Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

  For Hamilton, nobody in his generation showed a more genuine love of country or more salient leadership traits than his friend John Laurens. In January 1782, at a time when the British still held Charleston and Savannah, Laurens had addressed the South Carolina legislature in a futile last bid for his star-crossed scheme to recruit black troops. That July, he wrote a warm letter to Hamilton, expressing hope that his friend would “fill only the first offices of the republic.” (Once again, a portion of Laurens’s letter is missing, perhaps sanitized by Hamilton’s family.) The note concluded, “Adieu, my dear friend. While circumstances place so great a distance between us, I entreat you not to withdraw the consolation of your letters. You know the unalterable sentiments of your affectionate Laurens.”17 Hamilton believed fervently that, once the war ended, he and Laurens, like figures from classical antiquity, would embark jointly on a new political crusade to lay the foundations for a solid republican union. In mid-August, he told Laurens that the state legislature had named him to Congress. Striking an uplifting note, he made a stirring appeal for his old comrade to join him there. “Quit your sword my friend, put on the toga, come to Congress. We know each other’s sentiments, our views are the same. We have fought side by side to make America free. Let us hand in hand struggle to make her happy.”18

  We do not know whether Laurens ever set eyes on this message. In late August 1782, a British expedition from Charleston was foraging for rice near the Combahee River when the impetuous Laurens flouted orders and tried to ambush them with a small force. The enemy was tipped off and squatted in the high grass waiting for him. Once they stood up to fire, Laurens began to charge and exhorted his men to follow. He was instantly cut down by a bullet. John Laurens was one of the last casualties of the American Revolution. Many thought he had foolishly risked his life and those of his men in a trivial action against a superior force after real hostilities had ended. His death vindicated Washington’s judgment that the patriotic Laurens had only one serious fault: “intrepidity bordering on rashness.”19 He was mourned by many who thought he had had the makings of a fine leader. “Our country has lost its most promising character in a manner, however, that was worthy of the cause,” John Adams consoled Henry Laurens.20

  For Hamilton, the news was crushing. “Poor Laurens, he has fallen a sacrifice to his ardor in a trifling skirmish in South Carolina,” he wrote sadly to Lafayette, the other member of their war triumvirate. “You know how truly I loved him and will judge how much I regret him.”21 The death deprived Hamilton of the political peer, the steadfast colleague, that he was to need in his tempestuous battles to consolidate the union. He would enjoy a brief collaboration with James Madison and never lacked the stalwart if often aloof patronage of George Washington. But he was more of a solitary crusader without Laurens, lacking an intimate lifelong ally such as Madison and Jefferson found in each other. On a personal level, the loss was even more harrowing. Despite a large circle of admirers, Hamilton did not form deep friendships easily and never again revealed his interior life to another man as he had to Laurens. He became ever more voluble in his public life but somehow less introspective and revelatory in private. Henceforth, his confessional remarks were reserved for Eliza or Angelica Church. After the death of John Laurens, Hamilton shut off some compartment of his emotions and never reopened it.

  In late November 1782, Alexander Hamilton, after trotting on horseback all the way from Albany, arrived in Philadelphia to take up his place in the Confederation Congress. The city of forty thousand people that he encountered was larger and more affluent than New York or Boston. Having grown up in seaside towns, he must have found something pleasingly familiar about this seaport with its tall-masted ships and extensive wharves. Compared to the raucous commercial chaos of New York, Philadelphia was a more orderly place, abounding in elegant homes tucked tidily behind garden walls. On sunny days, fashionable ladies strolled with parasols. Many tree-shaded streets had brick sidewalks swept clean by a sanitation department and illuminated nightly by whale-oil lamps. Though Presbyterians and Baptists now outnumbered Quakers, a trace of their old austerity lingered. By 11:00 p.m.,one young English visitor grumbled, “there is no city in the world, perhaps, so quiet. At that hour, you may walk over half the town without seeing the face of a human being, except the watchman.”22

  Hamilton had left Eliza and baby Philip behind but was still the starry-eyed newlywed and did not wander the streets in search of nocturnal adventure. He assured his wife several weeks after arriving that “there never was a husband who could vie with yours in fidelity and affection.”23 At first, he tolerated Eliza’s absence well and did not yearn for her presence until early January, when he began arranging her trip to Philadelphia—then he could not wait to see her. “Every hour in the day I feel a severe pang on this account and half my nights are sleepless,” he told her. “Come my charmer and relieve me. Bring my darling boy to my bosom.”24

  In Philadelphia, Hamilton found himself part of a Congress whose inadequacy he had long ridiculed. The whole jerry-built structure—the endless ad hoc committees, the voting rules that encouraged states to veto vital measures, the term limits that restricted congressmen to three one-year terms in a six-year period— guaranteed paralysis. As Hamilton complained, the undemocratic voting rules put it in the power “of a small combination to retard and even to frustrate the most necessary measures.”25 For someone with his reverence for efficiency, it was an exasperating situation. The problems only worsened after November 30, 1782, when American peace commissioners signed a provisional peace treaty with Great Britain, sapping incentives for further unity. Local leaders such as Sam Adams in Massachusetts and Patrick Henry in Virginia eloquently asserted the sovereignty of the states. So magnetic was the allure of state governments that many members of Congress stayed home, making it difficult to muster quorums. The caliber of delegates suffered accordingly, and their jealous discords infuriated Hamilton.

  He was saved from despondency by a like-minded delegate who also foresaw a mighty nation and had a richly furnished mind to match his own: James Madison. They shared a continental perspective, enjoyed a congruent sense of missions, and served together on numerous committees. Having been thrown on his own resources at an early age, Hamilton, twenty-seven, was far more worldly than Madison, thirty-one, who had led a cosseted life. On the other hand, Madison, laboring in Congress since 1780, was already a seasoned legislator. He was so conscientious that he set a congressional endurance record by scarcely missing a day during three years of service. The French minister rated Madison “the man of soundest judgment in Congress....He speaks nearly always with fairness and wins the approval of his colleagues.”26

  In many ways, Madison was a pivotal figure in Hamilton’s career, their early collaboration and later falling-out demarcating distinct stages in Hamilton’s life. People tended either to embrace Hamilton or to abhor him; Madison stands out for having alternated between the usual extremes. Small and shy, James Madison had a formidable mind, but he was unprepossessing in manner and appearance. He usually dressed in black, had the bookish pallor of a scholar, and cut a somber figure. Seldom did he smile in public, and the wife of one Virginia politician chided him for being “a gloomy stiff creature.”27 Another female observer found Madison entertaining in private but “mute, cold, and repulsive” in company.28 He did not court publicity and lacked the charismatic sparkle that made the brashly confident Hamilton a natural leader. If Hamilton seemed born to rule, then Madison seemed born to reflect. Still, Madison’s diffidence could be deceptive, and his indomitable force showed when he opened his mouth. He was a queer mixture of intellectual assurance, bordering on conceit, and social timidity and awkwardness. Lacking Hamilton’s social ease and fluency, he could also be funny and a superb raconteur among warm companions, even telling the occasional bawdy tale. At the time they met, Madison was a priggish bachelor and tight-lipped about his private affairs. No personal gossip ever smudged the severe rectitude of James Madison’s i
mage.

  Madison came from a family that had lived comfortably in Virginia’s Piedmont region for a century and was related to many local landowners. Madison’s grandfather owned 29 slaves, and his father boosted that number to 118, making him the largest slaveholder in Orange County, Virginia. The family also owned up to ten thousand acres in the county. Until age fifty, Madison, the oldest of ten children, lived in economic dependence on his father and even in Congress fell back on income from the family plantation. Like Jefferson, he could not escape his dependence on slavery, whatever his private qualms, and told his father during his last year in Congress that unless the delegates got a pay raise, “I shall be under the necessity of selling a Negro.”29

  Against an incongruous backdrop of black hands stooping in the fields, Madison passed his cloistered childhood. Suffering from a nervous disorder reminiscent of epilepsy, he was prone to hypochondria and, like many sickly children, took to reading. He received a fine classical education: five years at a boarding school, followed by two years of private tutoring on his plantation. At Princeton, he absorbed prodigious heaps of books and slept only four or five hours per night. President Witherspoon, who had rejected Hamilton, remarked of Madison that “during the whole time he was under [my] tuition [I] never knew him to do, or to say, an improper thing.”30 Madison retained the air of a perennial student and always immersed himself in laborious study before major political events.

  Because of poor health, Madison served only briefly as a colonel in the Orange County militia and then became a member of the Virginia House of Delegates and the governor’s Council of State before being named the youngest member of Congress in 1780. Hamilton and Madison represented a new generation of postwar leaders whose careers were wholly identified with the new republic. At this juncture, they had a similar vision of the structural reforms needed by the government. Madison favored a standing army, a permanent navy, and other positions later associated with the Hamiltonians. If anything, Madison was even more militant than Hamilton in asserting central authority and wanted Congress to be able to apply force against states that refused to pay their requested contributions.

  Despite the thorny complexities, it was a heady time for these two young men who saw themselves striving for mankind. As Madison phrased it in April 1783, the rights for which America contended “were the rights of human nature,” and its citizens were “responsible for the greatest trust ever confided to a political society.”31 To galvanize the new country, Hamilton and Madison concentrated on the crying need for revenue—a need alleviated only partially when John Adams had arranged a large loan from Holland on June 11, 1782. They believed that Congress required a permanent, independent revenue source, free from reliance on the capricious whims of the states. Only then could Congress retire the huge war debt and stem a nascent movement to repudiate it. Hamilton stressed this in a resolution that read like a fervent trumpet blast: “Resolved, that it is the opinion of Congress that complete JUSTICE cannot be done to the creditors of the United States, nor restoration of PUBLIC CREDIT be effected, nor the future exigencies of the war provided for, but by the establishment of permanent and adequate funds to operate generally throughout the United States, to be collected by Congress.”32

  Hamilton joined Madison in a campaign to introduce a federal impost—a 5 percent duty on all imports—that would finally grant Congress autonomy in money matters. For Hamilton, the overriding goal was to institute a federal power of taxation. The most heated opposition came from Rhode Island, and Hamilton and Madison sat on a committee that dealt with the maverick state. They issued a joint statement, almost entirely in Hamilton’s handwriting, that reiterated his now standard plea of the importance of public credit to national honor. Then came a statement still more fraught with large consequences: “The truth is that no federal constitution can exist without powers that, in their exercise, affect the internal policy of the component members.”33

  Hamilton was throwing down a gauntlet: the central government had to have the right to enact laws that superseded those of the states and to deal directly with their citizens. In late January, he made a still more heretical speech: he wanted to assign federal tax collectors to the states as a way of “pervading and uniting” them.34 Hamilton was now aiming openly not at a makeshift confederation of states but at a unitary nation. Taken aback by this excessive candor, Madison noted that some members “smiled at the disclosure” and gloated privately “that Mr. Hamilton had let out the secret.”35 The incident again showed that Hamilton, far from being a crafty plotter, often could not muzzle his opinions. He was not one to traffic in halfhearted measures—Congress was setting enduring precedents for peacetime—and he opposed a compromise bill in April that limited the scope of the imposts and left revenue collection to each state. Hamilton’s quarrel with New York governor George Clinton over the impost was to blossom into full-blown mutual animosity and profoundly affect the rest of his career.

  Money was needed urgently to mollify the disaffected officers of the Continental Army, who threatened to turn mutinous at their winter camp in Newburgh, New York. The provisional peace treaty raised the unsettling prospect that the army might disband without officers receiving either back pay—as much as six years owed, in some cases—or promised pensions. The officer corps buzzed with threats of mass resignations, and a three-man delegation went to Philadelphia to negotiate a solution. On January 6, 1783, they presented Congress with a petition that expressed festering grievances: “We have borne all that men can bear—our property is expended—our private resources are at an end.”36 Some soldiers had been left so indebted by the fighting and the devalued currency that they feared they would be jailed upon their discharge from the army. Hamilton and Madison met with the disgruntled officers and were assigned to a subcommittee to devise a solution. The two men seized the chance to admonish Congress to fund the entire national war debt and satisfy the soldiers along with other creditors. The sad reality was that, deprived of real taxing power, Congress could offer the soldiers little but rhetorical solace.

  Hamilton held out slim hope that the states would replenish the general coffers and appease the officers’ demands. With his pessimistic imagination, he dwelled on the dangers inherent in situations, and he feared that civil strife, even disunion, would follow peace with Britain. In mid-February, he wrote apprehensively to Governor Clinton, outlining a plan to resettle military officers in New York State: “I wish the legislature would set apart a tract of territory and make a liberal allowance to every officer and soldier of the army at large who will become a citizen of the state.” As a leading “continentalist,” Hamilton knew that such a suggestion might seem to counter his image. “It is the first wish of my heart that the union may last,” he explained, “but feeble as the links are, what prudent man would rely upon it? Should a disunion take place, any person who will cast his eyes upon the map will see how essential it is to our state to provide for its own security.”37 In this case, Clinton heeded Hamilton’s advice and handed out lucrative land grants in New York State to willing officers.

  Hamilton knew that the final arbiter of the deadly stalemate between restive officers and an impotent Congress was George Washington, with whom he had not corresponded in more than a year. On February 13, presuming on their former trust, Hamilton addressed a confidential letter to him. Writing now as a peer, he dared to advise Washington on how to handle the threatened uprising. For Hamilton, such a threat had its uses if it could prod a lethargic Congress into bolstering national finances: “The claims of the army, urged with moderation but with firmness, may operate on those weak minds which are influenced by their apprehensions more than their judgments....But the difficulty will be to keep a complaining and suffering army within the bounds of moderation.”38 For Washington to maintain his standing among both the army and the citizenry at large, Hamilton urged him to badger Congress through surrogates.

  Hamilton was coaxing Washington to dabble in a dangerous game of pretending to b
e a lofty statesman while covertly orchestrating pressure on Congress. The letter shows Hamilton at his most devious, playing with combustible forces. (He wasn’t alone in this strategy: Gouverneur Morris in Philadelphia was also writing to General Nathanael Greene that the states would never pay the army “unless the army be united and determined in the pursuit of it.”)39 Hamilton feared that the cautious Washington might be thrust aside by more militant officers and told him of whispering in the army that he did not uphold his soldiers’ interests “with sufficient warmth. The falsehood of this opinion no one can be better acquainted with than myself, but it is not the less mischievous for being false.”40

  A week later, Hamilton and Madison met at the home of Thomas FitzSimons to discuss the growing officer militance. Madison’s notes give us Hamilton’s unexpurgated view of Washington at the time. It jibes with his earlier statements about Washington’s sometimes irritable personality but absolute rectitude:

  Mr. Hamilton said that he knew Gen[era]l Washington intimately and perfectly, that his extreme reserve, mixed sometimes with a degree of asperity of temper, both of which were said to have increased of late, had contributed to the decline of his popularity. But that his virtue, his patriotism, and his firmness would...never yield to any dishonorable plans into which he might be called. That he would sooner suffer himself to be cut into pieces; that he (Mr. Hamilton), knowing this to be his true character, wished him to be the conductor of the army in their plans for redress in order that they might be moderated and directed to proper objects.41

  On March 4, Washington thanked Hamilton for his frank letter and confessed that he had not fathomed the abysmal state of America’s finances. He referred gravely to the “contemplative hours” he had spent on the subject of the soldiers’ pay: “The sufferings of a complaining army on one hand, and the inability of Congress and tardiness of the states on the other, are the forebodings of evil.” Washington then obliquely rebuffed Hamilton’s misguided suggestion that he exploit army discontent to goad Congress into action on public finance, saying it might “excite jealousy and bring on its concomitants.”42 With unerring foresight, Washington perceived the importance of enshrining the principle that military power should be subordinated to civilian control.