War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901)

by Sedgwick, John

  Hamilton was not particularly interested in the affairs of the city, however. He endorsed the mechanics bill without thinking. Even as an assemblyman, he was attuned to the larger national issues embedded in local conflicts. He took an interest in an otherwise obscure quarrel between Maryland and Virginia over rights to commercial passage down the Potomac. To Hamilton, this was the country’s core liability: The states were not unified as a single, powerful nation, but splintered into thirteen rivalrous sovereignties. Just as Maryland squabbled with Virginia, New York was bickering with New Jersey and Connecticut, imposing duties and tariffs on goods passing through New York Harbor on their way to those neighboring states. While states were extorting revenue from one another, the national government was going bankrupt.

  The Potomac issue was eventually resolved, but Virginia’s governor, Edmund Randolph, saw the larger problem and invited representatives from the states to discuss the matter in Annapolis. Hamilton made sure he was one, but the moment he arrived, he felt unusual regret to be parted from Betsey, who had just given birth to their third child, Alexander: “Happy, however, I cannot be, absent from you and my darling little ones. I feel that nothing can ever compensate for the enjoyment I leave at home or can ever put my heart at tolerable ease. . . . Think of me with as much tenderness as I do of you and we cannot fail to be always happy.”

  Only twelve delegates from five states actually appeared. Of them, the dominant figure was not Hamilton, but the scholarly, beetle-browed James Madison, whom he’d met in the Confederation Congress. Madison believed in granting a central government the power of “coercion” over the states to bring order to what he termed “the present anarchy of our commerce.” The argument became so rancorous that, when Hamilton showed his final summary to Randolph, the governor thought he’d better tone it down “or all Virginia will be against you.” Hamilton’s own governor, George Clinton, would be even less obliging. He didn’t want New York (and Clinton himself) to defer to a higher power. By 1786, he’d already been elected three times to the governorship and hoped to be reelected many times more. Clinton had already earned the loathing of Hamilton for his Trespass Act, and the Clintonians started referring to Hamilton as “Tom S**t” and a “mustee”—the child of a white and a quadroon, the first of many smears on Hamilton’s ancestry.

  The Annapolis gathering led to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the broiling summer of 1787, with representatives from all the states. Leery of federalism, Clinton appointed two Clintonians to New York’s three-man delegation to ensure that Hamilton would be outvoted. The fifty-five delegates spent their days on the second floor of the statehouse, the blinds drawn through the long hot summer to close out the sun and to preserve the secrecy of the proceedings. They passed their nights in cramped quarters at the Indian Queen Tavern on Fourth Street. The convention was, said the eighty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin, piebald, pained by kidney stones, “the most august and respectable assembly” he’d ever taken part in.

  Happy on his farm above the Potomac, Washington had not planned to attend the gathering but was lured out of retirement by the shock of Shays’ Rebellion, that uprising of Massachusetts’s hill-town farmers outraged by the heavy taxes imposed to pay the state’s war debt. Their widespread marauding revealed the feeble powers of the new confederacy to control its citizens, to say nothing of repelling any foreign invasion. Determined to create a durable nation after the agonizing war, Washington presided silently over the gathering from a tall chair, the delegates fanned out before him, his visage alone lending gravity to proceedings that were otherwise both timeless and tedious. Uncharacteristically, Hamilton said little, but he commanded attention all the same. “His manners are tinctured with stiffness and sometimes with a degree of vanity that is highly disagreeable,” a delegate from Georgia noted. “When he comes forward, he comes charged with interesting matter. There is no skimming over the surface of a subject with him.” He was struck by the wide range of Hamilton’s expression, too, at points as “didactic” as the ponderous British statesman Lord Bolingbroke, at others positively “tripping” like the comic novelist Laurence Sterne.

  As the animating intellect, Madison took the minutes, often improving the remarks through his recording of them. Before the convention, he had listed the “vices” in the old Articles, chiefly that they failed to create a nation. This convention was to find the remedies. It soon became clear they were not to be produced by any revision of the Articles. They needed to be replaced by a new document that would create a new government as yet beyond imagining.

  Throughout much of the deliberations, Hamilton was silent in deference to his elders. He made up for it at the end when Washington selected him for the grand summation, and he delivered himself of an oration that ran six hours. While he lacked the resonance of a born orator, he was poised, quick on his feet, full of facts—and, to the regret of his audience that day, indefatigable. It was a bravura performance, but a disastrous one, as the speech would be reduced to a single idea that would haunt him forever. He declared the British government the finest in the world and recommended that the American president be an “elective monarch” who served for life subject to “good behavior.” In his own notes, he went further, saying the position should be hereditary and “have so much power that it will not be in his interest to acquire more.” In that setting, it was a blunder of the first order.

  The political world was soon ringing with the news that Alexander Hamilton wanted an elected king. It wasn’t implausible. An obvious elitist, he had an affinity for aristocracy. He’d taken the Tory side in that Rutgers case and in countless more property cases afterward; he’d spoken up for Tories, declaring that the city’s prosperity depended on them. His cultivated manners needed only a few puffs of perfume to win him a warm welcome from any royal court. The issue, as so often for Hamilton, wasn’t that he thought this way—many in the hall did—but that he felt obligated to tell the world at every turn. Unlike Burr, Hamilton could not bear to keep secrets.

  In the end, Hamilton’s royalist attitudes did not affect the deliberations. His speech, said one Connecticut delegate, “has been praised by everybody [but] . . . supported by none.” The convention ground on through three more months, hung up primarily on the thorny matter of how to apportion power among a few large states, such as Virginia, and many small ones, such as Delaware. The solution was reached on July 16 with the so-called Connecticut Compromise, which came up with the distinction between a Senate where each state was equally represented and a House that reflected each state’s size. With that breakthrough, the debate reached the end Madison sought—a new Constitution creating Madison’s “coercive” federal powers over the states that would make that nation, bolstered by a strong chief executive, a bicameral legislature, and a Supreme Court to uphold the Constitution—altogether a beautiful system of checks and balances that seemed almost Newtonian in its ability to bring clarity and order to the distribution of power.

  When the Constitution was being finalized in July, it should have been obvious that Hamilton was not a monarchist at heart, no matter what he might say. For no one worked harder to promote the ratification of a system of government where the people ruled. He immediately took on Governor Clinton, who’d made clear his opposition to the Constitution, assailing him in an anonymous article: “Such conduct in a man high in office argues greater attachment to his own power than to the public good.” Clinton’s henchmen divined the source and hit back, taunting Hamilton as a “superficial, self-interested coxcomb” who’d be nowhere without Washington. That struck a nerve, and Hamilton rushed to Washington for reassurances. “This,” he told the general, “I confess, hurts my feelings, and if it obtains credit will require a contradiction.” Caught between Clinton and Hamilton, Washington could only reassure his former aide by saying such charges were “entirely unfounded.”

  In September, Hamilton was chosen for the Style and Arrangement Committee with his fri
end Gouverneur Morris to render the Constitution in tight, orderly prose. A friend from his King’s College days, Morris possessed, in equal parts, gallantry, levity, brilliance, and recklessness. He’d twice crashed his phaeton on a city street from driving too fast and once lost a leg in a carriage accident, replacing it with a distinctive, clonking wooden one that proved no significant impediment to his many amorous pursuits. In a lighter moment at Constitution Hall, Hamilton entered into a schoolboy wager with Morris to see if his friend dared actually to touch Washington, who had a notorious aversion to such intimacy. Morris gladly took him on. He approached Washington, bowed, declared he had never seen the general look so well, and then—as everyone watched, aghast—laid his hand convivially on Washington’s shoulder. At that, the sun set. Washington “fixed his eye on Morris for several minutes with an angry frown.” Morris quietly retreated. “I have won the bet,” Morris told Hamilton grimly, “but paid dearly for it.”

  The Style Committee’s job was to edit the final draft of the Constitution, clarifying, sharpening, and condensing. It reduced the number of articles from twenty-three to seven, and Morris, ever the stylist, added such touches as the soaring opening phrase, “We the People of the United States.” And then thirty-nine of the original fifty-five delegates signed it and repaired to the City Tavern. The country had been made new.

  Whatever his ambivalence about democracy, Hamilton did more than anyone in New York—and most of the country—to advance the cause, as he undertook to write, under the name Publius (for Public Man), more than sixty of the essays in the Federalist Papers designed to promote the new Constitution to a skeptical public. He first conceived of the idea on board a schooner bound to New York from Albany and set the first one down while still on the water. It begins with a clarion call, “To the People of the State of New York”: “After an unequivocal experience of the inefficacy of the subsisting Federal Government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution of the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences, nothing less than the existence of the UNION, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire, in many respects the most interesting in the world.”

  It was the full Hamilton, as he markets his opinion as undeniable truth regarding the “fate of an empire.” Produced at breathtaking speed, the writing was like breathing, inhaling information, expelling enlightenment. And so each sentence pushed back the darkness.

  Just as the true Burr can be found in those fresh and quirky letters to his wife, the true Hamilton can be found here in his Federalist essays, all of them, one after another, pushing the cause of ratification the way Sisyphus pushed his rock, over and over and over, long past the time when anyone else would have given up. Hamilton’s very indefatigability was the trait his opponents hated most, even as it inspired his supporters. He could summon more arguments faster than his opponents could possibly counter, and they ultimately wilted under the hail of his blows. In his telling, federalism would improve commerce, boost government revenues, raise a navy, create efficiencies, undo the anarchy, embarrassment, and impotence of national and state governments under the Articles, and do it lawfully and benignly, reflecting the will of the people. He continued on in this vein until his Federalist No. 85, which concluded: “A Nation without a national government is, in my view, an awful spectacle. The establishment of a constitution in [a] time of profound peace by the voluntary consent of a whole people is a prodigy, to the completion of which I look forward with trembling anxiety”—meaning eagerness.

  The Federalist Papers ran in dozens of New York newspapers, pushing for the upcoming New York convention to ratify the Constitution and gain another of the nine states needed for adoption. Despite the firepower of Hamilton’s Federalist essays, an early poll of the delegates showed that the proponents, or Federalists, trailed the Anti-Federalists forty-six to nineteen. Worse, the convention would be presided over by the bovine Governor Clinton, a man Hamilton called “inflexibly obstinate.”

  The convention was to be held in a Poughkeepsie courthouse. Before it started, Hamilton unleashed another barrage of essays, and New York’s merchants—keen on the commercial possibilities of a federated nation—gave Hamilton a glorious sendoff from the city, culminating in a thirteen-cannon salute. As soon as he arrived, Hamilton attacked Clinton for running “a despicable and dangerous system of personal influence.” Clinton replied this was state influence, not his own, and assembled a flock of subordinates to plead the case, but Hamilton outtalked them all. After the Clintonians lambasted the Federalist Chancellor Livingston for exaggerating the damage of the Articles, Hamilton teased them for treating Livingston as if he’d “wandered in the flowery fields of fancy.” Their fears had overwhelmed their reason. “Events, merely possible have been magnified by distempered imagination into inevitable realities,” he declared. “And the most distant . . . conjectures have been formed into . . . infallible prediction.”

  “A political porcupine,” one observer called Hamilton, “armed at all points and brandishes a shaft to every opponent.” The dispute became so heated that at one point an Anti-Federalist, Colonel Oswald, challenged Hamilton to a duel. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. Before New York could reach a vote, Virginia and New Hampshire both ratified, pushing the pro-Constitution tally past the nine states needed out of the thirteen for passage. Incredibly, the new Constitution was in. In Poughkeepsie, the news caused an ear-splitting explosion of fifes and drums all around the hall. When the convention voted, even New York went along. Hamilton had done the impossible. He had turned a landslide defeat into a secure victory, as New York, despite all of Clinton’s power, voted yes by three votes. Even if it didn’t usher in the Constitution, the vote was key: As the country’s most dynamic state, with the fastest-growing population and economy, it helped establish the legitimacy of the new government.

  Hamilton’s accomplishment was not lost on the city, whose commerce stood to gain much from a federal system of government that would encourage the free flow of its products. In the general excitement, New York put forth a “Grand Federal Procession,” featuring five thousand exuberant workers, from bakers hoisting a ten-foot “federal loaf” to “Black Smiths” hammering iron anchors as they passed. All of them hungry for the prosperity the Constitution would bring, they marched in triumph down Broadway toward Great Dock Street and then took a wide turn about the southern tip of the city. The most stupefying sight was the federal ship Hamilton, a thirty-two-gun frigate, twenty-seven feet long, its towering masts bearing full, billowing sails. Seemingly pushed by the wind, the tall ship actually rode on heavy wheels (concealed behind blue drapes meant to suggest the sea) and was hauled by a team of ten horses. In the wild enthusiasm for Hamilton’s accomplishment, there was loud talk of renaming New York City “Hamiltonia.” At the climax of the celebration, the Hamilton paused by a lowly Spanish packet and fired off a booming salute to its namesake from all thirty-two of its cannons.

  AND BURR’S POSITION on the Constitution? At a time when the political world was split like an apple between the Constitution-endorsing Federalists and their fervid opponents, the Anti-Federalists, Burr seems to have been that rare man in public life who did not take sides. As someone who enjoyed secrecy, he probably preferred to keep his options open—and not make enemies by taking a stand. But others detected the odor of opportunism.

  While the votes he cast in the Assembly gave little indication of his political principles, probably the clearest revelation of his orientation came soon after, when, for a third term, he was invited to run with a slate of staunch Anti-Federalists headed by Melancton Smith, Hamilton’s primary antagonist at the Poughkeepsie convention. Burr agreed, revealing himself only by the company he kept.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  A Dreaded Dilemma

  AFTER THE CONSTITUTION was ratified, it was clear to everyone that only General Washington could serve as the nation’s
first president—and only Alexander Hamilton could persuade him of that fact. Always one to demur, claiming no interest in glory or preferment, Washington had ample reason to say no, as he was, at fifty-four, after eight years of war, settling at last into a comfortable semiretirement at his idyll on the Potomac. The life of a Virginia planter wasn’t without its frustrations, what with its strained economics and morally problematic slaves, and the fact that a stream of visitors had turned him into a hotelkeeper. But he was spending it at last with Martha, a woman of simple pleasures and boundless good cheer. And there was something about the glorious expanse of Mount Vernon, with its endless views and bright possibilities, that soothed and inspired him after all the tumult of war. His property covered thirty thousand acres, or nearly fifty square miles, of rolling farmland, much of it extending upland from his own little settlement by the river. It could have been mistaken for a charming English village, with two dozen neat outbuildings clustered around a stately manor house that stood off a circular drive about a bowling green. Complete with a deer park, formal gardens, fruit trees, and a splendid vista of the wide river, it was a country estate that would not have looked out of place in Derbyshire. If it lacked Monticello’s charm, Mount Vernon had majesty. It was all the empire Washington wanted.

  As a confirmed New Yorker, Hamilton regarded such pastoral splendor as so much vacancy and must have felt mystified that the general would be drawn to it. Hamilton himself needed the jostle of society to feel alive and considered the countryside useless except as a field of battle. His Wall Street house was in a prime location, and thanks to his flourishing legal career he’d been able to furnish it rather grandly. He’d bought splendid Louis XVI chairs to go with a Federal-style mahogany sofa, a piano secured for him by his sister-in-law in London, a Dürer etching, some evocative Hudson River scenes by the British painter William Winstanley, and a pair of exquisite French flowerpots that Angelica had brought back from Paris. It may not have been the extravagant French-style salon of the Burrs, which he visited at one soiree or another, doubtless appraising the quality of the furnishings, but it was definitely impressive in its way.