The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817
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The ferocity of this clash of views, which marked the birth of our two-party system, startles us today. Did Republicans and Federalists really mean it when they cursed each other as “monarchists” and “anarchists”? Yes—for their experiment in government, still brand-new, seemed fragile to them: Benjamin Franklin’s famous answer to Elizabeth Powel’s question of what kind of government the Constitutional Convention had produced was, “A republic—if you can keep it.”97 As Hamilton put it in 1800, in terms that echoed Burke and Washington: “A new government, constructed on free principles, is always weak, and must stand in need of the props of a firm and good administration; till time shall have rendered its authority venerable, and fortified it by habits of obedience.”98 Along with the sectional conflict, the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians each saw the other as perverters of Franklin’s trust.
And they said so pseudonymously in their party newspapers, the Republicans with sour scurrility. Hamilton, wrote New York governor George Clinton or one of his henchmen, was “Tom S***,” a “mustee” (the origin of the false belief that Hamilton had African blood).99 Hamilton’s “antirepublican” followers, wrote Madison in Philip Freneau’s no-holds-barred National Gazette, are “more partial to the opulent than to the other classes of society; and having debauched themselves into a persuasion that mankind are incapable of governing themselves,” they believe “that government can be carried on only by the pagentry of rank, the influence of money, . . . and the terror of military force.” They wish that “the government itself may by degrees be narrowed into fewer hands, and approximated to an hereditary form.”100 Hamilton, writing in John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States, mildly asked if readers thought it right for Jefferson to use government funds to employ Freneau to attack a government in which he himself was secretary of state—and if they really agreed with Jefferson’s denunciations of Hamiltonian policies. “If to National Union, national respectability[,] Public Order[,] and public Credit they are willing to substitute National disunion, National insignificance, Public disorder and discredit—then let them unite their acclamations and plaudits in favour of Mr. Jefferson.”101
Jefferson recalled that he and Hamilton were “daily pitted in the cabinet like two cocks,” and in a now-familiar tactic, the Republicans tried to wear down Hamilton with two congressional inquests, requiring written reports and days of testimony on his personal as well as official financial dealings.102 In truth, the two cabinet members wore each other down. Jefferson left as secretary of state at the end of 1793, Hamilton resigned as Treasury secretary just over a year later, and Washington decided that two terms were enough and returned to Mount Vernon in 1797.
ONE OF THE silliest things ever said about a land settled by immigrants seeking a new start across the sea is that there are no second acts in American lives. America, especially Hamiltonian opportunity America, is all about second chances—and third and fourth ones. But Hamilton himself had done almost everything he could to make his own political comeback very difficult.
Surely any Treasury secretary ought to know that, were a pretty twenty-three-year-old to turn up at his door saying that her husband had left her and asking for money, he should not offer to bring her some cash at her house later that evening, and he should not start an affair within moments of his arrival.103 But Hamilton was a sucker for pretty young women in distress (perhaps hoping to rescue someone like his mother). He’d been at West Point when Benedict Arnold’s treachery came to light, for example, and he completely fell for artful coconspirator Peggy Arnold’s charade of innocence as she tearfully received him, Washington, and Lafayette, in bed, all heaving bosom out of a cheap romance. “Her sufferings were so eloquent,” Hamilton wrote his fiancée, “that I wished myself her brother, to have a right to become her defender.”104 And at the height of his power, as he was guiding his bank bill through Congress in the summer of 1791, he fell just as easily for Maria Reynolds, who with her husband seems to have made a career of shaking down prominent men.
At first, the husband, who soon claimed to have reconciled with Maria, just “happened” to ask Hamilton for a Treasury job, without success. A wary Hamilton thought he’d better break off the affair, but Maria’s “appearances of violent attachment, and of agonizing distress at the idea of relinquishment” played on his “sensibility, perhaps my vanity,” so he planned “a gradual discontinuance . . . as least calculated to give pain, in case a real partiality existed”—meaning he couldn’t keep away from her.105 “Do something to Ease My heart Or Els I no not what I shall do for so I cannot live,” she wrote, in one of a series of such letters. “The variety of shapes which this woman could assume was endless,” Hamilton exclaimed with a half-admiring exasperation.106
Just before Christmas, the husband pretended to “discover” the goings-on and extorted $1,000 in blackmail “as the plaister of his wounded honor,” as Hamilton put it. A month later, Reynolds wrote Hamilton, “inviting me to renew my visits to his wife,” which Hamilton did, allowing Reynolds systematically to “levy contributions upon my passions on the one hand, and upon my apprehensions of discovery on the other.” With studied professionalism, Reynolds made sure that a witness, another lowlife named Clingman (who later himself lived with Maria), saw Hamilton several times as he came to his house to visit Maria—as he did, all told, for nearly a year.107 Having risen so high, Hamilton was back among the grifters he thought he’d left behind.
OF COURSE no amount of money would stop such blackmailers from using the power they had over him, and they passed it on to his enemies. When Reynolds and Clingman landed in jail as swindlers (on a different matter), Clingman, appealing to his ex-boss, Congressman Frederick Muhlenberg, for help, claimed he could “hang” Hamilton for conspiring in financial hanky-panky at the Treasury with Reynolds, showing notes from Hamilton to Maria as evidence. Duty bound to investigate, Muhlenberg, together with another congressman and Senator James Monroe, called upon Hamilton in December 1792 to ask. Yes, said Hamilton, he had had dealings with Reynolds—but not “for purposes of improper pecuniary speculations,” but rather because of Reynolds’s “design to extort money from me” for “an amorous connection with his wife.” Hamilton showed the three embarrassed legislators a sheaf of documents that amply persuaded them, and they declared themselves satisfied and sorry to have troubled him.108
But the matter didn’t end there. In the summer of 1797, a Republican journalistic hit man named James Callender revived the corruption charges against Hamilton and revealed the sex scandal, which he’d learned from Monroe.109 (In Jefferson’s pay like Freneau, Callender later turned on the sage of Monticello and revealed the then-president’s long affair with his slave Sally Hemings.) The official-misconduct charge ignited Hamilton’s fury. Scrupulously incorruptible and indifferent to riches, he had retired as Treasury secretary poor: the notoriously corruptible and rich French diplomat, the Prince de Talleyrand, who had become Hamilton’s friend when he took shelter in America from the Terror, reported with amazement, after glimpsing Hamilton through the candlelit window of his New York law office, “I have seen a man who made the fortunes of a nation laboring all night to support his family.”110
With remarkably poor judgment—Washington seems to have supplied all of the political prudence in their long partnership—Hamilton churned out a luridly explicit pamphlet, which I have been quoting, denying financial corruption and explaining his dealings with Reynolds by baring his affair with Maria. Had he kept silent, the gutter-press rumormongering would have died away. But now his enemies roasted him. Hamilton’s “whole proof in this pamphlet rests upon an illusion,” cackled Callender. “ ‘I am a rake and for that reason I cannot be a swindler. I have not broken the eighth commandment. . . . It is only the seventh which I have violated.’ ” Hamilton’s friends kept an embarrassed silence.111
But there was a worse pamphlet to come. Late in the 1800 presidential campaign three years later, he wrote the Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct
and Character of John Adams, Esq. President of the United States, which Adams believed cost him reelection. He already believed that Hamilton’s support of a rival Federalist had pared his 1796 presidential victory to a razor-thin margin, and he resentfully spurned his advice once in office. Hamilton nevertheless gave sub-rosa counsel to cabinet members, and Adams, suspecting “a mischievous plot against his independence,” summarily fired two of them. The two clashed repeatedly over policy, and Adams believed that Hamilton was working against his reelection, when the reverse was true.112
All this dirty linen Hamilton aired in his pamphlet, going on to argue that Adams had “great and intrinsic defects in his character, which unfit him for the office of Chief Magistrate,” including “a vanity without bounds, and a jealousy capable of discoloring every object.” His “ungovernable temper” makes him “liable to paroxisms of anger, which deprive him of self-command” (to the point, Jefferson recalled, of his “dashing and trampling his wig on the floor”). Nevertheless, he’s a Federalist, Hamilton concluded, and “I have finally resolved not to advise the withholding from him of a single vote.”113 Adams went down in defeat, the Federalist Party split in two and slowly died, Hamilton entered the political wilderness, and the southern Republicans he so despised—Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—reigned for the next quarter century.114
SOME THINK that Hamilton went into his duel with Aaron Burr five years later out of suicidal despair over the wreck of his political career. That wasn’t the case. He had built a beautiful yellow villa at the very top of Manhattan’s Harlem Heights in 1802—the only house he ever owned—and was happy to work on his highly successful law practice in his little book-lined study there, to take his gun around his thirty-five acres of woods looking for game birds, to tend the garden laid out by his friend Dr. David Hosack (whose own famous medicinal garden grew where Rockefeller Center now stands), to read to his seven children, and to gaze out his floor-to-ceiling bow windows at the magnificent rural views, eastward to Long Island Sound from his long dining room, and westward across the Hudson from the adjoining drawing room. “A disappointed politician is very apt to take refuge in a garden,” he explained.115
But he wasn’t even done with politics. Late in 1801, he and nine partners founded the New-York Evening Post—still operating today as the morning New York Post—and its editor recalled often visiting Hamilton late in the evening to get help judging some important political development. “As soon as I see him, he begins in a deliberate manner to dictate and I to note down in shorthand,” William Coleman recounted. “When he stops, my article is completed.”116 And when Vice President Aaron Burr, knowing that Jefferson would drop him from the ticket in the 1804 election, decided to run for governor of New York instead, Hamilton roused all his political skill and passion to stop him. Hamilton had met the handsome, dapper, well-born roué when Burr momentarily served on Washington’s wartime staff; their legal careers had intertwined ever since they both joined the bar.117 Hamilton thought Burr a cynical opportunist with “no principle, public or private,” who had never produced “a single measure of public utility” in political life, and who should not be governor of his home state. “If we have an embryo-Caesar in the United States,” he thought, “ ’tis Burr.”118
WHAT ACTUALLY led him to the duel was a tragic choice he had made just after the Post was born. He was a man torn between two irreconcilable ideals. Having come into the world with a congenital disgrace, he was self-made even in the matter of honor, thinking his own so precarious that he was quick to take offense at any slight, large or small. He castigated Adams, for example, for not asserting “the national dignity” after “the mortifying humiliations we had endured” from revolutionary France’s undeclared war on U.S. shipping in 1797 and 1798.119 Like most soldiers, he believed in asserting honor through dueling, and he had nearly challenged Monroe over the Virginian’s leaking the supposedly confidential facts of the Reynolds affair. On a practical level, he believed that the disgrace of evading a duel would ruin anybody’s political future. But as he got older, his early religious belief returned, with its condemnation of dueling.
So when he learned in November 1801 that his beloved nineteen-year-old “highest and eldest hope,” Philip—whom he had often taken with him on long official trips—was to fight a duel the next day, he was torn over what advice to give, especially since Philip had gotten into the duel by calling his opponent a “rascal” for a speech insulting Hamilton himself. Hamilton advised a course he thought would reconcile honor and morality. Philip should shoot in the air, honorable behavior in the dueling code. His opponent might do the same or might miss; only one duel in five was fatal. But this one was. Taken to his uncle’s house with a bullet in his gut, Philip died after hours of agony, his weeping parents lying on either side, clinging to him.120
And that drove Hamilton’s seventeen-year-old daughter mad. She lived to be seventy-three in a kind of permanent, fearful girlhood, talking of Philip as if he were still alive and singing the songs she used to sing with her father. Poor Angelica, said her younger sister when they were both old. “Lost to herself for half a century.”121 Material enough for novels by all the Brontës.
HAMILTON COULD easily, and honorably, have avoided his duel with Burr. Enraged by his loss in the gubernatorial race, blaming Hamilton for working against him and wrongly thinking him the author of slashing campaign attacks, Burr wanted revenge.122 He found the occasion in a letter printed in a newspaper, commenting on its report that Hamilton had called Burr “a dangerous man and one who ought not to be trusted with the reins of government.” Actually, said the letter writer—a guest at the dinner party where Hamilton had made the remark—“I could detail to you a still more despicable opinion which General HAMILTON has expressed of Mr. BURR.”123
That did it for Burr, who sent his second to demand that Hamilton explain what “despicable opinion” he held.124 The second diplomatically advised Hamilton to say he had no idea what the dinner guest was talking about, which would have ended the matter right there. Hamilton replied instead that Burr had no business asking him such questions.125 When Burr then demanded that Hamilton take back anything he’d ever said “derogatory to my honor,” the duel was on.126
Hamilton told his friends he would “throw away” his shot: just what he’d advised his son to do.127 Hamilton’s friends told him not to do that, for Burr, a crack marksman, had been doing target practice and meant to kill him.128 But Hamilton was thinking more about Philip than about Burr. Whether he lived or died, what he was seeking was atonement.
Rowing across the Hudson to Weehawken on July 11, 1804, he famously looked back at the New York he had done so much to shape “and spoke of the future greatness of the city.”129 Arriving at the secluded ledge on the Jersey bank, he took his position, put on his glasses, and fired above Burr’s head, shooting some twigs off a cedar tree.130 Burr shot him through the liver and shattered his spine. “This is a mortal wound,” Hamilton said; and surrounded by his family and a dozen weeping friends, in the middle of the next afternoon, aged forty-nine, he died.131
He left a statement apologizing to his creditors if he didn’t leave enough to pay off the debt from building his little villa, explaining that he had looked forward to a “comfortable retirement” there after having “been so much harassed in the busy world,” and that he expected the house, “by the progressive rise in property on this Island, and the felicity of its situation to become more and more valuable.”132 Indeed it did, as the engine of prosperity he had set in motion enriched his city and nation.
As a result, his villa—the “sweet project” he enjoyed planning and building—got moved not once but twice.133 In 1889, as his country landscape became urban, a developer bought part of his thirty-five acres to build row houses, and offered Hamilton Grange, as the house was called, to anyone who would move it. An Episcopal church rolled it two blocks from its original site at 143rd Street and Convent Avenue down to 141st Street, to use as a rectory, wedgi
ng the house in sideways to fit the space, moving the front door to the side, and shearing off the verandas. Hemmed in between the brownstone Romanesque church and a tall apartment building, the Grange, growing ever more shabby, looked like a ninety-five-pound old lady meekly squeezed on a subway seat between two hulking football players.
In 2008, the National Park Service, which had owned the Grange for nearly half a century and had long hoped to move it to a better site, finally acted. Since the church, built just after the house’s first move and partially blocking its access to the street, wouldn’t let the Park Service disassemble the arcade around its apse and then rebuild to let the house be moved in the normal way, the Park Service slowly jacked up the Grange about ten feet over several days, gently slid it across a temporary bridge of steel girders over the church onto Convent Avenue, gradually jacked it down again, and rolled it in what seemed the blink of an eye down to its new site around the corner—an amazing spectacle, which I watched for hours on two beautiful summer days, as the nineteenth-century-garbed children of the square-bearded Old German Baptists who were doing the move (doubtless descendants of a pietist sect that settled near Germantown, Pennsylvania, in the early eighteenth century) played on the Convent Avenue sidewalk. The new site is still on Hamilton’s land, and the Grange looks out as it originally did over a wooded hillside, right next to City College, where another generation of ambitious immigrants prepares itself to plunge into Hamilton’s opportunity America.
Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
The Park Service has beautifully restored the house, rebuilding the portico and airy piazzas, putting back the front door, and moving the stairs to their original position, discovering in the process that what seemed a Victorian replacement staircase is the original mahogany-railed one, its 1802 carvings preserved by being turned backward against a wall for a century. You can now see what an ambitious architectural marvel the house is for its modest size, with two twenty-two-foot-long, octagonal main rooms, placed end to end, opening into each other to form one axis of an intricate, perfectly balanced, and rational cruciform plan, the work of John McComb, Jr., architect of New York’s city hall and Gracie Mansion. You can see why Hamilton chose the layout: it’s a perfect embodiment of his elegant, logical, complicated Enlightenment mind, and, for all its rationality, it opens surprising and interesting vistas as you move through its spaces.