Jefferson and Hamilton (3 page)

Prologue

In the last days of November 1783 the British army in New York sullenly marched through the streets of Manhattan to waiting troop transports. Only a few thousand British regulars remained, some of them Americans, black and white, who had chosen to fight for the king, not for the United States. The soldiers, for the most part clad in resplendent red-and-white uniforms, did not appear to be part of a defeated army. But they were.

Slowly, inexorably, the army moved toward New York’s harbor. Few New Yorkers lined the streets to watch, but the rhythmic sound of marching men, the clattering of horses on cobblestones, the stolid rattle and creaking of heavy artillery reverberated through nearby neighborhoods. At dockside, the men, burdened with equipment, struggled up steep gangplanks and onto vessels of the Royal Navy. Late in the day, as the sun sank in the western sky, the fleet sailed away from America and once it did, there could be no question that the War of Independence had finally come to an end.

A month after the departure of the enemy soldiers, General George Washington returned to Virginia, arriving at Mount Vernon on Christmas Eve in the final moments of a winter’s twilight. No one had ever been happier to retire. He told acquaintances how thankful he was to be “eased of a load of public care,” and of his eagerness to sit “under the shadow of my own Vine & my own Fig tree, free from the bustles of a camp and the busy scenes of public life.” At last, he was free of the burden of making life-and-death decisions and of carrying the responsibility of the struggle to win American independence.
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Washington was sincere in his repeated insistence of wishing to live at home in peace. He had commanded the Continental army for eight trying years, and in the end he had gained victory and an iconic status. He was happy. He was with his wife, Martha, and overjoyed by the frequent visits of his four step-grandchildren, youngsters who ranged in age from three to seven and who frolicked loudly both indoors and on the emerald green lawns that splayed outward on every side of the mansion. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than his beloved estate. He was filled with plans for landscaping and
gardening and with ideas for furnishing the mansion, which had been expanded during his long wartime absence. When he first arrived home, Washington rode about the estate daily, not on business, but just to savor surroundings that he found so soul stirring.

Washington was proud of what he had achieved, and he enjoyed the acclaim of his countrymen. He told numerous correspondents that he was home to stay, that he planned to spend the time allotted him gliding “gently down the stream of life, until I sleep with my Fathers.” He never again wished to face the “watchful days & sleepless Nights” that were the lot of a military commander, nor did he ever again want to face trials “in pursuit of fame.” It was especially nice, he said, not to have young officers circling about him hopeful “of catching a gracious smile.”
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The United States had won the war and gained its independence, though Washington was all too aware that the young nation faced problems, mostly from what he called a “deranged” economy. Even so, he radiated optimism when he came home from the war. Yes, affairs were “unsettled,” but he was convinced that the “good sense of the People” would steer the new republic toward “order & sound policy.”
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Initially, Washington was more concerned, and preoccupied, with his own troubled business affairs, which had suffered egregiously from his lengthy wartime absence.
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Washington’s concern about the troubled financial health of the United States had crystallized during the war. Since at least the midpoint of the conflict he had urged reforms, particularly strengthening the powers of the national government so that it could raise revenue and regulate commerce. Washington’s principal concern was national security—the new nation’s ability to protect itself from foreign predators and to resolve pressing domestic issues before the Union imploded. An enervated United States could not forever “exist as an Independent Power.” To survive, to gain respectability, what was required was self-evident: The United States must have a national government possessed of “a Supreme Power to regulate and govern the general concerns of the Confederated Republic.”
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Washington had returned to Mount Vernon expecting the nation’s problems to be swiftly resolved. When reforms had not occurred by the mid-1780s, he too expressed alarm. The United States was “tottering,” he said. He knew that republican governments seldom moved in haste, and he worried that a cure might not be found in time. All that he knew for certain was that “something must be done, or the fabrick must fall.”
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Others shared Washington’s sense of a gathering crisis, though where he worried principally about national security, they were often troubled by other concerns. Creditors wrung their hands over the worthless paper money.
Debtors feared foreclosure, not to mention debtors’ prison. Nearly everyone groaned under an extraordinary burden of taxation, as governments sought to continue functioning while they at the very least paid the interest on their wartime debts. Commerce languished, causing misery and apprehension. Some merchants had suffered since before the war. Many workers were out of work or feared losing their jobs. After years of sacrifice, even deprivation, many urban artisans and shopkeepers, and not a few farmers, faced an austere life.

But some were troubled not so much by economic tribulations as by democracy. The American Revolution had planted the seeds of a very different society from that which had existed in colonial days. The hierarchical society of colonial America was waning. Class distinctions, once accentuated by sharp dissimilarities in dress, were eroding. No longer were those of “middling circumstances” and the “meaner sort” as likely to defer to their social betters by bowing to them, stepping aside when passing them on the street, or doffing their hats. No longer were commoners as willing to tolerate unequal treatment before the law. No longer were they willing to acquiesce in the old belief that only gentlemen possessed the skill to hold political office. No longer were people as willing to accept the ancient notion that there was a place for each person and each person was expected to remain in his place.

The Revolution and the long war had instilled in those who had once been on the bottom the belief, stated in innumerable declarations of rights, that citizens were “equally free and independent.” Many men who had been denied the suffrage before the Revolution could now vote. Men who would never have occupied positions of authority in the colonies now held public office, high office in some cases, sitting even in their state legislature. A new kind of popular leader had emerged in the United States: men who were less educated and less refined than their predecessors, men who were likely to take literally the Declaration of Independence’s proclamation that “all men are born equal.” But it was not only the disappearance of traditional habits and customs that was of concern. Some feared that in the emerging democracy the new politically active class would demand alternative economic policies that would benefit those in the middle and lower strata and be harmful to the wealthiest Americans. The notion of democracy and equality had taken root, and the most conservative Americans did not like it all. This was not the American Revolution that they had imagined. For them, the crisis of the 1780s included the social and political changes unleashed by the Revolution. Some looked back wistfully to colonial times, though it was unlikely that what had been done could be undone. Instead, they sought the means of removing important decisions from popular control.
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In the summer of 1786, New York’s John Jay, the secretary of foreign affairs
under the Articles of Confederation, the first United States constitution, told Washington of his belief that national “affairs seem to lead to some crisis—some Revolution—something that I cannot foresee or conjecture. I am uneasy and apprehensive—more so, than during the War.” French assistance had provided hope during the war. Now there seemed to be no hope. The United States appeared to be headed toward “Evils and Calamities,” and in large measure the nation’s plight arose from entrusting authority to a new set of men who were “neither wise nor good.” Washington responded that he agreed entirely with Jay’s concerns. “I do not conceive we can exist long as a Nation,” wrote Washington.
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Perhaps the earliest and most persistent voice warning that malevolent forces were sapping life from the United States belonged to Alexander Hamilton. An aide to General Washington during the war, Hamilton had first written on the American crisis more than three years before the conflict ended. He was elected to the New York Assembly in 1786, and early the following year he took the floor of the legislature to deliver a ninety-minute address on America’s vexations. Hamilton began by saying that the Declaration of Independence had proclaimed that the new United States might “do all … things that independent states may of right do,” though in fact the national government had never possessed the powers normally vested in sovereign governments. Saddled with an enfeebled government, the United States had very nearly lost the war, and since the end of hostilities it had been “in continual danger of dissolution.” Matters had now reached a stage in which “national affairs … are left … to float in the chaos.” The United States could not much longer subsist, and when it collapsed, the states would be opened to “foreign influence and intrigue.” They might even make war on one another. Large standing armies would have to be raised by each state, presenting a greater threat to liberty than was ever likely to be posed by a redoubtable republican government. The outcome of the “dissolution of the union,” Hamilton warned, was that the states would be compelled to ally with European powers in order to survive, a step that would “plunge us into all the labyrinths of European politics.” At risk, he said, was the American Revolution and all the hopes and dreams that had gone into it for a United States.
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On the day that Hamilton spoke, Thomas Jefferson was shopping in Paris, purchasing chinaware and a door for the carriage house at his residence.
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A former congressman and governor of Virginia, Jefferson was the American minister to France. He had been away from the United States for some eighteen months, but numerous friends kept him abreast of what was occurring at home. Some were worried about America’s prospects, and some saw things in nearly as gloomy a light as did Hamilton.

But Jefferson dissented from the chorus of doom. When told that many an American longed for a restoration of colonial society and governance, he responded that if there was such a man, “send him here. It is the best school in the universe to cure him of that folly.” The monarchical and aristocratic-dominated governments in Europe, he added, “are loaded with misery.” When told that there were those who hated the breakdown of the colonists’ hierarchical society, he replied that “the dignity of man is lost in arbitrary distinctions.” Indeed, the one “germ of destruction” that he saw in America’s institutions was the existence, and predominance, of aristocracy in the southern states. It was degrading, he went on, to think of a system in which “the many are crushed under the weight of a few.” When Jefferson learned that some Americans were assailing the notion that the people could establish good government, he responded that he was persuaded of the overall “good sense of the people” and that he could not understand why “fear predominates over hope.” Yes, there were problems, he acknowledged, but the “mass of mankind” in America “enjoys a precious degree of liberty & happiness.” If American democracy was bumpy, its mistakes should be weighed “against the oppressions” on the monarchies in Europe. On the whole, said Jefferson, the constitution of the United States was “a wonderfully perfect instrument.” While the U.S. government had some defects, to compare it to the governments of Europe would be “like a comparison of heaven & hell.”
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Jefferson wrote to Washington from time to time, usually confining his remarks to European affairs. Washington always answered promptly. On one occasion, however, Jefferson discoursed briefly on American affairs, telling Washington that “the inconveniences resulting” from the problems of the national government in the United States were “so light in comparison with those existing in every other government on earth, that our citizens may certainly be considered as in the happiest political situation that exists.”
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Washington did not answer that letter.

By the time Hamilton spoke in 1787, Washington had come to share with his most conservative countrymen their dark views regarding America’s troubles. Wondering now whether the people were fit for self-government, Washington concluded that “the discerning part of the community” must govern and the “ignorant & designing” must follow. It had to be this way, for most people simply would not accept “measures that are best calculated for their own good.”
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This was the prevailing sentiment regarding governance before the American Revolution.

By 1787 something else was clear. The battle lines had been drawn over determining the meaning of the American Revolution and, with it, the contours of the new American nation.

Coming of Age

Chapter 1
“To make a more universal Acquaintance”

Unhappy Youths

Neither Thomas Jefferson nor Alexander Hamilton enjoyed a happy childhood. Jefferson later characterized youth as a time of “colonial subservience.” Next to slavery, he said, one’s earliest years had to be the worst state imaginable.
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At age fourteen, Hamilton denounced the “grov’ling … condition” which his “Fortune &c condemn[ed] him” and deplored the “weakness” that appeared to be his destiny.
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