Alexander Hamilton

by Chernow, Ron

  At a meeting with Jay and Federalist senators and in a follow-up memo prepared for Washington, Hamilton sketched out Jay’s instructions as envoy, making him the primary architect of the treaty that was to result. In addition to compensation, Hamilton wanted a settlement of outstanding issues from the 1783 peace treaty. The most controversial item on his agenda, however, was the forging of a new commercial alliance in which each nation would receive “most favored nation status” from the other—that is, the lowest possible duties on goods they traded with each other. Presumably, this would increase the volume of trade between the two countries. After some modification, Hamilton’s instructions were adopted by the cabinet as Jay’s marching orders. In frequent meetings with Jay before his departure, Hamilton made clear that he did not want to coddle the British. On the contrary, because of the outrage voiced by the American people, Hamilton wanted Jay to be tough and demand “substantial indemnification.”18 At the same time, he wanted Jay to woo the British with a compelling vision of the advantages of closer AngloAmerican ties.

  On May 12, a thousand New Yorkers cheered from the docks as Jay sailed to England, hoping to avert war. Notwithstanding Republican fears, Washington and Hamilton trod the fine line of neutrality that summer. The U.S. government protested renewed attempts by French privateers to seek asylum in American ports while building up American military strength in case of war with Britain. Washington gave orders to construct six frigates—the birth of the U.S. Navy—and Hamilton negotiated contracts for many naval components: cannon, shot and shells, iron ballast, sailcloth, live oak and cedar, and saltpeter for gunpowder.

  Republicans watched Jay’s mission with grave doubts. Madison had a nagging intuition that Jay would surrender too much to England and rupture FrancoAmerican relations. The Republican press clung to the malicious fantasy that Jay would negotiate the sale of America back to the British monarchy. There were fresh rumors to boot that Hamilton was involved in a nefarious plot to make the duke of Kent, the fourth son of King George III, the new king of the United States. This prompted one Republican wag to opine that the royal family should adopt Alexander Hamilton to sire a new line in America. With Hamilton’s well-known attraction to the ladies, the British monarchy would never need to worry about a shortage of heirs in America.

  ... Even as the repression in France acquired a terrible new ferocity, Republicans could not shed their warm, fraternal attachment to the French Revolution. However upset by gory deeds committed in the name of liberty, Madison was heartened when Joseph Fauchet, Citizen Genêt’s successor as French minister, declared “the revolution firm as a rock.”19 Jefferson still gazed at France through rose-colored glasses that magically transformed horrific events into a fresco of glowing colors. “I am convinced they will triumph completely,” he said in May 1794 and blamed the excesses not on the French but on “invading tyrants” who had dared “to embroil them in such wickedness.” Far from being repelled by bloodshed, Jefferson awaited the day when “kings, nobles, and priests” would be packed off to “scaffolds which they have been so long deluging with blood.”20 By early summer 1794, that blood ran in rivers, and executions in Paris reached a monstrous toll of nearly eight hundred per month. Nevertheless, when Jefferson’s protégé James Monroe arrived in France, he embraced the president of the National Assembly and, to Jay’s dismay, lauded the “heroic valor” of French troops.21

  Where Jefferson dismissed these wholesale killings as regrettable but necessary sacrifices to freedom, Hamilton was traumatized by them. The burgeoning atheism of the French Revolution reawakened in him religious feelings that had lain dormant since King’s College days. “The very existence of a Deity has been questioned and in some instances denied,” he wrote in alarm about French attacks on Christianity. “The duty of piety has been ridiculed, the perishable nature of man asserted, and his hopes bounded to the short span of his earthly state. Death has been proclaimed an eternal sleep.”22 For Hamilton, the French Revolution had become a compendium of heretical doctrines, including the notion that morality could exist without religion or that human nature could be so refined by revolution that “government itself will become useless and society will subsist and flourish free from its shackles.”23

  Hamilton somehow managed to be worldly without having seen the world. He kept abreast of occurrences in France by subscribing to French newspapers and periodicals, and he polished his French through a Philadelphia tutor, M. Dornat. Equally important, he obtained eyewitness accounts of the French Revolution from the exodus of largely aristocratic refugees who flocked to America. At its peak, this refugee flood was so huge that one in every ten Philadelphians was French; one exile christened the capital “the French Noah’s Ark.”24 Hamilton felt at home among these elegant, reform-minded aristocrats. “Mr. Hamilton spoke French fluently and, as we did not sympathize with the revolutionists who drove the exiles from their homes, he was a favorite with many of the cultivated émigrés,” Eliza recalled.25 “He was small, with an extremely composed bearing, unusually small eyes, and something a little furtive in his glance,” Moreau de St. Méry said of Hamilton. “He spoke French, but quite incorrectly. He had a great deal of ready wit, kept a close watch over himself, and was...extremely brave.”26 Nobody else ever faulted Hamilton’s French. Another émigré, Madame de la Tour du Pin, said of Hamilton, “Although he had never been in Europe, he spoke our language like a Frenchman.”27

  Many French aristocrats were directed to Hamilton by Angelica Church, who had entertained them at her bountiful London table. She steered to him the vicomte de Noailles, Lafayette’s brother-in-law, who had formed part of the brotherhood at Yorktown and knew Hamilton well. Like other refugees, de Noailles had been hopeful at the inception of the French Revolution, then recoiled in horror as it veered toward violence. Church also referred the duc de La RochefoucauldLiancourt to Hamilton. An enlightened aristocrat and social reformer who had set up a model farm and two factories, the melancholy duke had tried to protect the king from mobs in 1792 before seeking safety in England. In Philadelphia, he grew to adore Hamilton. “Mr. Hamilton is one of the finest men in America, at least of those I have seen,” he later wrote. “He has breadth of mind and even genuine clearness in his ideas, facility in their expression, information on all points, cheerfulness, excellence of character, and much amiability.”28 Whatever his carping about the French, Hamilton invariably managed to charm them.

  Most French refugees were in desperate straits, having suffered steep declines in status and wealth. Once well-to-do Frenchmen now scraped out livings by giving French lessons, becoming cooks, or opening small stores. “I wish I was a Croesus,” Hamilton told Angelica Church. “I might then afford solid consolations to these children of adversity and how delightful it would be to do so. But now, sympathy, kind words, and occasionally a dinner are all I can contribute.”29 Both Alexander and Eliza Hamilton had a special feeling for the dispossessed and helped to raise money for indigent French émigrés. Beginning in 1793, Hamilton, touched as usual by the plight of distressed women, kept lists of French mothers marooned with their children in America. On one list, he wrote: “1 Madame Le Grand with two children lives near the little market at the house of Mr. Peter French hatter in the greatest indigence 2 Madame Gauvin second street North No. 83 with three children equally destitute.” On the attached donor list, the biggest contributor stood out plainly: “Eliza Hamilton—20 dollars.”30 Eliza sent off bundles of food and clothing to refugee families, showing an activism that previewed her later dedication to the cause of widows and orphans in New York City.

  Of all the French expatriates stranded in Philadelphia, none cut a more memorable figure than a French diplomat of unflappable composure who walked with a clubfoot from a childhood fall and who dissected the world with a sardonic eye: Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, better known as Talleyrand. On the eve of the Revolution, the king had named him bishop of Autun, a reward for managing church finances, not for superior spirituality, but he did
not allow the appointment to slow down his dissolute life. Gouverneur Morris described Talleyrand as “sly, cool, cunning, and ambitious.”31 He had an acerbic wit, and given his legions of enemies, he needed it. Mirabeau, the French revolutionary politician, once observed of Talleyrand that he “would sell his soul for money and he would be right, for he would be exchanging dung for gold.”32 Napoleon expressed this sentiment more concisely, calling Talleyrand “a pile of shit in a silk stocking.”33

  A man for all political seasons, Talleyrand had initially hoped the French Revolution would create a dynamic new state, based on law, order, and sound finance. He stuck with the Revolution until September 1792, when the overthrow of Louis XVI and the attendant massacres eliminated his last hopes. He sat out the subsequent Terror in England and was condemned in absentia for conspiring with the king. British Conservatives snubbed him, but he was welcomed by the opposition Whigs, led by Charles James Fox, and by the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the same social circle inhabited by John and Angelica Church.

  In January 1794, Talleyrand, informed that he had five days to leave England or face deportation, decided to join other stateless émigrés in Philadelphia. The Churches subsidized the trip, and Angelica smoothed the way for Talleyrand and his traveling companion, the chevalier de Beaumetz, by writing to Eliza and introducing the two gentlemen as martyrs for “the cause of moderate liberty....To your care, dear Eliza, I commit these interesting strangers. They are a loan I make you till I return to America, not to reclaim my friends entirely, but to share their society with you and dear Alexander the amiable.”34

  Angelica regretted that Eliza did not speak French nor Talleyrand English. Talleyrand’s linguistic isolation in America made Hamilton’s fluency an advantage. After Talleyrand arrived in April, Hamilton sounded out Washington discreetly about receiving him. Talleyrand himself ruled out an unofficial meeting. “If I cannot enter the front door,” he declared, “I will not go in the back.”35 Talleyrand was still a pariah in revolutionary France, and Joseph Fauchet warned his Parisian superiors of “an infernal plan” being hatched by Talleyrand and Beaumetz, with Hamilton acting as their confederate. Fauchet let Washington know that France frowned upon his receiving Talleyrand, and the president declined a meeting, lest it cause a stir among his Republican detractors. “My wish is...to avoid offence to powers with whom we are in friendship by conduct towards their proscribed citizens which would be disagreeable to them,” Washington told Hamilton, suggesting that private citizens take up the social burden of greeting Talleyrand.36

  Talleyrand soon acquired a mulatto mistress, whom he squired openly through the Philadelphia streets. This bothered some priggish souls in polite society but not Hamilton, although Eliza may have been less forgiving. “He was notoriously misshapen, lame in one foot, his manners far from elegant, the tone of his voice was disagreeable, and in dress he was slovenly,” she remembered as an old woman. “Mr. Hamilton saw much of him and while he admired the shrewd diplomat for his great intellectual endowments, he detested his utter lack of principle. He had no conscience.”37 Since Fauchet was already convinced that Hamilton was in league with Talleyrand, Hamilton suffered no political penalties in meeting with him. He and Talleyrand became companions with a mutual fascination, if not close friends.

  During his two-year sojourn in America, Talleyrand cherished his time with Hamilton and left some remarkable tributes for posterity: “I consider Napoleon, Fox, and Hamilton the three greatest men of our epoch and, if I were forced to decide between the three, I would give without hesitation the first place to Hamilton. He divined Europe.”38 Of Hamilton he told one American travel writer that “he had known nearly all the marked men of his time, but that he had never known one on the whole equal to him.”39 Hamilton savored the roguish diplomat’s company and gave him, as a token of esteem, an oval miniature portrait of himself.

  Hamilton and Talleyrand were both hardheaded men, disgusted with the utopian dreams of their more fanciful, radical compatriots. As one Talleyrand biographer put it, “They were both passionately interested in politics and both of them looked at politics from a realistic standpoint and despised sentimental twaddle whether it poured from the lips of a Robespierre or of a Jefferson.”40 Both men wanted to create strong nation-states, led by powerful executive branches, and both wanted to counter an aversion to central banks and stock markets. Oddly, Talleyrand agreed with Hamilton that Britain, not France, could best supply America with the long-term credit and industrial products it needed. Talleyrand recalled vividly how Hamilton asserted a passionate faith in America’s economic destiny. In their talks, Hamilton said that he foresaw “the day when—and it is perhaps not very remote—great markets, such as formerly existed in the old world, will be established in America.”41 Talleyrand confessed to only one complaint about Hamilton: that he was overly enamored of the grand personages of the day and took too little notice of Eliza’s beauty.

  Talleyrand was grateful to Angelica Church for having opened the door to the Hamilton home, and he informed her of Eliza’s kindness and Hamilton’s unique mind and manners. This elicited from her a remarkable letter to Eliza about the man who had so long mesmerized them both. Angelica Church came close to an outright admission that she was more than just entranced by Hamilton. Socially ambitious, she had always dreamed of political glory for her brother-in-law and now gave full-throated expression to her adoration of him and her hopes for his future.

  I have a letter, my dear Eliza, from my worthy friend M. de Talleyrand, who expresses to me his gratitude for an introduction to you and my Amiable. By my Amiable, you know that I mean your husband, for I love him very much and, if you were as generous as the old Romans, you would lend him to me for a little while. But do not be jealous, my dear Eliza, since I am more solicitous to promote his laudable ambition than any person in the world, and there is no summit of true glory which I do not desire he may attain, provided always that he pleases to give me a little chit-chat and sometimes to say, I wish our dear Angelica was here....Ah! Bess! you were a lucky girl to get so clever and so good a companion.42

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE WICKED INSURGENTS OF THE WEST

  After being exculpated by the House investigating committee in late May 1794, Hamilton had informed George Washington that he would not resign after all, citing the prospect of war. In the end, he did go to war, not

  against European powers but against American frontier settlers. The Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania that year was an armed protest against the excise tax on domestic distilled spirits—the “whiskey tax,” in common lingo—that Hamilton had enacted as part of his funding system. It may qualify as the first “sin tax” in American history, for in Federalist number 12, Hamilton had written reprovingly of liquor, “There is perhaps nothing so much a subject of national extravagance as these spirits.”1

  The whiskey tax was doomed to be unpopular, inevitably reminding Americans of the Stamp Act and the whole hated apparatus of British tax collecting. Nonetheless, the tax constituted the second largest source of federal revenues and was indispensable to Hamilton. If deprived of that crucial tax, he would have to raise tariffs, which would encourage more smuggling and tax evasion and spur commercial retaliation abroad. The government also needed money to finance military expeditions against the Indians—expeditions that were especially popular in the affected frontier communities, such as those of western Pennsylvania.

  Shortly after the whiskey tax was passed, federal collectors were shunned, tarred, feathered, blindfolded, and whipped. In May 1792, Hamilton had tried to pacify opponents by lowering the rates, but this conciliatory action did not appease them. That summer, Philip Freneau printed inflammatory letters that likened Hamilton’s taxes to those imposed arbitrarily under British rule: “The government of the United States, in all things wishing to imitate the corrupt principles of the court of Great Britain, has commenced the disgraceful career by an excise law.”2 In August 1792, embodying Hamilton’s worst
nightmare of mob rule, protesters terrorized Captain William Faulkner, who had rented his house to a whiskey-tax inspector, Colonel John Neville. Hamilton received hair-raising reports of the incident: “They drew a knife on him, threatened to scalp him, tar and feather him, and finally to reduce his house and property to ashes if he did not solemnly promise them to prevent the office of inspection from being there.”3 The next day, thirty armed men on horseback, their faces blackened, burst into Faulkner’s house, hoping to seize and throttle Neville.

  Around this time, a mass meeting in Pittsburgh tried to lend a patina of legitimacy to this open lawlessness. The gathering’s clerk was a Swiss-born member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, Albert Gallatin, who had taught French at Harvard and spoke with an unmistakable Gallic accent. A tall, skinny man with a narrow face and hooked nose, Gallatin was a notoriously slovenly character. It was probably Gallatin who drafted a resolution saying the protesters would persist in every “legal measure that may obstruct the operation of the [excise] law until we are able to obtain its total repeal.” In the meantime, tax collectors would be treated with the “contempt they deserve.”4 Gallatin later portrayed his part in this meeting as “my only political sin,” but Hamilton had a long memory for such transgressions.5 Moreover, as we have seen, when sworn in as a U.S. senator in late 1793, Gallatin had quickly emerged as an unremitting Hamilton critic.