by Ron Chernow
The slanderous hyperbole of Philip Freneau’s National Gazette now soared to a new pitch. To commemorate July 4, Freneau ran a front-page article listing the “rules for changing a limited republican government into an unlimited hereditary one” and mentioned Hamilton’s programs as the most effective means for doing so.58 Other articles followed with equally heavy-handed hints that Hamilton and his retinue planned to enslave America under a monarchy and an aristocracy. To provoke the president still further, Freneau had three copies of the National Gazette delivered to Washington each day.
Before leaving for Monticello for the rest of the summer, Jefferson again sat down with Washington to persuade him that a “corrupt squadron of voters in Congress” was in Hamilton’s pocket and voted for his measures only because they owned bank stock or government paper.59 Washington exhibited growing impatience with Jefferson’s warnings of a royalist plot and stated flatly that he endorsed Hamilton’s policies. Anyone who thought otherwise, he told Jefferson, must regard the president as “too careless to attend to them or too stupid to understand them.”60
On July 25, Hamilton planted in Fenno’s Gazette of the United States the opening shot in a sustained volley against Jefferson. Signed “T. L.,” this letter posed a simple query about Freneau and his State Department stipend: “Whether this salary is paid him for translations or for publications, the design of which is to vilify those to whom the voice of the people has committed the administration of our public affairs...?”61 The letter was just one paragraph, yet it could not have been more momentous: the treasury secretary was making anonymous public accusations against the secretary of state. Hamilton had returned to his old career as a bareknuckled polemicist, and Freneau relished the chance to retaliate. Three days later, he tarred John Fenno, his Federalist counterpart, as a “vile sycophant” who printed the journals of the U.S. Senate and received more money from the government than he did.62
Washington was upset by this extraordinary tumult. The nasty newspaper war was pushing things fast to the breaking point. On July 29, Washington sent Hamilton a letter from Mount Vernon, labeled “Private & Confidential,” that enumerated twenty-one grievances about his administration that he had heard during his trip home. Everyone agreed that the country was prosperous and happy but voiced concern over specific measures. Although Washington pretended that George Mason was the principal voice of these concerns, Jefferson was clearly the source. Reluctant to offend Hamilton, Washington tactfully avoided mention that the twenty-one grievances all related to Hamilton’s policies. The litany of complaints was by now familiar: the excise tax was oppressive, the public debt too high, speculation had drained capital from productive uses and corrupted Congress, and on and on. Finally, Washington told Hamilton of the rumor that the real intent of these initiatives was “to prepare the way for a change from the present republican form of government to that of a monarchy, of which the British Constitution is to be the model.”63
By the time he received Washington’s letter on August 3, Hamilton had already posted one to Mount Vernon, urging Washington to stand for reelection and warning him that failure to do so would be “deplored as the greatest evil that could befall the country at the present juncture.”64 Washington’s letter must have reinforced Hamilton’s fear that the government was encircled by enemies and that Jefferson was plotting his ouster. Before Hamilton replied, he published a stinging critique of Jefferson in the Gazette of the United States. Under the guise of “An American,” Hamilton raised the stakes markedly by naming names. Freneau’s newspaper, he alleged, had been set up to advance Jefferson’s views, and Madison had been the intermediary in bringing Freneau to Philadelphia. Hamilton engaged in some wicked mockery, noting that the only foreign language the translator Freneau knew was French and that Jefferson was already acquainted with that language. He then directly accused Jefferson of disloyalty: “Is it possible that Mr. Jefferson, the head of a principal department of the government, can be the patron of a paper, the evident object of which is to decry the government and its measures?”65 Many readers must have guessed the identity of the author hiding behind the mask of “An American.”
Now in the fray, Hamilton published two more installments of “An American” on August 11 and 18, elaborating on the impropriety of Jefferson’s relationship with Freneau: “It is a fact known to every man who approaches that officer . . . that he arraigns the principal measures of the government and, it may be added, with indiscreet if not indecent warmth.”66 Even as Hamilton fired these broadsides, he composed a fourteen-thousand-word letter to Washington, vindicating his Treasury tenure. He confessed to deep hurt at the false charges hurled against him. He could endure criticisms of his judgment but not of his integrity: “I feel that I merit them in no degree and expressions of indignation sometimes escape me in spite of every effort to suppress them.”67 Hamilton listed his economic feats in office. He talked of the steep drop in the interest rates that the United States had to pay for loans (from 6 percent to 4 percent) and the influx of foreign money that had financed commerce and agriculture. Abundant money was now available for legitimate business purposes. Even speculation had proved his system’s soundness, for “under a bad system the public stock would have been too uncertain an article” for people to speculate in it.68 Hamilton denied that any member of Congress “can properly be called a stock-jobber or a paper dealer,” even if some had invested in government debt.69 Many had bought bank stock after the founding of the Bank of the United States, and he saw nothing wrong with that. It irked Hamilton that Jefferson claimed a monopoly on morality, and he made the following retort to his adversary: “As to the love of liberty and country, you have given no stronger proofs of being actuated by it than I have done. Cease then to arrogate to yourself and to your party all the patriotism and virtue of the country.”70
For all its brilliance, the zeal of Hamilton’s letter must have heightened Washington’s worries about the schism in his administration. In late August, he sent Hamilton a melancholy reply, pleading for mutual tolerance between him and Jefferson. Aware of the accusations they were trading in the press, Washington regretted these “wounding suspicions” and “irritating charges” and asked for “healing measures” to restore harmony.71 The president feared that, if the acrimony continued, the union itself might dissolve.
This full-length portrait of Alexander Hamilton as treasury secretary in 1792 shows his trim physique and debonair style. Ensnared in controversy, Hamilton asked the artist, John Trumbull, to omit any allusions to his political life.
This 1768 portrait of Myles Cooper, an Anglican minister and second president of King’s College, reflects the massive self-confidence of this unrepentant Tory.
Hamilton helped save him from a patriotic mob in the early days of the Revolution.
In the eighteenth century, King’s College (later Columbia) was situated in lower Manhattan and enjoyed a bucolic Hudson River vista.
George Washington at Princeton. This splendid Charles Willson Peale portrait conveys the graceful panache of the Revolutionary War general, so unlike the later stiffness of his presidential demeanor.
During the Revolution, Hamilton formed a gallant trio with the marquis de Lafayette, pictured below in military uniform in the early days of the French Revolution, and John Laurens. The Laurens miniature
was probably a gift for Martha Manning, whom Laurens impregnated and then married during his prewar legal studies in London.
Prompted by her husband, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton visited a debtors’ prison to pose for this portrait by the insolvent artist Ralph Earl. Despite her elaborate hairdo, Earl captured Eliza’s lively, direct, and unpretentious nature.
Major General Philip Schuyler, a highly status-conscious man, embraced Hamilton as his
son-in-law despite the latter’s murky, illegitimate boyhood.
Angelica Church—bright, witty, and fashionable— captivated her brother-in-law Hamilton no less than she did Thomas Jefferson and other poli
tical notables of the day.
The elegant Schuyler mansion in Albany, the Pastures, was one of the few places where the high-strung, work-obsessed Hamilton allowed himself to relax.
This 1792 portrait of James Madison, painted a few years after his collaboration with Hamilton on The Federalist, testifies to his tough, combative nature as he tried to foil Hamilton’s financial system in the House of Representatives.
The first newspaper installment of The Federalist. Hamilton turned out the essays in a white heat, publishing up to five or six “numbers” in a single week.
A wary, lugubrious John Jay depicted just before he teamed up with Hamilton on The Federalist. He finally had to drop the project because of severe rheumatism.
George Clinton, the seven-time governor of New York State, repeatedly clashed with Hamilton and came to personify for him the perils of state power.
The two faces of Thomas Jefferson. These portraits chart Jefferson’s metamorphosis from the foppish aristocrat of his Parisian years to the seemingly more austere republican vice president under
John Adams.
William Branch Giles, then a fervent young congressman from Virginia, harried Treasury Secretary Hamilton at every turn with resolutions and investigations.
Philip Freneau. A celebrated poet and firebrand recruited by Jefferson and Madison to edit the National Gazette, Freneau baited both Hamilton and Washington with anti-administration polemics.
James Monroe as American minister to France. Alexander and Eliza
Hamilton devoutly believed that
after the Federalists demanded
Monroe’s recall from Paris, he
conspired to expose Hamilton’s
adulterous trysts with
Maria Reynolds.
The flamboyant diplomacy of
Citizen Genêt in America precipitated both frenzied support and opposition
and split a nation already deeply torn about the French Revolution.
The wily Charles
Maurice de Talleyrand
Périgord thought that
Hamilton was arguably
the greatest political
figure of the age, while
Hamilton found the
French statesman bril
liant but unprincipled.
This portrait of John Adams as vice president suggests formidable reserves of
strength but also hints at his unyielding pugnacity.
The title page of Hamilton’s 1800 pamphlet denouncing President Adams. Its publication was one of Hamilton’s least inspired ideas and only hastened his political decline.
Members of John Adams’s cabinet, allegedly under the treacherous control of Alexander Hamilton:
Left: Timothy Pickering, secretary of state.
Bottom left: Oliver Wolcott, Jr., secretary of the treasury. Bottom right: James McHenry, secretary of war.
Three stages in the protean career of Aaron Burr:
Left: As a young senator from New York, circa 1792, having replaced Philip Schuyler.
Bottom left: As vice president in 1802, two years before his fatal “interview” with Hamilton.
Bottom right: In 1834, two years before his death, the jaded Burr looked supremely cynical as he sat for his final portrait.
Recently graduated from
Columbia, nineteen-year-old Philip Hamilton became embroiled in a sudden dispute over his father’s reputation that resulted in his death in November 1801.
This somber portrait
of Hamilton registers
profound grief after
his son’s death and
reflects the sorrows
of his last years.
Eliza Hamilton outlived her husband by more than half a century. She was in her nineties when this delicate study was sketched in charcoal and chalk.
Until she died at ninety-seven, Eliza Hamilton doted on this marble bust of her beloved husband by Giuseppe Ceracchi.
Hamilton did not complete the Grange until two years before his death, but his widow and children continued to occupy the pastoral retreat for years afterward. Political life in the young republic now presented a strange spectacle. The intellectual caliber of the leading figures surpassed that of any future political leadership in American history. On the other hand, their animosity toward one another has seldom been exceeded either. How to explain this mix of elevated thinking and base slander? As mentioned, both sides believed that the future of the country was at stake. By 1792, both political parties saw their opponents as mortal threats to the heritage of the Revolution. But the special mixture of idealism and vituperation also stemmed from the experiences of the founders themselves. These selfless warriors of the Revolution and sages of the Constitutional Convention had been forced to descend from their Olympian heights and adjust to a rougher world of everyday politics, where they cultivated their own interests and tried to capitalize on their former glory. In consequence, the founding fathers all appear to us in two guises: as both sublime and ordinary, selfless and selfish, heroic and humdrum. After the tenuous unity of 1776 and 1787, they had become wildly competitive and sometimes jealous of one another. It is no accident that our most scathing portraits of them come from their own pens.
Far from heeding Washington’s call to desist from attacking Jefferson, Hamilton stepped up his efforts. Increasingly bitter, he was incapable of the forbearance Washington requested. The day before he replied to Washington on September 9, Hamilton found himself reeling from another fresh burst of articles against him. An author named “Aristides”—the name of an Athenian motivated by love of country, not mercenary gain—deified Jefferson as the “decided opponent of aristocracy, monarchy, hereditary succession, a titled order of nobility, and all the other mock-pageantry of kingly government.” He implied that Hamilton had endorsed these abhorrent things when, in fact, he had always condemned them. Noting the anonymous nature of Hamilton’s diatribes, the author likened the treasury secretary to “a cowardly assassin who strikes in the dark and securely wounds because he is unseen.”72 Freneau’s National Gazette continued to lambaste the Federalists as the “monarchical party,” the “monied aristocracy,” and “monocrats”—none of this likely to induce a mood of remorse in Hamilton.
In his September 9 letter, Hamilton applauded Washington’s attempts at reconciliation, then insisted that he hadn’t started the feud, that he was the injured party, and that he was not to blame. He took the feud a step further by recommending that Jefferson be expelled from the cabinet: “I do not hesitate to say that, in my opinion, the period is not remote when the public good will require substitutes for the differing members of your administration.”73 As long as it had not undermined the government, Hamilton said, he had tolerated Jefferson’s backstabbing. That was no longer the case: “I cannot doubt, from the evidence that I possess[,] that the National Gazette was instituted by him [Jefferson] for political purposes and that one leading object of it has been to render me and all the measures connected with my department as odious as possible.”74 Hamilton thought it his duty to unmask this antigovernment coterie and “draw aside the veil from the principal actors. To this strong impulse...I have yielded.”75 In an astounding statement, Hamilton told Washington that he could not desist from newspaper attacks against Jefferson: “I find myself placed in a situation not to be able to recede for the present.”76
Never before had Hamilton refused such a direct request from Washington, and not since quitting the general’s wartime staff had he so willfully asserted his own independence. Even while telling Washington that he would try to abide by any truce, he was preparing his next press tirade. The furious exchanges between Hamilton and Jefferson had hardened into a mutual vendetta that Washington was powerless to stop.
Nor did Jefferson heed Washington’s large-spirited plea for tolerance. In replying to the presidential request, he renewed his withering critique of Hamilton’s system, which, he said, “flowed from principles adverse to liberty and was calcu
lated to undermine and demolish the republic by creating an influence of his department over the members of the legislature.” He charged Hamilton with favoring a king and a House of Lords at the Constitutional Convention—a misconstruction of what Hamilton had said. With greater justice, he grumbled about Hamilton’s unauthorized meetings with British and French ministers, but he also displayed an ugly condescension toward Hamilton that he ordinarily concealed: “I will not suffer my retirement to be clouded by the slanders of a man whose history, from the moment at which history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which has not only received him and given him bread, but heaped its honors on his head.”77 The comment smacked of aristocratic disdain for the self-made man. In fact, no immigrant in American history has ever made a larger contribution than Alexander Hamiliton.
Hamilton seemed unhinged by the dispute. In the still secret Reynolds affair, he had shown a lack of private restraint. Now something compulsive and uncontrollable appeared in his public behavior. A captive of his emotions, he revealed an irrepressible need to respond to attacks. Whenever he tried to suppress these emotions, they burst out and overwhelmed him. Throughout that fall, the argumentative treasury secretary donned disguises and published blazing articles behind Roman pen names. Henceforth, he provided a running newspaper commentary on his own administration. Since he saw both his personal honor and the republic’s future at stake, he fought with his full arsenal of verbal weapons. Again and again in his career, Hamilton committed the same political error: he never knew when to stop, and the resulting excesses led him into irremediable indiscretions.