by Myron Magnet
With its “frank acceptance of differences and a belief that individual achievement matters more than birthright,” concludes Russell Shorto in The Island at the Center of the World, his dazzling history of Dutch New York, “this island city would become the first multiethnic, upwardly mobile society on America’s shores, a prototype of the kind of society that would be duplicated throughout the country.” It produced prototypical New Yorkers, too, says Shorto, “worldly, brash, confident, hustling.” When the British took over, they promised to preserve the regime of tolerance and free trade (and did so for a century). “The Dutch here shall enjoy the liberty of their consciences,” they proclaimed. “Dutch vessels may freely come hither.”20 Why meddle with success?
INTO THE THEATER of opportunity that had developed from such beginnings—the town where, in Gouverneur Morris’s words, “to be born in America seems to be a matter of indifference”—stepped the upwardly mobile young immigrant of dubious parentage and prodigious talent, just at the moment of the Boston Tea Party.21 Within months of entering King’s College, overlooking the Hudson and adjoining the port city’s busy red-light district, the nineteen-year-old threw himself into revolutionary politics. At a mass rally against England’s punitive Coercive Acts, he made himself famous with an impassioned impromptu speech, calling for a boycott of British goods in defense of American liberties, that electrified the crowd. He followed up with two pamphlets prophetic in their assumption that war would come, that the colonists (with the aid of France and Spain) would win with a guerrilla insurgency, and that they would outstrip Britain in population and wealth.22 Again and again in his career, Hamilton showed such premonitory insight: he saw complex things at a glance, saw them whole, and saw their consequences. And he had no patience with those who couldn’t keep up with his brilliance.23
The moment that news of Concord and Lexington reached New York, Hamilton, with his own brand of student activism, joined the militia and then, early in 1776, the Continental Army. In the dismal retreat from New York—which the British occupied for the next seven years—and in the famous victories at Trenton and Princeton, the twenty-one-year-old artillery captain earned the nickname “the little lion” for his cool determination and unflappable courage under fire. An excellent commander and superb organizer, he won the admiration of a quartet of generals, including Washington, who invited him to join his staff as an aide-de-camp and lieutenant colonel in March 1777, aged twenty-two.24 So the war he had wished for back in Saint Croix had come and had indeed exalted his station. As he said much later, revolutions, for all their horrors, “serve to bring to light, talents and virtues, which might otherwise have languished in obscurity, or only shot forth a few scattered and wandering rays.”25
His connection with Washington turned out to be the greatest opportunity in Hamilton’s life. Almost everything he achieved, he achieved as the commander in chief’s right-hand man. As Hamilton said at his patron’s death, “I have been much indebted to the kindness of the General; and he was an Aegis very essential to me.”26 They were each other’s completing counterparts; neither would have achieved such greatness alone. “As a team, they were unbeatable and far more than the sum of their parts,” says Hamilton’s splendid biographer Ron Chernow.27
In the war, Hamilton quickly became, wrote Washington to Adams, his “principal and most confidential aide, . . . enterprising, quick in his perceptions,” with “judgment intuitively great” and ambition “of that laudable kind which prompts a man to excel in whatever he takes in hand.”28 The aide worked out strategy with his commander, dealt with his subordinate generals, wrote letters exactly expressing Washington’s intention from only the vaguest hint. “During the whole time that he was one of the General’s aides-de-camp,” recalled Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, “Hamilton had to think as well as write for him in all his most important correspondence.”29
It was more than a professional relationship. Following conventional eighteenth-century usage, Washington called his staff of aides his “family,” and, convention aside, that word catches the emotional tone. Certainly the general’s closest aides-de-camp—Hamilton, the Marquis de Lafayette, and John Laurens—became a band of brothers, reminiscent, Hamilton’s son said, of the Three Musketeers.30 “All the family send their love,” Hamilton wrote to Laurens in April 1779. “In this join the General & Mrs. Washington & what is best, tis not in the stile of ceremony but sincerity.”31 Increasingly secure in Washington’s affection, he closed a letter to Laurens ten months later, “All the Lads embrace you. The General sends his love.”32 The orphaned and abandoned Hamilton acquired the greatest father figure of them all; and of no less emotional importance, the childless Father of his Country gained a surrogate son, whom he often called “my boy.” And indeed the rumor later went round, sparked by Hamilton’s enemies, that the slight, fine-boned West Indian with the gently pensive face was the strapping general’s illegitimate offspring.33
Wherever there’s a father figure and a son, the Viennese doctor would say, there’s tension. In this case at least, there came to be. After four years with Washington, Hamilton had risen far above his “grov’ling” condition, but he remained a sort of “Clerk” and began to feel stifled in a job “having in it a kind of personal dependance,” as he put it. He nursed dreams of further, personal, glory and chafed when Washington vetoed his requests for his own command. He came to feel his patron’s affection a burden—a demand not just for affection in return but also for self-suppression. For his part, Washington surely felt stung not only by Hamilton’s eagerness to move on but also by his brilliant protégé’s return of increasingly stiff reserve to his own warmth, the aide’s correct “Your Excellency” to the General’s “my boy.” “The pride of my temper would not suffer me to profess what I did not feel,” wrote Hamilton at the time. “Indeed when advances of this kind have been made to me on his part, they were received in a manner that showed at least I had no inclination to court them, and that I wished to stand rather on a footing of military confidence than of private attachment.”34
The inevitable explosion came, as usually happens, over a trifle. The two passed each other on the stairs, Washington told Hamilton he wanted to speak to him, and Hamilton said he’d be right back and went to finish his errand, returning, “I sincerely believe,” in less than two minutes. He found Washington in a rage. “Col Hamilton (said he), you have kept me waiting at the head of the stairs these ten minutes. I must tell you Sir you treat me with disrespect.” How much suppressed heartache that last sentence contains! “I am not conscious of it Sir,” replied Hamilton, “but since you have thought it necessary to tell me so we part.” “Very well Sir (said he) if it be your choice.” And though the General almost immediately tried to “heal a difference which could not have happened but in a moment of passion,” Hamilton, his pent-up, proud resentment unappeasable, quit the staff.35
In July 1781, Washington finally gave him the command he craved, and it brought him all the glory he wished. When American and French armies had bottled up British general Lord Cornwallis on the Yorktown peninsula, with a French fleet blocking him offshore, Washington and the French general, Comte de Rochambeau, needed to sweep away two British redoubts to squeeze their siege tighter. Washington ordered Hamilton’s New York light infantry to clear one and a French brigade the other. Hamilton did it with panache, jumping gallantly onto the redoubt’s parapet at the head of his troops, who bayoneted the enemy into quick submission; his French counterpart did it with less grace and more blood. But the two victories checkmated Cornwallis, who surrendered five days later, on October 19, 1781, ending the last great battle of the long war—though it was two more years before the British finally left New York City.
WHILE SOLDIERS starved and froze throughout the war, Hamilton, at Washington’s right hand, bitterly watched how Congress’s shortcomings worsened their sufferings with fecklessness and corruption that turned scarcity into famine. He mused over how to fix what was broken, and read widel
y, filling the blank pages of his old artillery-company paybook with facts and quotations from Bacon, Cicero, Hobbes, Hume, Montaigne, and Plutarch, along with Postlethwayt’s Trade and Commerce.36 By 1780, still Washington’s aide-de-camp, he had concluded, earlier than most, that the United States needed a constitutional convention to form an entirely new governmental structure. That year, in a prophetic letter to Congressman James Duane, with his characteristically brilliant grasp of a complex whole in all its details, he sketched out that new government: energetic, strongly centralized, with power to raise an army and build a navy, assess taxes and contract foreign loans to support these forces, declare war and peace, regulate trade, coin money, and establish banks.37
Having played his heroic part in the battle that won the war, he returned to civilian life aiming to help create that new order. Late in 1780, he had married Elizabeth Schuyler, the levelheaded, endlessly kind daughter of General (later Senator) Philip Schuyler, head of a great patroon family, owner of tens of thousands of upstate acres, and a proud friend and powerful ally of his son-in-law ever after. The young couple moved into the Schuyler mansion in Albany, the gabled town founded by Stuyvesant, where Eliza listened to sermons in Dutch, still spoken in the Hudson Valley until well into the nineteenth century.38 There Hamilton taught himself law by ravening through his friend Duane’s legal library, learning in six months what usually took three years and writing a study guide for himself that, passed around in manuscript copies, served other law students as a textbook for the next decade. In October 1782, three months after passing the bar, he also became the equivalent of a British barrister.39
When the British finally left New York City, leaving behind a half-burnt-out town stinking of sewage, Hamilton moved back with Eliza and brand-new baby Philip to a rented house at 57 Wall Street and became one of the city fathers who rebuilt Gotham. He joined the board of the now renamed Columbia College, helped create the New York Board of Regents, and founded the Bank of New York—all within the first year or so of his return. He also became one of the greatest lawyers of them all—up there with Daniel Webster, one judge later averred.40
ALL THE WHILE, the project of recasting the national government ripened in his mind. While still cramming for the bar in 1782, he won election to Congress, headed two of its key committees six months later, and grew even more fervent for reform from his firsthand congressional experience. In 1786, he sought a New York legislature seat, which he planned to use, he told a friend, “as a stepping stone to a general convention to form a general constitution.” His maneuvering in the months after he won it made him, says Catherine Drinker Bowen, arguably “the most potent single influence toward calling the Convention of ’87.”41
At the Convention, besides ensuring that immigrants like himself had full, New York–style opportunity to serve in Congress, he made only one other contribution: a six-hour speech outlining his ideal government, very “dissimilar,” he conceded “with the greatest diffidence,” from the two plans already under consideration. He proposed a highly democratic Assembly elected directly by the people every three years, counterbalanced by a president and senate to serve for life (unless impeached for misbehavior), chosen by electors picked by men of property.42 No believer in what we now call federalism, he foresaw that the “general power” of this new central government “must swallow up the State powers. Otherwise it will be swallowed up by them.”43
His purpose was threefold. He wanted to combine, as he’d suggested in his letter to Duane, the advantages of a monarchy’s energetic executive with republican liberty—to unite, as he thought the British constitution did so well, “public strength with individual security.” In the second place, he aimed to ensure real checks and balances between the rich and powerful and the rest. “Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few,” he explained, according to Madison’s Convention notes. “Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many.”44 His was a scheme that would ensure true equilibrium among monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, like the British constitution’s system of king, lords, and commons checking and balancing one another’s power to prevent a slide into tyranny, oligarchy, or anarchy. Flying in the face of this long-standing British constitutional theory—which fellow Founders John Adams, John Dickinson, and Richard Henry Lee also held—the other schemes proposed at the Convention, he argued, envisioned merely having “democracy, checked by democracy, or pork still, with a little change of the sauce,” as New York delegate Robert Yates recorded in his notes.45
His third purpose—and this was the goal of the equilibrium he sought—was “to go as far in order to achieve stability and permanency, as republican principles will admit.” While “the demagogue or middling politician, who, for the sake of a small stipend and the hopes of advancement, will offer himself as a candidate” for the Assembly, and will sway with every wayward puff of “the amazing violence & turbulence of the democratic spirit,” he wanted senators to be more like British lords, who have “nothing to hope for by a change, and . . . form a permanent barrier agst. every pernicious innovation.” His president-for-life idea had the same object of keeping officials “faithful to the national interest,” a view Patrick Henry shared: without the need to run for re-election, Hamilton argued, such an executive “is placed above temptation. He can have no distinct interests from the public welfare.”46 Of course, he foresaw, “It will be objected probably that such an Executive will be an elective Monarch.” Not so, he countered: “by making the executive subject to impeachment, the term monarchy cannot apply.”47
Behind these ideas lay his deepest worry: that direct democracy could decline into mindless mob rule. He had seen that happen after Concord and Lexington, when a Patriot mob had stormed King’s College president Myles Cooper’s house, aiming to tar and feather him for his rigid Toryism. The twenty-year-old Hamilton boldly harangued the drunken, anarchic crowd about how they were about to “disgrace and injure the glorious cause of liberty”—just long enough to let their target flee out the back door and take ship for England. So, too, in November did Hamilton try, unsuccessfully, to defend Tory newspaper publisher James Rivington when Patriots destroyed his print shop.48
“The same state of the passions which fits the multitude, who have not a sufficient stock of reason and knowlege to guide them, for opposition to tyranny and oppression, very naturally leads them to a contempt and disregard of all authority,” Hamilton wrote John Jay after the Rivington incident. “When the minds of these are loosened from their attachment to ancient establishments and courses, they seem to grow giddy and are apt more or less to run into anarchy. . . . In such tempestuous times, it requires the greatest skill in the political pilots to keep men steady and within proper bounds, on which account I am always more or less alarmed at every thing which is done of mere will and pleasure, without any proper authority.”49
But it’s not just the multitude who have a small stock of reason. At the heart of Hamilton’s political vision lay the belief that men in general are reasoning rather than reasonable animals. “Has it not . . . invariably been found, that momentary passions and immediate interests have a more active and imperious controul over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility or justice?” he asked—a vision as different from Jefferson’s Enlightenment rationalism as Edmund Burke’s was.50 “Why has government been instituted at all?” he asked. “Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.”51
So while the Constitution that finally emerged from the Convention couldn’t bring about “the deceitful dream of a golden age,” which no earthly government can accomplish, Hamilton noted, it was unquestionably a practical framework for ensuring liberty while keeping men steady and within proper bounds.52 Drawing from all the advances of “the science of politics,” it provided for the “regular distribution of power into distinct departments—the introduction of legislative balances and checks—the institution of courts composed of j
udges, holding their offices during good behaviour—the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own election. . . . These are . . . powerful means by which the excellencies of republican government may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided”—exactly what he was seeking in his marathon Convention speech.53
THIS WAS A CONSTITUTION that Hamilton thought worth fighting for, offering everything he had called for in his 1780 letter to Duane. With his then-friend James Madison and John Jay (whom injury soon sidelined), he began history’s noblest propaganda campaign ever in favor of the Constitution’s ratification—the Federalist Papers, eighty-five newspaper columns, some fifty of which Hamilton wrote, sometimes two, occasionally five or even six, a week. The first, which Hamilton penned on board a passenger sloop from New York to Albany, appeared on October 27, 1787, and stressed how high the stakes in the debate were: “whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions, on accident and force.”54
Americans learned from their “unequivocal experience . . . in the course of the revolution” that their existing governmental structure didn’t work, Hamilton argued. They knew even then that they had to make some basic change. Now the trade disputes raging between different states showed yet another defect in the old structure: it might prove too weak to hold the union together in the future.55 America could end up, like the European countries, divided into several warring confederacies, each too weak to defend itself against the depredations of the European powers.56 By now all citizens should all have learned “that the vigour of government is essential to the security of liberty.”57
