by Ron Chernow
Completion of the second trench snuffed out the last remnants of resistance among the British. Cornwallis had grown so desperate that he infected blacks with smallpox and forced them to wander toward enemy lines in an attempt to sicken the opposing forces. He knew that he lay in grave peril and wrote to Sir Henry Clinton, “My situation now becomes...critical.... [W]e shall soon be exposed to an assault in ruined works, in a bad position, and with weakened numbers.”39 After dark on October 16, Cornwallis tried to evacuate his men by sea, but a drenching midnight storm made that impossible. All the while, the allied artillery pummeled his position without mercy.
On the warm morning of October 17, a red-coated drummer boy appeared on the parapet, followed by an officer flapping a white handkerchief. The guns fell silent. Cornwallis had surrendered. “Tomorrow Cornwallis and his army are ours,” Hamilton rejoiced to Eliza on October 18. “In two days after, I shall in all probability set out for Albany and I hope to embrace you in three weeks from this time.”40 Tens of thousands of onlookers gaped in amazement as the shattered British troops marched out of Yorktown and, to the tune of an old English ballad, “The World Turned Upside Down,” moved between parallel rows of handsomely outfitted French soldiers and battered, ragged American troops.
Hamilton calmly surveyed the final ceremony on horseback. His chat with many defeated British soldiers left him with a bitter aftertaste. To the vicomte de Noailles he confided, “I have seen that army so haughty in its success[,]... and I observed every sign of mortification with pleasure.” He was outraged by the British soldiers’ taunts of future revenge against America: “Cruel in its vengeance, England will not believe that every project of conquest in America is vain.”41 Indeed, although the lopsided Franco-American victory at Yorktown put the eventual outcome of the war beyond dispute, the British still occupied New York City, fighting persisted in the West Indies, and the war was to drag on for another two years.
Within a week, Colonel Hamilton had sped off to join Eliza in Albany, riding so hard that he exhausted his horses and had to hire another pair. He was ill and fatigued from more than five years of fighting and spent much of the next two months recovering in bed. On January 22, 1782, Eliza rewarded him with a son, christened Philip in tribute to her father. “Mrs. Hamilton has given me a fine boy,” Hamilton wrote jovially to the vicomte de Noailles, “whose birth, as you may imagine, was attended with all the omens of future greatness.”42 In case further heavy fighting should flare up, Hamilton did not resign from the army right away and got a furlough from Washington. Only after visiting Washington in Philadelphia in March did Hamilton retire; he preserved his rank yet surrendered “all claim to the compensations attached to my military station during the war or afterwards.”43 Among other things, Hamilton renounced a pension that ultimately was to equal five years of full pay. His motives were certainly laudable—he wanted to remove the slightest conflict of interest as the army was demobilized and its members’ future compensation debated—but his widow and offspring were to one day rue his decision and work hard to reverse it.
Because of his valiant performance at Yorktown, Hamilton became a certified hero. Yet it rankled that Congress never honored his bravery as Louis XVI did the heroism of the Frenchman who seized the other redoubt. Though he lacked official recognition, Hamilton gained something infinitely more precious for his political future: legendary status. At Yorktown, Hamilton established his image as a romantic, death-defying young officer, gallantly streaking toward the ramparts. Take away that battle, and Hamilton would have gone down as the most prestigious of Washington’s aides, but not a hero. And without that cachet, he might never have been appointed a major general later on.
The American Revolution transformed Hamilton from an insecure outsider to a consummate insider who was married to the daughter of General Schuyler and stood on easy terms with the leaders of the Continental Army. In a eulogy that he later delivered for General Nathanael Greene, Hamilton talked about the personal opportunities that accompany revolutions. He said of them that “it has very properly been ranked not among the least of the advantages which compensate for the evils they produce that they serve to bring to light talents and virtues which might otherwise have languished in obscurity or only shot forth a few scattered and wandering rays.”44 Who could doubt that the comment had an autobiographical ring?
NINE
RAGING BILLOWS
With the British still clinging to New York City after Yorktown, Hamilton adopted the Schuyler mansion in Albany as his temporary home for the next two years. His lifelong wanderings ended as he formally
became a citizen of New York State in May 1782. As he rocked the cradle and dandled the infant Philip, the twenty-seven-year-old war veteran projected the image of a contented paterfamilias. “You cannot imagine how entirely domestic I am growing,” he told ex–Washington aide Richard Kidder Meade.1 In a letter veined with whimsy, Hamilton described Philip at seven months:
It is agreed on all hands that he is handsome, his features are good, his eye is not only sprightly and expressive, but it is full of benignity. His attitude in sitting is by connoisseurs esteemed graceful and he has a method of waving his hand that announces the future orator. He stands however rather awkwardly and his legs have not all the delicate slimness of his father’s....If he has any fault in manners, he laughs too much. 2
Hamilton so savored this unaccustomed domestic role that he informed Meade, “I lose all taste for the pursuits of ambition. I sigh for nothing but the company of my wife and my baby.”3 Meade must have known this was poppycock and that Hamilton’s career would move forward with its own furious inner propulsion. He had lost time in the Caribbean, plus another five years in the Revolution, so as he resumed the legal studies suspended at King’s he wanted to adhere to a speeded-up timetable. For Hamilton, the law arose as the shortest route to political power—the profession claimed thirty-four delegates at the Constitutional Convention—and it would enable him to make a tolerable, even lucrative, living. Ordinarily, the New York Supreme Court stipulated that would-be lawyers serve a three-year apprenticeship before appearing in court. However, responding to a petition from Aaron Burr that January, the rule was temporarily waived for returning veterans who had begun their law studies before the war. Having waded through the tomes of all the major legal sages at King’s, Hamilton qualified for this exemption and set about mastering the law in short order.
Unlike other aspiring lawyers of the time, Hamilton declined to clerk under a practicing attorney and planned to instruct himself. After serving Washington, he probably did not wish to be subservient to another boss and could not bear the prospect of copying out legal documents for some self-styled mentor. He had access to the superlative law library in Albany owned by his friend James Duane, its shelves stocked with treatises on British law, which closely paralleled New York law. “In this state, our judicial establishments resemble more nearly than in any other those of Great Britain,” Hamilton later wrote in Federalist number 83. For Hamilton and other New York law students, British thought crept into their minds in this subliminal fashion and exerted a conservative, Anglophile influence. Particularly influential were Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries, first published in America ten years earlier, which endowed British law with a more systematic coherence. Forrest McDonald has observed, “Blackstone taught Hamilton a reverential enthusiasm for the law itself....Moreover, the law as Blackstone spelled it out resolved once and for all the tension Hamilton had felt between liberty and law.”4
In that era, law students often cobbled together workbooks that arranged legal precedents, statutes, and procedures by category. John Marshall kept a digest that covered 238 manuscript pages, spanning more than seventy topics; he drew on it extensively in his practice. Hamilton prepared his own manual, entitled “Practical Proceedings in the Supreme Court of the State of New York.” This compendium of 177 manuscript pages and thirty-eight topics is the earliest surviving treatise that captures New York la
w as it shifted away from British and colonial models. Hamilton did not just transcribe dry extracts; he poked fun at legal pretensions. In one place, he said facetiously that the courts had lately acquired “some faint idea that the end of suits at law is to investigate the merits of the cause and not to [get] entangle[d] in the nets of technical terms.”5 Later the source of famous proclamations about the law’s majesty, Hamilton could also be quite waspish about his chosen profession, telling Lafayette that he was busy “rocking the cradle and studying the art of fleecing my neighbours.”6 “Practical Proceedings” was so expertly done, its copious information so rigorously pigeonholed, that it was copied by hand and circulated among New York law students for years until it was superseded by William Wyche’s 1794 manual, New York Supreme Court Practice, which was itself based in part on Hamilton’s outline. Even then, some attorneys continued to prefer Hamilton’s seminal version.
Hamilton raced through his legal studies with quicksilver speed. By July, just six months after starting his self-education, he passed the bar exam and was licensed as an attorney who could prepare cases before the New York State Supreme Court. In October, he further qualified as a “counsellor” who could argue cases, a status akin to an English barrister. He had to sign an allegiance oath, which showed the extent to which states held sovereign sway under the Articles of Confederation: “I renounce ...all allegiance to the King of Great Britain; and...will bear true faith and allegiance to the State of New York, as a free and independent state.”7
In acquiring these credentials, Hamilton lagged six months behind Aaron Burr, who had opened an Albany law office in July 1782. Aside from having sacrificed time to warfare, both young men were rushing to set up practices because it was widely known that patriotic lawyers would inherit the lion’s share of legal work after the peace. This had been confirmed in November 1781 when the New York legislature enacted a law barring Tory lawyers from state courts, a certain bonanza for republican attorneys. Even though Hamilton was to hotly contest anti-Tory bias, he and other young attorneys who had sided with the patriots profited from it during the more than four years that the law stayed in effect.
There is little doubt that Hamilton and Burr socialized a good deal in Albany. While Hamilton was still at Yorktown, Burr had shown up on the Schuyler doorstep with a letter of introduction from General Alexander McDougall: “This will be handed to you by Lieutenant Col. Burr, who goes to Albany, to solicit a license in our courts.”8 It was probably at this point that a pregnant Eliza first smiled and shook hands with her husband’s future executioner. Hamilton’s old classmate Robert Troup was studying for the bar in Albany with his friend Burr, and the two were licensed at the same time. During the summer of 1782, Troup resided at the Schuyler mansion, helping Hamilton with whatever legal tutoring he needed.
Thus, from the outset of their careers, Hamilton and Burr were thrust into close proximity and a competitive situation. Both were short and handsome, witty and debonair, and fatally attractive to women. Both young colonels had the selfpossession of military men, liked to flaunt their titles, and seemed cut out to assume distinguished places at the New York bar. Yet in the political sphere, Burr already trailed his upstart acquaintance, who was now a hero of Yorktown and basked in the reflected aura of General Washington. Hamilton also inhabited the splendid Schuyler mansion, while Burr settled for a frugal life until he could build up a legal clientele. That July, Burr married Theodosia Prevost, the confidante of Peggy Shippen Arnold, in the Dutch Reformed Church frequented by the Schuylers. (Theodosia’s husband, a British officer, had died in Jamaica the previous fall.) They had a daughter, also named Theodosia, the following year. The elder Theodosia was ten years older than Burr and was never mistaken for a beauty, but she was charming, pleasant, and conversant in both French and English literature. As much as any man of his day, Burr appreciated smart, accomplished women, which made his later roguish antics all the more inexplicable to admirers.
However impressive it was that Hamilton could compress three years of legal training into nine months, he juggled several other balls at once. After Yorktown, he wrote two more installments of the “Continentalist” essays, which he then lost or misplaced. “He has lately recovered them,” The New-York Packet informed readers in April 1782 in introducing “The Continentalist No. V.” The paper said he had published the essays “more to finish the development of his plan than from any hope that the temper of the times will adopt his ideas.”9 In a sweeping historical tour, Hamilton showed how the English government had fostered trade starting in the reign of Queen Elizabeth and how Louis Colbert had accomplished the like as Louis XIV’s finance minister. He alluded to David Hume’s essays in endorsing government guidance of trade, which he denied was self-regulating and self-correcting. Previewing his Treasury tenure, he advocated duties on imported goods as America’s best form of revenue. For a nation still fighting a revolution over unjust duties on tea and other imports, this was, to put it mildly, a loaded topic. To those who feared oppressive taxes, Hamilton made an argument that anticipated “supply-side economics” of the late twentieth century, saying that officials “can have no temptation to abuse this power, because the motive of revenue will check its own extremes. Experience has shown that moderate duties are more productive than high ones.”10
At the time, many states were loath to transfer control over their own import duties to Congress, and Hamilton feared that the resulting economic rivalries would threaten political unity. His qualms were shared by Robert Morris, who sketched the broad contours of a program—establishing a national bank, funding the war debt, and ending inflation—that was the forerunner of Hamilton’s work as treasury secretary. To strengthen the central government, Morris decided to appoint a tax receiver in each state who would be free from dependence on local officials. On May 2, 1782, he asked Hamilton to become receiver of continental taxes for New York. As an inducement, he assured Hamilton that he could pocket one-quarter of 1 percent of any monies collected. Hamilton, feeling harried, turned him down flat. “Time is so precious to me that I could not put myself in the way of any interruptions unless for an object of consequence to the public or to myself,” he replied.11 Hamilton may have suspected that with five New York counties still in enemy hands, the job would not be that remunerative. In early June, Morris sweetened the pot by guaranteeing Hamilton a percentage of the money owed, not just collected. This evidently persuaded Hamilton to accept the offer, and he further volunteered to lobby the state legislature for Morris’s tax measures. Whether the self-taught Hamilton knew it or not—and one suspects that he very much did—he was now squarely positioned to succeed Robert Morris as America’s preeminent financial figure.
The few months that Hamilton spent trying to gather taxes demonstrated anew the perils of the Articles of Confederation. States regarded their payments to Congress, in effect, as voluntary and often siphoned off funds for local purposes before making any transfers. This situation, combined with a lack of independent federal revenues, had forced the patriots to finance the Revolution by either borrowing or printing paper money. On July 4, in his sixth “Continentalist” essay, Hamilton, with a nod to Morris, applauded the appointment of federal customs and tax collectors to “create in the interior of each state a mass of influence in favour of the federal government.”12 This essay makes clear that, in the Revolution’s waning days, Hamilton had to combat the utopian notion that America could dispense with taxes altogether: “It is of importance to unmask this delusion and open the eyes of the people to the truth. It is paying too great a tribute to the idol of popularity to flatter so injurious and so visionary an expectation.”13
In mid-July, while still cramming for his next bar exam, Hamilton traveled to Poughkeepsie and pleaded successfully with state legislators to form a special committee to expedite tax collection. Working with Philip Schuyler, he got the legislature to adopt a set of resolutions (likely authored by Hamilton himself ) calling for more congressional taxing power and a na
tional conference to overhaul the Articles of Confederation—the first such appeal issued by a public body. Hamilton’s determined pursuit of reform won plaudits from Morris, and in his correspondence with Hamilton, Morris let down his guard and confided his frustration at congressional ineptitude. Hamilton repaid the candor. “The more I see, the more I find reason for those who love this country to weep over its blindness,” Hamilton wrote.14 He recoiled at the cowardice and selfishness he saw rampant in the New York legislature. “The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people,” he told Morris. “In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fickleness, and folly.”15 Increasingly Hamilton despaired of pure democracy, of politicians simply catering to the popular will, and favored educated leaders who would enlighten the people and exercise their own judgment.
Whatever his disdain for state legislators, Hamilton made a favorable impression at Poughkeepsie. Jurist James Kent recalled that “his animated and didactic conversation, far superior to ordinary discourse in sentiment, language, and manner, and his frank and manly deportment, interested my attention.”16 The legislators were so taken with Hamilton’s presentation that he was chosen as one of five members of New York’s delegation to the Continental (or Confederation) Congress that was to convene in November. With typical dexterity, Hamilton had parlayed the technocratic job of tax collector into a congressional seat.