Alexander Hamilton (60 page)

The abolitionist petitions were referred to a House committee. When this group reported back in March, it cited the twenty-year grace period for the slave trade adopted by the Constitutional Convention, meaning that Congress lacked authority to eliminate the slave trade before 1808, much less to emancipate the slaves. Whether from reluctant pragmatism or outright cowardice, abolition was now officially dead. After the House committee report, Madison, who had just masterminded the Bill of Rights, told Edmund Randolph that the south should bury the slavery issue with benign neglect. “The true policy of the Southern members,” he wrote approvingly, “was to let the affair proceed with as little noise as possible.”
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Madison was torn between intellectual sympathy for abolitionism and fear of irate southern reactions. Whether or not he was more motivated by a desire to save the union than to preserve slavery, his views would increasingly be colored by personal and regional self-interest as he curried favor with his Virginia constituents.

Tabling the slavery issue had been a precondition of union in 1787 and now again in 1790. Though a passionate slavery critic, Hamilton knew that this inflammatory issue could wreck the union. He couldn’t be both the supreme nationalist
and
the supreme abolitionist. He certainly couldn’t push through his controversial funding program if he stirred up the slavery question, which was probably a futile battle anyway. So this man of infinite opinions grew mute on that all-important matter, though he may have taken a secret swipe at slaveholders the following year. Historian Philip Marsh has argued that Hamilton, using the pen name “Civis” in a newspaper piece of February 23, 1791, penned the following telling sarcasm to Madison and Jefferson: “As to the negroes, you must be tender upon that subject.... Who talk most about liberty and equality ...? Is it not those who hold the bill of rights in one hand and a whip for affrighted slaves in the other?”
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If Hamilton wrote this, he was updating a gibe by the English radical Thomas Day, who had written in 1776, “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independence with the one hand and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”
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The bipartisan decision to shelve the slavery issue had profound repercussions for Hamilton’s economic measures, for it spared the southern economy from criticism. In the 1790s, America’s critical energies were trained exclusively on the northern economy and the financial and manufacturing system devised by Hamilton. This became immediately apparent in the heated debate over his funding system, which allowed southern slaveholders to proclaim that northern financiers were the evil ones and that slaveholders were the virtuous populists, upright men of the soil. It was testimony to the political genius of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison that they diverted attention from the grisly realities of southern slavery by casting a lurid spotlight on Hamilton’s system as the paramount embodiment of evil. They inveighed against the concentrated wealth of northern merchants when southern slave plantations clearly represented the most heinous form of concentrated wealth. Throughout the 1790s, planters posed as the tribunes of small farmers and denounced the depravity of stocks, bonds, banks, and manufacturing—the whole wicked apparatus of Hamiltonian capitalism.

When Congress returned to Hamilton’s
Report on Public Credit
in March, after debating the abolitionist petitions, many southerners seemed more outraged over the powers that Hamilton planned to give the federal government. If the treasury secretary welded the states into a strong union through his assumption plan, might not that strengthen the federal power to meddle with slavery? And did it therefore not behoove the south to resist Hamilton’s plan and shore up states’ rights? The extent of southern ire that spring was shown dramatically in the erratic behavior of Aedanus Burke. Burke had a shock of thick, white hair, a long, pointed nose, and a piercing gaze that expressed his fiery nature. That spring, he found himself in a political bind because he supported Hamilton’s assumption program even though many of his southern constituents opposed it.

To reclaim his political reputation, Burke pounced on a clever diversionary tactic. On March 31, 1790, he launched a tirade in the House against the July 4 eulogy that Hamilton had pronounced on General Nathanael Greene nine months earlier. From that speech, he plucked the line in which Hamilton referred to the militias as “the mimickry of soldiership.” Burke found this reference insulting and countered that many southern militiamen had “sacrificed their lives at the holy altar of liberty. Their graves are to be seen scattered over our glades and woodlands, they are now no more.”
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Then casting his eyes on the visitors’ gallery—since it was packed with pretty ladies, he supposed Hamilton sat among them—he blasted the treasury secretary in language that crossed the boundaries of political decorum: “In the face of this Assembly and in the presence of this gallery ...I give the lie to Col. Hamilton.”
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This blatant affront was so shocking that congressmen interrupted Burke’s outburst with loud calls for order.

Their main reason for alarm was that Burke, in branding Hamilton a liar, had violated his
personal
sense of honor. Like many contemporary politicians, Hamilton still inhabited two worlds: the modern world of constitutional law and the old feudal order based on honor and dignity. Unless retracted, any direct challenge to one’s honor had to be settled outside the legal realm on the field of honor—the dueling ground. Senator William Maclay, who had stopped by the House to eavesdrop on the debate, noted in his diary “a violent personal attack on Hamilton by Judge Burke of South Carolina, which the men of the blade say must produce a duel.”
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Some observers didn’t take seriously Burke’s insulting behavior. William Loughton Smith contended that Burke’s “mode of speaking and his roughness only excite laughter.”
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Hamilton, however, wasn’t laughing. Some members of the legislature did not yet know his irrepressible pugnacity or how fiercely he guarded his reputation. Fisher Ames observed that no man, “not the Roman Cato himself, was more inflexible on every point that touched, or only seemed to touch, integrity and honour” than Hamilton.
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When Smith discussed the imbroglio with him, Hamilton drew a distinction between criticism of his policies and his person: “He said he should at all times disregard any observations applied to his public station as Secretary of the Treasury, but that
this
was not to be passed over.”
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Smith also noted that Burke was “amazingly intimate” with Governor George Clinton and reportedly courting one of his daughters. “Clinton hates Hamilton mortally and has probably set on Burke,” he conjectured.
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The very next day, Hamilton sent off a short, heated letter to Burke. He claimed that the quote from the eulogy had been taken out of context and that the full sentence claimed that General Greene was “embarrassed by small fugitive bodies of volunteer militia,
the mimickry of soldiership.
” He had made a statement not about the South Carolina militia, but about irregular volunteers in the north: “Having thus, Sir, stated the matter in its true light, it remains for you to judge what conduct, in consequence of the explanation, will be proper on your part.”
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Before the day was out, Burke replied to Hamilton in a manner that ratcheted up the pressure. In a letter designed for consumption back home, Burke lauded the bravery of the southern militias. He knew that he had to explain why he had waited nine months to broadcast his charges. To have done so at the time, he told Hamilton, “would have been downright madness,” given Hamilton’s popularity.
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In the charged political atmosphere of the moment, the dispute now festered, and factions formed around the principals. “The town is much agitated about a duel between Burke and Hamilton,” Maclay reported. “So many people concerned in the business may really make the fools fight.”
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A party of six congressmen arbitrated an end to the dispute by securing two letters: one from Hamilton in which he insisted that he meant no dishonor to the southern militias, and a second from Burke in which he accepted this statement and apologized to Hamilton. It was all artfully orchestrated according to the unspoken rules of “affairs of honor.” The uproar backfired on Burke, who found himself demoted in influence.

The affair wasn’t altogether a victory for Hamilton. In his memorial speech for General Greene, he had taken gratuitous swipes at southern soldiers and had not paid sufficient attention to the pieties of democratic politics. Burke made him feel the sting of public opinion; it wasn’t the last time Hamilton paid a price for needless indiscretion. The contretemps again demonstrated that beneath his invincible facade, Hamilton was still the hypersensitive boy from the West Indies. His combativeness was always more than just political calculation, for he brooded obsessively about slights to his honor. This supreme rationalist, who feared the passions of the mob more than any other founder, was himself a man of deep and often ungovernable emotions.
SIXTEEN

n March 1, 1790, with Hamilton engulfed in conflict over his funding scheme, Thomas Jefferson set out from Monticello to assume his duties as the new secretary of state. He had sailed from Paris in October 1789,

ending a five-year stint as American minister to France. Only when his ship docked in Norfolk, Virginia, in late November did he discover Washington’s letter asking him to take the cabinet post. The Senate, still in its trusting infancy, had confirmed the nominee before he knew about the offer. Where the hyperthyroid Hamilton jumped at his assignment and sprang quickly into action, Jefferson dithered through the winter about taking the State Department job and did not accept until midFebruary 1790.

Similarly, as Hamilton, Madison, and Jay had defended the Constitution in
The Federalist,
Jefferson had vacillated about America’s new charter. At moments, he sounded as if he would have preferred a patched-up version of the Articles of Confederation. “There are very good articles in it and very bad,” he declared of the new charter from Paris. “I do not know which predominate.”
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He confided to Madison that he liked the government’s division into three branches but voiced grave doubts about his favorite bogeyman: executive power. In Philadelphia, Hamilton had espoused a lifetime president on good behavior, while Jefferson recoiled at any president who could serve additional four-year terms. “I own I am not a friend to a very energetic government,” he told Madison. “It is always oppressive.”
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Such a man was bound to clash with Hamilton and have misgivings about serving in the new central government. When Congress first met in the spring of 1789, Jefferson was still equivocating about the Constitution. Asked whether he was a federalist or antifederalist, Jefferson evaded the issue and expressed opposition to all party labels. “Therefore I protest to you that I am not of the party of the federalists,” he explained to Francis Hopkinson, a Pennsylvania judge and signer of the Declaration of Independence. “But I am much further from that of the antifederalists.”
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So with a multitude of reservations, Thomas Jefferson cast his lot with the new government.

In 1789, French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon executed a bust of Jefferson that shows a handsome man with a calm, self-confident air. Yet the vigilant eyes hint at someone who moved slowly, cautiously, taking everything in before acting. The tightly sealed lips convey something enigmatic beneath the patrician ease. Like Burr, Thomas Jefferson found strength in secrecy, in silence. Shy and aloof, he seldom made eye contact with listeners yet could be a warmly engaging presence among small groups of like-minded intimates. This laconic man knew how to sprinkle his conversation with brilliant aperçus that lingered in people’s minds. With his quiet charm and courtly demeanor, he had a knack for winning people over at dinner parties distinguished by good food and eight varieties of wine.

Tall, lean, and freckled, with reddish hair and hazel eyes, Jefferson had one trait that the marble bust failed to capture: his slack-jointed movements. When William Maclay met the new secretary, his slouching figure seemed to lack ministerial dignity. Maclay groused, “He sits in a lounging manner, on one hip commonly, and with one of his shoulders elevated much above the other.... [H]is whole figure has a loose, shackling air.”
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His dress was casual, almost sloppy. The folksy air charmed people and allowed Jefferson to root out their secrets. The plain dress, mild manners, and unassuming air were the perfect costume for a crafty man intent upon presenting himself as the spokesman for the common people.

With an elite pedigree on both sides of his family, Jefferson was anything but common. His father, Peter, was a tobacco planter, a judge of the court of chancery, and a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, while his mother, Jane Randolph, came from a prominent family. By the time Peter Jefferson died, he bequeathed to his children more than 60 slaves, 25 horses, 70 head of cattle, 200 hogs, and 7,500 acres; two-thirds of this bountiful legacy went to his eldest son, Thomas.

Peter Jefferson gave the boy a complete classical education. Tutored at home at age five, Jefferson went to a boarding school at age nine that afforded such thorough grounding in Greek and Latin that biographer Dumas Malone claims that for Jefferson “the heroes of antiquity were more real than either the Christian saints or modern historical figures.”
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He attended the College of William and Mary, which schooled the scions of the Virginia gentry, before being admitted to the bar. Like Hamilton, Jefferson was a fanatic for self-improvement. He rose before dawn each morning and employed every hour profitably, studying up to fifteen hours per day. Extremely systematic in his habits, Jefferson enjoyed retreating into the sheltered tranquillity of his books, and the spectrum of his interests was vast. He told his daughter, “It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.”
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Whether riding horseback, playing the violin, designing buildings, or inventing curious gadgets, Thomas Jefferson seemed adept at everything. Like many accomplished people, he was seduced by this quest for self-perfection and not easily lured into public office. The self-sufficiency and philosophic repose made him an atypical politician. He once wrote, “The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves and to suffice for our own happiness.”
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