Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

  Federalists rejoiced that the Republican vendetta had backfired, and one Boston Federalist exclaimed, “The conquest to the cause of government and the reputation of Hamilton must be as glorious as it was unexpected.”34 Hamilton, however, foresaw further attacks. “There is no doubt in my mind,” he told Rufus King, “that the next session will revive the attack with more system and earnestness.”35 By this point, harassment was exacting a terrible physical and mental toll on the exhausted Hamilton. Sometimes, he vented his rage in essays that he let molder in his drawer. In one unpublished essay, he railed against the Jeffersonians as “wily hypocrites” and “crafty and abandoned imposters.”36 He now viewed “hypocrisy and treachery” as “the most successful commodities in the political market. It seems to be the destined lot of nations to mistake their foes for their friends, their flatterers for their faithful servants.”37 He believed that he had made a huge but thankless sacrifice for his country.

  Hamilton was correct that Jefferson and his cohorts had no intention of desisting from their attacks. He now discovered that Muhlenberg, Venable, or Monroe— or perhaps all three—had breached the vow of confidentiality in the Reynolds affair. In early May 1793, Hamilton’s old friend from revolutionary days, Henry Lee, wrote from Virginia: “Was I with you, I would talk an hour with doors bolted and windows shut, as my heart is much afflicted by some whispers which I have heard.”38

  The vindication of Hamilton by Congress only strengthened the faith of the Jeffersonians that legislators could never exercise independent judgment when it came to him. Jefferson now asked John Beckley to provide him with a “list of paper-men”— that is, congressmen who held bank stock or government bonds. The supposed conflicts of interest of these legislators gave Jefferson the all-purpose explanation he needed to account for Hamilton’s acquittal. Madison, too, ascribed the defeated resolutions to corrupt congressmen who had profited from Hamilton’s fiscal measures. At this stage, it grew more and more evident to Jefferson that he would have to perpetuate the struggle against the treasury secretary not from inside the government but from the safe haven of Monticello.

  In the wake of their setback, Republicans seeking more damaging information about Hamilton latched on to a disgruntled former Treasury Department clerk named Andrew Fraunces. At first glance, he seemed like a magnificent find, an angry man with inside knowledge of Hamilton’s official duties. He had labored at the Treasury Department from its formation in 1789 until he was fired in March 1793. After moving to New York City, Fraunces was short of money and longed to retaliate against Hamilton. In May 1793, he presented to the Treasury two warrants for redemption that dated back to the early confederation period. In the first days of the new government, Treasury officials had routinely honored these claims, but they later declined automatic payment as they discovered how slipshod had been the paperwork of their predecessors. As a onetime Treasury employee, Fraunces knew this history. Nonetheless, when his claims were denied, he protested that he was being penalized by the treasury secretary, and he pestered both Hamilton and Washington for payment.

  In early June, Fraunces not only returned to Philadelphia but accosted Hamilton, who told him to renew his claim in writing. The stymied Fraunces now drifted into the twilight world of restless Hamilton haters. Pretty soon, he was meeting in New York with Jacob Clingman, the new husband of Maria Reynolds. He told Clingman, in boastful words reminiscent of those employed by James Reynolds six months earlier, that “he could, if he pleased, hang Hamilton.”39 Clingman was still trying to prove the preposterous notion that Hamilton had conspired with William Duer to rig the market in government securities, and Fraunces pretended that he had information linking Hamilton directly with Duer’s ill-fated speculations.

  Reports of talks between Clingman and Fraunces were relayed to John Beckley, who passed along this folderol to Jefferson. Beckley was prepared to believe any hearsay that defamed Hamilton, even the ludicrous notion that Hamilton had offered Fraunces two thousand dollars for papers showing his supposed financial ties to Duer. Fraunces went so far as to claim that he knew the couriers who had carried payments between the two men. Beckley was also intrigued by Clingman’s assertion that Maria Reynolds was now prepared to tell everything she knew about her former husband’s relations with Hamilton—as if the loose-tongued Maria had ever muzzled herself before.

  Although Jacob Clingman knew that Andrew Fraunces was an unsavory character, this did not dent his belief in the man’s story. Beckley recorded of Clingman’s reaction: “He considers Fraunces as a man of no principle, yet he is sure that he is privy to the whole connection with Duer....He tells me, too, that Fraunces is fond of drink and very avaricious and that a judicious appeal to either of those passions would induce him to deliver up Hamilton’s and Duer’s letters and tell all he knows.”40 Beckley was so famished for scandal about Hamilton that he traveled to New York and met with Fraunces “to unravel this scene of iniquity.”41 When Beckley tried to elicit documentation from Fraunces that would substantiate his wild allegations against Hamilton, the effort, as always, proved futile.

  All of this raw gossip flowed straight to the secretary of state, who faithfully recorded every scrap in his diary, even though he had just received extreme proof of Beckley’s bias. In his “Anas” for June 7, 1793, Jefferson noted Beckley’s crackpot story that the British had offered Hamilton asylum if his plans for an American monarchy miscarried. About this fairy tale—allegedly gleaned from Britain’s consul general in New York—Jefferson commented in the margin: “Impossible as to Hamilton. He was far above that.” Jefferson then made this further observation on his chief source of political intelligence: “Beckley is a man of perfect truth as to what he affirms of his own knowledge, but too credulous as to what he hears from others.”42 Nonetheless, Jefferson added to his swelling dossier on Hamilton the farrago of stories that Beckley had taken down from Clingman and Fraunces.

  By early July, Hamilton knew that enemies were tracking his movements and trying to extract information from Andrew Fraunces. He also knew that this spying operation was supervised by Jefferson’s protégé Beckley. In early July, Hamilton took a potentially hazardous step by inviting Jacob Clingman to his office. We know roughly what Hamilton said because the dialogue was transmitted to Beckley. Like an attorney subtly probing a witness, Hamilton tried to draw Clingman out, asking if he knew Andrew Fraunces, had boarded at his house, had dined at his table, or had visited his office. Clingman admitted to one dinner and one office visit with Fraunces. Hamilton then told Clingman to discount what Fraunces said, “as he spoke much at random and drank.”43 Showing the accuracy of his suspicions, Hamilton then asked Clingman, point-blank, if he ever visited John Beckley. Clingman said he had run into Beckley at the home of Frederick Muhlenberg, his former boss. This information could only have validated Hamilton’s worst fears.

  Perhaps aware that Hamilton had been blackmailed with some success before, Fraunces wrote to him in early August and threatened to expose everything to “the people” if he did not get paid for his two warrants. Within hours, Hamilton sent back a furious reply. He was not about to repeat the mistake he made with James Reynolds: “Do you imagine that any menaces of appeal to the people can induce me to depart from what I conceive to be my public duty!...I set you and all your accomplices at defiance.”44 The next day, Hamilton did something out of character: he wrote a toned-down letter to Fraunces, apologized for his rash initial response, and merely protested the notion that he had failed to pay for the warrants because of “some sinister motives.”45 The change of tone apparently came about because Washington had received another letter from Fraunces and had asked Hamilton to comment on the case. This must have reminded Hamilton that he was dealing with official business, not just private threats. Hamilton explained the affair to Washington’s satisfaction. At the same time, he sent a pointed letter to Fraunces’s lawyer, warning of legal consequences if any fabricated documents were used against him.

  Undeterred, in lat
e August Fraunces published a pamphlet of his correspondence with Hamilton and Washington. On October 11, an irate Hamilton placed a notice in two New York newspapers, informing the public that he had repeatedly asked Fraunces for proof of his charges and that Fraunces had evaded the request. Hamilton called his former employee “contemptible” and a “despicable calumniator.”46 The next day, an unrepentant Fraunces retorted in a rival paper that “if I am a despicable calumniator, I have been, unfortunately, for a long time past a pupil of Mr. Hamilton’s.”47 Fraunces kept up his diatribes, and Robert Troup and Rufus King gathered affidavits from prominent people attesting to Hamilton’s innocence. It was testimony to the vile partisanship of the period that a disgruntled former government clerk, tainted by a well-known history of drinking, could sustain such a public assault upon Hamilton’s character. It also testified to Hamilton’s exaggerated need to free his name from the slightest stain that he felt obliged to trade public insults with such an obscure figure.

  The Fraunces controversy ended when the former clerk appealed for justice to Congress, citing Hamilton’s supposed mishandling of his warrants. The charges, as Hamilton knew, lacked merit. On February 19, 1794, Congress passed two resolutions rejecting Fraunces’s claims and commending Hamilton’s honorable handling of the matter.

  TWENTY-THREE

  CITIZEN GENÊT

  On March 4, 1793, George Washington was sworn in for his second term as president. Unlike his talkative treasury secretary, the president believed in brevity and delivered a pithy inaugural address of two paragraphs. As he

  spoke in the Senate chamber, tension crackled below the surface of American politics that contrasted with the rapturous mood of the first inauguration. Fisher Ames, always a shrewd observer of the scene, mused that “a spirit of faction ...must soon come to a crisis.” He foresaw that congressional Republicans would discard their comparatively decorous criticism of Washington’s first term: “They thirst for vengeance. The Secretary of the Treasury is one whom they would immolate.... The President is not to be spared. His popularity is a fund of strength to that cause which they would destroy. He is therefore rudely and incessantly attacked.”1

  Washington’s second term revolved around inflammatory foreign-policy issues. The French Revolution forced Americans to ponder the meaning of their own revolution, and followers of Hamilton and Jefferson drew diametrically opposite conclusions. The continuing turmoil in Paris added to the caution of Hamiltonians, who were trying to tamp down radical fires at home. Those same upheavals encouraged Jeffersonians to stoke the fires anew. Americans increasingly defined their domestic politics by either their solidarity with the French Revolution or their aversion to its incendiary methods. The French Revolution thus served to both consolidate the two parties in American politics and deepen the ideological gulf between them.

  Most Americans had applauded the French Revolution as a worthy successor to their own, a fraternal link renewed in August 1792 when the National Assembly in Paris bestowed honorary citizenship upon “Georges Washington,” “N. Madison,” and “Jean Hamilton.”2 When Hamilton received a letter from the French interior minister confirming this, he scribbled scornfully on the back: “Letter from government of French Republic, transmitting me a diploma of citizenship, mistaking the Christian name....Curious example of French finesse.”3 But events in Paris had taken a bloody turn that horrified American representatives there. During the summer of 1792, William Short—Jefferson’s former private secretary in Paris, now stationed in The Hague—wrote to Jefferson of “those mad and corrupted people in France who under the name of liberty have destroyed their own government.” The Parisian streets, he warned, “literally are red with blood.”4 Short described to Hamilton mobs breaking into the royal palace and jailing King Louis XVI. In late August, a guillotine was erected near the Tuileries as Robespierre and Marat launched a wholesale roundup of priests, royalists, editors, judges, tramps, prostitutes—anyone deemed an enemy of the state. When 1,400 political prisoners were slaughtered in the so-called September Massacres, an intoxicated Robespierre pronounced it “the most beautiful revolution that has ever honored humanity.”5 “Let the blood of traitors flow,” agreed Marat. “That is the only way to save the country.”6

  For a long time, Jeffersonians had dismissed these reports of atrocities as rank propaganda. Moved by the soul-stirring rhetoric of the French Revolution, they affected the title of “Jacobin” and saluted one another as “citizen” or “citizeness,” in solidarity with their French comrades. After France declared itself a republic on September 20, 1792, American sympathizers feted the news with toasts, cannonades, and jubilation. When Jefferson replied to William Short’s letter, he noted that the French Revolution had heartened American republicans and undercut Hamiltonian “monocrats.” He regretted the lives lost in Paris, he said, then offered this chilling apologia: “The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest.... [R]ather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.”7 For Jefferson, it was not just French or American freedom at stake but that of the entire Western world. To his mind, such a universal goal excused the bloodthirsty means.

  On January 21, 1793, more grisly events forced a reappraisal of the notion that the French Revolution was a romantic Gallic variant of the American Revolution. Louis XVI—who had aided the American Revolution and whose birthday had long been celebrated by American patriots—was guillotined for plotting against the Revolution. The death of Louis Capet—he had lost his royal title—was drenched in gore: schoolboys cheered, threw their hats aloft, and licked the king’s blood, while one executioner did a thriving business selling snippets of royal hair and clothing. The king’s decapitated head was wedged between his lifeless legs, then stowed in a basket. The remains were buried in an unvarnished box. England reeled from the news, William Pitt the Younger branding it “the foulest and most atrocious act the world has ever seen.”8 On February 1, France declared war against England, Holland, and Spain, and soon the whole continent was engulfed in fighting, ushering in more than twenty years of combat.

  News of the royal beheading reached America in late March 1793, at an inopportune time for the Jeffersonians, who had stressed France’s moral superiority over Britain. Would they condemn or rationalize the action? The answer became clear when Freneau’s National Gazette published an article entitled “Louis Capet has lost his caput.” The author qualified his levity in celebrating the king’s death: “From my use of a pun, it may seem that I think lightly of his fate. I certainly do. It affects me no more than the execution of another malefactor.”9 The author said that the king’s murder represented “a great act of justice,” and anyone shocked by such wanton violence betrayed “a strong remaining attachment to royalty” and belonged to “a monarchical junto.”10 In other words, they were Hamiltonians. Once upon a time, Thomas Jefferson had lauded Louis XVI as “a good man,” “an honest man.”11 Now, he asserted that monarchs should be “amenable to punishment like other criminals.”12

  Madison admitted to some qualms about “the follies and barbarities” in Paris but was generally no less militant than Jefferson in admiring the French Revolution, describing it as “wonderful in its progress and...stupendous in its consequences”; he denigrated its enemies as “enemies of human nature.”13 Madison agreed with Jefferson that if their French comrades failed it would doom American republicanism. Madison was not fazed by Louis XVI’s murder. If the king “was a traitor,” he said, “he ought to be punished as well as another man.”14 Like Jefferson, Madison filtered out upsetting facts about France and mocked as “spurious” newspaper accounts that talked about the king’s innocence “and the bloodthirstiness of his enemies.”15

  One mordant irony of this obstinate blindness was that while Republicans rejoiced in the French Revolution and cited the sacred debt owed to French officers who had fought in the American Revolution, those same officers were being victimized by revolutionary violence. Gouverneur Morris, now
U.S. minister to France, informed Hamilton after the king’s execution, “It has so happened that a very great proportion of the French officers who served in America have been either opposed to the Revolution at an early day or felt themselves obliged at a later period to abandon it. Some of them are now in a state of banishment and their property confiscated.”16 With the monarchy’s fall, the marquis de Lafayette was denounced as a traitor. He fled to Belgium, only to be captured by the Austrians and shunted among various prisons for five years. Tossed into solitary confinement, he eventually emerged wan and emaciated, a mostly hairless cadaver. Lafayette’s family suffered grievously during the Terror. His wife’s sister, mother, and grandmother were all executed and dumped in a common grave. Other heroes of the American Revolution succumbed to revolutionary madness: the comte de Rochambeau was locked up in the Conciergerie, while Admiral d’Estaing was executed.

  If Republicans turned a blind eye to these events, the pro-British bias of the Federalists perhaps sharpened their vision. As early as March 1792, Jefferson groused in his “Anas” about Washington’s “want of confidence in the event of the French revolution....I remember when I received the news of the king’s flight and capture, I first told him of it at his assembly. I never saw him so much dejected by any event in my life.”17 Washington was indeed sickened by the bloodshed in France, and this widened the breach between him and Jefferson. John Adams was quite prescient about events in France and regretted that many Americans were “so blind, undistinguishing, and enthusiastic of everything that has been done by that light, airy, and transported people.”18 He warned that “Danton, Robespierre, Marat, etc. are furies. Dragons’ teeth have been sown in France and will come up as monsters.”19