by Ron Chernow
Given his imposing responsibilities, it is hard to imagine that Hamilton could have enjoyed a warm, happy social life without Eliza’s support. They created an elegant but unostentatious home filled with lovely furniture, including chairs in Louis XVI style and a Federal mahogany sofa. Among other ornaments, they had a china snuffbox from Frederick the Great (courtesy of Baron von Steuben), a portrait of Louis XVI (a gift from the French ambassador), and, later on, a stately Gilbert Stuart painting of George Washington. From London, Angelica Church showered them with exquisite items, including gold-embossed porcelain tableware and blue-and-gold French flowerpots. Eliza would gladly have devoted herself to private life alone, but she submitted good-naturedly to the demands of her husband’s career. She was always a sprightly presence at tea parties given by Martha Washington. She reminisced in old age:
I had little of private life in those days. Mrs. Washington who, like myself, had a passionate love of home and domestic life, often complained of the “waste of time” she was compelled to endure. “They call me the first lady in the land and I think I must be extremely happy,” she would say almost bitterly at times and add, “They might more properly call me the chief state prisoner.” As I was younger than she, I mingled more in the gaieties of the day.16
Martha Washington’s style of entertaining struck Eliza as possessing just the right amalgam of beauty, taste, and modesty. One of Eliza’s few surviving personal effects is a pair of pink satin slippers that Martha Washington left at the Schuyler mansion and that Eliza gratefully inherited.
As energetic as her husband, Eliza never complained about family demands. By the time Hamilton became treasury secretary, she had already given birth to four of their eight children. Eliza was an excellent housekeeper who ably governed a large household. James McHenry once teased Hamilton about reports that Eliza “has as much merit as your treasurer as you have as treasurer of the wealth of the United States.”17 Hamilton appreciated her steady contributions to his life. In frequent letters to her, he constantly inquired about her in solicitous, protective tones. He seldom mentioned his work, as if wishing to shield her from the rough-and-tumble of politics.
The bulk of the child rearing fell to Eliza, a strict but loving mother. On one occasion, she told a family friend that there is a “hazard in young people having their evenings to themselves until they know there is a friend that will observe and advise them.”18 But even with his time-consuming career, Hamilton did not fob off all the parenting duties on Eliza. When they were in separate cities, he often kept one or two of the older boys with him, allowing them to share his bed at night, while the younger children remained with their mother. Hamilton was a chronic worrier about his family, an emotion perhaps held over from his childhood. Angelica once commented to Eliza about her brother-in-law, “His sensibility suffers from the least anxiety to you or your babies.”19
Hamilton enjoyed tutoring his children. He had high expectations and wanted them to excel—he was, by nature, an exacting, ambitious person—but his handful of surviving letters to them also show patient affection. After his eldest son, Philip, went off at age nine to boarding school in Trenton in 1791, accompanied by Alexander, Jr., Hamilton received a letter from him, saying how contented he was. Hamilton replied:
Your teacher also informs me that you recited a lesson the first day you began, very much to his satisfaction. I expect every letter from him will give me a fresh proof of your progress, for I know you can do a great deal if you please. And I am sure you have too much spirit not to exert yourself that you may make us every day more and more proud of you.20
Hamilton did not assume that his children would emulate his outsize accomplishments and tailored his demands to their native endowments, gently molding their characters. When his daughter Angelica was nine and staying with Grandfather Schuyler in Albany, Hamilton took time from his duties to write this mildly didactic note:
I was very glad to learn, my dear daughter, that you were going to begin the study of the French language. We hope you will in every respect behave in such a manner as will secure to you the goodwill and regard of all those with whom you are. If you happen to displease any of them, be always ready to make a frank apology. But the best way is to act with so much politeness, good manners, and circumspection as never to have an occasion to make any apology. Your mother joins in best love to you. Adieu, my very dear daughter.21 The sensitivity and tact that Hamilton revealed as a father are the more remarkable considering the troubled circumstances of his own childhood, and he made it a point of honor never to break promises to his children.
Hamilton loved the arts and shared this interest with his children. Very musically inclined, he had Angelica Church search London for the best piano she could find for his daughter Angelica. Singing duets became their favorite pastime. Hamilton also had an appreciative eye for art. “I know Hamilton likes the beautiful in every way,” Angelica Church once told Eliza. “The beauties of nature and of art are not lost on him.”22 Hamilton counseled Martha Washington on purchases of paintings and assembled his own collection of woodcuts and copper engravings, including works by Mantegna and Dürer. Just as he and Eliza had rescued Ralph Earl from debtors’ prison in the 1780s, so they later scouted out work for William Winstanley, a British painter specializing in Hudson River scenes. Hamilton loaned money to the young artist and may have been responsible for two of his paintings that graced Martha Washington’s drawing room.
Another leitmotif of Hamilton’s private life was his constant support of educational and scholarly pursuits. On January 21, 1791, he was admitted to the American Philosophical Society, the country’s oldest learned organization. Academic honors tumbled in on this man who had never officially finished college. Already a trustee of Columbia College, he now harvested a succession of honorary doctorates from Columbia, Dartmouth, Princeton, Harvard, and Brown, all before the tender age of forty.
Through his interest in educating native Americans, Hamilton’s name came to adorn a college. During the Revolution, Philip Schuyler had negotiated with Indian tribes around Albany to guarantee their neutrality. For his translator and emissary, he often enlisted the cooperation of the Reverend Samuel Kirkland, a missionary to the six-nation Iroquois League. Especially close to the Oneida, Kirkland wooed them to the patriotic side. Hamilton had championed a humane, enlightened policy toward the Indians. When real-estate speculators had wanted to banish them from western New York, he warned Governor Clinton that the Indians’ friendship “alone can keep our frontiers in peace.... The attempt at the total expulsion of so desultory a people is as chimerical as it would be pernicious.”23 He was often outraged by depredations perpetrated by frontier settlers against the Indians; in one later speech drafted for Washington, he wrote that government policy had been “inadequate to protect the Indians from the violences of the irregular and lawless part of the frontier inhabitants.”24 When problems with the Indians arose, he always favored reconciliation before any resort to force.
With such sympathy for the Indians’ plight, Hamilton was receptive when Kirkland approached him in January 1793 to join the board of trustees of a new school in upstate New York to educate white and native American students. The latter would be taught both English and Indian languages. Kirkland wrote in his journal, “Mr. Hamilton cheerfully consents to be a trustee of the said seminary and will afford it all the aid in his power.”25 That same month, the New York legislature granted a charter for the Hamilton-Oneida Academy. The following year, Baron von Steuben, acting as Hamilton’s ambassador, laid the school’s cornerstone. Hamilton never actually visited the school, but his sponsorship was significant enough that the school was christened Hamilton College when it received a broad new charter in 1812.
The residence law that passed Congress in July 1790, establishing Philadelphia as the interim capital, dictated that all government offices relocate there by early December. The federal government did not decamp all at once but straggled off to Pennsylvania in a disorderly e
xodus. On August 12, 1790, Congress held its farewell session in Federal Hall; by the end of the month, President Washington had boarded a barge and waved his farewell to Manhattan. On September 1, surely with an audible sigh of relief, Jefferson and Madison fled the sinful haunts of Manhattan and began to roll south across New Jersey in a four-wheeled carriage. Abigail Adams, who did not set sail until November, seemed miffed by the enforced southward shift, swearing that she would try to enjoy Philadelphia but that “when all is done it will not be Broadway.”26
In reality, Philadelphia was a cosmopolitan city, praised by a highborn British visitor as “one of the wonders of the world,” “the first town in America,” and one that “bids fair to rival almost any in Europe.”27 Larger than either New York or Boston, it supported ten newspapers and thirty bookshops. Largely through the civic imagination of Benjamin Franklin, it boasted an astounding panoply of cultural and civic institutions, including two theaters, a subscription library, a volunteer fire company, and a hospital.
As chieftain of the biggest government department, Hamilton executed the shift to Philadelphia with almost martial precision. In early August, he secured a twostory brick building on Third Street, between Chestnut and Walnut Streets. Though now headquarters of the most powerful government ministry, the building had a curiously makeshift air, as noted by the visitors Hamilton received between 9:00 and 12:00 each morning. One French caller, Moreau de St. Méry, was “astounded that the official lodgings of a minister could be so poor.” He was surprised when a shuffling old retainer answered the front door. And of Hamilton’s plain groundfloor office he wrote, “His desk was a plain pine table covered with a green cloth. Planks and trestles held records and papers, and at one end was a little imitation Chinese vase and a plate with glasses on it....In a word,I felt I saw Spartan customs all about me.”28
From modest origins, the Treasury offices proliferated until they occupied the entire block. The 1791 city directory gives an anatomy of this burgeoning department, with 8 employees in Hamilton’s office, 13 in the comptroller’s, 15 in the auditor’s, 19 in the register’s, 3 in the treasurer’s, 14 in the office for settling accounts between the federal government and the states, and 21 in the customs office on Second Street, with an additional 122 customs collectors and surveyors scattered in various ports. By the standards of the day, this represented a prodigious bureaucracy. For its critics, it was a monster in the making, inciting fears that the department would become the Treasury secretary’s personal spy force and military machine. Swollen by the Customs Service, the Treasury Department payroll ballooned to more than five hundred employees under Hamilton, while Henry Knox had a mere dozen civilian employees in the War Department and Jefferson a paltry six at State, along with two chargés d’affaires in Europe. The corpulent Knox and his entire staff were squeezed into tiny New Hall, just west of the mighty Treasury complex. Inevitably, the man heading a bureaucracy many times larger than the rest of the government combined would arouse opposition, no matter how prudent his style.
The hardworking secretary informed merchant Walter Stewart that he wanted a house for his family “as near my destined office as possible.” Reared in the tropics, he was now a confirmed resident of the northern latitudes and had taken on the identity of a New Yorker. “A cool situation and exposure will of course be a very material point to a New Yorker,” he advised Stewart. “The house must have at least six rooms. Good dining and drawing rooms are material articles. I like elbow room in a yard. As to the rent, the lower the better, consistently with the acquisition of a proper house.”29 By October 14, Hamilton had taken a home at Third and Walnut, just down the block from his office, as if he wished to stumble from bed straight into his office. The move was indicative of how conscientious he was and how crowded his schedule.
History has celebrated his Treasury tenure for his masterful state papers, but probably nothing devoured more of his time during his first year than creating the Customs Service. This towering intellect scrawled more mundane letters about lighthouse construction than about any other single topic. This preoccupation seems peculiar until it is recalled that import duties accounted for 90 percent of government revenues: no customs revenue, no government programs—hence Hamilton’s unceasing vigilance about everything pertaining to trade.
Congress had authorized Hamilton to keep “in good repair the lighthouses, beacons, buoys, and public piers in the several states,” and he hired and supervised those assigned to care for them.30 He also wielded huge patronage powers in awarding contracts for these navigational aids. In creating a string of beacons, buoys, and lighthouses along the Atlantic seaboard, Hamilton reviewed each contract and got Washington’s approval—an administrative routine that stifled the two men with maddening minutiae. On the day after the famous dinner deal on assumption and the nation’s capital, Hamilton asked Washington to initial a contract “for timber, boards, nails and workmanship” for a beacon near the Sandy Hook lighthouse outside New York harbor.31 Hamilton became expert on such excruciating banalities as the best whale oil, wicks, and candles to brighten lighthouse beams.
Before the Revolution, smuggling had been a form of patriotic defiance against Britain, and colonists had cordially detested customs collectors. Now Hamilton had to correct these lawless habits. He asked Congress in April 1790 to commission a fleet of single-masted vessels called revenue cutters that would patrol offshore waters and intercept contraband. By early August, Washington had signed a bill setting up this service, later known as the Coast Guard. Hamilton advised Washington to avoid regional favoritism by constructing the first ten revenue cutters in “different parts of the Union.”32 Previewing his upcoming industrial policy, he recommended using homegrown cloth for sails rather than foreign fabrics. Once again, an instinct for executive leadership, an innate capacity to command, surfaced in Hamilton. He issued directives of breathtaking specificity, requiring that each cutter possess ten muskets and bayonets, twenty pistols, two chisels, one broadax, and two lanterns. Showing a detailed knowledge of seafaring ways that surely dated back to his Caribbean days, he instructed customs collectors that since cutters might be blown off course “even to the West Indies, it will be always proper that they have salted meat with biscuit and water on board sufficient to subsist them in case of such an accident.”33
In constructing the Coast Guard, Hamilton insisted on rigorous professionalism and irreproachable conduct. He knew that if revenue-cutter captains searched vessels in an overbearing fashion, this high-handed behavior might sap public support, so he urged firmness tempered with restraint. He reminded skippers to “always keep in mind that their countrymen are free men and as such are impatient of everything that bears the least mark of a domineering spirit. [You] will therefore refrain...from whatever has the semblance of haughtiness, rudeness, or insult.”34 So masterly was Hamilton’s directive about boarding foreign vessels that it was still being applied during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
Hamilton’s power as head of customs extended beyond his legion of employees. Equally important was the comprehensive view of economic activity that he gained in a large country hobbled by primitive communications. Seven of every eight Treasury Department employees worked outside the capital, supplying Hamilton with an unending stream of valuable intelligence. One of Jefferson’s chief political operatives, John Beckley, reviled this network as an “organized system of espionage through the medium of revenue officers.”35 To monitor government receipts, Hamilton insisted upon weekly reports from collectors, enabling him to track every ship passing through American ports. With his insatiable curiosity—he wanted to know the size, strength, and construction of ships, their schedules and trading routes and cargoes—he pioneered questionnaires to gather such data.
Hamilton also arbitrated innumerable disputes that arose with shippers, often wading into arcane legal issues. At one point, the Baltimore customs collector asked whether import duties should be levied on horses, and Hamilton decided that horses and livest
ock qualified as taxable objects of trade. He then made this further observation: “I think it, however, necessary to observe that I consider negroes to be exempted from duties on importation.”36 It is a sorry commentary that the question of imposing duties on horses immediately posed the question of how to treat slaves.
The Customs Service also invested Hamilton with huge influence over the monetary system, with tremendous sums passing through his hands. One apprehensive Virginian warned Madison, “I am not unacquainted personally with that gentleman at the head of that department of the revenue and...I tremble at the thought of his being at the head of such an immense sum as 86 millions of dollars—and the annual revenue of the Union.”37 In fact, Hamilton handled the cash flow in an impeccable manner.