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Hamilton had immigrated to North America to gratify his ambition and successfully seized the opportunity to distinguish himself. Both then and forever after, the poor boy from the West Indies commanded attention with the force and fervor of his words. Once Hamilton was initiated into the cause of American liberty, his life acquired an even more headlong pace that never slackened.
In fewer than five years, the twenty-two-year-old Alexander Hamilton had risen from despondent clerk in St. Croix to one of the aides to America’s most eminent man.
Abigail Adams had bewailed the situation: “It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me—to fight for ourselves for what we are robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”
“I was once determined to let my existence and American liberty end together. My Betsey has given me a motive to outlive my pride.”
When a story appeared that delegates were colluding to bring the duke of York, George III’s second son, from Britain to head an American monarchy, Hamilton traced this absurdity to a letter sent “to one James Reynolds of this city”—the first reference he ever made to the man whose wife would someday be his fatal enchantress.
The formula richly rewarded the southern states, artificially inflating their House seats and electoral votes and helping to explain why four of the first five presidents hailed from Virginia.
Indeed, the whole superstructure erected in Philadelphia rested on that unstable, undemocratic foundation.
wagered Morris that he would not dare to accost Washington with a friendly slap on the back. Taking up the challenge, Morris found Washington standing by the fireplace in a drawing room and genially cuffed him on the shoulder: “My dear general, how happy I am to see you look so well.” Washington fixed Morris with such a frigid gaze that Morris was sorry that he had ever taken up Hamilton’s dare.
“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.”109
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.
Taken aback, Washington replied, “I always knew Colonel Hamilton to be a man of superior talents, but never supposed that he had any knowledge of finance.” “He knows everything, sir,” Morris replied. “To a mind like his nothing comes amiss.”
He was the clear-eyed apostle of America’s economic future, setting forth a vision that many found enthralling, others unsettling, but that would ultimately prevail.
Hamilton preferred financial incentives to government directives. For instance, knowing that tariffs taxed consumers and handed monopoly profits to producers, Hamilton wanted them to be moderate in scale, temporary in nature, and repealed as soon as possible. He preferred bounties because they didn’t raise prices. In some cases, he even wanted lower tariffs—on raw materials, for instance—to encourage manufacturing.
It is tempting but misleading to think of the Federalists as the patrician party and the Republicans as representing the commoners. “The controversy which embroiled the two champions was not basically concerned with the haves and the have-nots,” James T. Flexner once wrote of the clash between Hamilton and Jefferson. “It was between rival economic systems, each of which was aimed at generating its own men of property.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
When John Marshall later read through Washington’s correspondence for his authorized biography, he expressed “astonishment at the proportion of it” from Hamilton’s pen.
Washington penned one of his loftiest tributes. In every relation which you have borne to me, I have found that my confidence in your talents, exertions, and integrity has been well placed. I the more freely render this testimony of my approbation, because I speak from opportunities of information w[hi]ch cannot deceive me and which furnish satisfactory proof of your title to public regard. My most earnest wishes for your happiness will attend you in retirement.
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.
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.
I remain your sincere friend and affectionate honorable servant.
Adams’s patent displeasure with Hamilton afforded Washington an opportunity to pay his protégé a huge compliment. Washington said that some people considered Hamilton “an ambitious man and therefore a dangerous one. That he is ambitious I readily grant, but it is of that laudable kind which prompts a man to excel in whatever he takes in hand. He is enterprising, quick in his perceptions, and his judgment intuitively great.” In sum, Hamilton’s loss would be “irreparable.”
Hamilton confided to Charles C. Pinckney after Washington’s death, “Perhaps no friend of his has more cause to lament on personal account than myself. . . . My imagination is gloomy, my heart sad.”
Hamilton tried to keep up a brave face, but he was heartbroken over his ill-fated corps. He told Eliza that he had to play “the game of good spirits but . . . it is a most artificial game and at the bottom of my soul there is a more than usual gloom.”
Alexander Hamilton triumphed as a doer and thinker, not as a leader of the average voter. He was simply too unashamedly brainy to appeal to the masses. Fisher Ames observed of Hamilton that the common people don’t want leaders “whom they see elevated by nature and education so far above their heads.”51
The first great skeptic of American exceptionalism, he refused to believe that the country was exempt from the sober lessons of history.
Where Hamilton looked at the world through a dark filter and had a better sense of human limitations, Jefferson viewed the world through a rose-colored prism and had a better sense of human potentialities. Both Hamilton and Jefferson believed
in democracy, but Hamilton tended to be more suspicious of the governed and Jefferson of the governors. A strange blend of dreamy idealist and manipulative politician, Jefferson was a virtuoso of the sunny phrases an...
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Under the tutelage of Washington, Adams, and Hamilton, the Federalists had bequeathed to American history a sound federal government with a central bank, a funded debt, a high credit rating, a tax system, a customs service, a coast guard, a navy, and many other institutions that would guarantee the strength to preserve liberty.
Hamilton had promoted a forward-looking agenda of a modern nation-state with a market economy and an affirmative view of central government. His meritocratic vision allowed greater scope in the economic sphere for the individual liberties that Jefferson defended so eloquently in the political sphere. It was no coincidence that the allegedly aristocratic and
reactionary Federalists contained the overwhelming majority of active abolitionists of the period. Elitists they might be, but they were an open, fluid elite, based on merit and money, not on birth and breeding—the antithesis of the southern plantation system. It was the northern economic system that embodied the mix of democracy and capitalism that was to constitute the essence of America in the long run. By no means did the 1800 election represent the unalloyed triumph of good over evil or of commoners over the wellborn. The 1800 triumph of Republicanism also meant the ascendancy of the
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Many of these slaveholding populists were celebrated by posterity as tribunes of the common people. Meanwhile, the self-made Hamilton, a fervent abolitionist and a staunch believer in meritocracy, was villainized in American history textbooks as an apologist of privilege and wealth.
George Eacker was never prosecuted for Philip Hamilton’s death. The young Jeffersonian lawyer died two years later of consumption.
Mine is an odd destiny. Perhaps no man in the U[nited] States has sacrificed or done more for the present Constitution than myself. And contrary to all my anticipations of its fate, as you know from the very beginning, I am still labouring to prop the frail and worthless fabric. Yet I have the murmur of its friends no less than the curses of its foes for my rewards. What can I do better than withdraw from the scene? Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me.
“Burr’s intention to challenge was known to a certain club . . . long before it was known to Hamilton. . . . [T]his circumstance induced many to consider it more like an assassination than a duel.”
Burr did kill him, Hamilton knew, he would at least have the posthumous satisfaction of destroying Burr’s alliance with the Federalists.
Hamilton alone seemed resigned as the end neared. At one point, speaking of politics, he said, “If they break this union, they will break my heart.”69 He could have left no more fitting political epitaph.
With my last idea, I shall cherish the sweet hope of meeting you in a better world. Adieu best of wives and best of women. Embrace all my darling children for me. Ever yours A H72
“I shall be glad to see Colonel Burr, but please tell him that a portrait of Alexander Hamilton always hangs in my study where all may see it.”54 Burr got the message and left.
“Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.”
“Mr. Monroe,” she told him, “if you have come to tell me that you repent, that you are sorry, very sorry, for the misrepresentations and the slanders and the stories you circulated against my dear husband, if you have come to say this, I understand it. But otherwise, no lapse of time, no nearness to the grave, makes any difference.”
