Alexander Hamilton (20 page)

The relationship between Washington and Hamilton was so consequential in early American history—rivaled only by the intense comradeship between Jefferson and Madison—that it is difficult to conceive of their careers apart. The two men had complementary talents, values, and opinions that survived many strains over their twenty-two years together. Washington possessed the outstanding judgment, sterling character, and clear sense of purpose needed to guide his sometimes wayward protégé; he saw that the volatile Hamilton needed a steadying hand. Hamilton, in turn, contributed philosophical depth, administrative expertise, and comprehensive policy knowledge that nobody in Washington’s ambit ever matched. He could transmute wispy ideas into detailed plans and turn revolutionary dreams into enduring realities. As a team, they were unbeatable and far more than the sum of their parts.

Nonetheless, the two men had clashing temperaments and frequently showed more mutual respect than true affection. When Charles Willson Peale painted Washington in 1779, he presented a manly, confident figure with a quiet swagger and an easy air of command. In fact, Washington wasn’t nonchalant and could be exacting and quick to take offense. While he had a dry wit, his mirth was restrained and seldom expressed in laughter. He did not encourage familiarity, fearing it would encourage laxity in subordinates, and held himself aloof with a grave sobriety that gave him power over other people. In addition, over time he became such a prisoner of his own celebrity that people couldn’t relax in his presence. Gilbert Stuart noted the fierce temper behind the fabled self-control, and his later paintings of Washington show something hooded and wary in the hard, penetrating eyes. The self-control was something achieved, not inherited, and often masked combustible emotions that could explode in fury. “His temper was naturally irritable and high-toned, but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendancy over it,” Jefferson later said perceptively. “If ever, however, it broke its bonds, he was most tremendous in his wrath.”
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Those who met Washington in social situations were usually taken with his gallantry and convivial charm. Abigail Adams fairly cooed when she met him, reassuring John that “the gentleman and soldier look agreeably blended in him.”
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Working with him in cramped quarters, however, Hamilton had many chances to see Washington’s irritable side and sometimes ungovernable temper. Washington was extremely fond of Hamilton, preferring him to his other aides, but he did not express his affection openly. Hamilton always addressed him as “Your Excellency,” and it irked him that he could not penetrate the general’s reserve. But Lafayette noted that Hamilton, in turn, held something back. The notion that Hamilton was a surrogate son to Washington has some superficial merit but fails to capture fully the psychological interplay between them. If Hamilton was a surrogate son, some suppressed Oedipal rage entered into the mix. Hamilton was so brilliant, so coldly critical, that he detected flaws in Washington less visible to other aides. One senses that he was the only young member of Washington’s “family” who felt competitive with the general or could have imagined himself running the army. It was temperamentally hard for Alexander Hamilton to subordinate himself to anyone, even someone with the extraordinary stature of George Washington. At the same time, he never doubted for an instant that Washington was a great leader of special gifts and the one irreplaceable personage in the early American pageant. He had the deepest admiration for Washington, even if he didn’t wallow in hero worship. He had misgivings about Washington as a military leader—the general did lose the majority of battles he fought in the Revolution—but not about him as a political leader. Having hitched his star to Washington, Hamilton struck a bargain with himself that he honored for the remainder of his career: he would never openly criticize Washington, whose image had to be upheld to unify the country.

So diffident was George Washington in speech that John Adams described him as a great actor with “the gift of silence.”
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Washington knew that he lacked verbal flow, once writing, “With me it has always been a maxim rather to let my designs appear from my works than by my expressions.”
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Yet this taciturn man had to cope with an unending flood of paperwork as he dealt with Congress and state legislatures while also issuing orders and arbitrating disputes among deputies. All the managerial problems of a protracted war—recruiting, promotions, munitions, clothing, food, supplies, prisoners—swam across his desk. Such a man sorely needed a fluent writer, and none of Washington’s aides had so facile a pen as did Hamilton.

Being Washington’s chief secretary was much more than a passive, stenographic task. “At present my time is so taken up at my desk,” Washington had written to Congress in September, “that I am obliged to neglect many other essential parts of my duty. It is absolutely necessary…for me to have persons that can think for me, as well as execute orders.”
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Washington further explained that his letters were drafted by aides, subject to his revision. Hamilton’s advent was thus a godsend for Washington. He was able to project himself into Washington’s mind and intuit what the general wanted to say, writing it up with instinctive tact and deft diplomatic skills. It was an inspired act of ventriloquism: Washington gave a few general hints and, presto, out popped Hamilton’s letter in record time. Most of Washington’s field orders have survived in Hamilton’s handwriting. “The pen for our army was held by Hamilton and for dignity of manner, pith of matter, and elegance of style, General’s Washington’s letters are unrivalled in military annals,” wrote Robert Troup.
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Hamilton was loath to admit that he served as a military adviser to Washington, lest this cast doubt on his boss’s abilities, but he offered him opinions on many matters. Another aide, James McHenry, said that Hamilton “had studied military service, practically under General Washington, and his advice in many instances (a fact known to myself) had aided our chief in giving to the machine that perfection to which it had arrived previously to the close of the revolutionary war.”
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Pretty soon, the twenty-two-year-old alter ego was drafting letters to Congress, state governors, and the most powerful generals in the Continental Army. Before long, he had access to all confidential information and was allowed to issue orders from Washington over his own signature. Timothy Pickering, then adjutant general, was later adamant that Hamilton was far more than the leading scribe at headquarters. “During the whole time that he was one of the General’s aides-de-camp, Hamilton had to
think
as well as to
write
for him in all his most important correspondence.”
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As Hamilton evolved from private secretary to something akin to chief of staff, he rode with the general in combat, cantered off on diplomatic missions, dealt with bullheaded generals, sorted through intelligence, interrogated deserters, and negotiated prisoner exchanges. This gave him a wide-angle view of economic, political, and military matters, further hastening his intellectual development. Washington was both military and political leader of the patriots, already something of a de facto president. He had to placate the Continental Congress, which insisted on supervising the army, and coordinate plans with thirteen bickering states. Both Washington and Hamilton came to think in terms of the general welfare, while many other officers and politicians got bogged down in parochial squabbles. In their mutual desire for a professional army and a strong central authority that would mitigate local rivalries, the two men felt the first stirrings of an impulse that would someday culminate in the Constitution and the Federalist party. Like Washington, Hamilton was scandalized by the dissension and cowardice, the backstabbing and avarice, of the politicians in Philadelphia while soldiers were dying in the field.

During his first weeks on Washington’s staff, Hamilton began building a network that became the foundation of his future political base at home. He agreed to update New York politicians about military affairs and exchanged twice-weekly reports with a newly appointed body called the New York Committee of Correspondence, placing him in regular contact with leaders such as Gouverneur Morris, John Jay, and Robert R. Livingston. On April 20, 1777, when the New York State Constitution was approved, Hamilton expressed general satisfaction with it. In commenting to Morris, Hamilton foreshadowed his later views, arguing that the election for governor “requires the deliberate wisdom of a select assembly and cannot be safely lodged with the people at large.” On the other hand, he still showed the radical influence of his student days when he worried that a separate senate, elected solely by propertied voters, will “degenerate into a body purely aristocratical.”
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In fact, the state’s aristocratic landowners were hugely disappointed when General Philip Schuyler of Albany was defeated for governor by General George Clinton, the champion of the small farmers. Hamilton’s future father-in-law was stung by the defeat, and, while expressing admiration for Clinton, Schuyler complained that “his family and connections do not entitle him to so distinguished a predominance.”
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One day, Hamilton was to inherit this Schuyler-Clinton feud as his own.

Shortly after Hamilton joined Washington’s staff, Charles Willson Peale visited the New Jersey headquarters and executed the first portrait of Hamilton, a miniature on ivory. It shows him in a blue-and-buff uniform with gold epaulets and the green ribbon of an aide-de-camp. He has close-cropped hair and a long, sharp nose and fixes the viewer with an intense gaze. He had not yet acquired the urbane self-assurance that later marked his demeanor. There was something still lean and unformed about his face, which gradually widened with age and came to look almost too large for his trim, dapper body.

Quartered at Jacob Arnold’s tavern, Hamilton lived in cheek-by-jowl intimacy with his new military family. So that he could summon his aides at any hour, Washington preferred to have them shelter under one roof. Sometimes, on frosty nights, the general would wrap himself in a blanket and lie thinking on a couch until interrupted by a sudden messenger on horseback. “The dispatches being opened and read,” recalled his adopted grandson, “there would be heard in the calm deep tones of that voice…the command of the chief to his now watchful attendant, ‘
Call Colonel Hamilton.
’”
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The four to six young aides usually slept in one room, often two to a bed, then worked long days in a single room with chairs crowded around small wooden tables. Washington typically kept a small office off to the side. During busy periods, the aides sometimes wrote and copied one hundred letters per day, an exhausting grind relieved by occasional dances, parades, and reviews. At night, the aides pulled up camp stools to a dinner table and engaged in lively repartee. Hamilton, though the youngest family member, was nevertheless Washington’s “principal and most confidential aide,” as the general phrased it.
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Instead of resenting him, the other aides treated Hamilton affectionately and nicknamed him “Ham” or “Hammie.”
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For an orphaned boy from the Caribbean, what better fate than to become part of this elite family?

Once again, the young immigrant had been transported to another sphere. Though past horrors would always lurk somewhere in his psyche, he spent the rest of his life in the upper stratum of American society, a remarkable transformation for someone with his rootless past. Unlike tradition-bound European armies, top-heavy with aristocrats, Washington’s army allowed for upward mobility. Though not a perfect meritocracy, it probably valued talent and intelligence more highly than any previous army. This high-level service completed Hamilton’s rapid metamorphosis into a full-blooded American. The Continental Army was a national institution and helped to make Hamilton the optimal person to articulate a vision of American nationalism, his vision sharpened by the immigrant’s special love for his new country.

Hamilton won admirers for his sprightly personality as well as intelligence. General Nathanael Greene remembered his presence at headquarters as “a bright gleam of sunshine, ever growing brighter as the general darkness thickened.”
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Such comments were echoed by those who knew Hamilton in after years. Harrison Gray Otis, later a senator, wrote: “Frank, affable, intelligent and brave, young Hamilton became the favorite of his fellow soldiers.”
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Lawyer William Sullivan likewise found Hamilton eloquent, high-minded, and openhearted but also noted that he always had his fair share of detractors: “He was capable of inspiring the most affectionate attachment, but he could make those whom he opposed fear and hate him cordially.”
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With a ready tongue and rapier wit, Hamilton could wound people more than he realized, and he was so nimble in debate that even bright people sometimes felt embarrassingly tongue-tied in his presence.

Hamilton was surrounded by a congenial group of young aides for whom he felt a familial warmth. He shared correspondence with Robert H. Harrison of Alexandria, Virginia, a respected lawyer and a neighbor of Washington. Ten years older than Hamilton, Harrison treated him fondly and nicknamed him “the little Lion.”
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Another early comrade was Tench Tilghman, who started out with a light-infantry company in Philadelphia. For nearly five years, Washington said, Tilghman was his “faithful assistant,” and he later applauded him as “a zealous servant and slave to the public” and as a man of “modesty and love of concord.”
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Richard Kidder Meade joined the staff around the same time as Hamilton and elicited warm praise from him: “I know few men estimable, fewer amiable and when I meet with one of the last description it is not in my power to withhold affection.”
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