The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789
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Within a few short months Morris had made himself the most powerful figure in the American government, second only to Washington as a national leader. In August 1781, at the same time he was signing the check to fund the Yorktown campaign, he drafted a comprehensive financial plan that synthesized his thinking about the reforms necessary to move the American economy from bankruptcy to solvency. The plan included the national bank, the impost, a land tax, a poll tax, and an excise tax on whiskey, plus the assumption of state debts by the Confederation Congress. It was a financial blueprint for a fully national economy almost identical to the plan that Alexander Hamilton would propose a decade later. Morris was at the peak of his power, and he felt it. “I can obtain whatever is wanted for the public service by a Script of the pen,” he boasted. Benjamin Rush concurred, calling Morris “a new star in our America hemisphere.”24
This could not last. For Morris was attempting, on his own, to impose a national economic architecture on a political foundation that vested sovereignty in the states. Arthur Lee, whose ideological antennae were poised to detect any stirrings in the political atmosphere that disrupted his keen sense of republican purity, regarded Morris’s financial reforms as the second coming of George III. “The accumulation of offices in this man, the number of valuable appointments in his gift, the absolute control given him over all revenue officers, his money and his art,” Lee lamented, “render him a most dangerous man to the Liberty of this Country.”25
Lee’s appetite for personal vendettas was voracious, and he now shifted his sights from Franklin to Morris, rising in Congress to question Morris’s apparently limitless power, eventually publishing a series of articles in the Freeman’s Journal attacking Morris’s character. “In fine, sir, is not the disbursement of eight million annually in contracts,” Lee asked rhetorically, “is not the profit and influence arising from this, is not the hourly offerings of incense and adulation from surrounding parasites…sufficient to satiate your vanity, pride, and avarice?” Even though Morris was spending substantial sums of his own money to subsidize the army, Lee accused him of profiteering at the expense of the public, casting a shadow over Morris’s reputation that, no matter how misguided, never completely disappeared.26
Meanwhile, just as Morris’s relentless campaign on behalf of the impost seemed successful—eleven of the necessary thirteen states had ratified—a change in the Rhode Island delegation created an impasse. The new member was David Howell, a former mathematics teacher at Rhode Island College (later Brown) who shared Lee’s hostile attitude toward Morris and held some “pure Whig” political convictions of his own with theological fervor. Howell acknowledged that his opposition to the impost was partly economic, chiefly the fact that the duties proposed would fall disproportionately on maritime states like Rhode Island. But more menacingly, the impost violated a core revolutionary principle enshrined in the Articles—namely, the sovereignty of the states, making them instead “mere provinces of Congress and tending to the establishment of an aristocratical or monarchial government.” Indeed, Howell described the Confederation Congress as “a foreign government” and the impost an updated version of the Townshend Acts.27
Rhode Island had a long-standing tradition of independence that sometimes verged on eccentricity. And following Howell’s lead, the legislature voted unanimously to reject the impost in November 1782. Morris was stunned, insisting that he was acting in accord with Article XIII of the Articles of Confederation, which granted Congress the authority to raise revenue from the states and thereby create “a common treasury” to pay for the war. He dispatched a three-man delegation to make this point to the Rhode Island legislature, but before the delegation could reach Providence, word arrived that Virginia had changed its mind and revoked its ratification of the impost. How this happened never found its way into the historical record, though the murky shadow of Arthur Lee hovers behind the scenes.
The death of the impost marked the end of Morris’s swashbuckling phase as Financier. Despite his relentless circulars to the states, the revenue acquired by requisition remained only a small fraction of what was required. “I am so habituated to receive apologies instead of Money,” he explained to one governor, “that I am never surprised. If Complaints of Difficulties were equivalent to Cash, I should not complain. But that is not the Case.” To make matters worse, his personal fortune suffered when the British navy, in reaction to the Yorktown disaster, decided to shut down American shipping all along the Atlantic coast, in the process scooping up the lion’s share of Morris’s fleet. “What I had afloat has all been lost,” he explained to a friend requesting a loan, then adding with a touch of the Morris wit that “the amount of that loss I will forebear to mention as there might be in it an appearance of ostentation.”28
While no treaty ending the war had yet been signed, and there was a firm consensus in the Congress as well as in the all-important mind of George Washington that one more campaign would be required to break the British will for good, out there in the countryside there was a conspicuous decline in support for a war that was all but over. And support for Morris’s fiscal policies declined as a consequence, because the driving force for national unity had always been the war for independence, not any larger sense of the collective interest. In a confidential letter, Morris even acknowledged that he harbored a secret hope that the war would not end: “But was I to confine myself to the language of a Patriot, I should tell you that a continuance of the War is Necessary until our Confederation is more strongly knit, until a sense of the obligation to support it shall be more generally diffused among all Ranks of American Citizens.”29
This might strike us as an odd argument, but it followed naturally from the widespread conviction that the primary motive for an American union had been winning the war, and once that motive was removed from the political equation, the union ended and only a loose confederation of states remained. What then happened to that confederation was anyone’s guess. The youngest member of the Virginian delegation, who styled himself James Madison, Jr., believed it did not bode well. “If our voluminous & entangled acts be not put into some certain course of settlement before a foreign war is off our hands,” he warned, “it is easy to see they must prove an exuberant & formidable source of intestine dissentions.”30
Madison, almost preternaturally shy and the second-youngest delegate in the Congress, had become one of Morris’s staunchest and most effective supporters. In some respects he remained a loyal Virginian—for instance, voting against the Bank of the United States, since Virginia regarded all banks as mysterious places where you sent your money to disappear. But Madison possessed a meticulous mind that liked to digest and assimilate evidence and experience in the deliberative style of a scholar or, once he made up his mind, like a lawyer defending his client. In 1782 he was still making up his mind, evolving toward his eventual role as, next to Washington, Virginia’s preeminent nationalist.31
One man whose mind was already made up, who at twenty-seven was the youngest delegate in the Congress as well as Morris’s most ardent supporter, was Alexander Hamilton. Soon after Morris’s appointment as superintendent of finance was announced, Hamilton had written him a lengthy, unsolicited letter. It was, as it turned out, a typical Hamiltonian document, sweepingly self-confident in both message and style, brimming over with facts and figures describing the deplorable conditions of the American economy, with a comprehensive outline of the proper fiscal policy to fix it. The solution required a national bank capitalized at $3 million, mandatory tax requisitions on the states that yielded $20 million annually, and a tariff on imports, all of which should prove sufficient to supply the army and retire the national debt within thirty years.32
Morris had never before encountered such overflowing financial wisdom from anyone so young, all the more remarkable because—this was why Morris regarded it as wisdom—Hamilton’s fiscal vision coincided perfectly with his own. Old enough to be Hamilton’s father, Morris immediately recognized a precocio
us presence and took him under his wing, a pattern that fit perfectly into what had already become the dominant theme of Hamilton’s young life.
The following year Morris asked Hamilton to serve as tax collector for New York, a thankless and ultimately hopeless task that Hamilton found frustrating. Morris consoled him by explaining that he was up against impossible odds and a state infrastructure that had perfected the art of avoiding taxes: “The several states and many of their public offices have so long been in the midst of boasting superior Assertions, that what was at first an Assumption has advanced along the Road to Belief, and then to perfect Conviction; And the Delusion is now kept up by the Darkness in which it is enveloped.” Hamilton should learn from this experience, Morris advised, sustaining his vision of a larger public interest, all the while dealing on a daily basis “with those vulgar Souls whose narrow optics can see but the little Circle of their selfish concerns.” As it turned out, it was a lesson that came naturally to Hamilton.33
Like Morris, Hamilton was an immigrant, though his origins were both more impoverished and more obscure. We know he was born out of wedlock in St. Kitts in the Caribbean to Rachel Faucette Lavien, a woman of French extraction. Historians disagree about his date of birth and his paternity. Hamilton claimed he was born in 1757, but several pieces of circumstantial evidence point to 1755. He also claimed that James Hamilton, a luckless Scottish merchant, was his father, though there is reason to believe that a well-to-do merchant in St. Croix named Thomas Stevens, who later took him in, was his real father. His early childhood was a grim catalog of disasters surrounded by broken, embittered people, topped off in 1768 when his mother came down with a mysterious fever, which Hamilton promptly caught. They lay in bed together, treated with the barbarous bloodletting and heavy laxatives that were the medical science of the day, until Rachel died next to him soaked in her own blood, vomit, and urine. Any attempt to imagine the young Hamilton of that horrific moment as a prominent statesman in a land he had never seen defies credibility.34
He was rescued from tropical obscurity by a combination of sheer talent, boundless ambition, and a series of powerful benefactors who all came to regard him as a prodigy. The talent was first put on display while he was working for the St. Croix shipping business of Beekman and Cruger, where he dazzled his employers with his deftness at manipulating account books and his conspicuous competence as a thirteen-year-old clerk. His ambition appears in the first surviving letter in his correspondence, which ends, “I wish there was a war.” The benefactor was Hugh Knox, a Presbyterian minister of Scottish origins with American contacts, who recognized special qualities in the young man. These became visible in public circles for the first time in an especially dramatic account Hamilton wrote of a recent hurricane, which became a local sensation for its verbal flair. Other St. Croix merchants helped subsidize his passage to Boston, and once released from his Caribbean origins, he never looked back. It was a perfect match. The prodigy had come to the land of opportunity.35
Hamilton was supposed to attend the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), but the interview with President John Witherspoon did not go well because Hamilton, ever audacious, insisted on completing his degree at his own pace, preferably within a year, which Witherspoon rejected as ridiculous. King’s College (now Columbia) accepted him without stipulation, a fateful decision that placed him in New York, where his education would benefit from the presence of a burgeoning mercantile elite and a hyperactive political climate vitalized by a roughly equal number of Whigs and Tories with fundamentally different views about America’s proper place in the British Empire. There is a famous scene in which Hamilton rescued Myles Cooper, the Tory president of King’s, from a mob—a scene rendered particularly poignant because Hamilton was already on record as supporting the cause of American independence.
The first occasion where he unveiled his political convictions was an impromptu speech delivered to a large crowd on the New York commons in July 1774, in which he endorsed the Boston Tea Party, the boycott of British goods, and preparation for war. He followed up the following year with two essays, A Full Vindication and The Farmer Refuted, both of which were bravura performances demonstrating what became the trademark Hamilton style: an assurance bordering on arrogance; a slashing mode of attack that would one day make him the most feared polemicist in America; the capacity to control and incisively convey a large body of information; and a keen sense of where history was headed, in this case a prediction that war with Great Britain was coming and, even more prophetic, that the Americans would win it by unconventional tactics that eventually eroded the British will to fight. No one could believe that all this was coming from a nineteen-year-old college student recently arrived from the West Indies.
Physical descriptions of the young man begin to appear in the historical record about this time, depicting a five-foot-seven lad of fair complexion, auburn hair, and flashing eyes, deep blue or purple in color. Commentators tended to notice his conspicuous sense of self-possession, his unique combination of serenity and energy, and his ability to focus with such intensity on a text or piece of writing that he was oblivious to others in the room, often pacing back and forth muttering semi-silently to himself as if in a trance.
But his defining characteristic was the ability to mesmerize everyone in his presence with the speed and flow of his conversation, which was simultaneously dazzling and yet never theatrical in an overly ostentatious fashion. He came across as a man’s man and a woman’s man, meaning that he could dominate a brandy-and-cigars discussion of politics, then move across the room and flirtatiously commend the ladies on their dress or jewelry. Men found him admirable, clubby, and disarmingly potent. Women found him irresistible. All these contemporary accounts suggest a man to the manor born, when in fact Hamilton was a penniless immigrant of questionable origins, whose resources were completely within himself. The only conclusion to reach is that those resources were truly massive and that Hamilton was the poster child for the kind of merit-based natural aristocrat uniquely possible in America. He clearly came from further behind than any prominent member of the revolutionary generation.
The war that he had been looking for as a young adolescent found him as a young man. He joined the Continental Army in March 1776 as captain of an artillery company. Henry Knox, head of artillery, soon identified him as the finest officer under his command. Hamilton maintained discipline in his company during the catastrophic New York campaign, when it was breaking down all around him. (In the headlong retreat up Manhattan, Hamilton and Aaron Burr, future duelists on the plains of Weehawken, bonded in a narrow escape from death or capture.) Then the familiar Hamilton pattern repeated itself in March 1777, when Washington plucked him from the ranks to serve as an aide-de-camp at the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was twenty or twenty-two at the time, depending on which of his birthdays is used to calculate his age.
This was an auspicious but awkward promotion for Hamilton. All of a sudden, it placed him in the center of the wind tunnel, drafting general orders for Washington’s signature and participating in the conferences among the general staff and in the nightly conversations within Washington’s official “family” about military strategy and tactics. There is no way of knowing for sure, but the bulk of the evidence makes it probable that this was the time when Hamilton developed a pronounced sense of disdain for the competence of the Continental Congress, which was sustaining the Continental Army on life support. During the last four years of the war—a roller-coaster ride when the Continental Army nearly evaporated on several occasions—Hamilton reached the conclusion that a state-based confederation was inadequate for the conduct of the war and even more inadequate for the postwar peace.
But Hamilton also bristled under the duties of aide-de-camp, which forced his instinctive sense of superiority into a subordinate status within Washington’s huge shadow. Starting in 1779, Hamilton began to badger Washington for an independent command in which he could lead troops in battle. There was a potent
psychological impulse at work here, for Hamilton harbored a quasi-chivalric sense of war as a ritualistic test of his own manhood. He needed to risk death in order to prove to the world, and himself, that he was worthy. For two years Washington dismissed these requests as misguided, arguing that Hamilton was an invaluable member of his staff whose aspirations for personal glory needed to be subordinated to the larger purposes of the war.
Hamilton began his correspondence with Morris in April 1781, when he was on furlough from the army to marry Elizabeth Schuyler, daughter of Philip Schuyler, patriarch of one of New York’s most prominent families. The fact that Hamilton was acceptable within that privileged circle is a testament to his mounting reputation but also to the more open-minded American society. Such a marriage would have been unimaginable in England or Europe. Orders then came for him to rejoin the army on its race toward Yorktown, along with Washington’s reluctant agreement to give him a combat command during the battle. On the evening of October 14, Hamilton led a bayonet charge across a pockmarked landscape to seize a well-defended British redoubt. Among the first over the breastworks, Hamilton subdued a British officer, bayonet against sword. It was all over in ten minutes. He had finally gotten his piece of glory, and newspaper accounts embellished the story to make Hamilton the hero of Yorktown. The young immigrant had made himself one of the most famous men in America.
In between his marriage to Betsy Schuyler and his dramatic, almost scripted act of heroism at Yorktown, Hamilton had somehow found the time to dash off six essays purporting to describe the proper course for postwar America, a typically Hamiltonian act of presumption, since the outcome of the war at that stage was undecided. He announced its central message in his title, The Continentalist.
“When the war began,” Hamilton acknowledged, “we possessed ideas adapted to the narrow colonial sphere, in which we had been accustomed to move, not of that enlarged kind suited to the government of an INDEPENDENT NATION.” As he saw it, too many Americans had learned the wrong lesson from the American Revolution: namely, to avoid establishing any political institutions that even remotely resembled the British government against which they were rebelling. By overcorrecting out of fear of despotism, they had carried the country in the opposite direction, which now verged on anarchy. This fear of political power per se had reached epidemic proportions: “It is to this Source that we are to trace many of the fatal mistakes which have so deeply endangered the common cause.” Here Hamilton mentioned the failure to provide for the Continental Army, which “had prolonged the war by several years.”36