Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

  The news of his resignation unleashed speculation about his future. Cynics perceived deep cunning in his stepping down as treasury secretary, a desire to succeed Washington as president. Detractors and admirers could not conceive that he intended to try private life for a while. When Governor Clinton announced in January that he would not run for reelection, the press pegged Hamilton as a gubernatorial prospect, maybe with his old boss Nicholas Cruger as lieutenant governor. Hamilton instructed Philip Schuyler to dampen this speculation, much of it, he thought, motivated by a wish to present him as a man of irrepressible ambition. When one New York attorney asked Hamilton if he could float his name for governor, he did not answer but appended his own private memo to the message: “This letter was probably written with some ill design. I keep it without answer as a clue to future events. A. H.”4 This self-protective action says much about the suspicious atmosphere of the day.

  The plain truth was that Hamilton was indebted and needed money badly. This alone refuted accusations that he had been a venal official. If Hamilton had a vice, it was clearly a craving for power, not money, and he left public office much poorer than he entered it. Having taken care of the nation’s finances, he had told Angelica Church, “I go to take a little care of my own, which need my care not a little.”5 He planned “to resign my political family and set seriously about the care of my private family.”6 As treasury secretary, Hamilton had made $3,500 per year, which fell far short of the expenses of his burgeoning family and of what he might have earned as an attorney. He owned little more than his household furniture and estimated it would take five or six years of steady work to repay his debts and replenish his finances. Because such indebtedness did not square with Jeffersonian orthodoxy, it had to be denied. After Hamilton resigned, Madison wrote to Jefferson, saying peevishly of Hamilton, “It is pompously announced in the newspaper that poverty drives him back to the bar for a livelihood.”7

  Hamilton was frank about his financial travails. George Washington Parke Custis, the president’s adopted grandson, told how Hamilton appeared at the presidential mansion after tendering his resignation. Washington’s staff was there when Hamilton smilingly entered. “Congratulate me, my good friends,” he announced, “for I am no longer a public man. The president has at length consented to accept my resignation and I am once more a private citizen.” Hamilton, noting their dismay, explained, “I am not worth exceeding five hundred dollars in the world. My slender fortune and the best years of my life have been devoted to the service of my adopted country. A rising family hath its claims.” Hamilton then picked up a slim volume on the table and turned it over in his hands. “Ah, this is the constitution,” he said. “Now, mark my words. So long as we are a young and virtuous people, this instrument will bind us together in mutual interests, mutual welfare, and mutual happiness. But when we become old and corrupt, it will bind us no longer.”8 This queasy view of America’s future guaranteed that Hamilton wouldn’t just bask in the afterglow of his Treasury success and would return to politics.

  Having grown up with insecurity, Hamilton was not immune to the attractions of wealth and wanted to live comfortably, but he had no desire to acquire a fortune by unethical means and gave dramatic proof of this after leaving office. When he returned to New York, he was contacted by his old classmate Robert Troup, who had been “in the habit of lending him [Hamilton] small sums of money to answer current family calls” while he was treasury secretary.9 The affable Troup had prospered as an agent for a leading real-estate promoter, Charles Williamson, who represented some wealthy British investors in American land. In late March 1795, Troup urged Hamilton to join a scheme for purchasing property in the old Northwest Territory: “No event will contribute more to my happiness than to be instrumental in making a man of fortune—I may say—a gentleman of you. For such is the present insolence of the world that hardly any man is treated like a gentleman unless his fortune enables him to live at his ease.”10 Troup then added that the law would wear down Hamilton and leave him, a decade later, unable to support his family.

  If Hamilton lusted for money, here was his chance: a dear friend fairly panted to make him rich by legitimate means. Instead, though touched by Troup’s concern, Hamilton wrote him a gracious letter and declined the invitation. That Williamson represented foreigners weighed in his decision because he foresaw “a great crisis in the affairs of mankind” and wanted to be free of any overseas involvement. Hamilton feared that the terrors of the French Revolution might soon be visited upon America, guillotines and all, and that he himself might be condemned by a revolutionary tribunal. “The game to be played may be a most important one,” he told Troup. “It may be for nothing less than true liberty, property, order, religion and, of course, heads. I will try Troup, if possible, to guard yours and mine.” He didn’t need to live “in splendor in town” if he could “at least live in comfort in the country and I am content to do so.”11 Thus Hamilton renounced his chance at fortune. He did accept a legal retainer from Charles Williamson but did not take part in the land deal.

  Hamilton spent most of that spring with Eliza and the children in Albany, while shuttling back and forth to a small temporary home and office at 63 Pine Street in Manhattan. He had fleeting reveries about making his first trip to Europe—it would have been his first outside the country since arriving in North America—but opted to spend this precious time with his family. Liberated from official duties, he seemed more lighthearted than he had in years and took an insouciant tone with Eliza. One day, when he failed to book the stagecoach to Albany in time, he told her, “I must therefore take my chance by water, which I shall do tomorrow and must content myself with praying for a fair wind to waft me speedily to the bosom of my beloved.”12 In May, Hamilton even took a weeklong vacation, riding with his friend Henry Glen all the way from Schenectady, New York, to the Susquehanna River and back. Hamilton could not relax for long, however, and by summer he was back in the city, attending to a blue-ribbon clientele that included many eminent New York names. From this base in lower Manhattan, Hamilton would not be as distant from national politics in Philadelphia as geography alone might have suggested.

  Hamilton’s vacation from American politics was so transient that few people could have noticed. While taking on a full legal calendar, he did not slacken the pace of his essay writing and dove into the first great controversy following his resignation: the furor over the Jay Treaty. No sooner had John Jay arrived in London the previous summer than Hamilton’s personal ambassador, Angelica Church, had taken him in hand and invited him to her soirees. Like other powerful males, Jay was taken with Church, telling Hamilton, “She certainly is an amiable, agreeable woman.”13 As he made the social rounds and received a cordial reception, Jay knew that the treaty he would negotiate could ignite a firestorm back home. He warned Hamilton that “we must not make a delusive settlement that would disunite our people and leave seeds of discord to germinate.”14

  Hamilton was still in office when the draft of the so-called Jay Treaty with England arrived in Philadelphia. Jefferson claimed that when Hamilton first set eyes on it, he criticized it privately as “execrable” and “an old woman’s treaty.”15 Whether true or not, Hamilton gave the draft treaty a coolly perspicacious review and protested to Secretary of State Edmund Randolph that article 12 placed too many restrictions on American trade with the British West Indies.

  Jay signed the final version on November 19, 1794. Refusing to brave the North Atlantic in winter, he remained in England until the spring, while the official version of his treaty preceded him to Philadelphia on March 7, 1795. It was not the sort of document calculated to gladden American hearts, and Washington decided to cloak it in “impenetrable secrecy,” as Madison termed it.16 Possibly because he was an ardent abolitionist, Jay had not pressed England to make good on compensation for slaves carried off at the close of the Revolution. Nor did he obtain satisfaction for American sailors abducted by the British Navy. Americans had expected him to uphol
d the traditional prerogatives of a neutral power in wartime, but he seemed to have bargained this away too. Most heinous of all to Republicans, Jay had granted British imports most-favored-nation status, while England made no equivalent concessions for American imports. Jay had secured some small but notable victories. Britain agreed to evacuate its northwest forts, to allow arbitration for American merchants whose cargo had been seized, and to grant limited access to the West Indies for small American ships. For the Jeffersonians, the Jay Treaty represented, in its rawest form, a Federalist capitulation to British hegemony and a betrayal of the historic alliance with France.

  From the Federalist perspective, however, Jay had attained something of surpassing importance. He had won peace with Britain at a time when war seemed suicidal for an ill-prepared America. By aligning the country’s fortunes with the leading naval power, Jay had also guaranteed access to overseas markets for American trade. Joseph Ellis has written of the treaty, “It linked American security and economic development to the British fleet, which provided a protective shield of incalculable value throughout the nineteenth century.”17

  Soon after Jay returned to America in late May, Washington summoned a special session of the Senate to debate his treaty behind closed doors. Hamilton expressed extreme anxiety about the outcome. “The common opinion among men of business of all descriptions,” he told Rufus King, “is that a disagreement to the treaty would greatly shock and stagnate pecuniary plans and operations in general.”18 Rather than renewing negotiations with England, Hamilton wanted the Senate to predicate approval on deleting the noxious article 12. Senate opposition was spearheaded by Aaron Burr, who wanted “the value of the Negroes and other property” carried off after the Revolution to “be paid for by the British government.”19 He indicated objections to ten other articles as well. Overriding Burr, the Senate narrowly passed the Jay Treaty on June 24 with the proviso that article 12 be partly suspended.

  Worried about popular reaction to the treaty, Washington still withheld the text from public scrutiny. Hamilton was eager for it to be printed, if only to allay exaggerated fears, and so advised Washington. On July 1, the full text, leaked by a Republican senator, appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper and created a hullabaloo such as American politics had never seen. Madison said the galvanic effect was “like an electric velocity” imparted “to every part of the Union.”20 Jay surfaced as the new scapegoat for Republican wrath. He had just resigned as first chief justice of the Supreme Court—Hamilton rebuffed an overture to replace him—and had been elected, in absentia, New York’s governor, with Hamilton’s brother-in-law, Stephen Van Rensselaer, as lieutenant governor. Jay was attacked with peculiar venom. Near his New York home, the walls of a building were defaced with the gigantic words, “Damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won’t damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won’t put up lights in the windows and sit up all night damning John Jay.”21

  The Jay Treaty resurrected the vengeful emotions called forth by the Citizen Genêt contretemps two years earlier. “No international treaty was ever more passionately denounced in the United States,” Elkins and McKitrick have written, “though the benefits which flowed from it were actually considerable.”22 The popular fury that swept city after city again disclosed the chasm separating the two main political factions. On the Fourth of July, Jay was burned in effigy in so many cities that he said he could have walked the length of America by the glow from his own flaming figure. For Hamilton, these protests confirmed his premonition that Jeffersonians were really Jacobin fanatics in diguise. On July 14, Charleston citizens celebrated Bastille Day by dragging the Union Jack through the streets then setting it ablaze in front of the British consul’s house.

  The capital was shaken by raucous demonstrations reminiscent of revolutionary Paris, albeit without royalist heads skewered on pikes. Oliver Wolcott, Jr., recorded one such scene: “The treaty was thrown to the populace, who placed it on a pole. A company of about three hundred then proceeded to the French minister’s house before which some ceremony was performed. The mob then went before Mr. [George] Hammond’s house and burned the treaty with huzzahs and acclamations.”23 John Adams was aghast and later recollected Washington’s residence being “surrounded by an innumerable multitude from day to day, buzzing, demanding war against England, cursing Washington, and crying success to the French patriots and virtuous Republicans.”24

  Thus far, Hamilton had generally hesitated to intrude upon his former cabinet colleagues and kept a salutary distance. Now his views were solicited by Washington—with his encyclopedic knowledge of trade and other issues, Hamilton was not easily replaced. Fully aware that the Jay Treaty was bound to be unpopular among Republicans, Washington at least wished to be convinced of its merits in his own mind and know how best to defend it. On July 3, he had sent Hamilton a letter marked “Private and perfectly confidential,” asking him to evaluate the treaty. He laid on the flattery pretty thick, praising Hamilton for having studied trade policy “scientifically upon a large and comprehensive scale.”25 Washington apologized for distracting Hamilton from his law practice and said he should refuse the request if he was too busy. Washington must have smiled as he wrote this, knowing Hamilton would deliver a formidable critique at the earliest opportunity. Indeed, on July 9, 10, and 11, Hamilton shipped to Washington, in three thick chunks, a detailed analysis of the treaty. He approved of the first ten articles, dealing with issues from the 1783 peace treaty. He again condemned article 12, restricting American trade with the West Indies, and reserved harsh words for article 18, with its absurdly long list of contraband goods that could be seized by Britain from American ships. The overwhelming message of the Jay Treaty, however, was benign and irresistible: peace for America. “With peace, the force of circumstances will enable us to make our way sufficiently fast in trade. War at this time would give a serious wound to our growth and prosperity.”26

  Washington was thunderstruck when he received Hamilton’s treatise so promptly. He expressed sincere thanks, adding, “I am really ashamed when I behold the trouble it has given you to explore and to explain so fully as you have done.”27 Washington quibbled with Hamilton on one or two points but otherwise stood in perfect agreement. His letter to Hamilton again corroborates what the Jeffersonians found difficult to credit: that Washington never shied away from differing with the redoubtable Hamilton but agreed with him on the vast majority of issues.

  After Alexander Hamilton left the Treasury Department, he lost the strong, restraining hand of George Washington and the invaluable sense of tact and proportion that went with it. First as aide-de-camp and then as treasury secretary, Hamilton had been forced, as Washington’s representative, to take on some of his decorum. Now that he was no longer subordinate to Washington, Hamilton was even quicker to perceive threats, issue challenges, and take a high-handed tone in controversies. Some vital layer of inhibition disappeared.

  This was first seen in Hamilton’s crusade for the Jay Treaty. Despite Senate passage, Washington had not yet affixed his signature to it. The battle over the treaty became more than a routine political clash for Hamilton. He fought as if it were a political Armageddon that would decide America’s fate. That summer he saw himself as in the midst of a quasi-revolutionary atmosphere in New York. The French tricolor even flapped above the Tontine Coffee House, gathering place of the merchant elite. In his more fearful moments, Hamilton envisaged Jeffersonian tumbrels carting him and other Federalists off to homegrown guillotines. “We have some cause to suspect, though not enough to believe, that our Jacobins meditate serious mischief to certain individuals,” Hamilton wrote confidentially to Oliver Wolcott, Jr. “It happens that the militia of this city, from the complexion of its officers in general, cannot be depended on....In this situation, our eyes turn as a resource in a sudden emergency upon the military now in the forts.”28

  It was increasingly difficult for Hamilton to trust the sincerity of his opponents, whom he viewed as a malignant force set to destroy him. E
arly in the spring, Commodore James Nicholson—the father-in-law of Albert Gallatin, a friend of Aaron Burr, and the former president of New York’s Democratic club—had leveled vicious accusations against him. Nicholson claimed that Hamilton, as treasury secretary, had stashed away one hundred thousand pounds sterling in a London bank—the clear insinuation being that Hamilton had both profited from public office and connived with the British. One of Hamilton’s friends, taking umbrage at this slander, demanded proof. The unruffled Nicholson replied that he would disclose his source only if Hamilton called upon him. “No call has, however, been made from that time to this,” John Beckley informed Madison, as if this constituted proof of Hamilton’s guilt. “Nicholson informed me of these particulars himself and added that, if Hamilton’s name is at any time brought up as a candidate for any public office, he will instantly publish the circumstance.”29 That Republicans could swallow such nonsense as gospel truth suggests that Hamilton did not entirely dream up the conspiracies ranged against him.

  The altercation with Nicholson formed the backdrop to some extraordinary events that unfolded in mid-July 1795. For several days, New York City was saturated with handbills urging citizens to gather at City Hall (Federal Hall) at noon on July 18 “to deliberate upon the proper mode of communicating to the President their disapprobation of the English treaty.”30 Boston citizens had issued a blanket condemnation of the Jay Treaty, and Hamilton feared a bandwagon effect. Already leaders of the Democratic clubs were delivering heated antitreaty speeches on Manhattan street corners. To devise ways to blunt the gathering, the business community summoned a meeting at the Tontine Coffee House on the night of the seventeenth at which Hamilton and Rufus King endorsed the Jay Treaty. They appealed to supporters to show up at City Hall the next day and stage a counterdemonstration.