Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

  It was New York’s other senator, Rufus King, who first informed Hamilton that Burr was rounding up key supporters in New England. King feared that Burr might shave ten votes from Adams’s electoral total and that, with his delicate ego, Adams might then feel so degraded by the results that he would decline to serve. “If the enemies of the government are secret and united, we shall lose Mr. Adams,” King warned Hamilton. “Nothing which has heretofore happened so decisively proves the inveteracy of the opposition.”9

  Hamilton was determined to have Washington and Adams back for a second term. Events of the previous year had taught him to cast a wary eye on Aaron Burr, whom Adams described as looking “fat as a duck and as ruddy as a roost cock.”10 Burr hadn’t endeared himself to Hamilton by defeating Philip Schuyler for the Senate seat. And Burr was a lone operator, a protean figure who formed alliances for short-term gain. In the Senate, he was loosely allied with the Jeffersonians and was an enthusiast for the French Revolution—a stand that irked Hamilton. Then in early 1792, Burr had decided to test the waters for New York governor and challenge George Clinton’s bid for a sixth term. His strategy was to enlist disaffected Clintonians and Federalists and reshuffle the political deck in New York. Afraid to adulterate his own party, Hamilton spiked this coalition and became an immovable obstacle in the path of Aaron Burr’s ambitions—a position he was to occupy so frequently in future years that it finally drove Burr into a frenzy.

  The New York gubernatorial contest in the spring of 1792 had been one of special venom. Once Burr saw that his attempt had miscarried, he switched back, without evident discomfort, to supporting Governor Clinton. On the other side, the Federalist ticket, likely crafted by Hamilton, consisted of Chief Justice John Jay for governor along with Stephen Van Rensselaer, Hamilton’s brother-in-law, for lieutenant governor. The Federalist ticket was so identified with Hamilton that the race turned into something of a poll on his policies. The election culminated in a helpless stalemate. When votes in three upstate counties were disputed, Aaron Burr and Rufus King were asked to give opinions about the disputed ballots. Burr came down decisively on Clinton’s side and handed him a controversial victory. Hamilton’s friend Robert Troup was so irate that he called Burr a Clinton tool and denounced the “shameful prostitution of his talents.... The quibbles and chicanery made use of are characteristic of the man.”11 Such reports only reinforced Hamilton’s sense of Burr as an unscrupulous opportunist eager to exploit popular turmoil.

  In now opposing Burr’s ambition to become vice president, Hamilton viewed him as a possible stalking horse for Governor Clinton and dispatched letters to dissuade people from backing him. Hamilton was a man of such deep, unalterable principles that Burr was bound to strike him as devoid of any moral compass. In writing to one correspondent, Hamilton even found sudden virtues in George Clinton, describing him as a “man of property” and “probity” in his private life. He couldn’t say as much for Burr:

  I fear the other gentleman [i.e., Burr] is unprincipled both as a public and private man. When the constitution was in deliberation . . . his conduct was equivocal....In fact, I take it he is for or against nothing but as it suits his interest or ambition. He is determined, as I conceive, to make his way to be the head of the popular party and to climb...to the highest honors of the state and as much higher as circumstances may permit....I am mistaken if it be not his object to play the game of confusion and I feel it a religious duty to oppose his career.12

  Hamilton denounced Burr in language similar to that he employed against Jefferson, warning that “if we have an embryo-Caesar in the United States ’tis Burr.”13 But if Jefferson was a man of fanatical principles, he had principles all the same— which Hamilton could forgive. Burr’s abiding sin was a total lack of principles, which Hamilton could not forgive.

  Hamilton’s anxieties about Burr proved premature. On October 16, a Republican caucus in Philadelphia bestowed unanimous approval upon George Clinton’s candidacy for vice president. As a professional politician, Burr was ready to concede defeat and fight another day; he graciously stepped aside. Students of the period point to this meeting as one of the first examples of party organization in American elections, though the participants were skittish about calling themselves a party. But the group’s multistate composition did reflect a new degree of political cohesion among like-minded politicians.

  The ringleader was the seemingly omnipresent House clerk John Beckley. Soon after the Republican caucus, Beckley described to Madison Hamilton’s growing influence in electoral politics. In the vice presidential race, Beckley said, the treasury secretary’s efforts both “direct and indirect are unceasing and extraordinary.... [T]here is no inferior degree of sagacity in the combinations of this extraordinary man. With a comprehensive eye, a subtle and contriving mind, and a soul devoted to his object, all his measures are promptly and aptly designed and, like the links of a chain, depend on each other [and] acquire additional strength by their union.”14 Beckley retained an unwavering belief in Hamilton’s wickedness and suggested to Madison that he had explosive new proof that might bring down the treasury secretary: “I think I have a clue to something far beyond mere suspicion on this ground, which prudence forbids a present disclosure of.”15 Beckley’s letter hints at early knowledge of the Reynolds affair.

  As always, Hamilton braced for attacks on his integrity and was prepared to squelch any slander. Early in the fall, he was advised that during a Maryland congressional campaign incumbent John F. Mercer had impugned his conduct in office. The son of a wealthy Virginia planter, Mercer had been a former aide-de-camp to General Charles Lee, the conceited general who had been court-martialed after the battle of Monmouth. A foe of strong central government, Mercer had been a voluble member of the Constitutional Convention (Jefferson described him as “afflicted with the morbid rage of debate”) and had left Philadelphia without signing the document.16

  In his campaign oratory, Mercer renewed every hoary charge ever leveled at Hamilton: Hamilton was the tool of the propertied class; had bought back government debt at inflated prices to enrich speculators; had dictated legislation to Congress; had rewarded William Duer with a lucrative contract to supply the Western Army; and had introduced the detestable excise tax on liquor. Mercer also revived a 1790 incident in which he had met Hamilton at the door of the Treasury building and asked to be reimbursed for horses shot from under him during the Revolution. Hamilton had replied facetiously that if Mercer voted for his assumption bill, he would pay for the horses from his own pocket. Mercer presented this passing jest as proof of Hamilton’s corruption. Finally, he ridiculed Hamilton as an upstart, “a mushroom excrescence,” who did not deserve the prominence he had gained.17

  When it came to aspersions against his honor, Hamilton always had a hairtrigger temper. In language signaling a possible duel, Hamilton wrote testily to Mercer and asked him to disavow the charge that he had bought back government debt at inflated rates to help speculators. Mercer partially retracted his words and admitted that Hamilton had never bought government bonds for personal gain. On the other hand, he insisted that Hamilton had exerted his influence to attach “to your administration a monied interest as an engine of government.”18 Unable to let the matter drop, Hamilton knocked on Mercer’s door in Philadelphia that December and demanded a further retraction. Hamilton got enough satisfaction—“I spoke nothing that could tend, in my opinion, to wound your honesty or integrity,” Mercer conceded—that a possible duel was averted.19 Hamilton may have opposed duels on principle, as he later claimed, but for such a hotheaded man these affairs of honor were expedient weapons in silencing his enemies. Whenever he was maligned, Hamilton aggressively sought retractions, persisting to the bitter end.

  On December 5, 1792, members of the electoral college assembled in their respective states. The outcome gratified Hamilton and corresponded with his expectations. Washington was chosen unanimously as president. Adams received seventy-seven votes, enough to return him as vice p
resident, while George Clinton gained a respectable fifty votes. In his “Anas”—always to be taken with a pound of salt— Jefferson reported that Senator John Langdon had commented to Adams on the closeness of his vote. According to Langdon, Adams gritted his teeth and exclaimed, “Damn ’em, damn ’em, damn ’em. You see that an elective government will not do.”20

  On the surface, the election seemed an impressive show of national unity, when it was just a passing truce in an ongoing war. For the last time, George Washington’s prestige papered over growing differences between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians. Three days after the electoral college met, James Monroe resumed his newspaper defense of Jefferson and slammed Hamilton as someone “suspected, with too much reason, to be attached to monarchy.”21 Far more noteworthy than such hackneyed tirades against Hamilton, however, were the first shots fired at Washington. No longer a sacred figure, immune to criticism, he was spattered with mud by Philip Freneau, who accused him of aping royalty in his presidential etiquette: “A certain monarchical prettiness must be highly extolled, such as levees, drawing rooms, stately nods instead of shaking hands, titles of office, seclusion from the people.”22 Given Washington’s reluctance to serve a second term, this was an especially undeserved cut, and Adams lamented the “sour, angry, peevish, fretful, lying paragraphs” with which the press battered the government.23

  Clearly, the political tone in Washington’s second term was going to be even harsher than in the first. Right before Christmas, Hamilton wrote a despairing letter to John Jay. He was worn down by the interminable attacks against him and slander he felt powerless to stop. He told Jay that he was oppressed by the weight of official business and the need to track legislative maneuvers against him, but that his “burden and perplexity” had still more sinister origins: “ ’Tis the malicious intrigues to stab me in the dark, against which I am too often obliged to guard myself, that distract and harass me to a point which, rendering my situation scarcely tolerable, interferes with objects to which friendship and inclination would prompt me.”24 Hamilton wrote this cheerless assessment three days after meeting with Muhlenberg, Venable, and Monroe. He must have known the Maria Reynolds affair would have repercussions for many years to come.

  As Washington’s first term ended in early 1793, the president remained distraught over his bickering cabinet. He continued to admonish his headstrong secretaries of treasury and state that they should try to get along for the national good. Jefferson assured the president that he would strive for unity and that he had “kept myself aloof from all cabal and correspondence on the subject of the government.”25 In the next breath, however, he renewed his corrosive attacks on Hamilton. Washington’s vaunted patience was giving way to petulant flashes of temper, and, according to Jefferson, he “expressed the extreme wretchedness of his existence while in office and went lengthily into the late attacks on him for levees.”26 This was an implicit rebuke of Jefferson, for it was Freneau who had accused Washington of holding royal “levees” or receptions.

  Even as Jefferson mouthed sedative pledges of peace, he and Madison were secretly orchestrating the first concerted effort in American history to expel a cabinet member for official misconduct. They had come to regard Hamilton as a grave threat to republican government, a monarchist bent on destroying the republic— all without any proof. The National Gazette put it that Hamilton “fancies himself the great pivot upon which the whole machine of government turns, throwing out of view... the president, the legislature, and the Constitution itself.”27 Jefferson and Madison abandoned any residual restraint as they prepared to launch an allout inquisition.

  To disguise their efforts, they employed as their surrogate a fiery Virginia congressman, William Branch Giles, who later courted one of Jefferson’s daughters. As early as the spring of 1792, Hamilton had suspected intrigue within the Virginia delegation and identified Madison as “the prompter of Mr. Giles and others, who were the open instruments of opposition.”28 The husky, often unkempt Giles was a Princeton graduate and noted Virginia lawyer. He shared his state’s endemic hatred of banks and modern finance and thought a “northern faction” was out to destroy the union. As a frequent mouthpiece for Jefferson, he employed his pugnacious style for states’ rights and did not spare anyone in the Federalist opposition. He even accused Washington of showing “a princely ignorance of the country,” evidenced by the fact that “the wants and wishes of one part had been sacrificed to the interest of the other.”29

  Giles tried to discredit Hamilton over his use of money that the government had borrowed in Europe. This charge originated in a memo that Jefferson had prepared surreptitiously for Madison. Hamilton had wanted to use foreign loans to repay a government loan from the Bank of the United States—two million dollars that the bank had extended to the federal government to purchase stock in the bank itself. Partial as ever to the French Revolution, the Jeffersonians feared that this money would be diverted from American debt payments to France. In the past, Hamilton had applied foreign loans to the repayment of domestic debt—a technical violation of the law but one, he claimed, that had been approved verbally by Washington. The suspicion prevailed among critics, however, that he wanted to transfer borrowed funds from Europe to the national bank to aid speculators. And a small circle of opponents, including Jefferson and Madison, now also knew about the denouement of the Maria Reynolds affair, with its accusations of official wrongdoing by Hamilton. Twice in late December 1792, the House demanded from Hamilton a strict accounting of foreign loans. Distracted by the Reynolds probe, he still managed to crank out a detailed report by January 3. The beleaguered Hamilton felt the weight of unseen forces marshaled against him and feared he was now the target of a highly organized attempt to destroy his reputation.

  Planning to exhaust Hamilton, Giles submitted five resolutions in the House on January 23, calling for still more extensive information on foreign loans. By design, these resolutions made massive, nay overwhelming, demands on Hamilton. He had to furnish a complete reckoning of balances between the government and the central bank, as well as a comprehensive list of sinking-fund purchases of government debt. Some historians, including Giles’s biographer, believe that Jefferson instigated these resolutions, with Madison drafting their language. Taking advantage of a short, four-month congressional session, the House gave Hamilton an impossible March 3 deadline. Republicans hoped that Hamilton’s failure to comply would then be construed as prima facie evidence of his guilt; Federalists were equally convinced that he would prove to be incorruptible.

  Hamilton’s critics seriously underrated his superhuman stamina. He enjoyed beating his enemies at their own game, and the resolutions roused his fighting spirit. By February 19, in a staggering display of diligence, he delivered to the House several copious reports, garlanded with tables, lists, and statistics that gave a comprehensive overview of his work as treasury secretary. In the finale of one twentythousand-word report, Hamilton intimated that he had risked a physical breakdown to complete this heroic labor: “It is certain that I have made every exertion in my power, at the hazard of my health, to comply with the requisitions of the House as early as possible.”30 Hamilton’s reports did not sway his opponents, who wanted to expose him, not engage him in debate. Every proof of his prodigious gifts made him seem only the more threatening.

  Defying Washington’s appeal for a truce with Hamilton, Jefferson intensified the combat at close quarters. On February 25, he proposed to Washington an official inquiry into Hamilton and the Treasury Department—a demand Washington spurned bluntly. Hamilton thought Jefferson should leave the cabinet and openly head the opposition, rather than subvert the administration from within. In response, Thomas Jefferson did something extraordinary: he drew up a series of resolutions censuring Hamilton and quietly slipped them to William Branch Giles. Jefferson now functioned as de facto leader of the Republican party. The great irony was that the man who repeatedly accused Hamilton of meddling with Congress and violating the separation of
powers was now secretly scrawling congressional resolutions directed against a member of his own administration.

  When Giles filed nine censure resolutions against Hamilton in late February, he did not disclose that they were based on Jefferson’s rough draft. (The telltale document did not even surface until 1895.) Giles introduced his charges with what one spectator described as “a most pointed attack” on Hamilton.31 The resolutions accused Hamilton of “indecorum” in dealing with Congress and of improperly mixing foreign and domestic loans. Giles omitted two of the more outlandish resolutions drawn up by Jefferson: a claim that Hamilton had attempted to benefit speculators and a demand that the treasurer’s office be hived off from the rest of the Treasury Department. One Jefferson resolution exposed the true intent behind his vendetta: “Resolved, That the Secretary of the Treasury has been guilty of maladministration in the duties of his office and should, in the opinion of Congress, be removed from his office by the President of the United States.”32 By submitting these resolutions on the eve of the congressional recess, Giles intended to deprive Hamilton of adequate time to rebut the charges. Despite Madison’s support, the House roundly voted down these resolutions. Jefferson anticipated this defeat but knew that the unsubstantiated accusations would float tantalizingly in the air. As he observed, the resolutions would enable people to “see from this the extent of their danger.”33

  The upshot of the abortive Republican campaign was an almost total vindication of Hamilton. All nine of the Virginian’s resolutions were defeated on March 1. At worst, Hamilton was found guilty of excessive discretion in shifting money among accounts to insure that the government did not miss interest payments. He also was not always meticulous in matching specific loans to the laws authorizing them, but nobody ever proved that Alexander Hamilton had diverted a penny of public money for personal profit.