Jefferson and Hamilton (7 page)

Jefferson also exaggerated his influence in the assembly during his first several years in the body. In his account, the leaders included him in secret meetings to plot strategy against the royal governor and colleagues beseeched his assistance. But it is extremely unlikely that Jefferson was a legislative kingpin before the American Revolution. He served on important committees, but as was his lifelong habit as a legislator, he seldom even spoke or joined in the floor debates.
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That he was not a leader was due somewhat to his temperament, but mostly to his absorption with private affairs.

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Seventeen-year-old Alexander Hamilton arrived in the British mainland colonies less than a year after Jefferson married. Jefferson had been five years older when he had made his first long trip from home, the trek that took him as far away as New York, and he had been accompanied by at least one attendant. Hamilton, whose life of travail on St. Croix had made him incredibly self-reliant, traveled alone across the perilous sea and into a land filled with strangers. It was a venture for a hardy soul, one with an iron will and a propulsive ambition. Hamilton booked passage on a vessel bound for Boston. He barely survived the journey. Before reaching the North American coast, his ship caught fire. The crew succeeded in saving it only after taking heroic measures, and the badly damaged brig limped into Boston Harbor. Friendless, Hamilton on his own had to find transportation to Manhattan.

Hamilton’s backers in Christiansted had hoped for his prompt admission to Princeton. However, given the deficiencies in his education, Princeton rejected Hamilton’s application for admission, though it guided him to a preparatory academy in what now is Elizabeth, New Jersey. This schooling, and all that followed, was paid for from the subscription fund established by his benefactors on St. Croix.

Through introductory letters written by Reverend Knox, Hamilton met several influential figures in New Jersey, including William Livingston, Elias Boudinot, and William Alexander, who called himself Lord Stirling. Each would subsequently play an important role in the American Revolution. As with Hamilton’s patrons in Christiansted, each must have glimpsed something extraordinary in the young West Indian, and each took Hamilton under his wing. Meanwhile, Hamilton on his own initiative bonded with others, including fellow students, with whom he was popular, and men with ties to the mercantile company that was partially bankrolling his education. Whereas Jefferson was reserved, even withdrawn, Hamilton was self-assured, gregarious, resilient, and never one to conceal his abilities.

Hamilton’s assertive nature took him only so far. After several months in the prep school, he again failed to gain admission to Princeton. He later said that he had been turned down because he had requested admittance on an accelerated track, though it is possible that he remained academically deficient.
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At some point following his second rebuff, Hamilton moved to Manhattan and prepared on his own. Finally, a year or more after his arrival in British North America—it was probably in late 1773 or early 1774—Hamilton was admitted to King’s College (now Columbia University), an institution tied to the Anglican Church. It consisted of three faculty and about twenty students in a single large building on a rambling wooded campus near the outskirts of New York City, which then took up just the southern part of Manhattan Island.
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King’s was widely seen as a conservative school with Royalist predilections, more so than William and Mary. King’s president, Myles Cooper, was an Anglican clergyman who subsequently became a leading foe of the American Revolution. Students attended chapel each morning at sunrise, vespers after every sunset, and two worship services on Sunday. Some fellow students later remembered Hamilton as a “zealous believer” who daily prayed “upon his knees both night and morning,” and once even composed a hymn, “The Soul Entering into Bliss.”
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Hamilton was admitted to King’s College as a charity student, a pupil who was fast-tracked because his financial resources were limited but who was judged capable of handling the rigors of a heavy academic load. He was permitted to audit classes and take free tutorials. Given his formidable intellect, incredible industry, and seemingly inexhaustible energy, Hamilton flourished, somehow even finding the time and stamina to organize a debating club and take part in several literary societies. Like Jefferson, Hamilton gave a wide berth to his less serious peers. His close friends were mostly the sober and serious students who stayed out of trouble. He was closest to Robert Troup, who hailed from a middle-rung background and went on to serve as an officer in the Continental army and ultimately as a federal judge.

From painful experience, Hamilton knew that life was filled with vicissitude. A college degree would serve as a stabilizer. Though security was crucial for him, he wanted more. Hamilton wanted to be somebody. Mere respect was insufficient; he was driven to gain prominence, authority, and acceptance.

Anglo-American relations were quiet during Hamilton’s first year or so in the English colonies. The strains and turbulence of the mid-1760s seemed a distant memory. Though reared on a Danish island in the Caribbean, Hamilton had worked for a firm owned by New Yorkers and had dealt with British clients scattered through the West Indies, so he likely had some sense of the issues that had divided the colonies and London. However, when he sailed for the mainland colonies in 1772, Hamilton could not have known that he was coming to a land that was about to be swept by a great revolution. As Hamilton neared the end of his first year in college, his world, like that of Thomas Jefferson, was about to change forever.

The American Revolution

Chapter 2
“The Galling Yoke of Dependence”

Becoming Rebels

Newly married and a father, Jefferson was happy at last. At age twenty he had wondered if there was “any such thing as happiness in the world.”
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As he neared age thirty, Jefferson knew there was. He had found contentment through his family. Jefferson had given up his legal practice. He had grown contemptuous of lawyers, calling them a “disagreeable crowd” that, like “parasites” feasted off the misery of others. However, it was the additional wealth that accrued from marriage that enabled him to live on a grand scale without practicing law.
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He anticipated tranquility and prosperity as a planter, and he doubtless looked toward a long career in the House of Burgesses, probably hoping that in time his intellect and pen would elevate him to a leadership role. Jefferson may have thought of writing for publication, perhaps doing as Franklin had done en route to becoming the best-known American of the era. Perhaps he too could now and then dash off a newspaper essay or write a pamphlet on a scientific matter, social criticism, or imperial policy. The last thing he expected, or wanted, was long absences from Monticello.

America’s growing conflict with Great Britain intruded on Jefferson’s bliss. Around the time of Jefferson’s birth, the prime minister and his cabinet in London had quietly contemplated tightening control over the colonies. Britain’s rulers feared that generations of distracted supervision and paltry enforcement of the imperial commercial laws might lead the American provinces to drift steadily toward independence. Nearly twenty years of warfare with Spain and France, including the Seven Years’ War, which began in the colonies in 1754, thwarted Great Britain’s plans to institute new colonial policies. But in 1763 hostilities ended in a magnificent British victory. In the Treaty of Paris, Great Britain acquired all of North America east of the Mississippi River, including Canada and Florida. With a long period of peace seemingly at hand, the way was clear for London to institute change. Wishing to put in
place governments in the newly won territories, regulate trade with the Indians, and resolve conflicting land claims, the Crown first promulgated the Proclamation of 1763, a decree that forbade the flow of population across the Appalachians until further notice. To keep peace on the frontier, and as leverage for inducing the Indians to relinquish their lands, London left an army of several thousand troops in America. It was the first time Great Britain had deployed a sizable force in America in peacetime. However, faced with a staggering war debt and the simultaneous cost of maintaining the army in America, London needed money. Officials glimpsed two new sources of revenue. One was through a stricter regulation of colonial commerce. The other was by levying taxes on the colonists.
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Jefferson was twenty-one and studying with Wythe when the Stamp Act, the first direct tax that Parliament had ever imposed on the colonists, went into effect in 1765. Jefferson followed events closely. Wythe wrote the first draft of the House of Burgesses’ denunciation of parliamentary taxation, asserting that it was unconstitutional. In the spring, Jefferson stood with the other spectators in the lobby outside the assembly chamber and listened as Patrick Henry delivered an impassioned speech assailing the tax. Thereafter, Jefferson not only said that Henry’s oration was the best speech he had ever heard—years later, he acknowledged the enormous “impression [it] made on me”—but he also insisted that Henry’s daring conduct in 1765 had launched the colonial insurgency against the parent state.
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Jefferson, however, did not rush into the ranks of agitators. Henry had hardly finished his celebrated speech before Jefferson returned home, embarking on two years of intense additional study. During those years, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in the face of American protests, though it simultaneously declared its authority to legislate for America “in all cases whatsoever.” In 1767, the year that Jefferson launched his legal practice, Parliament exercised the authority it claimed. It enacted the Townshend Duties, taxes on the sales of lead, tea, glass, paper, and paint in the colonies. A new wave of American resistance flared. Essays denouncing the taxes flowed from colonial presses. Several northern provinces joined in an economic boycott of British trade to force their repeal. Virginia was ready to join the embargo movement by the time the House of Burgesses assembled in May 1769, the first session in which the newly elected Jefferson served. The assembly convened and Jefferson took his seat. The royal governor, Baron de Botetourt, rode from the Governor’s Palace in a handsome carriage drawn by six white horses to open the session with a brief speech. Though a newcomer, Jefferson was asked to draft the assembly’s response. He did so, but his colleagues rejected his composition—possibly because its tone was not sufficiently obsequious.
The legislature instead adopted a statement that declared its “firm Attachment to his Majesty’s sacred Person and Government,” although the burgesses unanimously agreed to embargo British imports until Parliament rescinded the taxes.
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The American boycotts worked. In the spring of 1770, about the time that Jefferson began to court Martha Wayles Skelton, Parliament repealed all the Townshend duties except for its tax on tea. An air of calm settled over imperial relations, leading some to conclude that the Anglo-American tempest had ended. But the Townshend duties provoked a sea change in the thinking of even more Americans, as this second attempt to tax the colonists revealed an unmistakable pattern in London’s intentions. John Adams, in Massachusetts, thought the Stamp Act had caused the “People, even to the lowest Ranks … [to] become more attentive to their Liberties, more inquisitive about them, more determined to defend them.”
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Some colonists were beginning to believe that a “profoundly secret, dark, and deep” plot existed among royal officials to quash the rights of the colonists.
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In 1770, though, no colonist imagined that the American Revolution lay on the horizon, least of all Jefferson, whose focus remained on getting his life and career on track. When he remarked in his memoirs that “our countrymen seemed to fall into a state of insensibility to our situation” during the early 1770s, it may have been a subliminal reference to his own conduct.
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To the surprise of most, however, imperial troubles resurfaced late in 1773. Urban protests against the lingering tax on tea culminated in December in the Boston Tea Party, an organized strike in the night on ships in Boston’s harbor laden with dutied tea. Before sunrise, some ninety thousand pounds of East India Company tea had been destroyed. Imperial authorities responded with a heavy hand. In the spring, Parliament enacted the Coercive Acts, draconian measures levied solely against Massachusetts. The legislation fined the colony, shut the port of Boston until compensation was made for the destroyed tea, and made major changes to the provincial government in the Bay Colony. It was a last-ditch effort to break the back of the American insurgency by peaceful means. The colonists learned of these measures, which they called the Intolerable Acts, in May 1774.

Jefferson had by then pulled together his thoughts on the limits of British authority. He had been influenced by both Henry’s stirring speech and Wythe’s thinking on imperial constitutional matters. He had read deeply in the law, political theory, English history, the human condition, and the natural rights of humankind. He was also conversant with the remarkable abundance of radical tracts produced by English dissidents who styled themselves “Real Whigs,” an appellation they chose in order to emphasize their attachment to
the ideas of earlier English republicans. Since the late seventeenth century, these writers had produced a pugnacious literature that blended descriptions of corruption and decay in England with warnings of threats to liberty. The rot in England purportedly stemmed from the excessive powers and diabolical designs of a strong executive—the monarchy—which corrupted legislators through patronage and pensions. But England’s degeneration had also allegedly occurred because its modern financial system had produced unimaginable riches for the few and deepening poverty for the many, widening the gap between rich and poor, and cursing the land with a malignant tyranny that ate away at the liberties once enjoyed by Englishmen.
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