Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

  The fierce debates about Jefferson and Burr took place amid a welter of reports that the Federalists would refuse to yield power. One Republican scenario hypothesized that desperate Federalists would prevent both Republican candidates from being elected and that President Adams would choose a Federalist successor to head an interim government. One of Hamilton’s adversaries from the Whiskey Rebellion, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, envisioned Hamilton descending upon the capital with an army that would seize control of the government during the deadlock. Governor Thomas McKean of Pennsylvania swore that if Republicans were denied their victory, the Pennsylvania militia, twenty thousand strong, would march upon the capital and arrest any congressman who named someone other than Jefferson or Burr as president. Burr concurred that any Federalist attempt to subvert the election should be met by “a resort to the sword.”23

  Nobody was more upset by talk of extralegal schemes than Hamilton, who thought that any interference with the election would be “most dangerous and unbecoming.”24 The Federalists nourished their own fantasies of Republican plots, and Hamilton himself later claimed that Republican groups had colluded to “cut off the leading Federalists and seize the government” if Jefferson did not make it to the presidency.25 One Federalist newspaper quoted Jefferson’s partisans as issuing shrill threats that, if Burr became president, “we will march and dethrone him as an usurper.” If Federalists dared to “place in the presidential chair any other than the philosopher of Monticello...ten thousand republican swords will instantly leap from their scabbards in defence of the violated rights of the people!!!”26 This hysterical atmosphere only intensified as congressmen tried to resolve the stalemate between Jefferson and Burr.

  It was not until February 11, 1801, that votes cast by presidential electors in the various states were actually opened in the Senate chamber, confirming what was already common knowledge: that Jefferson and Burr had tied with seventy-three votes apiece. It was a snowy day in the brand-new capital. The helter-skelter site was a swampy, ramshackle village with a few boardinghouses clustered around an unfinished Capitol (Henry Adams quipped that it had “two wings without a body”), as well as some houses and stores near an unfinished executive mansion.27 The north wing of the Capitol still lacked a roof, and Pennsylvania Avenue was studded with tree stumps. Quail and wild turkey abounded, and the sharp reports of hunters’ guns punctuated construction sounds. It was very much a southern town, with ten thousand white citizens, seven hundred free blacks, and three thousand slaves. As a result, the majority of the six hundred workers who erected the White House and the Capitol were slaves whose wages were garnisheed by their masters. The federal government was still so small that when it had moved from Philadelphia the previous year, the complete executive-branch archives fit neatly into eight packing cases.

  Once the ballots were counted, the high drama moved to the House of Representatives. Each of the sixteen states was allowed a single vote for president, reflecting the majority sentiment of its delegation, and the winner would need a simple majority of nine votes. Since Federalists had dominated the outgoing Congress, their preference for Burr might have seemed conclusive. But matters were more complicated, since the Federalist votes were so concentrated in New England. On the first ballot, six states voted for Burr versus eight for Jefferson, who fell one vote short of winning. The delegations of the two remaining states, Vermont and Maryland, were evenly divided and therefore cast no votes. Since neither Jefferson nor Burr had nine votes, an impasse ensued that opened the door to further mischief, and rumors flew about that the Virginia militia was preparing to march on Washington.

  After Hamilton’s infamous Adams pamphlet, his power over the Federalists had dwindled. His judgment was now suspect, his actions imputed to personal pique. The first ballot deadlock confirmed his sense of his own waning power. Robert Troup reported, “Hamilton is profoundly chagrined with this prospect! He has taken infinite pains to defeat Burr’s election but he believes in vain....Hamilton declared that his influence with the federal party was wholly gone, that he could no longer be useful.”28 Nonetheless, Hamilton was not one to give up easily. He had already told Gouverneur Morris that he could support Jefferson with a clear conscience if the latter provided “assurances on certain points: the maintenance of the present system, especially on the cardinal articles of public credit, a navy, neutrality. Make any discreet use you think fit of this letter.”29 Jefferson had seemed to resist any deal. In the early republic, secret agreements behind closed doors were regarded as distasteful relics of monarchical ways. Nevertheless, the outlines of Hamilton’s deal were to linger and ultimately prevail.

  It was a long, hard road to the final ballot at the Capitol. The first session, which droned on for twenty hours, did not adjourn until 9:00 the next morning. Refreshments were brought to parched members at their seats. Some dozed in overcoats or lay down on the floor. One sick legislator who had not been present at first was carried through the snow and set down on a cot in an adjoining room, ready to vote if necessary. For five grueling days, the legislators suffered through thirty-five ballots that continued to replicate the original eight-to-six vote for Jefferson. The tedious pace only fostered concerns that disappointed Federalists would stall the vote until after the March 4 inauguration date and then anoint their own candidate as president.

  Afterward, both Jefferson and Burr swore that they had chastely refrained from politicking during the thirty-five ballots. Recent scholarship has tended to exonerate Burr from charges that he did anything untoward, and he certainly did not bargain outright. In the weeks before the balloting, his romantic liaisons seemed to bulk far larger in his correspondence than the presidential contest. (His wife, Theodosia, had died of stomach cancer in 1794.) Besides his amorous intrigues, Burr was busy with parochial New York politics and preparing for the wedding of his only child, his beloved daughter, Theodosia. Nonetheless, Burr’s behavior was not as passive as it seemed, for his silence and inaction stated eloquently that he was willing to defy the intentions of Republican electors and accept the presidency. Joanne Freeman has written that Burr made “one fundamental mistake: he did nothing to hide his interest in the office.”30 Hamilton had little doubt that Burr was maneuvering for the presidency. “Hamilton has often said he could prove it to the satisfaction of any court and jury,” Robert Troup told Rufus King.31

  The situation was tailor-made for Jefferson, who specialized in subtle, roundabout action. He denied stoutly that he had compromised to break the deadlock and told James Monroe, “I have declared to [the Federalists] unequivocally that I would not receive the government on capitulation, that I would not go into it with my hands tied.”32 That Jefferson believed his own version is certain. He did not lie to others so much as to himself. John Quincy Adams later observed of Jefferson that he had “a memory so pandering to the will that in deceiving others he seems to have begun by deceiving himself.”33 He now stuck by the serviceable fiction that he had refused to negotiate with the Federalists.

  The man who helped to rescue the representatives from their misery was James A. Bayard, a Delaware Federalist. A thickset lawyer known for sartorial elegance, Bayard was under heavy Federalist pressure to vote for Burr and did so for thirty-five ballots. As the lone representative of a tiny state, he was in a unique position. If he changed his vote, Delaware changed its vote. For two months, Hamilton bombarded him with letters, spelling out Burr’s flaws and heretical positions. “I have heard him speak with applause of the French system as unshackling the mind and leaving it to its natural energies and I have been present when he has contended against banking systems with earnestness.” Burr lacked any fixed principles, Hamilton argued, and played instead on “the floating passions of the multitude.”34

  Though Bayard did not like the deadlocked vote, it was hard to resist the tide of Federalist support for Burr. When he suggested at one party caucus that he might vote for Jefferson to save the Constitution, he was hooted down with jeers of “Deserter!”35 But a
fter the caucus, Bayard huddled with two friends of Jefferson: John Nicholas of Virginia and Samuel Smith of Maryland. Quite possibly influenced by Hamilton’s barrage of letters, Bayard set forth some Federalist prerequisites for supporting Jefferson: he would have to preserve Hamilton’s financial system, maintain the navy, and retain Federalist bureaucrats below cabinet level. After talking to Jefferson, Smith relayed to Bayard the candidate’s opinion that the Federalists need not worry about the points mentioned. This smelled like a deal, and Bayard interpreted it as such, but Jefferson, ever the consummate politician, blandly called his chat with Smith a private tête-à-tête of no political consequence. Everybody involved kept up an air of perfect innocence. Timothy Pickering alleged that certain congressmen had “sold their votes to Mr. Jefferson and received their pay in appointment to public offices. Had Burr been at the seat of government and made similar promises of appointments to offices,” he would have been president instead of Jefferson.36

  Perhaps softened up by Hamilton’s diatribes, Bayard later claimed he had doubted Burr’s Federalist credentials all along. On the thirty-sixth round of voting in the House, he submitted a blank ballot and withdrew Delaware’s vote from the Burr column. Simultaneously, Federalist abstentions in Vermont and Maryland gave Jefferson ten votes and a clear-cut victory. Burr, cut loose by both parties, was left in a political limbo for the rest of his life. While his second-place finish earned him the vice presidency, it simultaneously earned him the enmity of President-elect Jefferson. Jefferson probably owed his victory to Hamilton as much as to any other politician. Hamilton’s pamphlet had first dealt a blow to Adams, though not a mortal one, and he had then intervened to squelch Burr’s chances for the presidency, paving the way for a Federalist deal with Jefferson.

  As the first incumbent president in American history defeated for reelection, John Adams had a chance to set a precedent and end his tenure with dignity. But during his final days in office, he brooded alone and grieved over the recent death of his alcoholic son, Charles, whom he had refused to see again. On March 4, 1801, the day of Jefferson’s inauguration, Adams—now a balding, toothless, cantankerous old man—climbed into a stagecoach at four o’clock in the morning and left for Massachusetts eight hours before Thomas Jefferson was sworn into office. He thus became the first of only three presidents in American history who chose to boycott their successors’ inaugurations. “The golden age is past,” mourned Abigail Adams. “God grant that it may not be succeeded by an age of terror.”37

  At ten o’clock that morning, Aaron Burr was sworn in as vice president in the Senate chamber and then retreated to the seat from which he would oversee the Senate for the next four years. Jefferson showed up around noon, accompanied by Adams’s cabinet. To radiate republican simplicity, the new president wore plain clothes and marched behind a modest militia detachment. Secure in his victory, Jefferson believed that he embodied the will of the American people and could afford to be magnanimous in his inaugural address. He struck a conciliatory note when he remarked in a soft, almost inaudible voice, “We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”38 As Joseph Ellis has noted, in his handwritten draft of the speech, Jefferson did not capitalize Republicans and Federalists, making the famous statement a little less generous than it seemed. Jefferson sounded quite a different note when he said in a private letter that he would “sink federalism into an abyss from which there shall be no resurrection.”39

  In New York, Hamilton monitored the inaugural speech for compliance with the tacit deal that Jefferson had made with the Federalists. He was pleased to see that Jefferson promised to honor the funding system, the national debt, and the Jay Treaty. Hamilton wrote, “We view it as virtually a candid retraction of past misapprehensions and a pledge to the community that the new President will not lend himself to dangerous innovations, but in essential points will tread in the steps of his predecessors.”40 This grandly bipartisan tone wouldn’t last for long.

  Hamilton had intuited rightly that Jefferson, once in office, would be reluctant to reject executive powers he had deplored in opposition. Madison was appointed secretary of state and Albert Gallatin secretary of the treasury. Gallatin had been a persistent critic of Hamilton, publishing a pamphlet during the campaign claiming that Hamilton had enlarged the public debt instead of shrinking it. But as treasury secretary, he discovered merits in Hamilton’s national bank, which he had lambasted as a congressman. Hamilton, meanwhile, began his long retreat to the status of a prophet without honor.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  A WORLD FULL OF FOLLY

  Once Jefferson became president, Hamilton, forty-six, began to fade from public view, an abrupt fall for a man whose rise had been so spectacular, so incandescent. If stripped of his former political standing, however, he

  remained at the pinnacle of the legal profession, exerting influence over a wide range of New York institutions. He drew up a will for a wealthy retired seaman, Robert Richard Randall, who wanted to set up a sanctuary for retired American merchant sailors. The resulting home on Staten Island was called Sailors’ Snug Harbor. Hamilton also tendered legal advice to the Church of St. Mark’s in the Bowery as it sought independent status within the Trinity Church parish.

  But no legal fame or fortune could offset the painful decline of his political stature. From the time of his first newspaper essays at King’s College, Hamilton had shown a steady knack for being near the center of power. He had gravitated to Washington’s wartime staff, the Confederation Congress, the Constitutional Convention, and the first government. Now he was exiled from the main political action, a great general with no army marching behind him.

  In his more despairing moments, Hamilton had long toyed with the fantasy of retiring to a tranquil rural life, especially as Philip Schuyler continued to badger him about his cerebral, sedentary labors. But something had held him back. Part of the problem was that Hamilton was a quintessentially urban man, who preferred to commune with books, not running brooks. The other founders—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams—had plantations or substantial farms from which they had drawn financial and spiritual sustenance, while Hamilton had remained a city dweller, harnessed to his work.

  This began to change in the late 1790s as Hamilton found increasing solace in his family. Away on a business trip, he chided Eliza mildly for not having written about their sick infant, Eliza: “It is absolutely necessary to me when absent to hear frequently of you and my dear children. While all other passions decline in me, those of love and friendship gain new strength. It will be more and more my endeavor to abstract myself from all pursuits which interfere with those of affection. ’Tis here only I can find true pleasure.”1

  To fulfill his pledge of spending more time with his family, Hamilton formed a “sweet project” to build a country house nine miles north of lower Manhattan.2 He told a friend laughingly, “A disappointed politician is very apt to take refuge in a garden.”3 During the fall of 1799, he and Eliza rented a country house along with the Churches in the vicinity of Harlem Heights. This decision probably owed something to the yellow-fever epidemics that visited the city each autumn. Hamilton knew the area well. On fishing expeditions up the Hudson, he sometimes moored his boat to a dock owned by pharmacist Jacob Schieffelin, who had a lovely summer house on a nearby hilltop. Hamilton was so enraptured by the exquisite vista from this house that he tried to buy it. Instead, in August 1800 Schieffelin sold him an adjoining fifteen-acre parcel with a two-hundred-foot elevation with views of the Hudson River on one side and the Harlem River and East River on the other. From physician Samuel Bradhurst, Hamilton bought an additional twenty acres. The combined property was picturesquely wooded and watered by two streams that converged in a duck pond. It had outlying buildings, including stables, barns, sheds, gardens, orchards, fences, and a chicken house. The property was bisected by Bloomingdale Road (today Hamilton Place), which provided a fast, direct connection by stagecoach
or carriage to Manhattan or Albany.

  Hamilton called his retreat the Grange, a name that paid homage to both the ancestral Hamilton manse in Scotland and the plantation of uncle James Lytton in St. Croix. It was to be the only surviving residence linked to Hamilton’s memory and the only one we know for certain that he owned. Its name suggested both pride in his Scottish ancestry and a more relaxed attitude toward his Caribbean origins. One day, Hamilton was riding up to Albany to visit Eliza’s ailing sister Peggy and had to choose between bringing her a pie or a basket of crabs. Upon reflection, he told Eliza, he had opted for crabs: “Perhaps as a Creole, I had some sympathy with them.”4 Twenty years before, Hamilton would never have hazarded such a flippant remark about his boyhood.

  The Hamiltons used the existing farmhouse as a temporary residence until they completed a new structure. For this home, Hamilton drafted a man whom he had once hired at Treasury to design lighthouses: John McComb, Jr., then the most prominent New York architect and soon to be in charge of constructing the new City Hall. The main contractor was Ezra Weeks, brother of Levi, whom Hamilton had defended in the Manhattan Well Tragedy case. From his sawmills at Saratoga, Philip Schuyler shipped planks and boards down the Hudson along with handcarved timber, still rough with bark, to decorate the children’s attic. He also sent enormous bushels of potatoes and wheels of cheese. Hamilton brimmed with so much nervous energy that he could not remain aloof from any project for long and collaborated with McComb on everything from the design of the tall chimneys to the Italian-marble fireplaces. Like all new homeowners, he had scouted other residences for ideas. On one journey to Connecticut, he told Eliza, “I remark as I go along everything that can be adopted for the embellishment of our little retreat, where I hope for a pure and unalloyed happiness with my excellent wife and sweet children.”5