by John Ferling
Jefferson had inscribed on Martha’s tombstone that she had been “torn from him by death.” His bereavement was so protracted that some feared he was suicidal, and for a time he may have been. A month after his wife’s death, he wrote that he was experiencing a “miserable kind of existence … too burdensome to bear.” That he had suicidal thoughts seems confirmed by his confession that he would take his own life were it not for “the infidelity of deserting” his children. Desolated by his loss, Jefferson remained for weeks in a such a state of black depression that he was “absolutely unable” to tend to any business. Marriage and family had been crucial for Jefferson, liberating him from the reclusive and solitary existence that he had endured as a young adult. Now, he said, all “comfort and happiness” had been taken from him. He would not end his life, but his life appeared to be at an end.15
While Jefferson grieved, Hamilton conspired. Like Jefferson, Hamilton had gone home in 1781, and like his counterpart in Virginia, he proclaimed that he had lost “all taste for the pursuits of ambition,” adding: “I sigh for nothing but the company of my wife and my baby.”16 Otherwise, Hamilton’s first objective was to settle on a means of supporting his family. He had a background in business, but no appetite for it. Nor was practicing medicine, a pursuit he had considered while a college student, any longer appealing. Hamilton turned to the law. A good legal practice could support a comfortable lifestyle and, should his passion for distinction and power return, a legal career would do the most to facilitate his aspirations. After a month at home, he took up the study of the law, joking that he was “studying the art of fleecing my neighbors.” Hamilton had completed his college preparatory studies and learned economics on his own. Now, he eschewed the common practice of apprenticing himself to a licensed lawyer and opted for solitary study. His friend James Duane made available his law library, and John Lansing, who had been General Schuyler’s military secretary, agreed to help as need be.17 Hamilton completed his studies with extraordinary speed. Within six months he was certified to prepare cases. After another ninety days, he was authorized to argue in court.
While still studying, Hamilton also accepted Superintendent Morris’s offer to become collector of continental taxes for New York, a post that required he lobby the state legislature to streamline the collection process. Both experiences only deepened his contempt for the Articles of Confederation, which he had blasted in his “Continentalist” essays during the summer before Yorktown. He saw abundant evidence that the state was snatching funds that should have gone into the national treasury. Indeed, of the eight million dollars Congress requested from the states in 1782, it received only four hundred thousand. Hamilton additionally came away convinced that state legislatures were repositories of “fickleness and folly.” Unable to see beyond local interests, the state legislators lacked all sense of national well-being. Hamilton rushed out two more installments of his “Continentalist,” though he added little to what he had advocated a year earlier. He urged that Congress be given the power of taxation, and he called for an impost of foreign imports, land and poll taxes, taxation of certain commodities in interstate commerce, and a national bank. America would be happy, he declared, only if it could shake loose of the hegemony of “petty states” and create a truly “great Federal Republic.” Then, it would be “tranquil and prosperous at home, respectable abroad.”18
Hamilton’s vision was distinctly different from that of Jefferson. The Virginian’s emphasis had been on the preservation and expansion of the individual’s freedom and independence. Hamilton emphasized the well-being and strength of the nation. Jefferson had become a revolutionary largely in the hope of securing, enlarging, and sustaining personal liberties. Hamilton’s hard experience in the Revolutionary War led him to believe that liberty could never exist unless the nation was strong and secure. From Valley Forge onward, Hamilton had grown steadily more convinced that the nation’s strength required the consolidation of supreme power at the national level.
About a month before Martha Jefferson died, the New York assembly, which had just adopted resolutions urging the revision of the Articles of Confederation to strengthen the powers of the national government, added Hamilton to its five-member congressional delegation in Philadelphia. His selection was hardly a surprise. Both Hamilton and his father-in-law, General Schuyler, had spoken openly in favor of retiring the debt owed to public creditors, those owed money by the state and national governments for indebtedness incurred through sustaining the cause during the Revolutionary War. Committed to providing “compensation to the sufferers,” Hamilton urged trying the “only expedient … still unattempted”—vesting the national government with the capability of raising revenue. He was a public advocate of what he termed the “luminous” policies of Superintendent Morris, including funding the national debt as a means of establishing an enduring stream of revenue for the national government. Despite his cynical view of Congress, Hamilton was surprisingly optimistic. “I am going to throw away a few months more in public life and then I retire a simple citizen” and family man, he remarked, indicating a belief that the campaign to strengthen the national government would not be a protracted undertaking.19
The movement to endow Congress with authority to raise revenue had a long pedigree. During 1780 not only had some Continental army officers signed a manifesto urging an increase in congressional powers, but the Hartford Convention, composed of delegates from New England and New York, had advocated an impost—a federal tax on imports. The following year, while Hamilton penned his initial essays on economic matters, Congress sent to the states for ratification an amendment that would vest it with authority to enact an impost. Just as Hamilton arrived in Philadelphia, the amendment failed. Rhode Island’s concurrence had always been doubtful, but even before it could act, Virginia rescinded its earlier affirmation. Congress was left with no means of raising revenue other than to requisition money from the states, a system that had always been ineffectual. To make matters worse, France, which had sustained the United States with a series of loans during the past several years, indicated that no further loans would be forthcoming.
Hamilton had not come to Congress to be passive. Never one to take a back seat, he emerged as a leader with remarkable speed, soon joining young James Madison to revive the campaign for an impost. Only four years older than Hamilton, Madison came from a privileged background in Virginia. A sickly youth, he had led a troubled and undirected life until the American Revolution inspired him to enter politics. Within five years he had risen from a local Committee of Safety to a seat in Congress, which he entered eighteen months before the siege at Yorktown. By the time Hamilton arrived in Philadelphia, Madison had become one of the leaders in Congress. Like Hamilton, he was bright, diligent, persistent, energetic, and above all, industrious. Temperamentally, however, the two were as dissimilar as night and day. Hamilton was outgoing; Madison reserved. Hamilton dressed in bright, colorful clothing; Madison habitually wore black. One foreign observer characterized Hamilton as “decided” and Madison as “meditative.” Madison thought Hamilton “rigid” and inflexible.20
In 1782 both men favored a stronger national government. That had not always been the case for Madison. Like most Virginians, he had initially feared a powerful centralized government as much as he had apprehended London’s absolute dominion over the colonies, but the series of military disasters in the southern theater—and the dangers they posed for the Old Dominion—converted him into a supporter of a robust United States government. Although the war was nearly over after Yorktown, Madison remained committed to increasing federal authority.
Soon after Hamilton reached Philadelphia, Madison declared in a speech that to save “national independence” and the Union, Congress must have the means of securing revenue. Hamilton could not have put it better, and at this juncture he and Madison supported a federal impost and funded debt. Still, differences existed. Madison was not keen on a national bank, and he probably never agreed with the
wide range of national taxes that Hamilton favored.21
The starting point for the collaborators was to launch a new campaign to secure an impost amendment. Whether or not Madison knew it—and he probably did—Hamilton wanted more, for the revenue from the impost would simply cover the interest on the foreign debt. The impost was “a Tub for the whale,” was how Superintendent Morris put it, meaning that a tax on imports would raise some revenue, but not enough to help the public creditors.22 Yet it was a first step, and some among the backers of an impost conspired to find the means to win its approval. The conspirators naturally cloaked their activities in nearly impenetrable secrecy, leaving both contemporaries and historians to guess at the dark corners of the intrigue. But two things appear certain: Hamilton was among the conspirators, and Madison was not. In addition, the plot came together when the schemers realized that they might use disaffection within the corps of officers in the Continental army to secure their ends.
The army’s officers had real grievances, and for months they had been discussing remedies among themselves. Despite having “borne all that men can bear,” as they would put it, the officers had not been paid for months. They also feared they would never receive their promised pensions. During the Valley Forge winter, Congress had promised the officers half-pay pensions for seven years. Two years later, pressured both by threats of mass resignations by the officers and Washington’s warnings that the “temper of the Army … requires great caution,” Congress extended the half-pay pensions for life. Late in 1782, just prior to the failure of the impost amendment, the officers decided to petition Congress for their pay and pensions. General Henry Knox drafted their petition, which was carried to Philadelphia in January by a three-member delegation of officers.
The delegation was headed by General Alexander McDougall, who had taken the nineteen-year-old Hamilton under his wing during the prewar protests in New York and who may have been responsible for securing his appointment as Washington’s aide in 1777. McDougall spoke with Congress about the hardships the officers had endured and enumerated their complaints. He also revealed that the officers were willing to settle for “commutation.” They wanted their back pay, but were willing to accept having their lifetime half-pay pensions commuted to a five-year full-pay pension. McDougall, who had cut his teeth as a Sons of Liberty intriguer and agitator in Manhattan prior to the outbreak of the war, remained in Philadelphia for several days, all the while making sure the congressmen understood the dangers of what might occur if the officers were left empty-handed. Soon dark rumors were rampant: An officers’ mutiny was pending; Washington might be overthrown and replaced with a “less scrupulous guardian of [the nation’s] interests”; the army might stage a coup and establish “a military dictatorship”; mass resignations might force the breakup of the army before peace with Great Britain was concluded.23 Fear was palpable in the halls of Congress. Arthur Lee, a Virginia congressman, wrote to Samuel Adams that “Every Engine is at work here” to increase the power of the national government. The “terror of a mutinying Army” was being held over Congress like a sword of Damocles, he said, and he added that many were apprehensive that the officers were not beyond “subverting the Revolution” to gain their ends.24
Hamilton likely had been aware of the discussions that had ensued among the officers during the weeks preceding McDougall’s visit. But the coincidence of McDougall’s arrival in Philadelphia at almost the same instant that the impost failed, and the evident apprehension that gripped Congress in the wake of the menacing warnings spread by the officers, made Hamilton and others aware that this was a heaven-sent opportunity for trying once again to strengthen the national government. Probably led by Superintendent Morris, Gouverneur Morris (who was unrelated but served as the superintendent’s assistant), and James Wilson, a Pennsylvania congressman who, like Superintendent Morris, had supported American independence with considerable reluctance, a small cabal formed in January. They glimpsed the chance not only to resurrect the impost amendment but also to frighten Congress into seeking an entirely new revenue system that would permit servicing the debts of the United States and assuming the debts the states had accrued during the war. Gouverneur Morris, in a ciphered letter, revealed the conspirators’ thinking: “The army have swords in their hands. I am glad to see Things in their present Train…. Convulsion will ensue, yet it must terminate in giving the Government that Power without which Government is but a Name.”25
Whether Hamilton was part of the plotting from the outset, or was brought into it subsequently, is unclear. If the latter, the cabal must have seen Hamilton as especially useful. He was not only a congressman who shared their nationalistic agenda, but he also had ties with the army’s officers that stretched all the way to the commander himself.
The colluders rapidly secured a portion of what they wanted. Congress agreed to resume paying the officers and to see somehow that they received their back pay. However, on February 4, the commutation scheme was rejected by Congress. The plotters now knew that commutation, and the establishment of the means of assuring adequate permanent revenue for the national government, could only be achieved if the army continued to threaten mutinous action.26
The pot simmered among the officers at the army’s principal cantonment in Newburgh, New York. As their frustration was building toward a crescendo, Hamilton in early February wrote to Washington, his first missive to the commander in a year. His letter was a warning to Washington. While Hamilton was willing to use the army to strike fear in the hearts of congressmen, he never wanted the projected mutiny to come to fruition. A military coup would almost certainly fail, and the bitterness it aroused would be ruinous for those who hoped to strengthen the national government. Nevertheless, Hamilton was unwilling to divulge to Washington the full scope of the conspiracy, or to unmask the identity of the plotters. He couched his notice to Washington in cryptic terms, though fearing that the commander would not fully understand what he had written, Hamilton instructed him to seek clarification from Knox, an indication that the artillery chief was up to his neck in these machinations.
Hamilton spoke of the pressing need to “restore public credit and supply the future wants of government.” But the heart of his letter dealt with the conspiracy among the army’s officers. Hamilton alluded to the “temper … of the army” and how difficult it might be to confine it “within the bounds of moderation.” Washington must “take the direction” of the army and “bring order perhaps even good out of confusion.” If he did that, Hamilton added, Washington would win the hearts of his countrymen, emerging from the war as both a triumphant general and an American icon.27
If Washington did not at first understand all that Hamilton said, the scales fell from his eyes three weeks later when an unsigned manifesto was posted in the Newburgh cantonment. It proposed that Congress be confronted with an ultimatum: If commutation was not guaranteed, the army would disband if the peace talks failed and the war continued, but if peace broke out, the army would refuse to dissolve.28 Treason and mutiny were intermingled in what became known as the Newburgh Address. The officers were asked to attend a meeting on March 15 to decide on a course of action.
The meeting was set for the Temple, a twenty-one-hundred-square-foot building so newly constructed by the soldiery that the smell of green wood permeated the hall. The officers gathered in an atmosphere of breathless anticipation. They were just preparing to take up the inflammatory statement to Congress when Washington, suddenly and unexpectedly, strode into the room and took the podium. Given several days to consider his response to what he knew was coming—thanks to Hamilton’s advance warning—Washington read his own prepared address. He appealed to the officers to respect civilian authority and the “sovereign authority of the United States.” Legislative bodies “composed of a variety of different Interests” acted slowly, he reminded his audience, and he urged patience. He also pleaded with the officers not to sully the reputation of the army, which they would surely do should they embr
ace the “blackest designs” advocated in the Newburgh Address.29
Though one of Washington’s best speeches, his remarks did not sway the militants in his audience. Sensing that his appeal to reason had failed, Washington, a devotee of the theater who admired actors—and a polished thespian himself—turned to theatrics to win over his audience. Saying that he wanted to read a letter from a Virginia congressman, Washington, with suspenseful deliberation, extracted the missive from his buff-and-blue coat, meticulously unfolded it, and began reading. He stumbled over a sentence or two. With great drama, he paused and reached into his pocket once again, this time removing a pair of glasses, which with great care he put on. The men had never seen their commander wearing glasses. Without hurrying, he adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles, paused again, then in a voice muted by despair and fatigue, told the officers: “Gentlemen, you must pardon me. I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind.” It was the perfect touch. In an instant, the mood in the room was transformed. As tough combat-hardened men wept openly, the mutinous defiance that had taken hold in some circles dissolved immediately. The Newburgh Address was swept aside, and its proponents were silenced.30
