HAMILTON: A PORTRAIT
I
The genius for whom the Nation had been waiting, who walked briskly and
with a martial air[92] into the Treasury, and sat down at the almost
effeminate mahogany desk with the women’s faces carved upon the legs, to
bring order out of chaos, looked the leader. Not that he was of
commanding stature, for he was but five feet seven in height, with a
figure of almost boyish slimness. It was rather in his soldierly
erectness and the dignity of his bearing that he impressed. If his
carriage suggested the camp, the meticulous care of his dress hinted of
the court, for he was something of an elegant in his attire. We have one
striking picture of him in a blue coat with bright buttons, the skirts
unusually long, with a white waistcoat, black silk small-clothes, white
silk stockings;[93] another in fine lace ruffles.[94] It is quite
impossible to think of him as unfit for an instant summons to a court
levee or a ladies’ drawing-room, albeit Wolcott, who saw him first in
his office, thought him ‘a very amiable plain man.’[95] It was an age of
frills and fancies among the men of the aristocracy and his very
conservatism would have dissuaded him from the slightest departure from
the conventions.
It was his head and features that denoted the commander. His
well-shaped, massive, and symmetrical head, with its reddish fair hair
turned back from his forehead, powdered and collected in a queue behind,
was not so likely to attract attention as his pronounced features. These
were unique in that rarest of all combinations of beauty and strength.
He was handsome enough to be attractive to women, with his fair
complexion and almost rosy cheeks, his well-moulded lips, and dark,
almost violet, deep-set eyes that could smile as sweetly and seductively
as any gallant’s.
[Illustration: _A Hamilton_]
And yet these lips could be firm and stern, and the soft, mirthful eyes
could freeze and flash. If women were to observe the softer nature, the
politicians were to note the man of relentless will disclosed in the
firm, strong jaw. Graceful and debonair, elegant and courtly, seductive
and ingratiating, playful or impassioned, he could have fitted into the
picture at the Versailles of Louis XV, or at the dinner table at Holland
House. No one born in the atmosphere of courts could have looked the
part more perfectly.
And yet, such was his origin that the envious Adams could sneer at him
as ‘the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar,’[96] and it was not without
reason that Gouverneur Morris, meditating his funeral oration, and his
‘illegitimate birth,’ contrived a mode ‘to pass over this
handsomely.’[97] Even the sympathetic researches of Mrs. Atherton have
failed to lift the mystery of his origin and family. All we know is that
he was born of an irregular relation, without the intervention of the
clergy,[98] between an unprosperous Scotch merchant of the West Indies
and a brilliant and beautiful daughter of the French Huguenots. Even his
parentage by the man named Hamilton was doubted, on circumstantial
evidence, by so ardent a friend as Pickering, who thought he had found
the father in a physician.[99] Whoever the father--and the Pickering
Papers are not convincing--there is no doubt that Hamilton inherited his
genius from his brilliant, passionate, high-strung mother.
Nor does the mystery end with his birth. Pickering was half persuaded
that the mother lived into the manhood of her son, but the church
records at Saint Kitts bear out the claims of the family that she died
in 1768. It is not easy to account for the rather morbid relations later
between Hamilton and his father and brother. Both appear to have been a
worthless sort. For years Hamilton was ignorant of his father’s
whereabouts, which does not appear to have bothered him much.[100] Later
there was some correspondence looking to a possible reunion in America,
out of which nothing came.[101] At intervals money passed from the great
man in America to the indigent old man in the West Indies,[102] but at
no time does it appear that Hamilton had any thought of visiting his
father in the isle of his childhood. It was a long cry from the squalid
life in the West Indies to Mrs. Bingham’s drawing-room, and the genius
turned his back upon the past.
II
There is nothing so inexplicable in this amazing man as the precocity of
his genius. There is a suggestion of it in the younger Pitt, but he had
sat from infancy at the feet of Chatham. To the easy-going natives of
his natal isle this passionate, fiery-tempered, supersensitive boy,
dreaming of power, must have seemed an exotic. As a mere child he
appeared to sense that his field of conquest lay across the sea. He was
planning a career while his companions were absorbed in childish games.
His early range of knowledge and reading was remarkable. In his passion
for literature he was unconsciously moulding one of the weapons for his
successful assault on fame; through the pages of Plutarch he was lifting
himself above the drab slothful surroundings to the companionship of the
great.
Sometimes fate was serving his destiny when he felt himself a captive
beating against his cage. Thus, in the counting-room at Santa Cruz he
was mastering business methods and absorbing the commercial spirit on
which he was later to predicate his philosophy of government.[103] The
business letters he wrote were preparations for the framing of his
‘Report on the Public Credit.’ Even then it was a peculiarity of his
genius that he could write on business matters without clipping the
wings of his fancy. He seemed born with a mastery of words, a rare gift
of expression. When a hurricane swept the islands the description he
wrote for a paper became the talk of the West Indies. Only a little
while before he was rebelling against the ‘groveling ambition of a
clerk,’ and passionately writing that he ‘would willingly risk his life
but not his character to elevate his station.’ These were the aspirings
of a boy not yet thirteen. ‘I shall conclude by saying, I wish there was
a war.’ Here we have a vivid light upon his character.[104]
The description of the hurricane made his fortune. Dreaming of rising by
the sword, it was his pen that rallied friends who raised the money to
send him to America for an education. Through all his days he was to
aspire to glory through the sword, little knowing that he was winning
immortality with his pen.
The Little Corsican touching the soil of France, the little West Indian
landing in America--there is a striking analogy: both dreaming of
martial glory in the land of strangers; both obsessed with a morbid
ambition sustained by the rarest powers of application.
The records of the years preceding the Revolution are but vague, though
we get glimpses of the genius forging his weapons in the boy at the
grammar school at Elizabethtown poring over books till midnight, to rise
at dawn to continue his studies in the quiet of a near-by cemetery;
practicing prose composition; writing an elegy on the death of a lady;
composing the prologue and the epilogue of a play,[105] and, at Kings
College (Columbia), amazing his companions by the energy of his mind,
and puzzling pedestrians by talking to himself as he walked for hours
each day under the great trees of Batteau (Dey) Street.[106] Here, too,
an occasional display of the eloquence of maturity, enriched by the glow
of genius, set him apart.
Then came the Revolution. ‘I wish there was a war!’ cried the boy of
thirteen. And war came to find the lad of nineteen as eager to seize its
opportunities as was the Corsican youth when ordered to clear the
streets of Paris.
III
The war was to prove his genius, not as a soldier, but as a writer and
constructive thinker on governmental matters. He was a natural
journalist and pamphleteer--one of the fathers of the American
editorial. His perspicacity, penetration, powers of condensation, and
clarity of expression were those of a premier editorial writer. These
same qualities made him a pamphleteer without a peer. That he would have
shone with equal luster in the reportorial room of a modern paper is
shown in his description of the hurricane, and in his letter to Laurens
picturing vividly the closing hours of Major André.[107] From the moment
he created a sensation, with ‘A Farmer Refuted,’ in his eighteenth year,
until, in the closing months of his life, he was meeting Coleman
surreptitiously in the night to dictate vigorous editorials for the New
York ‘Evening Post’ he had established,[108] he recognized his power. No
man ever complained more bitterly of the attacks of the press; none ever
used the press more liberally and relentlessly to attack.
In ‘A Farmer Refuted,’ the maturity of the thought, the severity of the
reasoning, the vigor of the onslaught, the familiarity with history and
governmental processes displayed, denoted the hand of one seasoned in
controversy. The sprightliness, wit, humor, sarcasm, suggested more than
talent. The evident joy in the combat, with the air of assurance, was
that of the fighter unafraid. These are the qualities that were to run
through all of Hamilton’s literary work. Nowhere in the literature of
invective is there anything more vitriolic than the attack on a war
speculator and profiteer, under the signature of ‘Publius.’[109] This
tendency to bitter invective will appear, as we proceed, in Hamilton’s
attacks on Jefferson and Adams.
But usually he appealed to reason, and then he was at his best. Thus, in
‘The Continentalist,’ urging a more perfect union and a more potent
government, and in his letter to James Duer,[110] we are impressed with
the writer’s intimate knowledge of conditions, his constructive
instinct, his vision.[111] And thus, especially do these appear in ‘The
Federalist’--one of the most brilliant contributions to the literature
of political science in the world’s history. It will be impossible to
comprehend the genius of Hamilton, his domination of his party, and his
power, despite his unpopularity with the masses, without a foreknowledge
of his force with the pen. It was his scepter and his sword.
IV
His power as an orator was unsurpassed in any assembly that called it
forth, but with very few exceptions he did not appear before the
multitude. He swayed the leaders and won them to his leadership. There
was little of fancy in his speeches, scarcely any appeal to the
emotions, but he spoke with enthusiasm and an intensity of conviction.
Force, clearness, fire--‘logic on fire’--and a rapid fusillade of
impressively directed facts--with these he usually swept all before
him. The comparatively few speeches which have come down to us fail to
explain his power. The stories of audiences moved to tears are scarcely
in keeping with the absence of the slightest attempts at pathos or
appeals to the emotions. Kent, who heard him in court, recalled, long
after Hamilton was dead, ‘the clear, elegant and fluent style, and
commanding manner.’[112] Physically, he was far from imposing, but it is
easy to imagine the virility of his manner, the flash of his conqueror’s
eye. In the New York Convention called to pass on the Constitution, it
was the force and persuasiveness of his arguments that converted a
hostile majority. Later Congress was to refuse him permission to present
personally his reports on the ground that he might unduly sway its
judgment; and Jefferson was to resent his interminable and passionate
‘harangues’ in the Cabinet room. But these exhibitions of his eloquence
advanced his political career by impressing the leaders with the
brilliancy of his intellect.
V
It is significant that, while he was not vain of his power as a writer
and orator, he lived and died firmly convinced of his genius as a
soldier. In the earliest of his letters we have his longing for a war.
His son and biographer was impressed with the fact that, ‘while arms
seemed to be his predominant passion, the world was at peace.’[113] He
never faced the prospect of a war without seeing an opportunity for
distinction. At a time when he abhorred the French Revolution, and all
associated with it, he wrote of Napoleon as ‘that unequalled conqueror,
from whom it is painful to detract.’[114]
Was he a military genius? We have nothing on which to base a judgment.
In the Revolution we see him attracting the attention of Washington by
his military alertness on the heights of Harlem. At Monmouth we see his
horse shot under him as he dashes into the fray with a recklessness that
looked to the commander like a courting of death. Throughout his
services in the military household of Washington, where he became all
but indispensable in a secretarial capacity and in diplomacy, he chafed
under the conviction that his place was in a position of command. One of
his friends declared that ‘the pen of our army was held by Hamilton;
and for dignity of manner, pith of matter, and elegance of style,
General Washington’s letters are unrivaled in military annals,’ but the
youthful Hamilton felt that he should have been the army’s sword.[115]
The vision of the renown of the military conqueror was ever before him.
The war was an opportunity for glory, and he was missing it. ‘I
explained to you candidly my feelings in respect to military
reputation,’ he wrote Washington when seeking a separate command, ‘and
how much it was my object to act a conspicuous part in some enterprise
that might perhaps raise my character as a soldier above
mediocrity.’[116] At Yorktown he took desperate chances in an effort for
renown.[117] We shall find him leaving the Treasury to command soldiers
sent to put down the western insurrection, with no possible occasion for
it beyond his preference for the saddle and the sword. And when war with
France loomed large, we shall find him resorting to importunity and
intrigue to get the command over the protest of the President.
Was Hamilton a Napoleon? He thought himself of the race of military
masters. He had the courage, the coolness under fire, and the audacity,
but nothing that he did disclosed more genius than was shown by Aaron
Burr. Had the chance come, he might have justified his own high
pretensions as a military genius--but it did not come. He died with his
boyhood ambition to command great armies unrealized--and undimmed.[118]
VI
His association of a strong military establishment with a strong and
stable government was due in large measure to his temperament. He was
essentially an aristocrat. From the moment of his arrival in America, he
cultivated only the élite. His most partisan biographer has painted his
portrait in a sentence--‘His sympathies were always aristocratic, and he
was born with a reverence for tradition.’[119] There is nothing more
contradictory in his career than the lowliness of his origin and his
inherent passion for the lofty. This charity student moved in mansions
as to the manor born. He had lived on terms of comparative intimacy with
the aristocratic Washington of the camp, with Lafayette who brought
something of the flavor of Old World aristocracy, and he married into
one of the proudest of the manorial families, but his love of grandeur
was inherent. He luxuriated in elegant society and fine houses, loved
fine laces as an adornment, and, without having ever seen the interior
of a gallery, at least affected a partiality for the fine arts,
collecting such prints as his purse permitted, painting some himself,
and advising Mrs. Washington in the purchase of paintings.[120]
His ideal of government was the rule of ‘gentlemen’--the domination of
aristocrats; on the theory that these, with a certain prestige to
maintain, were more jealous of their honor and above the vulgar
strivings for mere place.[121] Thus it was impossible for him to
conceive of a strong and capable government over which the aristocracy
did not have sway.[122] Long before the Constitutional Convention we
find him writing Morris on financial matters, setting forth the
importance of creating an alliance between government and men of
wealth.[123] One of his most enthusiastic panegyrists has illustrated
his ideal: ‘The nearest approach to it is the popular conception of the
empire of Japan--a mass of intelligent humanity, reckless of their
lives, yet filled with the joy of life, eager for distinction, hungry
for success, alert, practical, and merry; but at the same time
subordinate, humbly and piously subordinate, to a pure
abstraction.’[124] But this abstraction had to be aristocracy--never
democracy; for he believed that democracy could only lead to
anarchy.[125] Temperamentally hostile to democracy in the beginning,
maintaining that attitude to the end, he never appreciated and always
despised public opinion, and in 1794 he frankly confessed to Washington
that he ‘long since learned to hold public opinion of no value.’[126]
This distrust of the people, contempt for democracy, and reliance on
strong government supported by wealth, and, if need be, sustained by
standing armies, were carried by him into the Constitutional Convention
and there proclaimed with all the tremendous force of his personality.
VII
Unless we divest ourselves of the Hamiltonian myths in reference to the
Constitution, an intelligent comprehension of his political character
will be impossible. We must rid ourselves of the fallacious notion that
he was satisfied with the Constitution or believed it adequate. No one
contributed more mightily to making the Constitutional Convention
possible. In the preliminary convention at Annapolis, no one did more to
crystallize sentiment for it, and it was his persuasive pen that wrote
the history-making address there determined upon. About his dining-table
in New York he did yeoman service in coaxing skeptical and reluctant
members of Congress to call a convention. There, under a simulation of
gayety, his eloquence and wit and banter made converts of the most
stubborn--a service of immeasurable value.[127]
But in the Convention itself he played no such part as is popularly
ascribed to him. After the presentation of his own plan in the early
stages, he played an inconspicuous part, and much of the time he was not
only absent from the Convention, but out of the State. This was not
because of indifference to the event, but to a realization that he could
accomplish nothing for his plan.[128]
This plan was a direct contradiction of that which was adopted. There is
nothing conjectural about that fact--the records are indisputable. We
have the plan, the brilliant five-hour oration in its behalf, the brief
from which he spoke. These have come down to us, not from his enemies,
but from his partial biographers, his son the editor of his ‘Works,’ and
the report of Madison on the authenticity of which he himself passed.
This plan provided for the election of a President for life; for
Senators for life or during good behavior, and by electors with a
property qualification; and for the crushing of the sovereignty of
States through the appointment by the President of Governors with a life
tenure and the power to veto any act of the State legislatures, though
passed unanimously. Not only was the President enabled under this plan
to negative any law enacted, but he had the discretionary power to
enforce or ignore any law existing.[129] Though his President, serving
for life, was not called a king, he was to be armed with more arbitrary
power than was possessed by the King of England. His English eulogist
does not overstate when he says that ‘what he had in mind was the
British Constitution as George III had tried hard to make it,’ and
failed because the English people would not tolerate it.[130] This
interpretation of Hamilton’s purpose is reënforced by another of his
most brilliant disciples who asserts that ‘Hamilton’s governor
[President] would have been not dissimilar to Louis XIV and could have
said with him, “L’état c’est moi.” ... Thinly veiled, his plan[131]
contemplated an elective king with greater powers than those of George
III, an imitation House of Lords, and a popular House of Commons with a
limited tenure.’[132] Even so this plan confessedly fell far short of
his conception of an ideal government. In the brief for his speech[133]
we are left in no doubt as to his partiality for a monarchy, in which
the aristocracy should have a special power. ‘The monarch ... ought to
be hereditary, and to have so much power that it would not be his
interest to risk much to acquire more.’ As for the aristocracy, ‘they
should be so circumstanced that they can have no interest in a
change.’[134] We should be ‘rescued from the democracy.’[135] As to the
republican form of government--‘Republics are liable to corruption and
intrigue,’[136] and, since ‘a republican government does not admit of a
vigorous execution, it is therefore bad.’[137]
Later, in one of his few discussions, he said that ‘those who mean to
form a solid republican government ought to proceed to the confines of
another government.’[138] His republic, and in his great speech he had
conceded that no other form would be accepted by the people, ‘was to be
an aristocratic as distinguished from a democratic republic, and the
power of the separate States was to be effectually crippled.’[139] In
one of his brief Convention talks he said of the States that ‘as States
he thought they should be abolished.’[140] Even after the Constitution
had been adopted, he believed that one of the objects of administration
should be ‘to acquire for the federal government more consistency than
the Constitution seems to promise for so great a country,’ to the end
that it ‘may triumph altogether over the state governments and reduce
them to an utter subordination, dividing the large States into simpler
districts.’[141] Such were the ideas urged by Hamilton in the forceful
five-hour speech which Gouverneur Morris thought the most brilliant
intellectual exhibition he had ever witnessed. After this exhaustive
exposition, he took but little part. Toward the close he explained his
comparative silence: ‘He had been restrained from entering into the
discussions by his dislike of the scheme of government in general.’[142]
This distaste did not diminish as the Convention closed its labors, and
he accepted the Constitution in the end ‘as better than nothing.’[143]
His motive for joining in recommending it to the people is conclusively
shown in his last Convention utterance: ‘No man’s ideas are more remote
from the plan than my own are known to be; but is it possible to
deliberate between anarchy and convulsion on one side, and the chance of
good to be expected from the plan on the other?’[144]
Nor did he ever lose faith in his own plan, or gain confidence in the
Constitution which was adopted.[145] Just before retiring from the
Cabinet he avowed himself a monarchist who had ‘no objections to a trial
being made of this thing of a republic.’[146] Two years before his death
he wrote bitterly to Morris of his support of a Constitution in which he
had never had faith ‘from the beginning,’ in which he described it as ‘a
frail and worthless fabric.’[147] And the night of his death, when his
bosom friend and confidant was meditating the funeral oration he was to
deliver on the steps of Trinity Church, he wrote in his diary, ‘He was
in principle opposed to republican and attached to monarchical
government, but then his opinions were generally known and have been
long and loudly proclaimed. His share in the forming of our Constitution
must be mentioned, and his unfavorable opinion cannot therefore be
concealed.’[148]
If, however, he was a tremendous factor in making any Constitutional
Convention possible, he was to be even more essential in securing the
ratification of the document he disliked--and it is here that he rises
to the pinnacle of patriotic statesmanship, and earns the eternal
gratitude of the Republic. When on that summer day, on a packet floating
lazily down the Hudson, he subordinated his personal preferences to the
public good, and sat down to the writing of the first number of ‘The
Federalist,’ he reached the very acme of his greatness. Had he done
nothing else, his fame would have been as eternal as the Nation he
helped to make. Thus does he take his rightful place among the greatest
nation-builders of all time.
VIII
The qualities of strength and weakness accounting for the successes and
failures of his political leadership are easily found in an analysis of
his character. As is true of most genius, his was three fourths hard
work. From his earliest boyhood he had learned the value of system.
Nothing was permitted to disturb the programme by which he regulated his
days and nights. We may surmise that he was his own most relentless
taskmaster from the rules he wrote for the guidance of his favorite son.
This almost monastic schedule denotes the system by which he governed
his own life.[149] He never completed his education, and the exactions
of politics and his profession never made him a stranger to his library.
Here, surrounded by his family, he ministered to an insatiable mind.
Never tiring of the classics, he kept pace with the printing-press, and
Mrs. Church rummaged about the book-stalls of London to supply him with
all the new worth-while publications. Thus the ‘Wealth of Nations’ was
in his hands as soon after its appearance as a boat could cross the
sea.[150] His manner of study was intensive, absorbing, and he fairly
lashed his mind and memory to their allotted tasks. Walking the floor
while reading and studying, it was a comment of his friends that with
equal exertion he could have walked from one end of the country to the
other.[151]
Quite as remarkable as the intensity of his application was his abnormal
capacity for sustained exertion. He thought nothing of sitting over a
paper ‘until the dawn dimmed his candles.’[152] Talleyrand’s comment on
finding lights in his office in the early morning is famous. It was not
unusual for him to ponder a problem long and earnestly until he had
thought it through, then to retire to sleep regardless of the hour of
the night, and after a while to arise, refresh himself with a cup of
strong coffee, seat himself at his table, and work on with great
rapidity for six, seven, or eight hours without rest. The resulting
product of his pen was so perfect, we are assured, such was his felicity
of expression, that it seldom required revision.[153]
This tenacity was one of the factors in his leadership. He was never a
fair-weather fighter. Opposition only whetted his appetite for battle.
Nor was he easily discouraged. Explaining to a friend who wished to
carry the news to New York of the situation in the Poughkeepsie
Convention, that the members stood two to one against the ratification
of the Constitution, he concluded with grim emphasis: ‘Tell them the
Convention shall never rise until the Constitution is adopted.’[154]
Along with this tenacity, he had an illimitable moral courage which made
it easy for him to fight for a cause without counting the cost. The real
Hamilton is seen in his defense of the persecuted Tories at the close of
the Revolution; in his fighting his way through a mob eager for the
blood of the Tory president of Columbia College to hold it at bay with
his indignant eloquence; in his letter to Jay against the destruction of
the notorious Rivington Press by a mob.[155] This reverence for law and
the constituted authority was the mainspring of his political character,
and he always had the moral courage to stand for both when cowardice
would have recommended compromise.
To these qualities must be added another which gave character to his
leadership--he was personally honest. Called to a station where he might
easily have enriched himself, as did many of his friends, he retired to
private life poorer than when he entered the public service. Small
wonder that Talleyrand was astounded at such disinterestedness and
restraint. There was no affectation in his letter lamenting his
inability to succor some immigrants from France. ‘I wish I was a Crœsus;
I might then afford solid consolation to these children of adversity,
and how delightful it would be to do so. But now, sympathy, kind words,
and occasionally a dinner are all that I can contribute.’ And at the
time he wrote great fortunes had been built on the financial system he
had created. So impeccable was he in this regard that his great
political protagonist, writing an estimate of his character in the calm
of his closet, recorded him as ‘disinterested, honest and honorable in
all private transactions.’[156] Profound as a thinker, exhaustive as a
student, moving in eloquence, powerful with the pen, logical in his
reasoning, constructive in his methods, tenacious in the advancement of
his plans, possessed of the courage of his convictions, personally
honest in public and private action, he possessed qualities of
leadership that drew high-minded men about, and to, him. But he
unhappily had the weakness of his strength that was to operate
disastrously upon his political fortunes. It is impossible to understand
his ultimate failure as a leader without a reference to his
temperamental deficiencies.
IX
As a party leader he was singularly lacking in tact, offensively
opinionated,[157] impatient and often insulting to well-meaning
mediocrity, and dictatorial. He did not consult--he directed. He did not
conciliate--he commanded. In the Cabinet he was to offend Jefferson
early because Hamilton ‘could not rid himself of the idea that he was
really the prime minister.’[158] It was not diplomatic to order Adams
back to his post of duty in Philadelphia in the manner of one addressing
a subordinate. Nor was it considerate to write to McHenry, who adored
him, and was doing the best his limited ability would permit: ‘Pray take
a resolution adequate to the emergency and rescue the credit of your
department.’[159] These outbursts of impatience and this intolerance of
weakness were forgiven by the strong, but treasured against him by
smaller and more envious minds, and the time was to come when, with his
field marshals loyal, he was to have few colonels and captains, and
practically no privates. He was a failure in the management of men, and
only his superior genius made it possible for him to dominate so long.
There was much of egotism and some vanity behind this dictatorial
disposition. This was inherent and incurable. The lowliness of his
origin, the phenomenal rapidity of his rise, the homage properly paid
him for the brilliancy of his youthful efforts with voice, pen, and
sword, all tended to convince him of his superiority. No one knew or
lamented his egotism more than men who loved him. Morris went weeping
from his death-bed to write his intimate opinion in his diary that he
was ‘vain and opinionated.’[160] Cabot, who clung to him like a lover,
wrote him frankly: ‘I am bound to tell you that you are accused by
respectable men of egotism.’[161] A descendant and biographer concedes
his vanity, taking issue with Hamilton’s son who had foolishly, but
naturally, denied it in his biography.[162] His self-sufficiency is
evident in his letter to Laurens: ‘It is my desire to preserve myself
free from particular attachments, and to keep my happiness independent
of the caprices of others.’[163] But were we without these confessions
from his friends, we should find them in his letters. What more amazing
and amusing than his letter to Schuyler explaining with gusto and some
swagger his quarrel with Washington.[164] Even at the age of
twenty-three and while serving in a secretarial capacity to one of the
foremost figures of all time, he was placing himself on an equality at
least with Washington and writing glibly of ‘what we owed to each
other.’ This spirit of self-exaltation was to drive many of the minor
leaders of his party from him, and to lead him, in the end, to the
supreme folly of his pamphlet attack on Adams which was hopelessly to
cripple, if not completely destroy, his influence.
Even more serious than his flamboyant egotism was his queer lack of
judgment in the handling of men. It was an irreparable blunder to force
the election of his father-in-law to the Senate from New York over
Chancellor Livingston who had superior claims. It was a temporary
triumph that drove one of the most powerful families in the State into
the ranks of his enemies.[165] Only the most execrable taste can pardon
the undignified writing of anonymous attacks on a colleague of the
Cabinet.[166] His blunder in the case of the Schuyler election could be
excused by his lack of political experience, but his most sympathetic
biographer admits that ‘middle age instead of ripening his judgment,
warped it.’[167] His was a nature of eternal youth, and in many respects
the indiscretions of boyish exuberance cursed him to the end.
If these personal weaknesses were to weaken him with the leaders of the
second rank, his unpopularity with the rank and file was to come from
his lack of sympathy for, and understanding of, the American spirit. No
one realized it more than he. In justice it must be said that he
honestly tried to suppress his doubts of America; but in moments of
depression he burst forth with expressions that bear the marks of long
incubation. ‘Am I a fool--a romantic Quixote--or is there a
constitutional defect in the American mind?’ he wrote King. ‘Were it not
for yourself and a few others I would adopt the reveries of De Paux, as
substantial truths, and could say with him that there is something in
our climate which belittles every animal, human or brute.’[168] And
toward the close of his life he wrote Morris: ‘Every day proves to me
more and more that this American world was not made for me. You, friend
Morris, are a native of this country, but by genius an exotic. You
mistake if you fancy that you are more of a favorite than myself, or
that you are in any sort upon a theatre suited to you.’[169] This touch
of the exotic, of which he himself was painfully conscious, was not lost
upon his political enemies. ‘Thus ignorant of the character of this
nation, of Pennsylvania, and of his own city and State of New York, was
Alexander Hamilton,’ wrote Adams.[170] But it was left for another to
‘discover the real secret of his confusion as to the American
character--he had never known the spirit, or had the training, of the
New England town meeting.[171] A marvelous genius, he thought in terms
of world politics at a time when America was creating a new spirit and
system of her own. It was not to weaken his work as the creator of
credit, but it was to dim his vision as an American leader.
X
If he possessed traits that made him thoroughly hated by some, he had
other qualities that bound his friends to him with bonds of steel. He
commanded affection because he was himself affectionate. His letters to
his wife were uniformly tender and playful. He was idolized by his
children. His comrades in the army loved him because he not only shared
their hardships, but at times helped them to necessities out of his own
all but empty pockets. He was sensitive to the sufferings of many
refugees in Philadelphia and New York, and he would often direct his
wife to send money and delicacies to the women and children.[172] We
have many instances of his generosity, like his attempt to spare Andre
the humiliation of the scaffold, and his letter to Knox protesting
against the execution of British officers in retaliation for the murder
of an American.[173] Among the young French officers he was idolized
because of his merry disposition and the cleverness and brilliancy of
his conversation. While prone to hold aloof from the mass, he was a
‘good fellow’ among those whom he considered his social equals. In
social assemblies of both sexes he fairly sparkled with boyish
enthusiasm.[174] In stag affairs, where he was immensely popular, we may
be sure that he was nothing of a prude. It is not of record that he
often drank to excess, but like most men of his time he loved his wine,
and we have it on the best authority that he sometimes took a wee bit
too much.[175] On these convivial occasions he could always be prevailed
upon to sing his one and only song:
‘We’re going to war, and when we die
We’ll want a man of God near by,
So bring your Bible and follow the drum.’
His one serious weakness was an inordinate fondness for women which was
to involve him in the one serious scandal of his career. It was McHenry
who wrote to Pickering, another friend: ‘Far be it from me to attempt to
palliate his pleasures, the indulgence in which Mr. Hamilton himself
publicly lamented.’[176] It was Otis who wrote of his ‘liquorish
flirtation’ with a married woman at a fashionable dinner party.[177] It
was Lodge who, in touching on his overpowering passions, refers to his
‘relations, which had an unenviable notoriety.’[178] It is Oliver who
says that ‘his private shortcomings cannot be denied,’[179] and that
‘in private life Hamilton was not always vigilant.’[180] It is the
historian of ‘The Republican Court’ who records that ‘it is true that
Hamilton was something of a roué.’[181] And it was reserved for a
descendant to remind us of the story of the alleged relations with the
celebrated Madame Jumel, who, in old age, made an unsuccessful attempt
to live with Aaron Burr,[182] and of the gossip, which he discredits,
that his relations with his sprightly sister-in-law, Mrs. Church, were
more tender than they should have been.[183] This same descendant,
writing with professional authority, explains these moral delinquencies
on the theory that, like other men of genius and great intelligence, he
was prone to ‘impulsively plunge into the underworld in obedience to
some strange promptings of their lower nature.’[184]
And yet, such are the strange inconsistencies of the
temperamental--nothing could have been more beautiful than his home
life. His endearing traits are evident in the passionate devotion of all
who knew the Hamilton of the hearth. If the ties that bound Angelica
Church to him were not more tender than they should have been, her
letters indicate something akin to love.[185] His wife, who must have
suffered tortures over the confessions of the Reynolds pamphlet, clung
to him with a faith born perhaps of an understanding of how much he must
have resisted. If he sometimes broke his vows, there can be no doubt
that the shrine of his heart was at his hearth.
‘Colonel Beckwith tells me that our dear Hamilton writes too much and
takes no exercise, and grows fat,’ wrote Angelica Church to Mrs.
Hamilton from London. ‘I hate both the word and the thing, and I desire
you to take care of his health, and his good looks.’[186] Here we have
the suggestion of another frailty which makes all the more notable the
intensity of his sustained efforts and the magnitude of his
achievements--the delicacy of his health. The first, and possibly the
last, medical service rendered by McHenry on becoming a member of
Washington’s military family was to prescribe for Hamilton and make
suggestions as to his diet. Early in the war he who was never robust
contracted a malarial infection from which he suffered every summer
throughout his life.[187] His correspondence is sprinkled throughout
with references to his health.[188] While in no sense an invalid, the
magnitude and multiplicity of his labors despite a chronic physical
disability measure the power of mind over matter and indicate something
of his unyielding will.
XI
In view of the sincere or simulated interest in religion shown by
Hamilton where political interests were involved, it would be
interesting to know just what he thought and felt. The records here are
slight. During his youth he passed through the period of religious
exaltation not uncommon in the average life. Not only was he attentive
to public worship, but he prayed fervently and with eloquence in the
seclusion of his room.[189] About this time he wrote a hymn, ‘A Soul
Entering into Bliss,’ which is said to have had some literary
merit.[190] We hear no more concerning his religious fervor for many
years until he pretended, if he did not feel, an intense indignation
against the revolutionary reaction aimed at the church establishment in
France. He was shocked that ‘equal pains have been taken to deprave the
morals as to extinguish the religion of the country.’[191]
A few years more, and, with the fall of his party, he outlined to Bayard
a ‘Plan of Conduct’ for Federalists with a view to its rehabilitation,
and proposed an association to be denominated ‘The Christian
Constitutional Society,’ having for its objects ‘the support of the
Christian Religion’ and ‘the support of the Constitution.’[192] This
hints strongly of the Old World idea of the union of Church and State.
In Connecticut the clergy had been the shock troops of Federalism, and
it is quite possible that the political advantage of an alliance between
the Church and his party appealed to Hamilton.
At any rate, he was a member of no church. One of his descendants
assures us that ‘he was a man of earnest, simple faith, quite
unemotional in this respect, so far as display was concerned, but his
belief was very strong.’[193] Strong as it was, it never led him to the
altar.
Leaving his idol’s death-bed, Oliver Wolcott wrote his wife that
‘Colonel H. in late years expressed his conviction of the truths of the
Christian Religion, and his desire to receive the Sacrament--but no one
of the clergy who have yet been consulted will administer it.’[194] At
length, life ebbing away, a bishop consented after being earnestly
solicited the second time. Thus in his dying hour, Hamilton declared:
‘It has for some time past been the wish of my heart, and it was my
intention to take an early opportunity of uniting myself to the church.’
The natural deduction from the meager information we have is that his
intensive political and professional activities and consuming ambitions
gave him little time to meditate on religion. He certainly never gave it
the consideration of his greatest political opponent whom his party
attacked as an enemy of Christianity. But he used the Church, whenever
possible, to advance his political views--and with effect.
Quite as problematical as his religious feeling was his attitude toward
Washington. It was the policy of the Federalists to capitalize
politically the popularity of the man of Mount Vernon, and they
succeeded, as we shall find, to a marked degree. Even so, some of
Hamilton’s most partial biographers[195] have commented on the absence
of any deep affection between the two, and Dr. Hamilton is not
convincing with his observation that his ancestor signed his letters to
Washington, ‘Very affectionately.’[196] As a matter of fact none of his
letters to Washington denote real affection. This would be more
impressive, however, but for the singular absence of the note of
affection in all his political correspondence. But in one of his letters
we find the very opposite of either affection or admiration. This was
his letter to General Schuyler on the occasion of Hamilton’s withdrawal
from Washington’s military family, and it does not speak well for the
reliability of his son’s biography that he deliberately mutilated the
letter. It was in this that he wrote that he had found his chief
‘neither remarkable for delicacy or good temper’ and complained of his
‘self love.’ Here we have the confession that ‘for three years past I
have felt no friendship for him and have professed none.’[197]
In his letter to Lear, the secretary, when Washington died he probably
came perilously near to summing up his attitude in a sentence: ‘I have
been much indebted to the kindness of the General, and he was an Aegis
very essential to me.’ And then, the significant postscript: ‘In whose
hands are his papers gone? Our very confidential situation will not
permit this to be a point of indifference to me.’[198]
* * * * *
Such a man was Hamilton, a Colossus, brilliant, fascinating, daring, and
audacious--a constructive statesman of the highest order, a genius of
the first rank, with all the strength and the weaknesses of genius. Such
the man who sat down at the mahogany desk to write the documents that
were to give credit to a nation and a programme to a party.