by Ron Chernow
At first, Adams pretended that he had yanked McHenry from the dinner party to discuss some inconsequential War Department business. Then, as McHenry was leaving, Adams erupted in a furious monologue about Hamilton and the New York election and accused McHenry of conspiring against him. Against all evidence, Adams accused the indefatigable Hamilton of having sought a Federalist defeat in the New York election. A dumbfounded McHenry said, “I have heard no such conduct ascribed to General Hamilton and I cannot think it to be the case.” To which Adams replied, “I know it, Sir, to be so and require you to inform yourself and report.”47 Then Adams unleashed a memorable volley:
Hamilton is an intriguant—the greatest intriguant in the world—a man devoid of every moral principle—a bastard and as much a foreigner as Gallatin. Mr Jefferson is an infinitely better man, a wiser one, I am sure, and, if President, will act wisely. I know it and would rather be vice president under him or even minister resident at the Hague than indebted to such a being as Hamilton for the Presidency....You are subservient to Hamilton, who ruled Washington and would still rule if he could. Washington saddled me with three secretaries who would control me, but I shall take care of that.48
This monologue went on and on. Adams faulted McHenry for not having forewarned him that Hamilton would materialize in Trenton the previous fall, charged him with incompetence in running his department, and mocked the notion that McHenry might know something about foreign affairs. “You cannot, sir, remain longer in office,” he concluded.49
McHenry was shocked less at being sacked than by Adams’s “indecorous and at times outrageous” behavior. He told his nephew that the president sometimes spoke “in such a manner of certain men and things as to persuade one that he was actually insane.”50 McHenry had just bought an expensive home in Washington, D.C., the federal district where the government would shortly move, and the firing cost him dearly. Nonetheless, he fell on his sword and resigned the next day.
Adams later expressed remorse at having “wounded the feelings” of McHenry, but Hamilton knew that McHenry was not the only one who felt the president’s anger. “Most, if not all, his ministers and several distinguished members of the two houses of Congress have been humiliated by the effects of these gusts of passion,” Hamilton wrote.51 For years, McHenry licked his wounds. Later on, upon reading Adams’s defense of his administration, he commented to Pickering, “Still in his own opinion the greatest man of the age, I see [Adams] will carry with him to the grave his vanity, his weaknesses, and follies, specimens of which we have so often witnessed and always endeavored to veil them from the public.”52
Five days after expelling McHenry, Adams wrote to Timothy Pickering and tried to induce the secretary of state to tender his resignation. A former adjutant general in the Continental Army, the Harvard-educated Pickering was too ornery to be controlled by anyone, even Hamilton, who acknowledged something “warm and angular in his temper.”53 He had tenaciously supported the Alien and Sedition Acts and proved an unyielding opponent of the Paris peace mission. Abigail Adams described Pickering as a man “whose temper is sour and whose resentments are implacable,” while her husband found him shifty eyed and ruthless, “a man in a mask, sometimes of silk, sometimes of iron, and sometimes of brass.”54 For Adams, Pickering had been Hamilton’s main henchman in his cabinet and an object of special detestation. As a confirmed abolitionist, Pickering so admired Hamilton that he later tried his hand at an authorized biography of him. “Mr. Pickering would have made a good collector of the customs, but, he was not so well qualified for a Secretary of State,” said Adams. “He was so devoted an idolater of Hamilton that he could not judge impartially of the sentiments and opinions of the President of the U[nited] States.”55 When Pickering received Adams’s note, he refused to give him the satisfaction of resigning, so Adams cashiered him in an act he called “one of the most deliberate, virtuous and disinterested actions of my life.”56
After three years of dealing with Adams at close quarters, Pickering circulated many stories about the president’s unreserved venom for Hamilton. “Once when Col. Hamilton’s name was mentioned to Mr Adams (who hated him) Adams said, ‘I remember the young bastard when he entered the army.’ ”57 Adams complained to Pickering that in accepting Hamilton as inspector general, the Senate had “crammed Hamilton down my throat.”58 Pickering believed that Adams feared Hamilton as a rival of superior talents and intelligence. Adams’s loathing of Hamilton grew so visceral, Pickering said, that the mere mention of his name “seemed to be sufficient to rouse his sometimes dormant resentments. And it is probable that he hoarded up all the gossiping stories of Hamilton’s amorous propensities.”59
Adams’s ouster of the two Hamiltonians produced jubilation among Republicans and led some Federalists to wonder whether that wasn’t the real point of the exercise. Pickering thought the clumsy firings were part of a deal that Adams cut with Republican opponents who would “support his re-election to the presidency, provided he would make peace with France and remove Mr. McHenry and me from office.”60 The Federalist press echoed this theme, with The Federalist of Trenton explaining Adams’s conduct as “the result of a political arrangement with Mr. Jefferson, an arrangement of the most mysterious and important complexion.”61
The repercussions of Adams’s firings were enduring. Combined with his simultaneous disbanding of the new army, Adams’s actions touched off a vindictive, mean-spirited mood in Hamilton, who now said of the president, “The man is more mad than I ever thought him and I shall soon be led to say as wicked as he is mad.”62 Beyond his own injured vanity and thwarted ambition, Hamilton regarded Adams as playing a duplicitous game, and he preferred an honest enemy to a dishonest friend. “I will never more be responsible for [Adams] by my direct support, even though the consequence should be the election of Jefferson,” Hamilton told Theodore Sedgwick. “If we must have an enemy at the head of the government, let it be one whom we can oppose and for whom we are not responsible.”63 Hamilton was congenitally incapable of compromise. Rather than make peace with John Adams, he was ready, if necessary, to blow up the Federalist party and let Jefferson become president.
The stream of personal abuse directed by Adams at Hamilton only made a bad situation worse. On June 2, McHenry sent Hamilton a confidential letter giving the unexpurgated version of his May 5 confrontation with Adams, complete with presidential references to Hamilton’s bastardy and foreign birth. Hamilton was as sensitive as ever about his illegitimacy, especially after a Republican newspaper in Boston warned him that “the mode of your descent from a dubious father, in an English island,” would bar any pretensions he might have to the presidency.64 Hamilton must have winced at this and quickly drafted a letter to an old wartime comrade, Major William Jackson. “Never was there a more ungenerous persecution of any man than of myself,” Hamilton began. “Not only the worst constructions are put upon my conduct as a public man but it seems my birth is the subject of the most humiliating criticism.”65 Hamilton then furnished the only account he ever left of his parentage, telling of his father’s chronic business troubles and his mother’s marriage to Johann Michael Lavien and subsequent divorce. He lied pathetically when he said that his parents had married but that the union was rendered technically illegal by the terms of his mother’s earlier divorce. With more than a dash of wounded pride, he added, “The truth is that on the question who my parents were, I have better pretensions than most of those who in this country plume themselves on ancestry.”66
Instead of sending the statement to Jackson, Hamilton showed it to James McHenry, who gave him wise advice: I sincerely believe that there is not one of your friends who have paid the least attention to the insinuations attempted to be cast on the legitimacy of your birth or who would care or respect you less were all that your enemies say or impute on this head true. I think it will be most prudent and magnanimous to leave any explanation on the subject to your biographer and the discretion of those friends to whom you have communicated the fac
ts.67
That someone of Hamilton’s elevated stature felt obligated to defend his birth at this stage of his career suggests how harrowing it must have been to hear of Adams’s constant digs at his upbringing.
After McHenry and Pickering were dismissed, Hamilton was emboldened to go further with his plans to strip Adams of the presidency. Most Federalists balked at opposing Adams, but some warmed to the idea of dropping a vote for him here and there and giving the edge to his running mate, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. That June, Hamilton sounded out Federalist opinion during a three-week tour that he made to New England under the guise of saying adieu to his crumbling army. In reality, it was a vote-getting campaign for Pinckney. In Oxford, Massachusetts, Hamilton reviewed a brigade and “expressed an unequivocal approbation of the discipline of the army and beheld with pleasure the progress of subordination and attention to dress and decorum,” a Boston paper reported.68 At moments, the tour seemed a sentimental version of Washington’s farewell from the Continental Army. At Oxford, under a flag-draped colonnade, with a backdrop of martial music, Hamilton threw a dinner for his outgoing officers. After toasting Washington’s memory, Hamilton gave a talk that “suffused every cheek” and showed “the agitation of every bosom.”69
Hamilton’s progress was tracked by a watchful Republican press. The Aurora told readers that Hamilton was traveling with “well-known aristocrats,” and when their carriage broke down in Boston the paper construed this mishap as a portent of “the downfall of aristocracy in the U[nited] States.”70 Hamilton must have felt he was riding high when he was honored by an adulatory dinner in Boston that included almost every Federalist of importance in the state. “The company was the most respectable ever assembled in this town on a similar occasion,” said one paper.71 Everywhere he went, Hamilton conjured up disturbing images of a Frenchstyle revolution in America, even telling one listener that it did not matter who became the next president because “he did not expect his head to remain four years longer upon his shoulders unless it was at the head of a victorious army.”72 This sounded like scare talk, but Hamilton actually believed these overblown fantasies of impending Jacobin carnage in America.
Spending the summer and early fall in Quincy, John and Abigail Adams understood the political agenda behind Hamilton’s mission. Quite understandably, John Adams became so consumed by anger against Hamilton, said Fisher Ames, that he was “implacable” against him and used language that was “bitter even to outrage and swearing.”73 Abigail disparaged Hamilton as “the little cock sparrow general” and described his trip as “merely an electioneering business to feel the pulse of the New England states and impress those upon whom he could have any influence to vote for Pinckney.”74 For Abigail, Hamilton was “impudent and brazen faced,” an upstart next to her husband.75 She derided Hamilton and his followers as “boys of yesterday who were unhatched and unfledged when the venerable character they are striving to pull down was running every risk of life and property to serve and save a country of which these beings are unworthy members.”76 This seemed to overlook Hamilton’s valor on many Revolutionary War battlefields. Increasingly, John and Abigail Adams pinned a new conspiratorial tag on Hamilton and his followers, branding them the Essex Junto. These supposed plotters, many of them born in Essex County, Massachusetts, included Fisher Ames, George Cabot, Benjamin Goodhue, Stephen Higginson, John Lowell, and Timothy Pickering.
As Hamilton’s trip progressed, it was something less than the triumphal tour he had expected. He declared snobbishly that the “first class men” were for Pinckney and the “second class men” for Adams, but he encountered more of the latter than he bargained for.77 Many Adams supporters told Hamilton bluntly that if he persisted in trying to elect Pinckney, they would withhold votes from him to guarantee an Adams victory. Bruised by his brushes with Adams, Hamilton was deaf to these warnings. An incomparable bureaucrat and master theoretician, he had no comparable gift for practical politics.
The most striking example of Hamilton’s maladroit approach came when he lobbied Arthur Fenner, the Rhode Island governor. Fenner said that Hamilton showed up at his home, grandly surrounded by a retinue of colonels and generals, and instantly broached the topic of the presidential election. Hamilton stressed that only Pinckney would have broad support in both the north and south and that Adams couldn’t be reelected. Fenner turned on him hotly: “I then asked him what Mr. Adams had done that he should be tipped out of the tail of the cart.”78 Fenner lauded the peace mission to France and praised the comeuppances of McHenry and Pickering. “Adams is out of the question,” Hamilton insisted to Fenner. “It is Pinckney and Jefferson.”79 After years of painting Thomas Jefferson as the devil incarnate, Hamilton suddenly preferred him to John Adams, again showing that both Hamilton and Adams had lost all perspective in their rages against each other.
Impervious to criticism, Hamilton had embarked on a mad escapade to elect Pinckney, and it was bootless for friends to warn him that he had started a dangerous vendetta. Visiting Rhode Island that July, John Rutledge, Jr., a Federalist congressman from South Carolina, heard nasty scuttlebutt about Hamilton. Many Rhode Island residents, Rutledge informed Hamilton, are “jealous and suspicious of you in the extreme, saying... that your opposition to Mr. A[dams] has its source in private pique. If you had been appointed commander in chief on the death of Gen[era]l W[ashington] you would have continued one of Mr A[dams]’s partisans.... [Y]ou are endeavoring to give success to Gen[era]l P[inckney]’s election because he will administer the government under your direction.”80 Although several associates warned Hamilton that his lobbying campaign was backfiring, he did not heed them. He had drawn all the wrong lessons from his peregrinations through New England and decided that he would have to enlighten benighted voters to the manifold failings of John Adams. And he would do so by the method that he had employed throughout his career at critical moments: a blazing polemic in which he would lay out his case in crushing detail.
THIRTY-SIX
IN A VERY BELLIGERENT HUMOR
In writing an intemperate indictment of John Adams, Hamilton committed a form of political suicide that blighted the rest of his career. As shown with “The Reynolds Pamphlet,” he had a genius for the self-inflicted wound and was
capable of marching blindly off a cliff—traits most pronounced in the late 1790s. Gouverneur Morris once commented that one of Hamilton’s chief characteristics was “the pertinacious adherence to opinions he had once formed.”1
Hamilton found it hard to refrain from vendettas. He would be devoured by dislike of someone, brood about it, then yield to the catharsis of discharging his venom in print. “The frankness of his nature was such that he could not easily avoid the expression of his sentiments of public men and measures and his extreme candor in such cases was sometimes productive of personal inconveniences,” observed friend Nathaniel Pendleton.2 Even Eliza in after years conceded that her adored husband had “a character perhaps too frank and independent for a democratic people.”3
So long as Hamilton was inspector general, he had stifled his pent-up anger against Adams, but by July 1800 his military service had ended and he could gratify his need to lash out at the president. He would repay all the snubs and slurs he had suffered, all the galling references to his bastardy. Once McHenry and Pickering were fired, Hamilton did not simply commiserate with them but encouraged them to preserve internal papers that would expose the president. “Allow me to suggest,” he told Pickering, “that you ought to take with you copies and extracts of all such documents as will enable you to explain both Jefferson and Adams.”4 Pickering encouraged the project that Hamilton meditated: “I have been contemplating the importance of a bold and frank exposure of A[dams]. Perhaps I may have it in my power to furnish some facts.”5 Suspecting that Adams and Jefferson had sealed a secret election pact, Hamilton told McHenry, “Pray favour me with as many circumstances as may appear to you to show the probability of coalitions with Mr. Jefferson[,]...which are spoken of.”
6
Hamilton ended up with the cooperation of the discontented cabinet members, including the one member of the triumvirate who had avoided the purge, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., the capable if unimaginative treasury secretary. Even though Adams thought Wolcott more loyal than McHenry and Pickering, Wolcott considered the president a powder keg. Of Adams, he told Fisher Ames, “We know the temper of his mind to be revolutionary, violent and vindictive.... [H]is passions and selfishness would continually gain strength.”7 Wolcott deprecated Adams’s peace overtures to France as a mere “game of diplomacy” designed to court votes.8 At moments, however, Wolcott grew ambivalent about the idea of Hamilton exposing Adams, arguing that “the people [already] believe that their president is crazy.”9 In the end, though, convinced that Adams would ruin the government, Wolcott told Hamilton that somebody had to write a “few paragraphs exposing the folly” of those who had idealized Adams as a noble, independent spirit.10
Thus, in his massive indictment of Adams, Hamilton drew on abundant information provided by McHenry, Pickering, and Wolcott about presidential behavior behind closed doors. Hamilton knew that the three would be charged with treachery by Adams, but he thought his pamphlet would forfeit all credibility without such documentation. Stories about Adams’s high-strung behavior, if legion in High Federalist circles, were little known outside of them. Hamilton also wanted to stress the mistreatment of cabinet members, lest readers dismiss his critique of Adams as mere personal pique over the disbanded army. Adams was duly shocked by the confidences that his ex–cabinet members betrayed. “Look into Hamilton’s pamphlet,” he told a friend. “Observe the pretended information of things which could only have passed between me and my cabinet.”11 In these revelations, Adams saw patent “treachery and perfidy.”12