It was Hamilton who gave him shape. He became politically what Burr became personally—Hamilton’s diametric opposite, a left hand for his right, an “anti” for every “pro.” With Burr, the antipathy may have been fed by their similarities. With Jefferson, it was their differences that did it. Just as Hamilton’s slender frame made Jefferson seem long limbed and Hamilton’s frantic scherzo pointed up Jefferson’s stately largo, Hamilton’s political faith—in a powerful central government, in commerce, in the elite, and in the virtues of England—came to be opposed by Jefferson in every particular, and with it, over time, a whole political philosophy was born: Jeffersonianism. On England, Jefferson could be especially scathing, as he lambasted the British as “rich, proud, hectoring, swearing, squabbling, carnivorous animals.” Then again, as an indebted Virginia planter, he was in hock to London creditors, which would not have been endearing. But Jeffersonianism might better have been called anti-Hamiltonianism since it was the opposite of everything Hamilton endorsed. Eventually it flew under the banner of Republicanism and became a political party. Advanced in the House by Madison, much to Hamilton’s irritation, it drew from the agrarian South, always suspicious of the financial North, gaining a political base that—amplified by the ugly clause in the Constitution giving slave owners a three-fifths share of a white vote for each slave they possessed—they would retain for decades. So it was that Hamilton defined both sides of that politically contentious age, the side that was with him, and the side that was against.
In opposing Jefferson, as he came to do, Hamilton of course personalized the quarrel so that he didn’t distinguish between his hatred for Jeffersonianism and his loathing for Jefferson. Jefferson had no great love for Hamilton either, but he had the self-control to conceal his feelings. “Each of us perhaps thought well of the other man,” Jefferson said later, “but as politicians it was impossible for two men to be of more opposite principles.” Since the two were the most powerful men in Washington’s cabinet, this growing antagonism became a point of increasing tension for Washington when they met at his lavish house on Cherry Street. The talkative Hamilton would go on for nearly an hour, and Jefferson, often tongue-tied, would offer a flustered rejoinder that Hamilton would effortlessly bat down, leaving Jefferson to sulk moodily and Hamilton to carry on with his crowing. Hamilton couldn’t quite see it, being inattentive to the moods of others, but Jefferson was smoldering.
All the while, there was a curious subterranean connection between the two men, although it is doubtful that either spoke of it to the other. In Paris, Jefferson fell in love with the graceful, whispery twenty-six-year-old Maria Cosway, her hair a tumble of yellow curls, her sinuous body designed to encourage advances. She was the wife of the prominent miniaturist painter Richard Cosway. Speaking no French, Jefferson joined the Cosways in the expatriate world, where he became transfixed by the decadent Parisian demimonde the Cosways spun about them. They threw outrageous parties for people like the transvestite diplomat and—it was said—spy, Mademoiselle la Chevalière d’Éon, whose superior fencing skills the Cosways wished to put on display. If the mademoiselle had demonstrated her art in the nude the effect could not have been more dazzling, but it was his hostess, Maria Cosway, who held Jefferson’s attention. Jefferson had enlisted Hemings, a long-haired, light-skinned slave of fourteen who was known at Monticello as “Dancing Sally,” to accompany his eight-year-old daughter, Mary, on her voyage across the Atlantic to Paris via London. While Jefferson’s sexual relationship with Hemings seems to have begun in those years, Jefferson toured much of Paris with Cosway. Nothing escaped their gaze—gardens, ruins, architecture. To Jefferson, the world must have all seemed like an extension of Cosway, until the fantasy ended when he snapped his wrist while trying to vault over a fountain. Surgery followed, and then a painful convalescence, and Cosway left for London without seeing him again. When Jefferson left Paris for a jaunt across Europe, he couldn’t stop thinking about the beautiful mystery woman, and the moment he returned home, he snatched up her letter before any of the others in the pile waiting for him. Right away he wrote her back, telling her that in Heidelberg he’d dreamed that he’d led her by the hand through a vast garden. He said no more but requested a similar confession back—one “teeming with affection,” he wrote, “such as I feel for you.” And then he closed with a suggestive joke with her about his long nose—the same one Hamilton had made years before. She didn’t oblige him.
Needing secrecy for his amorous campaign, Jefferson enlisted Hamilton’s sister-in-law Angelica Church, who was part of Jefferson’s circle while she was in Paris, to be his courier, since Jefferson knew she was a close friend of Cosway’s. If bringing her into the intrigue was a subtle overture to the fetching Mrs. Church, too, it worked. By playfully passing love letters back and forth between the two, she showed she didn’t mind such dalliances.
As a lover of secrets, Jefferson had an uncommon desire for married women, enjoying the world of whispers as much as Burr. For him, always quietly lordly, it may have represented a double conquest—winning the wife and besting the husband. In his twenties, he’d fallen hard for the pretty young wife of his best friend from childhood, John Walker, later senator from Virginia. Jefferson had been John Walker’s groomsman at his wedding and his executor afterward. Walker thought him a “friend of my heart.” After Walker left his wife, Betsy, with Jefferson when he had to travel on some military business, Jefferson made some unmistakable advances and didn’t back off after she made clear they weren’t welcome. When Betsy discovered that Jefferson had slipped a love note into the cuff of her sleeve, she ripped it to pieces in disgust. Still, Jefferson did not relent. He often spent evenings at the Walkers’, chatting with John and his friends but eyeing her. Once, after Betsy had headed to bed, Jefferson slipped away to sneak inside the Walkers’ bedchamber, where she was undressing. Betsy screamed and shoved him away. “He was repulsed with indignation and menaces of alarm and ran off,” a shocked John Walker reported later.
That ended that, but now it was more of the same. To Jefferson’s frustration, Maria Cosway had turned chilly. She clearly had no intention of leaving her marriage for him, or of entertaining him on any other basis. So he pivoted and let Angelica know that he might be interested in her. To this a relieved Cosway gave her blessing. At Christmastime 1787, Cosway teased the American minister: “Have you yet seen the lovely Mrs. Church? If I did not love her so much, I should fear her rivalship, but, no, I give you free permission to love her with all your heart.” With that, Cosway receded, although she did not completely disappear, and for some time, the two flirtatious young women hovered in Jefferson’s imagination like twin angels. Reflecting an undivided passion for each of them, Jefferson had the artist John Trumbull, a friend of the Churches’, do two miniatures of him—one to send to Cosway and the other to Angelica. The two women seemed to delight in the hold they had over this powerful man, but neither one seems to have gratified him. Once it was absolutely clear that Cosway wasn’t interested in a romance, Jefferson lit his candle for Angelica and invited her to visit him in Monticello, or join him on an expedition to Niagara Falls, or . . . anything. She knew better than to accept.
Meanwhile, of course, Hamilton had his own fascination for his sister-in-law, and that unspoken rivalry may have added a little fire to the political one. At one drawing room or another, doors closed, the gabby Angelica had likely given Hamilton an earful about the Cosway intrigue and may have added some tidbits about Sally Hemings, too. Despite appearances, Jefferson was not entirely ascetic, just as Hamilton would prove not to be just the devoted family man. Jefferson, however, proved to be far better at hiding this truth than Hamilton, and his elusiveness stoked Hamilton’s fury all the more.
AS THE ASSUMPTION bill moved toward a final vote, it seemed that Jefferson was the only man in America coolly indifferent to the outcome. He called himself “a stranger to the whole subject,” but that served him at a time when his loyalty to the administ
ration was starting to run counter to his personal philosophy, and he started taking offense at the peppery treasury secretary with a million ideas about how to create America. Jefferson was more directly concerned with the final location of the nation’s capital, which he wished to shift further south, bringing the center of power with it. There was a proposal to move the capital to some land by the Potomac, to a portion of Jefferson’s Virginia. To Hamilton, the assumption bill was the essential one. Without it, there might not be a capital.
As it was, each bill seemed so different—like an arrow and a glass of water—that each was a distraction from the other, and neither seemed headed for passage. With tremendous anguish, Hamilton saw the chances for his bill slipping away—until one fine evening in that spring of 1790.
As Jefferson later told the story, he noticed someone skulking by the front door to Washington’s grand residence on Cherry Street, seemingly unable to decide whether to knock or not. Looking closer, Jefferson saw it was Hamilton of all people, and, for Hamilton, he was extremely bedraggled. His dress was “uncouth and neglected,” Jefferson recalled. This is hard to picture, but to Jefferson the appearance may have been only metaphorical. It wasn’t really his dress but the man himself who was in tatters that night. “Somber, haggard, dejected,” he wrote of Hamilton, pounding home the adjectives. Jefferson may have felt some sympathy for his fellow secretary, struggling to move his mountain of finance. But the lines also suggest some pity, some condescension, which would have been far less welcome. Jefferson asked what was the matter, and Hamilton raged at the insufferable pettiness of legislators who would prefer to see the whole country crumble to dust rather than pass the bill that would secure its greatness forever. And then Hamilton caught himself. Perhaps Jefferson could help find a way out of this impasse? Was that possible? After all, Jefferson had many more friends on his side of the political divide than Hamilton did, starting with Madison. Could he bring some reason to this?
In due time, Jefferson invited Hamilton and Madison to his lodgings on Maiden Lane to break bread. It may have been the wine, or the cheering dinner, or the fact that Jefferson was spreading his wings over his two guests, but Hamilton managed, uncharacteristically, to set aside his frustrations with his former friend, and Madison did the same. And they reasoned together to reach the obvious. Hamilton wanted the assumption bill and Madison wanted the Potomac site. Clearly, there was room for a trade—and there was. The three men forged the deal that created the all-powerful central government that Jefferson later professed to decry, and placed the capital of it in his native Virginia. Hamilton agreed to back the capital move, and Madison would put his weight behind the assumption bill. Each would produce the requisite votes for the other. Done. It was Hamilton’s last piece of cooperation with Jefferson or with Madison.
In his later years, Jefferson always regretted his part in the scheme, claiming he’d been “duped” by the secretary of the treasury into passing a bill that led to the ruination of the country by financial interests, and his irritation may have caused him to play Hamilton as pitiable, as if there were no other reason he’d get involved in something so heinous. If it did happen this way, it was ironic that a display of weakness should bring Hamilton the greatest victory of his political life.
But, of course, the deal made Jefferson, too. A powerful central government, built on debt, crawling with speculators—this gave Jefferson a monolith to inveigh against.
TWENTY-SEVEN
And We Had a Bank
AFTER HIS SUCCESS with assumption, Hamilton followed up with a system of collecting taxes, an expanded customs service, and, most audaciously, a national bank. At that point, there were only a few banks in the country, one of them the Bank of New York, which Hamilton had himself helped start several years before. The bank bill sailed through, thirty-nine votes to twenty, but it instilled a foreboding among its opponents—Madison and Jefferson foremost among them. To them, a national bank served the powerful northern commercial interests that the Republicans dismissed as vile speculators. Indeed, the prospect sent Jefferson into a frenzy, and he shot a fireball to the governor of Virginia, Henry Lee. After dismissing the US Congress as a “foreign legislature,” the secretary of state raged that if anyone in a Virginia bank cooperated with Hamilton’s new national bank, even as a cashier, that person “shall be adjudged guilty of high treason and suffer death.” Jefferson garnered some support from his fellow Virginian Attorney General Edmund Randolph and then rode to Washington’s mansion to insist he veto it as a violation of the Constitution. Although he had never endorsed the Constitution, he was, when it was convenient, a strict enforcer of its positions and believed that anything not explicitly recognized by it was forbidden. As the Constitution made no provision for a national bank, it was to Jefferson unlawful—as simple as that.
But Hamilton saw it differently, and he elaborated a novel legal theory to back him. Specifically, he discerned a “principle of intent” by which certain powers were “implied” if they were needed to enact ones that were “expressed.” Thus, if the Constitution expected the government to collect taxes, borrow money, regulate trade, and raise an army, as it did, it had to be free to create a national bank to facilitate all that. “Every power vested in a government is in its nature sovereign,” Hamilton declared, “and includes by force of the term a right to employ all the means requisite and fairly applicable to the attainment of the ends of such power.” When Washington passed Jefferson’s objections on to Hamilton, he gave his treasury secretary a week to refute them, and exactly seven days later, with Betsey his scrivener, Hamilton delivered to Washington a fifteen-thousand-word essay that answered all of Jefferson’s objections in a manner that proved to be both ingenious and irrefutable* and left Jefferson and his allies fuming to have been outmaneuvered yet again. As Betsey Hamilton recalled for a visitor years later, “He made your government,” referring to her husband. “He made your bank. I sat up all night with him to help him do it. Jefferson thought we ought not to have a bank, and President Washington thought so. My husband said, ‘We must have a bank.’ I stay[ed] up all night, copied out his writing, and the next morning he carried it to President Washington and we had a bank.”
If Washington decided otherwise, Hamilton said he’d face “the singular spectacle of a political society without sovereignty or of a people governed without government.” If Washington had been one to smile, he’d have smiled at that. He never showed Hamilton’s rebuttal to Jefferson. Instead, he signed the banking bill into law.
WHEN THE NEW Bank of the United States issued its first stock in Philadelphia on July 4, 1791, it set off a near riot of eager purchasers. The city was in a pandemonium for paper profits. “Scriptomania” it was called, referring to the wild passion for the bank stock purchased as script. Hamilton had expected the offering to sell out in a week. It went in an hour. Offered for twenty-five, the shares shot to twice that before the day was out and skied to nearly three hundred a month later. Public bonds, those investments in the national debt, also rallied. The clamor was decried by Jefferson, who saw more proof of Hamilton’s northern favoritism and of his own conviction that the South was better off without such flashy forms of commerce. Hamilton saw it as another example of the economic Niagara that was there to power American business into the future. Still, he feared this was a bubble that would soon burst. Fortunately, he had devised that a “sinking fund,” intended to pay off the national debt, double as an emergency fund to calm the markets in a panic. Sure enough, the bank securities and debt bonds both crashed resoundingly, sending alarms in every direction. Speculators were derided as “Hamilton’s Rangers” and “Paper Hunters.” In local newssheets, giddy “scriptomania” had given way to galloping “scriptophobia.” James Jackson, a Jeffersonian from Georgia, denounced the speculators as “rapacious wolves seeking whom they may devour” and accused them of draining “the gallant veteran” of the “pittance which a grateful country had afforded him in reward for
his bravery and toils.” Hamilton summoned the other directors of the sinking fund and organized massive purchases of US debt through the Bank of New York, where he had personal relationships, having founded it himself. He asked the bank’s cashier, William Seton, to buy up several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of bonds and stocks. In a matter of days both markets had stabilized. But not everyone was made whole. When events settled, it became clear that this bubble was no accident, but the work of Hamilton’s former number two at Treasury, the avaricious New Yorker William Duer. He had gathered the paltry savings of “shopkeepers, widows, orphans, Butchers, Carmen, Gardners,” according to an associate, to try to corner the bond market. His mania fed a general exuberance for bonds, and when the price tumbled, he was not the only one to fall, although his fall was by far the most dramatic. According to the Gazette of the United States, Duer’s debts reached a spectacular 1,583,000 dollars, of which he may have owed as much as 1 million to Burr’s old client, the land speculator Macomb, now languishing in debtors’ prison in Philadelphia, dubbed “the hotel with grated doors.” But Duer’s creditors were so numerous and so infuriated, it was partly for his own safety that he was removed from his house on Broadway to the New Gaol. Its upper two floors were given over to a debtors’ prison that was almost tolerable once angry mobs quit pelting the place with stones.* There were many Duers in the vigorous young Republic, and their story makes for useful commentary about the exact nature of the élan vital that powered the Hamilton economy. Its zest could easily overwhelm its restraints. Burr was not the only one who required a governor.
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 23
