by John Ferling
But some were troubled not so much by economic tribulations as by democracy. The American Revolution had planted the seeds of a very different society from that which had existed in colonial days. The hierarchical society of colonial America was waning. Class distinctions, once accentuated by sharp dissimilarities in dress, were eroding. No longer were those of “middling circumstances” and the “meaner sort” as likely to defer to their social betters by bowing to them, stepping aside when passing them on the street, or doffing their hats. No longer were commoners as willing to tolerate unequal treatment before the law. No longer were they willing to acquiesce in the old belief that only gentlemen possessed the skill to hold political office. No longer were people as willing to accept the ancient notion that there was a place for each person and each person was expected to remain in his place.
The Revolution and the long war had instilled in those who had once been on the bottom the belief, stated in innumerable declarations of rights, that citizens were “equally free and independent.” Many men who had been denied the suffrage before the Revolution could now vote. Men who would never have occupied positions of authority in the colonies now held public office, high office in some cases, sitting even in their state legislature. A new kind of popular leader had emerged in the United States: men who were less educated and less refined than their predecessors, men who were likely to take literally the Declaration of Independence’s proclamation that “all men are born equal.” But it was not only the disappearance of traditional habits and customs that was of concern. Some feared that in the emerging democracy the new politically active class would demand alternative economic policies that would benefit those in the middle and lower strata and be harmful to the wealthiest Americans. The notion of democracy and equality had taken root, and the most conservative Americans did not like it all. This was not the American Revolution that they had imagined. For them, the crisis of the 1780s included the social and political changes unleashed by the Revolution. Some looked back wistfully to colonial times, though it was unlikely that what had been done could be undone. Instead, they sought the means of removing important decisions from popular control.7
In the summer of 1786, New York’s John Jay, the secretary of foreign affairs under the Articles of Confederation, the first United States constitution, told Washington of his belief that national “affairs seem to lead to some crisis—some Revolution—something that I cannot foresee or conjecture. I am uneasy and apprehensive—more so, than during the War.” French assistance had provided hope during the war. Now there seemed to be no hope. The United States appeared to be headed toward “Evils and Calamities,” and in large measure the nation’s plight arose from entrusting authority to a new set of men who were “neither wise nor good.” Washington responded that he agreed entirely with Jay’s concerns. “I do not conceive we can exist long as a Nation,” wrote Washington.8
Perhaps the earliest and most persistent voice warning that malevolent forces were sapping life from the United States belonged to Alexander Hamilton. An aide to General Washington during the war, Hamilton had first written on the American crisis more than three years before the conflict ended. He was elected to the New York Assembly in 1786, and early the following year he took the floor of the legislature to deliver a ninety-minute address on America’s vexations. Hamilton began by saying that the Declaration of Independence had proclaimed that the new United States might “do all … things that independent states may of right do,” though in fact the national government had never possessed the powers normally vested in sovereign governments. Saddled with an enfeebled government, the United States had very nearly lost the war, and since the end of hostilities it had been “in continual danger of dissolution.” Matters had now reached a stage in which “national affairs … are left … to float in the chaos.” The United States could not much longer subsist, and when it collapsed, the states would be opened to “foreign influence and intrigue.” They might even make war on one another. Large standing armies would have to be raised by each state, presenting a greater threat to liberty than was ever likely to be posed by a redoubtable republican government. The outcome of the “dissolution of the union,” Hamilton warned, was that the states would be compelled to ally with European powers in order to survive, a step that would “plunge us into all the labyrinths of European politics.” At risk, he said, was the American Revolution and all the hopes and dreams that had gone into it for a United States.9
On the day that Hamilton spoke, Thomas Jefferson was shopping in Paris, purchasing chinaware and a door for the carriage house at his residence.10 A former congressman and governor of Virginia, Jefferson was the American minister to France. He had been away from the United States for some eighteen months, but numerous friends kept him abreast of what was occurring at home. Some were worried about America’s prospects, and some saw things in nearly as gloomy a light as did Hamilton.
But Jefferson dissented from the chorus of doom. When told that many an American longed for a restoration of colonial society and governance, he responded that if there was such a man, “send him here. It is the best school in the universe to cure him of that folly.” The monarchical and aristocratic-dominated governments in Europe, he added, “are loaded with misery.” When told that there were those who hated the breakdown of the colonists’ hierarchical society, he replied that “the dignity of man is lost in arbitrary distinctions.” Indeed, the one “germ of destruction” that he saw in America’s institutions was the existence, and predominance, of aristocracy in the southern states. It was degrading, he went on, to think of a system in which “the many are crushed under the weight of a few.” When Jefferson learned that some Americans were assailing the notion that the people could establish good government, he responded that he was persuaded of the overall “good sense of the people” and that he could not understand why “fear predominates over hope.” Yes, there were problems, he acknowledged, but the “mass of mankind” in America “enjoys a precious degree of liberty & happiness.” If American democracy was bumpy, its mistakes should be weighed “against the oppressions” on the monarchies in Europe. On the whole, said Jefferson, the constitution of the United States was “a wonderfully perfect instrument.” While the U.S. government had some defects, to compare it to the governments of Europe would be “like a comparison of heaven & hell.”11
Jefferson wrote to Washington from time to time, usually confining his remarks to European affairs. Washington always answered promptly. On one occasion, however, Jefferson discoursed briefly on American affairs, telling Washington that “the inconveniences resulting” from the problems of the national government in the United States were “so light in comparison with those existing in every other government on earth, that our citizens may certainly be considered as in the happiest political situation that exists.”12 Washington did not answer that letter.
By the time Hamilton spoke in 1787, Washington had come to share with his most conservative countrymen their dark views regarding America’s troubles. Wondering now whether the people were fit for self-government, Washington concluded that “the discerning part of the community” must govern and the “ignorant & designing” must follow. It had to be this way, for most people simply would not accept “measures that are best calculated for their own good.”13 This was the prevailing sentiment regarding governance before the American Revolution.
By 1787 something else was clear. The battle lines had been drawn over determining the meaning of the American Revolution and, with it, the contours of the new American nation.
Coming of Age
Chapter 1
“To make a more universal Acquaintance”
Unhappy Youths
Neither Thomas Jefferson nor Alexander Hamilton enjoyed a happy childhood. Jefferson later characterized youth as a time of “colonial subservience.” Next to slavery, he said, one’s earliest years had to be the worst state imaginable.1 At age fourteen, Hamilton denounced the “grov’ling … condition�
�� which his “Fortune &c condemn[ed] him” and deplored the “weakness” that appeared to be his destiny.2
Thomas Jefferson was born to Peter and Jane Randolph Jefferson in 1743 at Shadwell, a sprawling country estate of 1,400 acres in the lush, mountainous terrain of frontier Albemarle County, Virginia. Young Thomas revered his father, a self-made man who, through industry, quick wits, and a good marriage, had risen to a planter’s status, colonial Virginia’s equivalent of aristocratic rank. Born in humble circumstances, Peter worked for years as a surveyor, growing steadily more affluent. Substance brought influence, which led in turn to a string of local posts, including justice of the peace, county surveyor, and sheriff. After marrying Jane Randolph, the daughter of a James River baron, Peter’s ascent gathered momentum. Soon he was second in command of his county militia and sat in the House of Burgesses, Virginia’s assembly. In the four years before Thomas’s birth, Peter built Shadwell, a six-room, one-and-a-half-story farmhouse that sat atop a ridge and looked toward the Rivanna River. He modeled it on homes that were fashionable with the English gentry, though Shadwell was more modest. Peter acquired ever more land and eventually also came to possess some three hundred head of livestock, a sizable library, and scores of slaves.3 Though Peter was not what colonial Americans considered a well-educated gentleman, Jefferson recollected his father as a man of good judgment with a keen taste for learning. In Thomas’s rendering, Peter had rounded off the coarse edges of his persona and was equally at home in a gentleman’s drawing room as on the untamed frontier.
Though born to a family of wealth and influence, young Thomas Jefferson thought something was missing. Because Shadwell burned in 1770, destroying nearly every letter he had written before the age of twenty-six, information on Jefferson’s youth is elusive, but clues exist to the causes of his unhappy early life.
He was sent away to school at age nine, separating him for the better part of each year from Shadwell, and from his parents and his six sisters and a brother. Four years later he was separated forever from his father, who died in 1757 at age forty-nine. The two experiences may have left young Jefferson feeling abandoned and stripped of the gratification and security of a family. His mother was there, but not for him, or at least that is what he appears to have felt. Only four references to her can be found in the thousands of Jefferson’s letters that have survived, none of them even remotely endearing. Whatever their true relationship, Jefferson must have felt that she did not nurture him with sufficient love and attention. A measure of his troubled sensations can be divined from his subsequent remark, “at 14 years of age, the whole care and direction of my self was thrown on my self entirely, without a relation … to advise or guide me.” As Jefferson later recalled, lacking guidance he developed poor habits and ran with “bad company.” He was amazed, he said, that he had not turned out to be “worthless.” Things worked out for the best, he added, only because of his own “prudent selections” based on his “reasoning powers.” Much of this sounds fanciful, and it may have been Jefferson’s way of persuading himself that, like his father, he was a self-made man.4
Alexander Hamilton’s early years were laced with material deprivation and emotional pain. Like Jefferson, he said little about his youth, and nothing that he said was in the least effusive.
Hamilton’s mother, Rachel Faucette, was the daughter of a sugar planter on Nevis in the British West Indies. At age sixteen, in 1745, after inheriting what her son later called a “snug fortune,” she moved with her mother, who was legally separated from her husband, to the nearby Danish island of St. Croix. In no time she married Johann Michael Lavien, a thirty-year-old Dane who was struggling without success to turn around an undercapitalized sugar plantation named—or, perhaps from Rachel’s perspective, misnamed—Contentment. After five years, Rachel walked away from her unhappy marriage. Enraged and humiliated, Lavien had her jailed for a few weeks on what may have been trumped-up charges of adultery. As soon as she was released, Rachel fled to St. Kitts, leaving Lavien for good and abandoning her only child, Peter.
Not long passed before Rachel met James Hamilton, a thirtysomething Scotsman who had come to the West Indies to seek his fortune as a merchant. He never found it. The reasons for his failures are not clear, though his son later attributed it to James’s “indolence” and lack of the unsparing toughness and preoccupation needed to succeed in business. By the time James encountered Rachel, his career was on the descent. He was scraping by in an unskilled job, possibly that of watchman.
Rachel, who appears to have been a risk taker given to impulsive behavior and bad decisions—traits that were passed on to her son—took up with James, despite his “indigent circumstances” and the fact that she was still legally married to Lavien. Though she and James never wed, they had several children, two of whom survived childhood. James Jr. was born in 1753. His younger sibling, Alexander, was most likely born in January 1755.5 Four years after Alexander’s birth, Lavien suddenly resurfaced and filed for divorce from Rachel. Charging that she was given to “whoring with everyone,” he told the court that she had “completely forgotten her duty” to her legitimate child. Lavien had no difficulty gaining the divorce. The judge, in fact, decreed that Rachel could never again legally marry and that her “whore-children” were not entitled to Lavien’s property.
It is unclear what James Hamilton did to support his family during the fifteen or so years that he was with Rachel, or precisely how comfortably he and his family lived. He probably worked some of the time and Rachel may have as well. What is known is that she had inherited three of her mother’s female slaves in the year after Alexander’s birth and that they almost certainly were hired out to generate income for the family. Somehow, Rachel found the resources to see that Alexander—who outshone his brother as a student—received a few years of schooling. Given the prejudices of the day, young Alexander was denied formal schooling because of his illegitimate birth, but he studied with a private tutor.
In 1765, James found work in Christiansted on St. Croix and moved Rachel and the boys with him. He did not linger long. A year later, James deserted his family. Alexander, who was eleven, never again saw his father, who skipped around the Caribbean for the next three decades.
The emotional toll on young Alexander had to be considerable. He coped with the knowledge that his mother was widely seen as scandalous, with his father’s desertion, and with the painful discrimination occasioned by his illegitimate birth. He never spoke ill of either parent, and when older and successful he invited his father to his wedding and sent him money.6 But what Hamilton felt when the searing pain was fresh during his youth is unknown. The most obvious legacy of the burden that he carried was an obsessive fervor to prevail over the hand that fate had dealt him.
* * *
Despite his decidedly dissimilar background, Jefferson, like Hamilton, was prodded by what he later called a “spice of ambition.”7 He was the son of a father who strove to get ahead. It stretches credulity to imagine that Peter had not done his utmost to instill his habits in his son—especially as the only other male child in the family, Randolph, possessed only modest abilities. If one of the boys was to excel, it had to be Thomas. Nor is it unlikely that a youngster who clearly idolized his father would seek to equal, and probably surpass, him in many ways.
In 1752 nine-year-old Thomas completed his preparatory education at Tuckahoe, the Randolph’s vast estate on the James River. Thereafter, his parents enrolled him in a Latin school run by Reverend William Douglas, a native of Scotland. The school was well to the east of Shadwell in Goochland County, the site of Douglas’s Anglican parish. Jefferson spent more than five years with Douglas and was introduced to Latin, Greek, and French. This prepared him for a superior classical school run by another Anglican clergyman, James Maury. Jefferson had little good to say about his time with Douglas, but he looked on his nearly thirty months with Maury as transformative. The product of a distinguished Virginia family and a graduate of the College of William
and Mary, Maury had much to offer, though the timing of Jefferson’s enrollment in his academy may have been crucial. Jefferson encountered Maury at a decisive moment, scant months following Peter Jefferson’s death. Jefferson boarded with Maury and his wife, and they became his surrogate family. Jefferson was impressed by his mentor’s collection of books, the most extensive library he had yet seen, but what was pivotal was Jefferson’s discovery that learning could be a “rich source of delight.” A new world opened to him. Under the guidance of this teacher, whom he called a “correct classical scholar,” Jefferson encountered the wisdom of the ancients in their own languages, which he subsequently said was a training ground for “fine composition.” Perhaps most important, Jefferson was introduced to the liberating scientific and political thought of the modern European Enlightenment.8 Young Jefferson likely had been adrift before he enrolled in Maury’s small log cabin school. Thereafter, while he yet expected to spend his life on a secluded plantation, Jefferson had found a means of bringing the world, old and new, to his remote corner.
Jefferson’s experience with Maury touched something else. It awakened his ambition. He wanted to be part of the wider world that he had found through Maury. All along he had been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, holding public office, possibly someday even sitting in the Virginia assembly. Jefferson still wished to take that path, and he doubtless dreamed of more. It was almost certainly at this juncture that he first coveted the qualities of a natural aristocrat, the learning, grace, and refinement that set such an individual apart from others, causing him to be seen as a natural leader because of his enlightenment, taste, and urbanity. At age sixteen, he wrote to his guardian asking that he be permitted to attend the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. What he learned there, as well as the “more universal Acquaintance” that he would make among his classmates and professors, would “hereafter be serviceable to me,” he said.9 Jefferson had begun to wish for more from life than running a plantation.
