The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

by Myron Magnet

  The only differences about his house were that it was bigger than most, with twelve spacious but cozy rooms (excluding hallways, cellar storerooms, and servants’ garrets); it had two little wings, for his study and a kitchen, with their own doors to the porch (or piazza, as the Jays called it); and it was built like a battleship. Along with simplicity, Jay wanted quality and spared no expense for the best materials. A religious friend who visited while he was enlarging the house remarked that “all his conduct seemed to have reference to perpetuity in this world and eternity in the next,” William recalls.167 In this spirit, while riding the circuit in 1792, Jay had sent his son Peter Augustus some mulberry seeds to plant. “My father planted many trees,” he wrote in the accompanying letter, “and I never walk in their shade without deriving additional pleasure from that circumstance; the time will come when you will probably experience similar emotions.”168

  All his furniture, still in the house, breathes the same republican gentleman’s solid simplicity: his unadorned, indestructible traveling barrister’s mahogany and glass-doored bookcases that unstack for transport, his mahogany Sheraton chest of drawers with its sober, subtle oval inlays, his rock-solid Sheraton four-poster, and especially those fine mahogany dining-room chairs James Fenimore Cooper sat in, with their slender vertical-slat backs fanned out just enough to be elegantly if severely stylish, their edges carved with just enough plain molding to show that a cabinetmaker, not a carpenter, made them—and so skillfully that, even though Jay’s descendants used them well past the middle of the twentieth century, not a joint is loose.

  Mementoes of his career are everywhere. In the hall hang engravings his former secretary John Trumbull gave him of two of his Revolutionary War paintings; in his study stand the cylinder-top desk he used as chief justice and three of the armchairs made for the original Senate chamber of New York’s Federal Hall and given to Jay as a souvenir when he retired.

  Not just a Founding Father but a family patriarch as well, he surrounded himself with portraits of his ancestors, his children, and his friends. The works and brass dial of his father’s grandfather clock, its case broken in a move, now tick in a replacement case Jay had made—plain and mahogany. He kept (and neatly labeled) the certificate, signed in 1686 by James II’s colonial governor of New York, Lord Limerick, that allowed his immigrant grandfather Augustus to live and work there. The four generations of descendants who lived in the house after Jay were equally reverent, carefully preserving their eminent forebear’s relics, and enlarging the building (with modern plumbing too) toward the back without erasing the original structure.

  Jay and his middle daughter, Ann, seventeen, moved into the house in the summer of 1801 to supervise the remodeling’s finishing touches. Sally, ailing after a slight stroke in December 1800, had been taking the waters at Lebanon Springs and Ballston Spa, New York, and staying with relatives to avoid the construction noise and dust. “Oh my dear Mr. Jay! The distance that separates us is too, too great,” she wrote from her sister Kitty’s house up the Hudson—as she had so often written before. When she traveled south to Jay’s childhood house at Rye, where his brother Peter lived, she wrote, “I have been rendered very happy by the company of our dear children but could we have been All together it would have heightened the satisfaction.”169 By December 2, 1801, she was in the new house, writing her newly married daughter Maria that, with the unusually mild weather, “Ann is at this moment in the garden planting peach-stones.”170 In May 1802 she wrote assuring Maria “that my health & appetite increases daily & that I really & truly feel very well indeed.”171

  That was the last letter Maria had from her mother: she died suddenly on May 28, aged forty-five, with her husband at her side. Jay led his children into the next room and read them from Corinthians: “Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”

  Jay wrote no letters for a long time. In January 1803, he wrote Rufus King, then U.S. envoy in London, of Sally’s “long and painful Illness, and (when she appeared to be fast recovering) her unexpected Death.” But he had a house and farm to finish and improve, an ill son, Peter Augustus, to care for and worry about (he recovered and became a successful New York lawyer), and Ann to look after (and look after him)—though Maria brought up her youngest sister, Sarah Louisa, and William went off to Yale. “My Expectations from Retirement have not been disappointed, and had Mrs. Jay continued with me, I should deem this the most agreeable part of my Life,” he told King. “Many Blessings yet remain and I enjoy them.”172

  He was up at dawn, in the saddle before breakfast on a horse whose grandam his father had given him in 1765 and whose mother he had then ridden. Outdoors most of the day, he supervised improvements, crops, and cider-, grist-, and saw-mills. He presided over morning and evening worship with his family and servants, and carefully annotated his prayer book with the appropriate prayers for specific days. He expanded his landholdings to about 750 acres and corresponded with British agricultural innovators on the latest advances in scientific farming. He rarely commented on politics or visited New York City, once letting eight years pass without a trip to town. “A stranger might have resided with him for months together, without discovering from his conversation that he had ever been employed in the service of his country,” writes William, who came to live with him in 1809, raised six children in the house at Bedford, and helped his father turn the farm into a profitable dairy operation, while also founding the American Bible Society and becoming a prominent abolitionist.173

  “The burden of time I have not experienced,” Jay wrote, adding that he enjoyed “frequent conversations with the ‘mighty dead,’ who, in a certain sense, live in their works.”174 Christian stoic that he was, he most often turned to the Bible and to Cicero, that beguiling conversationalist who loved virtue, revered private property, hated tyranny and taxation, and brought Greek stoic philosophy to Rome and to posterity. Like his fellow lawyer-statesman Jay, he understood that in a world of adversity, injustice, and suffering, where one must often “choose the least among evils,” one must live according to “the moral law which nature itself has ordained” and which philosophers have painstakingly (if inconsistently) elucidated, in order to better the human community and to feel whole and decent in one’s “own soul, which is the most godlike thing that God has given to man.”175 Along with that bracing doctrine, Jay also had his belief in the afterlife. Two years after Sally’s death, that Christian stoicism illuminates his condolence letter on the death of his friend Alexander Hamilton to Hamilton’s father-in-law, Jay’s old and dear friend, Philip Schuyler: “The philosophic topics of consolation are familiar to you,” he wrote, “and we all know from experience how little relief is to be derived from them. May the Author and only Giver of consolation be and remain with you.”176

  As his twenty-eight years of temperate and contented retirement neared their halfway mark, his worldview had grown, if anything, more wry. His health was better than a year ago, he wrote a friend, “so that at present, there is some Prospect of my living to see further Proofs of the Perfectibility of human nature by modern Philosophers, and of the increased Illumination of this Age of Reason.”177 On May 17, 1829, at the age of eighty-three, he died, as perfect in virtue as human imperfection allows.

  7

  Alexander Hamilton and the American Dream

  IN STARK CONTRAST TO WASHINGTON, Jefferson, or the Lees, descendants of seventeenth-century Virginians—or to Harvard-educated John Adams, whose forebears settled in Massachusetts Bay in 1638—Alexander Hamilton resembled those tempest-tost millions who sailed beneath the Statue of Liberty’s welcoming beacon in the three decades before World War I, fulfilling George Washington’s prediction that “the poor, the needy, & oppressed of the Earth” would find America “the second Land of promise.”1 A poor immigrant from the West Indies,
Hamilton, like them, had come to New York seeking his fortune.

  Nor was he just poor. “My birth,” as he delicately put it, “is the subject of the most humiliating criticism”—for he was, in Adams’s acidulous taunt, “the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar.”2 But rich in the ambition and enterprise that could thrive in the American opportunity society he so passionately championed, he rose to be one of the country’s most powerful and celebrated men, and he multiplied and strengthened the means for countless others to follow his footsteps up the ladder of success.

  It’s hard to exaggerate the squalor and dysfunction surrounding the future Treasury secretary’s Caribbean childhood. When his mother, “a handsome young woman having a snug fortune,” was only sixteen, Hamilton wrote, a Danish “fortune-hunter . . . bedizzened with gold,” dazzled her widowed mother by his “glitter” and persuaded her to let him marry the unwilling teenager.3 After five unhappy years on the Danish island of Saint Croix, the young wife abandoned her husband and their baby boy. The outraged Dane had her jailed, as Saint Croix law allowed, for “whoring with everyone,” he charged. But though he expected her to return to him chastened and meek, she fled upon her release, settling on her native Nevis with James Hamilton, a seedy but still dashing younger son of a Scottish laird. On that tiny British island—where her father, a Huguenot doctor had found refuge from religious persecution in the late seventeeth century—she and James Hamilton lived as man and wife, and she bore two more sons, James Jr., and, on January 11, 1755, Alexander. Though her Danish husband finally got a divorce from her in 1759, its terms forbade her remarriage.4

  The black sheep of a well-off family, James Hamilton had come to the sugar isles in search of riches like so many threadbare adventurers, but he had “too much pride and too large a portion of indolence,” Hamilton recalled much later, so his “affairs at a very early day went to wreck” and he sank into the crowd of failures and lowlifes who overran the West Indies.5 When Hamilton was ten, James decamped, drifting until he washed up, old and dying, near the southern Caribbean speck where Defoe shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe.6

  Hamilton’s intelligent and enterprising mother went back to Saint Croix and opened a general store. But when Hamilton was twelve, one of the tropical fevers that ravaged European fortune seekers in the islands felled her, and a sea of troubles engulfed the two Hamilton boys. The cousin who took them in killed himself two years later, leaving the boys destitute; their mother’s little estate—nine slaves, chiefly—had gone to her one legitimate son, who had swooped down to snatch it away from her two “obscene children.” All Hamilton had left were her thirty-four books, including the Plutarch and Pope that had been his beloved childhood companions, which his cousin had kindly bought for him in the auction of her household effects.7

  Then, like Mr. Brownlow rescuing Oliver Twist, fairy-tale magic struck. A rich Saint Croix merchant, Thomas Stevens, took Hamilton into his orderly, sheltering household, where he became lifelong friends with Stevens’s son Ned, a year older and remarkably similar in tastes and talents. And why did Stevens take in Alexander but leave his brother James Jr. to become a carpenter’s apprentice? Years later, when Secretary of State Timothy Pickering first met Ned Stevens, he was flabbergasted by his “extraordinary similitude” to Hamilton. “I thought they must be brothers,” Pickering wrote—an observation that one of Ned’s relatives later told him “had been made a thousand times.” So was Hamilton doubly illegitimate? Pickering thought so; perhaps someday the DNA sleuths will say for sure.8

  SOME MONTHS before the Stevenses took him in, Hamilton, without realizing it, had already attached himself to the great world beyond his little island. Though remote, Saint Croix was integral to the eighteenth-century British Empire’s economic dynamo, the triangle trade, which (to oversimplify) brought slaves from Africa to work the sugar estates of Britain’s and Europe’s West Indian colonies, carried the sugar and molasses to colonial New England to make into rum, and returned to Africa to trade rum for more slaves, generally with a stop in England to sell sugar and rum for manufactures. At thirteen, Hamilton had begun clerking for the island outpost of Beekman and Cruger, a New York trading firm owned by two of the city’s great Dutch mercantile families, key players in that business for generations.9 As he took his modest place in world commerce, he also launched himself onto a tributary that flowed into the heart of New York’s mainstream.

  His stint at Beekman and Cruger, he later told his son John, was “the most useful part of his education,” teaching him the facts of global economic life, from commodity prices, cash flow, and exchange rates to bill collecting and smuggling.10 When his boss, Nicholas Cruger, fell ill and went home to New York (where his uncle was mayor), he left his luminously gifted sixteen-year-old clerk in charge. The adolescent took to management with gusto: his vivid letter to young Cruger about how he fattened up a cargo of starving mules from the firm’s sloop Thunderbolt is a marvel of self-confident energy.11

  On his countinghouse stool, Hamilton dreamt big. At fourteen, he wrote to Ned Stevens, in his earliest surviving letter, “my Ambition is prevalent that I contemn the grov’ling and condition of a Clerk or the like, to which my Fortune &c. condemns me and would willingly risk my life tho’ not my Character to exalt my Station. . . . I mean to prepare the way for futurity. . . . [I] may be jusly said to Build Castles in the Air . . . , yet Neddy we have seen such Schemes successful when the Projector is Constant I shall Conclude saying I wish there was a War.”12

  But the upheaval that first exalted Hamilton’s station wasn’t a war; it was a hurricane that ripped through Saint Croix in August 1772. When Hamilton’s muscular account of the storm’s ferocity, its aftermath of death and desolation, and his own fears and religious hopes appeared in the local newspaper, its brio amazed readers, some of whom, led by Hamilton’s employers and a kindly clergyman, raised funds to send the teenaged prodigy off to college in North America.13 When Princeton declined to let him plow through its BA requirements as fast as he could rather than take the usual three years, the young-man-in-a-hurry enrolled instead at King’s College (later Columbia) in late 1773 or early 1774 and became a Manhattanite.14

  AMERICAN CULTURE embraces a host of microcultures—local traditions and ways of seeing the world that spring from some particular history and make different groups express their common Americanism in their own distinctive accents. The egalitarian Quaker culture of Philadelphia, to take sociologist Digby Baltzell’s example, nurtured many fewer strivers who made it into the Dictionary of American Biography than Boston’s more individualist Puritanism. Similarly, historian David Hackett Fischer has shown how the “folkways” of colonists from four different British regions, with their own variants of Protestantism, subtly molded the cultures of the sections of America they settled, so that their inhabitants ended up with differently inflected understandings even of so basic an idea as liberty.15

  The New York that welcomed Alexander Hamilton had its own distinctive culture, too, whose uniqueness went far deeper than John Adams’s description of a town where “they talk very fast, very loud, and all together.”16 Its Dutch past, from Peter Minuit’s 1626 purchase of Manhattan to Peter Stuyvesant’s forced handover of the flourishing New Netherland colony to the British in 1664, left an indelible legacy. After decades of brutal religious war, the Dutch Republic had embraced tolerance with fervor and transplanted to its trading post on the Hudson its constitutional promise that “each person shall remain free, especially in his religion, and no one shall be persecuted or investigated because of his religion.” So, for example, when Governor-General Stuyvesant wanted to limit the rights of twenty-three Jews who sought asylum in New Amsterdam in 1654, they petitioned the Dutch authorities, who commanded Stuyvesant to treat them with Dutch tolerance, reminding him also that Jews were big investors in the West India Company. And then—as if Jews weren’t bad enough—Quakers appeared in the Long Island village of Vlissingen, whose mostly English residents called it Flushing. When Stuyvesant forba
de the villagers from taking in the Quakers, they disobeyed, citing in their 1657 Flushing Remonstrance, one of the foundation documents of American religious liberty, the Dutch principle that “love peace and libertie” must extend even to “Jewes Turkes and Egiptians” and reminding the governor-general of their charter, which granted the right “to have and Enjoy the Liberty of Conscience, according to the Custome and manner of Holland.”17

  And so New Amsterdam became a melting pot like no other place in North America, with settlers arriving from all over the globe and not only living side by side but also marrying each other. A quarter of the couples married in the town’s Dutch Reformed Church were of different ancestries, with Germans marrying Danes, Italians Dutchmen, a man from “Calis in Vranckryck” wedding a girl from “Batavia in the East Indies.”18

  The tolerance, which also welcomed sectarian refugees from Massachusetts’ intolerant Puritanism, was a matter of policy as well as principle: the business of New Amsterdam was business, and the authorities wanted to recruit traders of any stripe. The town was quick to make newcomers full citizens. Whereas only 20 percent of that era’s New Englanders were freemen, New Amsterdam, in addition to the “great burgher” status it conferred on substantial taxpayers like the first Beekmans, also gave out “small burgher” status to almost anyone who asked. In the benign glow of such equal-opportunity inclusiveness, commerce boomed: Manhattan became a key shipping center even for Virginia tobacco.19