Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

For Hamilton, the utopian revolutionaries in France had emphasized liberty to the exclusion of order, morality, religion, and property rights.

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.

On August 1, Jefferson found himself trapped again in a cabinet meeting with Hamilton, the human word machine, who spontaneously spouted perfect speeches in every forum.

One senses the laconic Jefferson’s perplexity in dealing with this inspired windbag.

Did it never occur to you that the divisions of America might be ended by the sacrifice of this one man?”

his April 14 letter expressed his unswerving conviction that nations, transported by strong emotion, often miscalculate their interests: “Wars oftener proceed from angry and perverse passions than from cool calculations of interest.”

Like so many Hamilton polemics, the letter was a hot-blooded defense of a cool-eyed policy.

By early summer 1794, that blood ran in rivers, and executions in Paris reached a monstrous toll of nearly eight hundred per month.

Debt was a legitimate concern, with an astounding 55 percent of federal expenditures being siphoned off to service it.

There was a radical alienation inside Hamilton, a harrowing sense that he remained, on some level, a rootless outsider in America.

For a man so involved in public life, he was curiously unable to develop a self-protective shell.

Bankrupt when Hamilton took office, the United States now enjoyed a credit rating equal to that of any European nation.

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.

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

Without Washington’s guidance or public responsibility, he had again revealed a blazing, ungovernable temper that was unworthy of him and rendered him less effective.

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.

For his nom de guerre, Hamilton picked “Camillus,” from Plutarch’s Lives. This Roman general was a perfect symbol: a wise, virtuous man who was sorely misunderstood by his people, who did not see that he had their highest interests at heart.

The United States was “the embryo of a great empire,” and the European powers, if given half a chance, would happily stamp out this republican experiment:

Bold, cosmopolitan, and self-confident, Hamilton thought the United States had nothing to fear from commercial engagement with the rest of the planet.

The two men had won a great victory together: they had established forever the principle of executive-branch leadership in foreign policy.

It is odd that the man who melded the nation so closely together through his fiscal policies never arranged a pleasure trip through the United States.

The plague of partisan recriminations had already diminished the incentives for people to serve in government.

As its centerpiece, the farewell address called for American neutrality, shorn of names and party labels.

“Religion and morality are essential props. In vain does that man claim the praise of patriotism who labours to subvert or undermine these great pillars of human happiness.”

The arguments for neutrality and a foreign policy based on national interests became especially influential.

Adored by his followers, he was seen as cocky, conceited, and swaggering by his enemies.

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.

Hamilton thus went from unmatched access to President Washington to total exclusion from President Adams.

Adams was schooled in the ascetic virtues of Puritan New England: thrift, hard work, self-criticism, public service, plain talk, and a morbid dread of ostentation.

As was my father, born in 1927 in Lewiston, Maine.

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.”

This vanity made him feel unappreciated.

Hamilton, he said, had “a superabundance of secretions which he could not find whores enough to draw off.”

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.

At times, Adams seemed to be in headlong flight from his own government, spending up to seven months at a stretch in Massachusetts and trying to run the government by dispatch.

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.

Hamilton probably drew the attention of gossips who saw him mooning around Angelica’s adoring gaze.

A search for "probably" yields 121 mentions in the book.

Hamilton now reverted to lifelong practice: he would drown his accusers with words.

As in all political battles, Hamilton was seized by an overmastering compulsion to counterattack with all the verbal weapons at his command.

“Real firmness is good for everything. Strut is good for nothing.”

“My plan ever is to combine energy with moderation.”

Hamilton thought that America was in an undeclared civil war that had segregated the country into two warring camps.

this sudden flush of power in time proved perilous for the Federalists, for they were henceforth to lack the self-restraint necessary to curtail their more dogmatic, authoritarian impulses, thus paving the way for abuses of power.

It was ever thus.

Perhaps it took this scandal for Hamilton to recognize just how vital his wife had been in providing solace from his controversial political career.

The period of John Adams’s presidency declined into a time of political savagery with few parallels in American history, a season of paranoia in which the two parties surrendered all trust in each other.

“My opinion is that the mass [of aliens] ought to be obliged to leave the country”—

Many Republicans thought it best to sit back and let the Federalists blow themselves up.

In the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, Jefferson and Madison set forth a radical doctrine of states’ rights that effectively undermined the Constitution.

Hamilton’s life began to lose some of its clockwork precision, and the darkness of depression again invaded his mind.