Alexander Hamilton (124 page)

Hamilton was stunned by Adams’s altered stance toward France. Within the space of a month, the president had seemed to go from deep concern about the changed government in Paris to cavalier indifference. “The President has resolved to send the commissioners to France notwithstanding the change of affairs there,” he told George Washington. “All my calculations lead me to regret the measure.”
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When Hamilton noted that Adams had not consulted his war or treasury secretary, Washington sounded equally critical. “I was surprised at the
measure,
how much more so at the manner of it?” he told Hamilton. “This business seems to have commenced in an evil hour and under unfavourable auspices.”
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After his meetings in Trenton, Hamilton returned to New York, pausing en route to review his troops at their winter quarters in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. With envoys setting out for France, Hamilton must have wondered how long his inchoate army would last. He blamed Adams’s diplomacy for this threat to his army, but it also lacked the broad-based public support necessary in a democracy. The electorate did not want to pay new taxes or borrow money to maintain an expensive army and feared the uses to which Hamilton might put the troops. Even Hamilton’s most ardent supporters detected waning enthusiasm. Theodore Sedgwick worried that “the army everywhere to the southward is very unpopular and is growing daily more so.”
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Treasury Secretary Wolcott told Fisher Ames that nothing “is more certain than that the army is unpopular even in the southern states for whose defence it was raised…. The northern people fear no invasion or if they did, they perceive no security in a handful of troops.”
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While Hamilton wove fantasies around his army, the American people were fast losing interest in any military preparations. When Adams addressed a joint session of Congress in early December, he issued no new appeals for soldiers or sailors.

The confrontation between Hamilton and Adams in Trenton effectively ended their relationship. Adams could not bear to be hectored by Hamilton, who could not bear to be patronized by Adams. These two vain, ambitious men seemed to bring out the worst in each other. Instead of curtailing his plans, Hamilton reacted with more extravagant dreams. He now gazed at the world through a lens that magnified threats and obscured the chances for peace with France. He composed a long, nearly apocalyptic letter to Senator Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, setting forth a new Federalist political agenda. This document shows a total loss of perspective by Hamilton, the nadir of his judgment. Some ideas were vintage Hamilton: the establishment of a military academy, new factories to manufacture uniforms and other army supplies, and canals to improve interstate commerce. Other ideas, however, reflected a morbidly exaggerated fear of disorder. He believed his Virginia foes were plotting to dissolve the union and that the country was in jeopardy of civil war. He wanted more taxes to build ships and introduce longer army reenlistment periods. Showing waning faith in the good sense of the public, he wanted to strengthen state militias so they could be called out “to suppress unlawful combinations and insurrections.”
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Formerly skeptical about aspects of the Alien and Sedition Acts, he now gave them full-throated support and ranted about the need to punish people, especially the foreign born who libeled government officials: “Renegade aliens conduct more than one of the most incendiary presses in the U[nited] States and yet in open contempt and defiance of the laws they are permitted to continue their destructive labours. Why are they not sent away?”
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To reduce the power wielded by Virginia, Hamilton even came up with a crackpot scheme to break up large states into smaller units: “Great states will always feel a rivalship with the common head [and] will often be disposed to machinate against it…. The subdivision of such states ought to be a cardinal point in the Federalpolicy.”
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It is difficult to separate this dark, vengeful letter from the setbacks in Hamilton’s recent political life. Under President Washington, he had grown accustomed to great power and deference. President Adams had destroyed this sense of entitlement, and Hamilton never forgave him. The bitter face-off with Adams at Trenton confirmed that Hamilton had lost all direct influence with the president. There had been the further humiliation of the Reynolds scandal, which had mocked Hamilton’s pretensions to superior private morality. He had also been greatly embittered by the pitiless censure of his enemies. His vision now appeared to be so steeped in gloom that one wonders how much depression warped his judgment in later years. The ebullient hopefulness of his early days as treasury secretary seemed to be in eclipse.

By contrast, in these final years of the century, the abiding respect between Hamilton and Washington had ripened into real affection. On December 12, 1799, Washington sent Hamilton a letter applauding his outline for an American military academy: “The establishment of an institution of this kind…has ever been considered by me as an object of primary importance to this country.”
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It was the last letter George Washington ever wrote. After riding in a snowstorm, he developed a throat infection and died two days later. Washington did not live to see the government transferred to the new capital that was to bear his name. Haunted by a fear of being buried alive, he left instructions that his interment in a Mount Vernon vault should be held up for a few days after his death.

Washington departed the planet as admirably as he had inhabited it. He had long hated slavery, even though he had profited from it. Now, in his will, he stipulated that his slaves should be emancipated after Martha’s death, and he set aside funds for slaves who would be either too young or too old to care for themselves. Of the nine American presidents who owned slaves—a list that includes his fellow Virginians Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—only Washington set free all of his slaves.

Washington’s death dealt another devastating blow to Hamilton’s aspirations. For twenty-two years, their careers had been yoked together, and Hamilton had never needed Washington’s sponsorship more urgently than now. Hamilton confided to Charles C. Pinckney after Washington’s death, “Perhaps no friend of his has more cause to lament on personal account than myself…. My imagination is gloomy, my heart sad.”
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To Washington’s secretary, Tobias Lear, Hamilton wrote, “I have been much indebted to the kindness of the general…. [H]e was an aegis very essential to me…. If virtue can secure happiness in another world, he is happy.”
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Not wishing to intrude upon her mourning, Hamilton waited nearly a month before writing to Martha Washington: “No one better than myself knows the greatness of your loss or how much your excellent heart is formed to feel it in all its extent.”
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Hamilton’s heartfelt sadness over Washington’s death only thickened the shadows that surrounded him in his final years.

Briefly, the partisan squabbling ceased as the nation paid homage to its foremost founder. On December 26, 1799, Hamilton marched in a somber procession of government dignitaries, soldiers, and horsemen that escorted a riderless white horse from Congress Hall to the German Lutheran Church, where Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee of Virginia eulogized Washington as “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.”
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The members of Hamilton’s army would wear crepe armbands in the coming months. Though Vice President Jefferson presided over the Senate in a chair draped in black, he had been alienated from Washington and boycotted the memorial service. The envious Adams found excessive the posthumous glorification of Washington and later faulted the Federalists for having “done themselves and their country invaluable injury by making Washington their military, political, religious and even moral Pope and ascribing everything to him.”
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Adams was right about one thing: the Federalists
had
relied too much on Washington to heal the fratricidal warfare in their party, and this made them vulnerable after his death, especially with a presidential election in the offing. Many High Federalists around Hamilton wanted to discard Adams; Gouverneur Morris had drafted a letter to Washington right before he died, asking that he run again. Hamilton knew that Washington’s death could destroy the unstable Federalist coalition: “The irreparable loss of an inestimable man removes a control which was felt and was very salutary.”
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The Hamiltonian Federalists faced a knotty dilemma: whether to acquiesce in administration policies they detested or to risk a schism in the party.

Washington’s death left vacant the post of commanding officer of the army, and Hamilton thought he had earned the right to it. “If the President does not nominate” Hamilton, said Philip Schuyler, “it will evince a want of prudence and propriety…for I am persuaded that the vast majority of the American community expect that the appointment will be conferred on the general.”
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Hamilton had struggled tirelessly and at great personal sacrifice to create a new army with six cavalry companies and twelve infantry regiments. But having regretted naming Hamilton to the number-two position, Adams was not about to cede the top position to him, which therefore remained unfilled. Hamilton did succeed Washington as president general of the Society of the Cincinnati.

Time ran out on Hamilton’s military ambitions. By February 1800, Congress halted enlistments for the new army that he was assembling and that had monopolized his valuable time. That same month, Americans learned that Napoleon Bonaparte had eliminated the Directory in November and pronounced himself first consul, in precisely the turn to despotism that Hamilton had long prophesied for France. The fulfillment of his prediction, however, left him stranded in an awkward situation. Napoleon’s coup marked the end of the French Revolution and thereby weakened the case for military preparations against a country that the Federalists had identified with Jacobinism.
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Hamilton saw his vision of a brand-new army evaporate: “It is very certain that the military career in this country offers too few inducements and it is equally certain that my
present
station in the army
cannot
very long continue under the plans which seem to govern,” he told a friend.
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But as spring arrived, Hamilton still could not surrender his daydreams for the American military. With his hyperactive mind, he drafted a bill for a military academy encompassing the navy as well as the army and another for an army corps of engineers. He refined his guidelines for infantry training right down to the correct pace for marching—75 steps per minute for the
common
step, 120 per minute for the
quick
step. Hamilton was spinning his wheels. When Congress gave Adams the power in mid-May to disband most of the new army, he quickly exercised it. By this point, Adams thought Hamilton’s army an abomination and later recalled that it “was as unpopular as if it had been a ferocious wild beast let loose upon the nation to devour it.”
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Adams quipped grimly that if the venturesome Hamilton had been given a free hand with the army, he would have needed a second army to disband the first.
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Hamilton tried to keep up a brave face, but he was heartbroken over his ill-fated corps. He told Eliza that he had to play “the game of good spirits but…it is a most artificial game and at the bottom of my soul there is a more than usual gloom.”
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He was unaccustomed to failure, and here he had devoted a year and a half of his life to an aborted army. On May 22, 1800, he emerged from his tent at Scotch Plains to review his troops one last time before they were demobilized in mid-June. Abigail Adams was present and, despite her dislike of Hamilton, was impressed by his troops. “They did great honor to their officers and to themselves,” she told her sister.
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At the beginning of July, Hamilton shut up his New York headquarters, notified the secretary of war of his departure, and ended his military service. The taxing, dispiriting episode was over in every respect but one: he had not yet discharged his full store of bitterness against the president whom he held responsible for this inglorious end.

THIRTY-FIVE

GUSTS OF PASSION

E
ven while carrying out his duties as inspector general of a nascent army, Hamilton made time for the occasional legal case. He had seldom gravitated to criminal cases, preferring civil cases with substantial constitutional issues or commercial cases that generated adequate fees. On those infrequent occasions when he took criminal cases, he usually defended the underdog on a pro bono basis—evidence that once again challenges the historic stereotype of Hamilton as an imperious snob. Such a case arose in the spring of 1800 when he thought a likable young carpenter named Levi Weeks was being unjustly accused of murder. As in the postwar Loyalist cases, Hamilton was disturbed whenever public opinion howled for bloody revenge.

In the annals of New York crime, the Levi Weeks case is often called the Manhattan Well Tragedy, and it forms yet another chapter in the convoluted relationship of Hamilton and Aaron Burr. At first glance, the case seemingly involved an innocent maiden betrayed by an unfeeling cad. On the snowy evening of December 22, 1799, Gulielma Sands, about twenty-two, left her boardinghouse on Greenwich Street, which was operated by her respectable Quaker relatives, Catherine and Elias Ring. It was believed that she had gone off to marry her fiancé, Levi Weeks, who was also a tenant and was seen chatting with her before her departure. Later that night, Weeks returned to the Ring household alone, inquired if Sands had gone to bed, and was shocked to discover that she was not there. On January 2, her fully dressed corpse was fished from a wooden well owned by the Manhattan Company. Perhaps because he had founded the company, Aaron Burr joined with Hamilton and Brockholst Livingston to defend Levi Weeks against a murder charge.