Alexander Hamilton (128 page)

THIRTY-SIX

IN A VERY BELLIGERENT HUMOR

I
n writing an intemperate indictment of John Adams, Hamilton committed a form of political suicide that blighted the rest of his career. As shown with “The Reynolds Pamphlet,” he had a genius for the self-inflicted wound and was capable of marching blindly off a cliff—traits most pronounced in the late 1790s. Gouverneur Morris once commented that one of Hamilton’s chief characteristics was “the pertinacious adherence to opinions he had once formed.”
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Hamilton found it hard to refrain from vendettas. He would be devoured by dislike of someone, brood about it, then yield to the catharsis of discharging his venom in print. “The frankness of his nature was such that he could not easily avoid the expression of his sentiments of public men and measures and his extreme candor in such cases was sometimes productive of personal inconveniences,” observed friend Nathaniel Pendleton.
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Even Eliza in after years conceded that her adored husband had “a character perhaps too frank and independent for a democratic people.”
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So long as Hamilton was inspector general, he had stifled his pent-up anger against Adams, but by July 1800 his military service had ended and he could gratify his need to lash out at the president. He would repay all the snubs and slurs he had suffered, all the galling references to his bastardy. Once McHenry and Pickering were fired, Hamilton did not simply commiserate with them but encouraged them to preserve internal papers that would expose the president. “Allow me to suggest,” he told Pickering, “that you ought to take with you copies and extracts of all such documents as will enable you to
explain
both
Jefferson and Adams.
”
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Pickering encouraged the project that Hamilton meditated: “I have been contemplating the importance of a bold and frank exposure of A[dams]. Perhaps I may have it in my power to furnish some facts.”
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Suspecting that Adams and Jefferson had sealed a secret election pact, Hamilton told McHenry, “Pray favour me with as many circumstances as may appear to you to show the probability of coalitions with Mr. Jefferson[,]…which are spoken of.”
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Hamilton ended up with the cooperation of the discontented cabinet members, including the one member of the triumvirate who had avoided the purge, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., the capable if unimaginative treasury secretary. Even though Adams thought Wolcott more loyal than McHenry and Pickering, Wolcott considered the president a powder keg. Of Adams, he told Fisher Ames, “We know the temper of his mind to be revolutionary, violent and vindictive…. [H]is passions and selfishness would continually gain strength.”
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Wolcott deprecated Adams’s peace overtures to France as a mere “game of diplomacy” designed to court votes.
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At moments, however, Wolcott grew ambivalent about the idea of Hamilton exposing Adams, arguing that “the people [already] believe that their president is crazy.”
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In the end, though, convinced that Adams would ruin the government, Wolcott told Hamilton that somebody had to write a “few paragraphs exposing the folly” of those who had idealized Adams as a noble, independent spirit.
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Thus, in his massive indictment of Adams, Hamilton drew on abundant information provided by McHenry, Pickering, and Wolcott about presidential behavior behind closed doors. Hamilton knew that the three would be charged with treachery by Adams, but he thought his pamphlet would forfeit all credibility without such documentation. Stories about Adams’s high-strung behavior, if legion in High Federalist circles, were little known outside of them. Hamilton also wanted to stress the mistreatment of cabinet members, lest readers dismiss his critique of Adams as mere personal pique over the disbanded army. Adams was duly shocked by the confidences that his ex–cabinet members betrayed. “Look into Hamilton’s pamphlet,” he told a friend. “Observe the pretended information of things which could only have passed between me and my cabinet.”
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In these revelations, Adams saw patent “treachery and perfidy.”
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By early August, Hamilton was in a fighting mood. On July 12, the
Aurora
printed yet another article accusing him—“the
morally chaste
and
virtuous
head” of the Treasury Department—of having devised a “corrupt system” of controlling the press and government employees while in office.
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Hamilton was so offended by this interminable nonsense that he told Wolcott he might institute a libel suit: “You see I am in a very belligerent humor.”
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Just how belligerent was already clear on August 1, 1800, when the hotheaded Hamilton composed an extraordinary letter to the president. All summer, Hamilton had chafed at reports that Adams was branding him a British lackey. Now he wrote to the president in peremptory terms.

It has been repeatedly mentioned to me that you have on different occasions asserted the existence of a
British Faction
in this Country, embracing a number of leading or influential characters of the
Federal Party
(as usually denominated) and that you have named me…as one of this description of persons…. I must, Sir, take it for granted that you cannot have made suchassertions or insinuations without being willing to avow them and to assign the reasons to a party who may conceive himself injured by them.
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Hamilton demanded the evidence behind these statements. As Adams would have known from the phraseology, Hamilton was, implausibly, commencing an affair of honor with the president of the United States. Many duels began with such imperious demands for explanations of purported slander. Adams did not answer the letter because of its insolent tone; perhaps he also knew that it would be difficult to substantiate his accusations. Hamilton, too, must have realized that he would be rebuffed by Adams. On October 1, he sent a follow-up note to Adams, calling the allegations against him “a base, wicked, and cruel calumny, destitute even of a plausible pretext to excuse the folly or mask the depravity which must have dictated it.”
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This was shockingly offensive language to use with a president and terminated all possibility of future contact between the two men.

Once launched upon a course of action, the combative Hamilton could never stop. As Federalists speculated about his upcoming open letter, prominent party members had misgivings. George Cabot told Hamilton that a careful, well-tempered critique of Adams might tip the balance toward Pinckney, but he thought it was too late for the Federalists to abandon Adams altogether. He feared that Hamilton would go to extremes and only excite jealousy and discord. “Although I think some good [may] be derived from an exhibition of Mr Adams’s misconduct,” Cabot wrote, “yet I am well persuaded that you may do better than to put your name to it. This might give it an interest with men who need no such interest, but it will be converted to a new proof that you are a
dangerous man.
”
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The wavering Wolcott also warned Hamilton that his letter might breed divisions among Federalists, but he pressed on undeterred.

Hamilton did not seem to foresee that his anti-Adams pamphlet would prove so sensational. At first, he conceived of it as a private letter that would circulate among influential Federalists in New England and especially South Carolina, where he hoped electors might give the edge to Pinckney over Adams. What he did not anticipate was that his letter would soon be purloined and excerpted by the
Aurora
and other hostile Republican papers.

How did they gain access to Hamilton’s circular letter? Historians have tended to finger Burr, who obtained a copy and provided extracts to selected newspapers. In fact, the ubiquitous John Beckley, who leaked the Maria Reynolds pamphlet, may have been the conduit to the
Aurora.
Republicans knew that publishing Hamilton’s letter would deepen the rift in the Federalist party. Beckley gloated over Hamilton’s faulty judgment and hoped his letter would deal the coup de grâce to his career. “Vainly does he essay to seize the mantle of Washington and cloak the moral atrocities of a life spent in wickedness and which must terminate in shame and dishonor,” Beckley told a friend.
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The president’s nephew, William Shaw, confirmed that the pamphlet had been “immediately sent to Beckley at Philadelphia, the former clerk of the House of Rep[resentative]s, who caused extracts to be reprinted in the
Aurora,
through which medium it was first made known to the public.”
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The appearance of juicy passages in the
Aurora
and other Republican papers forced Hamilton to revise his plans and publish his letter openly in pamphlet form. He preferred that people read the entire document rather than portions selectively culled by his enemies. Among other things, Hamilton’s pamphlet was his riposte to Adams’s failure to acknowledge his challenging letter. So, contrary to his usual practice of anonymous publishing, Hamilton knew that, as a man of honor, he had to sign his name boldly to the document. The fifty-four-page pamphlet was published on October 24, 1800, while Hamilton was arguing a case before the New York Supreme Court in Albany. Instead of the letter being restricted to specific localities, it was now broadcast to a national audience.

In “The Reynolds Pamphlet,” Hamilton had exposed only his own folly. In the Adams pamphlet, he displayed both his own errant judgment
and
Adams’s instability. An elated Madison wrote to Jefferson, “I rejoice with you that Republicanism is likely to be so
completely
triumphant.”
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William Duane, the
Aurora
editor, exulted that the “pamphlet has done more mischief to the parties concerned than all the labors” of his paper.
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The Federalists were no less staggered by Hamilton’s folly. Noah Webster said that Hamilton’s “ambition, pride, and overbearing temper” threatened to make him “the evil genius of this country.”
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Condemnation of the pamphlet echoed down the generations even among the most admiring Hamiltonians. Henry Cabot Lodge labeled the open letter “a piece of passionate folly,” which coming on “the eve of a close and doubtful contest for the presidency was simple madness.”
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The bulk of the
Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq. President of the United States
is a petulant survey of John Adams’s life and presidency. The author presented a tale of growing disenchantment with a man he once admired: “I was one of that numerous class who had conceived a high veneration for Mr. Adams on account of the part he acted in the first stages of our revolution.”
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However, in the early 1780s, while Hamilton served in Congress, Adams had shed his halo as he displayed “the unfortunate foibles of a vanity without bounds and a jealousy capable of discoloring every object.”
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He described the Adams presidency as “a heterogeneous compound of right and wrong, of wisdom and error.”
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While granting that Adams was a fair theorist, he criticized his handling of the peace mission to France, told how he routinely overrode cabinet members, and recounted the “humiliating censures and bitter reproaches” meted out to James McHenry.
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Not content to catalog wrongs done to administration members, Hamilton made the mistake of reviewing his own personal grievances. He complained that the president had not named him commander in chief after Washington’s death and cited sources that “Mr. Adams has repeatedly indulged himself in virulent and indecent abuse of me…has denominated me a man destitute of every moral principle…[and] has stigmatized me as the leader of a British Faction.”
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Such special pleading made Hamilton appear petty and vengeful, more a self-absorbed man seeking personal vindication than an upstanding party leader.

The final section of the pamphlet seemed particularly absurd. Having pummeled Adams for dotty behavior, he then endorsed him for president and advised electors to vote equally for Adams and Pinckney. If Federalists stayed united behind these two men, he predicted, they would “increase the probability of excluding a third candidate of whose unfitness all sincere Federalists are convinced”—namely, Jefferson.
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For a man of Hamilton’s incomparable intellect, the pamphlet was a crazily botched job, an extended tantrum in print.

In his sketch of Adams, it must be said, Hamilton only repeated what he had seen and heard. Adams certainly was not “mad,” as Hamilton alleged, but he
had
given way to numerous instances of profane and inappropriate behavior. There had been raving and cursing, indecent comments, and loss of self-control. Hamilton reiterated criticisms that Jefferson, Franklin, and others had made privately about Adams and synthesized them with observations from cabinet members and other Federalists who had witnessed the president’s oddly changeable behavior. Joseph Ellis has written that, despite Hamilton’s political prejudices, “he effectively framed the question that has haunted Adams’s reputation ever since: how was it that one of the leading lights in the founding generation seemed to exhibit such massive lapses in personal stability?”
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