Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

  A case in point is Hamilton’s relationship with his Treasury successor, Oliver Wolcott, Jr. As early as April 1795, Hamilton did volunteer to tutor Wolcott on how to maintain American credit, saying, “Write me as freely as you please.”11 Government expenses were growing, the deficit yawned wider, and Republicans grumbled. Hamilton was glad to retain this hidden influence, but it was Wolcott who solicited advice, as if Hamilton had never stopped being his boss, and he plied him with technical questions about everything from French privateers to government loans. In a single letter on June 18, Wolcott asked Hamilton seven complicated questions about fiscal management. He could not quite emerge from Hamilton’s shadow and at times struck an almost plaintive note: “Will you reply briefly to a few questions I lately stated. I care not how briefly. Your ideas upon a system projected essentially by you will enable me to proceed with less hesitation. Indeed I need some help. There is no comptroller here.”12 In another letter, Wolcott confessed, “The public affairs are certainly in a critical state. I do not clearly see how those of the Treasury are to be managed.... [I]ntimations from you will always be thankfully rec[eive]d.”13 Based on these queries, Hamilton may well have fancied himself an ex officio member of the administration. He was uniquely poised to render authoritative opinions on how policies had evolved in the new government.

  In September 1795, Hamilton wrote deferentially to Washington, “I beg, Sir, that you will at no time have any scruple about commanding me.”14 Washington took full advantage of the offer. In late October, he asked Hamilton to help prepare his annual address to the opening session of Congress, and Hamilton drafted a speech as if he remained on the government payroll.

  The crux of the problem was that Washington’s second generation of cabinet members was decidedly inferior to the first. Federalist William Plumer compared Hamilton and Wolcott: “The first was a prodigy of genius and of strict undeviating integrity. The last is an honest man, but his talents are immensely beneath those of his predecessor.”15 The same could be said of other cabinet officers. There was simply a dearth of qualified people for Washington to consult. The plague of partisan recriminations had already diminished the incentives for people to serve in government. Washington told Hamilton a woeful tale of trying to replace Edmund Randolph. “What am I to do for a Secretary of State?” he asked forlornly, noting that four people had already rejected the post. “I ask frankly and with solicitude and shall receive kindly any sentiments you may express on the occasion.”16 Washington asked Hamilton to sound out Rufus King, who became the fifth person to turn down the State Department job. Hamilton reported that King declined because of “the foul and venomous shafts of calumny” constantly shot at government officials.17

  In the end, Washington settled upon his seventh pick, the crusty Timothy Pickering, a stern Federalist and unabashed Hamilton admirer. Like Wolcott, Pickering solicited Hamilton’s opinion regularly. When the secretary of war job descended to James McHenry, Hamilton’s old friend from Washington’s military family, Hamilton suddenly had three steadfast admirers in the cabinet. Its uniformly Federalist cast was no accident. Washington told Pickering that it would be “political suicide” to recruit anyone into his administration who was not prepared to support his programs wholeheartedly.18 He had learned his lesson with Jefferson and discarded the naïve belief that he could straddle both political factions. He was now more solidly aligned with the Federalists, and few of the prominent ones stood entirely outside of Hamilton’s extended social and intellectual coterie. James Madison, observing the stout phalanx of Hamiltonians surrounding the president, asked Jefferson rhetorically, “Through what official interstice can a ray of republican truths now penetrate to the President?”19

  Washington was probably glad to be spared any further rays of Republican truth. In portraits done during his final years in office, he looks moody and irritable, devoid of serenity. His energy seems spent, his eyes are dully glazed, and his military carriage sags. He was suffering from an aching back, bad dentures, and rheumatism; visitors noted his haggard, careworn look. Scarred by Republican attacks, Washington found it hard to contain his rage. One reason that he decided to return to private life was that he no longer wished to be buffeted “in the public prints by a set of infamous scribblers.”20

  Washington’s decision to forgo a third term was momentous. He wasn’t bound by term limits, and many Americans expected him to serve for life. He surrendered power in a world where leaders had always grabbed for more. Stepping down was the most majestic democratic response he could have flung at his Republican critics. Toward the end of his first term, he had asked James Madison to draft a farewell address and then stashed it away when he decided on a second term. Now, in the spring of 1796, he unearthed that draft. As at the close of the American Revolution, Washington wanted to make a valedictory statement that would codify some enduring principles in American political life. To update Madison’s draft, he turned to Hamilton. Washington no longer felt obliged to restrain his affection for his protégé and now sent Hamilton handwritten notes marked “Private.” He increasingly treated him as a peer and warm friend, and Hamilton responded with gratitude.

  There was piquant irony in Washington asking Hamilton—who had espoused a perpetual president at the Constitutional Convention—to draft the farewell address. Hamilton would now help to embed in American politics a tradition of presidents leaving office after a maximum of two terms, a precedent that remained unbroken until Franklin Roosevelt. In mid-May 1796, Washington sent Hamilton a rough draft, which consisted of Madison’s speech and a section that Washington had appended to reflect the “considerable changes” wrought by the past four years, especially in foreign affairs.21 He invited Hamilton, if he thought it best, to discard the old speech and “to throw the whole into a different form.”22 Washington wanted Hamilton to make the style plain and avoid personal references and controversial expressions. The goal was to create a timeless document that would elevate Americans above the partisan sniping that had disfigured public life. Usually the hotheaded one, Hamilton deleted some splenetic lines that Washington had slipped in about newspapers filled “with all the invective that disappointment, ignorance of facts, and malicious falsehoods could invent to misrepresent my politics.”23

  Hamilton tackled the task with exemplary energy, giving depth and scope and sterling expression to the overarching themes listed by Washington. That summer, he prepared two documents for Washington. One was a reworking of the MadisonWashington draft and the other his own version of the speech. Washington preferred the latter, which became the basis of the final product. But the president was bothered by the length of Hamilton’s draft; he had envisioned something elegant and concise, which could fit into a newspaper. “All the columns of a large gazette would scarcely, I conceive, contain the present draught,” he told Hamilton.24 By now a seasoned ghostwriter, Hamilton speedily pruned his draft to a more compact size. Washington and Hamilton honed and polished the speech until it had a uniformly authoritative voice. Occasionally, Hamiltonian thunder rumbled through the prose, as in the ranting line that factions can become “potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”25 In general, however, their two voices blended admirably together. The result was a literary miracle. If Hamilton was the major wordsmith, Washington was the tutelary spirit and final arbiter of what went in. The poignant opening section in which Washington thanked the American people could never have been written by Hamilton alone. Conversely, the soaring central section, with its sophisticated perspective on policy matters, showed Hamilton’s unmistakable stamp.

  It is difficult to disentangle the contributions of Washington and Hamilton because their ideas overlapped on many issues. Both men were still smarting over the Jay Treaty dispute and livid at reports that France might send an envoy and a fleet to demand its immediate repeal. Were it not for domestic acrimony over the treaty, Wa
shington told Hamilton, he would tell the French bluntly, “We are an independent nation and act for ourselves. Having fulfilled . . . our engagements with other nations and having decided on and strictly observed a neutral conduct towards the belligerent powers... we will not be dictated to by the politics of any nation under heaven farther than treaties require of us.”26 The farewell address sprang from this recent experience.

  As its centerpiece, the farewell address called for American neutrality, shorn of names and party labels. Hamilton’s words, however, were saturated with arguments that he had used to promote the Jay Treaty. Beneath its impartial air, the farewell address took dead aim at the Jeffersonian romance with France. When Hamilton implied that it was folly for one nation to expect disinterested favors from another, he restated an old argument against Jefferson: that France had aided America during the Revolution only to harm England. When Hamilton sounded the great theme that the United States should steer clear of permanent foreign alliances—“That nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave”—he echoed his earlier statements about Republicans betraying a reflexive hatred of England and adoration of France.27 Even his comments on the need for religion and morality, slightly altered in the final version, arose from his horror at the “atheistic” French Revolution: “Religion and morality are essential props. In vain does that man claim the praise of patriotism who labours to subvert or undermine these great pillars of human happiness.”28

  The domestic portion of the address was a digest of ideas that Hamilton had advanced under Washington’s aegis. Hamilton expressed an urgent plea for preserving the union and enumerated various threats. He cited the danger of domestic factions, which could become vehicles for unscrupulous men; urged a vigorous central government to protect liberty; stressed public credit and the need to control deficits; and invoked the sacred duty of obeying the Constitution. In a country riven by quarrels, Hamilton produced a vision of harmonious parts. Agriculture and commerce were mutually beneficial. North and south, the western frontier and the eastern seaboard, enjoyed complementary economies. The only thing needed to capitalize on these strengths was national unity.

  The farewell address was meant to be printed, not spoken, and Washington consulted Hamilton about the optimal time and place for publication. On September 19, 1796, it appeared in Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser, and it was then reprinted in newspapers across the country. It can be read two ways: as a dispassionate statement of American principles and as a thinly disguised attack on the Republicans. With consummate artistry, Washington and Hamilton had extracted general themes from particular debates about the Jay Treaty, the Whiskey Rebellion, and other events and endowed them with universal meaning. Over time, the underlying events have faded away, lending the aphorisms an oracular quality. The arguments for neutrality and a foreign policy based on national interests became especially influential. “It was the first statement, comprehensive and authoritative at the same time, of the principles of American foreign policy,” Felix Gilbert has written.29 A century later, as the document evolved into a canonical text, Congress read the speech aloud each year on Washington’s birthday.

  Though contemporary Americans hailed the address, the Republican reaction was venomous and unwittingly underscored its urgent plea for unity. One newspaper denounced Washington’s words as “the loathings of a sick mind.”30 In the Aurora, Benjamin Franklin Bache dredged up the old wives’ tale that Washington had conspired with the British during the Revolution. Bache also gave prominent play to an open letter to Washington from Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, expressing the hope that Washington would die and telling him that “the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor, whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any.”31

  Though never humble, Hamilton could be self-effacing in serving Washington and his country. Only a handful of intimates—Eliza, Robert Troup, and John Jay among them—knew that he had crafted the president’s address. Fired by a sense that Hamilton had been denied credit, Eliza often recollected the composition of the address. More than forty years later, she testified that Hamilton had written it

  principally at such time as his office was seldom frequented by his clients and visitors and during the absence of his students to avoid interruption; at which times he was in the habit of calling me to sit with him that he might read to me as he wrote, in order, as he said, to discover how it sounded upon the ear and making the remark, “My dear Eliza, you must be to me what Moliere’s old nurse was to him.” [Molière was popularly reported to have tested dramatic speeches on his old nurse to get her reaction.] The whole or nearly all the “Address” was read to me by him as he wrote it and a greater part, if not all, was written by him in my presence.32

  After the farewell address appeared, it was sold widely in pamphlet form. Eliza cherished the memory of strolling down Broadway with her husband when an old soldier accosted them and tried to sell them a copy. After buying one, Hamilton said laughingly to Eliza, “That man does not know he has asked me to purchase my own work.”33

  Hamilton’s central role also stayed a well-kept secret because Washington’s admirers feared its disclosure might detract from the ex-president’s Olympian stature. They perhaps succeeded too well. After Hamilton’s death, his draft of the farewell address and all related correspondence with Washington were entrusted to Rufus King. In the 1820s, Eliza and her sons had to file a lawsuit to retrieve the documents from King, who relinquished them only reluctantly. Later, Eliza recorded her memories of the events surrounding the farewell address so “that my children should be fully acquainted with the services rendered by their father to our country and the assistance given by him to General Washington during his administration for the one great object: the independence and stability of the government of the United States.”34

  For all the strife surrounding his time in office, historians now routinely rank George Washington with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt as one of the three outstanding American presidents. Washington left a legacy of prosperity, neutrality, sound public credit, stable government, and a viable constitution. As the resident policy genius of the administration, Hamilton deserves a large share of the accolades. Why, then, was he not a presidential candidate in 1796 or beyond? He had the advantage of being a major Federalist—perhaps the major Federalist—at a time when party elites chose presidential candidates. Nevertheless, Hamilton gave no hint that he or anybody else envisioned him as Washington’s successor, and he never received a single electoral vote in a presidential contest.

  How to explain the paradox that a man of such unbounded talent and ambition never attained the top office or even made a covert run for it? Surely he must have wanted to be president. The conundrum can be solved partly by noting that the political stars were never suitably aligned for Hamilton. Obviously, he could not have challenged Washington for the presidency, and, as John Adams correctly told Abigail, “I am the heir apparent.”35 Hamilton himself had stated that Adams, Jefferson, and Jay, by virtue of their seniority, were seen as presumptive presidential contenders. Also, Hamilton left the government determined to repair his finances and refurbish his legal practice. Moreover, by then he was so controversial, so divisive, that the mere mention of his name could trigger debates. Adored by his followers, he was seen as cocky, conceited, and swaggering by his enemies.

  Other reasons account for Hamilton’s failure to snatch the prize. Though blessed with a great executive mind and a consummate policy maker, Hamilton could never master the smooth restraint of a mature politician. His conception of leadership was noble but limiting: the true statesman defied the wishes of the people, if necessary, and shook them from wishful thinking and complacency. Hamilton lived in a world of moral absolutes and was not especially prone to compromise or consensus building. Where Washington and Jefferson had a gift for voicing the hopes of ordinary people, Hamilton had no specia
l interest in echoing popular preferences. Much too avowedly elitist to become president, he lacked what Woodrow Wilson defined as an essential ingredient for political leadership: “profound sympathy with those whom he leads—a sympathy which is insight—an insight which is of the heart rather than of the intellect.”36 Alexander Hamilton enjoyed no such mystic bond with the American people. This may have been why Madison was so adamant that “Hamilton never could have got in” as president.37

  A baser reason may explain Hamilton’s reluctance to stand for the presidency. During the 1796 election, Noah Webster, then a Federalist editor, suggested in his newspaper, The Minerva, that Hamilton might be an appropriate presidential candidate. According to scandalmonger James T. Callender, an unnamed Republican saw this and dispatched an emissary to New York, who confronted Hamilton to “inform him that if Webster should in future print a single paragraph on that head,” the Maria Reynolds papers would instantly “be laid before the world. It is believed the message was delivered to Mr. Hamilton for the Minerva became silent.”38

  While Hamilton knew he would not succeed Washington, he wasn’t about to play a passive role in 1796, the first contested presidential race in American history and the first dominated by parties. At the time, it was still considered crass for candidates to campaign or violate the charade of passivity, and this magnified the influence of party leaders. Madison began to agitate for Jefferson, who let his friend carry the burden. Similarly, the Federalist front-runner, John Adams, declared, “I am determined to be a silent spectator of the silly and wicked game.”39

  At first, Hamilton told a correspondent that his one overriding goal was to stop Thomas Jefferson from becoming president: “All personal and partial considerations must be discarded and everything must give way to the great object of excluding Jefferson.”40 He even toyed with backing Patrick Henry, who had grown estranged from Virginia Republicans and might erode support for Jefferson in the south, where Federalists were weak. When Henry refused to run, Hamilton turned to another dark-horse southerner, Thomas Pinckney, a wartime hero and former governor of South Carolina, who had served as an American diplomat in Spain and England.