Alexander Hamilton (113 page)

While Hamilton was pouring out his confessions in Philadelphia, he showed a special solicitude for Eliza. He knew that his pamphlet, at least temporarily, would shatter her heroic image of him, and he must have trembled with apprehension. He wrote to Eliza that he eagerly looked forward “to her embrace and to the company of our beloved Angelica. I am very anxious about you both—you for an obvious reason and her because Mr. Church mentioned in a letter to me that she complained of
a sore throat.
Let me charge you and her to be well and happy, for you comprise all my felicity. Adieu angel.”
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Two days later, Hamilton wrote again and said he would return to New York the next day. “Love to Angelica & Church,” he wrote. “I shall return full freighted with it for my dear brunettes.”
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Eliza decided to have the baby in Albany. A guilt-ridden Hamilton escorted her to the sloop that transported her up the Hudson, but he did not join her. Probably his presence was then too distressing. Angelica saw Hamilton right after he returned from the boat, and she sent Eliza a consoling note. Angelica always wrote to her as the worldly, protective older sister, often calling her “my dear child.” She knew Eliza was pure hearted and easily wounded. On the other hand, Angelica was willing to make allowances for her brother-in-law.

When [Hamilton] returned from the sloop, he was very much out of spirits and you were the subject of his conversation the rest of the evening. Catherine [Angelica’s daughter] played at the harpsichord for him and at 10 o’clock he went home. Tranquillize your kind and good heart, my dear Eliza, for I have the most positive assurance from Mr. Church that the dirty fellow who has caused us all some uneasiness and wounded your feelings, my dear love, is effectually silenced. Merit, virtue, and talents must have enemies and [are] always exposed to envy so that, my Eliza, you see the penalties attending the position of so amiable a man. All this you would not have suffered if you had married into a family less
near the sun.
But then [you would have missed?] the pride, the pleasure, the nameless satisfactions.
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Angelica signed the note, “With all my heart and redoubled tenderness.”
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Eliza did not buckle under the strain. One imagines that she had tolerated some discreet philandering from Hamilton before but not such open scandal. Did she see life with Hamilton the way Angelica did—that marriage to such an exceptional man entailed a large quota of pain and suffering that was abundantly compensated by his love, intelligence, and charm? The rest of her life suggests that this was indeed the case. The publication of Hamilton’s pamphlet must have been inexpressibly mortifying to Eliza when she discovered how vulgar and uneducated Maria Reynolds was and how breezily Hamilton had deceived her during the affair, urging her to stay in Albany for her health. Whatever pain she suffered, however, Eliza never surrendered her conviction that her husband was a noble patriot who deserved the veneration of his countrymen and had been crucified by a nefarious band. Her later work for orphans, the decades spent compiling her husband’s papers and supervising his biography, her constant delight in talking about him, her pride in Washington’s wine cooler, her fight to stake Hamilton’s claim to authorship of the farewell address—these and many, many other things testify to unflinching love for her husband. And the most convincing proof of all was the undying hatred that she bore for James Monroe.

Just a couple of weeks after Hamilton published the Reynolds pamphlet, he experienced a medical scare with his eldest son, Philip, that may have seemed like heavenly retribution for his wayward conduct. The fifteen-year-old Philip, an uncommonly handsome and intelligent boy, was the most promising of the children. In early September, he “was attacked with a severe, bilious fever, which soon assumed a typhus character,” said Dr. David Hosack, a professor of medicine and botany at Columbia College, who was summoned to attend the boy.
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Hamilton had to leave for Hartford, Connecticut, to represent New York State in a case in federal court. As soon as he reached Rye, thirty miles north of New York City, he wrote to his wife in a state of distress: “I am arrived here, my dear Eliza, in good health, but very anxious about my dear Philip. I pray heaven to restore him and in every event to support you.” He recommended a cold-bath treatment not unlike the one used by Edward Stevens to cure him of yellow fever: “Also, my Betsey, how much do I regret to be separated from you at such a juncture. When will the time come that I shall be exempt from the necessity of leaving my dear family? God bless my beloved and all my dear children. AH.”
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As Philip’s condition worsened, Hosack began to despair of his survival. Eliza grew so distraught that the good doctor banished her to another room so “that she might not witness the last struggles of her son.”
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He sent an express courier to fetch Hamilton from Hartford so he would arrive before the boy died. Meanwhile, Philip grew delirious, lost his pulse, and became comatose. Hosack managed to revive him by immersing him in hot baths of Peruvian bark and rum, then wrapping him in warm, dry blankets. Hosack later described Hamilton’s return as one of his most gratifying moments as a physician:

In the course of the night, General Hamilton arrived at his home under the full expectation that his son was no more. But to his great joy he still lived. When the father knew what had been done and the means that had been employed…he immediately came to my room where I was sleeping, and although I was then personally unknown to him, awakened me and taking me by the hand, his eyes suffused with tears of joy, he observed, “My dear Sir, I could not remain in my own house without first tendering to you my grateful acknowledgment for the valuable services you have rendered my family in the preservation of my child.”
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Hosack paid tribute to the “tender feeling” and “exquisite sensibility” that Hamilton showed as he assumed the role of maternal care. In tending his son, Hamilton was both nurse and physician, leaving the doctor amazed by both his medical knowledge and his tenderness toward his children.
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Hosack recalled, “From that moment, he devoted himself most assiduously to the care of his son, administering with his own hand every dose of medicine or cup of nourishment that was required. I may add that this was his custom in every important case of sickness that occurred in his family.”
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This was not a family that Hamilton was prepared to abandon, and whether from penance for the Reynolds affair or from his usual paternal dedication, he was very attentive to Eliza and the children in the coming years.

THIRTY-ONE

AN INSTRUMENT OF HELL

O
ne reason that Hamilton so feared the repercussions of the Reynolds affair was a premonition that the United States might soon be at war with an imperious France. If this conflict came about, Hamilton intended to assume a major position and could not afford any hint of scandal. As many Republicans had predicted, the French had retaliated against the Jay Treaty by allowing their privateers to prey on American ships carrying contraband cargo bound for British ports. With Napoleon emerging as the new French military strongman, Hamilton had little doubt that his troops would spread despotism across Europe. Writing under “Americus,” Hamilton had warned early in 1797 that the “specious pretence of enlightening mankind and reforming their civil institutions is the varnish to the real design of subjugating” other nations.
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Hamilton predicted that France would become “the terror and the scourge of nations.”
²

Soon after being sworn in as president, John Adams learned that the Directory, the five-member council now ruling France, had expelled the new American minister, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and promulgated belligerent new orders against America’s merchant marine. By spring, the French had seized more than three hundred American vessels. To lift domestic morale, Hamilton suggested to Secretary of State Pickering a day of prayer “to strengthen religious ideas in a contest” that might pit Americans “against atheism, conquest, and anarchy.”
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Not trusting to the Lord alone, Hamilton also recommended more muscular measures, principally a new naval force and a twenty-five-thousand-man provisional army. Far from being a reflexive warmonger, Hamilton wanted to explore first every diplomatic option. “My opinion is to exhaust the expedients of negotiation and at the same time to prepare
vigorously
for the worst,” he advised Oliver Wolcott, Jr.
⁴
“
Real firmness
is good for everything.
Strut
is good for nothing.”
⁵
He told William Loughton Smith, “My plan ever is to combine
energy
with
moderation.
”
⁶

President Adams decided to pursue a two-pronged strategy: maintaining American neutrality through negotiations while simultaneously expanding the military in case talks with France miscarried. He entertained the anodyne hope that he could thread a neat path between Federalist Anglophiles and Republican Francophiles. Like Adams, Hamilton wanted to preserve peace with France through diplomacy and possibly even negotiate a commercial treaty on the Jay Treaty model. In a high-minded mode, he urged that a bipartisan three-man commission that included an old political rival be sent to France. “Unless Mr. Madison will go, there is scarcely another character that will afford advantage,” he said.
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Despite heated protests from some Federalists, Hamilton thought that any delegation lacking a prominent Republican would forfeit all credibility with the French. He also yearned to call the Republicans’ bluff and show that the Federalists had done everything possible to conserve peace. Nevertheless, the three members of Adams’s cabinet under Hamilton’s supposed dominion—Pickering, Wolcott, and McHenry—steadfastly opposed the choice of a Republican. Wolcott did more than just defy Hamilton’s wishes: he threatened to resign if Adams executed such a policy. As Hamilton suspected, Madison, who had a deathly fear of transatlantic travel, turned down the chance to join the delegation to France, as did Jefferson.

Starting with this first crisis of the Adams administration, Hamilton answered interminable queries from the secretaries of state, treasury, and war, who sought his guidance and shared with him internal cabinet documents. Ensconced in his Manhattan law office, Hamilton was apprised of everything happening in Philadelphia. Adams knew nothing of these contacts. At first, Hamilton did not denigrate Adams or his cabinet and behaved in exemplary fashion. “I believe there is no danger of want of firmness in the executive,” he told Rufus King. “If he is not ill-advised, he will not want prudence.”
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Vice President Jefferson, by contrast, was already in the thick of a secret campaign to sabotage Adams in French eyes. The French consul in Philadelphia, Joseph Létombe, held four confidential talks with Jefferson in the spring of 1797—talks no less unorthodox than the ones Hamilton had held with British minister George Hammond—and informed his superiors in Paris, paraphrasing Jefferson, that “Mr. Adams is vain, suspicious, and stubborn, of an excessive self-regard, taking counsel with nobody.”
⁹
Jefferson predicted to Létombe that Adams would last only one term and urged the French to invade England. In the most brazen display of disloyalty, he advised the French to stall any American envoys sent to Paris: “Listen to them and then drag out the negotiations at length and mollify them by the urbanity of the proceedings.”
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Jefferson and other Republicans encouraged the French to believe that Americans sided with them overwhelmingly, and this may have toughened the tone that the Directory adopted with the new administration.

On May 16, 1797, President Adams delivered a bellicose message to Congress, denouncing the French for ejecting Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and stalking American ships and chiding them for having “inflicted a wound in the American breast.”
¹¹
He also announced plans to expand the navy and bolster the militias. For the
Aurora,
this suggested too much belligerence. After a pacific inaugural speech, editorialized the paper about Adams, “we see him gasconading like a bully, swaggering the hero, and armed cap-a-pie, throwing the gauntlet to the most formidable power on earth.” Ergo, Adams must be a British agent: “We behold him placing himself the file-leader of a British faction and marshalling his forces as if he were the representative of George the Third, instead of the chief magistrate of the American people.”
¹²

Dashing this Republican stereotype, Adams made a conciliatory overture and announced plans to dispatch a diplomatic mission to Paris. The three-man delegation was to include two southern Federalists, John Marshall and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and a northern Republican, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who had been a partisan of the French Revolution. “The French are no more capable of a republican government,” Adams advised Gerry, “than a snowball can exist a whole week in the streets of Philadelphia under a burning sun.”
¹³
Quite unlike the cabinet members he reputedly controlled, Hamilton applauded Adams with gusto. “I like very well the course of executive conduct in regard to the controversy with France,” he told Wolcott.
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But he had reservations about the likely outcome of the mission. He believed that Adams had erred by not sending a southern Republican, a move that would have convinced the French that the deck was not stacked against them. He also doubted that French officials would treat the American envoys respectfully and fulminated against them as “the most ambitious and horrible tyrants that ever cursed the earth,” rebuking Republicans who would “make us lick the feet of her violent and unprincipled leaders.”
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