Alexander Hamilton (56 page)

Far from bristling, Washington thanked Hamilton for his openness, which enabled him to assess the presidency without betraying unseemly ambition. In a confessional mode, Washington said that at the thought of being president he “always felt a kind of gloom” settle upon his mind and noted that if he became president, “the acceptance would be attended with more diffidence and reluctance than ever I experienced before in my life.”
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Sensing Washington’s need for gentle prodding, Hamilton stressed that America’s glorious destiny demanded him as president and that “no other man can sufficiently unite the public opinion or can give the requisite weight to the office in the commencement of the government.”
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Hearing this from others as well, Washington finally overcame his misgivings and agreed to stand for president.

While Hamilton endeared himself to Washington in this first election, he also antagonized John Adams, a man with an encyclopedic memory for slights. Returning from Europe in June 1788, Adams decided that any post less than vice president was “beneath himself,” as wife Abigail phrased it.
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As a favorite son of the New England states, with their hefty bloc of votes, Adams agreed to run for vice president. This created a ticklish predicament. Under the Constitution, the presidential electors cast two votes apiece, but they did not vote separately for president and vice president. Whoever garnered the most electoral votes became president and the runner-up vice president. The peril was manifest: there could be a tie vote, forcing the contest into the House of Representatives. Still worse, a vice presidential candidate might accidentally walk off with the presidency. “Everybody is aware of that defect in the constitution, which renders it possible the man intended for vice president may, in fact, turn up president,” Hamilton told Pennsylvania federalist James Wilson in early 1789. If Adams received a unanimous vote and a few votes were “insidiously withheld” from Washington, Hamilton said, Adams might edge out Washington for the presidency.
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Hamilton doubted that the sometimes irascible Adams could unite a divided country or give the new government its best chance of success. For Hamilton, the whole American experiment hinged upon having Washington as president. His worries were only compounded by the improbable presidential candidacy of George Clinton. As Hamilton maneuvered to wean electors away from Clinton, he feared they might turn to Adams instead of Washington. If so, Hamilton brooded, he might inadvertently help to defeat the one man he so desperately wanted as president.

In the fall of 1788, Hamilton and Adams had no personal relationship. Hamilton had become a major domestic figure during Adams’s long diplomatic sojourn abroad. Adams knew of Hamilton’s superlative reputation as a lawyer, but he would naturally have considered the younger man an upstart, a latecomer to the American Revolution. Hamilton, for his part, already felt ambivalent toward Adams. He could recall vividly the sympathy of the Massachusetts Adamses and the Virginia Lees with the nebulous Conway Cabal, which had encouraged the military pretensions of General Horatio Gates to supplant Washington. Hamilton told one Massachusetts ally, “The Lees and Adams[es] have been in the habit of uniting and hence may spring up a cabal very embarrassing to the executive and of course to the administration of the government.”
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At the same time, Hamilton credited Adams’s indisputable patriotism, his “sound understanding,” and his “ardent love for the public good,” and he was certain he would not “disturb the harmony” of a Washington administration.
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Hamilton confided to Madison that Adams was a trustworthy friend of the Constitution and as vice president would provide geographic balance with a Virginia president.

Nonetheless, Hamilton fretted that whether by chance or design Adams might sneak past Washington in the voting. So he approached two electors in Connecticut, two in New Jersey, and three or four in Pennsylvania and asked them to deny their votes to Adams to insure that Washington became president. As usual, Hamilton proved excessively fearful. When the sixty-nine electors met on February 4, 1789, they voted unanimously for Washington, who became the first president, and cast only thirty-four ballots for Adams, who came in second and thus became vice president. (The remaining thirty-five votes were split among ten candidates.) This relatively weak showing dealt a blow to the vanity of John Adams, who bemoaned it as a “stain” upon his character and even thought of declining the office out of wounded pride.
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At this juncture, he did not know of Hamilton’s efforts to deny him a handful of votes. When he learned of a “dark and dirty intrigue,” apparently originating in New York, to deprive him of votes, he was incensed. “Is not my election to this office, in the scurvy manner in which it was done, a curse rather than a blessing?” he protested to Benjamin Rush.
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Adams came to view Hamilton’s actions as unforgivably duplicitous.

In fact, Hamilton had approached only seven or eight electors, so that his actions could have accounted for just a small fraction of Adams’s thirty-five-vote deficit. And Hamilton had been motivated by a laudable desire to help Washington, not to harm Adams, whom he favored for vice president. Hamilton was thunderstruck when he learned that Adams had misread his actions as a calculated effort to humiliate him and lessen his public stature. Years later, he portrayed the episode as proof of Adams’s “extreme egotism” and vanity: “Great was my astonishment and equally great my regret when afterwards I learned…that Mr. Adams had complained of unfair treatment in not having been permitted to take an equal chance with General Washington.”
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It was the first of many hurtful misunderstandings between these two giants of the early republic.

The true target of Hamilton’s venom was Governor George Clinton, who had been in office for twelve years and ran again in the spring of 1789. Clinton had advocated the rotation of presidents in office but had no misgivings about converting the New York governorship into his personal fiefdom. Hamilton feared that Clinton would try to undermine the new government. Having waged a vigorous campaign to deny him the presidency, Hamilton now attempted to oust him as governor. Massachusetts federalist Samuel Otis informed a friend that Hamilton and Philip Schuyler planned to do everything in their power “to kill the governor politically.”
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On February 11, 1789, Hamilton chaired an overflowing meeting at Bardin’s Tavern on Broad Street, a business haunt, to anoint a candidate to challenge Clinton. The hundreds who showed up opted for a surprise choice: Judge Robert Yates. It was dramatic proof of Hamilton’s resolve to unseat Clinton that he endorsed this erstwhile foe, whom he thought capable of assembling a winning coalition of downstate federalists and upstate antifederalist farmers. Yates had impressed him by his unswerving support for the Constitution once it was ratified in New York. Hamilton agreed to chair a correspondence committee to foster support for him. One of Yates’s dearest friends, the antifederalist Aaron Burr, showed up at Bardin’s Tavern and consented to join the group.

Once Hamilton had latched on to Yates, he was determined to strike hard at Clinton in the slashing style that was fast becoming his trademark—a combativeness that may well have been a legacy of his troubled upbringing. He advised one supporter, “In politics, as in war, the first blow is half the battle.”
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In customary fashion, Hamilton opened his campaign with a blistering series of sixteen anonymous letters printed in
The Daily Advertiser
under the initials “H. G.” Like his
Federalist
essays, Hamilton wrote these letters in a titanic burst of energy, eight of them appearing in consecutive issues at the end of February 1789 alone.

Starting with the first “H. G.” essay, Hamilton flung poisoned darts at Clinton. Reviewing the governor’s political and military career, Hamilton accused him of “narrow views, a prejudiced and contracted disposition, a passionate and interested temper.”
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He questioned Clinton’s bravery as a brigadier general during the Revolution: “After diligent enquiry, I have not been able to learn that he was ever more than once in actual combat.”
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In one letter, Hamilton differentiated between two types drawn to revolutions: those sincerely interested in the public good and “restless and turbulent spirits,” such as Clinton, who sought to exploit unrest to become despots.
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Upping the stakes, Hamilton accused Clinton of having stolen from Philip Schuyler the first governor’s race, which was held during the Revolution, by forcing militiamen under his command to vote for him.

In later “H. G.” letters, Hamilton occupied higher moral ground. He analyzed Clinton’s unremitting opposition to the Constitution and found it unpardonable that the governor had maintained a course “replete with danger to the peace and welfare of this state and of the Union.”
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Hamilton wanted New York to continue as the nation’s capital, as it had been since January 1785. He noted that Clinton had opposed it as the residence for Congress because he was afraid this would encourage dissolute behavior: “Every man of sense knows that the residence of Congress among us has been a considerable source of wealth to the state. And as to the idle tale of its promoting luxury and dissipation, I believe there has not been for a number of years past a period of greater frugality than that in which Congress have resided in this city.”
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More than just petty, power hungry, and stubborn, Clinton was cast by Hamilton as a boor devoid of good manners who had not even paid courtesy calls on the last two presidents of the Confederation Congress.

The federalists were overjoyed by these resounding blasts. “Never was anything read with more avidity and with greater success,” wrote one Hamilton supporter.
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Said another: “
Col. H
[amilton] has taken a very active part in favour of Judges Yates, from which circumstance much is expected. I believe old Clinton the
sinner
will get
ousted.
”
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The old sinner did not rebut Hamilton with his own quill, preferring surrogates, and rejoinders soon glutted the press. In early March, one “Philopas” protested “the torrent of scurrility” from “H. G.”’s pen, which “would make an inhabitant of Billingsgate blush.”
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Another writer said the real issue in the election was that “an obscure
Plebeian
”—Clinton—had dared to oppose “the boundless ambition of
Patrician
families”: the Schuylers.
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If Yates beat Clinton, he predicted, he would be thrust aside at the next election so that the “F[athe]r and the S[o]n” could divide the fishes and loaves—a transparent reference to Philip Schuyler and his son-in-law Hamilton.
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By making cutting personal remarks about Clinton, Hamilton had ensured that the retaliation would also be highly personal. That Hamilton could be so sensitive to criticisms of himself and so insensitive to the effect his words had on others was a central mystery of his psyche.

The invective grew uglier in late March when someone writing under “William Tell” branded Hamilton a Machiavellian and tarred him as a power-mad politician puffed up “by an expecting band of sycophants, a train of ambitious relations, and a few rich men.” “William Tell” then leveled a charge against Hamilton more terrible than mere ambition: “Your private character is still worse than your public one and it will yet be exposed by your own works, for [you] will not be bound by the
most solemn of all obligations!
^*******
”
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The seven asterisks must have signified the word
wedlock,
meaning that Hamilton was being charged, for the first time in print, with adultery. As we shall see, there was a reason why this charge surfaced at this time.

Like other founding fathers, Hamilton inhabited two diametrically opposed worlds. There was the Olympian sphere of constitutional debate and dignified discourse—the way many prefer to remember these stately figures—and the gutter world of personal sniping, furtive machinations, and tabloid-style press attacks. The contentious culture of these early years was both the apex and the nadir of American political expression. Such a contradictory environment was probably an inescapable part of the transition from the lofty idealism of Revolution to the gritty realities of quotidian politics. The heroes of 1776 and 1787 were bound to seem smaller and more hypocritical as they jockeyed for personal power and advantage in the new government.

For the remainder of the gubernatorial campaign, Hamilton issued open letters to the electorate, and at Clinton campaign rallies his essays were hurled under the table as marks of contempt. In shaping his final appeal to voters, Hamilton said that Clinton’s most effective tactic was to single out the rich for abuse, and he warned that republicans scapegoated the rich to their detriment: “There is no stronger sign of combinations unfriendly to the general good than when the partisans of those in power raise an indiscriminate cry against men of property.”
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The argument did not persuade voters: Governor Clinton solidly defeated Judge Yates. This vicious election left a trail of wounded feelings, removing any chance of a rapprochement between Hamilton and Clinton. New York remained a bitterly divided state, ripe for political manipulation. The wily Clinton knew that he had to shore up his base, so in September he offered the state attorney-general job to Aaron Burr, whom he neither liked nor trusted. For the first time, Hamilton felt betrayed by Burr, who had campaigned for Yates. The political genius of Aaron Burr was to lie in figuring out endless ways to profit from the partisan wrangling in his home state. For three years, he had engaged in little political activity. Now his dormant ambition was beginning to awaken.