Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Hamilton was portrayed as the uppity “Tom S**t” (Tom Shit) and introduced as a “mustee”—the offspring of a white person and a quadroon. This was the first time that Hamilton’s opponents tried to denigrate him with charges of mixed racial ancestry.

He wrote with the speed of a beautifully organized mind that digested ideas thoroughly, slotted them into appropriate pigeonholes, then regurgitated them at will.

In typically categorical fashion, Hamilton ended by dismissing the Articles of Confederation as an abomination, “one of the most execrable forms of government that human infatuation ever contrived.”

Acknowledging imperfections in the impeachment process, Hamilton stressed that the Constitution had produced the best compromise available: “If mankind were to resolve to agree in no institution of government until every part of it had been adjusted to the most exact standard of perfection, society would soon become a general scene of anarchy and the world a desert.”

As he phrased it in number 70, “Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.”

That same day, Governor Clinton argued that the United States covered so vast a territory and possessed such a variety of peoples “that no general free government can suit” all the states.99 In rebuttal, Hamilton outlined his vision of American nationalism, showing that a true nation, with a unified culture, had been fused from the diverse groups and regions of the original colonies.

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.

Like other founding fathers, Hamilton inhabited two diametrically opposed worlds. There was the Olympian sphere of constitutional debate and dignified discourse—the way many prefer to remember these stately figures—and the gutter world of personal sniping, furtive machinations, and tabloid-style press attacks. The contentious culture of these early years was both the apex and the nadir of American political expression.

Both as a matter of temperament and policy, Washington was taciturn, once advising his adopted grandson, “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.”36 Such a circumspect president formed a striking contrast with the loquacious Hamilton.

At one ball, Angelica dropped a garter that was swept gallantly off the floor by Hamilton. Angelica, who had a sly wit, teased him that he wasn’t a Knight of the Garter. Angelica’s sarcastic sister, Peggy, then remarked, “He would be a Knight of the Bedchamber, if he could.”49 This may all have been harmless banter, but such tales fed material to the local gossips.

Washington could weigh all sides of an issue and coolly appraise the political repercussions. “Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, every consideration, was maturely weighed; refraining if he saw a doubt, but, when once decided, going through with his purpose whatever obstacles opposed,” said Jefferson.77 Such a man could be counted on to temper his treasury secretary’s excesses.

The one place where Hamilton deviated from official policy was in applauding Britain’s refusal to hand over slaves who had defected during the Revolution. “To have given up these men to their masters, after the assurances of protection held out to them, was impossible,” Hamilton told Beckwith.

Such taxation might dampen consumption and reduce revenues, Hamilton acknowledged, but he doubted this would happen, because “luxuries of every kind lay the strongest hold on the attachments of mankind, which, especially when confirmed by habit, are not easily alienated from them.”

From the controversy over his funding scheme, we can date the onset of that abiding rural fear of big-city financiers that came to permeate American politics.

If Hamilton wrote this, he was updating a gibe by the English radical Thomas Day, who had written in 1776, “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independence with the one hand and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”

This supreme rationalist, who feared the passions of the mob more than any other founder, was himself a man of deep and often ungovernable emotions.

Whether riding horseback, playing the violin, designing buildings, or inventing curious gadgets, Thomas Jefferson seemed adept at everything. Like many accomplished people, he was seduced by this quest for self-perfection and not easily lured into public office. The self-sufficiency and philosophic repose made him an atypical politician. He once wrote, “The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves and to suffice for our own happiness.”

That Hamilton and Jefferson were to become antagonists in a bloody, unrelenting feud would not have occurred to either man upon first meeting, and their relations started out amicably enough.

As a courtly gentleman of impeccable manners, Jefferson shrank from disagreement. Unlike Hamilton, a swashbuckler who reveled in debate, Jefferson hated controversy and was more guarded than Hamilton in exposing his thoughts. He suited his words to the occasion and catered to listeners’ prejudices, saying what they wanted to hear. This kept his own views secret while encouraging others to speak. Hamilton—opinionated, almost recklessly candid—was incapable of this type of circumspection.

This decision generated melodramatic speculation. Some people found the idea of a separate capital fraught with danger, fearing a privileged enclave. Governor George Clinton envisioned the ten-mile square as the scene of a presidential “court” disfigured by royal trappings and marked by “ambition with idleness, baseness with pride, the thirst of riches without labor . . . flattery . . . treason . . . perfidy, but above all the perpetual ridicule of virtue.”

Abigail Adams, who did not set sail until November, seemed miffed by the enforced southward shift, swearing that she would try to enjoy Philadelphia but that “when all is done it will not be Broadway.”

In reality, Philadelphia was a cosmopolitan city, praised by a highborn British visitor as “one of the wonders of the world,” “the first town in America,” and one that “bids fair to rival almost any in Europe.”27 Larger than either New York or Boston, it supported ten newspapers and thirty bookshops.

By October 14, Hamilton had taken a home at Third and Walnut, just down the block from his office, as if he wished to stumble from bed straight into his office. The move was indicative of how conscientious he was and how crowded his schedule.

Hamilton, wanting the bank to remain predominantly in private hands, advanced a theory that became a truism of central banking—that monetary policy was so liable to abuse that it needed some insulation from interfering politicians: “To attach full confidence to an institution of this nature, it appears to be an essential ingredient in its structure that it shall be under a private not a public direction, under the guidance of individual interest, not of public policy.”

In words that distinctly echoed Hamilton’s, Marshall said that necessary didn’t mean indispensable so much as appropriate. Repeatedly in American history, Hamilton’s flexible definition of the word necessary was to free government to handle unforeseen emergencies.

Philadelphia had its quota of sensual pleasures. Though French visitors dismissed it as quaintly puritanical, it enjoyed a livelier reputation among Americans.

As often is the case with addictions, the fanciful notion of a “gradual discontinuance” only provided a comforting pretext for more sustained indulgence.

That he inserted these trysts into such a tight schedule only strengthens the impression that Hamilton was ensnared by a sexual obsession. It was as if, after inhabiting a world of high culture for many years, Hamilton had regressed back to the sensual, dissolute world of his childhood. There is again a Dickensian quality to his story: the young hero escapes a tawdry life only to be lured back into it by a pair of unscrupulous swindlers.

It was Hamilton’s vision of America as a manufacturing behemoth, not Jefferson’s of a society of yeomen farmers, that threatened the British.