Alexander Hamilton (100 page)

Other reasons account for Hamilton’s failure to snatch the prize. Though blessed with a great executive mind and a consummate policy maker, Hamilton could never master the smooth restraint of a mature politician. His conception of leadership was noble but limiting: the true statesman defied the wishes of the people, if necessary, and shook them from wishful thinking and complacency. Hamilton lived in a world of moral absolutes and was not especially prone to compromise or consensus building. Where Washington and Jefferson had a gift for voicing the hopes of ordinary people, Hamilton had no special interest in echoing popular preferences. Much too avowedly elitist to become president, he lacked what Woodrow Wilson defined as an essential ingredient for political leadership: “profound sympathy with those whom he leads—a sympathy which is insight—an insight which is of the heart rather than of the intellect.”
³⁶
Alexander Hamilton enjoyed no such mystic bond with the American people. This may have been why Madison was so adamant that “Hamilton
never
could have got in” as president.
³⁷

A baser reason may explain Hamilton’s reluctance to stand for the presidency. During the 1796 election, Noah Webster, then a Federalist editor, suggested in his newspaper,
The Minerva,
that Hamilton might be an appropriate presidential candidate. According to scandalmonger James T. Callender, an unnamed Republican saw this and dispatched an emissary to New York, who confronted Hamilton to “inform him that if Webster should in future print a single paragraph on that head,” the Maria Reynolds papers would instantly “be laid before the world. It is believed the message was delivered to Mr. Hamilton for the
Minerva
became silent.”
³⁸

While Hamilton knew he would not succeed Washington, he wasn’t about to play a passive role in 1796, the first contested presidential race in American history and the first dominated by parties. At the time, it was still considered crass for candidates to campaign or violate the charade of passivity, and this magnified the influence of party leaders. Madison began to agitate for Jefferson, who let his friend carry the burden. Similarly, the Federalist front-runner, John Adams, declared, “I am determined to be a silent spectator of the silly and wicked game.”
³⁹

At first, Hamilton told a correspondent that his one overriding goal was to stop Thomas Jefferson from becoming president: “All personal and partial considerations must be discarded and everything must give way to the great object of excluding Jefferson.”
⁴⁰
He even toyed with backing Patrick Henry, who had grown estranged from Virginia Republicans and might erode support for Jefferson in the south, where Federalists were weak. When Henry refused to run, Hamilton turned to another dark-horse southerner, Thomas Pinckney, a wartime hero and former governor of South Carolina, who had served as an American diplomat in Spain and England.

Hamilton’s support for Pinckney’s candidacy set him on a collision course with Adams, who regarded himself as the legitimate successor to the presidency. There was a vague understanding among Federalists that Adams would be the presidential and Pinckney the vice presidential candidate. Hamilton’s unspoken preference for Pinckney was not immediately apparent because under the old constitutional rules electors did not distinguish between their votes for president and vice president. Some Federalists planned to withhold votes from Pinckney to insure that Adams became president, leaving Hamilton with a haunting fear that Jefferson might accidentally become president or vice president. (We recall his similar fear that Washington might be denied the first presidency by accident.) As a party chieftain, Hamilton stuck to his official position that Federalist electors should cast their votes equally for Adams
and
Pinckney. This surface neutrality, however, was really a stratagem to elect Pinckney as president. Since Pinckney was the stronger candidate in the south, if he managed to tie Adams in the north, he would roll up more total votes.

Hamilton bet on the wrong horse, a mistake that would haunt the rest of his career. As treasury secretary, he had only limited contact with John Adams, who was excluded from the inner policy circle. The two men had maintained a wary distance. Hamilton later said that by the time Washington left office, “men of principal influence in the Federal party” began to “entertain serious doubts about [Adams’s] fitness” for the presidency because of his temperament. Yet Adams’s “pretensions in several respects were so strong that, after mature reflection, they thought it better to indulge their hopes than to listen to their fears.”
⁴¹

George Washington, who “consulted much, pondered much, resolved slowly, resolved surely,” was Hamilton’s ideal of presidential temperament.
⁴²
John Adams, by contrast, was fiery and dyspeptic, as volatile as Washington was steady. Hamilton contrasted Pinckney’s “far more discreet and conciliatory” personality to “the disgusting egotism, the distempered jealousy, and the ungovernable discretion” of John Adams.
⁴³
These observations, written later, probably expressed reservations that Hamilton harbored in more muted form at the time.

At first, Adams did not suspect Hamilton’s duplicity in the campaign. He told friends that Hamilton genuinely feared that his own weakness as a presidential candidate might elect Jefferson and that Hamilton supported Pinckney as an alternative only in case he himself could not win. When Jefferson wrote to warn Adams that “you may be cheated of your succession by a trick worthy [of] the subtlety of your arch-friend of New York,” Madison persuaded Jefferson not to send the letter, lest it be interpreted as a crude effort to stir up dissension among Federalists.
⁴⁴
In late December, however, Elbridge Gerry presented Adams with evidence from Aaron Burr, the self-promoting Republican favorite for vice president, that exposed Hamilton’s quiet efforts to elect Pinckney ahead of Adams. Both John and Abigail Adams were shocked. “ ‘Beware that spare Cassius’ has always occurred to me when I have seen that cock sparrow,” Abigail told her husband of Hamilton. “I have ever kept my eye on him.”

“I shall take no more notice of his puppyhood,” John replied, “but return to him the same conduct that I always did—that is, to keep him at a distance.”
⁴⁵
This was Adams’s opening volley in an unending stream of abuse against Hamilton, whom he termed “as great a hypocrite as any in the U.S. His intrigues in the election I despise.”
⁴⁶
He thought Hamilton had championed Pinckney as somebody more pliant to his own ambitions, someone who would create “an army of horse and foot with Mr. Hamilton at their head.”
⁴⁷
Madison likewise thought that Hamilton feared that someone such as Adams was “too headstrong to be a fit puppet” for his “intrigues behind the screen.”
⁴⁸
Adams’s wrath against Hamilton was understandable, but he immediately stooped to personal insults and called Hamilton a “Creole bastard.”
⁴⁹
Such scurrilous comments about Hamilton persisted throughout Adams’s presidency and inflamed the already tense situation between the two men.

On October 15, 1796, John Beckley, the House clerk, alerted James Madison to a string of essays launched under the signature “Phocion” in the
Gazette of the United States.
Beckley divined that Hamilton was the author and guessed his dual intent: to denigrate Jefferson as a presidential candidate and tepidly endorse Adams. Between October 14 and November 24, the voluble Phocion published twenty-five installments of election commentary. Although John Adams also identified Hamilton as the author, these essays have inexplicably been omitted from Hamilton’s collected papers and biographies. They are not only unmistakably Hamiltonian in style— mocking, brilliant, prolix, bombastic, sometimes hairsplitting—but also characteristic in their obsession with Jefferson and the sanguinary turmoil of the French Revolution. Hamilton made little effort to conceal his identity, quoting earlier things he had written almost verbatim—a rare case of Hamilton cannibalizing his own work. For instance, writing as Catullus on September 29, 1792, Hamilton had called Jefferson a “Caesar
coyly refusing
the proferred diadem” and said he was “tenaciously grasping the substance of imperial domination.”
⁵⁰
Now, Phocion likened Jefferson to a proto-Caesar who had “coyly refused the proffered diadem” while “tenaciously grasping the substance of imperial domination.”
⁵¹
Once again, Hamilton portrayed Jefferson as a closet voluptuary hiding behind the garb of Republican simplicity.

Phocion reviewed Jefferson’s career from the time when, as Virginia governor, he had fled from British troops. Hamilton detected similar cowardice in Jefferson’s departure from Washington’s cabinet at a moment of national danger. “How different was the conduct of the spirited and truly patriotic HAMILTON?” Hamilton asked, almost advertising his presence. “He wished to retire as much as the philosopher of Monticello. He had a large family and his little fortune was fast melting away in the expensive metropolis. But with a Roman’s spirit he declared that, much as he wished for retirement, yet he would remain at his post as long as there was any danger of his country being involved in war.”
⁵²

The Phocion essays contain the most withering critique that Hamilton ever leveled at Jefferson as a slaveholder, and they hint heavily at knowledge of the Sally Hemings affair. Visitors to Monticello noted the many light-skinned slaves in residence, especially the Hemings family. One such visitor in 1786, the comte de Volney, expressed astonishment in his journal: “But I was amazed to see children as white as I was called blacks and treated as such.”
⁵³
In theory, Jefferson could have fathered all of Sally Hemings’s children. Fawn M. Brodie has written, “Jefferson was not only not ‘distant’ from Sally Hemings but in the same house nine months before the births of each of her seven children and she conceived no children when he was not there.”
⁵⁴
Jefferson freed only two slaves in his lifetime and another five in his will, and all belonged to the Hemings family, though he excluded Sally. On her deathbed, Sally Hemings told her son Madison that he and his siblings were Jefferson’s children. In 1998, DNA tests confirmed that Jefferson (or some male in his family) had likely fathered at least one of Sally Hemings’s children, Eston. Reading between the lines of “Phocion,” one surmises that Hamilton knew all about Sally Hemings, quite possibly from Angelica Church.

In the first “Phocion” essay, Hamilton listed eight virtues claimed for Jefferson and demolished each in turn. Was Jefferson a good moral philosopher? Hamilton replied with sarcasm: “If it can be shown that he has disapproved of the
cruelties
which have stained the French revolution . . . his qualities as a good moral philosopher would be valuable ingredients in the character of the President of the United States.”
⁵⁵
Had Jefferson made discoveries in the useful arts? Hamilton drolly evoked an airy philosopher at Monticello “impaling butterflies and insects and contriving turn-about chairs
for the benefit of his fellow citizens and mankind in general.
”
⁵⁶
But Hamilton was just warming up for his real indictment of Jefferson as a hypocritical slaveholder. He observed that in
Notes on the State of Virginia,
written in the early 1780s, Jefferson had argued for emancipating Virginia’s slaves and shipping them elsewhere—“exported to some less friendly region where they might all be murdered or reduced to a more wretched state of slavery.”
⁵⁷
He ridiculed Jefferson’s pseudoscientific belief that blacks were genetically inferior to whites. In
Notes,
Jefferson had said of blacks, “They secrete less by the kidneys and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour.”
⁵⁸
Hamilton further quoted him: “The first difference which strikes us is that of colour: whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and the scarf skin [epidermis], or in the scarf skin itself. Whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood or the colour of the bile or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature and is as real as if the cause were better known to us.”
⁵⁹

Hamilton taunted Jefferson about holding contradictory beliefs on race, saying that he could not make up his mind whether slaves belonged to the human race or not, with the result that he ranked blacks as “a peculiar race of animals below
man
and above the
orangutan...
a high kind of brute hitherto undescribed.”
⁶⁰
This referred to a passage in
Notes
in which Jefferson said that blacks favored the beauty of whites over their own kind and cited “the preferences of the Orangutan for the black woman over those of his own species.”
⁶¹
(
Orangutan
also denoted the “wild man of the woods” in the Malay language.) Hamilton then touched on the subject that he must have known Jefferson would dread above all others: sexual relations between masters and slaves.

At one moment he [Jefferson] is anxious to emancipate the blacks to vindicate the liberty of the human race. At another he discovers that the blacks are of a different race from the human race and therefore, when emancipated, they must be instantly removed beyond the reach of mixture lest he (or she) should
stain the blood
of his (or her) master, not recollecting what from his situation and other circumstances he ought to have recollected—that this
mixture
may take place while the negro remains in slavery. He must have seen all around him sufficient marks of this
staining of blood
to have been convinced that retaining them in slavery would not prevent it.
⁶²

It is this last suggestion that seems to betoken knowledge of Sally Hemings. Until this point, one can applaud Hamilton for satirizing Jefferson’s bigotry and raising taboo issues about his sexual behavior that were otherwise to slumber for two centuries. Unfortunately, the further one digs into the “Phocion” essays, the more apparent it becomes that Hamilton was engaging in devious manipulation of the southern vote. He was trying to turn southern slaveholders against Jefferson by asking whether they wanted a president who “promulgates his approbation of a speedy emancipation of their slaves.”
⁶³
Hamilton was trying to have it both ways. As an abolitionist, he wanted to expose Jefferson’s disingenuous sympathy for the slaves. As a Federalist, he wanted to frighten slaveholders into thinking that Jefferson might act on that sympathy and emancipate their slaves.