by John Ferling
Initially, Hamilton may have derived his ideas from Washington, who believed that much of the problem was caused by big businessmen “preying upon the vitals of this great country.” Washington additionally believed that the nation’s economic ills were the result of a decline in the quality of the delegates to Congress. The composition of Congress had changed markedly since Washington’s departure four years earlier. Three-fourths of those who had been his colleagues in Congress in June 1775 were now gone. Some had left for the army, and some—Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, for instance—were abroad on diplomatic missions, but like Jefferson, most had gone home to serve at the state level. With considerable justification, Washington thought those who were not serving the nation were shortsighted. Early in 1779 he wrote to a fellow Virginian asking, “where are our Men of abilities? Why do they not come forth to save their Country?” About thirty months after Jefferson left Congress, Washington pointedly asked: Where are “Jefferson & others” in this time of need?22
Hamilton concurred. A year earlier, he had complained about the “degeneracy” of those in Congress. “America once had a representation [in Congress] that would do honor to any age or nation,” he stated in February 1778. But many of those “great men” had departed to serve their states, a choice that he termed a “pernicious mistake.” The result had been an “alarming and dangerous” decline in the quality of congressmen. While at Valley Forge, Hamilton spoke with contempt of the gaggle of “indecisive and improvident” leaders in Philadelphia who, through “Folly, caprice, [and] a want of foresight,” had caused the army to suffer horribly. A year later, he wondered whether the war might be lost as a result of the “lethargy of voluptuous indolence” on the part of those who were sitting out the war.23 He never mentioned Jefferson in his correspondence, but it is likely that he heard Washington think out loud about him. It may be that Hamilton’s contempt for Jefferson was born early in 1779.
The numerous problems that plagued the army drove Hamilton to search for their causes. Although his workday ran from early morning until nearly sundown, Hamilton squeezed in time for reading. Typically an early riser, he must have been up and reading by candlelight in the predawn darkness on many mornings, plowing through the likes of Cicero, David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, and Plutarch, gleaning what he could about human nature and the formation of new governments, but also learning economics through numerous books. He borrowed from a friend several standard economic treatises of the day. He may also have read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, but the authors he is known to have read were Hume, Wyndam Beawes, Richard Price, and Malachy Postlethwayt. The latter appears to have exerted the greatest influence on his thinking. Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce reflected at length on taxes, banking, debts, and finance. Hamilton read it through and through, and took detailed notes. The words “production,” “manufactures,” and “exportation” appear over and again in his notebook. Hamilton was already looking toward how the new nation might make itself economically independent.24
Soon after Washington returned from his eye-opening trip to Philadelphia early in 1779, Hamilton for the first time wondered whether America would win its independence. “Our affairs are in a bad way” because of economic miseries, he said. Convinced that insatiable entrepreneurial greed was at the root of America’s problems, he added, “I hate money making men.” But as dark as things were beginning to look only a year after the French alliance was consummated, Hamilton remained confident. Expecting continued French assistance and Spain’s imminent entry into the war against Great Britain, Hamilton predicted that “Europe will save us in spite of ourselves.”25
Hamilton had been correct about Spanish belligerency, but by 1780 America’s prospects had worsened. While Washington remained inactive for a third consecutive campaign season, Great Britain was rolling up victories in the South. In 1778 it had invaded Georgia, retaken Savannah, and restored royal control. Early in 1780 the British invaded South Carolina. By June, they had retaken Charleston and a wide swath through the interior of the province.
Seeing that Washington could not, or would not, take the offensive, France—desperate to end a costly, stalemated war—announced that it was sending an army to America. Perhaps Washington would act in concert with it. Hamilton saw what the French had seen. Time was running out. If victory was not won soon, it would never be won. And if America did not win the war, hostilities would likely end in a peace negotiated in Europe and imposed on America. Hamilton urgently told acquaintances with influence in Congress that the army was in “a bad way” from lack of funds, and that not a moment could be spared.26
The French army arrived in stages, and later than expected. The first French soldiers, in their tight-fitting white uniforms, came ashore in Rhode Island in July 1780, but Comte de Rochambeau, their commander, was unwilling to take the field until all of his soldiery had crossed the ocean, and that would not be before the campaign season of 1781. While 1780 passed without a major campaign in the northern states, the British continued to score victories in the South, and as autumn approached, the British appeared close to conquering all of South Carolina. Hamilton’s spirits collapsed. Watching helplessly as American morale waned in the face of an endless war, and one without a significant American victory since Saratoga three years earlier, Hamilton despaired that his “countrymen … are determined not to be free.” Once again, he concluded, “If we are saved France and Spain must save us.”27
War weariness was growing throughout America. Hamilton called it a “disgrace,” but worse was to come. He was with Washington at West Point in September when Benedict Arnold’s treason was discovered. It “shocked me more than any thing I have met with,” Hamilton said, and he worried that it would further erode whatever spirit remained for carrying on the war. As never before, he wondered if all was lost. At best, he hoped the country was only in “a profound Sleep ’til the Cannon of the Enemy awaken us.” Rallying at the last moment “is our National Character,” he remarked.28
Driven to despair by the deteriorating military situation, Hamilton read and reflected on the national malaise over a period of eighteen months, and in all likelihood he spoke with assorted individuals who came to headquarters. By the fall of 1780 his thoughts had crystallized. They would not change substantially during the next decade.
The “fundamental defect” that Hamilton now saw was due not so much to a lack of talent in Philadelphia, as to “a want of power.” Congress, now under America’s first national constitution, the decentralized Articles of Confederation, was not “fit for war [or] peace,” he said. Fearing an oppressive central government, the states had overreacted and, in Hamilton’s opinion, had created a monster. Not only had they rendered the “union feeble and precarious,” but also without “a speedy change the army must dissolve; it is now a mob rather than an army, without clothing, without pay, without provisions, without morals, without discipline.” Then, in what would become a staple of Hamiltonianism, he issued a thinly veiled threat. The army’s officers, he cautioned, would “begin to hate the country for its neglect of us.”
Hamilton did not publish his ideas, though he communicated his views on the nation’s political and economic ills to Robert Morris, a Philadelphia businessman who through much of the war was Congress’s most influential member on economic matters. Hamilton urged the convening of a constitutional convention to remedy matters. He even recommended that what the convention produced need not be submitted to the states for ratification. Hamilton thought the new constitution should provide for a national government consisting of both executive and legislative branches. Of the former, he said little more than that it should be “an executive ministry,” implying the existence of a prime minister and cabinet level departments. His focus was on Congress. Hamilton’s remedies included vesting Congress with the authority to tax the citizenry, levy an impost on imports, and create a national bank. Indeed, a bank was critical, for Hamilton had put his finger on a key element in the na
tion’s economic ills: The country lacked sufficient money to finance the war. But a bank could create money. Hamilton proposed that half the bank’s start-up capital, a whopping two million pounds, would come from foreign loans; the remaining two million pounds would be raised through private subscriptions guaranteed by the United States. The bank would borrow money through the sale of securities and, in turn, make loans; in addition, as it would become a fountainhead of the money in circulation, the bank would provide a source of currency that could be taxed.29 All would be lost if these remedies were not adopted. The “patient will die,” was how he put it, for it was faced with “galloping consumption.”30
The ideas broached by the fledgling economist were not entirely new. Some had probably been bandied about in private conversations among merchants, financiers, and public officials during 1779, and by late 1780 they were discussed on the floor of Congress. He must have heard some of the remedies mooted at headquarters, which likely guided his reading. But while his plan was not wholly, or even largely, original, Hamilton had done something that few others had done before late 1780: He articulated his nostrums in a lengthy, thoughtful, written argument.
In January and February 1781 Congress took several steps that Hamilton had proposed. Hamilton’s advocacy was hardly the tipping point. His ideas were simply in sync with those of more powerful figures. A constitutional amendment giving Congress the authority to levy an impost on imports was sent to the states, and the Bank of North America was incorporated and supplied with capital. Congress also created four executive departments—Finance, War, Marine, and Foreign Affairs—and named Robert Morris to be the superintendent of Finance. General John Sullivan approached Washington about nominating the twenty-six-year-old Hamilton for the post, a sign that the young lieutenant colonel’s advocacy had earned him attention. Washington claimed that he had never discussed economics with Hamilton, a remark that stretches credulity, but he championed his aide’s intellect and patriotism, and added that no man “exceeds him in probity and sterling virtue.” Ultimately, seeing that Morris was a shoo-in for the position, Sullivan dropped his plan to nominate Hamilton.31
Hamilton’s economic recommendations, and those concerning strengthening the power of the national government, were not his only remedies for winning the war. Hamilton offered fresh ideas concerning the use of black soldiers. At the behest of the army’s leadership, Congress early in the war had prohibited the enlistment of African Americans in the Continental army. Two years later, finding it difficult to obtain adequate numbers of volunteers, Massachusetts began conscripting both free blacks and slaves. Within twelve months, four other northern states permitted blacks to serve. No southern state took such a step. Indeed, Virginia and South Carolina enticed whites to enlist by offering them slaves as bounties.32
But once Britain retook Savannah and invaded South Carolina, Colonel Laurens, Hamilton’s friend, implored Congress to raise a light infantry force composed of five thousand black soldiers to defend his province. Opposition was immediate in the South, especially in South Carolina. It was feared that not only would arming blacks lead to slave insurrections, but also that slavery might not survive the expedient.
Hamilton rapidly endorsed his friend’s scheme. He recognized that if South Carolina fell, the British would almost certainly retake North Carolina. Virginia would then be imperiled. He also understood that if Great Britain reconquered the South, the United States at best would be a small, weak nation of nine states north of the Potomac River, surrounded by the British in Canada, the West, and the South. Independence would be meaningless. But Hamilton was convinced—almost certainly correctly—that if the British were thwarted in their bid to regain their southern colonies, London would make peace. And, like Laurens, Hamilton believed that raising black soldiers was the essential ingredient to an American victory in the South. In longing for an army of blacks, Hamilton was not driven solely by a search for the means of vanquishing the enemy. His racial views were extraordinarily advanced for his time. They were an amalgam of Enlightenment thought, having been inspired by abolitionist acquaintances in Manhattan and hours of penetrating conversations with Laurens, who had returned to America from his studies in Geneva with flaming antislavery views.
In the spring of 1779, Hamilton wrote a remarkable letter to his friend John Jay, the president of Congress. “I have not the least doubt,” Hamilton wrote, “that the negroes will make very excellent soldiers.” Some, he said, believed that blacks were “too stupid to make soldiers.” He challenged such biased thinking, saying, their “natural faculties are probably as good as ours.” Americans, he told Jay, must overcome their racial bigotry. They must put national interest above “prejudices and self-interest.” He closed on a pragmatic note. The Continental army needed black soldiers if it was to field a sufficient force to defend the South. Furthermore, he noted, “if we do not make use of them in this way, the enemy probably will.”33
Opposition to the scheme advanced by Washington’s two young aides was strong among southerners in Congress. However, a handful of southern congressmen defended the idea and appealed to Washington for his support, the only hope of securing congressional approval. Washington refused to join the battle. He probably feared that South Carolina, if pushed, would drop out of the war rather than risk the annihilation of slavery.34 The plan advanced by Laurens and Hamilton was dead.
John Adams had written to Jefferson in 1777 urging his return to Congress. “We want your Industry and Abilities here,” he implored.35 Jefferson, busy with his attempts to carry out reforms in Virginia, shrugged off his friend’s entreaty. But two years later Jefferson was stung by Washington’s remarks about those who were not serving at the national level in the midst of America’s great crisis. Jefferson admired Washington. He also knew that Washington was the most respected figure in the land. If America won the war, Washington would be a titan, powerful and dominant. No ambitious person could afford to incur his ill will.
Others besides Washington had previously beseeched Jefferson to do more. Richard Henry Lee pleaded with him “to suffer every thing rather than injure the public cause.” Edmund Pendleton encouraged him to make sacrifices for the sake of “the rising Generation.” An appeal from William Fleming, a friend from college who now served in Congress, was one of the more unsettling. The American cause “wear[s] a very gloomy aspect,” Fleming wrote, adding, “we have … much to fear” both from the collapsing economy and Britain’s military focus on the South, “where we are the most vulnerable.” With hurt in his words, Fleming concluded his letter by saying that “Our great misfortune” was that too many had “lost sight of the great object for which we had recourse to arms, and have turned their thoughts solely to accumulating ideal wealth.”36
Soon thereafter Jefferson signaled a willingness to serve as Virginia’s governor. It was not solely the exhortations of others that induced him to abandon Monticello. Jefferson understood the dangers brought on by Britain’s war in the South, and he knew that if the redcoats succeeded in the Lower South, they would one day come after Virginia. Besides, he believed—as Lee had put it to him—that if “we can baffle the Southern invasion,” the “game will be presently up with our enemies.”37 Jefferson appreciated that this was a dangerous time to be Virginia’s governor, but it was an opportune moment as well for an ambitious and idealistic individual. If the American victory was finally won on his watch, there would be laurels to be worn. What is more, a bloc in the assembly that favored domestic reform was supportive of Jefferson’s candidacy. Much might be achieved if he led the state government.38
To be sure, Jefferson found the prospect of serving as governor to be unsettling. He worried about his abilities to handle the responsibilities of the office, especially as he had never served in an executive capacity. For that matter, Jefferson, who a year earlier had been overwhelmingly defeated in a contest to become Speaker of the House.39 Yet, while acknowledging that a “private retirement” at Monticello was “almost irres
istible,” Jefferson said it “would be wrong to decline” to serve as governor.40
On June 1, 1779, Virginia’s legislature elected Jefferson as governor, choosing him on the second ballot over two other candidates, both close acquaintances. One was John Page, perhaps his oldest, dearest friend. The other was Thomas Nelson of Yorktown, who had served in Congress and signed the Declaration of Independence, and in 1779 was the ranking officer in the state’s militia.
The governor of Virginia, like most chief executives during the Revolutionary era, had little power. He existed mostly to administer legislative enactments, which he could not veto. When the governor did have to make a decision, he had to do so in collaboration with the eight-member Council of State. However, the governor could request emergency authority, and Jefferson’s predecessor, Patrick Henry, had done just that when the British invaded nearby Pennsylvania in 1777. Jefferson, who believed in small, unobtrusive governments, had criticized the assembly for acceding to Henry’s wishes, and throughout his two years in office he steadfastly refused to request additional powers. Jefferson did have one power that he was free to use: taking up his remarkable pen. Yet, while he had previously wielded it to shape the thinking of his countrymen,—most spectacularly in the Declaration of Independence—as governor, Jefferson surprisingly never sought to rally or mold public opinion with a stirring executive address.
Jefferson was unhappy as governor. Within a month of taking office he was wistfully looking toward the day when his one-year term would end. It was bad enough holding an office that he did not relish, but Jefferson also knew when he became governor that morale was waning. As his old friend Fleming told him, the “bulk of the people … seem[ed] to have lost sight of the great object for which we had recourse to arms.”41 The war was four years old. The hope of imminent victory following the French alliance had faded. America had not won a significant victory in two years. Washington’s army had not fought a major engagement since Monmouth, and it had not campaigned in the real sense of the term in two years.