Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

  When he finished, Hamilton received a polite smattering of applause. Perhaps the delegates were glad to escape the heat and head for their lodgings. Gouverneur Morris extolled Hamilton’s speech as “the most able and impressive he had ever heard.”61 William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut said that Hamilton’s speech “has been praised by everybody [but]...supported by none.”62 Years later, John Quincy Adams lauded the plan as one “of great ability” and even better in theory than the one adopted, however misplaced in an American setting.63

  How had Hamilton blundered into this speech? That Hamilton had an abiding fear of mob rule did not distinguish him from most delegates. What did distinguish him was that his fears had triumphed so completely over his hopes. He was so busy clamping checks and balances on potentially fickle citizens that he did not stop to consider the potential of the electorate. Hamilton often seemed a man suspended between two worlds. He never supported a nobility, hereditary titles, or the other trappings of aristocracy. He never again uttered a kind word for monarchy. Still, he wondered whether republican government could withstand popular frenzy and instill the deep respect for law and authority that obtained in monarchical systems and that would safeguard liberties. Too often, his political vision harked back to a past in which well-bred elites made decisions for less-educated citizens. This contradicted the advanced economic thinking expressed in his vision of a fluid, meritocratic elite, open to talented outsiders such as himself.

  Incorrigibly honest, Hamilton must have felt duty bound to provide an alternative to the Virginia and New Jersey plans, which he thought certain to fail. He must have believed that, if no consensus was reached, his speech would be dusted off and its merits belatedly better appreciated. Until then, he would rely on the secrecy of the proceedings. Hamilton wasn’t the only delegate who offered harebrained ideas. At one point, Hugh Williamson of North Carolina claimed that it was “pretty certain that we should at some time or other have a king.”64 Four states even voted for Hamilton’s proposal of a president serving “during good behavior,” most notably the Virginia delegation that included James Madison, George Mason, and Edmund Randolph. When later taunted by the Jeffersonians, Hamilton was pleased to remind them that Madison, too, had favored such a president. If he was a monarchist, so was Madison. Madison also insisted upon giving the federal government a veto over state laws “as the King of Great Britain heretofore had.”65 Benjamin Franklin wanted a unicameral legislature and an executive council in lieu of a president. He also opposed a presidential veto on legislation, thinking it would lead to executive corruption “till it ends in monarchy.”66 John Dickinson wanted state legislatures to have the power to impeach the president. Elbridge Gerry wanted a three-man “presidency,” with each member representing a different section of America. Though not a delegate, John Adams thought hereditary rule inevitable and prophesied, “Our ship must ultimately land on that shore.”67

  For the great majority of delegates, Hamilton’s speech was just a daylong respite from the fierce infighting at hand. The next morning, nobody even took time to refute Hamilton. Madison feared that Hamilton’s speech would alienate small states at a critical moment. In fact, Madison’s Virginia Plan may have profited from Hamilton’s speech because it now seemed moderate by comparison. (Some scholars have argued that this was the true intent of Hamilton’s speech.) When Madison rose to speak, he made no reference to Hamilton’s oratory and consigned it to temporary oblivion. Instead, he mercilessly dissected the New Jersey Plan.

  Though Hamilton’s plan was doomed, its effects were to linger long after the delegates had dispersed. Till the end of his days, opponents dredged up the speech, as if it embodied the real Hamilton, the secret Hamilton, as if he had blurted out the truth in a moment of weakness. In fact, nobody fought harder or more effectively for the new Constitution than Hamilton, who never wavered in his resolution to support it. The June 18 speech was to prove one of three flagrant errors in his career. In each case, he was brave, detailed, and forthright on a controversial subject, as if laboring under some compulsion to express his inmost thoughts. Each time, he was spectacularly wrongheaded and indiscreet, yet convinced he was right. Only one thing was certain: this verbose, headstrong, loose-tongued man made poor material for the conspirator conjured up by his enemies.

  After his controversial speech, Hamilton lapsed into temporary silence as the large and small states squared off in a tense deadlock. It seemed the divided convention might collapse. When Franklin suggested on June 28 that each session start with a prayer for heavenly help, Hamilton countered that this might foster a public impression that “embarrassments and dissensions within the convention had suggested this measure.”68 According to legend, Hamilton also rebutted Franklin with the jest that the convention didn’t need “foreign aid.”69 The Lord did not seem much in evidence at this point in the convention. One story, perhaps apocryphal, claims that when Hamilton was asked why the framers omitted the word God from the Constitution, he replied, “We forgot.” One is tempted to reply that Alexander Hamilton never forgot anything important.

  On June 29, Hamilton mustered the will to speak again, voicing grave anxiety over the stalemated convention: “It is a miracle that we [are] now here exercising our tranquil and free deliberations on the subject. It would be madness to trust to future miracles.”70 Hamilton seized the chance to enunciate his first major statement on foreign policy, noting that great nations follow their interests and contesting the chimerical view that America should concentrate on domestic tranquillity while disregarding its interests abroad: “No governm[en]t could give us tranquillity and happiness at home, which did not possess sufficient stability and strength to make us respectable abroad.”71 He also combated the fantasy that the Atlantic Ocean would protect America from future conflicts. With these fighting words, Hamilton splashed a cold dose of realism on the sentimental isolationism of the time.

  After delivering these thoughts, Hamilton packed up and returned to New York the next day to attend to personal business. He was “seriously and deeply distressed” by the convention, he wrote to Washington. As he traveled back through New Jersey, he gathered impressions that reinforced his conviction that only tough, fearless measures could stem the country’s chaos. “I fear that we shall let slip the golden opportunity of rescuing the American empire from disunion, anarchy, and misery,” he informed Washington.72

  The warring New York delegation shortly fell apart. By July 6, Robert Yates and John Lansing, Jr., had expressed their disgust with the convention by also leaving Philadelphia. Members had come and gone before, but the two New York delegates were the first to depart irrevocably on principle. Washington, aggrieved, wrote to Hamilton: “I almost despair of seeing a favourable issue to . . . the Convention and do therefore repent having had any agency in the business.” He inveighed against “narrow-minded politicians...under the influence of local views,” who would selfishly block “a strong and energetic government” under the guise of protecting the people. Washington did not seem fazed by Hamilton’s June 18 speech. “I am sorry you went away,” he assured him. “I wish you were back.”73

  On July 16, the thick gloom finally lifted at Philadelphia when delegates agreed to a grand bargain, the so-called Connecticut Compromise, proposed by Roger Sherman of Connecticut and others. The major conflicts at the convention had perhaps hinged less on the question of federal versus state power than on how federal representation was apportioned among the states. The delegates solved this baffling riddle by deciding that all states would enjoy equal representation in the Senate (a sop to small states) while representation in the House of Representatives would be proportionate to each state’s population (a sop to large states). This broke the deadlock, though the Senate’s composition introduced a lasting political bias in American life in favor of smaller states.

  Left in limbo by Yates and Lansing, Hamilton drifted back and forth between New York and Philadelphia that summer. “Yates and Lansing never voted in one single i
nstance with Hamilton, who was so much mortified at it that he went home,” George Mason told Thomas Jefferson. “When the season for courts came on, Yates, a judge, and Lansing, a lawyer, went to attend their courts. Then Hamilton returned.”74 With Yates and Lansing gone, Hamilton still could not vote because each state needed a minimum of two delegates present, so he became a nonvoting convention member. Yet he no longer had to appease delegates from his own state. Hamilton behaved civilly toward Yates and Lansing, telling them that “for the sake of propriety and public opinion” he would gladly accompany them back to Philadelphia.75 Needless to say, neither ever took him up on the offer.

  Having repudiated the convention, Yates and Lansing no longer felt bound by its gag rule and briefed Governor Clinton on what was being meditated in Philadelphia. “We must candidly confess that we should have been equally opposed to any system...which had in object the consolidation of the United States into one government.”76 Perceiving a threat to his power, Clinton stated publicly that the most likely effect of any new charter would be that “the country would be thrown into confusion by the measure,” Hamilton recalled. Irate at this violation of the convention’s confidentiality, Hamilton said that Clinton had not given the Philadelphia meeting a fair chance and had “clearly betrayed an intention to excite prejudices beforehand against whatever plan should be proposed by the Convention.”77

  Hamilton was spoiling for a fight as New York resounded with rumors about the events in Philadelphia. When a story appeared that delegates were colluding to bring the duke of York, George III’s second son, from Britain to head an American monarchy, Hamilton traced this absurdity to a letter sent “to one James Reynolds of this city”—the first reference he ever made to the man whose wife would someday be his fatal enchantress.78 On July 21, Hamilton took dead aim at Governor Clinton in New York’s Daily Advertiser. In an unsigned article, he accused Clinton of poisoning the electorate’s mind against the ongoing work in Philadelphia, contending that “such conduct in a man high in office argues greater attachment to his own power than to the public good and furnishes strong reason to suspect a dangerous predetermination to oppose whatever may tend to diminish the former, however it may promote the latter.”79 As so often in his career, Hamilton’s assault on New York’s most powerful man—the opening salvo in his protracted campaign to win New York’s approval of the Constitution—seemed brave and foolhardy in equal measure.

  In attacking Clinton, Hamilton went straight for the jugular. The Clintonians hit back hard, spreading smears about Hamilton. While Hamilton had chastised Clinton’s character to illustrate the abuses of self-serving governors, his adversaries vilified his personal reputation. They knew that Hamilton enjoyed Washington’s all-important patronage and tried to soil that association in the public’s mind. In a piece signed “Inspector,” one Clinton henchman wrote, “I have also known an upstart attorney palm himself upon a great and good man for a youth of extraordinary genius and under the shadow of such a patronage make himself at once known and respected.... [H]e was at length found to be a superficial, self-conceited coxcomb and was of course turned off and disregarded by his patron.”80

  Hamilton was deeply offended. This man born without honor was exceedingly sensitive to any slights to his political honor. As an outsider on the American scene, he did not believe that he could allow such slander to go unanswered, so he appealed to Washington to correct the distortion: “This, I confess, hurts my feelings, and if it obtains credit will require a contradiction,” he told the general.81 Friendly toward both Hamilton and Clinton, Washington was reluctant to take sides but confirmed to Hamilton that the charges against him were “entirely unfounded.” He had no reason, he said, to believe that Hamilton had taken a single step to finagle an appointment to his military family. As for the confrontation that led to Hamilton’s departure, “Your quitting [was] altogether the effect of your own choice.”82 Through the years, Hamilton was to exhaust himself in efforts to refute lies that grew up around him like choking vines. No matter how hard he tried to hack away at these myths, they continued to sprout deadly new shoots. These myths were perhaps the inevitable reaction to a man so brilliant, so outspoken, and so sure of himself.

  Before returning to Philadelphia, Hamilton averted a duel between an English merchant friend, John Auldjo, and Major William Pierce, who happened to be a Georgia delegate to the Constitutional Convention. In a letter to Pierce’s second, Hamilton pleaded for forgiveness of Auldjo’s rude behavior in a business dispute and observed that “extremities ought then only to ensue when, after a fair experiment, accommodation has been found impracticable.”83 As was often the case, the prospect of a duel concentrated the minds of both parties, enabling them to reach a settlement without resort to bloodshed.

  On August 6, the Philadelphia convention reconvened to begin the arduous task of refining the Constitution. Hamilton, back by August 13, dove into a debate that passionately engaged him: immigration. He opposed any attempt to restrict membership in Congress to native-born Americans or to stipulate a residency period before immigrants could qualify for it. He told the assembly that “the advantage of encouraging foreigners is obvious....Persons in Europe of moderate fortunes will be fond of coming here, where they will be on a level with the first citizens. I move that the section be so altered as to require merely citizenship and inhabitancy.”84 This position again contradicts the image of Hamilton as indifferent to the plight of ordinary people. He was overruled: representatives would have a seven-year residency requirement, senators nine, the president fourteen. It has been speculated that Hamilton slipped a clause into the Constitution allowing him to become eligible for the presidency. The final document stated that the president had to be at least thirty-five and either native-born “or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution.” Since Hamilton was away from Philadelphia when a committee formulated this proposal, it seems unlikely that he had any influence upon it.

  As Madison conceded, the specter of slavery haunted the convention, and he argued that “the states were divided into different interests not by their difference of size, but principally from their having or not having slaves....[The conflict] did not lie between the large and small states. It lay between the northern and southern.”85 For many southerners, the slavery issue allowed no room for concessions, and they supported the Virginia Plan in exchange for protecting their peculiar institution. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina stated baldly, “South Carolina and Georgia cannot do without slaves.”86 The issue was so explosive that the word slavery did not appear in the Constitution, replaced by the euphemism of people “held to service or labor.”

  Slaveholding states wondered how their human property would be counted for congressional-apportionment purposes. Northern states finally agreed that five slaves would be counted as equivalent to three free whites, the infamous “federal ratio” that survived for another eighty years. The formula richly rewarded the southern states, artificially inflating their House seats and electoral votes and helping to explain why four of the first five presidents hailed from Virginia. This gross inequity was to play no small part in the eventual triumph of Jeffersonian Republicans over Hamiltonian Federalists. In exchange, southern states agreed that the importation of slaves might cease after 1808, feeding an illusory hope that slavery might someday just fade away. Without the federal ratio, Hamilton glumly concluded, “no union could possibly have been formed.”87 Indeed, the whole superstructure erected in Philadelphia rested on that unstable, undemocratic foundation.

  Hamilton’s upset over this tolerance of slavery may have been deeper than we know. There has always been some mystery as to his whereabouts after his August 13 statement on immigration. In fact, he had returned to New York for a meeting of the Manumission Society. Hamilton may have apprised members of the impending decision on slavery in Philadelphia, because they delivered a petition to the convention to “promote the attainment of the objects of this society.�
�88 After the slavery compromise in Philadelphia, Hamilton stepped up his involvement in the Manumission Society. The following year, even while pouring out fifty-one Federalist essays, serving in Congress, and campaigning to ratify the Constitution, he attended a meeting of the society that again protested the export of slaves from New York State and the “outrages committed in digging up and taking away the dead bodies of Negroes buried in the city.”89 Later in the year, Hamilton was appointed one of four counselors of the Manumission Society.

  By September 6, Hamilton was back in Philadelphia, having made full peace with the new Constitution. Madison recorded Hamilton as telling delegates that “he had been restrained from entering into the discussion from his dislike of the scheme in general, but as he meant to support the plan...as better than nothing, he wished to offer a few remarks.”90 On September 8, Hamilton joined the Committee of Style and Arrangement, which would arrange the articles of the Constitution and polish its prose. The five-member committee, chaired by William Samuel Johnson, included Rufus King and James Madison but owed most of its success to Hamilton’s friend Gouverneur Morris. Thanks to a carriage accident, Morris, thirty-five, had a wooden leg and walked with a cane, accoutrements that only enhanced his whimsically flamboyant presence. Like Hamilton, the blue-blooded Morris dreaded mob rule and had favored a Senate made up solely of great property owners. He considered slavery a “nefarious institution” that would summon the “curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed.”91 Although he represented Pennsylvania at the convention, he had grown up on Morrisania, the family estate in New York. Tall and urbane, he was a stout patriot with a biting wit and a cavalier twinkle in his eyes. He spoke a record 173 times at the convention, leading William Pierce to marvel at how “he charms, captivates, and leads away the senses of all who hear him.”92