Alexander Hamilton (109 page)

This first transfer of presidential power naturally awakened fears of civil war, despotism, and foreign intrigue. To soothe worries about an orderly succession and placate the Federalists, Adams took the statesmanlike step of retaining the core of Washington’s cabinet: Timothy Pickering at State, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., at Treasury, and James McHenry at War, the “triumvirate” that he came to loathe as traitors.
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All three men were identified with Hamilton and the rabidly Anglophile wing of the party known as High Federalists. Why did Adams submit to a situation that seems in retrospect fraught with trouble? “Washington had appointed them and I knew it would turn the world upside down if I removed any one of them,” he explained. “I had then no particular objection to any of them.”
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As he developed objections to his cabinet members, he portrayed himself as their helpless captive, duped by Hamilton and his minions. Hamilton did not think Adams could sidestep responsibility so lightly: “As the President nominates his ministers and may displace them when he pleases, it must be his own fault if he be not surrounded by men who for ability and integrity deserve his confidence.”
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John Adams told two stories of his presidency that never quite jibed. In one, he claimed to be an innocent bystander, long oblivious of Hamilton’s influence over his cabinet members. He had no idea until the end, he said, that they were receiving guidance from his foe; when he belatedly discovered the plot, he moved swiftly to purge the culprits. In another version, Adams claimed that he had known all along that Hamilton controlled the cabinet, because he had already controlled it under Washington: “The truth is, Hamilton’s influence over [Washington] was so well known that no man fit for the office of State or War would accept either.” For this reason, Washington “was driven to the necessity of appointing such as would accept. And this necessity was, in my opinion, the real cause of his retirement from office. For you may depend upon it, that retirement was not voluntary.”
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According to Adams, Washington was merely the titular president, a “viceroy under Hamilton.”
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Furthermore, wrote Adams, “I could not name a man who was not devoted to Hamilton without kindling a fire…. I soon found that if I had not the previous consent of the heads of departments and the approbation of Mr. Hamilton, I ran the utmost risk of a dead negative [veto] in the Senate.”
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After Adams was inaugurated, Hamilton inadvertently ruffled the new president by sending him an unsolicited memorandum, suggesting policies for the new administration. This “long, elaborate letter,” Adams said, contained “a whole system of instruction for the conduct of the President, the Senate and the House of Representatives. I read it very deliberately and really thought the man was in a delirium…. I despised and detested the letter too much to take a copy of it.”
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The sort of advice that Washington had so valued, Adams chose to resent. Not surprisingly, Hamilton wanted to maintain the intellectual preeminence he had enjoyed under Washington. Once again, he tried to be the one-man brain trust, promiscuously dispensing his opinions, and he was probably assaying what access he would enjoy under Adams. Hamilton was not the sort to surrender his proximity to power. Having mastered many arcane issues, he aspired to be the shadow president of the Federalists. In his endless missives to Pickering, Wolcott, and McHenry, one can feel Hamilton’s frustration that he no longer held the levers of power.

Washington had always shown great care and humility in soliciting the views of his cabinet. Adams, in contrast, often disregarded his cabinet and enlisted friends and family, especially Abigail, as trusted advisers. His cabinet members found him aloof and capricious and prone to bark out orders instead of asking opinions. Oliver Wolcott, Jr.—who had one of the warmer relationships with Adams—gave this sarcastic description of the administration: “Thus are the United States governed, as Jupiter is represented to have governed Olympus. Without regarding the opinions of friends or enemies, all are summoned to hear, reverence, and obey the unchangeable fiat.”
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The friction between Adams and his cabinet was exacerbated by the president’s puzzling retreats to his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. As a member of the Continental Congress and a diplomat in Europe, Adams had been ideally diligent and self-sacrificing, enduring separations from Abigail of as long as five years. Especially during John’s later years as vice president, Abigail often suffered from rheumatism and was forced to stay in Massachusetts. Adams became an absentee official, spending as many as nine months per year away from Philadelphia. During one foreign-policy crisis, Washington complained to his cabinet about his truant vice president: “Presuming that the vice president will have left the seat of government for Boston, I have not requested his opinion to be taken…. Should it be otherwise, I wish him to be consulted.”
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As president, Adams stuck to a similarly peculiar schedule and frequently seemed to be absent from his own administration. During his first year in office, he spent four months in Quincy, twice as long a period as Washington had ever left the capital. At times, Adams seemed to be in headlong flight from his own government, spending up to seven months at a stretch in Massachusetts and trying to run the government by dispatch. Washington, mystified by this behavior, groaned that it “gives much discontent to the friends of government, while its enemies chuckle at it and think it a favorable omen for them.”
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Adams, of course, blamed Hamilton for his loss of control over his cabinet and said bitterly that “I was as president a mere cipher.”
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But it is hard to separate Adams’s absences from the disloyalty of his cabinet. David McCullough has observed, “Adams’s presence at the center of things was what the country rightfully expected and could indeed have made a difference.”
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It was an inauspicious situation for the Federalists. The Republican leaders, Jefferson and Madison (the latter having now retired from Congress to Montpelier, his Virginia plantation), exhibited remarkable discipline and discretion. The two Virginians were shrewd men with an imperviously close bond and an impressive degree of patience and self-control. Meanwhile, the Federalists, united for two terms under Washington, were about to degenerate into a fractured party, led by two brilliant and unstoppable windbags, Adams and Hamilton, who cordially detested each other. Both were hasty, erratic, impulsive men and capable of atrocious judgment. And both had blazing gifts for invective, which they eventually turned against each other.

THIRTY

FLYING TOO NEAR THE SUN

T
hat spring, Hamilton received a long overdue letter from Scotland—several decades overdue, in fact—that afforded him profound satisfaction. It came from William Hamilton, one of his father’s younger brothers, who amiably related news of his Scottish relatives. This marked the first time that Hamilton, forty-two, had any contact with his paternal family. Despite a lack of direct dealings with them, he had valued his Scottish ancestry, serving as an officer of the St. Andrew’s Society of New York State.

In a cordial reply, Hamilton included the only thumbnail sketch of his life that he ever set down. It provided the contours of his life without shading; as so often in personal matters with Hamilton, the letter was essentially evasive. He assumed that his uncle knew about his father’s early mishaps in the West Indies and the separation it had caused in the family. But Hamilton’s letter confirms that James Hamilton had subsequently lost touch with his family, since Alexander had to inform his uncle that James still languished on St. Vincent: “I have strongly pressed the old gentleman to come to reside with me, which would afford him every enjoyment of which his advanced age is capable. But he has declined it on the ground that the advice of his physicians leads him to fear that the change of climate would be fatal to him.”
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Hamilton gave the impression of being a worldly man, secure in his station, who could afford to downplay his own exploits. He struck a mellow note of personal contentment: “It is impossible to be happier than I am in a wife and I have five children, four sons and a daughter, the eldest a son somewhat past fifteen, who all promise well as far as their years permit and yield me much satisfaction.”
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He told of the pecuniary sacrifice that went with public office and the baneful spirit of faction that had weakened executive authority: “The union of these motives, with the reflections of prudence in relation to a growing family, determined me as soon as my plan had attained a certain maturity to withdraw from office.”
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Hamilton seemed eager to stay in touch with his reclaimed relatives. This eagerness has a certain pathos, for Hamilton did not fathom the self-interested nature of the sudden overture from Uncle William. The Scottish Hamiltons had never tried to rescue Alexander from an impoverished, orphaned state and had never congratulated him on his amazing ascent in the world. The only reason William now wrote to Hamilton was for selfish purposes. He had been a successful tobacco and sugar merchant, but his business had gone awry, and he needed help. Pretty soon, Hamilton had the odd sensation of receiving a reverential letter from his first cousin Alexander Hamilton, a Sanskrit scholar who had returned from India because of his father’s business troubles. The following year, the Scottish Alexander Hamilton disclosed the true reason behind the correspondence: the family had to find work for his brother, a sailor named Robert, who was prepared to become a naturalized American citizen if he could obtain an assignment with the U. S. Navy. The willingness of the Scottish Hamiltons to exploit their American cousin’s eminence seems shameless. Nevertheless, having lacked a family and suffered the taint of illegitimacy, Hamilton took Robert Hamilton into his home for five months, squired his young relative around New York, and landed him an appointment as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. The grateful Scottish kinsmen hung a portrait of Hamilton above their mantel—sweet vindication for a man who had started out as a castaway of the islands—but they never made an effort to aid Hamilton’s father on St. Vincent or showed the least curiosity about him. Hamilton continued to do favors for his Scottish relatives, who had never done any favors for him.

Even more satisfying than this new rapport with his Scottish clan was the return of John and Angelica Church to New York. For years, Angelica had yearned to return home and was held back only by her husband’s parliamentary career. “You and my dear Hamilton will never cross the Atlantic,” she lamented to Eliza. “I shall never leave this island and, as to meeting in heaven, there will be no pleasure in that.”
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After Hamilton resigned from the Treasury and set up house with Eliza in New York at 26 Broadway, he implored his sister-in-law to come home. “You know how much we all love you,” he wrote with accustomed gallantry. “’Tis impossible you can be so well loved where you are. And what is there can be put in competition with the sweet affections of the heart?”
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Hamilton was preaching to the converted. Angelica wanted to rejoin the Hamiltons, reassuring Eliza that “I hope to pass with you the remainder of my days, that is, if you will be so obliging as to permit my brother [Hamilton] to give me his society, for you know how much I love and admire him. We will see each other every day.”
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Eliza advised Angelica on the fashions that she would find de rigueur in New York: “Remember that your waist must be short, your petticoats long, your headdress moderately high, and altogether
à la Grec.
”
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The Churches’ move to New York was slower than anticipated. In late 1795, they drafted Hamilton to scout luxurious mansions. Harried by a thousand duties, Hamilton found time to reconnoiter local real estate and bought his in-laws several lots on Broadway. “I am sensible how much trouble I give you,” Angelica wrote, “but you will have the goodness to excuse it when you know that it proceeded from a persuasion that I was asking from one who promised me his love and attention if I returned to America.”
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Angelica still wrote to Hamilton in a coquettish style, anointing him “the arbiter of wit and elegance,” and he gladly reciprocated.
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“How do you manage to charm all that see you?” he asked her. “While naughty tales are told to you of us, we hear nothing but of your kindness, amiableness, agreeableness &c.”
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For all his intimacy with Angelica, Hamilton was a bond that still seemed to unite the sisters instead of divide them. As he awaited Angelica’s appearance in New York, Hamilton told her that the only rivalry he and Eliza had “is in our attachment to you and we each contend for preeminence in this particular. To whom will you give the apple?”
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(This intriguing image alludes to the Trojan prince Paris, who had to hand an apple to the fairest of three goddesses.) Eliza would never have harbored deep affection for her sister or allowed Hamilton to write to her so freely if she had been aware of any real transgressions. In one revealing letter, Hamilton said that Eliza “consents to everything, except that I should love you
as well as herself
and this you are too reasonable to expect.”
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Angelica was always careful to incorporate them both into a triangle of family love. “Embrace my dear Hamilton with all my heart,” she wrote to Eliza during the summer of 1796. “Give me leave to love you both affectionately in spite of my being sometimes a little saucy.”
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