Alexander Hamilton (122 page)

At first, Hamilton was caught off guard by news that his private letter would be widely circulated, but then he professed pleasure. Like Adams, he was blinded by pride. George Cabot told Hamilton that even his most “respectable friends” faulted him for displaying “egotism and vanity” in the publication.
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When Troup said he dreaded the impact on the Federalist cause, Hamilton insisted that it was being read with “prodigious avidity” and would be “productive of good.”
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Hamilton had departed so far from common sense that he solicited “new anecdotes” from McHenry and Pickering for a revised, expanded edition, even though McHenry had been shocked to see Hamilton print his stories without permission.
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Oliver Wolcott, Jr., was so alarmed about the projected update that he goaded McHenry into writing a letter that “pointedly advised” Hamilton against any such move.
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Hamilton reconsidered, and no new edition appeared.

Without question, Adams was correct in not dignifying the pamphlet with a response. “This pamphlet I regret more on account of its author than on my own because I am confident it will do him more harm than me,” he told a friend, while reviving his bizarre accusation that Hamilton had tried to blackmail Washington by threatening to publish “pamphlets upon his character and conduct.”
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For Adams to have responded publicly on the eve of national elections would only have aggravated turmoil in Federalist ranks. Abigail Adams privately mocked Hamilton with epithets often applied to her husband and derided his “weakness, vanity and ambitious views.”
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Adams did compose a refutation of Hamilton’s
Letter
but then let it gather dust in the drawer. He was no more capable of long-term silence than Hamilton, however, though he waited until after Hamilton’s death. The manner of Hamilton’s dying did not faze Adams, who said that he would not permit his “character to lie under infamous calumnies because the author of them, with a pistol bullet through his spinal marrow, died a penitent.”
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In 1809, Adams undertook an elaborate justification of his presidency in
The Boston Patriot.
The series continued almost weekly for three years, and Adams proved every bit as volatile as Hamilton had long ago alleged. He rejected Hamilton’s pamphlet as being “written from his mere imagination, from confused rumors, or downright false information.”
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He was not content to undo the work of the pamphlet and again stooped to personal characterizations as spiteful as anything Hamilton had written against him. He again criticized him for being foreign born, for knowing nothing of the American character, for not being a
real
patriot, for being an incorrigible rake, for being immature, for lacking military knowledge, even for being a shiftless treasury secretary who spent his time scribbling “ambitious reports” while underlings carried out the real departmental business. Like most people, Hamilton and Adams were preternaturally sensitive to flaws in the other that they themselves possessed.

For all their fratricidal warfare, the Federalists ran a surprisingly close race for the presidency. Jefferson and Burr tied with seventy-three electoral votes apiece, while Adams and Pinckney trailed with sixty-five and sixty-four votes respectively. As expected, New England unanimously backed Adams, while Jefferson captured virtually the entire south. The New York City elections in April 1800, which had pitted Hamilton against Burr in riveting political drama, had the expected decisive influence. New York cast its twelve electoral votes in a solid bloc for the Republican ticket, giving it the edge. David McCullough has noted the rich irony that “Jefferson, the apostle of agrarian America who loathed cities, owed his ultimate political triumph to New York.”
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But John Adams never doubted that Hamilton’s pamphlet had dealt a fatal blow to his candidacy. He later said, “if the single purpose had been to defeat the President, no more propitious moment could have been chosen.”
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On another occasion, Adams said that Hamilton and his band had “killed themselves and... indicted me for the murder.”
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Scholars have questioned the pamphlet’s direct impact on the vote. In many of the sixteen states, electors had been chosen by state legislatures whose composition had been determined long before Hamilton perpetrated his pamphlet. And the results in states that had not yet selected their electors did not deviate significantly from earlier predictions. Hamilton had hoped that his efforts might boost Charles C. Pinckney in his native South Carolina, but Republicans swept the state.

Many observers thought Hamilton had frittered away his prestige and that his letter had backfired. “I do not believe it has altered a single vote in the late election,” Robert Troup remarked, adding that it had exposed Hamilton’s character, not Adams’s, as “
radically deficient in discretion.
”
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The Federalists had not dropped votes for Adams to install Pinckney as president, as Hamilton had urged—a precipitate fall from grace for Hamilton, who had lost his luster and once unchallenged power over Federalist colleagues. However peripheral in the election, Hamilton’s letter almost certainly hastened the collapse of the Federalists as a national political force. Adams was sure that Hamilton’s “ambition, intrigues, and caucuses have ruined the cause of federalism.”
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The Federalists lingered for another decade or two, but outside of New England they were a spent force. Their decline eliminated any chance that Hamilton would ever regain a top post, much less the presidency.

Why did Hamilton contribute to this disarray among the Federalists? As usual, he thought the country was careening toward a national emergency, either a French invasion or a civil war, and was convinced that Adams would adulterate federalism. Better to purge Adams and let Jefferson govern for a while than to water down the party’s ideological purity with compromises. “If the cause is to be sacrificed to a weak and perverse man,” Hamilton said of Adams’s leadership of the Federalists, “I withdraw from the party and act upon my own ground.”
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Doubtless Hamilton thought that he could pick up the pieces of a shattered Federalist party. What he overlooked was that in trying to wreck Adams’s career, he would wreck his own and that the Federalists would never be resurrected from the ashes.

The personal recriminations of the 1800 election can obscure the huge ideological shift that reshaped American politics and made the Republicans the majority party. In races for the House of Representatives, where Hamilton’s
Letter
played no part, the Republicans took control by a more lopsided margin—sixty-five Republicans to forty-one Federalists—than in their presidential victory. The people had registered their dismay with a long litany of unpopular Federalist actions: the Jay Treaty, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the truculent policy toward France, the vast army being formed under Hamilton and the taxes levied to support it. The 1800 elections revealed, for the first time, the powerful centrist pull of American politics—the electorate’s tendency to rein in anything perceived as extreme.

The stress placed upon the Adams-Hamilton feud pointed up a deeper problem in the Federalist party, one that may explain its ultimate failure to survive: the elitist nature of its politics. James McHenry complained to Oliver Wolcott, Jr., of their adherents, “They write private letters to each other, but do nothing to give a proper direction to the public mind.”
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The Federalists issued appeals to the electorate but did not try to mobilize a broad-based popular movement. Hamilton wanted to lead the electorate and provide expert opinion instead of consulting popular opinion. He took tough, uncompromising stands and gloried in abstruse ideas in a political culture that pined for greater simplicity. Alexander Hamilton triumphed as a doer and thinker, not as a leader of the average voter. He was simply too unashamedly brainy to appeal to the masses. Fisher Ames observed of Hamilton that the common people don’t want leaders “whom they see elevated by nature and education so far above their heads.”
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The intellectual spoilsport among the founding fathers, Hamilton never believed in the perfectibility of human nature and regularly violated what became the first commandment of American politics: thou shalt always be optimistic when addressing the electorate. He shrank from the campaign rhetoric that flattered Americans as the most wonderful, enlightened people on earth and denied that they had anything to learn from European societies. He was incapable of the resolutely uplifting themes that were to become mandatory in American politics. The first great skeptic of American exceptionalism, he refused to believe that the country was exempt from the sober lessons of history.

Where Hamilton looked at the world through a dark filter and had a better sense of human limitations, Jefferson viewed the world through a rose-colored prism and had a better sense of human potentialities. Both Hamilton and Jefferson believed in democracy, but Hamilton tended to be more suspicious of the governed and Jefferson of the governors. A strange blend of dreamy idealist and manipulative politician, Jefferson was a virtuoso of the sunny phrases and hopeful themes that became staples of American politics. He continually paid homage to the wisdom of the masses. Before the 1800 election, Federalist Harrison Gray Otis saw Jefferson’s approach as “a very sweet smelling incense which flattery offers to vanity and folly at the shrine of falsehood.”
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John Quincy Adams also explained Jefferson’s presidential triumph by saying that he had been “pimping to the popular passions.”
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To Jefferson we owe the self-congratulatory language of Fourth of July oratory, the evangelical conviction that America serves as a beacon to all humanity. Jefferson told John Dickinson, “Our revolution and its consequences will ameliorate the condition of man over a great portion of the globe.”
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At least on paper, Jefferson possessed a more all-embracing view of democracy than Hamilton, who was always frightened by a sense of the fickle and fallible nature of the masses.

Having said that, one must add that the celebration of the 1800 election as the simple triumph of “progressive” Jeffersonians over “reactionary” Hamiltonians greatly overstates the case. The three terms of Federalist rule had been full of dazzling accomplishments that Republicans, with their extreme apprehension of federal power, could never have achieved. Under the tutelage of Washington, Adams, and Hamilton, the Federalists had bequeathed to American history a sound federal government with a central bank, a funded debt, a high credit rating, a tax system, a customs service, a coast guard, a navy, and many other institutions that would guarantee the strength to preserve liberty. They activated critical constitutional doctrines that gave the American charter flexibility, forged the bonds of nationhood, and lent an energetic tone to the executive branch in foreign and domestic policy. Hamilton, in particular, bound the nation through his fiscal programs in a way that no Republican could have matched. He helped to establish the rule of law and the culture of capitalism at a time when a revolutionary utopianism and a flirtation with the French Revolution still prevailed among too many Jeffersonians. With their reverence for states’ rights, abhorrence of central authority, and cramped interpretation of the Constitution, Republicans would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to achieve these historic feats.

Hamilton had promoted a forward-looking agenda of a modern nation-state with a market economy and an affirmative view of central government. His meritocratic vision allowed greater scope in the economic sphere for the individual liberties that Jefferson defended so eloquently in the political sphere. It was no coincidence that the allegedly aristocratic and reactionary Federalists contained the overwhelming majority of active abolitionists of the period. Elitists they might be, but they were an open, fluid elite, based on merit and money, not on birth and breeding—the antithesis of the southern plantation system. It was the northern economic system that embodied the mix of democracy and capitalism that was to constitute the essence of America in the long run. By no means did the 1800 election represent the unalloyed triumph of good over evil or of commoners over the wellborn.

The 1800 triumph of Republicanism also meant the ascendancy of the slaveholding south. Three Virginia slaveholders—Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe— were to control the White House for the next twenty-four years. These aristocratic exponents of “democracy” not only owned hundreds of human beings but profited from the Constitution’s least democratic features: the legality of slavery and the ability of southern states to count three-fifths of their captive populations in calculating their electoral votes. (Without this so-called federal ratio, John Adams would have defeated Thomas Jefferson in 1800.) The Constitution did more than just tolerate slavery: it actively rewarded it. Timothy Pickering was to inveigh against “Negro presidents and Negro congresses”—that is, presidents and congresses who owed their power to the three-fifths rule.
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This bias inflated southern power against the north and disfigured the democracy so proudly proclaimed by the Jeffersonians. Slaveholding presidents from the south occupied the presidency for approximately fifty of the seventy-two years following Washington’s first inauguration. Many of these slaveholding populists were celebrated by posterity as tribunes of the common people. Meanwhile, the self-made Hamilton, a fervent abolitionist and a staunch believer in meritocracy, was villainized in American history textbooks as an apologist of privilege and wealth.
THIRTY-SEVEN

amilton, Adams, and other Federalists had proved far more realistic about the course of the French Revolution than their credulous Republican counterparts. On dozens of occasions, Hamilton had prophesied that

the revolutionary chaos would culminate in a dictatorship. This forecast had been borne out on November 9, 1799, when Napoleon Bonaparte grabbed power in a coup d’état that made him first consul of the French Republic. When Talleyrand, the eternal foreign minister, declared that it was time to settle differences with America, Napoleon agreed.