Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

  Three days after Washington signed Hamilton’s bank bill on February 25, 1791, Jefferson, at Madison’s behest, tried to lure Freneau to Philadelphia by offering him a job as State Department translator at a modest $250 annual salary. Freneau knew only one foreign tongue, French, and was poorly qualified for the post. In Hamilton’s view, this sinecure disguised the real design. Indeed, Jefferson hinted to Freneau that the translation job “gives so little to do as not to interfere with any other calling the person may choose.”27 When Jefferson and Madison made their botanizing tour in 1791, they breakfasted with Freneau in New York and urged him to move to Philadelphia to launch an opposition paper. Jefferson volunteered to toss in small State Department jobs, such as printing legal notices, to give the paper extra income. (He later denied making any such promises.) In his acerbic account of these events, Hamilton observed of Jefferson, “He knows how to put a man in a situation calculated to produce all the effects he desires without the gross and awkward formality of telling him, ‘Sir I mean to hire you for the purpose.’ ”28 By July 1791, Freneau had agreed to take the job as State Department translator, and on October 31 the maiden issue of the National Gazette appeared. This freewheeling paper soon became the foremost Republican organ in America.

  Like other newspapers of the 1790s, Freneau’s National Gazette did not feign neutrality. With the population widely dispersed, newspapers were unabashedly partisan organs that supplied much of the adhesive power binding the incipient parties together. Americans were a literate people, and dozens of newspapers flourished. The country probably had more newspapers per capita than any other. A typical issue had four long sheets, crammed with essays and small advertisements but no drawings or illustrations. These papers tended to be short on facts—there was little “spot news” reporting—and long on opinion. They more closely resembled journals of opinion than daily newspapers. Often scurrilous and inaccurate, they had few qualms about hinting that a certain nameless official was embezzling money or colluding with a foreign power. “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper,” Jefferson later said. “Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”29 No code of conduct circumscribed responsible press behavior.

  Signed articles were relatively rare. Perhaps the era’s most prolific essayist, Hamilton seldom published under his own name and drew on a bewildering array of pseudonyms. Such pen names were sometimes transparent masks through which the public readily identified prominent politicians. The fashion of allowing anonymous attacks permitted extraordinary bile to seep into political discourse, and savage remarks that might not otherwise have surfaced appeared regularly in the press. The brutal tone of these papers made politics a wounding ordeal. One contemporary critic said of newspaper publishers, “Like birds of game...they make sport to the public as their party prompts or supplies them with materials. By this practice our elective privileges are converted into a curse.”30

  Though Jefferson and Madison were the chief instigators of the National Gazette, Jefferson had to move cautiously, while Madison could be more open. Madison solicited friends to subscribe to the paper, explaining that he did so “from a desire of testifying my esteem and friendship to Mr. Freneau by contributing to render his profits as commensurate as possible to his merits.”31 That Madison held high partisan hopes for the National Gazette is evident from a letter to Attorney General Edmund Randolph in which he rhapsodized about Freneau as “a man of genius” and described the need for a newspaper that would be an “antidote to the doctrines and discourses circulated in favor of monarchy and aristocracy.”32 By now, monarchy and aristocracy were standard code words for Hamilton and the Federalists.

  One of Jefferson’s main weapons in discrediting Hamilton was his own insatiable appetite for political intelligence. After noteworthy discussions, Jefferson scribbled down the contents on scraps of paper. In 1818, he collected these snippets of political chatter into a scrapbook he called his “Anas”—a compendium of table gossip. In these pages, Hamilton figures as the melodramatic villain of the Washington administration, appearing in no fewer than forty-five entries. These horror stories about Hamilton have been regurgitated for two centuries and are now engraved on the memories of historians and readers alike. Unfortunately, these vignettes often cruelly misrepresent Hamilton and have done no small damage to his reputation. Jefferson understood very well the power of laying down a paper trail.

  By coincidence or not, Jefferson recorded his first “Anas” item right after Freneau agreed to take the State Department job. Jefferson was credulous when it came to tales about Hamilton and believed implicitly in the Anglophile, royalist demon he conjured up. In the “Anas,” he fingered Hamilton as the cat’s-paw of a cabal that wished to defeat the Constitution and install a British-style monarchy—never mind that Hamilton had written the bulk of The Federalist Papers and almost singlehandedly gotten the Constitution ratified in New York. In his silent but lethal style, Jefferson stored up Hamilton’s indiscretions. It was here that Jefferson recorded the story of Hamilton and Adams singing the praises of the British constitution; of Hamilton supposedly raising a toast to George III at a St. Andrew’s Society dinner in New York; and of Hamilton declaring at a dinner party that “there was no stability, no security in any kind of government but a monarchy.”33 The suspect nature of these stories can be seen in the anecdote Jefferson told of Hamilton visiting his lodging in 1791 and inquiring about three portraits on the wall. “They are my trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced,” Jefferson replied: “Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Locke.” Hamilton supposedly replied, “The greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar.”34 What makes the story suspect, if not downright absurd, is that Hamilton’s collected papers are teeming with pejorative references to Julius Caesar. In fact, whenever Hamilton wanted to revile Jefferson as a populist demagogue, he invariably likened him to Julius Caesar. One suspects that if Hamilton was accurately quoted, he was joking with Jefferson.

  The problem with the “Anas” isn’t that Jefferson fabricated things. Sometimes he accepted secondhand gossip at face value. Sometimes he took a casual comment and blew it up into a monstrous portrait. Sometimes he missed nuances that would have cast matters in a different light. Take the references to Hamilton as an avowed monarchist: Hamilton had always wondered whether the Constitution would be durable enough to protect society and feared that a constitutional monarchy might be necessary; on the other hand, he had sworn to do everything in his power to give the new government a fair chance. In one “Anas” entry of August 13, 1791, Jefferson got this emphasis right when he reported Hamilton as saying that the new republic “ought to be tried before we give up the republican form altogether, for that mind must be really depraved which would not prefer the equality of political rights which is the foundation of pure republicanism, if it can be obtained consistently with order.”35 At other times, however, Jefferson was not so careful, stating baldly that Hamilton “was not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption.”36

  The most damaging tale about Hamilton, however, came not from Jefferson but from a much later book called the Memoir of Theophilus Parsons. Parsons had been an attorney general appointed by John Adams; the book was published by his son in 1859—forty-six years after Theophilus Parsons died and fifty-five after Alexander Hamilton died. The author contends that at a New York dinner party, soon after the Constitution was adopted, an unnamed guest was declaiming about the wisdom of the American people. Hamilton allegedly slammed his fist on the table and exclaimed, “Your people, sir—your people is a great beast!” The author added, “I have this anecdote from a friend, to whom it was related by one who was a guest at the table.”37 As Stephen F. Knott has shown in Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth, this report of an event that occurred seventy-one years earlier, relayed by someone who heard it from someone else who heard it from someone else, has been trotted out at every opportunity by people seeking to
smear Hamilton’s reputation. In fact, the quote was derived from a populist poem by a Dominican friar, Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), who argued that the people were a slumbering beast who should awaken to their own power. Hamilton was wont to say that the world was full of knaves and fools, but this particular comment, if he ever made it, may have had a very different tone or intent from what has been imputed to it.

  On the afternoon of February 28, 1792, Jefferson sat down with Washington, ostensibly to discuss the post office. The real purpose was Jefferson’s intention to warn Washington that Hamilton’s Treasury Department was threatening to devour the government. Jefferson wanted the post office under his jurisdiction at State because “the department of the Treasury possessed already such an influence as to swallow up the whole executive powers and that even future presidents...would not be able to make head against this department.”38 As always, Jefferson piously disclaimed any political ambitions, said that he contemplated resigning his post, and noted glumly that Hamilton showed no signs of leaving. At breakfast the next day, Washington urged Jefferson to stay. Notwithstanding the general prosperity, Jefferson contended that the country’s troubles arose from a single source, Hamilton’s system, and he accused his colleague of luring the citizenry into financial gambling. Hamilton did not know about Jefferson’s efforts to turn Washington against him.

  Jefferson grew more sedulous in propagating defamatory charges against Hamilton. At one cabinet meeting in April, Hamilton said that he would try to accommodate congressional demands for internal Treasury Department documents but would reserve the right to withhold sensitive information. “They might demand secrets of a very mischievous nature,” he explained. For Jefferson, this was all a cover story. “Here I thought [Hamilton] began to fear they would go on to examining how far their own members and other persons in the government had been dabbling in stocks, banks etc.,” Jefferson wrote in his “Anas.”39 In May, Jefferson warned Washington that Philip Schuyler had advocated hereditary government at a dinner a few months earlier. That same month, Jefferson wrote a memo to Washington arguing that the “ultimate objective” of the Hamiltonian system was “to prepare the way for a change from the present republican form of government to that of a monarchy.”40 The incorruptible Washington had known Hamilton intimately for fifteen years and was smart enough to dismiss these charges.

  Madison had become no less confirmed an opponent of Hamilton than had Jefferson and thought his diabolical foe must be stopped. As Garry Wills has observed, “Madison tended to think that those who opposed what seemed to him the obvious truth must have evil motives.”41 Madison saw Hamilton grafting British-style corruption on America in preparation for a monarchy. Freneau’s National Gazette provided a handy platform for Madison, and each month his anonymous blasts against Hamilton grew more withering. In February 1792, as Jefferson burrowed away at Hamilton from within the cabinet, Madison railed against “a government operated by corrupt influence, substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty.”42 By March, Madison’s critique of Hamilton had grown indiscriminate: Hamilton was coddling speculators, inflating the national debt, distorting the Constitution, and scheming to bring aristocracy to America.

  A master legislative tactician, Madison was now recognized as the first opposition leader in House history and had most of the south lined up solidly behind him. Among other things, Madison may have resented that Hamilton had replaced him as Washington’s confidential adviser. In an attempt to stymie Hamilton, Madison tried to exert legislative control over the Treasury’s power to raise money for the army for an upcoming western expedition. Madison did not prevail, but Hamilton was aghast that his former friend tried to curtail his power so drastically. As he said afterward, Madison “well knew that if he had prevailed, a certain consequence was my resignation.”43 Abigail Adams saw the anti-Hamilton campaign emanating from Virginia. “All the attacks upon the Secretary of the Treasury and upon the government come from that quarter,” she told her sister, “but I think whilst the people prosper and feel themselves happy, they cannot be blown up.”44 Fisher Ames also saw systematic opposition to Hamilton coming from Virginia. “Virginia moves in a solid column,” he told a friend, “and the discipline of the party is as severe as the Prussian. Deserters are not spared. Madison is become a desperate party leader.”45

  That spring, Hamilton closely monitored the National Gazette. While Freneau glorified Jefferson as the “illustrious patriot” and the “colossus of liberty,” he presented Hamilton in satirical terms, mocking him as “Atlas.”46 In early May, he taunted Hamilton with this verse: “Public debts are public curses / In soldiers’ hands! then nothing worse is! / In speculators’ hands increasing, / Public debt’s a public blessing!”47 Nor did Freneau exempt Washington from his mockery. When Hamilton made an innocent proposal to place Washington’s face on the new currency, Freneau saw royalist tendencies at work: “Shall Washington, my fav’rite child, / Be ranked ’mongst haughty kings?”48

  That such antigovernment diatribes were being published by the paid translator for Jefferson’s State Department was finally too much for Hamilton. He concluded that Jefferson and Madison had mounted a concerted effort to drive him from office. He wasn’t being just criticized but crucified. With an imagination no less suspicious than Jefferson’s, he saw a populist conspiracy out to destroy him. After years of restraint as treasury secretary, Hamilton’s mind and emotions were now at full boil.

  On May 26, 1792, he wrote a remarkable letter to Edward Carrington, a revenue supervisor in Virginia, that virtually declared war against Jefferson and Madison. Hamilton shed discretion and let his deepest feelings gush forth. He told Carrington that as early as the debates over his funding system, people had given him hints of Madison’s enmity, but he had not believed them. Now the scales had dropped from his eyes. “It was not ’till the last session that I became unequivocally convinced of the following truth: That Mr. Madison cooperating with Mr. Jefferson is at the head of a faction decidedly hostile to me and my administration and actuated by views in my judgment subversive of the principles of good government and dangerous to the union, peace and happiness of the country.”49 Of the “systematic opposition” of Jefferson and Madison, Hamilton declared, “My subversion, I am now satisfied, has been long an object with them.”50

  Hamilton seemed more anguished by Madison’s betrayal than Jefferson’s. By this point, Hamilton saw the mild-mannered Jefferson as a fanatic with a settled malice toward him, if not toward the federal government itself. Madison had always impressed him as the more brilliant and honorable man. Now he concluded that Madison had fallen under Jefferson’s sway. “I cannot persuade myself that Mr. Madison and I, whose politics had formerly so much the same point of departure, should now diverge so widely in our opinions of the measures which are proper to be pursued,” Hamilton told Carrington. “The opinion I once entertained of the candour and simplicity and fairness of Mr. Madison’s character has, I acknowledge, given way to a decided opinion that it is one of a peculiarly artificial and complicated kind.”51

  Not for the last time, Hamilton tried to refute the grotesque fantasy that he belonged to a “monarchical party” that meditated the downfall of republican government. He conceded that he and kindred spirits held less populist beliefs than Jefferson and Madison but that they would regard “as both criminal and visionary any attempt to subvert the republican system of the country.” He wanted to give the Constitution every possible chance: “I am affectionately attached to the republican theory. I desire above all things to see the equality of political rights, exclusive of all hereditary distinction, firmly established by a practical demonstration of its being consistent with the order and happiness of society.”52

  If he had wanted to impose a monarchy upon America, Hamilton said, he would follow the classic path of a populist demagogue: “I would mount the hobbyhorse of popularity, I would cry out usurpation, danger to liberty etc. etc. I would endeavour to prostrate the nationa
l government, raise a ferment, and then ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm.” He denied Madison was doing this but was doubtful about Jefferson, a “man of profound ambition and violent passions.”53 Lest Carrington consider these views confidential, Hamilton indicated that he had thrown down the gauntlet to both Jefferson and Madison: “They are both apprised indirectly from myself of the opinion I entertain of their views.”54 The period of covert skirmishing had ended. Open warfare had begun.

  George Washington watched this feuding in his cabinet with dismay. He was no longer the swaggering young general of the Revolution but a craggy, aging man with parchment skin. His gray eyes seemed smaller, more deeply set in their sockets. He was plagued by rheumatism, and his painful dentures crafted from hippopotamus tusks rubbed agonizingly against his one remaining good tooth. William Maclay found his “complexion pale, nay, almost cadaverous. His voice hollow and indistinct, owing, as I believe, to artificial teeth before his upper jaw.”55

  Washington clung to an idealized image of the president as a citizen-king above partisanship. This pose was more and more difficult to maintain with a bitterly divided cabinet. Jefferson sniped privately at Washington as a vain, close-minded man, easily manipulated by flattery. “His mind has been so long used to unlimited applause that it could not brook contradiction or even advice offered unasked,” Jefferson complained to a friend, adding that “I have long thought therefore it was best for the republican interest to soothe him, by flattering where they could approve the measures and to be silent when they disapprove.”56 Unable to believe that Hamilton won internal arguments on their merits, Jefferson concluded that Washington was being hoodwinked. If not an intellectual, Washington was fully capable of independent judgment and could not be tricked or coerced. When Jefferson later accused him of falling under Hamilton’s influence, Washington reminded him irritably that “there were so many instances within [your] own knowledge of my having decided against as in favor of the opinions of the person evidently alluded to [Hamilton].”57 By early July 1792, it was clear that George Washington would not have the option of silence or inaction in stemming the feud between Hamilton and Jefferson. He had probably waited too long to assert control. His fine, nonpartisan stance may have only intensified the partisan mischief between his two appointees.