Alexander Hamilton (128 page)

he popularity of President Jefferson further darkened Hamilton’s pessimistic outlook. Fortified by Republican majorities in the House and Senate, Jefferson presided over a united government that his two predecessors

would have envied, as he purged Federalist officeholders. Thanks to Washington and Hamilton, the American economy flourished; thanks to Adams, the Quasi-War with France had receded to a memory. Inheriting domestic prosperity and international peace, Jefferson benefited from exceptional good fortune as America settled down for the first time since the Revolution.

Jefferson soon adopted a relatively reclusive style as an administrator. He almost never made speeches and communicated with cabinet officers largely through memos. But he took daily horseback rides through Washington and perfected his populist image. “He has no levee days, observes no ceremony, often sees company in an undress, sometimes with his slippers on, always accessible to, and very familiar with, the sovereign people,” said Robert Troup.
¹
Jefferson cultivated rapport with the common people, while Hamilton stuck with his dated, paternalistic view of politics. The Federalists found themselves on the wrong side of a historical divide, associated with well-bred gentlemen, while Republicans appealed to a more democratic, rambunctious populace.

With Jefferson triumphant, Hamilton imagined that his own achievements would be scorned or soon forgotten. Republican journalist James Cheetham revived the hoary story that Hamilton had advocated a monarchy at the Constitutional Convention. Forced again to refute this propaganda, Hamilton sent a famously bleak letter to Gouverneur Morris in late February 1802:
Mine is an odd destiny. Perhaps no man in the U[nited] States has sacrificed or done more for the present Constitution than myself. And contrary to all my anticipations of its fate, as you know from the very beginning, I am still labouring to prop the frail and worthless fabric. Yet I have the murmur of its friends no less than the curses of its foes for my rewards. What can I do better than withdraw from the scene? Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me.
²

Written during the period of mourning after Philip’s death, the letter is tremendously revealing about Hamilton’s deep sense of estrangement from American politics. He hewed to a tragic view of life in which virtue was seldom rewarded or vice punished.

If given to dispirited musings, Hamilton could never completely withdraw from politics. His dismay over Jefferson’s success only added urgency to his desire to reverse the Republican tide. In “The Examination” essays, Hamilton undertook a broad-gauge assault on Jefferson’s program. The tone was captious and lacked the large-minded generosity that had distinguished his earlier work. Jefferson wanted to abolish the fourteen-year naturalization period for immigrants, and Hamilton insinuated that foreigners, not real Americans, had voted the Virginian into office; he predicted that “the influx of foreigners” would “change and corrupt the national spirit.”
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Most amazing of all, this native West Indian published a diatribe against the Swiss-born treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin. “Who rules the councils of our own ill-fated, unhappy country?” Hamilton asked, then replied, “
A foreigner!
⁴
Throughout his career, Hamilton had been an unusually tolerant man with enlightened views on slavery, native Americans, and Jews. His whole vision of American manufacturing had been predicated on immigration. Now, embittered by his personal setbacks, he sometimes betrayed his own best nature.

After Philip’s death, Hamilton’s views seemed to emanate from some gloomy recess of his mind. He stood on more solid ground when he took Jefferson to task for favoring repeal of the whiskey tax and all other revenues except import duties. It galled him that Jefferson, who had accused him of wanting a perpetual debt, now canceled taxes that might have extinguished the federal debt more rapidly. In the end, Jefferson proved lucky: through a trade-induced boom in tariff revenues, he was able to cut taxes and produce a budget surplus.

As he pondered an amorphous comeback—he never spelled it out—Hamilton struggled with the conundrum that while Republicans might be “wretched impostors” with “honeyed lips and guileful hearts,” they had won the public’s affection.
⁵
How could this be? Hamilton thought that Republicans appealed to emotion, while Federalists relied too much on reason. “Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by their passion,” he told James Bayard, and his controversial solution was something called the Christian Constitutional Society.
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The charge of atheism had been a leitmotif of Hamilton’s critiques of Jefferson and the French Revolution. Now he hoped that by publishing pamphlets, promoting charities, and establishing immigrant-aid societies and vocational schools, this new society would promote Christianity, the Constitution, and the Federalist party, though not necessarily in that order of preference. By signing up God against Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton hoped to make a more potent political appeal. The society was an execrable idea that would have grossly breached the separation of church and state and mixed political power and organized religion. Hamilton was not honoring religion but exploiting it for political ends. Fortunately, other Federalists didn’t cotton to the idea. As he drifted into more retrograde modes of thought, Hamilton seemed to rage alone in the wilderness, and few people listened.

It is striking how religion preoccupied Hamilton during his final years. When head of the new army, he had asked Congress to hire a chaplain for each brigade so that soldiers could worship. Although he had been devout as a young man, praying fiercely at King’s College, his religious faith had ebbed during the Revolution. Like other founders and thinkers of the Enlightenment, he was disturbed by religious fanaticism and tended to associate organized religion with superstition. While a member of Washington’s military family, he wrote that “there never was any mischief but had a priest or a woman at the bottom.”
⁷
As treasury secretary, he had said, “The world has been scourged with many fanatical sects in religion who, inflamed by a sincere but mistaken zeal, have perpetuated under the idea of serving God the most atrocious crimes.”
⁸

The atheism of the French Revolution and Jefferson’s ostensible embrace of it (Jefferson was a deist who doubted the divinity of Christ, but not an atheist) helped to restore Hamilton’s interest in religion. He said indignantly in his 1796 “Phocion” essays, “Mr. Jefferson has been heard to say since his return from France that the men of letters and philosophers he had met with in that country were generally
atheists.
”
⁹
He thought James Monroe had also been infected by godless philosophers in Paris and pictured the two Virginians dining together to “fraternize and philosophize against the
Christian religion
and the absurdity of
religious worship.
”
¹⁰
For Hamilton, religion formed the basis of all law and morality, and he thought the world would be a hellish place without it.

But did Hamilton believe sincerely in religion, or was it just politically convenient? Like Washington, he never talked about Christ and took refuge in vague references to “providence” or “heaven.” He did not seem to attend services with Eliza, who increasingly spoke the language of evangelical Christianity, and did not belong formally to a denomination, even though Eliza rented a pew at Trinity Church. He showed no interest in liturgy, sectarian doctrine, or public prayer. The old discomfort with organized religion had not entirely vanished. On the other hand, Eliza was a woman of such deep piety that she would never have married someone who did not share her faith to some degree. Hamilton believed in a happy afterlife for the virtuous that would offer “far more substantial bliss than can ever be found in this checkered, this ever varying, scene!”
¹¹
He once consoled a friend in terms that left no doubt of his overarching faith in a moral order: “Arraign not the dispensations of Providence. They must be founded in wisdom and goodness. And when they do not suit us, it must be because there is some fault in ourselves which deserves chastisement or because there is a kind intent to correct in us some vice or failing of which perhaps we may not be conscious.”
¹²
How then did Hamilton interpret God’s lesson after the death of Philip?

The papers of John Church Hamilton provide fresh evidence of his father’s genuine religiosity in later years. He said that Hamilton experienced a resurgence of his youthful fervor, prayed daily, and scribbled many notes in the margin of the family Bible. A lawyer by training, Hamilton wanted logical proofs of religion, not revelation, and amply annotated his copy of
A View of the Evidences of Christianity,
by William Paley. “I have examined carefully the evidence of the Christian religion,” he told one friend, “and if I was sitting as a juror upon its authenticity, I should rather abruptly give my verdict in its favor.”
¹³
To Eliza, he said of Christianity, “I have studied it and I can prove its truth as clearly as any proposition ever submitted to the mind of man.”
¹⁴
John Church Hamilton believed that the time his father spent at the Grange, strolling about the grounds, broadened his religious awareness. During his final months, he was walking with Eliza in the woods and speaking of their children when he suddenly turned to her and said in an enraptured voice, “I may yet have twenty years, please God, and I will one day build for them a chapel in this grove.”
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The one grim consolation that Hamilton derived from Jefferson’s administration was that Aaron Burr’s ostracism only worsened with time. The vice president’s contacts with the president were confined to fortnightly dinners, and he met with the cabinet once a year. Burr gave a satiric picture of his exclusion from power when he told his son-in-law, “I...now and then meet the [cabinet] ministers in the street.”
¹⁶
One senator said that Burr presided over the Senate “with great ease, dignity and propriety,” yet it says much about Burr’s estrangement from Jefferson that his most notable achievements came in the legislature.
¹⁷
John Adams had experienced the same frustration as vice president but not the same hostility from Washington’s administration.

Burr kept up a loyal air to Jefferson until he broke ranks with other Republicans over repeal of the Judiciary Act. With this, Burr knew that he had signed his death warrant with the party and had to curry favor with the Federalists. Burr was now “completely an insulated man in Washington,” declared Theodore Sedgwick, “wholly without personal influence.”
¹⁸
Just how far Burr would go to woo Federalists became evident on February 22, 1802, when party legislators gathered at Stelle’s Hotel to honor Washington’s birthday, with Gouverneur Morris hosting the festivities. At the end of the dinner, guests heard a modest tapping at the door and were amazed when the vice president slipped into the room and asked if he was intruding. Having been invited by the organizers, he was received civilly, and he offered a bipartisan toast to a “
union
of all
honest
men.”
¹⁹
With that deft gesture, Burr effectively severed ties with Jefferson. Pondering Burr’s appearance, Hamilton asked, “Is it possible that some new intrigue is about to link the Federalists with a man who can never [be] anything else than the bane of a good cause?”
²⁰

As Federalists entered a game of mutual manipulation with the vice president, Hamilton did not dismiss Burr’s overture outright, thinking that the best way to engineer Jefferson’s downfall was to drive a wedge between him and Burr and divide Republicans. “As an
instrument,
the person will be an auxiliary of
some
value,” Hamilton wrote of Burr, while noting that “as a chief, he will disgrace and destroy the party.”
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For Hamilton, this strategy was fraught with peril, for Burr might try to replace him as the Federalist chieftain. Thus, a situation arose in which Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, two desperate politicians with fading careers, regarded each other as insuperable obstacles to their respective political revivals.

As Burr eyed a New York comeback—either by taking control of the local Republican party, infiltrating the Federalists, or patching together a coalition of defectors from both parties—press attacks erupted among local factions in what historians have labeled the Pamphlet Wars. After Burr became vice president, a mysterious handbill entitled “A Warning to Libellers” appeared on the walls of New York coffeehouses, accusing him of “abandoned profligacy.” This anonymous sheet claimed that “numerous unhappy wretches” had been victimized by this seasoned “debauchee.”
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It also listed the initials of courtesans whom Burr had left “the prey of disease, of infamy, and [of] wretchedness.”
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Some contemporaries drew parallels between the sexual exploits of Hamilton and those of Burr. Architect Benjamin Latrobe observed that “both Hamilton and Burr were little of stature and both inordinately addicted to the same vice.”
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But the innumerable references to women in Burr’s letters attest to the exotic variety and frequency of his affairs. In comparison, Hamilton was a mere choirboy.
²⁵

The unsigned broadside against Burr may have originated with De Witt Clinton, the governor’s rangy, strong-willed nephew, who now controlled state patronage, earning him the unsavory title of “father of the spoils system.”
²⁶
Adept at the bareknuckled style, Clinton was the moving force behind the
American Citizen,
started in 1801 and edited by a former hatter and rabble-rousing English journalist named James Cheetham. It soon became necessary for every New York faction to possess its own newspaper. Hamilton had countered with William Coleman and the
NewYork Evening Post
. Burr and his cohorts started the
Morning Chronicle,
which was edited by Peter Irving, the older brother of Washington Irving.