by Ron Chernow
The bipartisan decision to shelve the slavery issue had profound repercussions for Hamilton’s economic measures, for it spared the southern economy from criticism. In the 1790s, America’s critical energies were trained exclusively on the northern economy and the financial and manufacturing system devised by Hamilton. This became immediately apparent in the heated debate over his funding system, which allowed southern slaveholders to proclaim that northern financiers were the evil ones and that slaveholders were the virtuous populists, upright men of the soil. It was testimony to the political genius of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison that they diverted attention from the grisly realities of southern slavery by casting a lurid spotlight on Hamilton’s system as the paramount embodiment of evil. They inveighed against the concentrated wealth of northern merchants when southern slave plantations clearly represented the most heinous form of concentrated wealth. Throughout the 1790s, planters posed as the tribunes of small farmers and denounced the depravity of stocks, bonds, banks, and manufacturing—the whole wicked apparatus of Hamiltonian capitalism.
When Congress returned to Hamilton’s Report on Public Credit in March, after debating the abolitionist petitions, many southerners seemed more outraged over the powers that Hamilton planned to give the federal government. If the treasury secretary welded the states into a strong union through his assumption plan, might not that strengthen the federal power to meddle with slavery? And did it therefore not behoove the south to resist Hamilton’s plan and shore up states’ rights? The extent of southern ire that spring was shown dramatically in the erratic behavior of Aedanus Burke. Burke had a shock of thick, white hair, a long, pointed nose, and a piercing gaze that expressed his fiery nature. That spring, he found himself in a political bind because he supported Hamilton’s assumption program even though many of his southern constituents opposed it.
To reclaim his political reputation, Burke pounced on a clever diversionary tactic. On March 31, 1790, he launched a tirade in the House against the July 4 eulogy that Hamilton had pronounced on General Nathanael Greene nine months earlier. From that speech, he plucked the line in which Hamilton referred to the militias as “the mimickry of soldiership.” Burke found this reference insulting and countered that many southern militiamen had “sacrificed their lives at the holy altar of liberty. Their graves are to be seen scattered over our glades and woodlands, they are now no more.”62 Then casting his eyes on the visitors’ gallery—since it was packed with pretty ladies, he supposed Hamilton sat among them—he blasted the treasury secretary in language that crossed the boundaries of political decorum: “In the face of this Assembly and in the presence of this gallery ...I give the lie to Col. Hamilton.”63 This blatant affront was so shocking that congressmen interrupted Burke’s outburst with loud calls for order.
Their main reason for alarm was that Burke, in branding Hamilton a liar, had violated his personal sense of honor. Like many contemporary politicians, Hamilton still inhabited two worlds: the modern world of constitutional law and the old feudal order based on honor and dignity. Unless retracted, any direct challenge to one’s honor had to be settled outside the legal realm on the field of honor—the dueling ground. Senator William Maclay, who had stopped by the House to eavesdrop on the debate, noted in his diary “a violent personal attack on Hamilton by Judge Burke of South Carolina, which the men of the blade say must produce a duel.”64
Some observers didn’t take seriously Burke’s insulting behavior. William Loughton Smith contended that Burke’s “mode of speaking and his roughness only excite laughter.”65 Hamilton, however, wasn’t laughing. Some members of the legislature did not yet know his irrepressible pugnacity or how fiercely he guarded his reputation. Fisher Ames observed that no man, “not the Roman Cato himself, was more inflexible on every point that touched, or only seemed to touch, integrity and honour” than Hamilton.66 When Smith discussed the imbroglio with him, Hamilton drew a distinction between criticism of his policies and his person: “He said he should at all times disregard any observations applied to his public station as Secretary of the Treasury, but that this was not to be passed over.”67 Smith also noted that Burke was “amazingly intimate” with Governor George Clinton and reportedly courting one of his daughters. “Clinton hates Hamilton mortally and has probably set on Burke,” he conjectured.68
The very next day, Hamilton sent off a short, heated letter to Burke. He claimed that the quote from the eulogy had been taken out of context and that the full sentence claimed that General Greene was “embarrassed by small fugitive bodies of volunteer militia, the mimickry of soldiership.” He had made a statement not about the South Carolina militia, but about irregular volunteers in the north: “Having thus, Sir, stated the matter in its true light, it remains for you to judge what conduct, in consequence of the explanation, will be proper on your part.”69
Before the day was out, Burke replied to Hamilton in a manner that ratcheted up the pressure. In a letter designed for consumption back home, Burke lauded the bravery of the southern militias. He knew that he had to explain why he had waited nine months to broadcast his charges. To have done so at the time, he told Hamilton, “would have been downright madness,” given Hamilton’s popularity.70 In the charged political atmosphere of the moment, the dispute now festered, and factions formed around the principals. “The town is much agitated about a duel between Burke and Hamilton,” Maclay reported. “So many people concerned in the business may really make the fools fight.”71
A party of six congressmen arbitrated an end to the dispute by securing two letters: one from Hamilton in which he insisted that he meant no dishonor to the southern militias, and a second from Burke in which he accepted this statement and apologized to Hamilton. It was all artfully orchestrated according to the unspoken rules of “affairs of honor.” The uproar backfired on Burke, who found himself demoted in influence.
The affair wasn’t altogether a victory for Hamilton. In his memorial speech for General Greene, he had taken gratuitous swipes at southern soldiers and had not paid sufficient attention to the pieties of democratic politics. Burke made him feel the sting of public opinion; it wasn’t the last time Hamilton paid a price for needless indiscretion. The contretemps again demonstrated that beneath his invincible facade, Hamilton was still the hypersensitive boy from the West Indies. His combativeness was always more than just political calculation, for he brooded obsessively about slights to his honor. This supreme rationalist, who feared the passions of the mob more than any other founder, was himself a man of deep and often ungovernable emotions.
SIXTEEN
DR. PANGLOSS
On March 1, 1790, with Hamilton engulfed in conflict over his funding scheme, Thomas Jefferson set out from Monticello to assume his duties as the new secretary of state. He had sailed from Paris in October 1789,
ending a five-year stint as American minister to France. Only when his ship docked in Norfolk, Virginia, in late November did he discover Washington’s letter asking him to take the cabinet post. The Senate, still in its trusting infancy, had confirmed the nominee before he knew about the offer. Where the hyperthyroid Hamilton jumped at his assignment and sprang quickly into action, Jefferson dithered through the winter about taking the State Department job and did not accept until midFebruary 1790.
Similarly, as Hamilton, Madison, and Jay had defended the Constitution in The Federalist, Jefferson had vacillated about America’s new charter. At moments, he sounded as if he would have preferred a patched-up version of the Articles of Confederation. “There are very good articles in it and very bad,” he declared of the new charter from Paris. “I do not know which predominate.”1 He confided to Madison that he liked the government’s division into three branches but voiced grave doubts about his favorite bogeyman: executive power. In Philadelphia, Hamilton had espoused a lifetime president on good behavior, while Jefferson recoiled at any president who could serve additional four-year terms. “I own I am not a friend to a very energetic government,” he
told Madison. “It is always oppressive.”2 Such a man was bound to clash with Hamilton and have misgivings about serving in the new central government. When Congress first met in the spring of 1789, Jefferson was still equivocating about the Constitution. Asked whether he was a federalist or antifederalist, Jefferson evaded the issue and expressed opposition to all party labels. “Therefore I protest to you that I am not of the party of the federalists,” he explained to Francis Hopkinson, a Pennsylvania judge and signer of the Declaration of Independence. “But I am much further from that of the antifederalists.”3 So with a multitude of reservations, Thomas Jefferson cast his lot with the new government.
In 1789, French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon executed a bust of Jefferson that shows a handsome man with a calm, self-confident air. Yet the vigilant eyes hint at someone who moved slowly, cautiously, taking everything in before acting. The tightly sealed lips convey something enigmatic beneath the patrician ease. Like Burr, Thomas Jefferson found strength in secrecy, in silence. Shy and aloof, he seldom made eye contact with listeners yet could be a warmly engaging presence among small groups of like-minded intimates. This laconic man knew how to sprinkle his conversation with brilliant aperçus that lingered in people’s minds. With his quiet charm and courtly demeanor, he had a knack for winning people over at dinner parties distinguished by good food and eight varieties of wine.
Tall, lean, and freckled, with reddish hair and hazel eyes, Jefferson had one trait that the marble bust failed to capture: his slack-jointed movements. When William Maclay met the new secretary, his slouching figure seemed to lack ministerial dignity. Maclay groused, “He sits in a lounging manner, on one hip commonly, and with one of his shoulders elevated much above the other.... [H]is whole figure has a loose, shackling air.”4 His dress was casual, almost sloppy. The folksy air charmed people and allowed Jefferson to root out their secrets. The plain dress, mild manners, and unassuming air were the perfect costume for a crafty man intent upon presenting himself as the spokesman for the common people.
With an elite pedigree on both sides of his family, Jefferson was anything but common. His father, Peter, was a tobacco planter, a judge of the court of chancery, and a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, while his mother, Jane Randolph, came from a prominent family. By the time Peter Jefferson died, he bequeathed to his children more than 60 slaves, 25 horses, 70 head of cattle, 200 hogs, and 7,500 acres; two-thirds of this bountiful legacy went to his eldest son, Thomas.
Peter Jefferson gave the boy a complete classical education. Tutored at home at age five, Jefferson went to a boarding school at age nine that afforded such thorough grounding in Greek and Latin that biographer Dumas Malone claims that for Jefferson “the heroes of antiquity were more real than either the Christian saints or modern historical figures.”5 He attended the College of William and Mary, which schooled the scions of the Virginia gentry, before being admitted to the bar. Like Hamilton, Jefferson was a fanatic for self-improvement. He rose before dawn each morning and employed every hour profitably, studying up to fifteen hours per day. Extremely systematic in his habits, Jefferson enjoyed retreating into the sheltered tranquillity of his books, and the spectrum of his interests was vast. He told his daughter, “It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.”6 Whether riding horseback, playing the violin, designing buildings, or inventing curious gadgets, Thomas Jefferson seemed adept at everything. Like many accomplished people, he was seduced by this quest for self-perfection and not easily lured into public office. The self-sufficiency and philosophic repose made him an atypical politician. He once wrote, “The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves and to suffice for our own happiness.”7
This pampered life rested on a foundation of slavery. Jefferson’s earliest memory was of being carried on a pillow by a slave on horseback. He never tried to justify slavery and said he eagerly awaited the day “when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil.”8 When the Virginia legislature rebuffed his bid to stop importing slaves into the state, he regretted that “the public mind would not bear the proposition.”9 However much Jefferson deplored the “moral and political depravity” of slavery, his own slaves remained in bondage to his career and his incorrigibly spendthrift ways.10 When he commissioned his mountaintop home at Monticello, he seemed oblivious of the toll this would exact on his slaves, who had to hoist the building materials to such a height.
In 1769, while the fourteen-year-old Hamilton dreamed of escape from St. Croix, the twenty-six-year-old Jefferson was elected to Virginia’s House of Burgesses. Jefferson belonged to an aristocracy with a clear path of advancement. At twentyeight, he married a young widow, Martha Wayles Skelton, who inherited 135 slaves after her father’s death. This loving ten-year marriage was marred by childhood mortality—only two of their six children reached maturity—and in September 1782 Martha herself died at thirty-four. Only thirty-nine at the time, Jefferson survived his wife by forty-four years but never remarried. Ensconced at Monticello with his books, inventions, and experiments, Jefferson became an unfathomable loner.
If the American Revolution had not supervened, Thomas Jefferson might well have whiled away his life on the mountaintop, a cultivated planter and philosopher. For Jefferson, the Revolution was an unwelcome distraction from a treasured private life, while for Hamilton it was a fantastic opportunity for escape and advancement. Like Hamilton, Jefferson rose in politics through sheer mastery of words—sunny, optimistic words that captured the hopefulness of a new country. Nobody gave more noble expression to the ideals of individual freedom and dignity or had a more devout faith in the wisdom of the common man. As chief draftsman of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson took often commonplace ideas and endowed them with majestic form. When the new government was formed, the Declaration had not yet attained the status of American Scripture. (Jefferson’s authorship remained largely anonymous until he found attribution politically convenient in the 1790s.) Thus, when Hamilton first met Jefferson in 1790, he did not see him as quite the revered figure that we do today.
Hamilton may have believed that Jefferson’s contributions to the nation paled beside his own and not just because of his own work on behalf of the Constitution. Besides handling Washington’s correspondence, Hamilton had spent five years in combat, exposing himself to enemy fire on many occasions. Jefferson had never set foot on a battlefield. Elected Virginia governor in 1779, he found the job irksome and wanted to resign, prompting Edmund Pendleton to complain to Madison, “It is a little cowardly to quit our posts in a bustling time!”11 When the turncoat Benedict Arnold burned and pillaged Richmond in January 1781, the capital stood defenseless despite warnings from Washington to Jefferson. Governor Jefferson fled in the early hours, giving up Richmond without a shot and allowing munitions and government records to fall into British hands. In June, in Jefferson’s waning hours as governor, the British pounced on Charlottesville and almost captured the Virginia Assembly gathered there. Then, when word came that a British cavalry was approaching Monticello, Jefferson scrambled off on horseback into the woods. He was accused of dereliction of duty and neglecting the transfer of power to his successor. Though the Virginia Assembly exonerated him of any wrongdoing, Hamilton wasn’t the only one who suspected Jefferson of cowardice. He later wrote mockingly that when real danger appeared, “the governor of the ancient dominion dwindled into the poor, timid philosopher and, instead of rallying his brave countrymen, he fled for safety from a few light-horsemen and shamefully abandoned his trust!”12
The Revolution left Jefferson with an implacable aversion to the British, whom he regarded as a race of “rich, proud, hectoring, swearing, squabbling, carnivorous animals.”13 He had a long list of personal grievances beyond his distaste for Britain as a corrupt, monarchical society. Cornwallis had ravaged one of Jefferson’s farms, butchering animals, torching crops, and snatching thirty slaves. Like many Virginia plantation owners, Jefferson was land rich but
cash poor and chronically indebted to British creditors. He once said mordantly that the Virginia planters were “a species of property annexed to certain mercantile houses in London.”14 By the late 1780s, as tobacco prices plummeted, Virginia planters struggled to repay old debts to London creditors and demanded the return of slaves carried off by British troops. The steep payments he owed British bankers forced Jefferson to retain his enormous workforce of slaves despite his professed hatred for the institution. “The torment of mind I endure till the moment shall arrive when I shall owe not a shilling on earth is such really as to render life of little value,” he told his American manager in 1787. But he would not sell land to pay his debts; “nor would I willingly sell the slaves as long as there remains any prospect of paying my debts with their labor.”15 The weight of that debt, created by his own extravagance, perhaps prevented Thomas Jefferson from being the person he would ideally like to have been. Even while secretary of state, he remained in hock to British creditors for an exorbitant seven thousand pounds. He carried these large debts until his death in 1826, necessitating the sale of 130 of his slaves at Monticello six months later. It was not the image that the philosopher of the common man would have preferred to leave to posterity.