Alexander Hamilton (119 page)

By midnight on May 1, 1800, the local political world learned the result of this fierce election, one that portended a fundamental realignment in American politics: the Republican slate had swept New York City, converting Hamilton’s own home turf from a Federalist to a Republican stronghold. This meant that Jefferson could now count on twelve electoral votes where he had received none in 1796. Since he had lost to Adams then by only three votes, this shift was a real thunderbolt. Burr took justifiable pride in his triumph, explaining to one downcast Federalist that “we have beat[en] you by superior
management.
”
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Theodore Roosevelt later interpreted Burr’s victory as that of the skillful ward politician, with a “mastery of the petty political detail,” over the statesmanlike Hamilton, but Hamilton had not hesitated to dip into the humble mechanics of politics.
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A shaken Hamilton and fellow Federalists attended a May 4 caucus that was infiltrated by the Republican press. The
Aurora
said that the “despondency” of those assembled verged on “the melancholy of despair.”
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Those present were so petrified at the thought of Jefferson as president that they considered desperate measures. Led by Hamilton, they decided to appeal to Governor Jay and have him convene the outgoing state legislature to impose new rules for choosing presidential electors. They now wanted the electors chosen through popular voting by district. Most shocking of all, they wanted this new system applied retroactively, to overturn the recent election. In heated arguments over the proposition, the
Aurora
noted that “when it was urged that it might lead to a civil war...a person present observed that a civil war would be preferable to having Jefferson.”
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Hamilton’s appeal may count as the most high-handed and undemocratic act of his career. A year earlier, Burr had championed a proposal in the state legislature to scrap the existing method for selecting presidential electors: instead of having the legislature elect them, they would be elected by the people on a district-by-district basis. The Federalists had hooted this down, but now Hamilton had the gall to revive the idea. On May 7, he warned Jay that the recent election would probably install Jefferson—“an
atheist
in religion and a
fanatic in politics
”—as president.
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He portrayed the Republican party as an amalgam of dangerous elements, some favoring “the overthrow of the government by stripping it of its due energies, others... a revolution after the manner of Buonaparte.”
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Hamilton acknowledged that Republicans would unanimously oppose his measure but that “in times like these in which we live, it will not do to be overscrupulous. It is easy to sacrifice the substantial interests of society by a strict adherence to ordinary rules.”
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This from a man who had consecrated his life to the law. Henry Cabot Lodge said of this irreparable blot on Hamilton’s career, “The proposition was, in fact, nothing less than to commit under the forms of law a fraud, which would set aside the expressed will of a majority of voters in the state.”
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Hamilton seemed oblivious of the contradiction in asking Jay to resort to extralegal means to conserve the rule of law. A politician of strict integrity, Jay was dumbstruck by Hamilton’s letter, which he tabled and never answered. On the back, he wrote this deprecating description: “Proposing a measure for party purposes which it would not become me to adopt.”
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Jay’s silence was an apt expression of scorn.

How had Hamilton justified this disgraceful action to himself? He believed that Jefferson’s support for the Constitution had always been lukewarm and that, once in office, he would dismantle the federal government and return America to the chaos of the Articles of Confederation. This was not entirely paranoid thinking on Hamilton’s part, for Jefferson made statements that sounded as if he wanted an annulment or radical recasting of the Constitution. “The true theory of our Constitution,” Jefferson told Gideon Granger, was that “the states are independent as to everything within themselves and united as to everything respecting foreign nations.”
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The application of this theory would have canceled out much of Hamilton’s domestic system. Yet by this point Hamilton should have known that Jefferson’s rhetoric tended to outpace reality and that a wily, pragmatic politician lurked behind the sometimes overheated ideologist.

Within days of the New York election, Burr felt within his grasp the prize he coveted: the Republican nomination for vice president. As a reward for the New York victory, a congressional caucus in Philadelphia decided that the party’s vice presidential candidate should come from that state. Although consideration was given briefly to George Clinton and Robert R. Livingston, Burr had masterminded the victory, and his followers exacted their due. A heavy load of mutual distrust between Jefferson and Burr was temporarily set aside. Burr remembered that during the previous presidential campaign, Virginia Republicans had pledged to support him and then given him only lackluster backing. For his part, Jefferson later admitted that he had employed Burr as a (slippery) tool to further his ambitions in 1800. “I had never seen Colonel Burr till he came as a member of [the] Senate,” he would write. “His conduct very soon inspired me with distrust. I habitually cautioned Mr. Madison against trusting him too much.”
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Only Burr’s bravura performance in the New York elections had secured his place on the ticket. “When I destined him for a high appointment,” Jefferson continued, “it was out of respect for the favor he had obtained with the republican party by his extraordinary exertions and successes in the New York election in 1800.”
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Jefferson had no true respect for Burr, much less affection. Their partnership was to last as long as it served their mutual interests and not a second longer.

Hamilton always believed that the Federalist defeat in New York City in the spring of 1800 had thrown John Adams into such a fright about his reelection prospects that he decided to purge his cabinet of Hamilton loyalists in order to court Republican votes. On May 3, the day the news arrived, Jefferson saw that the election results had indeed dealt a horrendous blow to Adams. “He was very sensibly affected,” Jefferson reported, “and accosted me with these words, ‘Well, I understand that you are to beat me in this contest and I will only say that I will be as faithful a subject as any you will have.”
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John Adams later claimed that in May 1800 he had experienced a sudden epiphany and discovered Hamilton’s malevolent control over his cabinet. But he had harbored such thoughts all along, and rumors of impending cabinet firings had flitted about since the previous summer. George Washington had handled cabinet infighting in a forceful, dignified fashion, as when he tried in vain to impose a truce in the anonymous newspaper war between Hamilton and Jefferson. By contrast, Adams had sputtered and railed and done nothing. “Adams was contemplative and something of a loner,” wrote John Ferling, “whereas Washington was an aggressive, energetic businessman-farmer who read relatively little and was happiest when he was physically active.”
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Washington had a command over his subordinates, and a subtle knowledge of their true nature that Adams never managed to achieve.

Increasingly, Adams had accused Pickering and McHenry of being tools of Great Britain who opposed his French peace initiatives, and he excoriated them openly. Treasury Secretary Wolcott told a colleague in December 1799 that President Adams “considers Col. Pickering, Mr. McHenry, and myself as his enemies; his resentments against General Hamilton are excessive; he declares his belief at the existence of a British faction in the United States.”
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With his selective memory, Adams sometimes forgot having made such defamatory remarks. Federalist George Cabot told Wolcott that the president “denies that he ever called us [a] ‘British faction.’ . . . [H]e does not recollect these intemperances and thinks himself grossly misunderstood or misrepresented.”
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House Speaker Sedgwick supplied Hamilton with similar anecdotes of the president belittling his Federalist colleagues and subordinates: “He everywhere denounces the men . . . in whom he confided at the beginning of his administration as an oligarchish faction.” Adams noisily upbraided his cabinet, Sedgwick said, telling them that “they cannot govern him” and that “this faction and particularly Hamilton its head . . . intends to drive the country into a war with France and a more intimate . . . union with Great Britain.”
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Fisher Ames said that Adams went on in this vein “like one possessed.”
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The image of a wrathful Adams, prone to temper tantrums, was not the invention of Alexander Hamilton, and he was far from alone in finding Adams agitated, intemperate, and subject to violent fits. Congressman James A. Bayard of Delaware told Hamilton that Adams was “liable to gusts of passion little short of frenzy, which drive him beyond the control of any rational reflection. I speak of what I have seen. At such moments the interest of those who support him or the interest of the nation would be outweighed by a single impulse of rage.”
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The Republicans disseminated a similarly unflattering view of an irascible Adams. Jefferson recalled how Adams shouted profanities at his cabinet while storming around the room and “dashing and trampling his wig on the floor.”
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And Jefferson’s tool, James T. Callender, assailed Adams in a string of essays collected into a book entitled
The Prospect Before Us:
“The reign of Mr. Adams has been one continued tempest of malignant passions. As president, he has never opened his lips or lifted his pen without threatening and scolding.”
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Callender got nine months in jail for his tirade, which had been modestly subsidized by Jefferson. The latter denied any involvement until Callender later publicized a clutch of telltale letters that Jefferson had written to him.

Many High Federalists who constituted Hamilton’s wing of the party preferred Charles Cotesworth Pinckney as their presidential standard-bearer. An Oxfordeducated lawyer from South Carolina—a southern state with a significant merchant class—Pinckney had risen to brigadier general during the Revolution and later attended the Constitutional Convention. His candidacy possessed powerful symbolic value, on account of his role in the XYZ Affair and his position as Hamilton’s senior partner in the recent army. Pinckney’s admirers, however, knew that they could hardly dump a sitting president and would have to settle for him as vice president. After Federalist congressmen caucused in Philadelphia on May 3, 1800, they decided that to “support
Adams and Pinckney,
equally, is the only thing that can possibly save us from the fangs of
Jefferson,
” as Hamilton wrote.
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But if Pinckney received more votes than Adams in his native South Carolina, he could easily become president instead of vice president on the Federalist ticket. Adams saw the Pinckney boomlet as a thinly veiled ploy by Hamilton to replace him with someone more tractable to his wishes. Hamilton now regarded Adams as unstable and thought Pinckney had a more suitable temperament for the presidency. His preference for Pinckney was a risky strategy, since Adams was an incumbent president, and Americans were scarcely clamoring for Charles Cotesworth Pinckney.

So when Adams inaugurated his cabinet purge on May 5, 1800, it was not so much that he had just “discovered” Hamilton’s control over his cabinet in a flash of light. Rather, he was alarmed by the realization of his own weakness as a candidate, as evidenced by the New York elections that week. One can scarcely fault Adams for cleansing his cabinet of mediocre or disloyal men, and he should have fired them a lot earlier. But he conducted the firings in an autocratic manner that led to a political bloodbath, widened the discord in Federalist ranks, and confirmed Hamilton’s doubts about his unbecoming behavior.

The firings started on May 5 when Adams summoned the unwitting James McHenry from a dinner party. The Irish-born McHenry had been an inept secretary of war. He was a sensitive, mild-mannered man who wrote poetry and retained a lilt in his voice. As a cabinet member, McHenry had been unnerved by the president’s mercurial moods and capricious judgment. He once said that whether Adams was “sportful, playful, witty, kind, cold, drunk, sober, angry, easy, stiff, jealous, cautious, confident, close, open,” it was “almost always in the
wrong place
or to the
wrong persons.
”
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At first, Adams pretended that he had yanked McHenry from the dinner party to discuss some inconsequential War Department business. Then, as McHenry was leaving, Adams erupted in a furious monologue about Hamilton and the New York election and accused McHenry of conspiring against him. Against all evidence, Adams accused the indefatigable Hamilton of having sought a Federalist defeat in the New York election. A dumbfounded McHenry said, “I have heard no such conduct ascribed to General Hamilton and I cannot think it to be the case.” To which Adams replied, “I know it, Sir, to be so and require you to inform yourself and report.”
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Then Adams unleashed a memorable volley:

Hamilton is an intriguant—the greatest intriguant in the world—a man devoid of every moral principle—a bastard and as much a foreigner as Gallatin. Mr Jefferson is an infinitely better man, a wiser one, I am sure, and, if President, will act wisely. I know it and would rather be vice president under him or even minister resident at the Hague than indebted to such a being as Hamilton for the Presidency....You are subservient to Hamilton, who ruled Washington and would still rule if he could. Washington saddled me with three secretaries who would control me, but I shall take care of that.
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This monologue went on and on. Adams faulted McHenry for not having forewarned him that Hamilton would materialize in Trenton the previous fall, charged him with incompetence in running his department, and mocked the notion that McHenry might know something about foreign affairs. “You cannot, sir, remain longer in office,” he concluded.
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