by Ron Chernow
During his stay of a little more than a week in New York, Washington salvaged the reputations of several suspected Tories who had engaged in espionage for the patriots. Whether coincidentally or not, two were old acquaintances of Hamilton from King’s College days. The morning after he entered New York, Washington breakfasted with the loquacious tailor, Hercules Mulligan, who had spied on British officers visiting his shop. To wipe away any doubts about Mulligan’s true loyalties, Washington pronounced him “a true friend of liberty.”71
Washington also strolled into the bookshop of the urbane printer James Rivington, who had been attacked by Isaac Sears and the Sons of Liberty when Hamilton was at King’s. With the war over, Rivington tried to stay in business by deleting the world Royal from his newspaper’s name and the British arms from its masthead, but he finally had to suspend publication. In reality, he had done yeoman’s work for the patriots, having stolen the British fleet’s signal book, which had been transmitted to Admiral de Grasse. Washington disappeared into a back room with Rivington under the guise of consulting some agricultural books and rewarded him with a bag of gold pieces.
On December 4, Washington made his tearful farewell to his officers at Fraunces Tavern at the corner of Broad and Pearl Streets, again underscoring that military officers were merely servants of the republic. Washington resisted all calls to become a king. There is no proof that Hamilton attended the historic valedictory, in spite of his having been at Washington’s side for four years of war. His absence, which must have been noted, suggests that he still nursed some secret wound because of his treatment by Washington. Certainly Washington, of all people, would not have lacked the magnanimity to invite him. Afterward, trailed by speechless admirers, Washington strolled down Whitehall Street and boarded a barge that carried him to the New Jersey shore.
Just a few days earlier, Alexander and Eliza Hamilton, along with baby Philip, had begun to rent a house at 57 (later 58) Wall Street, not far from Fraunces Tavern. For the first time, the vagabond young man from the West Indies had a real hometown, a permanent address. By the standards of the day, Wall Street was a broad, elegant thoroughfare, and many of the best-known merchant families resided there. The Hamiltons lived on the less fashionable eastern end, which was full of shops and offices, while Aaron and Theodosia Burr lived at tony 3 Wall Street—“next door but one to the City Hall,” at Wall and Broad, as Burr proudly put it.72 The lives of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr continued in parallel. Both had passed the bar in Albany at almost the same time, and they now occupied the same New York street and inaugurated their legal practices at almost the same time.
After so many years of war, Hamilton had a pressing need to earn money and tried to keep full-time politics at bay. A month after Evacuation Day, he spotted a newspaper item stating that he had been nominated for the New York Assembly. Hamilton politely but firmly deflected the honor. “Being determined to decline public office,” he wrote to the paper, “I think it proper to declare my determination to avoid in any degree distracting the votes of my fellow citizens.”73 Local populists associated with the Sons of Liberty scored lopsided victories in the election, resulting in a spate of punitive measures against Tories. As a fierce opponent of such vengeance, Hamilton busied himself defending persecuted Tories and halting their banishment.
Perhaps no individual was identified more with the postwar resurgence of New York City—not to mention the city’s future greatness—than Alexander Hamilton. He was destined to excel in what was to emerge as America’s commercial and financial metropolis, and he articulated the most expansive vision of its future. Nonetheless his vision was imperfect. At a dinner party soon after Evacuation Day, Hamilton and some other educated young men fated to lead the city debated whether to invest in local real estate or unspoiled forestland upstate. Hamilton’s son James told the tale:
John Jay was in favor of New York and made purchases there and as his means enabled him to hold his lots. His speculation made him rich....Some of the others, including my father, took the opposite view and invested in the lands in the northern counties of the state. The wild lands were purchased at a few cents an acre, but they were not settled very rapidly.74
This last sentence was a gross understatement. That Alexander Hamilton opted to purchase land in the far northern woods and bungled the chance to buy dirt-cheap Manhattan real estate must certainly count as one of his few conspicuous failures of economic judgment.
TEN
A GRAVE, SILENT, STRANGE SORT OF ANIMAL
From the time he started out as a young lawyer in postwar New York, Hamilton presented a dashing figure in society. He was trim and stylish, though not showy in dress. His account books reflect a concern with fashion, as shown
by periodic visits to a French tailor, and his sartorial elegance is confirmed in portraits. In one painting, he wears a double-breasted coat with brass buttons and gilt-edged lapels, his neck swathed delicately in a ruffled lace jabot. One French historian remarked, “He belonged to the age of manners and silk stockings and handsome shoe-buckles.”1 He was as fastidious as a courtier in caring for his reddish-brown hair, and his son James recorded his daily ritual with the barber: “I recollect being in my father’s office in New York when he was under the hands of his hair-dress[er] (which was his daily course). His back hair was long. It was plaited, clubbed up, and tied with a black ribbon. His front hair was pomatumed [i.e., pomaded], powdered, and combed up and back from his forehead.”2 Many artists who painted Hamilton picked up the quiet smile that suffused his ruddy cheeks and shined in his close-set blue eyes, conveying an impression of mental keenness, inner amusement, and debonair insouciance. His strong, well-defined features, especially the sharply assertive nose and chin, made for a distinctive profile. Indeed, his family thought a profile—not a portrait—done by James Sharples the best likeness of him ever done.
Hamilton’s friends liked to rhapsodize his charm. His Federalist ally Fisher Ames was to eulogize his great capacity for friendship by saying that he was “so entirely the friend of his friends... that his power over their affections was entire and lasted through his life.”3 For Judge James Kent, who often rendered him in superlatives, Hamilton “was blessed with a very amiable, generous, tender, and charitable disposition, and he had the most artless simplicity of any man I ever knew. It was impossible not to love as well as respect and admire him.”4 Yet close observers also detected something contradictory in the way the mobile features shifted quickly from gravity to mirth. Boston lawyer William Sullivan noted the contrasting expressions of his face: “When at rest, it had rather a severe and thoughtful expression, but when engaged in conversation, it easily assumed an attractive smile.”5 This mixture of the grave and the playful was the very essence of his nature. His grandson wrote that Hamilton’s personality was “a mixture of aggressive force and infinite tenderness and amiability.”6
In his early years, Hamilton drew much of his social sustenance from the small, clubby circle of New York lawyers. The New York Directory for 1786 listed approximately forty people under the rubric “Lawyers, Attorneys, and Notary-Publics.” The departure of many Tory lawyers had cleared the path for capable, ambitious men in their late twenties and early thirties, including Burr, Brockholst Livingston, Robert Troup, John Laurance, and Morgan Lewis. They were constantly thrown together in and out of court. Much of the time they rode the circuit together, often accompanied by the judge, enduring long journeys in crude stagecoaches that jolted along bumpy upstate roads. They stayed in crowded, smoky inns and often had to share beds with one another, creating a camaraderie that survived many political battles.
To assist with a caseload of mostly civil but also criminal work, Hamilton struck a partnership with Balthazar de Haert, who was either his colleague or his office manager for three years. Though he had just passed the bar himself, Hamilton was swamped with requests to coach aspiring lawyers, and he trained the sons of many prominent men, including John Adams. Hamilton struck his young char
ges as an exacting boss. One early trainee, Dirck Ten Broeck, recruited straight from Yale, wrote a former classmate a mournful letter about clerking for the little dynamo: “But now, instead of all the happiness once so near to view, I am deeply engaged in the study of law, the attaining of which requires the sacrifice of every pleasure [and] demands unremitted application.... [H]eavy for the most part have been the hours to me.”7
Notwithstanding later conspiracy talk that he had stashed away bribes from the British, Hamilton seemed relatively indifferent to money, and many contemporaries expressed amazement at his reasonable fees. The duc de La RochefoucauldLiancourt commented, “The lack of interest in money, rare anywhere, but even rarer in America, is one of the most universally recognized traits of Mr. Hamilton, although his current practice is quite lucrative. I’ve heard his clients say that their sole quibble with him is the modesty of the fees that he asks.”8 Robert Troup said that Hamilton rejected fees if they were larger than he thought warranted and generally favored arbitration or amicable settlements in lieu of lawsuits.
Hamilton’s son James related two incidents that show his father’s legal scruples. In one case, the executor of a Long Island estate tried to retain Hamilton to defend him against some heirs who were suing him. To soften him up, the man pushed a pile of gold pieces across Hamilton’s writing table before stating his case. When he was done, “Hamilton pushed the gold back to him and said, ‘I will not be retained by you in such a cause. Take your money, go home, and settle without delays with the heirs, as in justice you are bound to do.’ ”9 Another time, he flatly refused the business of a certain Mr. Gouverneur after learning he had made disparaging remarks about the “attorneylike” way somebody had padded his bill. In a caustic note, Hamilton lectured Gouverneur that his behavior “cannot be pleasing to any man in the profession and [that it] must oblige anyone that has proper delicacy to decline the business of a person who professedly entertains such an idea of the conduct of this profession.”10
As a lawyer in a humming seaport and financial hub, Hamilton dealt with innumerable suits over bills of exchange and maritime insurance. He also gravitated toward cases that established critical points of constitutional law. It would be a mistake, however, to think of Hamilton only as a cloud-wreathed, Olympian lawyer. He sometimes represented poor people in criminal cases on a pro bono basis or was paid with just a barrel of ham. He had an incorrigible weakness for aiding women in need. In December 1786, he defended a spinster, Barbara Ransumer, who was indicted for stealing fans, lace, and other costly items. “I asked her what defence she had,” Hamilton recollected. “She replied that she had none.”11 Unlike many modern lawyers, Hamilton represented clients only if he believed in their innocence. But he disobeyed his personal rule with Ransumer. In a speech dripping with shameless pathos, he managed to persuade the jury of her innocence. “Woman is weak and requires the protection of man,” Hamilton summed up. “And upon this theme, I attempted to awaken the sympathies of the jury and with such success that I obtained a verdict of ‘not guilty.’ I then determined that I would never again take up a cause in which I was convinced I ought not to prevail.”12 That same year, Hamilton represented George Turner, who was indicted as a “dueller, fighter, and disturber of the peace,” again suggesting that Hamilton was perhaps less averse to dueling than he later intimated.13
Hamilton was regarded as one of the premier lawyers of the early republic and was certainly preeminent in New York. Judge Ambrose Spencer, who watched many legal titans pace his courtroom, pronounced Hamilton “the greatest man this country ever produced....In power of reasoning, Hamilton was the equal of [Daniel] Webster and more than this could be said of no man. In creative power, Hamilton was infinitely Webster’s superior.”14 A no less glowing encomium came from Joseph Story, a later Supreme Court justice: “I have heard Samuel Dexter, John Marshall, and Chancellor [Robert R.] Livingston say that Hamilton’s reach of thought was so far beyond theirs that by his side they were schoolboys—rush tapers before the sun at noonday.”15
Whence the source of this legendary reputation? Hamilton had a taste for courtroom theatrics. He had a melodious voice coupled with a hypnotic gaze, and he could work himself up into a towering passion that held listeners enthralled. In January 1785, jurist James Kent watched Hamilton square off against Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, who was representing himself in a lawsuit claiming additional land south of his vast estate on the Hudson. (The post of chancellor was one of the top judicial positions in the state.) A member of New York’s most powerful family, Livingston was tall and confident and moved with the natural grace of a born aristocrat. In comparison, Hamilton’s style seemed almost feverish. “He appeared to be agitated with intense reflection,” Kent recalled. “His lips were in constant motion and his pen rapidly employed during the Chancellor’s address to the court. He rose with dignity and spoke for perhaps two hours in support of his motion. His reply was fluent and accompanied with great earnestness of manner and emphasis of expression.”16
In speech no less than in writing, Hamilton’s fluency frequently shaded into excess. Hamilton had the most durable pair of lungs in the New York bar and could speak extemporaneously in perfectly formed paragraphs for hours. But it was not always advantageous to have a brain bubbling with ideas. Robert Troup complained that the prolix Hamilton never knew when to stop: “I used to tell him that he was not content with knocking [his opponent] in the head, but that he persisted until he had banished every little insect that buzzed around his ears.”17 Troup also speculated that Hamilton was so distracted by public matters later on that he never had the chance to become deeply read in the law. This was probably true. On the other hand, the myriad claims on his time forced Hamilton to avoid trivia and plumb the basic principles of a case. “With other men, law is a trade, with him it was a science,” said Fisher Ames.18 He forced other lawyers to fight on his turf, starting out with a painstaking definition of terms and then reciting a long string of precedents. He brought into court lengthy lists of legal authorities and Latin quotations he wished to cite. His sources were varied, esoteric, and unpredictable. His legal editor, Julius Goebel, Jr., has observed: “Hamilton’s reading was not confined to English law, for in addition to citations to basic Roman law texts we find him proffering passages from exotics like the Frenchman Domat, the Dutchman Vinnius, and the Spaniard Perez.”19
A good-natured legal rivalry arose between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Sometimes they worked on the same team, more often on opposing sides. Hamilton did not drag political feuds into dinner parties and drawing rooms, and so he mingled with Burr cordially. Later on, Hamilton said that in their early relationship they had “always been opposed in politics but always on good terms. We set out in the practice of the law at the same time and took opposite political directions. Burr beckoned me to follow him and I advised him to come with me. We could not agree.”20 Burr’s friend Commodore Thomas Truxtun verified this rapport in nonpolitical matters: “I always observed in both a disposition when together to make time agreeable...at the houses of each other and of friends.”21 Burr and Hamilton supped at each other’s homes, and Burr’s wife, Theodosia, visited Eliza. In 1786, the two men helped to finance the Erasmus Hall Academy in Flatbush, the forerunner of Erasmus Hall High School, today the oldest secondary school in New York State.
Many weird coincidences stamped the lives of Hamilton and Burr, yet their origins were quite dissimilar. Burr embodied the old aristocracy, such as it then existed in America, and Hamilton the new meritocracy. Born on February 6, 1756, one year after Hamilton, Burr boasted an illustrious lineage. His maternal grandfather was Jonathan Edwards, the esteemed Calvinist theologian and New England’s foremost cleric. Edwards’s third daughter, Esther, married the Reverend Aaron Burr, a classical scholar and theologian who became president of Princeton.
The infant Burr was born into the most secure and privileged of childhoods, yet it was steeped in horror. At the time of Burr’s birth, the college was
moving from Newark to Princeton, and in late 1756 the family took up residence in the new president’s house. Then came a nightmarish chain of events. In September 1757, Aaron Burr, Sr., died at forty-two and was replaced five months later as president by his father-in-law, Jonathan Edwards. Soon after arriving, Edwards was greeted with the news that his own father, a Connecticut clergyman, had died. Princeton had recently been struck by smallpox, which Edwards promptly contracted by inoculation, dying two weeks after settling in. Then Burr’s mother, Esther, came down with smallpox and died two weeks after her father. Dr. William Shippen took Burr and his orphaned sister into his Philadelphia home. When Grandmother Edwards came to reclaim the children, she contracted virulent dysentery and died shortly afterward. Thus, by October 1758, two-year-old Aaron Burr had already lost a mother, a father, a grandfather, a grandmother, and a great-grandfather. Though he lacked any memory of these gruesome events, Burr was even more emphatically orphaned than Hamilton.
Raised in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and Elizabethtown, New Jersey, by his uncle, the Reverend Timothy Edwards, Burr attended the same Presbyterian academy that later educated Hamilton. Entering Princeton at thirteen, he developed into a first-rate scholar and delivered a commencement speech entitled “Building Castles in the Air,” in which he declaimed against frittering away energy on idle dreams. Burr studied law with his brother-in-law, the Connecticut jurist Tapping Reeve, then fought courageously in the Revolution.
Like Hamilton, the impeccably tailored Burr made an elegant impression, with his lustrous dark eyes, full lips, and boldly arched eyebrows. He was witty, urbane, and unflappable and had a mesmerizing effect on men and women alike. Despite his later courtship of the Jeffersonians, Burr never shed a certain patrician hauteur, epicurean tastes, and a faint disdain for moneymaking activities. He believed that through self-control he could learn to control others. With his impervious aplomb, he was a better listener than talker. Hamilton was easy to ruffle, whereas Burr hid his feelings behind an enigmatic facade. When faced with confessions of wrongdoing, Burr said coolly, “No apologies or explanations. I hate them.”22 Unlike Hamilton, he could store up silent grievances over extended periods.