Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

  As the clock tolled twelve the next day, Hamilton took up a position on the stoop of an old Dutch building on the west side of Broad Street, right across from City Hall. More than five thousand people had squeezed into the intersection where George Washington had taken the oath as president in 1789. But the scene of concord six years earlier now witnessed one of the uglier clashes in the early republic. From his stoop, Hamilton shouted out and demanded to know who had convened the meeting. The irate crowd shouted back in response, “Let us have a chairman.”31 Colonel William S. Smith, John Adams’s son-in-law, was chosen and presided from the balcony of City Hall. Peter R. Livingston began to speak against the Jay Treaty, but he was brusquely interrupted by Hamilton, who questioned his right to speak first. When a vote was taken, the vast majority of those present favored Livingston, who resumed his oration. But there was so much heckling, such a tremendous din of voices, that Livingston could not be heard, and he suggested to treaty opponents that they move down Wall Street toward Trinity Church.

  Not all treaty critics drifted away, however, and about five hundred listened in a surly mood as Hamilton began his ringing defense. According to one newspaper, Hamilton stressed “the necessity of a full discussion before the citizens could form their opinions. Very few sentences, however, could be heard on account of hissings, coughings, and hootings, which entirely prevented his proceeding.”32 This was a remarkable spectacle: the former treasury secretary had descended from Mount Olympus to expose himself to street hecklers. John Church Hamilton contends that when his father asked the demonstrators to show respect, he was greeted “by a volley of stones, one of which struck his forehead. When bowing, he remarked, ‘If you use such knock-down arguments, I must retire.’ ”33 Federalist Seth Johnson confirmed the tale: “Stones were thrown at Mr. Hamilton, one of which grazed his head,” while another indignant Federalist said that the “Jacobins were prudent to endeavour to knock out Hamilton’s brains to reduce him to an equality with themselves.”34 Before long, treaty opponents stormed down to the Battery, formed a circle, and ceremonially burned a copy of the Jay Treaty. When Jefferson heard about Hamilton being stoned in the street, he didn’t react with horror or sadness; rather, he was elated, telling Madison that “the Livingstonians appealed to stones and clubs and beat him and his party off the ground.”35 Evidently, Jefferson thought this would delight the author of the Bill of Rights.

  For a man of his stature, Hamilton had suffered the ultimate indignity. The opposition had turned into the faceless rabble he had feared. On the other hand, his own behavior had been provocative and unbecoming. When he told “friends of order” to follow him down the block, only a small number complied. It was at this moment that Hamilton and his entourage came upon a shouting match in the street between a Federalist lawyer, Josiah Ogden Hoffman, and the same Commodore James Nicholson who had smeared Hamilton months earlier. When Hamilton intervened to stop the quarrel, he was insulted anew by Nicholson, who called him an “abettor of Tories” and told him he had no right to interrupt them. Hamilton tried to herd the feuding men indoors. Nicholson then said that he didn’t need to listen to Hamilton and accused him of having once evaded a duel. These were incendiary words for any gentleman. “No man could affirm that with truth,” Hamilton retorted, and he “pledged himself to convince Mr. Nicholson of his mistake” by calling him to a duel at a more suitable time and place.36

  Hamilton wasn’t through with his swaggering performance. After leaving Nicholson, he and his followers stopped by the front door of Edward Livingston— the youngest brother of Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, a later mayor of New York, and a man Hamilton called “rash, foolish, intemperate, and obstinate”— where Hoffman and Peter Livingston were locked in a nasty verbal scuffle over the Jay Treaty.37 The discussion grew more heated until Edward Livingston and Rufus King begged the men to settle their quarrel elsewhere. “Hamilton then stepped forward,” Edward Livingston later said, “declaring that if the parties were to contend in a personal way, he was ready, that he would fight the whole party one by one. I was just beginning to speak to him on the subject [of] this imprudent declaration when he turned from me, threw up his arm and declared that he was ready to fight the whole ‘detestable faction’ one by one.”38 Livingston thought Hamilton must have been “mortified at his loss of influence before he would descend [to] language that would have become a street bully.”39 This was truly amazing behavior: Hamilton was prepared to descend into outright fisticuffs in the streets with his opponents, as if he were a common ruffian. Maturin Livingston, Peter’s brother, coolly told Hamilton that he was ready to take up his offer and duel him “in half an hour where he pleased.”40 Hamilton confessed that he already had another duel on his hands but would get around to Livingston once he had disposed of Nicholson. Evidently, Hamilton had no concerns about issuing two deadly challenges in quick succession. Vigilant as ever about his reputation, he knew how to exploit such affairs of honor to face down his enemies.

  The Republican newspaper, The Argus, called for another large protest rally against the Jay Treaty two days later. This huge meeting passed a resolution against the treaty, an action duplicated by protest rallies in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston. It was a horrendously busy week for Hamilton, who was supposed to defend before the Supreme Court the legality of a tax on carriages that he had instituted as treasury secretary. (In the end, the case wasn’t argued until February.) Two days after their encounter, Hamilton stung Commodore Nicholson with a letter proposing a duel a week later: “The unprovoked rudeness and insult which I experienced from you on Saturday leaves me no option but that of a meeting with you, the object of which you will readily understand.”41 Hamilton didn’t leave room for an apology and proceeded straight to a challenge. His old friend Nicholas Fish, drafted as his second, delivered the letter to Nicholson. Within minutes, the impulsive Nicholson scratched out a reply, accepting the duel and asking that it take place the next morning. He claimed that his family would be upset by any delay and that word might leak out. In a series of faintly mocking replies—“I should hope that it will be easy for you to quiet the alarm in your family”—Hamilton insisted that he was too busy to duel before the following Monday.42 He adopted the brisk tone of an important man irritated by having to negotiate with an inferior. From the tone of this exchange, one can tell that Hamilton felt fully in charge and free to needle Nicholson at will.

  For several days, their seconds scurried back and forth, trying to work out a settlement. In all likelihood, Hamilton thought Nicholson was bluffing and would back down. But Hamilton took the prospect of a duel seriously enough that he named Troup executor of his estate and wrote him a letter that would serve as a revised will. Hamilton was especially concerned about a sheaf of personal papers that he had stowed in a leather trunk and marked “JR. To be forwarded to Oliver Wolcott Junr. Esq.”43 Presumably, the “JR” referred to James Reynolds, with Wolcott charged if need be with the safekeeping of the correspondence related to the Reynolds affair.

  The 1795 will sheds light on other mysteries, including Hamilton’s relationship with his father, who had moved to St. Vincent five years earlier. They had never entirely lost touch and now exchanged stilted, intermittent letters through couriers. James Hamilton ended one letter to his famous son with his “respectful compliments to Mrs. Hamilton and your children,” whom he had still never met.44 James Hamilton had borrowed seven hundred dollars from his son. Hamilton now worried that, if he died in a duel, his creditors might seek to recover money from his aging father. Hamilton told Troup that he had considered giving his father special protection from creditors, then decided against it:

  I hesitated whether I would not also secure a preference to the drafts of my father. But these, as far as I am concerned, being a merely voluntary engagement, I doubted the justice of the measure and I have done nothing. I regret it lest they should return upon him and increase his distress. Though, as I am informed, a man of respectable connections in Scotland, he
became bankrupt as a merchant at an early day in the West Indies and is now in indigence. I have pressed him to come to me, but his great age and infirmity have deterred him from the change of climate.45

  Hamilton seemed to repress some unspoken hostility here—there is pity but no warmth in the description—as he leaves his father to the tender mercies of his creditors. Though now free of Treasury duties, Hamilton never expressed a wish to visit his aging father in St. Vincent.

  The will again belies Jeffersonian fantasies that Hamilton had reaped a fortune from government service and had salted away embezzled funds in a British bank. Hamilton told Troup that he owed five thousand pounds to his brother-in-law, John Barker Church, and that he feared he was insolvent: “For after a life of labor, I leave my family to the benevolence of others, if my course shall happen to be terminated here.”46 In the event that he died in debt, Hamilton said that he trusted to the “friendship and generosity” of John Barker Church.47

  In the end, Hamilton tinkered with the apology that he wanted Nicholson to make, and Nicholas Fish got him to sign it pretty much verbatim. As for the second duel that Hamilton broached on July 18, he got Maturin Livingston to deny that he had ever cast aspersions on his manhood or accused him of cowardice. Hamilton had prevailed in the two affairs of honor arising from the Jay Treaty protests, but at what price? He had shown a grievous lack of judgment in allowing free rein to his combative instincts. Without Washington’s guidance or public responsibility, he had again revealed a blazing, ungovernable temper that was unworthy of him and rendered him less effective. He also revealed anew that the man who had helped to forge a new structure of law and justice for American society remained mired in the old-fashioned world of blood feuds. When it came to intensely personal conflicts, New York’s most famous lawyer still turned instinctively not to the courtroom, but to the dueling ground.

  Four days after confronting his Jay Treaty foes in the streets, Hamilton took to the public prints. Republicans had chipped away at the treaty behind Roman names— whether Robert R. Livingston writing as “Cato” or Brockholst Livingston as “Decius” and “Cinna”—and Hamilton commenced a ferocious counterattack called “The Defence.” Over a period of nearly six months, he published twenty-eight glittering essays, strengthening his claim as arguably the foremost political pamphleteer in American history. As with The Federalist Papers, “The Defence” spilled out at a torrid pace, sometimes two or three essays per week. In all, Hamilton poured forth nearly one hundred thousand words even as he kept up a full-time legal practice. This compilation, dashed off in the heat of controversy, was to stand as yet another magnum opus in his canon.

  Like The Federalist, “The Defence” was conceived as a collaboration. Hamilton planned to handle the first section of the Jay Treaty, which dealt with violations of the 1783 peace treaty, writing twenty-eight articles in all. Rufus King contributed another ten on the commercial and maritime articles. Governor Jay stayed in touch with both men but refrained from adding to their output. “Jay was also to have written a concluding peroration,” John Adams told Abigail, “but being always a little lazy, and perhaps concluding that it might be most politic to keep his name out of it, and perhaps finding that the work was already well done, he neglected it. This I have from King’s own mouth.”48

  Hamilton employed a daring strategy used before, publishing the first twenty-one essays deep in enemy territory: the pages of The Argus, which had printed Robert R. Livingston’s “Cato” essays. For his nom de guerre, Hamilton picked “Camillus,” from Plutarch’s Lives. This Roman general was a perfect symbol: a wise, virtuous man who was sorely misunderstood by his people, who did not see that he had their highest interests at heart. The fearless Camillus expressed unpalatable truths and was finally exiled for his candor. He was vindicated when he was recalled from banishment to rescue his city, which was endangered by the Gauls. The choice of pen name tells us much about how Hamilton viewed himself and what he perceived as a lack of appreciation by his fellow citizens.

  As usual, Hamilton wrote like a man possessed, showing drafts to James Kent, who marveled that even under deadline pressure Hamilton did not stint on scholarship: “Several of the essays of Camillus were communicated to me before they were printed and my attention was attracted ...to the habit of thorough, precise, and authentic research which accompanied all his investigations. He was not content, for instance, with examining Grotius and taking him as an authority in any other than the original Latin.”49

  In his first essay on July 22, Hamilton attacked the motives of the Jay Treaty opponents—what he saw as their desire to subvert the Constitution, embroil the United States in war on France’s side, and install one of their own as president: “There are three persons prominent in the public eye as the successor of the actual president of the United States in the event of his retreat from the station: Mr. Adams, Mr. Jay, Mr. Jefferson.”50 By discrediting the treaty, Hamilton averred, Republican critics hoped to destroy Jay as a presidential candidate. Since Adams was also a Federalist, Hamilton clearly implied that the hue and cry over the treaty was a stratagem to further Jefferson’s presidential ambitions. Interestingly enough, after reading this first issue, Washington wrote an approving note from Mount Vernon: “To judge of this work from the first number, which I have seen, I augur well of the performance, and shall expect to see the subject handled in a clear, distinct, and satisfactory manner.”51

  Washington had complained of the treaty being distorted by “tortured interpretation” and “abominable misrepresentations,” and so Hamilton reviewed each article in turn.52 First, however, he wanted to address the larger political context. The specter of war with Britain was real, and Hamilton dreaded the demolition of his economic program. “Our trade, navigation, and mercantile capital would be essentially destroyed” if war came, he warned.53 He excoriated the Republicans as “our war party” and pleaded that the young nation required an interval of peace. The United States was “the embryo of a great empire,” and the European powers, if given half a chance, would happily stamp out this republican experiment: “If there be a foreign power, which sees with envy or ill will our growing prosperity, that power must discern that our infancy is the time for clipping our wings.”54 Better to negotiate than to engage in premature war with England. In the “Defence” essays, we see the restrained, pacific side of Hamilton, who turned to war only as a last resort in case of direct aggression or national humiliation.

  Hamilton was not content to write as Camillus alone. Two days after his second essay appeared, he began to publish, in the same paper, a parallel series as “Philo Camillus.” For several weeks, Philo Camillus indulged in extravagant praise of Camillus and kept up a running attack on their Republican adversaries. The prolific Hamilton was now writing pseudonymous commentaries on his own pseudonymous essays. He also tossed in two trenchant essays under the name “Horatius” in which he accused Jeffersonians of “a servile and criminal subserviency to the views of France.”55 During this frenetic period, Hamilton found time to stop by political gatherings. At one meeting at the Assembly Room on William Street, he warned his followers that “unless the treaty was ratified, we might expect a foreign war, and if it is ratified, we might expect a civil war.”56 Hamilton was not alone in worrying that civil turmoil could erupt. From Philadelphia, Treasury Secretary Wolcott reported, “I think we shall have no dangerous riots, but one month will determine the fate of our country.”57 In the third “Defence,” Hamilton portrayed his opponents in the blackest colors: “If we suppose them sincere, we must often pity their ignorance; if insincere, we must abhor the spirit of deception which it betrays.”58 Contrary to his usual image, Hamilton paid homage to the ability of the common people to resist such deceptions and said that they would disappoint those “who, treating them as children, fancy that sugar plums and toys will be sufficient to gain their confidence and attachment.”59

  In reviewing the 1783 peace treaty, Hamilton noted that the Jay Treaty would create
a bilateral commission to arbitrate disputes over debt, the British seizure of American ships, and the boundaries between America and Canada. He claimed that the only article that Britain refused to honor was payment of compensation for nearly three thousand former slaves, and he thought it foolish to risk the treaty over this issue. This uncompromising abolitionist wrote that “the abandonment of negroes, who had been promised freedom, to bondage and slavery would be odious and immoral.”60 Hamilton also made the courageous but still taboo argument that the United States as well as England had violated the peace treaty. As to whether the Jay Treaty would create an “alliance” with Great Britain, Hamilton described this as “an insult to the understandings of the people to call it by such a name.”61 He was being disingenuous, however, when he said that the treaty would not bind the United States more closely to Great Britain and suggested that a commercial treaty lacked political implications. There was a deeply emotional coloring to Hamilton’s pro-British views that he could not admit and that often clashed with his image as the cool-eyed exponent of Realpolitik. In much the same way, his detestation of France was fueled by moral outrage as well as a sober assessment of U.S. interests. Madison was certain that the treaty would undercut U.S. neutrality: “I dread in the ratification . . . an immediate rupture with France....I dread a war with France as a signal for a civil war at home.”62

  Critics said that Jay had given away everything in his treaty and gotten little in return. Hamilton countered that Britain had made significant concessions, modifying her old “system of colonial monopoly and exclusion” and granting concessions to America that no other country had won.63 He thought these would lead to a burst of American trading abroad. Bold, cosmopolitan, and self-confident, Hamilton thought the United States had nothing to fear from commercial engagement with the rest of the planet. “The maxims of the U[nited] States have hitherto favoured a free intercourse with all the world,” he wrote. “They have conceived that they had nothing to fear from the unrestrained competition of commercial enterprise and have only desired to be admitted to it upon equal terms.”64