by Ron Chernow
From the outset of his New York residence, Hamilton contributed to many local institutions. In a quest to improve education in the state, he worked to create the Board of Regents and served on it from 1784 to 1787. In this capacity, he was also a trustee of his alma mater, now renamed Columbia College to banish any royal remnants, and received from it an honorary master-of-arts degree. He was involved in countless neighborhood projects, petitioning the Common Council to relocate a statue of William Pitt that obstructed Wall Street traffic or working to improve sanitation on the street by asking the council to raise “the pavements of the said street in the middle thereof so as to throw the water on each side of the street.”6
Hamilton also performed innumerable small acts of benevolence for friends. One special recipient was Baron von Steuben, who had received a verbal pledge from Congress that he would be paid if the patriots won the Revolution. When Congress reneged on this promise, Hamilton took Steuben into his home and helped him to craft petitions to the legislature; Hamilton’s papers are replete with entries for unpaid loans to the spendthrift baron, who was finally granted sixteen thousand acres in upstate New York. Alexander and Eliza also rescued a thirty-fiveyear-old painter, Ralph Earl, who had painted battle scenes of the Revolution and studied under Benjamin West in London. Upon returning to New York in 1786, Earl lost his money in dissolute habits and was tossed into debtors’ prison. Moved by his plight, Hamilton induced Eliza “to go to the debtors’ jail to sit for her portrait and she induced other ladies to do the same,” wrote James Hamilton. “By this means, the artist made a sufficient sum to pay his debts.”7 To this thoughtful patronage we owe Earl’s lifelike portrait of Eliza in a cushioned chair with gilded arms, which superbly captures the “earnest, energetic, and intelligent woman” that her son James evoked in his memoirs.8
By age thirty, Alexander Hamilton was a New York luminary and a stalwart member of the continental elite. He had traveled an almost inconceivable distance from his West Indian youth. Occasionally, his troubled past burst in upon him unexpectedly. After Yorktown, Hamilton was informed that his half brother Peter Lavien had died in South Carolina, leaving token bequests of one hundred pounds apiece to Hamilton and his brother, James. Lavien had been so estranged from his two illegitimate half brothers that in his will he referred to them as “Alexander & Robert [sic] Hamilton ...now or late residents of the island of Santa Cruz in the West Indies.”9 Had Hamilton simply been the more vivid brother or had Lavien’s memory been refreshed by reports that his bastard half brother was, miraculously, aide-decamp to George Washington? Instead of being touched by this belated penance, such as it was, Hamilton noted scornfully that Peter Lavien had left the bulk of his assets—properties in South Carolina, Georgia, and St. Croix—to three close friends. From the way Hamilton broke the news to Eliza, we can see that she had long known the story of his being cheated of his inheritance. “You know the circumstances that abate my distress,” he told her, “yet my heart acknowledges the rights of a brother. He dies rich, but has disposed of the bulk of his fortune to strangers. I am told he has left me a legacy. I did not inquire how much.”10 We can also learn much about Hamilton’s attitude toward this bequest by legal work he performed on the will of Sir William Johnson, who, by coincidence, had a legitimate son named Peter and eight illegitimate children. Hamilton turned in an unsparing verdict: “I am of opinion that the survivors of the eight children were entitled” as well to the inheritance originally given to Peter alone.11
It must have distressed Hamilton to gaze backward, and he retained few acquaintances from his past. During the war, he had corresponded with his old St. Croix mentor, Hugh Knox, who doted proudly on his success, marveled at his proximity to Washington, and implored him to draft a history of the American Revolution. Then, in 1783, Knox sent Hamilton a plaintive letter, complaining that his former disciple had greeted his letters with silence for three years. He admitted to bruised feelings: “When you were covered with the dust of the camp and had cannonballs whistling thick about your ears, you used to steal an hour’s converse with an old friend every 5 or 6 months; and now in a time of profound peace and tranquillity you cannot, it seems, find two minutes for this kind of office.... [A]re you grown too rich and proud to have a good memory?...Pray make haste to explain this strange mystery!”12
Hamilton rushed to mollify Knox, explaining that he had never received the letters. Knox then replied in ecstatic tones that “you have not only answered, but even far exceeded our most sanguine hopes and expectations.”13 He conjured up the frail but persistent adolescent he had befriended and beseeched Hamilton not to exhaust himself through overwork. Though Hamilton patched things up with Knox, the anomaly remains that he had not sent him a letter in three years. He displayed not the slightest interest in revisiting St. Croix or showing Eliza the scenes of his upbringing. Did he need some psychic distance from the West Indies to reinvent himself in America? When Knox died seven years later, Hamilton must have regretted that he had not seen his fond old mentor again. Knox was eulogized as a “universal lover of mankind” in Hamilton’s old paper, the Royal Danish American Gazette.14 He certainly had shown a special and abiding love for Hamilton.
In May 1785, Hamilton’s brother, James, resurfaced with a letter begging for money. The envelope that Hamilton sent in reply shows that James had migrated to St. Thomas. (He probably died there the following year, from causes unknown.) Hamilton’s reply is a shocking revelation of just how estranged he had grown from his carpenter brother and their father, notwithstanding his earlier efforts to stay in touch with them. Hamilton expressed surprise that James had not received a letter he sent him six months before and reproached him gently, saying this was only the second letter he had gotten from him in many years. We do not know what James thought of his wondrous brother, but how could he not have been envious? Forgiving his brother’s failure to write, Hamilton addressed him with an affecting eagerness to help: “The situation you describe yourself to be in gives me much pain and nothing will make me happier than, as far as may be in my power, to contribute to your relief.”15 While Hamilton said that his own prospects were “flattering”—his sole, discreet reference to his own spectacular good fortune—he also said that he could not afford to lend him more at the moment, though he wanted in time to help settle him on a farm in America.
My affection for you, however, will not permit me to be inattentive to your welfare and I hope time will prove to you that I feel all the sentiment of a brother. Let me only request of you to exert your industry for a year or two more where you are and at the end of that time, I promise myself to be able to invite you to a more comfortable settlement in this country. Allow me only to give you one caution, which is to avoid if possible getting in debt. Are you married or single? If the latter, it is my wish for many reasons it may be agreeable to you to continue in that state.16
That Hamilton didn’t have the slightest notion of whether his brother was married or not and didn’t assume that he would have been invited to any wedding suggests the wide gulf separating the two brothers. When Hamilton turned to the subject of their feckless father, his poignant letter grew more heartbreaking:
But what has become of our dear father? It is an age since I have heard from him or of him, though I have written him several letters. Perhaps, alas! he is no more and I shall not have the pleasing opportunity of contributing to render the close of his life more happy than the progress of it. My heart bleeds at the recollection of his misfortunes and embarrassments. Sometimes I flatter myself his brothers have extended their support to him and that he now enjoys tranquillity and ease. At other times, I fear he is suffering in indigence. I entreat you, if you can, to relieve me from my doubts and let me know how or where he is, if alive; if dead, how and where he died. Should he be alive, inform him of my inquiries, beg him to write to me, and tell him how ready I shall be to devote myself and all I have to his accommodation and happiness.17
This letter confirms that Hamilton lacked
any clear grasp of his wayward father’s situation or even whether he was still alive. He did suspect, however, that his brother had maintained contact with him. The letter also makes manifest that he felt more tenderness and sorrow than anger toward his father.
There were only two figures from St. Croix with whom Hamilton remained in touch throughout his life. Hamilton’s cousin Ann Lytton Venton, who had helped to bankroll his education at King’s College, escaped a wretched marriage when her husband died in 1776. Four years later, she married a Scot, George Mitchell, who filed for bankruptcy the next year, forcing them to flee St. Croix. Three years after that, they moved to Burlington, New Jersey. It was a ghastly time for Ann Mitchell, who complained in 1796 that she and her daughter “have suffered and still suffer every hardship incident to poverty.”18 Hamilton sometimes met Mitchell in Philadelphia and tried to prop her up with financial and legal help, but he was later bothered by a nagging conscience that he had not done more to alleviate her struggles.
The only truly happy relationship that Hamilton sustained from boyhood was with his best friend, Edward Stevens. In 1777, Stevens had completed his medical studies in Edinburgh, publishing a dissertation in Latin on stomach digestion, inspired by the peculiar case of a man who made a living by swallowing stones to amuse street crowds. The following year, at age twenty-four, Stevens became the first junior president of the Royal Medical Society. Like Hugh Knox, he was thrilled by Hamilton’s exploits under Washington, even slightly agog. “Who would have imagined, my friend,” he wrote to Hamilton in French in 1778, “that a man of your size, of your delicacy of constitution, and your tranquillity would have shone so much and in such a short time on the Field of Mars, as you have done.”19 (The emphasis on Hamilton’s “size” may well have been a bawdy allusion.) In 1783, Stevens returned to St. Croix, married, and started a medical practice. Like Hamilton, he seemed to succeed readily at everything he tried. “The doctor has an extensive and lucrative practice and is much and deservedly esteemed in his profession,” Hugh Knox reported from the island. “He sometimes talks much of going to America and I believe would do exceedingly well there in one of the capitals, as he has a fine address and great merit and cleverness.”20 Hamilton and Stevens remained united by an indissoluble bond that seems conspicuously missing in Hamilton’s relationships with his father and brother.
The memories of his West Indian childhood left Hamilton with a settled antipathy to slavery. During the war, Hamilton had supported John Laurens’s futile effort to emancipate southern slaves who fought for independence. He had expressed an unwavering belief in the genetic equality of blacks and whites—unlike Jefferson, for instance, who regarded blacks as innately inferior—that was enlightened for his day. And he knew this from his personal boyhood experience.
Among many Americans, the Revolution had generated a backlash against slavery as a horrifying practice incompatible with republican ideals. In one abolitionist pamphlet, Samuel Hopkins had written, “Oh, the shocking, the intolerable inconsistence!...This gross, barefaced inconsistence.”21 As early as 1775, Philadelphia Quakers had launched the world’s first antislavery society, followed by others in the north and south. Unfortunately, slavery itself had expanded in tandem with the rousing rhetoric of freedom that seemed to undercut its legitimacy.
Hamilton’s marriage into the Schuyler family may have created complications in his stand on slavery. At times Philip Schuyler had as many as twenty-seven slaves tending his Albany mansion and his fields and mills near Saratoga. They labored at every branch of household work: cooking, cultivating gardens, grooming horses, mending shoes, as well as doing carpentry and laundry, and fishing. Eliza had direct contact with these domestic slaves, to the extent that her grandson surmised that she was “probably her mother’s chief assistant in the management of the house and slaves.”22 The image is terribly jarring, for we know Eliza was a confirmed foe of slavery. There is no definite proof, but three oblique hints in Hamilton’s papers suggest that he and Eliza may have owned one or two household slaves as well. Five months after his wedding, Hamilton wrote to Governor George Clinton that “I expect by Col. Hay’s return to receive a sufficient sum to pay the value of the woman Mrs. H had of Mrs. Clinton.”23 Arguing that this transaction involved the hiring of a domestic servant, not the purchase of a slave, biographer Forrest McDonald has pointed out that the “sufficient sum” referred to back pay that Hamilton was slated to receive from Lieutenant Colonel Udny Hay, deputy quartermaster general—a sum that would have fallen far short of the money then requisite to buy a slave.24 In 1795, Philip Schuyler informed Hamilton that “the Negro boy & woman are engaged for you.” Apparently in payment, Hamilton debited his cashbook the next spring for $250 to his father-in-law “for 2 Negro servants purchased by him for me.”25 As we shall see, this purchase may have been made for John and Angelica Church and undertaken reluctantly by Hamilton. Ditto for the purchase of a Negro woman and child on May 29, 1797, which was explicitly charged to John B. Church. In 1804, Angelica noted regretfully that Eliza did not have slaves to assist with a large party that the Hamiltons were planning.
By no means confined to the south, slavery was well entrenched in much of the north. By 1784, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut had outlawed slavery or passed laws for its gradual extinction—at the very least, New England’s soil did not lend itself to large plantations— but New York and New Jersey retained significant slave populations. New York City, in particular, was identified with slavery: it still held slave auctions in the 1750s and was also linked through its sugar refineries to the West Indies. Even in the 1790s, one in five New York City households kept domestic slaves, a practice ubiquitous among well-to-do merchants who wanted cooks, maids, and butlers and regarded slaves as status symbols. (After the Revolution, few Americans cared to work as servile bonded servants in this new, more egalitarian society.) Slaves tilled the farms of many Hudson River estates along with tenant farmers, one English visitor noting that “many of the old Dutch farmers...have 20 to 30 slaves[, and] to their care and management everything is left.”26
The north never relied on slavery as much as the south, where it was inescapably embedded in the tobacco and cotton economies. When Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, slaves constituted 40 percent of the population of his home state, Virginia. Slaves in South Carolina outnumbered whites. The magnitude of southern slavery was to have far-reaching repercussions in Hamilton’s career. The most damning and hypocritical critiques of his allegedly aristocratic economic system emanated from the most aristocratic southern slaveholders, who deflected attention from their own nefarious deeds by posing as populist champions and assailing the northern financial and mercantile interests aligned with Hamilton. As will be seen, the national consensus that the slavery issue should be tabled to preserve the union meant that the southern plantation economy was effectively ruled off-limits to political discussion, while Hamilton’s system, by default, underwent the most searching scrutiny.
Few, if any, other founding fathers opposed slavery more consistently or toiled harder to eradicate it than Hamilton—a fact that belies the historical stereotype that he cared only for the rich and privileged. To be sure, John Adams never owned a slave and had a good record on slavery, which he denounced as a “foul contagion in the human character.”27 Yet he did not always translate his beliefs into practice. According to biographer John Ferling, “As a lawyer he occasionally defended slaves, but as a politician he made no effort to loosen the shackles of those in bondage.”28 Fearing southern dissension, Adams opposed plans to emancipate slaves joining the Continental Army, contested the use of black soldiers, and opposed a bill in the Massachusetts legislature to abolish slavery. “There is no evidence that he ever spoke out on the issue of slavery in any national forum or that he ever entered into a dialogue on the subject with any of his southern friends,” Ferling concluded.29
In his more radical later years, Benjami
n Franklin was a courageous, outspoken president of Pennsylvania’s abolition society. As a young and middle-aged man, however, he brokered slave sales from his Philadelphia print shop, ran ads for slaves, and bought and sold them for himself and others. At many times, he kept one or two household slaves. Biographer Edmund Morgan has noted of Franklin’s involvement with slavery, “Not until late in life did it begin to trouble his conscience.”30
The Virginia founders came to see the problem as intractable, since their economic security was so interwoven with slavery. By the time of the Revolution, George Washington was a mostly benevolent master of more than one hundred slaves at Mount Vernon, though he could be a stickler for reclaiming runaway slaves. While he did not criticize slavery publicly, he had an uneasy conscience and belatedly acted on his views. In 1786, when he owned more than two hundred slaves, he refused to break up families and swore not to buy another slave. “There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition” of slavery, he told Robert Morris.31 Washington emancipated his slaves in his will and even set aside money to assist the freed slaves and their children.
As owner of about two hundred slaves at Monticello and other properties, Thomas Jefferson was acutely conscious of the discrepancy between high-minded revolutionary words and the bloody reality of slavery. Early in the Revolution, he endorsed a plan to stop importing slaves and was dismayed when Congress expunged a passage from the Declaration of Independence in which he blamed George III for the slave trade. In Notes on the State of Virginia, written in the early 1780s, he laid out a gradual scheme for ending slavery, with emancipated blacks relocated to the continent’s interior. (As president, he preferred sending them to the West Indies.) In 1784, he proposed blocking slavery in the Northwest Territory, albeit with a sixteen-year grace period. Over time Jefferson yielded to a craven policy of postponing action on slavery indefinitely, constantly foisting the problem onto future generations, hoping vaguely that it would wither away. Unlike Washington, Jefferson freed only a handful of his slaves, including the brothers of his apparent mistress, Sally Hemings.