Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

  When Samuel Jones supported the measure, Hamilton refuted him “in terms of great cogency” and convinced the Assembly to side with him.35 That Hamilton argued so strenuously for this measure hints at surviving hobgoblins from the Caribbean that still hovered uneasily in his mind.

  Soon after Hamilton was trounced on the impost measure, he introduced a motion in the Assembly to send five delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The general expectation was that the convention would simply tinker with the Articles of Confederation, not overhaul its basic machinery. Hamilton envisaged something far more audacious, hoping that a robust union would result. Two days later, the Clintonians boxed him into a corner by slashing the delegate count to three. Since Hamilton had been New York’s chief catalyst for the convention, the Clintonians couldn’t very well deny him a place; instead, they flanked him with two opponents of federal power who would smother his influence. Albany mayor John Lansing, Jr., was a prosperous landowner, and Robert Yates a pretentious judge on the New York Supreme Court. Both were vocal foes of efforts to endow Congress with independent taxing powers. They were a tightly knit pair for other reasons. The two men were related by marriage and the younger Lansing had clerked in Yates’s law office as a teenager. So instead of leading a united delegation, Hamilton was demoted to being a minority delegate from a dissenting state.

  Hamilton arrived in Philadelphia on May 18, 1787, and joined other delegates at the Indian Queen Tavern on Fourth Street. Madison had arrived days earlier to brace for battle, confiding to Washington his fears that the team of Lansing and Yates would be a fatal “clog” on their friend Hamilton.36 Like other delegates, Madison had a sense of high drama, believing the document about to be drawn up would “decide forever the fate of republican government.”37 Lacking a quorum, the meeting did not convene officially for another week: against a patter of steady rain, Washington was then unanimously elected president of the convention. Hamilton had helped to coax the reluctant general from his Mount Vernon retreat and convince him to attend. At the end of the Revolution, Washington had been no less perturbed than Hamilton by the weak central government and worried that “local or state politics will interfere too much with that more liberal and extensive plan of government which wisdom and foresight...would dictate.”38 Though Washington was taciturn at the convention, his preference for a more effective central government was well known.

  Washington appointed Hamilton, George Wythe, and Charles Pinckney to a small committee that drew up rules and procedures for the convention. To free himself from the domination of Lansing and Yates, Hamilton wanted the votes of individual members recorded. Instead, the convention chose to proceed on a onestate, one-vote basis, which meant that Hamilton’s vote would likely be nullified by his two fellow delegates. The committee prevailed in its general preference for secrecy. Preliminary votes were not recorded. To encourage candor, the committee also decided that “nothing spoken in the House be printed, or otherwise published, or communicated without leave.”39 Journalists and curious spectators were forbidden to attend, sentries were stationed at doors, and delegates, sworn to secrecy, remained tight-lipped to outsiders. The delegates even adjourned to the second floor of the State House to ensure confidentiality. During a sultry Philadelphia summer, in the face of thick swarms of tormenting flies, the blinds were often drawn and the windows shut to guarantee privacy. Even Madison’s copious notes of the convention were not published until decades later.

  Why such undemocratic rules for a conclave crafting a new charter? Many delegates believed they were enlightened, independent citizens, concerned for the commonweal, not members of those detestable things called factions. “Had the deliberations been open while going on, the clamours of faction would have prevented any satisfactory result,” said Hamilton. “Had they been afterwards disclosed, much food would have been afforded to inflammatory declamation.”40 The closeddoor proceedings yielded inspired, uninhibited debate and brought forth one of the most luminous documents in history. At the same time, this secrecy made the convention’s inner workings the stuff of baleful legend, with unfortunate repercussions for Hamilton’s later career.

  The venue for the convention was the gunmetal-gray East Room of the redbrick State House, where the Declaration of Independence had been signed. It had the proper dignity and simplicity for these right-minded republicans. Delegates sat in Windsor chairs, arranged in fan-shaped rows in front of Washington’s high-backed wooden chair, and jotted notes on tables covered with green baize. The tall windows were partly obscured by drooping green drapes. The room provided an intimate setting for these deliberations. Unlike orators in an amphitheater, the delegates met in a space cozy enough to enable speakers to make eye contact with every delegate and talk in a normal conversational voice.

  Seated front-row center was James Madison, who staked out this pivotal spot to take minutes. “In this favorable position for hearing all that passed ...I was not absent a single day, nor more than a casual fraction of an hour in any day, so that I could not have lost a single speech, unless a very short one.”41 One observer said that the diminutive Virginian, bent over his notes, had “a calm expression, a penetrating blue eye, and looked like a thinking man.”42

  Major William Pierce of Georgia filed the fullest portrait of Hamilton, finding him impressive, if a little too self-consciously the strutting young genius. “He is about 33 years old, of small stature, and lean,” Pierce observed. “His manners are tinctured with stiffness and sometimes with a degree of vanity that is highly disagreeable.” Hamilton’s voice lacked the resonance of a great orator’s, but he was eloquent and able and plumbed subjects to their roots: “When he comes forward, he comes highly charged with interesting matter. There is no skimming over the surface of a subject with him. He must sink to the bottom to see what foundation it rests on.” Pierce captured Hamilton’s mercurial personality, ponderous one moment, facetious the next. His “language is not always equal, sometimes didactic like Bolingbroke’s, at others light and tripping like [Laurence] Stern[e]’s.”43

  Who were these solons rhapsodized by Benjamin Franklin as “the most august and respectable assembly he was ever in in his life”?44 The fifty-five delegates representing twelve states—the renegade Rhode Island boycotted the convention— scarcely constituted a cross section of America. They were white, educated males and mostly affluent property owners. A majority were lawyers and hence sensitive to precedent. Princeton graduates (nine) trumped Yale (four) and Harvard (three) by a goodly margin. They averaged forty-two years of age, meaning that Hamilton, thirty-two, and Madison, thirty-six, were relatively young. As a foreign-born delegate, Hamilton wasn’t alone, since nearly a dozen others had been born or educated abroad. Many delegates shared Hamilton’s preoccupation with public debt. The majority owned public securities, the values of which would be affected dramatically by decisions taken here. During the next few months, Hamilton’s attendance was spotty, but this wasn’t atypical. Many delegates shuttled back to their home states on business, and only about thirty of the fifty-five delegates were present much of the time.

  The convention gave Hamilton a fleeting brush with the one founder otherwise absent from his story: eighty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin. The ancient Philadelphian, with his mostly bald head, lank strands of side hair, and double chin, was bedeviled by gout and excruciating kidney stones. He often discoursed to Hamilton and other delegates under the canopy of a mulberry tree in his courtyard, sometimes with his fond grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache looking on. Legend has it that when the enfeebled Franklin first came to the convention, he was borne aloft on a sedan chair, toted by four convicts conscripted from the Walnut Street jail. Nevertheless, with exemplary dedication, he showed up for every session of the four-month convention, sometimes asking others to deliver statements for him. Hamilton’s first act in Philadelphia paid homage to Franklin. The sage had opposed salaries for executive-branch officers, hoping such a measure would produce civicminded leaders,
not government officials feeding at the public trough. Others thought this would exclude all but the idle rich from holding office. Hamilton seconded Franklin’s quixotic motion, likely from veneration for the man. Madison commented that the idea was “treated with great respect, but rather for the author of it than from any apparent conviction of its expediency or practicability.”45

  In theory, the convention had a mandate only to revise the Articles of Confederation. Any delegates who took this circumscribed mission at face value were soon rudely disabused. On May 30, Edmund Randolph presented a plan, formulated chiefly by Madison, that sought to scuttle the articles altogether and create a strong central government. This “Virginia Plan” made a clean break with the past and contained the basic design of the future U.S. government. It provided for a bicameral legislature, with both houses based on proportional representation. (As the most populous state, Virginia had a vested interest in this approach.) It concentrated extra power in the executive branch by calling for a one-person executive (i.e., a president) with a seven-year term, rather than the council favored by radicals. To heighten the separation of powers, it envisioned a national judiciary, crowned by a supreme tribunal. The Virginia Plan left little doubt that while the states would retain some sovereignty, they would be subservient to the federal government.

  After Randolph’s presentation, Hamilton confronted delegates with the core question of whether the new government should muddle on as a confederation or form a true nation. They should debate “whether the United States were susceptible to one government” or whether each state needed “a separate existence connected only by leagues.”46 Hamilton saw the vital importance of the national government possessing ultimate sovereignty. The positive reaction to his statement revealed that the delegates were ready to embark on vigorous reform, and the convention agreed overwhelmingly that “a national government ought to be established consisting of a supreme legislative, executive and judiciary.”47 Robert Yates at once exposed the irreparable split in the New York delegation by voting against Hamilton’s motion. Had John Lansing, Jr., arrived by this time, he would surely have done likewise.

  For many delegates, a separation of federal powers was one thing, a sharp diminution of state power quite another. Small states trembled at the thought of a bicameral legislature with both houses chosen by proportional representation. On June 15, William Paterson of New Jersey furnished the convention with a notably divergent vision. Instead of razing the old structure to erect a brand-new government, Paterson wanted to “correct” the Articles of Confederation and retain basic state sovereignty; instead of two houses of Congress, the New Jersey Plan envisioned one chamber, with each state casting one vote. It also retained the voluntary system of “requisitions” that had hobbled the country’s finances. In place of a president, the plan contemplated an executive council that could be removed by a majority of the state governors. For obvious reasons, many large states gravitated toward the Virginia Plan, while smaller states coalesced around the New Jersey Plan.

  Though a delegate from the fifth largest state, John Lansing expressed warm admiration for the New Jersey Plan, since it “sustains the sovereignty of the respective states.” He chided the Virginia Plan: “The states willl never sacrifice their essential rights to a national government.”48 So visceral was Lansing’s revulsion against Madison’s plan that he said that if New York had suspected a new national government would be contemplated, it would never have sent delegates to Philadelphia. Lansing’s speech confirmed Hamilton’s minority status in his delegation, reducing his influence on the convention floor.

  For those who knew Hamilton, his generally passive behavior during the first three weeks was mystifying. He had never been known to hug the sidelines. As the convention split over the Virginia and New Jersey plans, Hamilton stayed conspicuously aloof from both camps. Robert Yates noted on June 15, “Col. Hamilton cannot say he is in sentiment with either plan.”49 Madison recorded Hamilton as saying that he had been self-effacing partly because he did not wish to dissent from those “whose superior abilities, age, and experience rendered him unwilling to bring forward ideas dissimilar to theirs” and partly owing to the split in his delegation.50

  It was predictable that when the wordy Hamilton broke silence, he would do so at epic length. Faced with a deadlock between large and small states, he decided to broach a more radical plan. On Monday morning, June 18, the thirty-two-year-old prodigy rose first on the convention floor and in the stifling, poorly ventilated room he spoke and spoke and spoke. Before the day was through, he had given a six-hour speech (no break for lunch) that was brilliant, courageous, and, in retrospect, completely daft. He admitted to the assembly that he would adumbrate a plan that did not reflect popular opinion. “My situation is disagreeable,” he admitted, “but it would be criminal not to come forward on a question of such magnitude.”51 He said people were tiring in their enthusiasm for “democracy,” by which he meant direct representation or even mob rule, as opposed to public opinion filtered through educated representatives. “And what even is the Virginia Plan,” he asked, “but democracy checked by democracy, or pork with a little change of the sauce?”52 Of all the founders, Hamilton probably had the gravest doubts about the wisdom of the masses and wanted elected leaders who would guide them. This was the great paradox of his career: his optimistic view of America’s potential coexisted with an essentially pessimistic view of human nature. His faith in Americans never quite matched his faith in America itself.

  It was typical of Hamilton’s egotism, expansive imagination, and supernormal intellect that he refused to settle for refinements on somebody else’s plan. His mind had minted an entire program for a new government, not just scattered aspects of it. In future years, he reminded critics that the deliberations had been kept secret precisely so that delegates could provoke debate and voice controversial ideas without fear of reprisals. Instead, his speech acquired diabolical status in the rumor mills of the early republic, providing gloating opponents with damning proof of his supposed political apostasy.

  Though we have no written transcript of the speech, the sometimes conflicting notes left by Hamilton, Madison, Yates, Lansing, and Rufus King agree in most essentials. Ever since his September 1780 letter to James Duane, Hamilton had toyed with creating a new hybrid form of government that would have the continuity of a monarchy combined with the liberties of a republic, guarding against both anarchy and tyranny. He now suggested a president and Senate that would be elected but would then serve for life on “good behavior.” Hamilton’s chief executive differed from a hereditary monarch because he would be elected and, if he misbehaved, subject to recall. “It will be objected probably that such an executive will be an elective monarch and will give birth to the tumults which characterize that form of gov[ernmen]t,” Madison scribbled as Hamilton declaimed. “He w[oul]d reply that monarch is an indefinite term. It marks not either the degree or duration of power.”53 It scarcely helped Hamilton’s historical reputation that in his personal notes he observed of this monarch, “He ought to be hereditary and to have so much power that it will not be his interest to risk much to acquire more.”54 Hamilton edited this from his talk, however, and never openly advocated a hereditary monarchy, as evidenced by Madison’s reference to an “elective monarch.” And nowhere else in Hamilton’s vast body of work does he support a hereditary executive. Even here, in his most extreme statement, he called for a chief executive subject to ultimate legislative control. However atrociously misguided the idea was, it fell short of proposing a real monarchy, in which a king has permanent, autonomous, hereditary powers that supersede those of all other branches of government.

  While Hamilton’s Senate would be chosen for life by electors, his House of Representatives, by contrast, was exceedingly democratic, chosen directly by universal male suffrage every three years. Thus, the aristocratic element would be represented by the Senate, the common folk by the House. As prosperity widened income differentials in fut
ure years, Hamilton feared that the Senate and House might try to impose their wills on each other: “Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many.”55 The system needed an impartial arbiter to transcend class warfare and regional interests, and here Hamilton muddied the waters by using the dreaded word monarch: “This check is a monarch....There ought to be a principle in government capable of resisting the popular current.”56 Fearing aristocrats as well as commoners, Hamilton wanted to restrain abusive majorities and minorities. “Demagogues are not always inconsiderable persons,” he responded to one Madison speech. “Patricians were frequently demagogues.”57 To curb further abuse, Hamilton recommended a Supreme Court that would consist of twelve judges holding lifetime offices on good behavior. In this manner, each branch would maintain a salutary distance from popular passions. The House of Representatives would be the striking exception. Hamilton concluded, “The principle chiefly intended to be established is this—that there must be a permanent will.”58

  No less inflammatory to some listeners was Hamilton’s assessment of the former mother country. “In his private opinion,” Madison recorded, “he had no scruple in declaring... that the British Gov[ernmen]t was the best in the world and that he doubted much whether anything short of it would do in America.”59 For future conspiracy theorists, this admission clinched the case: Hamilton was a dangerous traitor, ready to sell America back into bondage to Britain. In fact, admiration for the British political system was still widespread. At one point, Pierce Butler of South Carolina remarked that the delegates were “constantly running away with the idea of the excellence of the British parliament and with or without reason copying from them.”60 But Hamilton’s detractors were to interpret his view as one of uniquely servile adoration for the British system, with a desire to import it to America.