Alexander Hamilton (117 page)

For the moment, Washington delegated plenary power to him. Hamilton told one general, since Washington had “for the present declined actual command, it has been determined…to place the military force everywhere under the superintendence of Major General Pinckney and myself.”
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Not just the new army but the old one stationed on the western frontier came under Hamilton’s direct command, while Pinckney oversaw the southern troops. Hamilton exercised his far-flung authority from a small office at 36 Greenwich Street in Manhattan. From the outset, his work was often thankless. He drew no salary until November and then earned only $268.35 a month, one-quarter of what he had taken home as a lawyer. More than half of his legal clients, fearing distractions, dropped him when he was made inspector general. Hamilton could not resist government service but could never quite reconcile himself to the pecuniary sacrifice. In pleading for more money with McHenry, he said, “It is always disagreeable to speak of compensations for one’s self, but a man past 40 with a wife and six children and a very
small
property beforehand is compelled to wa[i]ve the scruples which his nicety would otherwise dictate.”
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Frequently laid up with poor health that winter, Hamilton had to conjure up an entire army aided by a single aide-de-camp, twenty-year-old Captain Philip Church, Angelica’s eldest son. He was so exceedingly good-looking that Hamilton told Eliza that his presence “gives great pleasure to the ladies who wanted a
beau.
”
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This Anglo-American young man had led an improbable life. Educated at Eton with young noblemen and trained as a legal apprentice at the Middle Temple in London, he was now handling clerical work for a major general in the U.S. Army. Contemptuous of President Adams for touting his inept son-in-law, Hamilton engaged here in some minor nepotism of his own. He admitted to the president that Church’s appointment was “a personal favour to myself” and added, “Let me at the same time beg you to be persuaded, Sir, that I shall never on any other occasion place a recommendation to office on a similar footing.”
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Nevertheless, he pressed James McHenry to name several Schuyler relatives as lieutenants.

A chronic stickler for etiquette, Hamilton entered into the minutiae of protocol and dress, showing an unrestrained love of military matters. The most fastidious tailor could not have dictated more precise instructions for Washington’s uniform: “A blue coat without lapels, with lining collar and cuffs of buff, yellow buttons and gold epaulettes of double bullion tag with fringe, each having three stars. Collar cuffs and pocket flaps to have full embroidered edges and the button holes of every description to be full embroidered.” For Washington’s hat: “A full cocked hat, with a yellow button gold loop, a black cockade with a gold eagle in the center and a white plume.” For his boots: “Long boots, with stiff tops reaching to the center of the knee pan, the whole of black leather lined above with red morocco so as just to appear.”
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Hamilton’s descriptions of other uniforms were no less meticulous.

His mind percolating with ideas, Hamilton also designed huts for each rank. The huts for lieutenant colonels had to measure fourteen by twenty-four feet, while majors were given fourteen by twenty-two feet: “It is contemplated that the huts be roofed with boards, unless where slabs can be had very cheap.”
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After learning the value of training manuals from Steuben during the Revolution, the indefatigable inspector general devised one for drill exercises. What, for instance, should a soldier do when a commander barked “Head right”? Hamilton answered: “At the word ‘right,’ the soldier turns his head to the right, briskly but without violence, bringing his left eye in a line with the buttons of his waistcoat and with his right eye looking along the breasts of the men upon his right.”
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He signed up the German-born John De Barth Walbach to test cavalry systems used in Prussia, France, and Great Britain and to figure out which would work best in an American setting. To identify the ideal length and speed of the marching step, he conducted experiments using pendulums that vibrated at 75, 100, and 120 times per minute.

So encyclopedic was Hamilton’s grasp of military affairs that he laid down the broad outlines of the entire military apparatus. He viewed the new army as the kernel of a permanent military establishment that would free the country from reliance on state militias. To foster a corps of highly trained officers, he pursued an idea that he and Washington had discussed: establishing a military academy. Contrary to many of his compatriots, Hamilton thought America had much to learn from Europe about military affairs. “Self-sufficiency and a contempt of the science and experience of others are too prevailing traits of character in this country,” he wailed to John Jay.
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(This attitude was of a piece with his dismay over the Jeffersonian faith that Americans had much to teach the world but little to learn from it.) He had already pressed a leading French military authority to present him with “a digested plan of an establishment for a military school. This is an object I have extremely at heart.”
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For a military academy, Hamilton wanted a site on navigable water, with easy access to cannon foundries and small-arms manufacturers. A few weeks later, he galloped off to tour the fortress at West Point.

Hamilton’s elaborate plans contemplated five schools specializing in military science, engineering, cavalry, infantry, and the navy. With Hamiltonian thoroughness, he listed the necessary instructors right down to two drawing masters, an architect, and a riding master. He was no less directive when it came to curricula, declaring that the engineering school should teach “fluxions, conic sections, hydraulics, hydrostatics, and pneumatics.”
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Before Adams left office, Hamilton and McHenry had introduced in the House of Representatives “A Bill for Establishing a Military Academy.” Ironically, the academy at West Point was to come into being during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, who had rejected the idea as unconstitutional during Washington’s administration.

Hamilton also devised plans for military hospitals and something very like a veterans’ administration that would tend men wounded in battle and their families: “Justice and humanity forbid the abandoning to want and misery men who have spent their best years in the military service of a country or who in that service had contracted infirmities which disqualify them to earn their bread in other modes.”
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Hamilton had a plethora of ideas, but implementing them was tough, partly because of the mediocrity of his old friend James McHenry. From the start, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., had warned Hamilton that if he became inspector general he would have to double as secretary of war because McHenry’s “good sense, industry, and virtues are of no avail without a certain address and skill in business which he has not and cannot acquire.”
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Washington chimed in that McHenry’s “talents were unequal to great exertions or deep resources.”
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The new army was plagued by bureaucratic problems, and Hamilton ended up lecturing McHenry on how to run a cabinet department. “I observe you plunged in a vast mass of detail,” he told McHenry, admonishing him to delegate more authority. As an old friend of McHenry, Hamilton did not wish to shunt him aside, but his incompetence was too glaring to overlook. Hamilton advised Washington confidentially that “my friend McHenry is wholly insufficient for his place, with the additional misfortune of not having himself the least suspicion of the fact!”
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Hamilton constantly issued directives to the hapless McHenry. That he accepted such guidance from Hamilton makes one suspect that he lacked confidence in his abilities and welcomed the guidance. But McHenry was not a quick pupil, and Hamilton wearied of trying to educate him. Before long, a querulous tone crept into Hamilton’s letters. He opened a back channel to Wolcott, telling his Treasury successor how he might assist McHenry in managing the War Department. All this intrigue thrust Hamilton ever deeper into the inner workings of John Adams’s cabinet. But this wasn’t simply a case of Hamilton’s trying to control the cabinet or alienate it from President Adams; rather, he needed a capable bureaucrat at the helm of the War Department. There was painful irony in the fact that Hamilton was quietly feuding with one of the very people whom Adams would shortly accuse him of controlling.

As Hamilton assembled his army in 1799, the bureaucratic snags only worsened, and recruits began to desert. At moments, Hamilton seemed to be reliving the anguish of the Revolution, when an inefficient Congress seemed deaf to the pleas of the Continental Army. Hamilton complained to McHenry about the lack of pay for his soldiers, the shortage of clothing, his fear that dissatisfied troops might mutiny. But the difficulties went deeper than administrative inadequacy on McHenry’s part; the real problems were political and far more intractable.

Republicans had long viewed Hamilton as a potential despot, but so long as he worked in harness to George Washington these fears had been totally baseless. As a member of Washington’s wartime family and then his cabinet, Hamilton operated within strict bounds. Now, Washington was retreating to a more passive role. As Hamilton drifted away from Washington’s supervision and felt more exasperated by Adams’s undisguised hostility toward him, he began to indulge in wild flights of fantasy and to resemble more the military adventurer of Republican mythology or the epithets that Abigail Adams pinned to him: “Little Mars” and “a second Bona-party.”
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This martial fervor was most apparent in Hamilton’s woefully misguided dream of liberating European colonies in North and South America. If an open break with France came, he wanted to collude with Britain to take over Spanish territory east of the Mississippi, while wresting Spanish America from Spain. “All on this side [of] the Mississippi must be
ours,
including both Floridas,” he had already argued to McHenry in early 1798.
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This imperialist escapade traced its origins back to a man named Francisco de Miranda. Born in Venezuela, he had fought against the British in the American Revolution along with Spanish forces. Stopping in New York in 1784, he had wooed a wary Hamilton with plans to emancipate Venezuela. A womanizer with a taste for luxury, Miranda had droned on with rapid, impassioned eloquence, pacing the room with long strides. Hamilton had given him a list of American officers whose interest might be piqued by his plan. In the years that followed, the nomadic Miranda lived in England and tried to dragoon Britain into inciting revolution in Latin America. Thwarted, he crossed the Channel and became a lieutenant general in the French Army. Then he became disillusioned with the French Revolution, telling Hamilton it had been taken over by crooks and ignoramuses in the name of liberty. In early 1798, upon leaving France, he resumed his crusade to have England and America jointly expel Spain from Latin America.

Miranda was a close friend of Adams’s son-in-law, William Smith, and perhaps imagined he would find a sympathetic ear in America. In London, he held secret talks with the U.S. minister, Rufus King, who relayed the contents to Timothy Pickering. Miranda also wrote about his plans to Hamilton, who did not answer the letter and scrawled on top of it: “Several years ago this man was in America, much heated with the project of liberating S[outh] Am[erica] from the Spanish domination…. I consider him an intriguing adventurer.”
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Only after becoming inspector general did Hamilton reply to Miranda’s letters and then cautioned him that nothing could be done unless the project was “patronized by the government of this country.”
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Nevertheless, Hamilton endorsed the plan in his letter, foresaw a combined British fleet and American army, and noted that he was raising an army of twelve thousand men. Hoping that the project would mature by winter, he told Miranda he would then “be happy in my official station to be an instrument of so good a work.”
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In sending this reply, Hamilton took a bizarre precaution to preserve secrecy, enlisting his six-year-old son, John Church Hamilton, as secretary so the letter would not bear his own handwriting. The boy also copied out a letter to Rufus King in London, supporting Miranda’s harebrained plot and hoping that the projected land force would be completely American. “The command in this case would very naturally fall upon me and I hope I should disappoint no favourable anticipation,” said Hamilton.
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Like the Reynolds pamphlet, these clandestine messages signal a further deterioration in Hamilton’s judgment once he no longer worked under Washington’s wise auspices and was left purely to his own devices. His actions were wrongheaded on several counts. Outwardly, he was professing neutrality toward Britain and France, while secretly contemplating an invasion with Britain. He was also mustering an army intended to defend America against a French threat while meditating its use in the southern hemisphere. He was also encouraging Miranda by private diplomatic channels rather than taking the matter directly to President Adams, with whom he seldom communicated. The projected mission, with Hamilton as its self-styled commander, gave him a vested interest in perpetuating the new army and resisting any accommodation with France. Drafting a letter for Washington in December 1798, Hamilton said the new army should be retained because there “may be imagined enterprises of very great moment to the permanent interests of this country, which would certainly require a disciplined force.”
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