Alexander Hamilton (19 page)

THE LITTLE LION

P
lagued by foul weather and abysmal morale and with the British tailing his movements, George Washington led the bedraggled Continental Army across New Jersey. The losses he had sustained in New York strengthened his sense that he had to dodge large-scale confrontations that played to the enemy’s strength. “We should on all occasions avoid a general action or put anything to the risk,” he told Congress, “unless compelled by a necessity into which we ought never to be drawn.”
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Instead, he would opt for small-scale, improvisational skirmishes, the very sort of mobile, risk-averse war of attrition that Hamilton had expounded in his undergraduate article. Hamilton continued to believe in his theory. “By hanging upon their rear and seizing every opportunity of skirmishing,” the situation of the British could “be rendered insupportably uneasy,” he wrote.
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The rugged terrain and dense forests of America would make it difficult for the British to wage conventional warfare.

Washington had occasion to marvel anew at Hamilton’s prowess during the retreat. The general hoped to make a stand at the Raritan River, near New Brunswick, then decided that his straggling troops could not withstand an enemy offensive and decided to push ahead. Posted with guns high on a riverbank, Hamilton ably provided cover for the retreating patriots. According to Washington’s adopted grandson, the commander “was charmed by the brilliant courage and admirable skill” Hamilton displayed as he “directed a battery against the enemy’s advanced columns that pressed upon the Americans in their retreat by the ford.”
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In an early December letter to Congress, Washington, though not mentioning Hamilton by name, hailed the “smart cannonade” that allowed his men to escape.
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In yet another blunder, General Howe occupied New Jersey but permitted Washington and his men to cross the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. As he pondered his scruffy, poorly clad men, Washington warned Congress on December 20, “Ten days more will put an end to the existence of our army.”
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With the enlistment periods of many soldiers about to expire, he needed to assay something daring to rally his despondent troops, who lacked winter clothing and blankets.

In his waning days as an artillery captain, Hamilton confirmed his reputation for persistence despite recurring health problems. He lay bedridden at a nearby farm when Washington decided to recross the Delaware on Christmas night and pounce on the besotted Hessians drowsing at Trenton. Hamilton referred vaguely to his “long and severe fit” of illness, but he somehow gathered up the strength to leave his sickbed and fight.
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Through death and desertion, Hamilton’s company had now been pared to fewer than thirty men. As part of Lord Stirling’s brigade, they were summoned to move out after midnight, huddling in cargo boats caked with ice as they poled their way across the frigid Delaware.

After an eight-mile march through a thickening snowfall, Hamilton and his troops, equipped with two cannon, glimpsed the metal helmets and glinting bayonets of a Hessian detachment. When they exchanged fire, Hamilton narrowly escaped cannonballs, which whizzed by his ears. With snow muffling their footsteps, Washington and his men crept up on the main body of Hessians, groggy from their Christmas festivities the night before, and captured more than one thousand of them. The fire from Hamilton’s artillery company helped to force the surrender of many enemy soldiers. Patriots everywhere rejoiced at the news, which had a psychological impact far out of proportion to its slim military significance.

Eager to capitalize on his triumph, Washington then attempted a stunning foray against British forces at Princeton on January 3, 1777—another minor but hugely inspiring triumph that revived faith in Washington’s leadership. As his men rounded up two hundred British prisoners, an exultant Washington exclaimed, “It is a fine fox chase, my boys!”
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A senior officer recalled Hamilton and his rump company marching into the village. “I noticed a youth, a mere stripling, small, slender, almost delicate in frame, marching beside a piece of artillery, with a cocked hat pulled down over his eyes, apparently lost in thought, with his hand resting on a cannon, and every now and then patting it, as if it were a favorite horse or a pet plaything.”
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A mythic gleam began to cling to the young captain. People had already noticed his special attributes during the retreat across New Jersey. “Well do I recollect the day when Hamilton’s company marched into Princeton,” said a friend. “It was a model of discipline. At their head was a boy and I wondered at his youth, but what was my surprise when that slight figure…was pointed out to me as that Hamilton of whom we had already heard so much.”
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Hamilton found himself back at the college that had spurned him a few years earlier, only this time one regiment of enemy troops occupied the main dormitory. Legend claims that Hamilton set up his cannon in the college yard, pounded the brick building, and sent a cannonball slicing through a portrait of King George II in the chapel. All we know for certain is that the British soldiers inside surrendered. Hamilton believed that the Continental Army had regained its esprit de corps, showing that green patriots could outwit well-trained British troops. He later referred to “the enterprises of Trenton and Princeton…as the dawnings of that bright day which afterwards broke forth with such resplendent luster.”
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With these back-to-back victories, Washington saved Philadelphia from enemy forces and gained several months to restore his depleted army. He moved his three thousand men into winter quarters at Morristown, New Jersey, thirty miles from New York and cupped in a beautiful valley that formed a protective perimeter around his men. When a vacancy opened on Washington’s staff, Hamilton was ideally suited to fill it. By now, the boy genius had been “discovered” by four generals—Alexander McDougall, Nathanael Greene, Lord Stirling, and Washington himself—any one of whom might have been responsible for his promotion. Robert Troup ascribed the foremost influence to Henry Knox, artillery commander of the Continental Army and Hamilton’s nominal superior. A former Boston bookseller of Scotch-Irish ancestry, the three-hundred-pound Knox was a jolly fellow with a bulbous nose, a warm spirit, and an earthy sense of humor. He was already renowned for his heroism, having dragged artillery captured at Fort Ticonderoga across snow-covered expanses to defend Boston. Like many people Hamilton befriended in these years, the self-made Knox had known early hardship. His father died when he was twelve, and he had become his mother’s sole support. Like Hamilton, Knox was a voracious reader who had tutored himself in warfare by digesting books on military discipline and quizzing British officers who visited his bookshop.

On January 20, 1777, slightly more than two weeks after the fighting at Princeton, Washington penned a note to Hamilton, personally inviting him to join his staff as an aide-de-camp. Five days later,
The Pennsylvania Evening Post
inserted this item: “Captain Alexander Hamilton, of the New York company of artillery, by applying to the printer of this paper, may hear of something to his advantage.”
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This cryptic sentence must have referred to Washington’s note. The appointment was announced officially on March 1, and from that date Hamilton was jumped up to the rank of lieutenant colonel. By then, Hamilton was already encamped with Washington, who had set up his headquarters at Jacob Arnold’s tavern on the village green at Morristown.

In fewer than five years, the twenty-two-year-old Alexander Hamilton had risen from despondent clerk in St. Croix to one of the aides to America’s most eminent man. Yet Hamilton did not react with jubilation. Such was his craving for battlefield distinction that he balked at taking a job that would chain him to a desk, precluding a field command. Washington once wrote that those around him were “confined from morning to evening, hearing and answering…applications and letters.”
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More than twenty years later, when capable of much greater candor with Washington, Hamilton told him of his early disappointment on this score: “When in the year 1777 the regiments of artillery were multiplied, I had good reason to expect that the command of one of them would have fallen to me had I not changed my situation and this in all probability would have led further.”
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Hamilton may have underrated the signal importance of his promotion in March 1777, for that job won him the patronage of America’s leading figure and ushered him into the presence of military officers who were later to form a critical sector of his political following. In many respects, the political alignments of 1789 were first forged in the appointment lists of the Revolution.

Still recuperating from illness, Hamilton was fortunate to take up his assignment with Washington at a slack moment in the campaign. The British fought at a leisurely pace, even though time worked to the Americans’ advantage. Several weeks after reporting to Morristown, Hamiliton told his New York associates of daily skirmishes but “with consequences so trifling and insignificant as to be scarcely worth mentioning.”
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He informed Hugh Knox in St. Croix that for several months after his appointment the war had produced “no military event of any great importance.”
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Yet if Hamilton sounded faintly bored at first, he took charge of Washington’s staff with characteristic, electrifying speed. On March 10, he wrote to Brigadier General Alexander McDougall that Washington had been ill and that he had hesitated to disturb him. Now that Washington had recovered, Hamilton went on, “I find he is so much pestered with matters which cannot be avoided that I am obliged to refrain from troubling him on the occasion, especially as I conceive the only answer he would give may be given by myself.”
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How rapidly Hamilton had acquired the confidence to function as Washington’s proxy! He already spoke in an authoritative voice and seemed to have few qualms about exercising his own judgment in Washington’s absence.

The pause in the fighting that spring gave Hamilton plenty of time to study his new boss. The superficial contrast between the tall forty-five-year-old Virginian and his slight twenty-two-year-old aide was striking. Washington towered over Hamilton by at least seven inches. This physical contrast, among other things, belies the moldy canard that Washington had fathered the illegitimate Hamilton on a trip to Barbados in 1751, four years before Hamilton was actually born. Many events in Washington’s early years might have engendered sympathy in him for Hamilton. Washington’s patrician aura could be misleading. Though the son of a wealthy tobacco planter who died when George was only eleven, leaving him at the mercy of an imperious mother, Washington had limited formal schooling, never attended college, and had trained as a surveyor as an adolescent. Famous later on for granite self-control, he had been a hot-tempered youth. “I wish that I could say that he governs his temper,” Lord Fairfax wrote to the mother of the sixteen-year-old Washington. “He is subject to attacks of anger and provocation, sometimes without just cause.”
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As a teenager who knew the insecurities of an outsider and was eager to earn respect, Washington tried to advance into polished society through a strenuous program of self-improvement. He learned to dance and dress properly, read biographies and histories, and memorized rules of deportment from a courtesy manual. Like Hamilton, the young Washington saw military fame as his vehicle for ascending in the world. By age twenty-two, he was already a precocious lieutenant colonel in the Virginia militia, showing a brash courage during the French and Indian War. “I have heard the bullets whistle,” he said after experiencing battle, “and believe me there is something charming in the sound.”
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Sensitive to slights, Washington chafed under the British condescension toward colonial officers and never forgot his experience as aide-de-camp to the abusive, pigheaded General Edward Braddock. Early disappointments with people left Washington with a residual cynicism that was to jibe well with Hamilton’s views.

By a swift, unforeseen series of events, Washington had been catapulted from frustrated young officer to prosperous planter. The death of his half brother Lawrence after their visit to Barbados eventually left him sole owner of the family estate, Mount Vernon. His prospects were further enhanced by marriage at twenty-six to the wealthy widow Martha Dandridge Custis. Though Custis had two surviving children from her previous marriage, she never had children with Washington, prompting speculation that he was sterile, possibly as a by-product of smallpox he contracted on the Barbados trip. Perhaps from unfulfilled paternal instincts, Washington had several surrogate sons during the Revolution, most notably the marquis de Lafayette, and he often referred to Hamilton as “my boy.”

Washington proved an excellent businessman, first as a canny speculator in western lands, then as lord of Mount Vernon. Sometimes buying human cargo directly from the holds of slave ships, he came to own more than one hundred slaves by the Revolution and expanded his estate until it encompassed thirteen square miles. An innovative farmer, he invented a plough and presided over a small industrial village at Mount Vernon that included a flour mill and a shop for manufacturing cloth, an entrepreneurial bent that appealed to Hamilton. Washington also brought extensive political experience to his military command, having served for fifteen years in the Virginia House of Burgesses and having attended the First and Second Continental Congresses. In a supreme act of patriotism, he refused to take a salary for his services during the Revolution, accepting money only for expenses.