Alexander Hamilton (126 page)

Jefferson’s more extreme impulses were restrained by his treasury secretary, the balding, Geneva-born Albert Gallatin, who broke the shocking news to him that it was too soon to abolish all internal taxes. He educated Jefferson that the national bank and Customs Service did help reduce the national debt. “It mortifies me to be strengthening principles which I deem radically vicious,” the president replied, but he agreed that Gallatin was probably right “that we can never completely get rid of [Hamilton’s] financial system.” Indeed, Hamilton had deliberately shaped his policies so as to make it difficult to extirpate them.

The new president relished the chance to rifle through Treasury files and corroborate his suspicions of Hamilton. He asked Gallatin to browse through the archives and uncover “the blunders and frauds of Hamilton.” Having tangled with Hamilton over the years, Gallatin undertook the task “with a very good appetite,” he admitted, but he failed to excavate the findings Jefferson wanted. Years later, he related the president’s crestfallen reaction: “ ‘Well Gallatin, what have you found?’ [Jefferson asked]. I answered: ‘I have found the most perfect system ever formed. Any change that should be made in it would injure it. Hamilton made no blunders, committed no frauds. He did nothing wrong.’ I think Mr. Jefferson was disappointed.”
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Gallatin complimented Hamilton by saying that he had done such an outstanding job as the first treasury secretary that he had turned the post into a sinecure for all future occupants. As for the First Bank of the United States, once denounced by Jeffersonians as a diabolical lair, Gallatin proclaimed that it had “been wisely and skillfully managed.”
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Republicans still found it hard to accept the need for the central bank. As president, James Madison allowed the bank’s charter to expire, and American finances suffered as a result during the War of 1812. When a chastened Madison then sponsored the Second Bank of the United States, critics inveighed that he “out-Hamiltons Alexander Hamilton.”
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Hamilton still feared that Jefferson would weaken presidential power, since he had long contended that a strong executive branch would revert to monarchical methods. “A preponderance of the executive over the legislative branch cannot be maintained but by immense patronage, by multiplying offices, making them very lucrative, by armies, navies, which may enlist on the side of the patron all those whom he can interest and all their families and connections,” Jefferson had written.
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Hamilton should have trusted his election prediction that Jefferson in office would discover the joys of presidential power. Jefferson resolved his ideological dilemma by showing outward deference to Congress while subtly steering congressional leaders at private dinners that he held three times per week at the presidential residence.

One area where Hamilton perceived a legitimate threat to the Federalist legacy was the judiciary, the last redoubt of party power. Right before Adams left office, Congress had enacted the Judiciary Act, which created new courts and twenty-three new federal judgeships so as to spare Supreme Court justices the onerous task of riding the circuit. The high court’s justices had spent more time negotiating muddy roads than deciding cases in Philadelphia. At the end of his term, President Adams rushed through appointments for these judges, offending Republicans who thought he should have allowed the new president to choose. Worse, Adams made baldly partisan selections for a judiciary already packed with Federalists. His appointment of the so-called midnight judges rubbed old Republican wounds. “The Federalists have retired into the judiciary as a stronghold and from that battery all the works of republicanism are to be beaten down and erased,” Jefferson declared.
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William Branch Giles agreed with Jefferson that “the revolution is incomplete so long as the judiciary” was possessed by the enemy.
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Thus the battle was joined between triumphant Republicans and defeated Federalists over Republican efforts to repeal the Judiciary Act. Hamilton and other High Federalists feared that Republicans would thereby destroy judicial independence.

Republican ire about the Federalist dominance of the judiciary became especially strident after Adams nominated John Marshall as chief justice of the Supreme Court in late January 1801. Marshall, forty-five, was a tall, genial man with penetrating eyes and a shock of unruly hair. He now rivaled, perhaps even superseded, Hamilton as the leading Federalist and had contempt for his distant cousin, Jefferson, whom he mocked as “the great lama of the mountain.”
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Historian Henry Adams said of Marshall, “This excellent and amiable man clung to one rooted prejudice: he detested Thomas Jefferson.”
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Jefferson reciprocated the animosity, especially since the new chief justice revered Hamilton, having once observed that next to the former treasury secretary he felt like a mere candle “beside the sun at noonday.”
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After reading through George Washington’s papers, Marshall pronounced Hamilton “the greatest man (or one of the greatest men) that had ever appeared in the United States.”
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Marshall considered Hamilton and Washington the two indispensable founders, and it therefore came as no surprise that Jefferson looked askance at the chief justice as “the Federalist serpent in the democratic Eden of our administration.”
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During thirty-four years on the court, John Marshall, more than anyone else, perpetuated Hamilton’s vision of both vibrant markets and affirmative government. When he became chief justice, the Supreme Court met in the Capitol basement in a less-than-magisterial setting. Hamilton had always regarded the judiciary as the final fortress of liberty and the most vulnerable branch of government. John Marshall remedied that deficiency, and many of the great Supreme Court decisions he handed down were based on concepts articulated by Hamilton. In writing the decision in
Marbury v. Madison
(1803), Marshall established the principle of judicial review—the court’s authority to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional— drawing liberally on Hamilton’s
Federalist
number 78. His decision in the landmark case of
McCulloch v. Maryland
(1819) owed a great deal to the doctrine of implied powers spelled out by Hamilton in his 1791 opinion on the legality of a central bank.

The scalding debate over repeal of the Judiciary Act prompted Hamilton to lambast Jefferson in a series of eighteen essays entitled “The Examination.” Reviving themes from
The Federalist Papers,
he explained why the judiciary was destined to be the weakest branch of government. It could “ordain nothing. Its functions are not active but deliberative....Its chief strength is in the veneration which it is able to inspire by the wisdom and rectitude of its judgments.”
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For Hamilton, Jefferson’s desire to overturn the Judiciary Act was an insidious first step toward destroying the Constitution: “Who is so blind as not to see that the right of the legislature to abolish the judges at pleasure destroys the independence of the judicial department and swallows it up in the impetuous vortex of legislative influence?”
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Without an independent judiciary, the Constitution was a worthless document. “Probably before these remarks shall be read,” he concluded, the “Constitution will be no more! It will be numbered among the numerous victims of democratic frenzy.”
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Despite the ink that Hamilton copiously expended and his warning before the New York bar that the law’s cancellation would trigger civil war, the Republicans managed to repeal the Judiciary Act in March 1802 without incident.

The repeal and other Jeffersonian innovations had spurred Hamilton and his friends to found a new Federalist paper, the
New-York Evening Post,
now the oldest continuously active paper in America. Robert Troup complained at the time, “We have not a paper in the city on the federal side that is worth reading.”
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Newspaper editor Noah Webster had turned against Hamilton after the Adams pamphlet, depriving him of an outlet for his views. Marginalized but far from eliminated as a force in national affairs, Hamilton hoped the
Post
would chart a path for other Federalist newspapers and breathe life into a nearly moribund party. Of the ten thousand dollars of start-up capital, Hamilton likely contributed one thousand. Tradition has it that the decision to launch the
Post
was made in the mansion of merchant Archibald Gracie.

For chief editor, Hamilton plucked one of his most colorful disciples, thirty-fiveyear-old William Coleman, an engaging man with a broad, florid face and a nimble wit. Born to an impecunious Boston family, Coleman had been serving in the Massachusetts House of Representatives when Hamilton toured New England in 1796 and Coleman fell promptly under his spell. He considered Hamilton “the greatest statesman beyond comparison of the age” and later dated his professional success from the time of their meeting.
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After moving to New York, Coleman practiced law with Aaron Burr, a decision he regretted and quickly reversed. Attracted to writers, he joined a literary society called the Friendly Club, where he mingled with Hamilton’s Federalist associates. Coleman was wrestling with financial problems when Hamilton got him the coveted clerkship of the circuit court, where he employed his shorthand skills to produce the comprehensive transcript of the Manhattan Well Tragedy case.

William Coleman was such an unreconstructed Federalist that one Republican journalist crowned him “The Field Marshall of Federal Editors.”
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After Jefferson’s election, Coleman sent the new president a bombastic epistle, accusing him of pulling down the old temple of morality and religion and erecting in its place “a foul and filthy temple consecrated to atheism and lewdness.”
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He threw himself so wholly into Stephen Van Rensselaer’s gubernatorial campaign that a Republican paper predicted that this “seller of two-pence halfpenny pamphlets, this sycophantic messenger of Gen. Hamilton[,]...will at one time or another receive a due reward.”
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Coleman was a casualty of the back-to-back victories of Thomas Jefferson and George Clinton. After the governor’s nephew De Witt Clinton emerged as the reigning figure of the all-powerful Council of Appointments, he purged Federalist officeholders and ejected Coleman from his clerkship.

Hamilton and his partners set up Coleman in a brick house on Pine Street. When the newspaper’s first issue appeared on November 16, 1801, it sounded a patrician note, promising “to diffuse among the people correct information on all interesting subjects, to inculcate just principles in religion, morals, and politics, and to cultivate a taste for sound literature.”
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It made no bones about soliciting the backing of local merchants, announcing it would write about whatever relates to “that large and respectable class of our fellow-citizens.”
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While openly admitting its Federalist pedigree, it also noted that “we disapprove of that spirit of dogmatism which lays exclusive claim to infallibility and...believe that honest and virtuous men are to be found in each party.”
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The paper soon won plaudits for its legible print, high-quality paper, and lucid, trenchant writing. None other than James T. Callender bestowed kind words upon Hamilton’s publication: “This newspaper is, beyond all comparison, the most elegant piece of workmanship that we have seen either in Europe or America.”
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The
Post
immediately became Hamilton’s newspaper of choice for assailing Jefferson, and all eighteen installments of “The Examination” appeared there under the name Lucius Crassus. Hamilton was no hands-off investor, and Coleman candidly described his pervasive influence on the paper: “Whenever anything occurs on which I feel the want of information, I state matters to him, sometimes in a note. He appoints a time when I may see him, usually a late hour in the evening. He always keeps himself minutely informed on all political matters. As soon as I see him, he begins in a deliberate manner to dictate and I to note down in shorthand. When he stops, my article is completed.”
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Coleman’s vignette confirms that Hamilton had a lawyer’s ability to organize long speeches in his head and often dictated his essays. Otherwise, the sheer abundance of his writing is hard to comprehend.

In a macabre coincidence, the
New-York Evening Post
had its first major story on its hands just one week after its maiden issue: a duel involving Hamilton’s eldest son. With his high forehead, luminous eyes, and Roman nose, Philip Hamilton, nearly twenty, was exceedingly handsome. Smart and with a winning manner, he had followed a career path that replicated his father’s: he had graduated the year before from Columbia College with high honors, was a fine orator, and studied to be a lawyer. “Philip inherits his father’s talents,” Angelica Church told Eliza. “What flattering prospects for a mother! You are, my dear sister, very happy with such a husband and such promise in a son.”
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One of Eliza’s friends asked whimsically if she could notify the “renowned Philip” that she had heard he had “outstripped all his competitors in the race of knowledge” and daily gained “new victories by surpassing himself.”
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Hamilton regarded Philip as the family’s “eldest and
brightest
hope” and was grooming him for major accomplishments.
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In Robert Troup’s opinion, Hamilton held “high expectations of his future greatness” and likely expected him to perpetuate his own work.
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Like Hamilton, Philip was partial to ornate rhetoric and once complained to his father that the Columbia president had made him strike this purple patch from a speech: “
Americans, you have fought the battles of mankind, you have enkindled that sacred fire of freedom.
”
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Like his father when he was younger, Philip had a wayward streak—Troup called him a “sad rake”—and drifted into escapades that required gentle paternal reprimands.
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Strict but loving, Hamilton had recently prepared a daily schedule for Philip that included reading, writing, church attendance, and recreation, governing all his waking moments from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. Nevertheless, Hamilton showed some amused tolerance for his son’s antics, ending one letter to Eliza in October 1801 with the words, “I am anxious to hear from Philip. Naughty young man.”
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