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After these wounding confrontations, Adams beat a hasty retreat to Quincy and stayed there for seven months, sometimes buried in the collected works of Frederick the Great.
Abigail Adams went so far as to fear that Hamilton might stage a coup d’état against her husband’s administration.
While Hamilton wove fantasies around his army, the American people were fast losing interest in any military preparations.
His vision now appeared to be so steeped in gloom that one wonders how much depression warped his judgment in later years. The ebullient hopefulness of his early days as treasury secretary seemed to be in eclipse.
I wonder how this period will be presented in the musical.
Of the nine American presidents who owned slaves—a list that includes his fellow Virginians Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—only Washington set free all of his slaves.
Those present were so petrified at the thought of Jefferson as president that they considered desperate measures.
He believed that Jefferson’s support for the Constitution had always been lukewarm and that, once in office, he would dismantle the federal government and return America to the chaos of the Articles of Confederation.
Adams was “liable to gusts of passion little short of frenzy, which drive him beyond the control of any rational reflection.
Adams’s actions touched off a vindictive, mean-spirited mood in Hamilton, who now said of the president, “The man is more mad than I ever thought him and I shall soon be led to say as wicked as he is mad.”
Hamilton was congenitally incapable of compromise. Rather than make peace with John Adams, he was ready, if necessary, to blow up the Federalist party and let Jefferson become president.
In writing an intemperate indictment of John Adams, Hamilton committed a form of political suicide that blighted the rest of his career.
Hamilton found it hard to refrain from vendettas. He would be devoured by dislike of someone, brood about it, then yield to the catharsis of discharging his venom in print.
Once launched upon a course of action, the combative Hamilton could never stop.
For a man of Hamilton’s incomparable intellect, the pamphlet was a crazily botched job, an extended tantrum in print.
David McCullough has noted the rich irony that “Jefferson, the apostle of agrarian America who loathed cities, owed his ultimate political triumph to New York.”
However peripheral in the election, Hamilton’s letter almost certainly hastened the collapse of the Federalists as a national political force.
What he overlooked was that in trying to wreck Adams’s career, he would wreck his own and that the Federalists would never be resurrected from the ashes.
The 1800 elections revealed, for the first time, the powerful centrist pull of American politics—the electorate’s tendency to rein in anything perceived as extreme.
He took tough, uncompromising stands and gloried in abstruse ideas in a political culture that pined for greater simplicity.
He was incapable of the resolutely uplifting themes that were to become mandatory in American politics.
He helped to establish the rule of law and the culture of capitalism at a time when a revolutionary utopianism and a flirtation with the French Revolution still prevailed among too many Jeffersonians.
By no means did the 1800 election represent the unalloyed triumph of good over evil or of commoners over the wellborn.
Slaveholding presidents from the south occupied the presidency for approximately fifty of the seventy-two years following Washington’s first inauguration.
Adams described the preservation of peace during his presidency as the “most splendid diamond in my crown” and requested that the following words be incised on his tombstone: “Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of peace with France in the year 1800.”
“The appointment of Burr as president would disgrace our country abroad,” he informed Sedgwick. “No agreement with him could be relied upon.”
Jefferson probably owed his victory to Hamilton as much as to any other politician. Hamilton’s pamphlet had first dealt a blow to Adams, though not a mortal one, and he had then intervened to squelch Burr’s chances for the presidency, paving the way for a Federalist deal with Jefferson.
Hamilton had intuited rightly that Jefferson, once in office, would be reluctant to reject executive powers he had deplored in opposition.
This compulsive bibliophile packed the Grange with up to one thousand volumes.
He hewed to a tragic view of life in which virtue was seldom rewarded or vice punished.
For Hamilton, religion formed the basis of all law and morality, and he thought the world would be a hellish place without it.
Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, two desperate politicians with fading careers, regarded each other as insuperable obstacles to their respective political revivals.
Their affair of honor was less about slurs and personal insults than politics and party leadership.
At every step, Hamilton proceeded with a sense of gravity that suggested his awareness of the possibility of his impending death.
Hamilton dedicated his last night to the activity that had earned him such lasting fame: framing words.
In other words, Burr knew that Hamilton had squandered his shot before he returned fire.
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.
Then, at 2:00 P.M. on Thursday, July 12, 1804, thirty-one hours after the duel, forty-nine-year-old Alexander Hamilton died gently, quietly, almost noiselessly.
Everybody in New York knew that the city had lost its most distinguished citizen.
Thus ended the most dramatic and improbable life among the founding fathers.
Jefferson and Adams took advantage of the next two decades to snipe at Hamilton and burnish their own exploits through their lengthy correspondence and other writings.
Burr’s reputation perished along with Hamilton, exactly as Hamilton had anticipated.
John Church Hamilton, was a lawyer, also fought in the War of 1812, and devoted decades to writing a many-volumed life of his father and sorting through his labyrinthine papers.
When historian Benson J. Lossing interviewed her when she was ninety-one, he found her anything but tearful or morose: “The sunny cheerfulness of her temper and quiet humor . . . still made her deportment genial and attractive.”
A devout woman, Eliza never lost her faith that she and Hamilton would be gloriously reunited in the afterlife.
Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton died at age ninety-seven.
I offered to pay for the genetic testing of any direct Hamilton descendants. The results are pending.
My special thanks to David McCullough, who graciously encouraged me to undertake this project.
Whatever her own private woes, she refused to let them interfere with the completion of this book. For a comparable case of love and loyalty, one would have to turn to Eliza Hamilton.
