influence over the distant cabinet members is patent from his extensive correspondence with them. What is equally clear, however, is that he did not obtrude in some power-hungry, ham-handed fashion but was gradually invited into their deliberations.
Though blessed with a great executive mind and a consummate policy maker, Hamilton could never master the smooth restraint of a mature politician.
Hamilton lived in a world of moral absolutes and was not especially prone to compromise or consensus building.
Woodrow Wilson defined as an essential ingredient for political leadership: “profound sympathy with those whom he leads—a sympathy which is insight—an insight which is of the heart rather than of the intellect.”
During the 1796 election, Noah Webster, then a Federalist editor, suggested in his newspaper, The Minerva, that Hamilton might be an appropriate presidential candidate. According to scandalmonger James T. Callender, an unnamed Republican saw this and dispatched an emissary to New York, who confronted Hamilton to “inform him that if Webster should in future print a single paragraph on that head,” the Maria Reynolds papers would instantly “be laid before the world. It is believed the message was delivered to Mr. Hamilton for the Minerva became silent.”
At first, Hamilton told a correspondent that his one overriding goal was to stop Thomas Jefferson from becoming president: “All personal and partial considerations must be discarded and everything must give way to the great object of excluding Jefferson.”
under the old constitutional rules electors did not distinguish between their votes for president and vice president.
Hamilton bet on the wrong horse, a mistake that would haunt the rest of his career. As treasury secretary, he had only limited contact with John Adams, who was excluded from the inner policy circle. The two men had maintained a wary distance. Hamilton later said that by the time Washington left office, “men of principal influence in the Federal party” began to “entertain serious doubts about [Adams’s] fitness” for the presidency because of his temperament. Yet Adams’s “pretensions in several respects were so strong that, after mature reflection, they thought it better to indulge their hopes
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In late December, however, Elbridge Gerry presented Adams with evidence from Aaron Burr, the self-promoting Republican favorite for vice president, that exposed Hamilton’s quiet efforts to elect Pinckney ahead of Adams. Both John and Abigail Adams were shocked.
