by Ron Chernow
Despite shrieking vendors, tinkling cowbells, and rumbling carts on Wall Street that often drowned out speakers inside Federal Hall, the new government slowly took shape during the summer and early fall. In the House, James Madison helped to compress dozens of changes to the Constitution recommended by the state conventions into twelve amendments; the first ten, when ratified by the states, would be known as the Bill of Rights. And in the Senate, Oliver Ellsworth took the lead in drafting a judiciary act that provided for a six-member Supreme Court, buttressed by federal district and circuit courts. On May 19, Representative Elias Boudinot of New Jersey, Hamilton’s old patron from Elizabethtown, proposed that Congress establish a department of finance. From the clamor that arose over what would become the Treasury Department, it was clear this would be the real flash point of controversy in the new government, the place where critics feared that Europeanstyle despotism could take root. Legislators recalled that British tax abuses had spawned the Revolution and that chancellors of the exchequer had directed huge armies of customs collectors to levy onerous duties. To guard against such concentrated power, Elbridge Gerry wanted to invest the Treasury leadership in a board, not an individual. It was Madison who insisted that a single secretary, equipped with all necessary powers, should superintend the department.
A tremendous hubbub accompanied the act outlining the treasury secretary’s duties, including his need to report to Congress on matters in his bailiwick. Opponents did not see this duty as a welcome form of congressional oversight that would subject the secretary to the bright glare of scrutiny. Mindful of British precedent, they feared it would open the door to executive tampering with legislative affairs— a charge that was, in fact, to hound Hamilton throughout his tenure.
The spring of 1789 was a gratifying time for the patriotic Schuylers. Leaving behind her husband and four children, Angelica Church sailed from England and arrived in time to witness Washington’s inauguration. She missed home terribly and was concerned about her gout-ridden father. Most of all, she yearned for the company of Alexander and Eliza. Hamilton remained smitten with his sister-in-law, never missing a chance to flatter or tease her with some arch message. With Angelica, he reverted to the high-spirited, chivalric young man. “I seldom write to a lady without fancying the relation of lover and mistress,” he had told her after knocking off Federalist number 17. “It has a very inspiring effect. And in your case, the dullest materials could not help feeling that propensity.”42
John Barker Church’s political ambitions had subjected Angelica to a peculiarly uncomfortable fate: this daughter of an American general was about to become the wife of a member of the British Parliament. Trying to make the best of the situation, Angelica told Hamilton that she would happily have her husband in the House of Commons “if he possessed your eloquence.”43 Hamilton replied that he would rather have seen his brother-in-law elected to the new American Congress. Nevertheless, Church became an M.P. from Wendover Borough in 1790. At Down Place, their estate near Windsor Castle, the Churches surrounded themselves with luminous personalities from the literary, artistic, and political worlds. A visiting American cousin found the fashionable Angelica “an angel, all affectionate politeness towards a cousin who trudges out to her country seat on foot.”44 The Churches inhabited a social world in which excessive drinking, compulsive gambling, and discreet adultery were routine. At the center of their circle stood the Prince of Wales, later King George IV, who adored Angelica, and Charles James Fox, the Whig leader, who shared John Church’s gambling passion and often borrowed immense sums from him to feed his habit. The Churches also kept a private box at the Drury Lane Theater and befriended the spendthrift playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, author of The School for Scandal, who once refused to satisfy his creditors on the grounds that “paying only encourages them.”45 The Churches also grew close to the American artist John Trumbull, lending him money so that he could study with Benjamin West in England and Jacques-Louis David in France.
For all the glamorous settings, Angelica was often lonely and melancholy in her European exile. In one later plaintive letter to Eliza, she described going to the theater and beholding the royal family there, then added, “What are Kings and Queens to an American who has seen a Washington!”46 She went on to tell her sister: “I envy you the trio of agreeable men. You talk of my father and my Baron [von Steuben] and your Hamilton. What pleasant evenings, what agreeable chitchat, whilst my society must be confined to chill, gloomy Englishmen.”47 In another letter, heavy with homeward longing, Angelica wrote, “Adieu, my dear Eliza. Be happy and be gay and remember me in your mirth as one who deserves and wishes to partake of your happiness. Embrace Hamilton and the Baron.”48
It may be more than coincidental that the first scandalous reference to Hamilton’s marital infidelity occurred in late March 1789 just as Angelica Church returned to New York. The town was humming with social events marking the new government, and the mutual admiration between Hamilton and his sister-in-law, apparent at parties and dinners they attended, must have excited speculation. At one ball, Angelica dropped a garter that was swept gallantly off the floor by Hamilton. Angelica, who had a sly wit, teased him that he wasn’t a Knight of the Garter. Angelica’s sarcastic sister, Peggy, then remarked, “He would be a Knight of the Bedchamber, if he could.”49 This may all have been harmless banter, but such tales fed material to the local gossips.
Angelica stayed in New York till November, when she received a letter from John Church that some of their children had fallen sick. She promptly booked passage back to England. Whatever did—or did not—happen between Alexander and Angelica during her long stay in New York, Eliza was so distraught by her beloved sister’s departure that she could not bear to see her off; she was consoled with difficulty by, among others, Baron von Steuben. Hamilton, his eldest son, Philip, and the baron escorted Angelica to the Battery and wistfully watched her vessel disappear from the harbor. The men gave way to extravagant emotions. “Imagine what we felt,” Hamilton wrote to Angelica of this parting scene. “We gazed, we sighed, we wept.”50 Even Steuben, hardened old warrior that he was, stood with tears brimming in his eyes. “Amiable Angelica!” Hamilton concluded. “How much you are formed to endear yourself to every good heart.... Some of us are and must continue inconsolable for your absence.”51 Alexander and Eliza seemed united, not divided, by their shared adoration of Angelica. “Betsey and myself make you the last theme of our conversation at night and the first in the morning,” Hamilton told her.52 Those gossips whose tongues wagged over the seeming flirtation of Alexander and Angelica might have been surprised to see Eliza’s tender farewell note to her sister:
My very dear beloved Angelica: I have seated myself to write to you, but my heart is so saddened by your absence that it can scarcely dictate, my eyes so filled with tears that I shall not be able to write you much. But remember, remember, my dear sister, of the assurances of your returning to us and do all you can to make your absence short. Tell Mr. Church for me of the happiness he will give me in bringing you to me, not to me alone, but to fond parents, sisters, friends, and to my Hamilton, who has for you all the affection of a fond own brother. I can no more. Adieu, adieu. E. H.53
As if to symbolize the tenuous state of the new administration, George Washington developed a queer affliction in mid-June 1789 that nearly killed him. What started out as a fever was followed by a tenderness in his left thigh that soon progressed to painful swelling and a “malignant carbuncle.” The president lost weight, could not sit up, and lay dangerously ill in bed for days. Few people outside the small presidential circle understood the extreme gravity of the illness, much less that it might prove fatal. Whether this was a product of anthrax, as diagnosed at the time, or a tumor, it was surgically excised without an anesthetic. (In a still rural America, it was not uncommon for farmers and planters to contract anthrax from infected animals.) The senior surgeon who presided over the procedure did so with seemingly sadistic gusto. “Cut away,” he e
xclaimed. “Deep—deeper—deeper still. Don’t be afraid. You will see how well he bears it!”54 The president’s health remained so uncertain that Mayor James Duane stopped carriages from passing Washington’s residence and had straw spread on the sidewalk to muffle any sounds that might disturb him.
As he convalesced, Washington lacked the strength to attend a Fourth of July celebration conducted at St. Paul’s Chapel by the Society of the Cincinnati. The ex–revolutionary officers forgathered at the City Tavern, then headed for the church, attended by an artillery regiment and martial band. As they passed the presidential residence, Washington, decked out in full regimental regalia, greeted them from the doorway. Martha Washington then joined the officers at St. Paul’s for the most glittering assemblage of personalities since the inauguration. Vice President Adams attended with the Senate and House of Representatives in tow. With eagles pinned to their buttonholes, the bemedaled Cincinnati members occupied their own special section. The highlight of the program was Hamilton’s memorial oration for his friend, General Nathanael Greene, who had died three years earlier. One newspaper noted that “a splendid assembly of ladies” gazed down from the galleries—doubtless to Hamilton’s delight.55
The clean, airy chapel sparkled with cut-glass chandeliers and Corinthian columns and was a superb, if slightly ironic, setting for the occasion. Speakers stood at a hooded pulpit topped by a coronet of six feathers—the last surviving emblem of British rule in the city. Hamilton had once paid homage to Greene by saying that he lacked “nothing but an education to have made him the first man in the United States,” and he now eulogized him with unfeigned affection.56 Like Hamilton, Greene had risen from modest circumstances and taught himself the science of warfare. At moments, Hamilton’s panegyric had autobiographical overtones:
It is an observation as just as it is common that in those great revolutions which occasionally convulse society, human nature never fails to be brought forward in its brightest as well as in its blackest colors. And 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.57
As commander of the Southern Army late in the Revolution, harassing Cornwallis, Greene had been renowned for performing wonders with often meager forces. Probably with this in mind, Hamilton committed the faux pas of openly mocking the state militias that had served under Greene. In recounting his exploits, Hamilton deprecated the militias as “the mimickry of soldiership.” As he told of fierce fighting in South Carolina, Hamilton said that front-line militia under Greene had buckled under fire and were rescued by a second line of brave, resolute Continentals.58 Hamilton probably had scant notion that his passing comment on southern soldiers had mortally offended a congressman from South Carolina, Aedanus Burke, a bibulous, hot-tempered Irishman. At the time, Hamilton was not a federal official, and Burke did not make an open issue of the speech. Moreover, after the New York Ratifying Convention, Hamilton stood at the peak of his popularity, and Burke did not dare to challenge him. He later explained, “Mr. Hamilton was the hero of the day and the favorite of the people. And had I hurt a hair of his head, I’m sure I should have been dragged through the kennels of New York and pitched headlong into the East River.”59 As we shall see, Burke stewed about the episode and awaited a strategic moment to retaliate. He and other southerners perhaps also took umbrage at Hamilton’s frank statement that patriotic operations in the south had been hampered “by a numerous body of slaves bound by all the laws of injured humanity to hate their masters.”60 Hamilton was admitting that masters deserved to be hated by their slaves and had behaved logically in sympathizing with the British or failing to cooperate with the patriots—sentiments that surely were anathema to the slaveholders.
Hamilton seemed to spark controversy at every turn. At the time of his July Fourth oration, New York still had not selected its first two senators. Under the Constitution, this decision fell to state legislatures, insuring that local mandarins would have a disproportionate say in the matter. As in the colonial period, New York politics was still largely governed by a few powerful families. In the felicitous words of one early Burr biographer, “The Clintons had power, the Livingstons had numbers, and the Schuylers had Hamilton.”61 As chieftain of his clan, General Philip Schuyler was a certain choice for one senatorial post. (One of Schuyler’s other sonsin-law, the superrich Stephen Van Rensselaer, was elected to the New York Assembly that year.) Schuyler promised the rival Livingstons that he would support New York mayor James Duane, who had married into their family, for the other Senate seat. Had this alliance held, the Schuylers and the Livingstons might have shared power in New York and isolated George Clinton. They might even have thwarted the later Jeffersonian incursion into the state and altered the entire configuration of American politics.
This scenario never materialized, however, because Hamilton stumbled into a spectacular political blunder. Afraid that Duane’s successor as mayor might be “some very unfit character” whose politics would prove “injurious to the city,” Hamilton decided to oppose him for the second Senate seat.62 In a blatant affront to the almighty Livingstons, Hamilton threw his weight behind his thirty-fouryear-old friend Rufus King, a handsome, Harvard-educated lawyer from New England who had recently moved to New York. King had married a beautiful heiress, Mary Alsop, and the two socialized with the Hamiltons. A mellifluous orator and an impassioned critic of slavery, King had attended the Constitutional Convention as a Massachusetts delegate and served on the style committee with Hamilton. In a short period of time, King became a fixture in New York City society—“our King is as much followed and attended to by all parties as ever a new light preacher was by his congregation,” Robert Troup told Hamilton63—and Hamilton induced Philip Schuyler to renege on his pledged support for Duane in favor of King. In a foolish and egotistical move, Hamilton was bent upon having both his father-in-law and his friend as New York’s two senators.
With finely honed political instincts, George Clinton saw that Hamilton was overreaching, and he secretly aided King’s candidacy in order to drive a wedge between the Schuylers and the Livingstons. When New York picked its second senator on July 16, 1789, Rufus King came out on top. Just as Clinton suspected, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston was irate and gradually moved into the governor’s camp. The polished, graceful Livingston was accustomed to deference and felt stymied by the parvenu Hamilton. This weakened Hamilton in his home state, depriving him later of a vital springboard to the presidency. It also paved the way for Aaron Burr to work his peculiar mischief in state politics. Compounding the tension between Hamilton and Robert R. Livingston that summer was that both men had fixed their gaze on the same tantalizing prize: the job of treasury secretary, soon to be assigned by Washington and sure to be the most powerful spot in the first administration.
As George Washington mulled over his choice, he knew that fiscal bungling had led to the demise of the confederation, making this a critical appointment. He turned first to the man synonymous with patriotic finance, Robert Morris, the Philadelphia merchant who had pledged his personal credit on behalf of the Revolution. Washington’s adopted grandson said that en route to the inauguration in April, the president-elect had stopped at Morris’s opulent residence. “The treasury, Morris, will of course be your berth,” Washington confided. “After your invaluable services as financier of the Revolution, no one can pretend to contest the office of the secretary of the treasury with you.” Citing private reasons—Morris was already lurching down a long, slippery path that led to bankruptcy and debtors’ prison—Morris politely declined the offer.
“But, my dear general,” he reassured Washington, “you will be no loser by my declining the secretaryship of the treasury, for I can recommend to you a far cleverer fellow than I am for your minister of finance in the person of your former aide-decamp, Colonel Hamilton.�
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Taken aback, Washington replied, “I always knew Colonel Hamilton to be a man of superior talents, but never supposed that he had any knowledge of finance.”
“He knows everything, sir,” Morris replied. “To a mind like his nothing comes amiss.”64 Another version of this story has Washington asking Morris what to do about the huge pile of public debt. Morris advised, “There is but one man in the United States who can tell you: that is, Alexander Hamilton.”65 Robert Morris served in the first U.S. Senate instead.
Even as Washington conferred with Morris, Hamilton was strolling down a New York street when he encountered Alexander J. Dallas, a Philadelphia lawyer. “Well, colonel, can you tell me who will be the members of the cabinet?” Dallas asked.
“Really, my dear sir,” Hamilton answered, “I cannot tell you who will, but I can very readily tell you of one who will not be of the number and that one is your humble servant.”66
Soon after being sworn in as president, Washington informed Hamilton that he planned to name him to the top financial spot. Hamilton must have daydreamed about this moment for years. Why else had he ploughed through dry economic texts during the war or perused the three-volume memoir of Jacques Necker, the French finance minister? For years, his mind had wrought detailed financial plans, as if he were rehearsing for the job. His ascent to the Treasury post seemed an almost inevitable next step in his headlong rush to fame. Clearly, he felt equal to the task and told Washington that he would accept if offered.