Alexander Hamilton (97 page)

Four days after confronting his Jay Treaty foes in the streets, Hamilton took to the public prints. Republicans had chipped away at the treaty behind Roman names— whether Robert R. Livingston writing as “Cato” or Brockholst Livingston as “Decius” and “Cinna”—and Hamilton commenced a ferocious counterattack called “The Defence.” Over a period of nearly six months, he published twenty-eight glittering essays, strengthening his claim as arguably the foremost political pamphleteer in American history. As with
The Federalist Papers,
“The Defence” spilled out at a torrid pace, sometimes two or three essays per week. In all, Hamilton poured forth nearly one hundred thousand words even as he kept up a full-time legal practice. This compilation, dashed off in the heat of controversy, was to stand as yet another magnum opus in his canon.

Like
The Federalist,
“The Defence” was conceived as a collaboration. Hamilton planned to handle the first section of the Jay Treaty, which dealt with violations of the 1783 peace treaty, writing twenty-eight articles in all. Rufus King contributed another ten on the commercial and maritime articles. Governor Jay stayed in touch with both men but refrained from adding to their output. “Jay was also to have written a concluding peroration,” John Adams told Abigail, “but being always a little lazy, and perhaps concluding that it might be most politic to keep his name out of it, and perhaps finding that the work was already well done, he neglected it. This I have from King’s own mouth.”
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Hamilton employed a daring strategy used before, publishing the first twenty-one essays deep in enemy territory: the pages of
The Argus,
which had printed Robert R. Livingston’s “Cato” essays. For his nom de guerre, Hamilton picked “Camillus,” from Plutarch’s
Lives.
This Roman general was a perfect symbol: a wise, virtuous man who was sorely misunderstood by his people, who did not see that he had their highest interests at heart. The fearless Camillus expressed unpalatable truths and was finally exiled for his candor. He was vindicated when he was recalled from banishment to rescue his city, which was endangered by the Gauls. The choice of pen name tells us much about how Hamilton viewed himself and what he perceived as a lack of appreciation by his fellow citizens.

As usual, Hamilton wrote like a man possessed, showing drafts to James Kent, who marveled that even under deadline pressure Hamilton did not stint on scholarship: “Several of the essays of
Camillus
were communicated to me before they were printed and my attention was attracted ...to the habit of thorough, precise, and authentic research which accompanied all his investigations. He was not content, for instance, with examining Grotius and taking him as an authority in any other than the original Latin.”
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In his first essay on July 22, Hamilton attacked the motives of the Jay Treaty opponents—what he saw as their desire to subvert the Constitution, embroil the United States in war on France’s side, and install one of their own as president: “There are three persons prominent in the public eye as the successor of the actual president of the United States in the event of his retreat from the station: Mr. Adams, Mr. Jay, Mr. Jefferson.”
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By discrediting the treaty, Hamilton averred, Republican critics hoped to destroy Jay as a presidential candidate. Since Adams was also a Federalist, Hamilton clearly implied that the hue and cry over the treaty was a stratagem to further Jefferson’s presidential ambitions. Interestingly enough, after reading this first issue, Washington wrote an approving note from Mount Vernon: “To judge of this work from the first number, which I have seen, I augur well of the performance, and shall expect to see the subject handled in a clear, distinct, and satisfactory manner.”
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Washington had complained of the treaty being distorted by “tortured interpretation” and “abominable misrepresentations,” and so Hamilton reviewed each article in turn.
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First, however, he wanted to address the larger political context. The specter of war with Britain was real, and Hamilton dreaded the demolition of his economic program. “Our trade, navigation, and mercantile capital would be essentially destroyed” if war came, he warned.
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He excoriated the Republicans as “our war party” and pleaded that the young nation required an interval of peace. The United States was “the embryo of a great empire,” and the European powers, if given half a chance, would happily stamp out this republican experiment: “If there be a foreign power, which sees with envy or ill will our growing prosperity, that power must discern that our infancy is the time for clipping our wings.”
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Better to negotiate than to engage in premature war with England. In the “Defence” essays, we see the restrained, pacific side of Hamilton, who turned to war only as a last resort in case of direct aggression or national humiliation.

Hamilton was not content to write as Camillus alone. Two days after his second essay appeared, he began to publish, in the same paper, a parallel series as “Philo Camillus.” For several weeks, Philo Camillus indulged in extravagant praise of Camillus and kept up a running attack on their Republican adversaries. The prolific Hamilton was now writing pseudonymous commentaries on his own pseudonymous essays. He also tossed in two trenchant essays under the name “Horatius” in which he accused Jeffersonians of “a servile and criminal subserviency to the views of France.”
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During this frenetic period, Hamilton found time to stop by political gatherings. At one meeting at the Assembly Room on William Street, he warned his followers that “unless the treaty was ratified, we might expect a
foreign war,
and if it is ratified, we might expect a
civil war.
”
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Hamilton was not alone in worrying that civil turmoil could erupt. From Philadelphia, Treasury Secretary Wolcott reported, “I think we shall have no dangerous riots, but one month will determine the fate of our country.”
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In the third “Defence,” Hamilton portrayed his opponents in the blackest colors: “If we suppose them sincere, we must often pity their ignorance; if insincere, we must abhor the spirit of deception which it betrays.”
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Contrary to his usual image, Hamilton paid homage to the ability of the common people to resist such deceptions and said that they would disappoint those “who, treating them as children, fancy that sugar plums and toys will be sufficient to gain their confidence and attachment.”
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In reviewing the 1783 peace treaty, Hamilton noted that the Jay Treaty would create a bilateral commission to arbitrate disputes over debt, the British seizure of American ships, and the boundaries between America and Canada. He claimed that the only article that Britain refused to honor was payment of compensation for nearly three thousand former slaves, and he thought it foolish to risk the treaty over this issue. This uncompromising abolitionist wrote that “the abandonment of negroes, who had been promised freedom, to bondage and slavery would be odious and immoral.”
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Hamilton also made the courageous but still taboo argument that the United States as well as England had violated the peace treaty. As to whether the Jay Treaty would create an “alliance” with Great Britain, Hamilton described this as “an insult to the understandings of the people to call it by such a name.”
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He was being disingenuous, however, when he said that the treaty would not bind the United States more closely to Great Britain and suggested that a commercial treaty lacked political implications. There was a deeply emotional coloring to Hamilton’s pro-British views that he could not admit and that often clashed with his image as the cool-eyed exponent of Realpolitik. In much the same way, his detestation of France was fueled by moral outrage as well as a sober assessment of U.S. interests. Madison was certain that the treaty would undercut U.S. neutrality: “I dread in the ratification . . . an immediate rupture with France....I dread a war with France as a signal for a civil war at home.”
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Critics said that Jay had given away everything in his treaty and gotten little in return. Hamilton countered that Britain had made significant concessions, modifying her old “system of colonial monopoly and exclusion” and granting concessions to America that no other country had won.
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He thought these would lead to a burst of American trading abroad. Bold, cosmopolitan, and self-confident, Hamilton thought the United States had nothing to fear from commercial engagement with the rest of the planet. “The maxims of the U[nited] States have hitherto favoured a free intercourse with all the world,” he wrote. “They have conceived that they had nothing to fear from the unrestrained competition of commercial enterprise and have only desired to be admitted to it upon equal terms.”
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By the time Hamilton completed eight “Defence” and three “Philo Camillus” essays, President Washington had signed the Jay Treaty in mid-August 1795 despite a steady drumbeat of press criticism. At first the treaty’s prospects had looked poor, but the American economy was booming from British trade while French trade had dropped by more than half since the Bastille was stormed in 1789. With the treaty approved, Hamilton did not rest his pen. If anything, its passage gave his “Defence” essays extra weight as an authoritative exposition.

Hamilton had become the treaty’s undisputed champion. Fisher Ames thought he was so far superior to his Republican critics that he had squandered his talents in writing “The Defence”: “Jove’s eagle holds his bolts in his talons and hurls them, not at the Titans, but at sparrows and mice.”
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Though of a different political persuasion, Jefferson agreed that the Republicans had provided no effective antidote to Hamilton’s poison. It was a difficult time for Jefferson, who was suffering from rheumatism at Monticello. He was reading the “Defence” series, forwarded to him by John Beckley, with mounting upset. He feared that Hamilton was winning the argument, and by September 21 he could stand it no longer. Once again, he turned to Madison as his proxy. In so doing, Jefferson gave voice to the sheer terror that Hamilton’s intellect inspired in him and paid his foe one of the supreme lefthanded tributes in American history. He told Madison:

Hamilton is really a colossus to the anti-republican party. Without numbers, he is an host [i.e., an army or multitude] within himself. They have got themselves into a defile, where they might be finished. But too much security on the Republican part will give time to his talents and indefatigableness to extricate them. We have had only middling performances to oppose to him. In truth, when he comes forward, there is nobody but yourself who can meet him.
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Before Jefferson requested his aid, Madison had been cocky in his critique of Hamilton’s performance, stating that “Camillus...if I mistake not will be betrayed by his anglomany into arguments as vicious and vulnerable as the treaty itself.”
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Now that Jefferson asked him to rebut those arguments, Madison beat a hasty retreat from the challenge.

While Madison shrank from verbal jousting with Hamilton, he continued to wage a vigorous legislative campaign against the Jay Treaty. He did so by pouncing upon an interpretation of the Constitution so unorthodox as to provoke a full-blown constitutional crisis. Back in the distant days when they had coauthored
The Federalist Papers,
Madison and Hamilton had jointly explained why the Constitution gave the Senate—with its long terms, learned members, and institutional memory— the sole power to ratify treaties. Now Madison found it expedient to argue that approval of the Jay Treaty fell within the bailiwick of the House of Representatives as well, because it had the power to regulate commerce. Of this astonishing proposition, biographer Garry Wills has noted that it was more than a “loose construction” of the Constitution: “It amounted to reversal of its plain sense.”
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Once upon a time, Jefferson had applauded the notion that the populist House would retain power over money matters while foreign affairs would be assigned to the more patrician Senate. Eager to scotch the treaty, he now altered his position: “I trust the popular branch of our legislature will disapprove of it and thus rid us of this infamous act.”
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Hamilton considered the legislative threat to the Jay Treaty as tantamount to a House veto—something that would fundamentally alter the balance of power in the American system. Fortunately, Hamilton was in an excellent position to resume his protreaty crusade. Rufus King had just completed his “Defence” essays dealing with the commercial side of the treaty, allowing Hamilton to cap the series by tackling the new constitutional issues. In early January, he devoted the last two essays of “The Defence” to exposing the absurdity of letting the House scrap a treaty. If such a precedent was established, the “president, with the advice and consent of the Senate, can make neither a treaty of commerce nor alliance and rarely, if at all, a treaty of peace. It is probable that, on minute analysis, there is scarcely any species of treaty which would not clash, in some particular, with the principle of those objections.”
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If Madison’s novel argument stood, the federal government would be unable to manage relations with foreign countries and would have to cede such authority to a squabbling, pontificating Congress.

The young country seemed to face another clash on basic governance issues, another battle over the true meaning of the Constitution. Led by Madison, the Republicans seemed willing to hazard all to kill the treaty. John Adams told Abigail that the “business of the country . . . stands still.... [A]ll is absorbed by the debates.” If the Republicans remained “desperate and unreasonable,” he warned, “this Constitution cannot stand....I see nothing but a dissolution of government and immediate war.”
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Under the shadow of this impasse, business slowed, prices fell, and imports declined.

In pushing the treaty, the major asset that the Federalists possessed was still George Washington, the unifying figure in American life. For Jefferson, Federalism was a spent force sustained only by the president’s unique stature. Hence, Republicans decided that the time had come to shatter the taboo about criticizing Washington, and they declared open season on him. Once again, the Republican press drew a facile equation between executive power and the British monarchy. On December 26, 1795, Philip Freneau wrote that Washington wanted to enact the Jay Treaty to elevate himself to a king: “His
wishes
(through the treaty) will be gratified with a hereditary monarchy and a House of Lords.”
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This sort of vicious abuse, once reserved for Alexander Hamilton, was now directed at the venerable Washington. The president heard rumors that Jefferson was leading a whispering campaign that portrayed him as a senile old bumbler and easy prey for Hamilton and his monarchist conspirators. Jefferson kept denying to Washington that he was the source of such offensive remarks. Joseph Ellis has commented, however, “The historical record makes it perfectly clear, to be sure, that Jefferson
was
orchestrating the campaign of vilification, which had its chief base of operations in Virginia and its headquarters at Monticello.”
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