Literature

Praise for Alexander Hamilton

“In Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow, author of The House of Morgan, The War- burgs, and Titan and a biography of John D. Rockefeller, has brought to vivid life the founding father who did more than any other to create the modern United States . . . [a] magisterial biography.” —Michael Lind, The Washington Post

“Ron Chernow’s new Hamilton could not be more welcome. This is grand-scale bi- ography at its best—thorough, insightful, consistently fair, and superbly written. It clears away more than a few shopworn misconceptions about Hamilton, gives credit where credit is due, and is both clear-eyed and understanding about its very human subject. . . . The whole life and times are here in a genuinely great book.”

—David McCullough, author of John Adams and Truman

“Ron Chernow ranks as one of today’s best writers of history and biography. Not only is his work compelling but, unusual among such writers, Chernow also has a sound understanding of finance and economics. These skills shined through in his previous books. . . . They are once again on full display in Alexander Hamilton.”

—Raymond J. Keating, Newsday

“Chernow’s Hamilton is a success. Rarely does a biographer uncover so much new in- formation about a long-dead, much-chronicled individual. Rarely does a biographer fill in the gaps with such incisive, justified speculation. Rarely does a biographer write narrative so well.” —Steve Weinberg, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Ron Chernow has produced an original, illuminating, and highly readable study of Alexander Hamilton that admirably introduces readers to Hamilton’s personality and accomplishments. Chernow penetrates more deeply into the mysteries of Hamilton’s origins and family life than any previous biographer . . . Chernow’s ac- counts of Hamilton’s contributions to political theory, politics, and the law are compelling.” —Walter Russell Mead, Foreign Affairs

“Like a few hundred thousand other people, I’ve been reading Ron Chernow’s en- thralling biography of Alexander Hamilton. It serves as a timely reminder that the era of the founding fathers, which we usually think of (correctly) as a time of high- minded philosophical discourse, was also full of venomous vituperation that has no parallel in modern America.” —Max Boot, Financial Times

“A brilliant historian has done it again! The thoroughness and integrity of Ron Chernow’s research shines forth on every page of his Alexander Hamilton. He has created a vivid and compelling portrait of a remarkable man—and at the same time he has made a monumental contribution to our understanding of the beginnings of the American republic.”

—Robert A. Caro, author of The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson

“Fascinating.” —People

“Chernow’s gripping story sheds new light not only on Hamilton’s legacy, but also on the conflicts that accompanied the republic’s birth. . . . Alexander Hamilton is based on prodigious research, and it will likely prop up Hamilton’s reputation in the same way David McCullough’s biography bolstered John Adams’s. . . . impressive detail.”

—Matthew Dallek, Washington Monthly

“Magisterial. . . . Mr. Chernow has done a splendid job of capturing the backbiting political climate of Hamilton’s times. . . . Mr. Chernow delivers a comprehen- siveness that rivals Hamilton’s . . . [and gives] the full measure of such a tireless, complex, and ultimately self-destructive man.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“A superb study. . . . Chernow’s book is remarkable . . . for his unblinkered view of Hamilton’s thought and behavior . . . Chernow’s Hamilton is a whirlwind of a man, always in action, always in pursuit of a goal not quite within his grasp, and beset by the demons that have so often afflicted great minds. . . . It has been said that Hamil- ton was a great man but not a great American. Chernow’s Hamilton is both.”

—Edmund Morgan, The New York Review of Books

“Alexander Hamilton has been overshadowed by the founding fathers he served under, notably George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Ron Chernow’s magisterial new biography will certainly change that. . . . The first must-read biography of 2004.”

—John Freeman, TimeOut New York

“A splendid new biography . . . Chernow unearths new information about Hamil- ton, but more importantly this beautifully written book recounts the formidable obstacles he surmounted to become, next to George Washington, the indispensable American founder. Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton is the best biography of Hamil- ton ever written, and it is unlikely to be surpassed.”

—Stephen F. Knott, Claremont Review of Books

“Superb . . . Chernow is a shrewd student of power, and he couldn’t have chosen a more compelling subject.” —James Aley, Fortune

“Chernow writes beautifully and skillfully, and opens up aspects of Hamilton’s life that others have not yet understood.” —Andrew Burstein, Chicago Tribune

“Now, Ron Chernow, whose previous books have chronicled the American Beauty roses and kudzu vines of mature American capitalism—Warburgs, Morgans, John D. Rockefeller, Sr.—examines the man who planted the seeds. . . . Alexander Hamil- ton is thorough, admiring, and sad—just what a big book on its subject should be.”

—Richard Brookhiser, Los Angeles Times

“Terrific . . . Ron Chernow’s magisterial Alexander Hamilton treats the first secretary of the treasury with the weight and gravitas of a nineteen-century novel.”

—John Freeman, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Powerful . . . Chernow’s magisterial work combines a biography of Hamilton and a political history of the United States in the early years of the republic. Exhaus- tively researched and beautifully written, the volume tells us a great deal about the founding fathers and helps restore one of them to his rightful place in the pan- theon.” —Terry W. Hartle, The Christian Science Monitor

“Chernow has chosen an ideal subject. . . . No other founding father more richly deserves the modern-eye-on-the-colonial-guy treatment . . . electrifying . . . Cher- now does an admirable job.” —Justin Martin, San Francisco Chronicle

“[T]he life of Alexander Hamilton was ‘so tumultuous that only an audacious nov- elist could have dreamed it up.’ Such is the assessment of Ron Chernow in this splendid new biography of Hamilton.” —Steve Raymond, The Seattle Times

“In this engaging new book, Ron Chernow reassesses the historical legacy of the brilliant founding father, political theorist, and politician Alexander Hamilton. . . . Lively and beautifully written.” —Anne Lombard, The San Diego Union-Tribune

“Alexander Hamilton is a balanced portrait of the man and his many contra- dictions . . . Admirers of David McCullough’s John Adams or Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin will thoroughly enjoy this excellent book.”

—Roger Bishop, BookPage

“On July 11, 1804, on a ledge overlooking the Hudson River in Weehawken, New Jersey, Burr mortally wounded Hamilton . . . For thirty days, the city’s residents wore black armbands. . . . The extraordinary and improbable career of Alexander Hamilton had come to and end, and here we have another fitting tribute to it: Ron Chernow’s massively researched and beautifully written biography.”

—James Chace, The New York Observer

“Ron Chernow’s absorbing, exhaustively researched Alexander Hamilton justifies his claim that Hamilton’s was the most dramatic and improbable life among the founding fathers. . . . Chernow, who won the National Book Award for The House of Morgan, shows all Hamilton’s complexity.” —David Gates, Newsweek

“Chernow’s splendid, thorough and brilliantly written biography of Hamilton gives us a new understanding of Hamilton’s vital role during the war and immediately af- ter as secretary of the treasury. . . . There have been other biographies of Hamilton, but Chernow’s is far and away the most comprehensive and compelling of any I have read. It is a fitting tribute to the man who set the U.S. on the path that has made our nation the economic leader of the world.”

—Caspar W. Weinberger, former secretary of defense, and chairman of Forbes

“As Ron Chernow points out in this magnificent biography, Hamilton was the boy wonder of early American politics.” —The Economist

“A splendid life of an enlightened and reactionary founding father . . . Literate and full of engaging asides. By far the best of the many lives of Hamilton now in print, and a model of the biographer’s art.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“In Alexander Hamilton, his mammoth and comprehensive study of the nation’s first treasury secretary, Chernow has captured the essence of the man. . . . Chernow is especially skillful at evoking a sense of time and place, an achievement that dom- inates Alexander Hamilton. He goes beyond the stick-figure characters that often emerge from most stories about the founders to present three-dimensional por- trayals. . . . Now, with this carefully crafted revision of the record, Hamilton’s accomplishments should be seen in a different light, one bright enough to show what he has meant for America.” —Ray Locker, The Associated Press

“In this majestic and thorough biography, Chernow explores the conundrums and paradoxes of Hamilton’s private and public life and gives the man his due.”

—John C. Chalberg, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

“Ron Chernow’s fascinating new biography of Alexander Hamilton is the best written about the man. . . . Chernow sorts out this period of history and humanizes Hamil- ton. . . . Chernow obviously believes Hamilton has not received much of the credit he deserves, but this book will help rectify the situation.” —Larry Cox, Tucson Citizen

“In the first full-length biography of Alexander Hamilton in many years, Ron Cher- now, known for his impressive work on the titans of American industry, has made an exceptional contribution to American history.”

—Dennis Lythgoe, Deseret Morning News

“Chernow’s achievement is to give us a biography commensurate with Hamilton’s character, as well as the full, complex content of his unflaggingly active life. . . . This is a fine work that captures Hamilton’s life with judiciousness and verve.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[Chernow’s] sweeping narrative chronicles the complex and often contradictory life of Hamilton. . . . A first-rate life and excellent addition to the ongoing debate about Hamilton’s importance in shaping America.” —Library Journal

“Ron Chernow’s altogether splendid, full-scale biography is a weighty and meticu- lously researched tome of more than 800 pages. It nonetheless reads like a great his- torical novel, because Chernow brings his central characters to such vivid life. This is a life not only of Hamilton the politician, lawyer, and technocrat, but of Hamil- ton the man.” —John Steele Gordon, American Heritage

p e n g u i n b o o k s

A L E X A N D E R H A M I LTO N

A graduate of Yale and Cambridge, Ron Chernow won the National Book Award in 1990 for his first book, The House of Morgan, which the Modern Library cites as one of the hundred best nonfiction books of the twentieth century. His second book, The Warburgs, won the Eccles Prize as the best business book of 1993. His biography of John D. Rockefeller, Titan, was a national bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Both Time magazine and The New York Times listed it among the ten best books of 1998. Chernow lives in Brooklyn, New York.

au t h o r’s n o t e

In order to make the text as fluent as possible and the founders less remote, I have taken the liberty of modernizing the spelling and punctuation of eighteenth-century prose, which can seem antiquated and jarring to mod- ern eyes. I have also cured many contemporary newspaper editors of their addiction to italics and capitalized words. Occasionally, I have retained the original spelling to emphasize the distinctive voice, strong emotion, patent eccentricity, or curious education of the person quoted. I trust that these exceptional cases, and my reasons for wanting to reproduce them pre- cisely, will be evident to the alert reader.

R O N C H E R N OW

ALEXANDER H A M I LTON

p e n g u i n b o o k s

penguin books Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in the United States of America by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2004

Published in Penguin Books 2005

Copyright © Ron Chernow, 2004 All rights reserved

Illustration credits appear on pages 789–90.

the library of congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Chernow, Ron.

Alexander Hamilton / Ron Chernow. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 1-4295-3118-5

1. Hamilton, Alexander, 1757–1804. 2. Statesmen—United States—Biography. 3. United States—Politics and government—1783–1809. I. Title.

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Contents

Author’s Note v

prologue: The Oldest Revolutionary War Widow

one: The Castaways 7

two: Hurricane 29

three: The Collegian 41

four: The Pen and the Sword 62

five: The Little Lion 83

six: A Frenzy of Valor 107

seven: The Lovesick Colonel 126

eight: Glory 154

nine: Raging Billows 167

ten: A Grave, Silent, Strange Sort of Animal 187

eleven: Ghosts 203

twelve: August and Respectable Assembly 219

thirteen: Publius 243

fourteen: Putting the Machine in Motion 270

fifteen: Villainous Business 291

sixteen: Dr. Pangloss 310

seventeen: The First Town in America 332

eighteen: Of Avarice and Enterprise 344

1

nineteen: City of the Future 362

twenty : Corrupt Squadrons 389

twenty-one: Exposure 409

twenty-two: Stabbed in the Dark 419

twenty-three: Citizen Genêt 431

twenty-four: A Disagreeable Trade 448

twenty-five: Seas of Blood 458

twenty-six: The Wicked Insurgents of the West 468

twenty-seven: Sugar Plums and Toys 482

twenty-eight: Spare Cassius 501

twenty-nine: The Man in the Glass Bubble 517

thirty : Flying Too Near the Sun 526

thirty-one: An Instrument of Hell 546

thirty-two: Reign of Witches 569

thirty-three: Works Godly and Ungodly 580

thirty-four: In an Evil Hour 592

thirty-five: Gusts of Passion 603

thirty-six: In a Very Belligerent Humor 619

thirty-seven: Deadlock 630

thirty-eight: A World Full of Folly 640

thirty-nine: Pamphlet Wars 657

forty : The Price of Truth 665

forty-one: A Despicable Opinion 680

forty-two: Fatal Errand 695

forty-three: The Melting Scene 710

epilogue: Eliza 723

Acknowledgments 733

Notes 739

Bibliography 780 Selected Books, Pamphlets, and Dissertations 780

Selected Articles 786

Index 791

TO VA L E R I E ,

best of w ives and best of women

O b s e r v a t i o n s b y A l e x a n d e r H a m i l t o n

I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are,

not as they ought to be.

— L E T T E R O F AU G U S T 1 3 , 1 7 8 2

The passions of a revolution are apt to hurry

even good men into excesses.

— E S S AY O F AU G U S T 1 2 , 1 7 9 5

Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals,

for the most part governed by the impulse of passion.

— L E T T E R O F A P R I L 1 6 , 1 8 0 2

Opinion, whether well or ill founded,

is the governing principle of human affairs.

— L E T T E R O F J U N E 1 8 , 1 7 7 8

PROLOGUE

T H E O L D E ST R EVO LU T I O NA RY

WA R W I D OW

I n the early 1850s, few pedestrians strolling past the house on H Street in Wash-

ington, near the White House, realized that the ancient widow seated by the

window, knitting and arranging flowers, was the last surviving link to the glory

days of the early republic. Fifty years earlier, on a rocky, secluded ledge overlooking

the Hudson River in Weehawken, New Jersey, Aaron Burr, the vice president of the

United States, had fired a mortal shot at her husband, Alexander Hamilton, in a

misbegotten effort to remove the man Burr regarded as the main impediment to

the advancement of his career. Hamilton was then forty-nine years old. Was it a be-

nign or a cruel destiny that had compelled the widow to outlive her husband by half

a century, struggling to raise seven children and surviving almost until the eve of

the Civil War?

Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton—purblind and deaf but gallant to the end—was a

stoic woman who never yielded to self-pity. With her gentle manner, Dutch tenac-

ity, and quiet humor, she clung to the deeply rooted religious beliefs that had abet-

ted her reconciliation to the extraordinary misfortunes she had endured. Even in

her early nineties, she still dropped to her knees for family prayers. Wrapped in

shawls and garbed in the black bombazine dresses that were de rigueur for widows,

she wore a starched white ruff and frilly white cap that bespoke a simpler era in

American life. The dark eyes that gleamed behind large metal-rimmed glasses—

those same dark eyes that had once enchanted a young officer on General George

Washington’s staff—betokened a sharp intelligence, a fiercely indomitable spirit,

and a memory that refused to surrender the past.

In the front parlor of the house she now shared with her daughter, Eliza Hamil-

ton had crammed the faded memorabilia of her now distant marriage. When visi-

2 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

tors called, the tiny, erect, white-haired lady would grab her cane, rise gamely from

a black sofa embroidered with a floral pattern of her own design, and escort them

to a Gilbert Stuart painting of George Washington. She motioned with pride to a

silver wine cooler, tucked discreetly beneath the center table, that had been given to

the Hamiltons by Washington himself. This treasured gift retained a secret meaning

for Eliza, for it had been a tacit gesture of solidarity from Washington when her

husband was ensnared in the first major sex scandal in American history. The tour’s

highlight stood enshrined in the corner: a marble bust of her dead hero, carved by

an Italian sculptor, Giuseppe Ceracchi, during Hamilton’s heyday as the first trea-

sury secretary. Portrayed in the classical style of a noble Roman senator, a toga

draped across one shoulder, Hamilton exuded a brisk energy and a massive intelli-

gence in his wide brow, his face illumined by the half smile that often played about

his features. This was how Eliza wished to recall him: ardent, hopeful, and eternally

young. “That bust I can never forget,” one young visitor remembered, “for the old

lady always paused before it in her tour of the rooms and, leaning on her cane,

gazed and gazed, as if she could never be satisfied.”

For the select few, Eliza unearthed documents written by Hamilton that qualified

as her sacred scripture: an early hymn he had composed or a letter he had drafted

during his impoverished boyhood on St. Croix. She frequently grew melancholy and

longed for a reunion with “her Hamilton,” as she invariably referred to him. “One

night, I remember, she seemed sad and absent-minded and could not go to the par-

lor where there were visitors, but sat near the fire and played backgammon for a

while,” said one caller. “When the game was done, she leaned back in her chair a

long time with closed eyes, as if lost to all around her. There was a long silence, bro-

ken by the murmured words, ‘I am so tired. It is so long. I want to see Hamilton.’ ”1

Eliza Hamilton was committed to one holy quest above all others: to rescue her

husband’s historical reputation from the gross slanders that had tarnished it. For

many years after the duel, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and other political ene-

mies had taken full advantage of their eloquence and longevity to spread defama-

tory anecdotes about Hamilton, who had been condemned to everlasting silence.

Determined to preserve her husband’s legacy, Eliza enlisted as many as thirty assis-

tants to sift through his tall stacks of papers. Unfortunately, she was so self-effacing

and so reverential toward her husband that, though she salvaged every scrap of his

writing, she apparently destroyed her own letters. The capstone of her monumen-

tal labor, her life’s “dearest object,” was the publication of a mammoth authorized

biography that would secure Hamilton’s niche in the pantheon of the early repub-

lic. It was a long, exasperating wait as one biographer after another discarded the

project or expired before its completion. Almost by default, the giant enterprise fell

to her fourth son, John Church Hamilton, who belatedly disgorged a seven-volume

3 The Oldest Re volutionar y War Widow

history of his father’s exploits. Before this hagiographic tribute was completed,

however, Eliza Hamilton died at ninety-seven on November 9, 1854.

Distraught that their mother had waited vainly for decades to see her husband’s

life immortalized, Eliza Hamilton Holly scolded her brother for his overdue biog-

raphy. “Lately in my hours of sadness, recurring to such interests as most deeply af-

fected our blessed Mother . . . I could recall none more frequent or more absorbent

than her devotion to our Father. When blessed memory shows her gentle counte-

nance and her untiring spirit before me, in this one great and beautiful aspiration

after duty, I feel the same spark ignite and bid me . . . to seek the fulfillment of her

words: ‘Justice shall be done to the memory of my Hamilton.’ ”2 It was, Eliza Hamil-

ton Holly noted pointedly, the imperative duty that Eliza had bequeathed to all her

children: Justice shall be done to the memory of my Hamilton.

Well, has justice been done? Few figures in American history have aroused such

visceral love or loathing as Alexander Hamilton. To this day, he seems trapped in a

crude historical cartoon that pits “Jeffersonian democracy” against “Hamiltonian

aristocracy.” For Jefferson and his followers, wedded to their vision of an agrarian

Eden, Hamilton was the American Mephistopheles, the proponent of such devilish

contrivances as banks, factories, and stock exchanges. They demonized him as a

slavish pawn of the British Crown, a closet monarchist, a Machiavellian intriguer, a

would-be Caesar. Noah Webster contended that Hamilton’s “ambition, pride, and

overbearing temper” had destined him “to be the evil genius of this country.”3

Hamilton’s powerful vision of American nationalism, with states subordinate to a

strong central government and led by a vigorous executive branch, aroused fears of

a reversion to royal British ways. His seeming solicitude for the rich caused critics

to portray him as a snobbish tool of plutocrats who was contemptuous of the

masses. For another group of naysayers, Hamilton’s unswerving faith in a profes-

sional military converted him into a potential despot. “From the first to the last

words he wrote,” concluded historian Henry Adams, “I read always the same

Napoleonic kind of adventuredom.”4 Even some Hamilton admirers have been un-

settled by a faint tincture of something foreign in this West Indian transplant;

Woodrow Wilson grudgingly praised Hamilton as “a very great man, but not a great

American.”5

Yet many distinguished commentators have echoed Eliza Hamilton’s lament that

justice has not been done to her Hamilton. He has tended to lack the glittering

multivolumed biographies that have burnished the fame of other founders. The

British statesman Lord Bryce singled out Hamilton as the one founding father who

had not received his due from posterity. In The American Commonwealth, he ob-

served, “One cannot note the disappearance of this brilliant figure, to Europeans

the most interesting in the early history of the Republic, without the remark that his

4 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

countrymen seem to have never, either in his lifetime or afterwards, duly recognized

his splendid gifts.”6 During the robust era of Progressive Republicanism, marked by

brawny nationalism and energetic government, Theodore Roosevelt took up the

cudgels and declared Hamilton “the most brilliant American statesman who ever

lived, possessing the loftiest and keenest intellect of his time.”7 His White House

successor, William Howard Taft, likewise embraced Hamilton as “our greatest con-

structive statesman.”8 In all probability, Alexander Hamilton is the foremost politi-

cal figure in American history who never attained the presidency, yet he probably

had a much deeper and more lasting impact than many who did.

Hamilton was the supreme double threat among the founding fathers, at once

thinker and doer, sparkling theoretician and masterful executive. He and James

Madison were the prime movers behind the summoning of the Constitutional

Convention and the chief authors of that classic gloss on the national charter, The

Federalist, which Hamilton supervised. As the first treasury secretary and principal

architect of the new government, Hamilton took constitutional principles and in-

fused them with expansive life, turning abstractions into institutional realities. He

had a pragmatic mind that minted comprehensive programs. In contriving the

smoothly running machinery of a modern nation-state—including a budget sys-

tem, a funded debt, a tax system, a central bank, a customs service, and a coast

guard—and justifying them in some of America’s most influential state papers, he

set a high-water mark for administrative competence that has never been equaled.

If Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton

established the prose of American statecraft. No other founder articulated such a

clear and prescient vision of America’s future political, military, and economic

strength or crafted such ingenious mechanisms to bind the nation together.

Hamilton’s crowded years as treasury secretary scarcely exhaust the epic story of

his short life, which was stuffed with high drama. From his illegitimate birth on

Nevis to his bloody downfall in Weehawken, Hamilton’s life was so tumultuous that

only an audacious novelist could have dreamed it up. He embodied an enduring ar-

chetype: the obscure immigrant who comes to America, re-creates himself, and

succeeds despite a lack of proper birth and breeding. The saga of his metamorpho-

sis from an anguished clerk on St. Croix to the reigning presence in George Wash-

ington’s cabinet offers both a gripping personal story and a panoramic view of the

formative years of the republic. Except for Washington, nobody stood closer to the

center of American politics from 1776 to 1800 or cropped up at more turning

points. More than anyone else, the omnipresent Hamilton galvanized, inspired, and

scandalized the newborn nation, serving as the flash point for pent-up conflicts of

class, geography, race, religion, and ideology. His contemporaries often seemed de-

5 The Oldest Re volutionar y War Widow

fined by how they reacted to the political gauntlets that he threw down repeatedly

with such defiant panache.

Hamilton was an exuberant genius who performed at a fiendish pace and must

have produced the maximum number of words that a human being can scratch out

in forty-nine years. If promiscuous with his political opinions, however, he was fa-

mously reticent about his private life, especially his squalid Caribbean boyhood. No

other founder had to grapple with such shame and misery, and his early years have

remained wrapped in more mystery than those of any other major American

statesman. While not scanting his vibrant intellectual life, I have tried to gather an-

ecdotal material that will bring this cerebral man to life as both a public and a pri-

vate figure. Charming and impetuous, romantic and witty, dashing and headstrong,

Hamilton offers the biographer an irresistible psychological study. For all his su-

perlative mental gifts, he was afflicted with a touchy ego that made him querulous

and fatally combative. He never outgrew the stigma of his illegitimacy, and his ex-

quisite tact often gave way to egregious failures of judgment that left even his keen-

est admirers aghast. If capable of numerous close friendships, he also entered into

titanic feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Monroe, and Burr.

The magnitude of Hamilton’s feats as treasury secretary has overshadowed

many other facets of his life: clerk, college student, youthful poet, essayist, artillery

captain, wartime adjutant to Washington, battlefield hero, congressman, abolition-

ist, Bank of New York founder, state assemblyman, member of the Constitutional

Convention and New York Ratifying Convention, orator, lawyer, polemicist, educa-

tor, patron saint of the New-York Evening Post, foreign-policy theorist, and major

general in the army. Boldly uncompromising, he served as catalyst for the emer-

gence of the first political parties and as the intellectual fountainhead for one of

them, the Federalists. He was a pivotal force in four consecutive presidential elec-

tions and defined much of America’s political agenda during the Washington and

Adams administrations, leaving copious commentary on virtually every salient is-

sue of the day.

Earlier generations of biographers had to rely on only a meager portion of his

voluminous output. Between 1961 and 1987, Harold C. Syrett and his doughty ed-

itorial team at Columbia University Press published twenty-seven thick volumes of

Hamilton’s personal and political papers. Julius Goebel, Jr., and his staff added five

volumes of legal and business papers to the groaning shelf, bringing the total haul

to twenty-two thousand pages. These meticulous editions are much more than ex-

haustive compilations of Hamilton’s writings: they are a scholar’s feast, enriched

with expert commentary as well as contemporary newspaper extracts, letters, and

diary entries. No biographer has fully harvested these riches. I have supplemented

6 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

this research with extensive archival work that has uncovered, among other things,

nearly fifty previously undiscovered essays written by Hamilton himself. To retrieve

his early life from its often impenetrable obscurity, I have also scoured records in

Scotland, England, Denmark, and eight Caribbean islands, not to mention many

domestic archives. The resulting portrait, I hope, will seem fresh and surprising

even to those best versed in the literature of the period.

It is an auspicious time to reexamine the life of Hamilton, who was the prophet

of the capitalist revolution in America. If Jefferson enunciated the more ample view

of political democracy, Hamilton possessed the finer sense of economic opportu-

nity. He was the messenger from a future that we now inhabit. We have left behind

the rosy agrarian rhetoric and slaveholding reality of Jeffersonian democracy and

reside in the bustling world of trade, industry, stock markets, and banks that Hamil-

ton envisioned. (Hamilton’s staunch abolitionism formed an integral feature of this

economic vision.) He has also emerged as the uncontested visionary in anticipat-

ing the shape and powers of the federal government. At a time when Jefferson and

Madison celebrated legislative power as the purest expression of the popular will,

Hamilton argued for a dynamic executive branch and an independent judiciary,

along with a professional military, a central bank, and an advanced financial sys-

tem. Today, we are indisputably the heirs to Hamilton’s America, and to repudiate

his legacy is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.

ONE

T H E CA STAWAY S

A lexander Hamilton claimed Nevis in the British West Indies as his birth-

place, although no surviving records substantiate this. Today, the tiny is-

land seems little more than a colorful speck in the Caribbean, an exotic

tourist hideaway. One million years ago, the land that is now Nevis Peak thrust up

from the seafloor to form the island, and the extinct volcanic cone still intercepts

the trade winds at an altitude of 3,200 feet, its jagged peak often obscured behind a

thick swirl of clouds. This omnipresent mountain, looming over jungles, plunging

gorges, and verdant foothills that sweep down to sandy beaches, made the island a

natural fortress for the British. It abounded in both natural wonders and horrors:

in 1690, the first capital, Jamestown, was swallowed whole by the sea during an

earthquake and tidal wave.

To modern eyes, Nevis may seem like a sleepy backwater to which Hamilton was

confined before his momentous escape to St. Croix and North America. But if we

adjust our vision to eighteenth-century realities, we see that this West Indian setting

was far from marginal, the crossroads of a bitter maritime rivalry among European

powers vying for mastery of the lucrative sugar trade. A small revolution in con-

sumer tastes had turned the Caribbean into prized acreage for growing sugarcane

to sweeten the coffee, tea, and cocoa imbibed in fashionable European capitals. As a

result, the small, scattered islands generated more wealth for Britain than all of her

North American colonies combined. “The West Indians vastly outweigh us of the

northern colonies,” Benjamin Franklin grumbled in the 1760s.1 After the French

and Indian War, the British vacillated about whether to swap all of Canada for the

island of Guadeloupe; in the event the French toasted their own diplomatic cun-

ning in retaining the sugar island. The sudden popularity of sugar, dubbed “white

8 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

gold,” engendered a brutal world of overnight fortunes in which slavery proved in-

dispensable. Since indigenous Caribbeans and Europeans balked at toiling in the

sweltering canebrakes, thousands of blacks were shipped from slave-trading forts in

West Africa to cultivate Nevis and the neighboring islands.

British authorities colonized Nevis with vagabonds, criminals, and other riffraff

swept from the London streets to work as indentured servants or overseers. In 1727,

the minister of a local Anglican church, aching for some glimmer of spirituality, re-

gretted that the slaves were inclined to “laziness, stealing, stubbornness, murmur-

ing, treachery, lying, drunkenness and the like.” But he reserved his most scathing

strictures for a rowdy white populace composed of “whole shiploads of pickpock-

ets, whores, rogues, vagrants, thieves, sodomites, and other filth and cutthroats of

society.”2 Trapped in this beautiful but godless spot, the minister bemoaned that the

British imports “were not bad enough for the gallows and yet too bad to live among

their virtuous countrymen at home.”3 While other founding fathers were reared in

tidy New England villages or cosseted on baronial Virginia estates, Hamilton grew

up in a tropical hellhole of dissipated whites and fractious slaves, all framed by a

backdrop of luxuriant natural beauty.

On both his maternal and paternal sides, Hamilton’s family clung to the insecure

middle rung of West Indian life, squeezed between plantation aristocrats above and

street rabble and unruly slaves below. Taunted as a bastard throughout his life,

Hamilton was understandably reluctant to chat about his childhood—“my birth is

the subject of the most humiliating criticism,” he wrote in one pained confession—

and he turned his early family history into a taboo topic, alluded to in only a cou-

ple of cryptic letters.4 He described his maternal grandfather, the physician John

Faucette, as “a French Huguenot who emigrated to the West Indies in consequence

of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and settled in the island of Nevis and there

acquired a pretty fortune. [Revoked in 1685 by Louis XIV, the Edict of Nantes had

guaranteed religious toleration for French Protestants.] I have been assured by per-

sons who knew him that he was a man of letters and much of a gentleman.”5 Born

ten years after his grandfather’s death, Hamilton may have embellished the sketch

with a touch of gentility. In the slave-based economy, physicians often attended the

auctions, checking the teeth of the human chattel and making them run, leap, and

jump to test whatever strength remained after the grueling middle passage. No

white in the sugar islands was entirely exempt from the pervasive taint of slavery.

The archives of St. George’s Parish in the fertile, mountainous Gingerland sec-

tion of Nevis record the marriage of John Faucette to a British woman, Mary Up-

pington, on August 21, 1718. By that point, they already had two children: a

daughter, Ann, and a son, John, the latter arriving two months before the wedding.

In all likelihood, lulled by the casual mores of the tropics, the Faucettes decided to

9 The Castaways

formalize their link after the birth of their second child, having lived until then as a

common-law couple—an expedient adopted by Hamilton’s own parents. In all, the

Faucettes produced seven children, Hamilton’s mother, Rachel, being the second

youngest, born circa 1729.

A persistent mythology in the Caribbean asserts that Rachel was partly black,

making Alexander Hamilton a quadroon or an octoroon. In this obsessively race-

conscious society, however, Rachel was invariably listed among the whites on local

tax rolls. Her identification as someone of mixed race has no basis in verifiable fact.

(See pages 734–35.) The folklore that Hamilton was mulatto probably arose from

the incontestable truth that many, if not most, illegitimate children in the West In-

dies bore mixed blood. At the time of Rachel’s birth, the four thousand slaves on

Nevis outnumbered whites by a ratio of four to one, making inequitable carnal re-

lations between black slaves and white masters a dreadful commonplace.

Occupying a house in the southern Nevis foothills, the Faucettes owned a small

sugar plantation and had at least seven slaves—pretty typical for the petite bour-

geoisie. That Nevis later had a small black village named Fawcett, an anglicized ver-

sion of the family name, confirms their ownership of slaves who later assumed their

surname. The sugar islands were visited so regularly by epidemics of almost bibli-

cal proportions—malaria, dysentery, and yellow fever being the worst offenders—

that five Faucette children perished in infancy or childhood, leaving only Rachel

and her much older sister, Ann, as survivors. Even aided by slaves, small planters

found it a tough existence. Skirting the volcanic cone, the Nevis hills were so steep

and rocky that, even when terraced, they proved troublesome for sugar cultivation.

The island steadily lost its economic eminence, especially after a mysterious plant

disease, aggravated by drought, slowly crept across Nevis in 1737 and denuded it of

much of its lush vegetation. This prompted a mass exodus of refugees, including

Ann Faucette, who had married a well-to-do planter named James Lytton. They de-

camped to the Danish island of St. Croix, charting an escape route that Hamilton’s

parents were to follow.

Evidence indicates that the Faucette marriage was marred by perpetual squab-

bling, perhaps compounded by the back-to-back deaths of two of their children in

1736 and the blight that parched the island the next year. Mary Faucette was a

pretty, socially ambitious woman and probably not content to dawdle on a stagnant

island. Determined and resourceful, with a clear knack for cultivating powerful

men, she appealed to the chancellor of the Leeward Islands for a legal separation

from her husband. In the 1740 settlement, the Faucettes agreed to “live separately

and apart for the rest of their lives,” and Mary renounced all rights to her husband’s

property in exchange for an inadequate annuity of fifty-three pounds.6 It is possi-

ble that she and Rachel traversed the narrow two-mile strait to St. Kitts, where they

10 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

may even have first encountered a young Scottish nobleman named James Hamil-

ton. Because her mother had surrendered all claims to John Faucette’s money,

sixteen-year-old Rachel Faucette achieved the sudden glow of a minor heiress in

1745 when her father died and left her all his property. Since Rachel was bright,

beautiful, and strong willed—traits we can deduce from subsequent events—she

must have been hotly pursued in a world chronically deficient in well-heeled, edu-

cated European women.

Rachel and her mother decided to start anew on St. Croix, where James and Ann

Lytton had prospered, building a substantial estate outside the capital, Christiansted,

called the Grange. The Lyttons likely introduced them to another newcomer from

Nevis, a Dane named Johann Michael Lavien, who had peddled household goods

and now aspired to planter status. The name Lavien can be a Sephardic variant of

Levine, but if he was Jewish he managed to conceal his origins. Had he presented

himself as a Jew, the snobbish Mary Faucette would certainly have squelched the

match in a world that frowned on religious no less than interracial marriage.

From fragmentary evidence, Lavien emerges as a man who dreamed of plucking

sudden riches from the New World but stumbled, like others, into multiple disap-

pointments. The year before he met Rachel, he squandered much of his paltry cap-

ital on a minor St. Croix sugar plantation. On this island of grand estates, a profitable

operation required fifty to one hundred slaves, something beyond the reveries of

the thinly capitalized Lavien. He then lowered his sights appreciably and, trying to

become a planter on the cheap, acquired a 50 percent stake in a small cotton plan-

tation. He ended up deeply in hock to the Danish West India and Guinea Company.

Beyond her apparent physical allure, Rachel Faucette must have represented a fresh

source of ready cash for Lavien.

For Alexander Hamilton, Johann Michael Lavien was the certified ogre of his

family saga. He wrote, “A Dane, a fortune hunter of the name of Lavine [Hamilton’s

spelling], came to Nevis bedizzened with gold and paid his addresses to my mother,

then a handsome young woman having a snug fortune.” In the eighteenth century,

a “snug” fortune signified one sufficient for a comparatively easy life. Partial to

black silk gowns and blue vests with bright gold buttons, Lavien was a flashy dresser

and must have splurged on such finery to hide his threadbare budget and palm

himself off on Mary Faucette as an affluent suitor. Hamilton rued the day that his

grandmother was “captivated by the glitter” of Lavien’s appearance and auctioned

her daughter off, as it were, to the highest bidder. “In compliance with the wishes

of her mother . . . but against her own inclination,” Hamilton stated, the sixteeen-

year-old Rachel agreed to marry the older Lavien, her senior by at least a dozen

years.7 In Hamilton’s blunt estimation, it was “a hated marriage,” as the daughter of

one unhappy union was rushed straight into another.8

11 The Castaways

In 1745, the ill-fated wedding took place at the Grange. The newlyweds set up

house on their own modest plantation, which was named, with macabre irony, Con-

tentment. The following year, the teenage bride gave birth to a son, Peter, destined

to be her one legitimate child. One wonders if Rachel ever submitted to further

conjugal relations with Lavien. Even if Lavien was not the “coarse man of repulsive

personality” evoked by Hamilton’s grandson, it seems clear that Rachel felt stifled

by her older husband, finding him crude and insufferable.9 In 1748, Lavien bought

a half share in another small sugar plantation, enlarging his debt and frittering away

Rachel’s fast dwindling inheritance. The marriage deteriorated to the point where

the headstrong wife simply abandoned the house around 1750. A vindictive Lavien

ranted in a subsequent divorce decree that while Rachel had lived with him she had

“committed such errors which as between husband and wife were indecent and

”11very suspicious.”10 In his severe judgment she was “shameless, coarse, and ungodly.

Enraged, his pride bruised, Lavien was determined to humiliate his unruly bride.

Seizing on a Danish law that allowed a husband to jail his wife if she was twice

found guilty of adultery and no longer resided with him, he had Rachel clapped

into the dreaded Christiansvaern, the Christiansted fort, which did double duty as

the town jail.12 Rachel has sometimes been portrayed as a “prostitute”—one of

Hamilton’s journalistic nemeses branded him “the son of a camp-girl”—but such

insinuations are absurd.13 On the other hand, that Lavien broadcast his accusations

against her and met no outright refutation suggests that Rachel had indeed flouted

social convention and found solace in the arms of other men.

Perched on the edge of Gallows Bay, Fort Christiansvaern had cannon that could

be trained on pirates or enemy ships crossing the coral reef, as well as smaller ar-

tillery that could be swiveled landward and used to suppress slave insurrections. In

this ghastly place, unspeakable punishments were meted out to rebellious blacks

who had committed heinous crimes: striking whites, torching cane fields, or dashing

off to freedom. They could be whipped, branded, and castrated, shackled with heavy

leg irons, and entombed in filthy dungeons. The remaining cells tended to be pop-

ulated by town drunks, petty thieves, and the other dregs of white society. It seems

that no woman other than Rachel Lavien was ever imprisoned there for adultery.

Rachel spent several months in a dank, cramped cell that measured ten by thirteen

feet, and she must have gone through infernal torments of fear and loneliness.

Through a small, deeply inset window, she could stare across sharpened spikes that

encircled the outer wall and gaze at blue-green water that sparkled in fierce tropical

sunlight. She could also eavesdrop on the busy wharf, stacked with hogsheads of

sugar, which her son Alexander would someday frequent as a young clerk in a trad-

ing firm. All the while, she had to choke down a nauseating diet of salted herring,

codfish, and boiled yellow cornmeal mush.

12 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

As an amateur psychologist, Lavien left something to be desired, for he imagined

that when Rachel was released after three to five months this broken woman would

now tamely submit to his autocratic rule—that “everything would be better and

that she like a true wife would have changed her ungodly mode of life and would

live with him as was meet and fitting,” as the divorce decree later proclaimed.14 He

had not reckoned on her invincible spirit. Solitude had only stiffened her resolve to

expel Lavien from her life. As Hamilton later philosophized in another context, “Tis

only to consult our own hearts to be convinced that nations like individuals revolt

at the idea of being guided by external compulsion.”15 After Rachel left the fort, she

spent a week with her mother, who was living with one of St. Croix’s overlords,

Town Captain Bertram Pieter de Nully, and supporting herself by sewing and rent-

ing out her three slaves.

Then Rachel did something brave but reckless that sealed her future status as a

pariah: she fled the island, abandoning both Lavien and her sole son, Peter. In do-

ing so, she relinquished the future benefits of a legal separation and inadvertently

doomed the unborn Alexander to illegitimacy. In her proud defiance of persecu-

tion, her mental toughness, and her willingness to court controversy, it is hard not

to see a startling preview of her son’s passionately willful behavior.

When she left for St. Kitts in 1750, Rachel seems to have been accompanied by

her mother, who announced her departure to creditors in a newspaper notice and

settled her debts. Rachel must have imagined that she would never again set eyes on

St. Croix and that the vengeful Lavien had inflicted his final lash. Alexander Hamil-

ton may have been musing upon his mother’s marriage to Lavien when he later ob-

served, “ ’Tis a very good thing when their stars unite two people who are fit for each

other, who have souls capable of relishing the sweets of friendship and sensibili-

ties. . . . But it’s a dog of [a] life when two dissonant tempers meet.”16 When the

time came for choosing his own wife, he would proceed with special care.

Hamilton’s other star-crossed parent, James Hamilton, had also been bedeviled

by misfortune in the islands. Born around 1718, he was the fourth of eleven chil-

dren (nine sons, two daughters) of Alexander Hamilton, the laird of Grange in

Stevenston Parish in Ayrshire, Scotland, southwest of Glasgow. In 1711, that

Alexander Hamilton, the fourteenth laird in the so-called Cambuskeith line of

Hamiltons, married Elizabeth Pollock, the daughter of a baronet. As Alexander

must have heard ad nauseam in his boyhood, the Cambuskeith Hamiltons pos-

sessed a coat of arms and for centuries had owned a castle near Kilmarnock called

the Grange. Indeed, that lineage can be traced back to the fourteenth century in im-

peccable genealogical tables, and he boasted in later years that he was the scion of a

blue-ribbon Scottish family: “The truth is that, on the question who my parents

13 The Castaways

were, I have better pretensions than most of those who in this country plume them-

selves on ancestry.”17

In 1685, the family took possession of ivy-covered Kerelaw Castle, set promi-

nently on windswept hills above the little seaside town of Stevenston. Today just a

mound of picturesque ruins, this stately pile then featured a great hall with grace-

ful Gothic windows and came complete with its own barony. “The castle stands on

the rather steep, wooded bank of a small stream, and overlooks a beautiful glen,”

wrote one newspaper while the structure stood intact.18 The castle’s occupants en-

joyed a fine if often fogbound view of the island of Arran across the Firth of Clyde.

Then as now, the North Ayrshire countryside consisted of gently rolling mead-

ows that were well watered by streams and ponds; cows and horses browsed on

largely treeless hillsides. At the time James Hamilton grew up in Kerelaw Castle, the

family estate was so huge that it encompassed not just Stevenston but half the

arable land in the parish. Aside from a cottage industry of weavers and a small band

of artisans who made Jew’s harps, most local residents huddled in cold hovels, sub-

sisted on a gruesome oatmeal diet, and eked out hardscrabble lives as tenant farm-

ers for the Hamiltons. For all his storybook upbringing in the castle and highborn

pedigree, James Hamilton faced uncertain prospects. As the fourth son, he had lit-

tle chance of ever inheriting the storied title of laird of Grange, and, like all younger

brothers in this precarious spot, he was expected to go off and fend for himself. As

his son Alexander noted, his father, as “a younger son of a numerous family,” was

“bred to trade.”

From the sketchy information that can be gleaned about James’s siblings, it seems

that he was the black sheep of the family, marked for mediocrity. While James had

no formal education to speak of, two older and two younger brothers attended the

University of Glasgow, and most of his siblings found comfortable niches in the

world. Brother John financed manufacturing and insurance ventures. Brother

Alexander became a surgeon, brother Walter a doctor and apothecary, and brother

William a prosperous tobacco merchant, while sister Elizabeth married the sur-

veyor of customs for Port Glasgow. Easygoing and lackadaisical, devoid of the am-

bition that would propel his spirited son, James Hamilton did not seem to internalize

the Glaswegian ethos of hard work and strict discipline.

One has the impression that his eldest brother, John, now laird of Grange, was

no country squire riding to hounds but an active, enterprising man who was in-

tensely involved in the banking, shipping, and textile business revolutionizing Glas-

gow. This cathedral and university town, rhapsodized by Daniel Defoe in the 1720s

as “the most beautiful little town in Britain,” already breathed a lively commercial

spirit of the sort that later appealed to Alexander Hamilton.19 After the 1707 union

14 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

with England, as Scottish trade with the North American and West Indian colonies

boomed, merchant princes grew rich trafficking in sugar, tobacco, and cotton. In

November 1737, John Hamilton took the affable but feckless James, then nineteen,

and steered him into a four-year apprenticeship with an innovative Glasgow busi-

nessman named Richard Allan. Allan had executed a daring raid on Dutch indus-

trial secrets (one that strikingly anticipates what Alexander Hamilton later attempted

in bringing manufacturing to Paterson, New Jersey) and helped to pioneer the linen

industry in Scotland with his Haarlem Linen and Dye Manufactory.

In 1741, John Hamilton teamed up with Allan and three Glasgow grandees—

Archibald Ingram, John Glassford, and James Dechman—to form the Glasgow

Inkle Factory, which produced linen tapes (inkles) that were used in making lace.

Hamilton’s partners were the commercial royalty of Glasgow, who drove about in

fancy coaches, presided over landed estates, and dominated the River Clyde with

their oceangoing vessels. For many years these men would tirelessly bail out the

hapless James Hamilton from recurrent financial scrapes.

The onerous four-year contract that James Hamilton signed with Richard Allan

in 1737 was a form of legal bondage that obligated him to work as both “an ap-

prentice and servant.”20 John Hamilton paid Allan forty-five pounds sterling to

groom his younger brother in the textile trade. In exchange, James would receive

room, board, and fresh linen in the Allan household but no guaranteed holidays

or free weekend time. John Hamilton must have thought that he was shepherding

the wayward James into a promising new industry. In time, the linen industry in-

deed proved profitable, but during this start-up phase it was a dispiriting, money-

draining proposition. So when the apprenticeship agreement expired in 1741, James

Hamilton decided to test his luck in the West Indies.

Many young aristocrats flocked to the West Indian sugar islands, seduced by a

common fantasy: they would amass a quick fortune as planters or merchants, then

return to Europe, flush with cash, and snap up magnificent estates. The Glasgow

countryside was studded with the country houses of winners in this sweepstakes.

Great shiploads of sugar traveled from the West Indian islands to Glasgow’s “boil-

ing houses” or refineries, and its distilleries produced brandy from that sugar. Beyond

the sugar trade, industrious Scots also operated stores that sold provisions to plan-

tations and marketed their produce. One historian has noted, “Their emporiums

were crammed with full lines of European and North American goods—hardware,

draperies, clothing, shoes, and what not—and much resembled warehouses.”21 Of

all the Caribbean islands, few enjoyed more intimate connections with Glasgow

than St. Christopher in the Leeward Islands, commonly known as St. Kitts. More

than half of the island’s original land grants were awarded to Scots.

As the son of a Scottish laird, James Hamilton must have started out with a mod-

15 The Castaways

icum of social cachet in St. Kitts, but it was never enhanced by money or business

success. Trading sugar or plantation supplies in the West Indies was hazardous to

those with skimpy capital. Clients demanded credit from these middlemen, who

had to carry the risk for merchandise until it was resold in Europe; meanwhile, they

had to pay the sugar duties. The slightest error in calculation or payment delay

could swamp a trader in catastrophic losses. Some such fate probably overtook

James Hamilton, who faltered quickly and had to be rescued repeatedly by his

brother John and his Glasgow friends. “In capacity of a merchant he went to St.

Kitts, where from too generous and too easy a temper he failed in business and at

length fell into indigent circumstances,” his son Alexander wrote in tactful tones.22

He spoke of his father in a forgiving tone, tinged with pity rather than scorn. “It was

his fault to have had too much pride and too large a portion of indolence, but his

character was otherwise without reproach and his manners those of a gentleman.”23

In short, Hamilton saw his father as amiable but lazily inept. He inherited his fa-

ther’s pride, though not his indolence, and his exceptional capacity for work was its

own unspoken commentary about his father’s.

James Hamilton had little notion that his protective older brother was acting as

his lender of last resort, for John exhorted his brother’s creditors to mask his role,

cautioning one creditor in 1749, “My brother does not know I am engaged for

him.”24 From John Hamilton’s letters, one senses that James was distant, even es-

tranged, from his family. “The last letter his mother had from him was some time

ago, where he writes he had bills but at that time they were not due,” John disclosed

in one letter to a business associate.25 Perhaps embarrassed by his perennial bungling,

James seems to have concealed the scope of his financial troubles.

That James Hamilton’s career likely lay in ruins before Rachel Faucette Lavien

materialized is suggested by the minutes of the St. Kitts Council meeting of July 15,

1748, which reported that he had taken the oath of either a watchman or a weigh

man (insects have unfortunately eaten the middle letters) for the port of Basseterre,

the island’s capital.26 So if his stint in the tropics was meant to be a fleeting, money-

making interlude, it had begun to turn into a permanent trap instead. Many

young European fortune seekers, expecting to return home, would take a tempo-

rary black or mulatto mistress and defer marriage until safely back on native soil.

That his plans had drastically miscarried would have made James Hamilton more

receptive to a romantic liaison with a separated European woman, now that he knew

he was not going to see Scotland again any time soon.

By the time Rachel met James Hamilton for sure in St. Kitts in the early 1750s, a

certain symmetry had shaped their lives. They were both scarred by early setbacks,

had suffered a vertiginous descent in social standing, and had grappled with the ter-

rors of downward economic mobility. Each would have been excluded from the

16 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

more rarefied society of the British West Indies and tempted to choose a mate from

the limited population of working whites. Their liaison was the sort of match that

could easily produce a son hypersensitive about class and status and painfully con-

scious that social hierarchies ruled the world.

Divorce was a novelty in the eighteenth century. To obtain one in the Crown

colonies was an expensive, tortuous affair, and this deprived James and Rachel of

any chance to legitimize their match. Putting the best face on the embarrassing sit-

uation, Alexander sometimes pretended that his parents had married. Of Rachel’s

flight from St. Croix, he declared, “My mother afterwards went to St. Kitts, became

acquainted with my father and a marriage between them ensued, followed by many

years cohabitation and several children.”27 Since the relationship may have lasted

fifteen years, it presumably took on the trappings of a marriage, enabling Alexander

to maintain that his illegitimacy was a mere legal technicality and had nothing to do

with negligent or profligate parents. Indeed, Hamilton’s parents, though a common-

law couple, presented themselves as James and Rachel Hamilton. They had two sons:

James, Jr., and, two years later, Alexander. (Since Hamilton spoke of his mother’s

bearing “several children,” other siblings may have died in childhood.)

The personalities of James and Rachel Hamilton evoked by Alexander’s descen-

dants have a slightly unreal, even sanitized, quality. Hamilton’s own son John con-

jured up Rachel as “a woman of superior intellect, elevated sentiment, and unusual

grace of person and manner. To her he was indebted for his genius.”28 Perhaps

no less fanciful was the paternal portrait daubed by Hamilton’s grandson Allan

McLane Hamilton: “Hamilton’s father does not appear to have been successful in

any pursuit, but in many ways was a great deal of a dreamer, and something of a stu-

dent, whose chief happiness seemed to be in the society of his beautiful and tal-

ented wife, who was in every way intellectually his superior.”29 Is this cozy domestic

scene based on credible oral history or family public relations? The documentary

record is, alas, mute. The one inescapable impression we have is that Hamilton re-

ceived his brains and implacable willpower from his mother, not from his errant,

indolent father. On the other hand, his father’s Scottish ancestry enabled Alexander

to daydream that he was not merely a West Indian outcast, consigned forever to a

lowly status, but an aristocrat in disguise, waiting to declare his true identity and act

his part on a grander stage.

Few questions bedevil Hamilton biographers more than the baffling matter of

his year of birth. For a long time, historians accepted 1757, the year used by Hamil-

ton himself and his family. Yet several cogent pieces of evidence from his Caribbean

period have caused many recent historians to opt for 1755. In 1766, Hamilton af-

fixed his signature as the witness to a legal document, a dubious honor if he was

17 The Castaways

only nine. In 1768, a probate court in St. Croix reported his age as thirteen—highly

compelling evidence, since it did not rely on his testimony but came from his uncle.

When Alexander published a poem in a St. Croix newspaper in 1771, the aspiring

bard informed the editor, “Sir, I am a youth about seventeen”—an adolescent’s way

of stating that he was sixteen, which would also tally with the 1755 date. The mass

of evidence from the period after Hamilton’s arrival in North America does suggest

1757 as his birth year, but, preferring the integrity of contemporary over retrospec-

tive evidence, we will opt here for a birthday of January 11, 1755.

From her father, Rachel had inherited a waterfront property on the main street

in Charlestown, the Nevis capital, where legend proclaims that Alexander was born

and lived as a boy. If so, he would have seen off to the left the town anchorage and

a bright expanse of water, crowded with slave and cargo ships; off to the right lay the

rugged foothills and dim, brown mountains of St. Kitts. Appropriately enough, this

boy destined to be America’s foremost Anglophile entered the world as a British

subject, born on a British isle, in the reign of George II. He was slight and thin

shouldered and distinctly Scottish in appearance, with a florid complexion, reddish-

brown hair, and sparkling violet-blue eyes. One West Indian mentor who remem-

bered Hamilton as bookish and “rather delicate and frail” marveled that he had

mustered the later energy for his strenuous American exploits.30 Like everyone in

the West Indies, Hamilton had extensive early exposure to blacks. In this highly

stratified society, with its many gradations of caste and color, even poor whites

owned slaves and hired them out for extra income. In 1756, one year after Hamil-

ton was born, his grandmother, Mary Faucette, now residing on the Dutch island of

St. Eustatius, made out her final will and left “my three dear slaves, Rebecca, Flora

and Esther” to her daughter Rachel.31

Hamiliton probably did not have formal schooling on Nevis—his illegitimate

birth may well have barred him from Anglican instruction—but he seems to have

had individual tutoring. His son later related that “rarely as he alluded to his per-

sonal history, he mentioned with a smile his having been taught to repeat the Deca-

logue in Hebrew, at the school of a Jewess, when so small that he was placed

standing by her side upon a table.”32 This charming vignette squares with two

known facts: elderly women in the Caribbean commonly tutored children, and

Nevis had a thriving population of Sephardic Jews, many of whom had escaped

persecution in Brazil and entered the local sugar trade. By the 1720s, they consti-

tuted one quarter of Charlestown’s white population and created a synagogue, a

school, and a well-kept cemetery that survives to this day. His French Huguenot

mother may also have instructed Hamilton, for he was comfortably bilingual and

later was more at ease in French than Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and other Ameri-

can diplomats who had spent years struggling to master the tongue in Paris.

18 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

Perhaps from this exposure at an impressionable age, Hamilton harbored a life-

long reverence for Jews. In later years, he privately jotted on a sheet of paper that

the “progress of the Jews . . . from their earliest history to the present time has been

and is entirely out of the ordinary course of human affairs. Is it not then a fair con-

clusion that the cause also is an extraordinary one—in other words that it is the ef-

fect of some great providential plan?”33 Later on, in the heat of a renowned legal

case, Hamilton challenged the opposing counsel: “Why distrust the evidence of the

Jews? Discredit them and you destroy the Christian religion. . . . Were not the

[Jews] witnesses of that pure and holy, happy and heaven-approved faith, converts

to that faith?”34

For a boy with Hamilton’s fertile imagination, Nevis’s short history must have

furnished a rich storehouse of material. He was well situated to witness the clash

of European powers, with incessant skirmishes among French, Spanish, and En-

glish ships and swarms of marauding pirates and privateers. The admiralty court

sat in Nevis, which meant that swaggering buccaneers in manacles were dragged

into the local courthouse before proper hangings in Gallows Bay. While some pi-

rates were just plain freebooters, many were discreetly backed by warring European

nations, perhaps instructing Hamilton in the way that foreign powers can tamper

with national sovereignty.

Periodically, cutthroats came ashore for duels, resorting to conventional pistols

or slashing one another with heavy cutlasses—thrilling fare for any boy. Blood

feuds were routine affairs in the West Indies. Plantation society was a feudal order,

predicated on personal honor and dignity, making duels popular among whites

who fancied themselves noblemen. As in the American south, an exaggerated sense

of romantic honor may have been an unconscious way for slaveholders to flaunt

their moral superiority, purge pent-up guilt, and cloak the brutish nature of their

trade.

To the extent that dueling later entranced Hamilton to an unhealthy degree, this

fascination may have originated in the most fabled event in Nevis in the 1750s. In

1752, John Barbot, a young Nevis lawyer, and Matthew Mills, a wealthy planter

from St. Kitts, were bickering over a land deal when Mills lashed out at Barbot as

“an impertinent puppy”—the sort of fighting words that prompted duels.35 One

day at dawn, elegantly clad in a silver laced hat and white coat, Barbot was rowed

over to St. Kitts by a slave boy. At a dueling ground at Frigate Bay, he encountered

Mills, lifted his silver-mounted pistol, and slaughtered him at close range.

At the sensational murder trial, it was alleged that Barbot had gunned down

Mills before the latter even had a chance to grab his pistol from his holster. A star

witness was Dr. William Hamilton (a possible relation of James Hamilton), who

testified that Mills had been shot in the side and therefore must have been am-

19 The Castaways

bushed. Certain elements of this trial almost creepily foreshadow the fatal clash be-

tween Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Barbot, well bred yet debt ridden,

sneered at the softhearted notion that he had murdered the popular Mills, claiming

that he had “killed him fairly according to the notions of honour prevailing among

men.”36 Barbot insisted that Mills had aimed his pistol at him even as he absorbed

the fatal bullet. As was to happen with Aaron Burr, locals testified that Barbot, in

ungentlemanly fashion, had taken target practice in the preceding weeks. Barbot

was eventually convicted and packed off to the gallows. Nevis children such as

Hamilton, who was born three years later, would have savored every gory detail of

this history.

Violence was commonplace in Nevis, as in all the slave-ridden sugar islands. The

eight thousand captive blacks easily dwarfed in number the one thousand whites, “a

disproportion,” remarked one visitor, “which necessarily converts all such white

men as are not exempted by age and decrepitude into a well-regulated militia.”37

Charlestown was a compact town of narrow, crooked lanes and wooden buildings,

and Hamilton would regularly have passed the slave-auction blocks at Market Shop

and Crosses Alley and beheld barbarous whippings in the public square. The

Caribbean sugar economy was a system of inimitable savagery, making the tobacco

and cotton plantations of the American south seem almost genteel by comparison.

The mortality rate of slaves hacking away at sugarcane under a pitiless tropical sun

was simply staggering: three out of five died within five years of arrival, and slave

owners needed to replenish their fields constantly with fresh victims. One Nevis

planter, Edward Huggins, set a sinister record when he administered 365 lashes to a

male slave and 292 to a female. Evidently unfazed by this sadism, a local jury ac-

quitted him of all wrongdoing. A decorous British lady who visited St. Kitts stared

aghast at naked male and female slaves being driven along dusty roads by overseers

who flogged them at regular intervals, as if they needed steady reminders of their

servitude: “Every ten Negroes have a driver who walks behind them, holding in his

hand a short whip and a long one . . . and you constantly observe where the appli-

cation has been made.”38 Another British visitor said that “if a white man kills a

black, he cannot be tried for his life for the murder. . . . If a negro strikes a white

man, he is punished with the loss of his hand and, if he should draw blood, with

death.”39 Island life contained enough bloodcurdling scenes to darken Hamilton’s

vision for life, instilling an ineradicable pessimism about human nature that in-

fused all his writing.

All of the horror was mingled incongruously with the natural beauty of tur-

quoise waters, flaming sunsets, and languid palm fronds. In this geologically active

zone, the hills bubbled with high-sulfur hot springs that later became tourist mec-

cas. The sea teemed with lobster, snapper, grouper, and conch, while the jungles were

20 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

alive with parrots and mongooses. There were also monkeys galore, green vervets

shipped from Africa earlier in the century. Many travelers prized the island as a se-

cluded refuge, one finding it so “captivating” that he contended that if a man came

there with his wife, he might linger forever in the “sweet recess” of Nevis.40 It was all

very pleasant and balmy, supremely beautiful and languid, if you were white, were

rich, and turned a blind eye to the black population expiring in the canebrakes.

If Rachel thought that Johann Michael Lavien’s appetite for revenge had been sated

in Christiansted, she was sadly disabused of this notion in 1759. Nine years after

Rachel had fled St. Croix, Lavien surfaced for one final lesson in retribution. Op-

pressed by debt, he had been forced to cede his most recent plantation to two Jew-

ish moneylenders and support himself as a plantation overseer while renting out

his little clutch of slaves. In the interim, he had begun living with a woman who

took in washing to boost their income. It may have been Lavien’s wish to marry this

woman that abruptly prompted him to obtain an official divorce summons from

Rachel on February 26, 1759.

In a document seething with outrage, Lavien branded Rachel a scarlet woman,

given to a sinful life. Having failed to mend her ways after imprisonment, the decree

stated, Rachel had “absented herself from [Lavien] for nine years and gone else-

where, where she has begotten several illegitimate children, so that such action is

believed to be more than sufficient for him to obtain a divorce from her.”41 Lavien

noted bitterly that he himself “had taken care of Rachel’s legitimate child from what

little he has been able to earn,” whereas she had “completely forgotten her duty and

let husband and child alone and instead given herself up to whoring with everyone,

which things the plaintiff says are so well known that her own family and friends

must hate her for it.”42 After this vicious indictment, Lavien demanded that Rachel

be denied all legal rights to his property. He warned that if he died before her,

Rachel “as a widow would possibly seek to take possession of the estate and there-

fore not only acquire what she ought not to have but also take this away from his

child and give it to her whore-children.”43 This was how Lavien designated Alexan-

der and his brother: whore-children. He was determined to preserve his wealth for

his one legitimate son, thirteen-year-old Peter.

Rachel was undoubtedly stunned by this unforeseen vendetta, this throwback to

a nightmarish past. Summoned to appear in court in St. Croix, she must have feared

further reprisals from Lavien and did not show up or refute the allegations. On June

25, Lavien received a divorce that permitted him to remarry, while Rachel was

strictly prohibited from doing so. The Danish authorities took such decrees seri-

ously and fined or dismissed any clergyman who married couples in defiance of

such decisions. In one swiftly effective stroke, Lavien had safeguarded his son’s in-

21 The Castaways

heritance and penalized Rachel, making it impossible for her two innocent sons

ever to mitigate the stigma of illegitimacy. However detestable Lavien’s actions, two

things should be said in his defense. Rachel had relinquished responsibility for Pe-

ter and forced Lavien to bring the boy up alone. Also, Lavien subsequently wit-

nessed legal documents for the Lyttons, Rachel’s St. Croix in-laws, suggesting that

her own family may have seen her life as less than blameless.

In view of this lacerating history, Rachel probably never imagined that she

would return to St. Croix, but a confluence of events changed that. In the early

1760s, Lavien moved to Frederiksted, on the far side of St. Croix from Chris-

tiansted, and dabbled in real estate. Then, around 1764, Peter moved to South Car-

olina. So when James Hamilton received a business assignment in Christiansted in

April 1765, he could have taken along Rachel and the two boys without fearing any

untoward collisions with Lavien. James Hamilton had continued to feed off his

brother’s Glasgow business connections. He served as head clerk for Archibald In-

gram of St. Kitts, the son of a Glasgow “tobacco lord” of the same name. The In-

grams asked James to collect a large debt due from a man named Alexander Moir,

who was returning to Europe and denied owing them money; the resulting lawsuit

was to drone on until January 1766. In the meantime, Rachel and the boys took up

residence in Christiansted. Thrust back into the world of her former disgrace,

Rachel lived blocks from the fort where she had been jailed and no longer had the

liberty of posing as “Mrs. Hamilton.” (On the St. Croix tax rolls, she shows up un-

der misspelled variants of Faucette and Lavien.) Stripped of whatever cover of le-

gitimacy had sheltered them, it would have become glaringly evident to Alexander

and James, Jr., for the first time that they were “natural” children and that their

mother had been a notorious woman.

James Hamilton scored an apparent victory in the Moir case, then left St. Croix

and deserted his family forever. Why this sudden exit? Did Rachel’s scandalous rep-

utation cause a rift in their relationship? Did Lavien conduct a smear campaign and

poison the air with innuendo? These scenarios seem unlikely given that James

Hamilton never appeared on the St. Croix tax rolls, suggesting that he knew all

along that he was a transient visitor. Alexander offered a forgiving but plausible rea-

son for his father’s desertion: he could no longer afford to support his family. Be-

cause James, Jr., twelve, and Alexander, ten, had attained an age where they could

assist Rachel, James, Sr., may have believed that he could wash his hands of paternal

duties without undue pangs of guilt. More in sorrow than malice, Alexander wrote

a Scottish kinsman thirty years later, “You no doubt have understood that my fa-

ther’s affairs at a very early day went to wreck, so as to have rendered his situation

during the greatest part of his life far from eligible. This state of things occasioned

a separation between him and me, when I was very young.”44 Alexander probably

22 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

never set eyes again on his vagabond father, who stayed in the Caribbean, either

lured by the indolent tropic tempo or ground down by poverty. Father and son

never entirely lost touch with each other, but a curious detachment, an estrange-

ment as much psychological as geographical, separated them. As we shall see, there

is a possible reason why James Hamilton may have felt less than paternal toward his

son and Alexander less than filial toward him.

For a woman once hounded from St. Croix in disgrace, Rachel exhibited remark-

able resilience upon her return. As she ambled about Christiansted in a red or white

skirt, her face shaded by a black silk sun hat, this “handsome,” self-reliant woman

seems to have been fired by some inner need to vindicate herself and silence her

critics. At this, she succeeded admirably, superseding James Hamilton as the family

breadwinner. Already on August 1, 1765, her wealthy brother-in-law, James Lytton,

had bought her six walnut chairs with leather seats and agreed to foot the bill for

her rent. Alexander later testified to the Lyttons’ indispensable largesse, saying that

his father’s departure “threw me upon the bounty of my mother’s relations, some of

whom were then wealthy.”45

Rachel’s return to St. Croix had probably been premised on support from Ann

and James Lytton, a hope that never quite panned out, as her in-laws were them-

selves besieged by successive problems. As prominent sugar planters, the Lyttons

had enjoyed a leisurely life at the Grange, occupying a stone “great house” with pol-

ished wooden floors, louvered blinds, paneled shutters, and chandeliers. Like many

sugar plantations, it was a world in miniature, a compound that included slave quar-

ters, a sugar mill, and a boiling house that produced molasses and brown sugar. Then,

one by one, the Lytton children were overtaken by the curse that seemed to afflict

everyone around Alexander Hamilton. Several years earlier, Ann and James’s sec-

ond son, James Lytton, Jr., had formed a partnership with one Robert Holliday. This

business venture failed so abysmally that one summer night in 1764, the bankrupt

James, Jr., and his wife climbed aboard the family schooner, herded twenty-two

stolen slaves on board, and cast off for the Carolinas, while the less quick-witted

Holliday was captured and jailed for nearly two years. Shattered by this scandal,

James and Ann Lytton sold the Grange and in late 1765 moved back to Nevis, just

months after Rachel and her two boys arrived in St. Croix from there. Within one

year, Ann Lytton was dead, leaving Rachel as the last surviving Faucette.

Rachel took a two-story house on 34 Company Street, fast by the Anglican

church and school. Adhering to a common town pattern, she lived with her two

boys in the wooden upper floor, which probably jutted over the street, while turn-

ing the lower stone floor into a shop selling foodstuffs to planters—salted fish, beef,

pork, apples, butter, rice, and flour. It was uncommon in those days for a woman to

23 The Castaways

be a shopkeeper, especially one so fetching and, at thirty-six, still relatively young.

One traveler to St. Croix remarked, “White women are not expected to do anything

here except drink tea and coffee, eat, make calls, play cards, and at times sew a lit-

tle.”46 In her enclosed yard, Rachel kept a goat, probably to provide milk for her

boys. She bought some of her merchandise from her landlord, while the rest came

from two young New York merchants, David Beekman and Nicholas Cruger, who

had just inaugurated a trading firm that was to transform Hamilton’s insecure,

claustrophobic boyhood.

No less than in Nevis, slavery was all-pervasive on St. Croix—it was “the source

from which every citizen obtains his daily bread and his wealth,” concluded one

contemporary account—with twelve blacks for every white.47 A decade later, a cen-

sus ascertained that Company Street had fifty-nine houses, with 187 whites and 427

slaves packed into breathless proximity. Since the neighborhood was zoned to in-

corporate free blacks and mulattoes, Alexander was exposed to a rich racial mélange.

Because her mother had died, Rachel now owned five adult female slaves and sup-

plemented her income by hiring them out. The slaves also had four children; Rachel

assigned a little boy named Ajax as a house slave to Alexander and another to James.

This early exposure to the humanity of the slaves may have made a lasting impres-

sion on Hamilton, who would be conspicuous among the founding fathers for his

fierce abolitionism.

St. Croix had its picturesque side in its conical sugar mills, powered by windmills

or mules, that crushed the sugarcane with big rollers. During harvesttime, the twi-

light glittered with fires from boiling houses that dotted the island. The coast

around Christiansted was lined with soft, green hills and punctuated by secluded

inlets and coves. Early idealized prints of the town show two distinct moods: a

smart military precision down near the fort and wharf, with heaps of sugar barrels

ready for export, and a slower, more sensual inland atmosphere, with black women

balancing large bundles on their heads. Though house slaves donned shirts and

skirts, it wasn’t unusual for one or two hundred slaves to toil naked in a steaming

field beneath the towering sugar stalks. By night, the whitewashed town of Chris-

tiansted, laid out in a formal grid by Danish authorities, erupted into a roaring, li-

centious bedlam of boisterous taverns and open brothels overflowing with rebels,

sailors, and outlaws from many countries. So extensive was the sexual contact be-

tween whites and blacks that local church registers were thickly sprinkled with en-

tries for illegitimate mulatto children.

If Alexander Hamilton was exposed to abundant savagery and depravity, he also

snatched distant glimpses of an elegant way of life that might have fostered a desire

to be allied with the rich. The local atmosphere was not likely to breed a flaming

populist: poverty carried no dignity on a slave island. The big planters rode about

24 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

in ornate carriages and shopped for imported watches, jewelry, and other European

finery. Some oases of culture survived amid the barbarism. Two dancing schools

gave lessons in the minuet, while the Leeward Islands Comedians served up a sur-

prisingly varied fare of Shakespeare and Restoration comedy. Rachel tried to give

her spartan household a patina of civility. From a later inventory, we know that she

had six silver spoons, seven silver teaspoons, a pair of sugar tongs, fourteen porce-

lain plates, two porcelain basins, and a bed covered with a feather comforter.

Of most compelling interest to our saga, the upstairs living quarters held thirty-

four books—the first unmistakable sign of Hamilton’s omnivorous, self-directed

reading. Many people on St. Croix would have snickered at his bookish habits, mak-

ing him feel freakish and contributing to an urgent need to flee the West Indies.

From his first tentative forays in prose and verse, we can hazard an educated guess

about the books that stocked his shelf. The poetry of Alexander Pope must have

held an honored place, plus a French edition of Machiavelli’s The Prince and

Plutarch’s Lives, rounded off by sermons and devotional tracts. If Hamilton felt

something stiflingly provincial about St. Croix, literature would certainly have

transported him to a more exalted realm.

The boy could be forgiven his escapist cravings. In late 1767, Rachel, thirty-

eight, uprooted her family and hustled them down the block to 23 Company Street.

Then, right after New Year’s Day, she dragged them back to number 34 and suc-

cumbed to a raging fever. For a week, a woman named Ann McDonnell tended

Rachel before summoning a Dr. Heering on February 17; by that point, Alexander,

too, had contracted the unspecified disease. Dr. Heering subjected mother and

child to the medieval purgatives so popular in eighteenth-century medicine. Rachel

had to endure an emetic and a medicinal herb called valerian, which expelled gas

from the alimentary canal; Alexander submitted to bloodletting and an enema.

Mother and son must have been joined in a horrid scene of vomiting, flatulence,

and defecation as they lay side by side in a feverish state in the single upstairs bed.

The delirious Alexander was probably writhing inches from his mother when she

expired at nine o’clock on the night of February 19. Notwithstanding the late hour,

five agents from the probate court hastened to the scene and sequestered the prop-

erty, sealing off one chamber, an attic, and two storage spaces in the yard.

By the day of the funeral, Hamilton had regained sufficient strength to attend

with his brother. The two dazed, forlorn boys surely made a pathetic sight. In a lit-

tle more than two years, they had suffered their father’s disappearance and their

mother’s death, reducing them to orphans and throwing them upon the mercy of

friends, family, and community. The town judge gave James, Jr., money to buy

shoes for the funeral and bought black veils for both boys. Their landlord, Thomas

Dipnall, donated white bread, eggs, and cakes for the mourners, while cousin Peter

25 The Castaways

Lytton contributed eleven yards of black material to drape the coffin. As a divorced

woman with two children conceived out of wedlock, Rachel was likely denied a bur-

ial at nearby St. John’s Anglican Church. This may help to explain a mystifying am-

bivalence that Hamilton always felt about regular church attendance, despite a

pronounced religious bent. The parish clerk officiated at a graveside ceremony at

the Grange, the erstwhile Lytton estate outside of Christiansted, where Rachel was

laid to rest on a hillside beneath a grove of mahogany trees.

There was to be no surcease from suffering for the two castaway boys, just a cas-

cading series of crises. Heaps of bills poured in, including for the batch of medicine

that had failed to save their mother. Less than a week after Rachel died, the probate

officers again trooped to the house to appraise the estate. The moralistic tone of

their report shows that Johann Michael Lavien meditated further revenge against

Rachel at the expense of her two illegitimate sons. The court decided that it had to

consider three possible heirs: Peter Lavien, whose father had divorced Rachel “for

valid reasons (according to information obtained by the court) by the highest au-

thority,” and the illegitimate James and Alexander, the “obscene children born after

the deceased person’s divorce.”48 The whole marital scandal was dredged up again,

only now at an age when Alexander and his brother could fully fathom its meaning.

At a probate hearing, Lavien brandished the 1759 divorce decree and lambasted

Alexander and James as children born in “whoredom,” insisting that Peter merited

the entire estate, even though Peter hadn’t set eyes on his mother for eighteen years.

Life had not improved for the embittered Lavien, who had remained on a steep eco-

nomic slide and served as janitor of a Frederiksted hospital. His second wife had

died just a month before Rachel, and the couple had already lost the two children

they had together.

For a year after his mother’s death, Alexander was held in painful suspense by the

probate court and perhaps absorbed the useful lesson that people who manipulate

the law wield the real power in society. While he was awaiting settlement of the

small estate—principally Rachel’s slaves and a stock of business supplies—the

court auctioned off her personal effects. James Lytton considerately bought back

for Alexander his trove of books. In light of Rachel’s unhappy history with Lavien,

the final court decision seems foreordained. Alexander and James Hamilton were

disinherited, and the whole estate was awarded to Peter Lavien. In November 1769,

no less implacably vengeful than his father, Peter Lavien returned to St. Croix and

took possession of his small inheritance—an injustice that rankled Alexander for

many years. Peter had fared sufficiently well in Beaufort, South Carolina, to be

named a church warden—the chief financial and administrative officer—in St.

Helena’s Parish the previous year, yet he couldn’t spare a penny for the two destitute

half brothers orphaned by his mother’s death.

26 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

One sidelight of Peter Lavien’s return to St. Croix deserves attention because he

did something shocking and seemingly inexplicable for a twenty-three-year-old

church warden: he was quietly baptized. Why had he not been baptized before? One

explanation is that Johann Michael Lavien had painstakingly concealed his Jewish

roots but still did not want his son baptized. Peter’s furtive baptism, as if it were

something shameful, suggests that he felt some extreme need for secrecy.

After Rachel died, her sons were placed under the legal guardianship of their thirty-

two-year-old first cousin Peter Lytton. Already a widower, Peter had stumbled

through a string of botched business dealings, including failed grocery stores in

Christiansted. His brother later insisted that Peter was “insane.”49 Life as a ward of

Peter Lytton proved yet another merciless education in the tawdry side of life for

Alexander Hamilton. Lytton had a black mistress, Ledja, who had given birth to a

mulatto boy with the impressive name of Don Alvarez de Valesco. On July 16, 1769,

just when the Hamilton boys must have imagined that fate couldn’t dole out more

horrors, Peter Lytton was found dead in his bed, soaked in a pool of blood. Accord-

ing to court records, he had committed suicide and either “stabbed or shot himself

to death.”50 For the Hamilton boys, the sequel was equally mortifying. Peter had

drafted a will that provided for Ledja and their mulatto child but didn’t bother to

acknowledge Alexander or James with even a token bequest. When a crestfallen

James Lytton appeared to claim his son’s estate, he tried to aid the orphaned boys

but was stymied by legal obstacles resulting from the suicide. On August 12, 1769,

less than one month after Peter’s death, the heartbroken James Lytton died as well.

Five days earlier, he had drafted a new will, which also made no provision for his

nephews Alexander and James, who must have felt jinxed.

Let us pause briefly to tally the grim catalog of disasters that had befallen these

two boys between 1765 and 1769: their father had vanished, their mother had died,

their cousin and supposed protector had committed bloody suicide, and their aunt,

uncle, and grandmother had all died. James, sixteen, and Alexander, fourteen, were

now left alone, largely friendless and penniless. At every step in their rootless, topsy-

turvy existence, they had been surrounded by failed, broken, embittered people.

Their short lives had been shadowed by a stupefying sequence of bankruptcies,

marital separations, deaths, scandals, and disinheritance. Such repeated shocks

must have stripped Alexander Hamilton of any sense that life was fair, that he ex-

isted in a benign universe, or that he could ever count on help from anyone. That

this abominable childhood produced such a strong, productive, self-reliant human

being—that this fatherless adolescent could have ended up a founding father of a

country he had not yet even seen—seems little short of miraculous. Because he

maintained perfect silence about his unspeakable past, never exploiting it to puff

27 The Castaways

his later success, it was impossible for his contemporaries to comprehend the ex-

ceptional nature of his personal triumph. What we know of Hamilton’s childhood

has been learned almost entirely during the past century.

Peter Lytton’s death marked a fork in the road for Alexander and James, who hence-

forth branched off on separate paths. The latter was apprenticed to an aging Chris-

tiansted carpenter, Thomas McNobeny, which tells us much about his limited

abilities. Most whites shied away from crafts such as carpentry, where they had to

compete with mulattoes or even skilled slave labor. Had James shown any real

promise or head for business, it is doubtful that he would have been relegated to

manual work. By contrast, even before Peter Lytton’s death, Alexander had begun to

clerk for the mercantile house of Beekman and Cruger, the New York traders who

had supplied his mother with provisions. It was the first of countless times in

Hamilton’s life when his superior intelligence was spotted and rewarded by older,

more experienced men.

Before considering his first commercial experience, we must ponder another

startling enigma in Hamilton’s boyhood. While James went off to train with the

elderly carpenter, Hamilton, in a dreamlike transition worthy of a Dickens novel,

was whisked off to the King Street home of Thomas Stevens, a well-respected mer-

chant, and his wife, Ann. Of the five Stevens children, Edward, born a year before

Alexander, became his closest friend, “an intimate acquaintance begun in early

youth,” as Hamilton described their relationship.51 As they matured, they often

seemed to display parallel personalities. Both were exceedingly quick and clever,

disciplined and persevering, fluent in French, versed in classical history, outraged

by slavery, and mesmerized by medicine. In future years, Edward Stevens was wont

to remind Hamilton of “those vows of eternal friendship, which we have so often

mutually exchanged,” and he often fretted about Hamilton’s delicate health.52

If their personalities exhibited unusual compatibility, their physical resemblance

bordered on the uncanny, often stopping people cold. Thirty years later, when

Hamilton’s close friend Timothy Pickering, then secretary of state, first set eyes on

Edward Stevens, he was bowled over by the likeness. “At the first glance,” recalled

Pickering, “I was struck with the extraordinary similitude of his and General

Hamilton’s faces—I thought they must be brothers.” When Pickering confided his

amazement to Stevens’s brother-in-law, James Yard of St. Croix, the latter “in-

formed me that the remark had been made a thousand times.”53 This mystery be-

gan to obsess the inquisitive Pickering, who finally concluded that Hamilton and

Stevens were brothers. In notes assembled for a projected biography of Hamilton,

Pickering wrote that “it was generally understood that Hamilton was an illegitimate

son of a gentleman of [the] name” of Stevens.54 This scuttlebutt resonated through

28 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

the nineteenth century, so that in 1882 Henry Cabot Lodge could write that “every

student of the period [is] familiar with the story, which oral tradition had handed

down, that Hamilton was the illegitimate son of a rich West Indian planter or mer-

chant, generally supposed to have been Mr. Stevens, the father of Hamilton’s early

friend and school-fellow.”55

What to make of this extraordinary speculation? No extant picture of Edward

Stevens enables us to probe any family resemblance. Nevertheless, in the absence of

direct proof, the notion that Alexander was the biological son of Thomas Stevens

instead of James Hamilton would clarify many oddities in Hamilton’s biography. It

might identify one of the adulterous lovers who had so appalled Lavien that he had

hurled Rachel into prison. It would also explain why Thomas Stevens sheltered

Hamilton soon after Rachel’s death but made no comparable gesture to his brother,

James. (In the eighteenth century, illegitimate children frequently masqueraded as

orphaned relatives of the lord or lady of the house—a polite fiction understood and

accepted by visitors.) This parentage would also explain why Hamilton formed an

infinitely more enduring bond with Edward Stevens than with his own brother. It

might suggest why James Hamilton, Sr., left his family behind, assumed no further

responsibility for them, and took no evident delight in Alexander’s later career.

Most of all, it would account for the peculiar distance that later held Hamilton

apart from both his father and his brother. As will be seen, Alexander Hamilton

was an intensely loyal person, endowed with a deep streak of family responsibility.

There is something telltale about the way that he, his father, and his brother let re-

lations abruptly lapse, as if the three of them were in headlong flight from some

harrowing shared secret.

TWO

H U R R I CA N E

E ven in the languorous tropics, Hamilton, while clerking at Beekman and

Cruger, was schooled in a fast-paced modern world of trading ships and

fluctuating markets. Whatever his frustrations, he did not operate in an ob-

scure corner of the world, and his first job afforded him valuable insights into

global commerce and the maneuvers of imperial powers. Working on an island first

developed by a trading company, he was exposed early on to the mercantilist poli-

cies that governed European economies.

Beekman and Cruger engaged in an export-import business that provided an

excellent training ground for Hamilton, who had to monitor a bewildering inven-

tory of goods. The firm dealt in every conceivable commodity required by planters:

timber, bread, flour, rice, lard, pork, beef, fish, black-eyed peas, corn, porter, cider,

pine, oak, hoops, shingles, iron, lime, rope, lampblack, bricks, mules, and cattle.

“Amid his various engagements in later years,” John C. Hamilton said of his father,

“he adverted to [this time] as the most useful part of his education.”1 He learned to

write in a beautiful, clear, flowing hand. He had to mind money, chart courses for

ships, keep track of freight, and compute prices in an exotic blend of currencies, in-

cluding Portuguese coins, Spanish pieces of eight, British pounds, Danish ducats,

and Dutch stivers. If Hamilton seemed very knowing about business as a young

adult, it can partly be traced to these formative years.

Located above the harbor at the elevated intersection of King and King’s Cross

Streets, Beekman and Cruger ran a shop and an adjoining warehouse. A pleasant

stroll down the sloping main street would have brought Hamilton, freshened by sea

breezes, to the hectic wharf area, where the firm maintained its own dock and ship.

While the clerk inspected incoming merchandise, some of it contraband, the air

30 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

was thick with the sweet fragrances of sugar, rum, and molasses, hauled in barrels

by horse-drawn wagons and ready for shipment to North America in exchange for

grain, flour, timber, and sundry other staples. The neutral Danish island served as a

transit point to the French West Indies, converting Hamilton’s ease in French into a

critical business asset. As a rule, the merchants of St. Croix were natives of the

British Isles, so that English, not Danish, functioned as the island’s lingua franca.

Beekman and Cruger furnished Hamilton with a direct link to his future home

in New York, which carried on extensive trade with St. Croix. Many Manhattan

trading firms dispatched young family members to the islands as local agents, and

Nicholas Cruger was a prime example. He came from one of colonial New York’s

most distinguished families. His father, Henry, was a wealthy merchant, shipowner,

and member of His Majesty’s Royal Council for the province. His uncle, John

Cruger, had been a long-standing mayor and a member of the Stamp Act Congress.

While this blue-blooded clan had distinct Anglophile tendencies, time was to ex-

pose a split. Nicholas’s brother, also Henry, based in Britain, was elected a member

of Parliament from Bristol beside no less august a personage than Edmund Burke.

Nicholas himself was to side with the rebel colonists and revere George Washing-

ton. One wonders whether he functioned as Hamilton’s first political tutor. He also

exposed Hamilton to a prosperous, civic-minded breed of New York businessmen,

who stood as models for the elite brand of Federalism he later espoused.

From the outset, the young Hamilton had phenomenal stamina for sustained

work: ambitious, orphaned boys do not enjoy the option of idleness. Even before

starting work, he must have developed unusual autonomy for a thirteen-year-old,

and Beekman and Cruger would only have toughened his moral fiber. Hamilton ex-

uded an air of crisp efficiency and cool self-command. While his peers squandered

their time on frivolities, Hamilton led a much more strenuous, urgent life that was

to liberate him from St. Croix. He was a proud and sensitive boy, caught in the

lower reaches of a rigid class society with small chance for social mobility. His

friend Nathaniel Pendleton later said of his clerkship that Hamilton “conceived so

strong an aversion to it as to be induced to abandon altogether the pursuits of com-

merce.”2 On November 11, 1769, in his earliest surviving letter, the fourteen-year-

old Hamilton vented the blackest pent-up despair. Written in elegant penmanship,

the letter shows that the young clerk felt demeaned by his lowly social station and

chafed with excess energy. Already he sought psychic relief in extravagant fantasies

of fame and faraway glory. The recipient was his dear friend and lookalike Edward

Stevens, who had recently begun his studies at King’s College in New York:

To confess my weakness, Ned, my ambition is [so] prevalent that I contemn

the grovelling and conditions of a clerk or the like to which my fortune &c.

31 Hurricane

condemns me and would willingly risk my life, tho’ not my character, to exalt

my station. I’m confident, Ned, that my youth excludes me from any hopes of

immediate preferment, nor do I desire it, but I mean to prepare the way for

futurity. I’m no philosopher, you see, and may be jus[t]ly said to build castles

in the air. My folly makes me ashamed and beg you’ll conceal it, yet Neddy we

have seen such schemes successful when the projector is constant. I shall con-

clude [by] saying I wish there was a war. Alex. Hamilton.3

What prophetic aspirations Hamilton telescoped into this short letter! The boy

hankering for heroism and martial glory was to find his war soon enough. He be-

trayed a stinging sense of shame that the adult Hamilton would studiously cloak

behind an air of bravado. Of special interest are his intuitive fear that his outsized

ambition might corrupt him and his insistence that he would never endanger his

ethics to conquer the world. Despite some awkwardness in the writing, he appears

surprisingly mature for fourteen and springs full-blown into the historical record.

He had ample opportunities to exercise his many talents. In 1769, David Beek-

man quit the business and was replaced by Cornelius Kortright—another New

Yorker with another prestigious name—and the firm was reconstituted as Kortright

and Cruger. In October 1771, for medical reasons, Nicholas Cruger returned to

New York for a five-month stint and left his precocious clerk in charge.

A sheaf of revealing business letters drafted by Hamilton shows him, for the first

time, in the take-charge mode that was to characterize his tumultuous career. With

peculiar zeal, he collected money owed to the firm. “Believe me Sir,” he assured the

absent Cruger, “I dun as hard as is proper.”4 The bulk of the correspondence con-

cerns a sloop called the Thunderbolt, partly owned by the Crugers, that carried sev-

eral dozen miserable mules through churning seas in early 1772. Hamilton had to

direct this cargo safely along the Spanish Main (South America’s northwestern

coast), then brimming with hostile vessels. Hamilton did not hesitate to advise his

bosses that they should arm the ship with four guns. He said flatly to Tileman

Cruger, who oversaw family operations in Curaçao, “It would be undoubtedly a

great pity that such a vessel should be lost for the want of them.”5 When the ship

docked with forty-one skeletal, drooping mules, Hamilton lectured the vessel’s

skipper in a peremptory tone that someday would be familiar to legions of respect-

ful subordinates: “Reflect continually on the unfortunate voyage you have just

made and endeavour to make up for the considerable loss therefrom accruing to

your owners.”6 The adolescent clerk had a capacity for quick decisions and showed

no qualms about giving a tongue-lashing to a veteran sea captain. So proficient and

eager to lead was he that he must have been slightly deflated when Nicholas Cruger

returned to St. Croix in March 1772.

32 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

Hamilton’s apprenticeship provided many benefits. He developed an intimate

knowledge of traders and smugglers that later aided his establishment of the U.S.

Coast Guard and Customs Service. He saw that business was often obstructed by

scarce cash or credit and learned the value of a uniform currency in stimulating

trade. Finally, he was forced to ponder the paradox that the West Indian islands,

with all their fertile soil, traded at a disadvantage with the rest of the world because

of their reliance on only the sugar crop—a conundrum to which he was to return

in his celebrated “Report on Manufactures.” It may be that Hamilton’s preference

for a diversified economy of manufacturing and agriculture originated in his

youthful reflections on the avoidable poverty he had witnessed in the Caribbean.

While Kortright and Cruger mostly brokered foodstuffs and dry goods, at least

once a year the firm handled a large shipment of far more perishable cargo: slaves.

On the slave ships, hundreds of Africans were chained and stuffed in fetid holds,

where many suffocated. So vile were the conditions on these noisome ships that

people onshore could smell their foul effluvia even miles away. On January 23,

1771, during Hamilton’s tenure, his firm ran a notice atop the front page of the lo-

cal bilingual paper, the Royal Danish American Gazette: “Just imported from the

Windward Coast of Africa, and to be sold on Monday next, by Messrs. Kortright &

Cruger, At said Cruger’s yard, Three Hundred Prime SLAVES.”7 The following year,

Nicholas Cruger imported 250 more slaves from Africa’s Gold Coast and com-

plained that they were “very indifferent indeed, sickly and thin.”8 One can only

imagine the inhuman scenes that Hamilton observed as he helped to inspect,

house, groom, and price the slaves about to be auctioned. To enhance their appear-

ance, their bodies were shaved and rubbed with palm oil until their muscles glis-

tened in the sunlight. Some buyers came armed with branding irons to imprint

their initials on their newly purchased property. From the frequency with which

Nicholas Cruger placed newspaper notices to catch runaway slaves, it seems clear

that the traffic in human beings formed a substantial portion of his business.

By the time Hamilton arrived on St. Croix, the burgeoning slave population had

doubled in just a decade, and the planters banded together to guard against upris-

ings or mass escapes to nearby Puerto Rico, where slaves could secure their freedom

under Spanish rule. In this fearful environment, no white enjoyed the luxury of be-

ing a neutral spectator: either he was an accomplice of the slave system or he left the

island. To remove any ambiguity in the matter, the government in Copenhagen is-

sued a booklet, “The St. Croixian Pocket Companion,” which spelled out the duties

of every white on the island—duties that would have applied to Hamilton starting

in 1771. Every male over sixteen was obligated to serve in the militia and attend

monthly drills with his arms and ammunition at the ready. If the fort fired its guns

twice in a row, all white males had to grab their muskets and flock there instantly.

33 Hurricane

On days when renegade slaves were executed at Christiansvaern, the white men

formed a ring around the fort to prevent other slaves from interfering. Any slave

who attacked a white person faced certain death by hanging or decapitation—death

that probably came as a blessed relief after first being prodded with red-hot pokers

and castrated. Punishments were designed to be hellish so as to terrorize the rest of

the captive population into submission. If a slave lifted a hand in resistance, it

would promptly be chopped off. Any runaway who returned within a three-month

period would have one foot lopped off. If he then ran away a second time, the other

foot was amputated. Recidivists might also have their necks fitted with grisly iron

collars of sharp, inward-pointing spikes that made it impossible to crawl away

through the dense underbrush without slashing their own throats in the effort.

It is hard to grasp Hamilton’s later politics without contemplating the raw cru-

elty that he witnessed as a boy and that later deprived him of the hopefulness so

contagious in the American milieu. On the most obvious level, the slave trade of

St. Croix generated a permanent detestation of the system and resulted in his later

abolitionist efforts. But something deeper may have seeped into his consciousness.

In this hierarchical world, skittish planters lived in constant dread of slave revolts

and fortified their garrison state to avert them. Even when he left for America,

Hamilton carried a heavy dread of anarchy and disorder that always struggled with

his no less active love of liberty. Perhaps the true legacy of his boyhood was an

equivocal one: he came to detest the tyranny embodied by the planters and their

authoritarian rule, while also fearing the potential uprisings of the disaffected

slaves. The twin specters of despotism and anarchy were to haunt him for the rest

of his life.

Like Ben Franklin, Hamilton was mostly self-taught and probably snatched every

spare moment to read. The young clerk aimed to be a man of letters. He may al-

ready have had a premonition that his facility with words would someday free him

from his humble berth and place him on a par with the most powerful men of his

age. The West Indies boasted few stores that sold books, which had to be ordered by

special subscription. For that reason, it must have been a godsend to the culture-

starved Hamilton when the Royal Danish American Gazette launched publication in

1770. The paper had a pronounced Anglophile slant, reflecting the fact that King

Christian VII of Denmark was both first cousin and brother-in-law to King George III

of England. Each issue carried reverential excerpts from parliamentary debates in

London, showcasing William Pitt the Elder and other distinguished orators, and re-

tailed gossipy, fawning snippets about the royal household.

Having a potential place to publish, Hamilton began to scribble poetry. Once his

verbal fountain began to flow, it became a geyser that never ceased. The refined wit

34 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

and pithy maxims of Alexander Pope mesmerized the young clerk, and just as Pope

wrote youthful imitations of the classical poets so Hamilton penned imitations of

Pope. On April 6, 1771, he published a pair of poems in the Gazette that he intro-

duced with a diffident note to the editor: “Sir, I am a youth about seventeen, and

consequently such an attempt as this must be presumptuous; but if, upon perusal,

you think the following piece worthy of a place in your paper, by inserting it you’ll

much oblige Your obedient servant, A. H.” The two amorous poems that follow are

schizophrenic in their contrasting visions of love. In the first, the dreamy poet steals

upon his virgin love, who is reclining by a brook as “lambkins” gambol around her.

He kneels and awakens her with an ecstatic kiss before sweeping her up in his arms

and carrying her off to marital bliss, intoning, “Believe me love is doubly sweet / In

wedlock’s holy bands.”9 In the next poem, Hamilton has suddenly metamorphosed

into a jaded rake, who begins with a shocking, Swiftian opening line: “Celia’s an

artful little slut.” This launches a portrait of a manipulative, feline woman that

concludes:

So, stroking puss’s velvet paws,

How well the jade conceals her claws

And purrs; but if at last

You hap to squeeze her somewhat hard

She spits—her back up—prenez garde;

Good faith she has you fast.

The first poem seems to have been composed by a sheltered adolescent with an

idealized view of women and the second by a world-weary young philanderer who

has already tasted many amorous sweets and shed any illusions about female virtue.

In fact, this apparent attraction to two opposite types of women—the pure and an-

gelic versus the earthy and flirtatious—ran straight through Hamilton’s life, a con-

tradiction he never resolved and that was to lead to scandalous consequences.

The next year, Hamilton published two more poems in the paper, now re-

creating himself as a somber religious poet. The change in heart can almost cer-

tainly be attributed to the advent in St. Croix of a Presbyterian minister named

Hugh Knox. Born in northern Ireland of Scottish ancestry, the handsome young

Knox migrated to America and became a schoolteacher in Delaware. As a raffish

young man, he exhibited a lukewarm piety until a strange incident transformed his

life. One Saturday at a local tavern where he was a regular, Knox amused his tipsy

companions with a mocking imitation of a sermon delivered by his patron, the

Reverend John Rodgers. Afterward, Knox sat down, shaken by his own impiety but

35 Hurricane

also moved by the sermon that still reverberated in his mind. He decided to study

divinity at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) under its president, Aaron

Burr, an eminent divine and father of the man who became Hamilton’s nemesis. It

was almost certainly from Knox’s lips that Alexander Hamilton first heard the name

of Aaron Burr.

Ordained by Burr in 1755, Knox decided to propagate the gospel and was sent to

Saba in the Dutch West Indies. This tiny island near Nevis measured five square

miles, had no beaches, and was solitary enough to try the fortitude of the most de-

termined missionary. Rough seas girded Saba’s rocky shores, making it hazardous

for ships to land there. As the sole clergyman, Knox resided in a settlement known

as the Bottom, sunk in the elevated crater of an extinct volcano; it could be reached

only by climbing up a stony path. Knox left a bleak picture of the heedless sinners

he was assigned to save. “Young fellows and married men, not only without any

symptoms of serious religion . . . but keepers of negro wenches . . . rakes, night

rioters, drunkards, gamesters, Sabbath breakers, church neglecters, common swear-

ers, unjust dealers etc.”10 An erudite man with a classical education, Knox was

starved for both intellectual companionship and money. In 1771, he visited St.

Croix and was received warmly by the local Presbyterians, who enticed him to move

there. In May 1772, he became pastor at the Scotch Presbyterian church at a salary

considerably beyond what he had earned inside his old crater.

After the lonely years in Saba, the forty-five-year-old Knox felt rejuvenated in St.

Croix. Humane and tolerant, politically liberal (he was to fervently support Amer-

ican independence), opposed to slavery (though he owned some slaves), and later

author of several volumes of sermons, he held a number of views that would have

attracted Hamilton. In his earliest surviving letter, he defended his confirmed belief

that illegitimate children should be baptized and argued that clergymen should res-

cue them from their parents instead of rejecting them. He departed from a strict

Calvinist belief in predestination. Instead of a darkly punitive God, Knox favored a

sunny, fair-minded one. He also saw human nature as insatiably curious and re-

served his highest praise for minds that created “schemes or systems of truth.”11

Then an illegitimate young clerk with an uncommon knack for systematic

thinking stepped into his life. Knox must have marveled at his tremendous luck in

discovering Hamilton. We do not know exactly how they met, but Knox threw open

his library to this prodigious youth, encouraged him to write verse, and prodded

him toward scholarship. An avuncular man with a droll wit, Knox worried that

Hamilton was too driven and prone to overwork, too eager to compensate for lost

time—a failing, if it was one, that he never outgrew. In later years, Knox liked to re-

mind Hamilton that he had been “rather delicate & frail,” with an “ambition to ex-

36 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

cel,” and had tended to “strain every nerve” to be the very best at what he was do-

ing.12 Knox had an accurate intuition that this exceptional adolescent was fated to

accomplish great deeds, although he later confessed that Alexander Hamilton had

outstripped even his loftiest expectations.

Among his other gifts, the versatile Hugh Knox was a self-taught doctor and apothe-

cary and a part-time journalist who occasionally filled in for the editor of the Royal

Danish American Gazette. It may have been at the newspaper office, not at the

church, that he first ran into Hamilton. That Knox moonlighted as a journalist

proved highly consequential for Hamilton when a massive hurricane tore through

St. Croix on the night of August 31, 1772, and carved a wide swath of destruction

through nearby islands.

By all accounts, the storm struck with unprecedented fury, the Gazette reporting

that it was the “most dreadful hurricane known in the memory of man.” Starting at

sundown, the gales blew “like great guns, for about six hours, save for half an hour’s

intermission. . . . The face of this once beautiful island is now so calamitous and

disfigured, as it would beggar all description.”13 The tremendous winds uprooted

tall trees, smashed homes to splinters, and swept up boats in foaming billows and

flung them far inland. Detailed reports of the storm in Nevis, where the destruction

was comparable—huge sugar barrels were tossed four hundred yards, furniture

landed two miles away—confirm its terrifying power. Nevis had also been struck by

a severe earthquake that afternoon, and it seems probable that Nevis, St. Kitts, St.

Croix, and neighboring islands were deluged by a tidal wave up to fifteen feet high.

The devastation was so widespread that an appeal for food was launched in the

North American colonies to avert an anticipated famine.

On September 6, Hugh Knox gathered the jittery faithful at his church and de-

livered a consoling sermon that was published in pamphlet form some weeks later.

Hamilton must have attended and been inspired by Knox’s homily, for he went

home and composed a long, feverish letter to his father, trying to convey the hurri-

cane’s horror. (It is noteworthy that Hamilton was still in touch with his father

more than six years after the latter’s departure from St. Croix. That James Hamilton

resided outside the storm area suggests that he was in the southern Caribbean, pos-

sibly Grenada or Tobago.) In his melodramatic description of the hurricane, one

sees the young Hamilton glorying in his verbal powers. He must have shown the

letter to Knox, who persuaded him to publish it in the Royal Danish American

Gazette, where it appeared on October 3. The prefatory note to the piece, presum-

ably written by Knox, explained: “The following letter was written the week after

the late hurricane, by a youth of this island, to his father; the copy of it fell by acci-

dent into the hands of a gentleman, who, being pleased with it himself, showed it to

37 Hurricane

others to whom it gave equal satisfaction, and who all agreed that it might not

prove unentertaining to the public.” Lest anyone suspect that an unfeeling Hamil-

ton was capitalizing on mass misfortune, Knox noted that the anonymous author

had at first declined to publish it—perhaps the last time in Alexander Hamilton’s

life that he would prove bashful or hesitant about publication.

Hamilton’s famous letter about the storm astounds the reader for two reasons.

For all its bombastic excesses, it does seem wondrous that a seventeen-year-old self-

educated clerk could write with such verve and gusto. Clearly, Hamilton was highly

literate and already had a considerable fund of verbal riches: “It seemed as if a total

dissolution of nature was taking place. The roaring of the sea and wind, fiery mete-

ors flying about it [sic] in the air, the prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning,

the crash of the falling houses, and the ear-piercing shrieks of the distressed, were

sufficient to strike astonishment into angels.”

But the description was also notable for the way Hamilton viewed the hurricane

as a divine rebuke to human vanity and pomposity. In what sounded like a cross be-

tween a tragic soliloquy and a fire-and-brimstone sermon, he exhorted his fellow

mortals:

Where now, oh! vile worm, is all thy boasted fortitude and resolution? What

is become of thine arrogance and self sufficiency? . . . Death comes rushing

on in triumph, veiled in a mantle of tenfold darkness. His unrelenting scythe,

pointed and ready for the stroke . . . See thy wretched helpless state and learn

to know thyself. . . . Despise thyself and adore thy God. . . . O ye who revel in

affluence see the afflictions of humanity and bestow your superfluity to ease

them. . . . Succour the miserable and lay up a treasure in heaven.14

Gloomy thoughts for a teenage boy, even in the aftermath of a lethal hurricane.

The dark spirit of the storm that he summons up, his apocalyptic sense of univer-

sal tumult and disorder, bespeak a somber view of the cosmos. He also shows a

strain of youthful idealism as he admonishes the rich to share their wealth.

Hamilton did not know it, but he had just written his way out of poverty. This

natural calamity was to prove his salvation. His hurricane letter generated such a

sensation—even the island’s governor inquired after the young author’s identity—

that a subscription fund was taken up by local businessmen to send this promising

youth to North America to be educated. This generosity was all the more remark-

able given the island’s dismal state. The hurricane had flattened dwellings, shredded

sugarcane, destroyed refineries, and threatened St. Croix with prolonged economic

hardship. It would take many months, maybe years, for the island to recover.

The chief sponsor of the subscription fund was likely the good-hearted Hugh

38 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

Knox, who later told Hamilton, “I have always had a just and secret pride in having

advised you to go to America and in having recommended you to some [of] my old

friends there.”15 The chief donors were probably Hamilton’s past and present

bosses—Nicholas Cruger, Cornelius Kortright, and David Beekman—plus his

guardian, Thomas Stevens, and his first cousin, Ann Lytton Venton. Possibly aware

of Hamilton’s early (indeed, abiding) interest in medicine, the business community

may have hoped to train a doctor who would return and treat the many tropical

diseases endemic to the island. Doctors were perpetually scarce in the Caribbean,

and Edward Stevens was already in New York preparing for such a career.

In the standard telling of his life, Hamilton boards a ship in October 1772 and

sails off to North America forever. Yet a close study of the Royal Danish American

Gazette and other documents raises questions about this usual chronology. Hamil-

ton may have been the “Juvenis” who published a poem, “The Melancholy Hour,” in

the Gazette of October 11, 1772. This brooding work—“Why hangs this gloomy

damp upon my mind / Why heaves my bosom with the struggling sigh”—reprises

the theme of the hurricane as heavenly retribution upon a fallen world. On Octo-

ber 17, the Gazette ran an unsigned hymn in imitation of Pope that incontestably

came from Hamilton’s pen and was later cherished by his wife as proof of her hus-

band’s religious devotion. Entitled “The Soul Ascending into Bliss,” it is a lovely,

mystical meditation in which Hamilton envisions his soul soaring heavenward.

“Hark! Hark! A voice from yonder sky / Methinks I hear my Saviour cry. . . . I come

oh Lord, I mount, I fly / On rapid wings I cleave the sky.” There is a third poem by

Hamilton that has been overlooked and that appeared in the Gazette of February 3,

1773, under the heading: “Christiansted. A Character. By A. H.” In this short, disil-

lusioned verse, Hamilton evokes a sharp-witted fellow named Eugenio who man-

ages inadvertently to antagonize all of his friends. The poem concludes: “Wit not

well govern’d rankles into vice / He to his Jest his Friend will sacrifice!”16 The dis-

covery of this poem, possibly influenced by an event in the life of Molière, bolsters

the supposition that Hamilton spent the winter of 1772–1773 in St. Croix, although

he could have mailed Hugh Knox the verse from North America.

To understand this transitional moment in Hamilton’s life, we must introduce yet

another figure into the convoluted saga of his early years: his first cousin Ann Lyt-

ton Venton, later Ann Mitchell. So incalculable was Hamilton’s debt to her that on

the eve of his duel with Burr, as he contemplated his life, he instructed his wife:

“Mrs. Mitchell is the person in the world to whom as a friend I am under the great-

est obligations. I have [not] hitherto done my [duty] to her.”17 Why this guilt-

ridden homage to a figure who has lingered in the historical shadows?

Twelve years older than Hamilton, Ann Lytton Venton was the oldest daughter

39 Hurricane

of Rachel’s sister, Ann. Like so many figures in Hamilton’s family, she led a check-

ered life. In her early teens, she married a poor Christiansted grocer, Thomas Hall-

wood, and promptly had a son. After one year of marriage, Hallwood died. In 1759,

Ann married the somewhat more prosperous John Kirwan Venton, who bought a

small sugar estate. By 1762, his business had failed, and their home and effects were

seized by creditors. The couple decamped to New York, leaving an infant daughter

with Ann’s parents. The Ventons evidently faltered in New York and were drawn

back to St. Croix in 1770 after the suicide of Ann’s brother Peter and the death of

her father, James Lytton. If John Kirwan Venton hoped to lay hands on Ann’s in-

heritance, he was foiled by the foresight of his father-in-law, who left two-sevenths

of his estate to Ann but specifically excluded Venton from the money, calling him

“unfortunate in his conduct.”

At this point, the Venton marriage dissolved in acrimony, with Ann and her

daughter occupying Peter’s house in Christiansted while John took refuge in Fred-

eriksted. After the hurricane, John Venton filed for bankruptcy again and posted a

notice to his creditors. No less mean-spirited than Johann Michael Lavien, Venton

also placed the following threatening ad in the Gazette of May 15, 1773: “JOHN

KIRWAN VENTON forbids all masters of vessels from carrying Ann Venton, or her

daughter Ann Lytton Venton off this island.”18 Defying this warning, Ann Venton

and her daughter fled to New York, a brave act that would have reminded Hamilton

of his mother flouting the odious Lavien. To secure her inheritance, Ann entrusted

the eighteen-year-old Hamilton with a power of attorney that allowed him to col-

lect payments from her father’s estate due on May 3 and 26 and June 3, 1773. It may

well have been after receipt of this money that he boarded a vessel bound for

Boston, leaving the West Indies forever. Perhaps in gratitude for his assistance or

else plain affection for her exceedingly bright cousin, Ann Lytton Venton repaid

Hamilton by becoming a benefactor—quite likely the principal benefactor—of his

voyage to North America and subsequent education. If so, Hamilton repaid the fa-

vor by aiding Ann financially in future years. He always felt under a more com-

pelling obligation to her than to anyone else from his early years, and we may know

only a fraction of the vital services that she rendered him.

What a world of scarred emotion and secret grief Alexander Hamilton bore with

him on the boat to Boston. He took his unhappy boyhood, tucked it away in a men-

tal closet, and never opened the door again. Beside the horrid memories, this young

dynamo simply was not cut out for the drowsy, slow-paced life of slave owners on a

tropical island, and he never evinced the least nostalgia for his West Indian boy-

hood or voiced any desire to return. He wrote two years later, “Men are generally

too much attached to their native countries to leave it and dissolve all their con-

40 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

nexions, unless they are driven to it by necessity.”19 He chose a psychological strat-

egy adopted by many orphans and immigrants: he decided to cut himself off from

his past and forge a new identity. He would find a home where he would be ac-

cepted for what he did, not for who he was, and where he would no longer labor in

the shadow of illegitimacy. His relentless drive, his wretched feelings of shame and

degradation, and his precocious self-sufficiency combined to produce a young man

with an insatiable craving for success. As a student of history, he knew the mutabil-

ity of human fortune and later observed, “The changes in the human condition are

uncertain and frequent. Many, on whom fortune has bestowed her favours, may

trace their family to a more unprosperous station; and many who are now in ob-

scurity, may look back upon the affluence and exalted rank of their ancestors.”20 He

would be the former, his father no less unmistakably the latter.

As Alexander sailed north toward spectacular adventures, his father sank ever

deeper into incurable poverty. Documents located in St. Vincent reveal that James

Hamilton had wandered to the southern end of the Caribbean, almost to the coast

of South America. On the tiny, secluded island of Bequia, located just south of St.

Vincent, he had entered into a program set up by the British Crown to encourage

impoverished settlers. Bequia is the northernmost of the Grenadine Islands, an iso-

lated spot, seven square miles in size, of soft hills, jagged cliffs, and sandy beaches.

On March 14, 1774, James Hamilton signed a contract that gave him twenty-five

acres of free woodland property along the shore of Southeast Bay. In this lovely but

menacing place, a stronghold of indigenous black and yellow Caribs and runaway

slaves, James Hamilton chose a spot on public land reserved for a future fortifica-

tion. Bequia was the sort of distant, godforsaken place that could have attracted

only somebody who had exhausted all other options. The deed for James Hamil-

ton’s land purchase tells its own tacit tale of woe; it made clear that his twenty-five

acres were “not adapted for sugar plantations” and had been set aside “for the ac-

commodations of poor settlers.”21 Under the grant, James Hamilton didn’t have to

pay a penny for the first four years but had to stay on the island for at least one year.

A 1776 survey shows him sharing seventy acres with a man named Simple, and they

are the only two people listed on the roster of poor residents. There must have been

days when it was hard for James to believe that he was the fourth son of a Scottish

laird and had grown up in a fogbound castle. The descent of his life had been as

stunning and irrevocable as the rise of his son in America was to seem almost bless-

edly inevitable.

THREE

T H E CO L L E G I A N

A lexander Hamilton never needed to worry about leading a tedious, un-

eventful life. Drama shadowed his footsteps. When his ship caught fire

during his three-week voyage to North America, crew members scram-

bled down ropes to the sea and scooped up seawater in buckets, extinguishing the

blaze with some difficulty. The charred vessel managed to sail into Boston Harbor

intact, and Hamilton proceeded straight to New York. This was a mandatory stop,

since he had to pick up his allowance at Kortright and Company, which managed

the subscription fund that financed his education. The New York firm owned seven

vessels that shuttled between New York and the West Indies and employed Kort-

right and Cruger as its St. Croix representative. Periodically, the subscription fund

was replenished by sugar barrels sent from St. Croix, with Hamilton pocketing a

percentage of the proceeds from each shipment. Hence, the education of this future

abolitionist was partly underwritten by sugarcane harvested by slaves.

When he came to New York, Hamilton was fortified with introductory letters

from Hugh Knox but otherwise did not know a soul except Edward Stevens. Yet this

young man from the tropics, who had probably never worn an overcoat or experi-

enced a change of seasons, did not seem handicapped by his past and never struck

people as a provincial bumpkin. He seemed to vault over the high hurdles of social

status with ease. Smart, handsome, and outgoing, he marched with an erect mili-

tary carriage, thrusting out his chest in an assertive manner. He had all the magnetic

power of a mysterious foreigner and soon made his first friend: a fashionable tailor

with the splendid name of Hercules Mulligan, whose brother was a junior partner

at Kortright and Company. Born in Ireland in 1740, the colorful, garrulous Mulli-

gan was one of the few tradesmen Hamilton ever befriended. He had a shop and

42 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

home on Water Street, and Hamilton may have boarded with him briefly. With a

sizable dollop of Irish blarney, Mulligan took full credit for introducing Hamilton

into New York society: “Mr. H. used in the evenings to sit with my family and my

brother’s family and write doggerel rhymes for their amusement; he was always

amiable and cheerful and extremely attentive to his books.”1 These soirees may have

featured some subversive political content, for Hercules Mulligan had reputedly

been one of the “Liberty Boys” involved in a skirmish with British soldiers on

Golden Hill (John Street) six weeks before frightened British troops gunned down

fractious colonists in the 1770 Boston Massacre. Later, during the British occupa-

tion of wartime New York, Mulligan was to dabble in freelance espionage for George

Washington, discreetly pumping his foppish clients, mostly Tories and British offi-

cers, for strategic information as he taped their measurements.

Hamilton’s early itinerary in America closely mirrored the connections of Hugh

Knox. Through Knox, he came to know two of New York’s most eminent Presby-

terian clergymen: Knox’s old mentor, Dr. John Rodgers—an imposing figure who

strutted grandly down Wall Street en route to church, grasping a gold-headed cane

and nodding to well-wishers—and the Reverend John M. Mason, whose son would

end up attempting an authorized biography of Hamilton. Through another batch

of Knox introductory letters, Hamilton ended up studying at a well-regarded

preparatory school across the Hudson River, the Elizabethtown Academy. Like all

autodidacts, Hamilton had some glaring deficiencies to correct and required cram

courses in Latin, Greek, and advanced math to qualify for college.

Elizabethtown, New Jersey—today plain Elizabeth—was chartered by George II

and ranked as the colony’s oldest English community. It was a small, idyllic village

graced with orchards, two churches, a stone bridge arching over the Elizabeth River,

and windmills dispersed among the salt meadows outside of town. Located on the

grounds of the Presbyterian church, the Elizabethtown Academy occupied a two-

story building topped by a cupola. Its headmaster, Francis Barber, was a recent

graduate of the College of New Jersey (henceforth called Princeton, its much later

name) and was only five years older than Hamilton. He was a dashing figure, with a

high forehead, heavy eyebrows, and a small, prim mouth. Steeped in the classics and

with reform-minded political sympathies, he was in many ways an ideal preceptor

for Hamilton. He would see combat duty on the patriotic side during the Revolu-

tion and would find himself at Yorktown, in a startling inversion, under the direct

command of his West Indian pupil.

Because the Elizabethtown Academy supplied many students to Princeton, we

can deduce something about Hamilton’s preparatory studies from that college’s re-

quirements. Princeton applicants had to know Virgil, Cicero’s orations, and Latin

grammar and also had to be “so well acquainted with the Greek as to render any

43 The Collegian

part of the four Evangelists in that language into Latin or English.”2 Never tentative

about tackling new things and buoyed by a preternatural self-confidence, Hamilton

proved a fantastically quick study. He often worked past midnight, curled up in his

blanket, then awoke at dawn and paced the nearby burial ground, mumbling to

himself as he memorized his lessons. (Hamilton’s lifelong habit of talking sotto

voce while pacing lent him an air of either inspiration or madness.) A copious note

taker, he left behind, in a minute hand, an exercise book in which he jotted down

passages from the Iliad in Greek, took extensive notes on geography and history,

and compiled detailed chapter synopses from the books of Genesis and Revelation.

As if wanting to pack every spare moment with achievement, he also found time to

craft poetry and wrote the prologue and epilogue of an unspecified play performed

by a local detachment of British soldiers.

Hamilton’s attendance at the Elizabethtown Academy brought him into the im-

mediate vicinity of the younger Aaron Burr, who had attended the same school sev-

eral years earlier. Burr’s brother-in-law, jurist Tapping Reeve, sat on the academy’s

board of visitors and had been a vital force behind the school’s creation. By an ex-

traordinary coincidence, Burr spent the summer of 1773 in Elizabethtown, right

around the time Hamilton arrived. Hamilton might have seen this handsome, ge-

nial young man sauntering down the street, gliding by in a boat along the town’s

many inlets, or hunting in the nearby woods. As we shall see, they probably also met

in the drawing rooms of mutual friends.

Hamilton always displayed an unusual capacity for impressing older, influential

men, and he gained his social footing in Elizabethtown with surpassing speed,

crossing over an invisible divide into a privileged, patrician world in a way that

would have been impossible in St. Croix. Thanks to the letters from Hugh Knox, he

had instant access to men at the pinnacle of colonial society in New Jersey. He met

William Livingston and Elias Boudinot, well-heeled lawyers and luminaries in the

Presbyterian political world, who exposed him to the heterodox political currents

of the day. They were both associated with the Whigs, who sought to curb royal

power, boost parliamentary influence, and preserve civil liberties.

Unquestionably the most vivid figure in Hamilton’s new life was fifty-year-old

Livingston, a born crusader, who had abandoned a contentious career in New York

politics to assume the sedate life of a New Jersey country squire. As work proceeded

on Liberty Hall, his 120-acre estate, Livingston took temporary quarters in town,

and Hamilton may have lodged with him during this interlude. Livingston was the

sort of contradictory figure that always enchanted the young Hamilton. A blue-

blooded rebel and scion of a powerful Hudson River clan, Livingston had spurned

an easy life to write romantic poetry, crank out polemical essays, and plunge into

controversial causes. Tall and lanky, nicknamed “the whipping post,” the voluble

44 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

Livingston tilted lances with royal authorities with such self-righteous glee that one

Tory newspaper anointed him “the Don Quixote of the Jerseys.”3

Like many Presbyterians, Livingston had gravitated to political dissent while op-

posing Tory efforts to entrench the Church of England in America. Two decades

earlier, he had spearheaded a vitriolic campaign to block the establishment of an

Anglican college in New York, which, he warned, would become “a contracted re-

ceptacle of bigotry” and an instrument of royal power.4 After their campaign failed

and the school received a royal charter as King’s College in 1754, Livingston and his

friends founded the New York Society Library to provide safe alternative reading

matter for students. (Hamilton would take out books there.) An opponent of the

Stamp Act and subsequent measures to saddle the colonies with oppressive taxes,

Livingston was to attend the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Conven-

tion and become the first governor of an independent New Jersey in 1776.

A gregarious man, William Livingston conducted Hamilton into a much more

glamorous society than the one he left behind. Though benefiting from Livingston

largesse, Hamilton was never mistaken for the family help, and he befriended the

Livingston children, including the cerebral Brockholst, who was later an eminent

Supreme Court judge and already friendly with Aaron Burr. There were also daz-

zling Livingston daughters to ravish the eye. As one of Burr’s friends observed of

Elizabethtown at the time, “There is certainly something amorous in its very air.”5

Hamilton observed the courtship of the beautiful, high-spirited Sarah Livingston

by a young lawyer named John Jay. (So regal was Sarah Livingston’s presence that

when she later attended the opera in Paris, some audience members mistook her for

the queen of France.) A special rapport sprang up between Hamilton and another

Livingston daughter, Catharine, known as Kitty. She was the type of woman Hamil-

ton found irresistible: pretty, coquettish, somewhat spoiled, and always ready for

flirtatious banter. Judging from a letter Hamilton wrote to her during the Revolu-

tion, one suspects that Kitty was his first romantic conquest in America:

I challenge you to meet me in whatever path you dare. And, if you have no

objection, for variety and amusement, we will even make excursions in the

flowery walks and roseate bowers of Cupid. You know I am renowned for gal-

lantry and shall always be able to entertain you with a choice collection of the

prettiest things imaginable. . . . You shall be one of the graces, or Diana, or

Venus, or something surpassing them all.6

It is hard to imagine that Alexander Hamilton slept under the same roof as Kitty

Livingston and didn’t harbor impure thoughts.

In this sociable world, Hamilton also befriended Livingston’s brother-in-law,

45 The Collegian

William Alexander, a bluff, convivial man known as Lord Stirling because of his

contested claim to a Scottish earldom. An extravagant spendthrift, he was already

swamped with debt when he met Hamilton. A decade earlier, the handsome,

round-faced Stirling had constructed a thousand-acre estate at Basking Ridge,

adorned with stables, gardens, and a deer park in imitation of the country houses

of British nobility. Like Livingston, Lord Stirling was a curious amalgam of re-

former and self-styled aristocrat. He rode about in a coach emblazoned with the

Stirling coat of arms and possessed a princely wardrobe of 31 coats, 58 vests, 43

pairs of breeches, 30 shirts, 27 cravats, and 14 pairs of shoes.

If Aaron Burr is to be trusted, Lord Stirling drank his way straight through the

American Revolution as a brigadier general, plied by his aide-de-camp, James Mon-

roe, who served as his faithful cupbearer: “Monroe’s whole duty was to fill his lord-

ship’s tankard and hear, with indications of admiration, his lordship’s long stories

about himself.”7 Burr’s barbed commentary doesn’t do justice to the bibulous Lord

Stirling, who would win renown in the battle of Brooklyn. He was a literate man

with eclectic interests, including mathematics and astronomy (he published a mono-

graph on the transit of Venus), and a cofounder of the New York Society Library. Of

special relevance to Hamilton’s future, he was a leading proponent of American

manufactures. He bred horses and cattle, grew grapes and made wine, and pro-

duced pig iron and hemp. Lord Stirling had one final attraction for Hamilton: he

also had enchanting daughters, especially the charming Catharine, always called

“Lady Kitty.” She was to marry William Duer, the most notorious friend in Hamil-

ton’s life.

The third and most enduring tie formed by Hamilton was with Elias Boudinot,

a lawyer who later became president of the Continental Congress and who owned

copper and sulfur mines. A balding man with a jowly face and a smile that radiated

benign intelligence, Boudinot was an innkeeper’s son and, like Hamilton, descended

from French Huguenots. Such was his piety that he became the first president of the

American Bible Society. As an organizer of the Elizabethtown Academy, he had

pushed for the admission of “a number of free scholars in this town” and would

have embraced heartily a poor but deserving youth such as Hamilton.8

As a regular visitor to Boudinot’s mansion, Boxwood Hall, Hamilton was ex-

posed to a refined world of books, political debate, and high culture. Boudinot’s

wife, Annie, wrote verse that George Washington complimented as “elegant poetry,”

and this bookish family gathered each evening to hear biographies and sacred his-

tories read aloud.9 Hamilton’s friendship with the Boudinots was so intimate that

when their infant daughter, Anna Maria, contracted a fatal illness in September

1774, Hamilton kept a vigil by the sickly child and composed an affecting elegy af-

ter she died. This poem highlights a notable capacity for empathy in Hamilton, who

46 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

dared to write it in the voice of the grieving mother. Since Hamilton had at least one

sibling who had died in infancy or childhood, the poem may have summoned up

memories of his own mother’s hardships:

For the sweet babe, my doting heart

Did all a mother’s fondness feel;

Careful to act each tender part

And guard from every threatening ill.

But what alas! availed my care?

The unrelenting hand of death,

Regardless of a parent’s prayer

Has stopped my lovely infant’s breath—10

Later on, friends would comment on the almost maternal solicitude that Hamilton

showed for friends or family members in distress.

As a young man in a constant rush, scarcely pausing for breath, Hamilton did

not dally in Elizabethtown for more than six months. Nevertheless, this fleeting pe-

riod may have left its imprint on his politics. He hobnobbed with wealthy, accom-

plished men who lived like English nobility even as they agitated for change. These

men wanted to modify the social order, not overturn it—a fair description of

Hamilton’s future politics. At this juncture, Hamilton’s New Jersey patrons rejected

national independence as a rash option, favored reconciliation, and repeatedly in-

voked their rights as English subjects. Far from wanting separation from the British

empire, they favored fuller integration into it. Britain remained their beau ideal, if

a somewhat faded one. Hamilton later admitted to having had a “strong prejudice”

for the British viewpoint while at Elizabethtown and apparently leaned toward

monarchism. Like his mentors, he would always be an uneasy and reluctant revolu-

tionary who found it hard to jettison legal forms in favor of outright rebellion.11

Mingling with Presbyterians may also have influenced his politics. The denomina-

tion was associated with the Whig critique of the British Crown, while Anglicans

tended to be Tories and more often supported British imperial policy toward the

colonies and an established church.

As Hamilton contemplated his next educational step, there were only nine colleges

in the colonies to consider. William Livingston and Elias Boudinot sat on Prince-

ton’s board of trustees—Livingston was such a trusted friend of the former pres-

ident Aaron Burr that he had delivered his eulogy—and it would have been

impolitic, not to say rude, for Hamilton to resist their entreaties to at least scout out

47 The Collegian

the college. The school already had a contingent of West Indian students, and Pres-

ident John Witherspoon was so eager to augment their numbers (or tap the money

of rich sugar planters for professorships) that he had issued a rousing newspaper

appeal the previous year, an “Address to the Inhabitants of Jamaica and the Other

West Indian Islands on Behalf of the College of New Jersey,” wherein he discoursed

“on the advantages of his college for the education of West Indian youth.”12 Founded

in 1746 as a counterweight to the Church of England’s influence, Princeton was a

hotbed of Presbyterian/Whig sentiment, preached religious freedom, and might

have seemed a logical choice for Hamilton. Hercules Mulligan contends that Ham-

ilton told him that “he preferred Princeton to King’s College because it was more

republican.”13 Indeed, the school bubbled with such political ferment that it was

denounced in Tory quarters as a nursery of political radicalism. President Wither-

spoon confessed that “the spirit of liberty” ran “high and strong” at Princeton.14

Little more than a coach stop between New York and Philadelphia, the rural

hamlet of Princeton was hemmed in by thick forests. For Presbyterians eager to

produce new ministers to fill rapidly expanding pulpits, this isolation was a protec-

tive measure that shielded students from urban temptations. The school stood in

the throes of a religious revival when Hamilton applied. Hercules Mulligan said

that he accompanied his young friend to this rustic outpost and introduced him to

Witherspoon, but William Livingston and Elias Boudinot, as trustees, would have

provided any needed introductions.

An eminent theologian, born in Edinburgh, Witherspoon was a husky man with

an oddly shaped head that narrowed at the top and bulged out in the middle. Garry

Wills has called him “probably the most influential teacher in the history of Amer-

ican education,” and Princeton under his tutelage produced a bumper crop of

politician alumni: a U.S. president, a vice president, twenty-one senators, twenty-

nine congressmen, and twelve state governors.15 He was to sign the Declaration of

Independence and minister to the Continental Congress as its first clergyman. By

no coincidence, Princeton outpaced all other colleges by sending nine alumni to the

Constitutional Convention. Witherspoon could be intimidating on first encounter.

Pugnacious and outspoken, he had an unsettling way of erupting in strange twitches

and fidgets. Hamilton, with his rock-hard ego, held his ground with the college

president. Witherspoon examined Hamilton orally and was impressed by his fully

fledged intellect. Then Hamilton made an unconventional proposal. According to

Hercules Mulligan, Hamilton informed Witherspoon that he wanted to enter the

college and advance “with as much rapidity as his exertions would enable him to

do. Dr. Witherspoon listened with great attention to so unusual a proposition from

so young a person and replied that he had not the sole power to determine that but

that he would submit the request to the trustees who would decide.”16 One feels

48 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

here the vastly accelerated tempo of Hamilton’s life, which was likely due to the

chronic impatience fostered by his belated start in life.

When Witherspoon had taken over at Princeton a few years earlier, he had set

about to stiffen its lax admissions requirements and might have frowned on Hamil-

ton’s special timetable for that reason. Mulligan blamed the trustees for rebuffing

the proposal, saying that two weeks later Hamilton received a letter from Wither-

spoon “stating that the request could not be complied with because it was contrary

to the usage of the college and expressing his regret because he was convinced that

the young gentleman would do honor to any seminary at which he should be edu-

cated.”17 In fact, there had been a precedent for Hamilton’s brash request: Aaron

Burr had tried to enter Princeton at age eleven and was told he was too young. He

had then crammed for two years and cheekily applied for admission to the junior

class at age thirteen. In a compromise, he was admitted as a sophomore and gradu-

ated in 1772 at sixteen. Hamilton may have learned about this experience from Burr

himself or through their mutual friend Brockholst Livingston.

In weighing Hamilton’s demand, Witherspoon and his trustees may have been

deterred by the recent experience of a young Virginia scholar who had entered as a

sophomore in 1769 and worked himself into a state of nervous exhaustion by com-

pleting his bachelor’s degree in two years instead of three. His name was James

Madison, later Hamilton’s illustrious collaborator on The Federalist Papers. Fond of

Witherspoon and too weak to travel after graduation, Madison had lingered in

Princeton for a year to study privately with “the old Doctor.”18 When Madison fi-

nally returned to Virginia in the spring of 1772, he was still so debilitated from his

intense studies that he feared for his health.

While applying to Princeton Hamilton may have decided to “correct” his real age

and shed a couple of years. If he was born in 1755, he would have been applying to

college at eighteen, when fourteen or fifteen was often the standard minimum age

for entrance—a highly uncomfortable state of affairs for a wunderkind. (Gouver-

neur Morris had entered King’s College at age twelve.) Prodigies aren’t supposed to

be overaged freshmen. To be sure, Madison had entered Princeton at eighteen,

but he was considered slightly old for a newcomer and skipped to sophomore sta-

tus. If Hamilton trimmed two years from his age, one can sympathize with him. Af-

ter all, while Aaron Burr was delivering a commencement speech at Princeton the

year before, Hamilton, a year older, was still trying to figure out an escape route

from Cruger’s countinghouse on St. Croix. For a precocious young man in his

predicament, lying about his age would have been a pardonable lapse.

Spurned at Princeton, Hamilton ended up at King’s College. He did not lack

sponsors. Lord Stirling, who had inherited a town house on Broad Street in lower

Manhattan, had long sat on the college’s governing board and raised money for it.

49 The Collegian

Hamilton’s life was now set moving in a new direction. This nomadic, stateless boy

found a home in the best possible city for a future treasury secretary, a city in which

commerce always held an honored place. He was to be immersed in a heady world

of business, law, and politics, and he made valuable contacts in the merchant

community.

Had he gone to Princeton, Hamilton might well have been radicalized sooner in

the revolt against Britain, but that is arguable. Instead of with Witherspoon, Hamil-

ton studied under one of the most ardent Tories in the colonies, Dr. Myles Cooper,

the president of King’s. Attendance at King’s placed Hamilton in a city with a vocal

Tory population, the bastion of British colonial power. At the same time, being in

New York was also to lead to firsthand contact with tremendous revolutionary fer-

ment and exposure to some of the colonies’ most eloquent agitators and outspoken

newspapers. The virulent clash of Tories and Whigs in New York was to sharpen all

of the conflicting feelings in Hamilton’s nature, enabling him to sympathize with

the views of both patriots and Loyalists. In fact, by rejecting Alexander Hamilton,

President Witherspoon and his associates at Princeton unintentionally thrust the

young West Indian straight into the thick of the combustible patriotic drama in a

way that would have proved impossible in a sleepy New Jersey country town.

Set on an enormous tract of land that Trinity Church had received from Queen

Anne early in the century, King’s College stood on the northern fringe of the city,

housed in a stately three-story building with a cupola that commanded a superb

view of the Hudson River across a low, rambling meadow. This elevated campus is

defined by today’s West Broadway, Murray, Barclay, and Church Streets, a spot that

one British visitor rhapsodized as the “most beautiful site for a college in the

world.”19 President Cooper tried gamely to segregate his students from unwhole-

some external influences. “The edifice is surrounded by a high fence,” he wrote,

“which also encloses a large court and garden, and a porter constantly attends at the

front gate, which is closed at ten o’clock each evening in the summer and at nine in

the winter, after which hours, the names of all that come in are delivered weekly to

the President.”20 This cloistered environment was modeled upon Oxford’s and the

students strode about in academic caps and gowns.

One reason that Cooper sought to sequester his students was that the college ad-

joined the infamous red-light district known as the Holy Ground, its name a satir-

ical allusion to the fact that St. Paul’s Chapel owned the land. As many as five

hundred Dutch and English “ladies of pleasure” (equivalent to 2 percent of the

city’s entire population) patrolled these dusky lanes each evening, and the proxim-

ity of this haunt to susceptible young scholars troubled town elders. One dismayed

Scot visitor wrote in 1774, “One circumstance I think is a little unlucky . . . is that

50 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

the entrance to [King’s College] is through one of the streets where the most noted

prostitutes live.”21 The college promulgated rules that “none of the pupils shall fre-

quent houses of ill fame or keep company with any persons of known scandalous

behavior.”22 Women were strictly banned from the college grounds, along with

cards, dice, and other subtle snares of the devil. In returning to the college before

the curfew, did Hamilton sometimes linger in the Holy Ground to sample its pro-

fane pleasures?

In warding off outside temptations, President Cooper also looked askance at the

political protests mounted nearby. King’s College had evolved into the fortress of

British orthodoxy that William Livingston and Presbyterian critics had feared, with

the Anglican reverence for hierarchy and obedience breeding subservience to royal

authority. (During the Revolution, the British Army was to take malicious pleasure

in converting Presbyterian and Baptist churches into stables or barracks.) To Presi-

dent Cooper’s consternation, King’s College stood one block west of the Common

(now City Hall Park), a popular spot for radicals to congregate in. During Hamil-

ton’s stay at the college, an eighty-foot pole towered over this grassy expanse, around

the top of which spun a gilded weather vane with the single word LIBERTY on it.

Hamilton’s debut as a rabble-rousing orator was to take place in this very park.

With fewer than twenty-five thousand inhabitants, New York was already second

in size among American colonial cities, behind Philadelphia but edging ahead of

Boston. Founded as a commercial venture by the Dutch West India Company in

1623, the city already had a history as a raucous commercial hub, a boisterous port

that blended many cultures and religions. Fourteen languages were spoken there by

the time Hamilton arrived. Each year, its congested wharves absorbed thousands of

new immigrants—mostly British, Scotch, and Irish—and Hamilton must have ap-

preciated the city’s acceptance of strangers carving out new lives. His friend Gou-

verneur Morris later observed that “to be born in America seems to be a matter of

indifference at New York.”23

The settled portion of the city stretched from the Battery up to the Common.

Shaded by poplars and elms, Broadway was the main thoroughfare, flanked by

mazes of narrow, winding streets. There were sights galore to enthrall the young

West Indian. Fetching ladies promenaded along Broadway, handsome coaches

cruised the streets, and graceful church spires etched an incipient skyline. Rich

merchants had colonized Wall Street and Hanover Square, and their weekend plea-

sure gardens extended north along the Hudson shore. On his way to the Continen-

tal Congress in Philadelphia in 1774, John Adams admired the city’s painted brick

buildings and praised its streets as “vastly more regular and elegant than those in

Boston and the houses are more grand as well as neat.”24 At the same time, the in-

habitants already conformed to the eventual stereotype of fast-talking, sharp-

51 The Collegian

elbowed, money-mad strivers. “They talk very loud, very fast, and all together,”

Adams protested. “If they ask you a question, before you can utter three words of

your answer, they will break out upon you again and talk away.”25 The opulence

made the poverty only more conspicuous. During the glacial winter of 1772–1773,

the East River froze, and the municipal hospital was overrun with indigent patients.

Crime was so pervasive that ground had recently been broken for Bridewell prison.

Hamilton must have entered King’s in late 1773 or early 1774, because his stay

overlapped with that of Edward Stevens, his St. Croix friend, and Robert Troup,

both of whom graduated by the summer of 1774. President Cooper listed Hamilton

among seventeen students who matriculated in 1774. Since the average King’s stu-

dent entered at fifteen, one again suspects that the nineteen-year-old Hamilton took

the liberty of subtracting two years from his age. To gratify the youth’s insistence

upon rapid advancement, Cooper granted Hamilton status as a special student who

took private tutorials and audited lectures but did not belong, at least initially, to

any class. In September 1774, Hamilton contracted with Professor Robert Harpur

to study math. Trained in Glasgow, Harpur probably introduced his new pupil to

the writings of David Hume and other worthies of the Scottish Enlightenment. It

took nine years for Hamilton to discharge his debt to Harpur, suggesting that even

armed with his St. Croix subsidy Hamilton had to make do on a stringent budget

and never quite forgot that he was a charity student.

There are no extant drawings of Hamilton at this age. From later descriptions,

however, we know that he stood about five foot seven and had a fair complexion,

auburn hair, rosy cheeks, and a wide, well-carved mouth. His nose, with its flaring

nostrils and irregular line, was especially strong and striking, his jaw chiseled and

combative. Slim and elegant, with thin shoulders and shapely legs, he walked with

a buoyant lightness, and his observant, flashing eyes darted about with amusement.

His later Federalist friend and ally Fisher Ames left some graphic impressions of

Hamilton’s appearance. Of his eyes, he said, “These were of a deep azure, eminently

beautiful, without the slightest trace of hardness or severity, and beamed with

higher expressions of intelligence and discernment than any others that I ever saw.”

Ames often bumped into Hamilton on his daily walks and said “he displayed in his

manners and movements a degree of refinement and grace which I never witnessed

in any other man . . . and I am quite confident that those who knew him intimately

will cheerfully subscribe to my opinion that he was one of the most elegant of mor-

tals. . . . It is impossible to conceive a loftier portion of easy, graceful, and polished

movements than were exhibited in him.”26 Though Hamilton acquired greater ur-

banity later on, even as a young man, fresh from the islands, he had a dignified air

of self-possession remarkable in a former clerk.

At first, Hamilton aspired to be a doctor and attended anatomy lectures given by

52 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

Dr. Samuel Clossy, a pioneering surgeon from Dublin. Upon arriving in New York

in 1767, Clossy had acquired quick notoriety as a practitioner of the black art of

snatching cadavers from local cemeteries for dissection. (The practice was not out-

lawed until 1789, after it sparked a massive riot.) Clossy’s lectures stayed firmly

embedded in Hamilton’s retentive memory. Years later, Hamilton’s physician, Dr.

David Hosack, recalled, “I have often heard him speak of the interest and ardour he

felt when prosecuting the study of anatomy” under Clossy. He further remarked of

Hamilton that “few men knew more of the structure of the human frame and its

functions.”27

Though not an outstanding school, King’s offered a solid classical curriculum of

Greek and Latin literature, rhetoric, geography, history, philosophy, math, and sci-

ence. Hamilton at once proved himself a student of incomparable energy, racing

through his studies with characteristic speed. “I cannot make everybody else as

rapid as myself,” he was to one day write laughingly to his wife. “This you know by

experience.”28 From his college essays, we can tell that he ransacked the library, por-

ing over the works of Locke, Montesquieu, Hobbes, and Hume, as well as those of

such reigning legal sages as Sir William Blackstone, Hugo Grotius, and Samuel von

Pufendorf. He was especially taken with the jurist Emmerich de Vattel, whom he

lauded as “the most accurate and approved of the writers on the laws of nations.”29

His education supplemented by voracious reading, Hamilton was able to compen-

sate for his childhood deficiencies. After King’s, he could rattle off the classical allu-

sions and exhibit the erudition that formed parts of the intellectual equipment of

all the founding fathers. Also, he would be able to draw freely on a stock of lore

about Greek and Roman antiquity, providing essential material for the unending

debates about the fate of republican government in America.

Hamilton was often spotted shortly after dawn, chattering to himself, as if un-

able to contain the contents of his bursting brain. He paced the Hudson River bank

and rehearsed his lessons or walked along tree-shaded Batteau Street (later Dey

Street). Based on a schedule that Hamilton later drew up for his son, we can surmise

that he followed a tight daily regimen, rising by six and budgeting most of his avail-

able time for work but also allocating time for pleasure. His life was a case study in

the profitable use of time. Hamilton showed little interest in student pranks and

pratfalls, and his name does not appear in the college’s Black Book, which recorded

infractions against Myles Cooper’s rules. Offending students were forced to memo-

rize lines from Horace or translate essays from The Spectator into Latin.

When Hamilton was at King’s, his friends were struck by his religious nature,

though some of this may have stemmed from the school’s requirements. There was

obligatory chapel before breakfast, and bells chimed after dinner for evening

prayers; on Sunday, students had to attend church twice. His chum at King’s, Robert

53 The Collegian

Troup, was convinced that Hamilton’s religious practice was driven by more than

duty. He “was attentive to public worship and in the habit of praying on his knees

night and morning. . . . I have often been powerfully affected by the fervor and elo-

quence of his prayers. He had read many of the polemical writers on religious sub-

jects and he was a zealous believer in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.”30

The vivacious Hamilton never had trouble making friends; Troup, the son of a

sea captain, was soon his warmest companion. At King’s, Troup wrote, “they occu-

pied the same room and slept in the same bed” and continued to live together for a

time after Troup graduated.31 Born in Elizabethtown in 1757, Troup had also be-

come an orphan, his father having died in 1768 (the year Hamilton’s mother died)

and his mother the following year. As with Hamilton, some friends took responsi-

bility for Troup’s welfare. Adolescent hardship instilled in Troup a lasting sense of

financial insecurity, and he was amazed that Hamilton worried so little about

money. “I have often said that your friends would be obliged to bury you at their

own expence,” Troup wrote to Hamilton in later years, a statement that was to prove

queasily prophetic.32

Was it pure happenstance that Troup and Hamilton roomed together, or did

Myles Cooper guess that they would forge a secret bond among the more affluent

boys? Where early sorrow had toughened Hamilton, hardening his self-reliance, it

made Troup insecure and prone to hero worship. Bright and jovial, favored with an

easy laugh, he idolized his gifted friends and came to enjoy the odd distinction of

being a confidant of both Hamilton and Burr. In one letter, Burr referred to Troup

fondly as “that great fat fellow” and said another time, “He is a better antidote for

the spleen than a ton of drugs.”33 Both Hamilton and Burr were prey to depression

and appear to have been buoyed by Troup’s exuberant humor.

In Hamilton’s first months at King’s, he and Troup formed a club that gathered

weekly to hone debating, writing, and speaking skills. The other members—

Nicholas Fish, Edward Stevens, and Samuel and Henry Nicoll—rounded out

Hamilton’s first circle of intimates. Small literary societies were then a staple of col-

lege life, their members composing papers and reading them aloud for comment.

Hamilton was the undisputed star. “In all the performances of the club,” Troup said,

Hamilton “made extraordinary displays of richness of genius and energy of mind.”34

As tension with England worsened, many discussions hinged on the question of

royal-colonial relations. At first, Hamilton didn’t differ much from the Loyalist

views espoused by Myles Cooper and was “originally a monarchist,” Troup asserted.

“He was versed in the history of England and well acquainted with the principles of

the English constitution, which he admired.”35 As Hamilton’s views evolved, how-

ever, and he began to publish the outspoken anti-British pieces that made his repu-

tation, he used the debating club at King’s to preview his essays.

54 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

. . .

The colonial struggle against the Crown took a dramatic turn on the moonlit night

of December 16, 1773, around the time that Hamilton entered King’s College. A

mob of two hundred men with soot-darkened faces, roughly costumed as Mohawk

Indians, crept aboard three ships in Boston harbor, used tomahawks to smash open

342 chests of tea, and pitched the contents overboard. Another two thousand

townspeople urged them on from the docks. “This is the most magnificent moment

of all,” John Adams cheered from Braintree, Massachusetts.36 The Boston Tea Party

expressed patriotic disgust at both violated principles and eroded profits. For a

time, the colonists had acquiesced to a tea tax because they had been able to smug-

gle in contraband tea from Holland. After Parliament manipulated duties to grant

a de facto tea monopoly to the East India Company in 1773, the smugglers were

thwarted and rich Boston merchants—at least those not selected as company

agents—suddenly decided to make common cause with the town radicals and

protest the parliamentary measures.

Four days later, Paul Revere galloped breathlessly into New York with news of the

Boston uprising. Troup contended that Hamilton rushed off to Boston to engage in

firsthand reportage. This seems unlikely for a new student, but he may well have

rushed into print. As a former clerk acquainted with import duties, contraband

goods, and European trade policies, Hamilton was handed a tailor-made issue that

wasn’t entirely new to him: the West Indian islands had felt the distant repercus-

sions of the Stamp Act protests and other thwarted attempts by Britain to tax the

colonists. “The first political piece which [Hamilton] wrote,” recalled Troup, “was

on the destruction of the tea at Boston in which he aimed to show that the destruc-

tion was both necessary and politic.”37 This anonymous salvo may have been the

“Defence and Destruction of the Tea” published in John Holt’s New-York Journal. In

Troup’s telling, Hamilton assuaged the keen anxieties of merchants alarmed by the

assault on property. Such reassurance was especially timely after New York hosted

its own “tea party” on April 22, 1774, when a group of sea captains, led by Alexan-

der McDougall and decked out in Mohawk dress, stormed the British ship London

and chucked its tea chests into the deep.

The enraged British lost all patience with their American brethren after the

Boston Tea Party and enacted punitive measures. One especially irate member of

Parliament, Charles Van, said Boston should be obliterated like Carthage: “I am of

the opinion you will never meet with that proper obedience to the laws of this

country until you have destroyed that nest of locusts.”38 By May 1774, news arrived

that England had retaliated with the Coercive or “Intolerable” Acts. These draco-

nian measures shut down Boston’s port until the colonists paid for the spilled tea.

55 The Collegian

They also curbed popular assemblies, restricted trial by jury, subjected Massachu-

setts to ham-handed military rule, and guaranteed that the Boston streets would

be blanketed with British troops in an overpowering show of force. On May 13,

General Thomas Gage, the new military commander, arrived in Boston with four

regiments to enforce these acts, which dealt a crippling blow to the free-spirited

maritime town. The British response triggered a still tenuous unity among colonists

who balked at the notion that Parliament could impose taxes without their consent.

Until this point, the colonies had been tantamount to separate countries, joined by

little sense of common mission or identity. Now committees of correspondence in

each colony began to communicate with one another, issuing calls for a trade em-

bargo against British goods and summoning a Continental Congress in Philadel-

phia in September.

Even in rabidly Anglophile New York, the political atmosphere by late spring was

“as full of uproar as if it was besieged by a foreign force,” said one observer.39 These

were stirring days for Hamilton, who must have been constantly distracted from his

studies by rallies, petitions, broadsides, and handbills. In choosing New York’s del-

egates for the first Continental Congress, a feud arose between hard-line protesters,

who favored a boycott of British goods, and moderate burghers who criticized such

measures as overly provocative and self-defeating. To beat the drum for a boycott,

the militant Sons of Liberty, members of a secret society first convened to flout the

Stamp Act, gathered a mass meeting on the afternoon of July 6, 1774. It took place

at the grassy Common near King’s College, sometimes called The Fields, in the

shadow of the towering liberty pole.

Alexander McDougall chaired the meeting and introduced resolutions con-

demning British sanctions against Massachusetts. The rich folklore surrounding

this pivotal event in Hamilton’s life suggests that his speech came about sponta-

neously, possibly prompted by somebody in the crowd. After mounting the plat-

form, the slight, boyish speaker started out haltingly, then caught fire in a burst of

oratory. If true to his later style, Hamilton gained energy as he spoke. He endorsed

the Boston Tea Party, deplored the closure of Boston’s port, endorsed colonial unity

against unfair taxation, and came down foursquare for a boycott of British goods.

In his triumphant peroration, he said such actions “will prove the salvation of

North America and her liberties”; otherwise “fraud, power, and the most odious

oppression will rise triumphant over right, justice, social happiness, and freedom.”40

When his speech ended, the crowd stood transfixed in silence, staring at this

spellbinding young orator before it erupted in a sustained ovation. “It is a colle-

gian!” people whispered to one another. “It is a collegian!”41 Hamilton, nineteen,

looked young for his age, which made his performance seem even more inspired.

From that moment on, he was treated as a youthful hero of the cause and recog-

56 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

nized as such by Alexander McDougall, John Lamb, Marinus Willett, and other

chieftains of the Sons of Liberty. It is worth remarking that at this juncture Hamil-

ton sided with the radical camp, along with the artisans and mechanics, rather than

with the more circumspect merchant class he later led. Hamilton had immigrated

to North America to gratify his ambition and successfully seized the opportunity to

distinguish himself. Both then and forever after, the poor boy from the West Indies

commanded attention with the force and fervor of his words. Once Hamilton was

initiated into the cause of American liberty, his life acquired an even more headlong

pace that never slackened.

As rumors of the militant commotion at the Common filtered back to the college,

Dr. Myles Cooper must have been appalled that the orphan whom he had treated so

indulgently was now fraternizing with disreputable elements. Cooper maligned the

Sons of Liberty as the “sons of licentiousness, faction, and confusion.”42 The situa-

tion was an awkward one for Cooper, who was tugging his forelock at royal author-

ity while Hamilton was thumbing his nose at it. Exactly three months before, the

college president had published an obsequious open letter to William Tryon, the

departing royal governor, that was a classic of unctuous prose and that concluded,

“We can only say, that as long as the society shall have any existence and wherever

its voice can extend, the name of TRYON will be celebrated among the worthiest of

its benefactors.”43

Hamilton contended that he was “greatly attached” to Cooper, and in ordinary

times he might have been a fond disciple.44 Cooper was a witty published poet, a

Greek and Latin scholar, and a worldly bachelor with epicurean tastes. In a portrait

by John Singleton Copley, he has a smooth, well-fed face and stares sideways at the

viewer in a smug, self-assured manner. On the tiny King’s faculty, it was Cooper

who likely tutored Hamilton in Latin, Greek, theology, and moral philosophy.

Cooper had been recommended for the King’s presidency by the archbishop of

Canterbury and was in many respects an outstanding choice. In little more than a

decade, he had inaugurated a medical school, enlarged the library, added profes-

sors, and even launched an art collection. Like John Witherspoon, he boasted a

roster of distinguished pupils, including John Jay, Robert R. Livingston, Gou-

verneur Morris, Benjamin Moore, and Hamilton. In 1774, Cooper had intensified

the overriding quest of his presidency, for a charter that would convert King’s Col-

lege into a royal university. Then the Revolution blasted his hopes. He found the re-

volt at first an irritant, then an outrage, then a mortal threat to his ambitions. He

could not afford to be a neutral bystander and began to flay the protesters in caus-

tic essays, claiming that the tea tax was exceedingly mild. “The people of Boston are

a crooked and perverse generation . . . and deserve to forfeit their charter,” he

57 The Collegian

wrote.45 With such retrograde views, he became one of New York’s most despised

Loyalists and was increasingly assailed by his students. Samuel Clossy also grew dis-

gusted with the turmoil and returned to the British Isles.

Colonial resistance began to assume a more organized shape. By late August

1774, all the colonies save Georgia had picked their delegates to the First Continen-

tal Congress. The New York delegates, among them John Jay and James Duane, de-

parted for Philadelphia amid stirring fanfare. One newspaper reported, “They were

accompanied to the place of their departure by a number of the inhabitants, with

colours flying and music playing and loud huzzas at the end of each street.”46 It was

not an assembly of dogmatic extremists who sat in Windsor chairs for six weeks in

the red-and-black brick structure known as Carpenters’ Hall. Far from being bent

on fighting for independence, these law-abiding delegates offered up a public

prayer that war might be averted. They reaffirmed their loyalty as British subjects,

hoped for a peaceful accommodation with London, and scrupulously honored le-

gal forms. Yet there were limits to their patience. The congress formed a Continen-

tal Association to enforce a total trade embargo—no exports, no imports, not even

consumption of British wares—until the Coercive Acts were repealed. Every com-

munity was instructed to assemble committees to police the ban, and when New

York chose its members that November, many of Hamilton’s friends, including

Hercules Mulligan, appeared among their numbers.

Even though John Adams had found Jay and Duane far too timid for his tastes,

the Continental Congress’s actions stunned Tory sentiment in New York. For Myles

Cooper, the meeting had been a satanic den of sedition, which he acidly con-

demned in two widely read pamphlets. He informed the startled colonists that

“subjects of Great Britain are the happiest people on earth.”47 Far from criticizing

Parliament, he maintained that “the behavior of the colonies has been intolera-

ble.”48 He then poured vitriol on the congress’s initiatives: “To think of succeeding

by force of arms or by starving the nation into compliance is a proof of shameful ig-

norance, pride, and stupidity.”49 Like many people, he scorned the notion that the

colonies could ever defeat Britain’s invincible military. “To believe America able to

withstand England is a dreadful infatuation.”50

Myles Cooper was not the only Anglican clergyman in New York to rail against

the Continental Congress. He formed part of a Loyalist literary clique that included

Charles Inglis, later rector of Trinity Church, and Samuel Seabury, the Anglican rec-

tor of the town of Westchester. Seabury was a redoubtable man of massive physique

and learned mind. Educated at Yale and Oxford, he was very pompous and wrote

prose that bristled with energetic intelligence. Because Westchester had been granted

special privileges by a royal charter, local farmers felt especially threatened by the

trade embargo. So after the Continental Congress adjourned, Seabury, with the full

58 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

knowledge of Myles Cooper, launched a series of pamphlets under the pseudonym

“A Westchester Farmer.” (The title cunningly echoed John Dickinson’s famous

polemic against parliamentary taxation, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania.)

Seabury’s blistering essays reviled the officers of the new Continental Association as

“a venomous brood of scorpions” who would “sting us to death,” and he suggested

that they be greeted with hickory sticks.51 He appealed cleverly to farmers by warn-

ing that they would be the major casualties of any trade boycott against Britain. If

merchants could not import goods from Britain, would they not then hike their

prices to farmers? As he wrote, “From the day the exports from this province are

stopped, the farmers may date the commencement of their ruin. Can you live with-

out money?”52

After the first installment of Seabury’s invective was published by James Riving-

ton in the New-York Gazetteer, the paper reported a febrile patriotic response, espe-

cially among Hamilton’s newfound companions: “We can assure the public that at

a late meeting of exotics, styled the Sons of Liberty,” the “Farmer” essay was intro-

duced, “and after a few pages being read to the company, they agreed . . . to commit

it to the flames, without the benefit of clergy, though many, very many indeed,

could neither write nor read.”53 To drive home the point, some copies were tarred

and feathered and slapped on whipping posts. Nonetheless, the essay made a huge

popular impression and demonstrated that the patriots were being outgunned by

Tory pamphleteers and needed a literary champion of their own.

Seabury gave Hamilton what he always needed for his best work: a hard, strong

position to contest. The young man gravitated to controversy, indeed gloried in

it. In taking on Seabury, Hamilton might have suspected—and may well have

enjoyed—the little secret that he was combating an Anglican cleric in Myles Cooper’s

inner circle. He had to tread stealthily and keep his name out of print. (Most polit-

ical essays at the time were published anonymously anyway.) Eager to make his

mark, Hamilton was motivated by a form of ambition much esteemed in the eigh-

teenth century—what he later extolled as the “love of fame, the ruling passion of

the noblest minds, which would prompt a man to plan and undertake extensive and

arduous enterprises for the public benefit.”54 Ambition was reckless if inspired by

purely selfish motives but laudable if guided by great principles. In this, his first

great performance in print, Hamilton placed his ambition at the service of lofty

ideals.

On December 15, 1774, the New-York Gazetteer ran an advertisement for a newly

published pamphlet entitled “A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress”

that promised to answer “The Westchester Farmer.” The farmer’s sophistry would

be “exposed, his cavils confuted, his artifices detected, and his wit ridiculed.”55 This

thirty-five-page essay had been written in two or three weeks by Hamilton, as he

59 The Collegian

entered the fray with all the grandiloquence and learning at his disposal. He showed

himself proficient at elegant insults, an essential literary talent at the time, and pos-

sessing a precocious knowledge of history, philosophy, politics, economics, and law.

In retrospect, it was clear that he had found his calling as a fearless, swashbuckling

intellectual warrior who excelled in bare-knuckled controversy.

By the time of “A Full Vindication,” Hamilton had clearly assumed the coloring

of his environment. Few immigrants have renounced their past more unequivocally

or adopted their new country more wholeheartedly. “I am neither merchant, nor

farmer,” he now wrote, just a year and a half after leaving St. Croix. “I address you

because I wish well to my country”: New York.56 Hamilton reviewed the Boston Tea

Party and the punitive measures that had ensued in Boston, including “license [of]

the murder of its inhabitants” by British troops.57 Hamilton supported the Tea

Party culprits and faulted the British for punishing the whole province instead of

just the perpetrators. He voiced the increasingly popular complaints about taxation

without representation and defended the trade embargo, insisting that England

would suffer drastic harm. Sounding more like the later Jefferson than the later

Hamilton, he evoked an England burdened by debt and taxes and corrupted by

luxuries.

In many places, “A Full Vindication” was verbose and repetitive. What foreshad-

owed Hamilton’s mature style was the lawyerly fashion in which he grounded his

argument in natural law, colonial charters, and the British constitution. He already

showed little patience with halfway measures that prolonged problems instead of

solving them crisply. “When the political salvation of any community is depending,

it is incumbent upon those who are set up as its guardians to embrace such mea-

sures as have justice, vigor, and a probability of success to recommend them.”58

Most impressive was Hamilton’s shrewd insight into the psychology of power. Of

the British prime minister, Lord North, he wrote with exceptional acuity:

The Premier has advanced too far to recede with safety: he is deeply interested

to execute his purpose, if possible. . . . In common life, to retract an error

even in the beginning is no easy task. Perseverance confirms us in it and riv-

ets the difficulty. . . . To this we may add that disappointment and opposition

inflame the minds of men and attach them still more to their mistakes.59

After Seabury rebutted “A Full Vindication,” Hamilton struck back with “The

Farmer Refuted,” an eighty-page tour de force that Rivington brought out on Feb-

ruary 23, 1775. More than twice the length of its predecessor, this second essay be-

trayed a surer grasp of politics and economics. Seabury had mocked Hamilton’s

maiden performance and now suffered the consequences. “Such is my opinion of

60 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

your abilities as a critic,” Hamilton addressed him directly, “that I very much prefer

your disapprobation to your applause.”60 As if Seabury were the young upstart and

not vice versa, Hamilton taunted his riposte as “puerile and fallacious” and stated

that “I will venture to pronounce it one of the most ludicrous performances which

has been exhibited to public view during all the present controversy.”61 This slash-

ing style of attack would make Hamilton the most feared polemicist in America,

but it won him enemies as well as admirers. Unlike Franklin or Jefferson, he never

learned to subdue his opponents with a light touch or a sly, artful, understated turn

of phrase.

Like most colonists, Hamilton still hoped for amity with England and com-

plained that the colonists were being denied the full liberties of British subjects. In

justifying American defiance of British taxation, he elaborated the fashionable ar-

gument that the colonies owed their allegiance to the British king, not to Parlia-

ment. The point was critical, for if the colonies were linked only to the king, they

could, theoretically, wriggle free from parliamentary control while creating some

form of commonwealth status in the British empire. Indeed, Hamilton cast himself

as “a warm advocate for limited monarchy and an unfeigned well-wisher to the

present royal family.”62 In what became his trademark style, he displayed exhaustive

research, tracing royal charters for North America back to Queen Elizabeth and

showing that no powers had been reserved to Parliament. In one glowing passage,

Hamilton invoked the colonists’ natural rights: “The sacred rights of mankind are

not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written,

as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of the divin-

ity itself and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”63 These lines echo

John Dickinson, who had written that the essential rights to happiness are be-

stowed by God, not man. “They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals.”64

Hamilton added beauty and rhythm to the expression.

Clearly, Hamilton was reading the skeptical Scottish philosopher David Hume,

and he quoted his view that in framing a government “every man ought to be sup-

posed a knave and to have no other end in all his actions but private interests.” The

task of government was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to har-

ness it for the public good. In starting to outline the contours of his own vision of

government, Hamilton was spurred by Hume’s dark vision of human nature, which

corresponded to his own. At one point, while talking about the advantages that En-

gland derived from colonial trade, he said, “And let me tell you, in this selfish, rapa-

cious world, a little discretion is, at worst, only a venial sin.”65 That chilling aside—a

“selfish, rapacious world”—speaks volumes about the darkness of Hamilton’s up-

bringing.

With “The Farmer Refuted,” the West Indian student became an eloquent booster

61 The Collegian

of his chosen country and asserted the need for unity to resist British oppression.

“If the sword of oppression be permitted to lop off one limb without opposition,

reiterated strokes will soon dismember the whole body.”66 He already took the long

view of American destiny, seeing that the colonies would someday overtake the

mother country in economic power. “If we look forward to a period not far distant,

we shall perceive that the productions of our country will infinitely exceed the de-

mands, which Great Britain and her connections can possibly have for them. And

as we shall then be greatly advanced in population, our wants will be proportion-

ably increased.”67 Here, in embryonic form, is his vision of the vast, diversified

economy that was to emerge after independence.

“The Farmer Refuted” was a bravura performance, flashing with prophetic in-

sights. While the British disputed that America could win a war of independence,

Hamilton accurately predicted that France and Spain would aid the colonies. The

twenty-year-old student anticipated the scrappy, opportunistic military strategy

that would defeat the British:

Let it be remembered that there are no large plains for the two armies to meet

in and decide the conquest. . . . The circumstances of our country put it in

our power to evade a pitched battle. It will be better policy to harass and ex-

haust the soldiery by frequent skirmishes and incursions than to take the

open field with them, by which means they would have the full benefit of their

superior regularity and skills. Americans are better qualified for that kind of

fighting which is most adapted to this country than regular troops.68

This was Washington’s strategy, compressed into a nutshell and articulated even be-

fore the fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord. This was more than just pre-

cocious knowledge: this was intuitive judgment of the highest order.

As rumors went around that Hamilton had authored the two “Farmer” essays,

many New Yorkers, Myles Cooper included, dismissed the notion as preposterous.

“I remember that in a conversation I once had with Dr. Cooper,” said Robert Troup,

“he insisted that Mr. Jay must be the author[,] . . . it being absurd to imagine [that]

so young a man” as Hamilton could have written it.69 Others attributed the pieces

to much more established figures, such as William Livingston. Hamilton must have

been flattered by the fuss and his literary club deeply amused. In a city with a dearth

of republican pamphleteers, Hamilton represented an important recruit to the

cause. He had demonstrated inimitable speed (the two “Farmer” essays totaled sixty

thousand words), supreme confidence in his views, and an easy, sophisticated grasp

of the issues. He was to be a true child of the Revolution, growing up along with his

new country and gaining in strength and wisdom as the hostilities mounted.

FOUR

T H E P E N A N D

T H E SWO R D

B y the time Hamilton wrote “The Farmer Refuted,” the British Parliament

had declared Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion and ratified the

king’s unswerving determination to adopt all measures necessary to compel

obedience. On the night of April 18, 1775, eight hundred British troops marched

out of Boston to capture Samuel Adams and John Hancock and seize a stockpile of

patriot munitions in Concord. As they passed Lexington, they encountered a mot-

ley battalion of armed farmers known as Minutemen, and in the ensuing exchange

of gunfire the British killed eight colonists and then two more in Concord. As the

redcoats retreated helter-skelter to Boston, they were riddled by sniper fire that

erupted from behind hedges, stone walls, and fences, leaving a bloody trail of 273

British casualties versus ninety-five dead or wounded for the patriots.

The news reached New York within four days, and a mood of insurrection

promptly overtook the city. People gathered at taverns and on street corners to pon-

der events while Tories quaked. One of the latter, Judge Thomas Jones, watched ex-

ultant rebels storm by in the street “with drums beating and colours flying, attended

by a mob of negroes, boys, sailors, and pickpockets, inviting all mankind to take up

arms in defence of the ‘injured rights and liberties of America,’ ” he said.1 The newly

emboldened Sons of Liberty streamed down to the East River docks, pilfered ships

bound for British troops in Boston, then emptied the City Hall arsenal of its mus-

kets, bayonets, and cartridge boxes, grabbing one thousand weapons in all.2

Armed with this cache, volunteer militia companies sprang up overnight, as they

did throughout the colonies. However much the British might deride these ragtag

citizen-soldiers, they conducted their business in earnest. Inflamed by the astonish-

ing news from Massachusetts, Hamilton was that singular intellectual who picked

63 The Pen and the Sword

up a musket as fast as a pen. Nicholas Fish recalled that “immediately after the Bat-

tle of Lexington, [Hamilton] attached himself to one of the uniform companies of

militia then forming for the defence of the country by the patriotic young men of

this city under the command of Captain Fleming, in which he devoted much time,

attending regularly all the parades and performing tours of duty with promptitude

and zeal.”3 Fish and Troup were among the diligent cadre of King’s College volun-

teers who drilled before classes each morning in the churchyard of nearby St. Paul’s

Chapel. Their drillmaster was Edward Fleming, who had served in a British regiment

and married into the prominent De Peyster family but was still warmly attached to

the American side. As a sturdy disciplinarian, Fleming was a man after Hamilton’s

own heart; Hamilton’s son said that the fledgling volunteer company was named

the Hearts of Oak, although military rolls identify the group as the Corsicans. The

young recruits marched briskly past tombstones with the motto “Liberty or Death”

stitched across their round leather caps. On short, snug green jackets they also

sported, for good measure, red tin hearts that announced “God and Our Right.”

Hamilton approached this daily routine with the same perfectionist ardor that

he exhibited in his studies. Robert Troup stressed the “military spirit” infused into

Hamilton and noted that he was “constant in his attendance and very ambitious of

improvement.”4 Hamilton, never one to fumble an opportunity, embarked on a

comprehensive military education. With his absorbent mind, he mastered infantry

drills, pored over volumes on military tactics, and learned the rudiments of gunnery

and pyrotechnics from a veteran bombardier. Despite the physical delicacy that

Hugh Knox had observed, there was a peculiar doggedness about this young man,

as if he were already in training for something far beyond humble infantry duty.

On April 24, a huge throng of patriots, some eight thousand strong, massed in

front of City Hall. While radicals grew giddy with excitement, many terrified Tory

merchants began to book passage for England. The next day, an anonymous hand-

bill blamed Myles Cooper and four other “obnoxious gentlemen” for the patriotic

deaths in Massachusetts and said the moment had passed for symbolic gestures,

such as burning Tories in effigy. “The injury you have done to your country cannot

admit of reparation,” these five Loyalists were warned. “Fly for your lives or antici-

pate your doom by becoming your own executioners.” This blatant death threat was

signed, “Three Millions.”5 A defiant Myles Cooper stuck to his college post.

After a demonstration on the night of May 10, hundreds of protesters armed

with clubs and heated by a heady brew of political rhetoric and strong drink de-

scended on King’s College, ready to inflict rough justice on Myles Cooper. Hercules

Mulligan recalled that Cooper “was a Tory and an obnoxious man and the mob

went to the college with the intention of tarring and feathering him or riding him

upon a rail.”6 Nicholas Ogden, a King’s alumnus, saw the angry mob swarming

64 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

toward the college and raced ahead to Cooper’s room, urging the president to

scramble out a back window. Because Hamilton and Troup shared a room near

Cooper’s quarters, Ogden also alerted them to the approaching mob. “Whereupon

Hamilton instantly resolved to take his stand on the stairs [i.e., the outer stoop] in

front of the Doctor’s apartment and there to detain the mob as long as he could by

a harangue in order to gain the Doctor the more time for his escape,” Troup later

recorded.7

After the mob knocked down the gate and surged toward the residence, Hamil-

ton launched into an impassioned speech, telling the vociferous protesters that

their conduct, instead of promoting their cause, would “disgrace and injure the glo-

rious cause of liberty.”8 One account has the slightly deaf Cooper poking his head

from an upper-story window and observing Hamilton gesticulating on the stoop

below. He mistakenly thought that his pupil was inciting the crowd instead of paci-

fying them and shouted, “Don’t mind what he says. He’s crazy!”9 Another account

has Cooper shouting at the ruffians: “Don’t believe anything Hamilton says. He’s a

little fool!”10 The more plausible version is that Cooper had long since vanished,

having scampered away in his nightgown on Ogden’s warning.

Hamilton likely knew he couldn’t stop the intruders, but he won the vital minutes

necessary for Cooper to clamber over a back fence and rush down to the Hudson.

Afraid for his life, Cooper meandered along the shore all night. The next day, he

boarded a man-of-war bound for England, where he resumed his tirades against

the colonists from the safety of a study. Among other things, he published a melo-

dramatic poem about his escape. He told how the rabble—“a murderous band”—

had burst into his room, “And whilst their curses load my head / With piercing steel

they probe the bed / And thirst for human gore.”11 This image of the president set

upon by bloodthirsty rebels was more satisfying than the banal truth that he cravenly

ran off half dressed into the night. Cooper never saw Hamilton again and wept co-

piously when England lost the Revolution. He could not resist grumbling in his will

that “all my affairs have been shattered to pieces by this abominable rebellion.”12

Of all the incidents in Hamilton’s early life in America, his spontaneous defense

of Myles Cooper was probably the most telling. It showed that he could separate

personal honor from political convictions and presaged a recurring theme of his

career: the superiority of forgiveness over revolutionary vengeance. Hamilton had

shown exemplary courage. Beyond risking a terrible beating, he had taken the

chance that he would sacrifice his heroic stature among the Sons of Liberty. But

Hamilton always expressed himself frankly, no matter what the consequences. Most

of all, the episode captured the contradictory impulses struggling inside this com-

plex young man, a committed revolutionary with a profound dread that popular

sentiment would boil over into dangerous excess. Even amid an insurrection that he

65 The Pen and the Sword

supported, he fretted about the damage to constituted authority and worried about

mob rule. Like other founding fathers, Hamilton would have preferred a stately rev-

olution, enacted decorously in courtrooms and parliamentary chambers by gifted

orators in powdered wigs. The American Revolution was to succeed because it was

undertaken by skeptical men who knew that the same passions that toppled tyran-

nies could be applied to destructive ends. In a moment of acute anxiety a year ear-

lier, John Adams had wondered what would happen if “the multitude, the vulgar,

the herd, the rabble” maintained such open defiance of authority.13

For Hamilton and other patriotic New Yorkers, the late spring of 1775 was a season

of pride, dread, hope, and confusion. When New England delegates to the Second

Continental Congress swept through town en route to Philadelphia on May 6,

thousands of New Yorkers jammed rooftops, stoops, and doorways to roar their ap-

proval above an incessant clanging of church bells. Since the old Loyalist assembly

in New York had refused to send delegates to the First Continental Congress, it was

disbanded and replaced by a New York Provincial Congress. This new body pieced

together a slate of delegates to send to Philadelphia, including Philip Schuyler,

Hamilton’s future father-in-law, and George Clinton, his future political nemesis.

As the congress convened in the Pennsylvania State House (today’s Indepen-

dence Hall) on May 10, most colonists still prayed for a peaceful resolution of the

standoff, though armed conflict now seemed inevitable. The Second Continental

Congress lacked many of the prerequisites of an authentic government—an army,

a currency, taxing power—yet it evolved in pell-mell fashion into the first govern-

ment of the United States. Its most pressing task was to appoint a commander in

chief. All eyes turned to a strapping, reticent Virginian who carried himself with

unusual poise and wore a colonel’s uniform to advertise his experience in the

French and Indian War. One congressman said that George Washington was “no

harum-scarum, ranting, swearing fellow, but sober, steady, and calm.”14 On June 15,

Washington, forty-three, was named head of the Continental Army for reasons that

transcended talent and experience. Since the fighting had thus far been restricted to

New England, the choice of a Virginian signaled that this was a crusade of unified

colonies, not some regional squabble. Also, with one-fifth of the population of the

colonies, Virginia felt entitled to a leadership role, and the selection of Washington

was the first of many efforts by the north to please and placate the south.

Two days later, at Bunker Hill—or, rather, Breed’s Hill—north of Boston, a bat-

tle took place that hardly seemed at first like a patriotic victory. Americans were

flushed from their elevated fortification, and more than four hundred were killed

or wounded. Nevertheless, the patriotic soldiers showed great coolness under fire,

and the British suffered more than one thousand casualties, including dozens of of-

66 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

ficers. “The dead lay as thick as sheep in a fold,” said Colonel John Stark.15 This first

formal battle of the Revolution demolished the myth of British invincibility and

raised, for the first time, the question of just how many deaths the mother coun-

try would tolerate to subjugate the colonies. The British were unhinged by the

colonists’ unorthodox fighting style and shocking failure to abide by gentlemanly

rules of engagement. One scandalized British soldier complained that the American

riflemen “conceal themselves behind trees etc. till an opportunity presents itself of

taking a shot at our advance sentries, which done, they immediately retreat. What

an unfair method of carrying on a war!”16

Following this battle, George Washington stopped in New York on his way to

Cambridge, Massachusetts, to assume his command. On June 25, he crossed the

Hudson on the Hoboken ferry, then proceeded along Broadway in a carriage pulled

by a team of white horses, the triumphant procession moving grandly past King’s

College. On that glorious summer afternoon, Alexander Hamilton stood unnoticed

among the delirious spectators, unaware that within two years he would serve as

chief aide to the general he now observed for the first time. Probably accompanied

by Major General Philip Schuyler, Washington sped by with a touch of magnifi-

cence, a purple sash across his blue uniform, and a ceremonial plume sprouting

from his hat.

Hamilton had not been idle while the Second Continental Congress deliberated

and urged Canadian colonists to join the fray. On the day that Washington was ap-

pointed top commander, Hamilton published the first of two letters in Rivington’s

paper assailing the Quebec Act, passed the previous year; the second article appeared

just three days before Washington’s visit. The act extended Quebec’s boundaries

south to the Ohio River and guaranteed full religious freedom to French-Canadian

Catholics. For the patriots, this did not reflect British tolerance so much as the

frightening imposition of French civil law and Roman Catholicism in a neighbor-

ing frontier area. Hamilton discerned a sinister intent behind Britain’s bid to enlist

the aid of the Roman Catholic clergy in Canada. “This act develops the dark designs

of the ministry more fully than any thing they have done and shows that they have

formed a systematic project of absolute power.”17 If Hamilton displayed some atavis-

tic Huguenot fear of popery, he also sounded a theme that was to resonate straight

through the Revolution and beyond: that the best government posture toward reli-

gion was one of passive tolerance, not active promotion of an established church.

On July 5, the Second Continental Congress made one final feeble effort to ward

off further hostilities when it endorsed the Olive Branch Petition, urging a negoti-

ated solution to the conflict with England. The document professed loyalty to the

king and tactfully blamed his “artful and cruel” ministers.18 When the haughty King

George III did not deign to answer this conciliatory message, his frosty rigidity de-

67 The Pen and the Sword

moralized congressional moderates and guaranteed intensified military prepara-

tions. On August 23, the king issued a royal proclamation that his American sub-

jects had “proceeded to open and avowed rebellion.”19 The world’s most powerful

nation had now pledged itself, irrevocably, to breaking the resistance of its unruly

overseas colonists.

By coincidence, on that same night of August 23, Alexander Hamilton got his

first unforgettable taste of British military might. Everyone knew that Manhattan,

encircled by water, was vulnerable to the royal armada and would not be defensible

for long without a navy. So when the British warship Asia appeared in the harbor

that summer, it proved an effective instrument of terror. The New York Provincial

Congress worried that the two dozen cannon posted at Fort George at the tip of the

Battery might be seized by the British. Hamilton, joined by fifteen other King’s Col-

lege volunteers, signed up for a hazardous operation to drag the heavy artillery to

safety under the liberty pole on the Common. (College lore later claimed that two

of the salvaged cannon were buried under the campus green.) Lashing the cannon

with ropes, Hamilton and his fellow students rescued more than ten big guns before

a barge from the Asia, moored near the shore, began to strafe them with fire. The

patriots, possibly including Hamilton, returned fire as the barge darted back to the

Asia. The warship then let loose a thunderous broadside of grapeshot and cannon-

balls that blew a big hole in the roof of Fraunces Tavern and sent thousands of pan-

icky residents fleeing from their beds and screaming into the streets.

As in his defense of Myles Cooper, the intrepid Hamilton displayed unusual

sangfroid. “The Asia fired upon the city,” wrote Hercules Mulligan, “and I recollect

well that Mr. Hamilton was there, for I was engaged in hauling off one of the can-

non when Mr. H. came up and gave me his musket to hold and he took hold of the

rope.” After Hamilton disposed of his ordnance, he ran into Mulligan again and

asked for his musket back, only to be told that the tailor had left it down at the

Battery—the spot most exposed to fierce shelling from the Asia. “I told him where

I had left it,” Mulligan continued, “and he went for it notwithstanding [that] the fir-

ing continued, with as much unconcern as if the vessel had not been there.”20

During an autumn term that allowed little time for leisure, Hamilton found him-

self in a new predicament over the progressively more precarious situation of James

Rivington, the New-York Gazetteer publisher. The son of a prosperous London

bookseller, Rivington was an elegant but combative man who wore a silver wig.

When he inaugurated his newspaper in 1773 at the foot of Wall Street, he prided

himself on his political neutrality and swore that he would be receptive to all view-

points. As shown by his relationship with Hamilton, he did not shrink from ques-

tioning Tory dogma.

68 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

Nevertheless, with the passage of time Tory opinion predominated in his paper.

Rivington took an especially harsh tone toward the Sons of Liberty, with their

rough-hewn, working-class followers, and singled out their leaders, Alexander Mc-

Dougall and Isaac Sears, for special abuse. By September 1774, Sears retaliated with

scathing letters to Rivington. “I believe you to be either an ignorant impudent pre-

tender to what you do not understand,” he wrote, “or a base servile tool, ready to do

the dirty work of any knave who will purchase you.”21 Pretty soon, the rival New-

York Journal ran lengthy lists of patriotic subscribers who felt so betrayed by Riv-

ington that they had canceled their subscriptions to his paper. Rivington’s days were

numbered after Lexington and Concord. The same mob that chased Myles Cooper

from King’s proceeded to attack the petrified Rivington, who spent the next ten

days in seclusion aboard the man-of-war Kingfisher. Though he returned to his

print shop, his ordeal wasn’t over. Later that summer, the New York Provincial

Congress ruled that anyone aiding the enemy could be disarmed, imprisoned, or

even exiled. Isaac Sears seized on this decision to be done with Rivington once and

for all.

Though nicknamed the “king” of the New York streets, Sears was not a plebeian

hero but a prosperous skipper who had worked the West Indian trade and amassed

a small fortune as a privateer during the French and Indian War. On November 19,

Sears gathered up a militia of nearly one hundred horsemen in Connecticut, kid-

napped the Reverend Samuel Seabury, and terrorized his prisoner’s family in

Westchester before parading his humiliated Tory trophy through New Haven. Con-

fined under military guard, Seabury refused to confess that he was the “Westchester

Farmer” whose essays had provoked Hamilton’s celebrated rebuttal. Sears’s little

army, turning south, then swooped down in a surprise raid on Rivington’s print

shop in Manhattan, planning to put it out of business. Because Hamilton poured

out his anguish afterward in a letter to John Jay, this is one of the better-documented

episodes of his King’s College days. We also know about the fracas from another

source. Probably encouraged by his old mentor, Hugh Knox, Hamilton seems to

have mailed unsigned dispatches from New York to the Royal Danish American

Gazette. These hitherto undiscovered articles give a more detailed glimpse of his life

in the early days of the rebellion and fill major gaps in the sketchy documentary

record of Hamilton’s early career. In a report on Rivington, the anonymous corre-

spondent wrote:

The contents of all last week’s New-York Gazetteer occasioned Mr. Rivington,

the printer, to be surprised and surrounded on the 23rd of November by 75

of the Connecticut Light horse, with firelocks and fixed bayonets, who burst

69 The Pen and the Sword

into his house between twelve and one o’clock at noon, and totally destroyed

all his types, and put an entire stop to his business, and reduced him at up-

wards of 50 years of age to the sad necessity of beginning the world again.

The astonished citizens beheld the whole scene without affording the perse-

cuted proscribed printer the least assistance. The printing of the New-York

Gazetteer will be discontinued until America shall be blessed with the restora-

tion of good government.22

Although the author of this dispatch was anonymous, who else but Hamilton

would have filed such a dispatch to St. Croix? From Hercules Mulligan, we know

that the one bystander who had the pluck to rise to Rivington’s defense was Hamil-

ton himself. “When Rivington’s press was attacked by a company from the east-

ward, Mr. H., indignant that our neighbours should intrude upon our rights

(although the press was considered a tory one), he went to the place, addressed the

people present and offered if any others would join him to prevent these intruders

from taking the type away.”23

As with the mob assault against Myles Cooper, the scene at Rivington’s became

stamped on Hamilton’s memory, and his horror at such mob disorder foreshad-

owed his fearful reaction to the French Revolution. Several days after Sears’s men

pillaged Rivington’s shop, Hamilton wrote to John Jay and acknowledged that Riv-

ington’s press had been “dangerous and pernicious” and that the man himself was

“detestable.” Nevertheless, he felt obliged to condemn the lawless nature of the

action:

In times of such commotion as the present, while the passions of men are

worked up to an uncommon pitch, there is great danger of fatal extremes.

The same state of the passions which fits the multitude, who have not a

sufficient stock of reason and knowledge to guide them, for opposition to

tyranny and oppression, very naturally leads them to a contempt and disre-

gard of all authority. The due medium is hardly to be found among the more

intelligent. It is almost impossible among the unthinking populace. When the

minds of these are loosened from their attachment to ancient establishments

and courses, they seem to grow giddy and are apt more or less to run into

anarchy.24

Clearly, this ambivalent twenty-year-old favored the Revolution but also worried

about the long-term effect of habitual disorder, especially among the uneducated

masses. Hamilton lacked the temperament of a true-blue revolutionary. He saw too

70 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

clearly that greater freedom could lead to greater disorder and, by a dangerous di-

alectic, back to a loss of freedom. Hamilton’s lifelong task was to try to straddle and

resolve this contradiction and to balance liberty and order.

The sequel to the print-shop raid deserves mention. James Rivington was tem-

porarily put out of business, only to be resurrected as a “Printer to His Majesty the

King” during Britain’s wartime occupation of New York. Appearances could be de-

ceiving. Even as he reviled the patriots in The Royal Gazette, Rivington was surrep-

titiously relaying British naval intelligence to Washington, sealed inside the covers

of books he sold to patriotic spies. He was to be rewarded in the fullness of time.

While Rivington had been muzzled by his critics, Hamilton himself was still

gripped by the publishing itch. For an ambitious young man of a broadly literary

bent, polemical broadsides fired at the British ministry presented the surest road to

fame. In early January 1776, a self-taught English immigrant, Thomas Paine, who

had arrived in Philadelphia two years earlier, provided Hamilton with a perfect

model when he anonymously published Common Sense. The onetime corset maker

and excise officer issued a resounding call for American independence that sold a

stupendous 120,000 copies by year’s end.

By now, Hamilton had switched his journalistic allegiance to the stalwart repub-

lican paper of John Holt, the New-York Journal. He probably met Holt through

William Livingston, who had cofounded the paper. In 1774, Holt had dropped the

royal symbols from his masthead and replaced them with a well-known engraving

that Ben Franklin had created to foster his Albany Plan of intercolonial union

twenty years before: a copperhead snake sliced into segments and accompanied by

the fighting slogan “Unite or Die.” (In Franklin’s version, “Join or Die.”) Robert

Troup said that Hamilton published many articles while at King’s, “particularly in

the newspaper then edited in New York by John Holt, who was a zealous Whig.”25

Nor had Hamilton given up on poetry. He constantly scribbled doggerel, rhyme,

and satirical verse and gave Troup a thick sheaf of these poems, which the latter

proceeded to lose during the Revolution.

Oddly, the otherwise thorough editors of Hamilton’s papers have reprinted his

essays published by the Tory Rivington but have omitted his collaborations with the

dissident Holt. Hamilton’s contemporaries knew him as the nameless scribe behind

some of the New-York Journal’s most trenchant editorials. “I hope Mr. Hamilton

continues busy,” John Jay told Alexander McDougall on December 5, 1775. “I have

not received Holt’s paper these three months and therefore cannot judge of the

progress he makes.”26 In fact, Hamilton’s contributions were evident there. From

November 9, 1775, to February 8, 1776, the New-York Journal ran fourteen install-

ments of “The Monitor,” probably the longest and most prominently featured

71 The Pen and the Sword

string of essays that Holt printed before the Revolution. In this series, Hamilton re-

capitulated the central theme of his anti-“Farmer” essays that the colonies owed

their fealty to the king, not to Parliament. Although Hamilton later retracted some

of his more hot-blooded opinions, such as his opposition to standing armies, and

though he may have regretted his withering mockery of statesmen, royalty, popes,

and priests, many of the essays are vintage Hamilton.

In “The Monitor,” Hamilton left many clues to his authorship. Echoing his 1769

letter to Edward Stevens, in which he bemoaned the “grovelling” life of a clerk, he

now warned his comrades against “a grovelling disposition” that would degrade

them “from the rank of freemen to that of slaves.”27 He expressed views of leader-

ship that closely anticipate his later dicta about the need for decisive, unequivocal

action: “In public exigencies, there is hardly anything more prejudicial than exces-

sive caution, timidity and dilatoriness, as there is nothing more beneficial than

vigour, enterprise and expedition.”28 At times, he repeated his anti-“Farmer” essays

almost verbatim, saying of the British ministry, “They have advanced too far to re-

treat without equal infamy and danger; their honour, their credit, their existence

as ministers, perhaps their life itself, depend upon their success in the present

undertaking.”29 Like many prolific authors, Hamilton sometimes quoted himself

unwittingly.

The “Monitor” essays reveal Hamilton as an anomalous revolutionary. At the

outset, he shows the rousing optimism about the revolutionary future that is the

stock-in-trade of radical prose. He delivers a paean to America’s destiny as he

prophesies that after the war the country will be elevated “to a much higher pitch of

grandeur, opulence, and power than we could ever attain to by a humble submis-

sion to arbitrary rule.”30 Yet this hopefulness is hedged by a somber view of human

affairs. Hamilton lauds the conduct of his countrymen but cannot refrain from say-

ing sardonically that “it is a melancholy truth that the behaviour of many among us

might serve as the severest satire upon the [human] species. It has been a com-

pound of inconsistency, falsehood, cowardice, selfishness and dissimulation.”31

Hamilton also displays a swooning fascination with martyrdom, telling the colonists

that they should vow either to “lead an honourable life or to meet with resignation

a glorious death.”32 This idea so bewitched him that he ended one “Monitor” essay

with a quote from Pope’s Iliad that begins: “Death is the worst, a fate which all must

try; / And, for our country, ’tis a bliss to die.”33

Hamilton dashed off the “Monitor” essays at the frenetic pace of one a week—

the more incredible as he was still a student and dutifully attending drills in the St.

Paul’s churchyard each morning. Even this did not exhaust the scope of his activi-

ties. This peerless undergraduate had begun preliminary legal studies and was

combing the superb law library at King’s, steeping himself in the works of Sir

72 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

William Blackstone and Sir Edward Coke. As he later said, by “steady and laborious

exertion” he had qualified for a bachelor’s degree and was able “to lay a foundation,

by preparatory study, for the future profession of the law.”34 Hamilton probably

spent little more than two years at King’s and never formally graduated due to the

outbreak of the Revolution. By April 6, 1776, King’s College, tarred by its earlier as-

sociation with Myles Cooper, was commandeered by patriot forces and put to use

as a military hospital.

After Hamilton published his last “Monitor” installment on February 8, he par-

layed his budding fame as a pamphleteer into a military appointment that perfectly

suited his daydreams of martial glory. On February 18, he sent a personal dispatch

to the Royal Danish American Gazette that announced he was joining the military.

The unsigned letter was filled with grim forebodings of martyrdom: “It is uncer-

tain whether it may ever be in my power to send you another line. . . . I am going

into the army and perhaps ere long may be destined to seal with my blood the sen-

timents defended by my pen. Be it so, if heaven decree it. I was born to die and my

reason and conscience tell me it is impossible to die in a better or more important

”35cause.

What prompted this declaration was that the Provincial Congress had decided to

raise an artillery company to defend New York, providing another chance for the

upwardly mobile West Indian to excel. Like most revolutions, this one made ample

room for talented outsiders. Luckily for Hamilton, Alexander McDougall was in

charge of forming New York’s first patriotic regiment. A fiery, pugnacious Scot and

former ship captain, McDougall was yet another Presbyterian protégé of William

Livingston, who may have provided the introduction. While at King’s, Hamilton

borrowed political pamphlets from McDougall and was mortified when they were

stolen from his room.

On February 23, the Provincial Congress reported that “Col. McDougall recom-

mended Mr. Alexander Hamilton for Capt. of a Company of Artillery.”36 Robert

Troup said that McDougall prodded John Jay (by this time William Livingston’s

son-in-law) to wrangle the coveted commission for Hamilton. After being exam-

ined, Hamilton received the assignment on March 14, 1776. When doubts arose

about this student’s fitness to lead an artillery company, McDougall and Jay per-

suasively overcame them. Right before Hamiliton received his appointment, he was

approached by Elias Boudinot on behalf of Lord Stirling, who had been elevated to

brigadier general and desired Hamilton as his military aide. The headstrong Hamil-

ton shrank from being subordinate to anyone and rebuffed an offer that would have

tempted his peers. Boudinot informed a disappointed Stirling that Hamilton had

accepted an artillery command and “was therefore denied the pleasure of attending

your Lordship’s person as Brigade Major.”37

73 The Pen and the Sword

Hercules Mulligan contended that Hamilton’s appointment as artillery captain

was premised on the condition that he would muster thirty men; Mulligan bragged

that he and Hamilton recruited twenty-five the first afternoon alone. Hamilton as-

sumed an almost paternal responsibility for the sixty-eight men who eventually

came under his command. Some of them were illiterate and entered marks instead

of signatures into the so-called pay book where Hamilton kept track of their food,

clothing, pay, and discipline. According to tradition, he took money from his St.

Croix subscription fund and used it to equip his company. He later wrote, “Military

pride is to be excited and kept up by military parade. No time ought to be lost in

teaching the recruits the use of arms.”38

The twenty-one-year-old captain became a popular leader known for sharing

hardships with his gunners and bombardiers. He was sensitive to inequities and

lobbied to get the same pay and rations for his men as their counterparts in the

Continental Army. As a firm believer in meritocracy, he favored promotion from

within his company, a policy adopted by the New York Provincial Congress. His

subordinates remembered him as tough but fair-minded. Years later, one of them

retained Hamilton as a lawyer, even though he had become a vocal political enemy.

When Hamilton questioned the wisdom of this, the ex-soldier replied, “I served in

your company during the war and I know you will do me justice in spite of my

rudeness.”39

Throughout his career, Hamilton was fastidious about military dress, insisting

that his men be properly attired. “Nothing is more necessary than to stimulate the

vanity of soldiers,” he later wrote. “To this end a smart dress is essential. When not

attended to, the soldier is exposed to ridicule and humiliation.”40 His men wore

blue coats with brass buttons and buff collars and white shoulder belts strapped di-

agonally across their chests. Within four months, he had secured seventy-five pairs

of buckskin breeches for his men and personally advanced them money if needed.

Hamilton’s company looked and acted the part. “As soon as his company was

raised,” said Troup, “he proceeded with indefatigable pains to perfect it in every

branch of discipline and duty and it was not long before it was esteemed the most

beautiful model of discipline in the whole army.”41 Later on, as a major general,

Hamilton instructed his officers on the need to be personally involved in drilling

and training their men.

Hamilton betrayed none of the novice’s typical air of slipshod indecision and

made a profound impression on several senior military figures, who joined his

swelling circle of admirers. One day, General Nathanael Greene, an ex-Quaker and

former ironmonger from Rhode Island, was crossing the Common when Hamilton

caught his eye. He was struck by how smartly this young man put his troops

through their parade exercises and paused to chat with him. He then invited Hamil-

74 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

ton to dinner and was thunderstruck by his immense military knowledge. The

largely self-educated Greene was well placed to appreciate Hamilton’s instant ex-

pertise, for his own military background was restricted to two years of militia duty.

Most of what he knew about war was also gleaned from books. “His knowledge was

intuitive,” artillery chief Henry Knox later said of Greene. “He came to us the rawest

and most untutored human being I ever met with, but in less than twelve months

he was equal in military knowledge to any general officer in the army.”42 George

Washington valued Nathanael Greene above all his other generals, and it was likely

Greene who first touted Hamilton’s merits to Washington. Like Lord Stirling,

Greene may even have offered Hamilton a job as his military aide. If so, Hamilton

again spurned a general’s offer.

After Boston fell to the Continental Army in March—a shock for the British and

a tonic to patriotic spirits—New York loomed as the next battlefront, and the city

braced for impending invasion. Hamilton had already informed his distant St.

Croix readers, “This city is at present evacuated by above one half of its inhabitants

under the influence of a general panic.”43 Starting in March, Lord Stirling had su-

pervised four thousand men who sealed off major streets and strung a network of

batteries and earthworks across Manhattan from the Hudson to the East River.

Hamilton’s company constructed a small fort with twelve cannon on the high

ground of Bayard’s Hill, near the present-day intersection of Canal and Mulberry

Streets.

In April, Washington came down from New England to oversee military prep-

arations in New York and employed as his headquarters a Hudson River mansion

called Richmond Hill, later the home of Aaron Burr. By a curious coincidence, Burr,

fresh from the failed patriot assault on Quebec, visited Washington in June and ac-

cepted his offer to serve on his military staff, or “family,” as it was known. By some

accounts, the aristocratic young Burr had grandiose expectations and imagined

that Washington would confer with him on grand matters of strategy. When he re-

alized that he would be relegated to more prosaic duties, he quickly quit in disgust

and sent a letter to Washington protesting that less-qualified men had been pro-

moted ahead of him. He then went to work for Major General Israel Putnam. Some-

thing about Aaron Burr—his penchant for intrigue, a lack of sufficient deference,

perhaps his insatiable chasing after women—grated on George Washington. Much

of Burr’s political future was shaped by his decidedly cool wartime relations with

Washington, while other contemporaries, Hamilton being the prime example, prof-

ited from the general’s approbation.

During this period, Washington was at least marginally aware of Hamilton. An

exacting captain, Hamilton ordered the arrest of a sergeant, two corporals, and a

private for “mutiny,” and they received mild punishments in a court-martial. Wash-

75 The Pen and the Sword

ington pardoned the two principal offenders before issuing general orders for

Hamilton to assemble his company on May 15, 1776, “at ten o’clock next Sunday

morning upon the Common.”44 A month later, as we learn from the Royal Danish

American Gazette, Hamilton gallantly led a nighttime attack of one hundred men

against the Sandy Hook lighthouse outside New York harbor. “I continued the

attack for two hours with fieldpieces and small arms,” the war correspondent–

cum–artillery captain reported, “being all that time between two smart fires from

the shipping and the lighthouse, but could make no impression on the walls.”45

Hamilton did not lose any men and said the raid miscarried because he lacked suf-

ficient munitions and because the enemy had been tipped off to the attack. With the

speed of youthful dreams, Hamilton had moved from the fantasy to the reality of

combat leadership.

Back in Manhattan, the young captain found a city engaged in a spree of wanton

violence against Tory sympathizers. Many Loyalists were subjected to a harrowing

ritual known as “riding the rail,” in which they were carried through the streets sit-

ting astride a sharp rail borne by two tall, strong men. The prisoners’ names were

proclaimed at each street corner as spectators lustily cheered their humiliation. One

bystander reported, “We had some grand Tory rides in the city this week. . . . Sev-

eral of them were handled very roughly, being carried through the streets on rails,

their clothes torn off their backs and their bodies pretty well mingled with the

dust. . . . There is hardly a Tory face to be seen this morning.”46

Because New York had been a citadel of Tory sentiment, there was a pervasive

fear of clandestine plots being hatched against Washington, whose capture or as-

sassination would have been an inestimable prize to the British. Indeed, the former

New York governor, William Tryon, tried to orchestrate just such a plan. On June

21, as Hamilton returned from Sandy Hook, a cabal to murder General Washington

and recruit a Loyalist force to aid the British was laid bare. New York’s Tory mayor,

David Mathews, was charged “with dangerous designs and treasonable conspiracies

against the rights and liberties of the United Colonies of America.”47 Others impli-

cated in this shocking plot included several members of Washington’s personal

guard, especially Sergeant Thomas Hickey. Mayor Mathews admitted to having

contact with the British and was imprisoned in Connecticut, but a defiant Hickey

produced no witnesses at his court-martial and was sentenced to death.

Hamilton regaled his St. Croix readers with these dramatic events, telling them

that “a most barbarous and infernal plot has been discovered among our Tories.” He

sketched a widespread conspiracy, the goal of which was to “murder all the staff of-

ficers, blow up the magazines, and secure the passes of the town.”48 On June 28,

nearly twenty thousand spectators—virtually every person still in town, Hamilton

included—turned out in a meadow near the Bowery to watch Thomas Hickey

76 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

mount the gallows. The prisoner had remained unrepentant, and Washington de-

cided to make an example of him. Hickey waived the presence of a chaplain, ex-

plaining that “they are all cutthroats.”49 He kept up his air of bravado until the

hangman slipped the noose and blindfold over his head, at which point he briefly

wiped away tears. Moments later, his body hung slack from the gallows. In his sec-

ond dispatch on this sensational event, Hamilton applauded Washington’s swift

justice. “It is hoped the remainder of those miscreants now in our possession will

meet with a punishment adequate to their crimes.”50 Hamilton might have ended

his dispatch there. Instead, in a curious non sequitur, the future treasury secretary

reported rumors that copper coins made with base metal alloys would be called in,

possibly replaced by new continental copper coins of larger size. Evidently, the

young captain was boning up on monetary policy.

Within days of Hickey’s execution, King George III revealed just how far he was

prepared to go to crush his refractory colonies. The world’s foremost naval power

began to gather a massive armada of battleships and transports at Sandy Hook, the

prelude to the largest amphibious assault of the eighteenth century. An assemblage

of military might was soon marshaled—some three hundred ships and thirty-two

thousand men, including eighty-four hundred Hessian mercenaries—a fighting

force designed expressly to intimidate the Americans and restore them to their san-

ity through a terrifying show of strength. The British had so many troops stationed

aboard this floating city that they surpassed in numbers the patriotic soldiers and

citizens left facing them in New York.

Entrenched in southern Manhattan, with fewer than twenty thousand inexperi-

enced soldiers at his disposal and lacking even a single warship, Washington must

have wondered how he could possibly defeat this well-oiled fighting machine. He

was making “every preparation” for an imminent assault, he wrote, but conceded

that his army was “extremely deficient in arms . . . and in great distress for want of

them.”51 To remedy a grave shortage of ammunition, the New York Provincial Con-

gress ordered that lead be peeled from roofs and windows and melted down to

make bullets. So many trees had already been chopped down for firewood that New

York resembled a ghost town. “To see the vast number of houses shut up, one would

think the city almost evacuated,” one fleeing Tory wrote. “Women and children are

scarcely to be seen in the streets.”52

On July 2, the British battle plan began to unfold as General William Howe

directed ships commanded by his brother, Admiral Lord Richard Howe, to sail up

through the Narrows. Thousands of redcoats disembarked on Staten Island. From

Manhattan wharves and rooftops, Continental Army soldiers stared flabbergasted

at the interminable procession of imposing vessels crowding into the harbor. Sur-

77 The Pen and the Sword

veying a bay thick with British masts, one American soldier said that it resembled “a

wood of pine trees.” “I could not believe my eyes. I declare that I thought all Lon-

don was afloat.”53 Captain Hamilton and his artillery company, posted at the Bat-

tery, had an unobstructed view of the enemy.

It seemed an inauspicious moment for the threatened colonies to declare inde-

pendence, and yet that is exactly what they did. Faced with the military strength of

the most colossal empire since ancient Rome, they decided to fight back. On July 2,

the Continental Congress unanimously adopted a resolution calling for indepen-

dence, with only New York abstaining. Two days later, the congress endorsed the Dec-

laration of Independence in its final, edited form. (The actual signing was deferred

until August 2.) There was nothing impetuous or disorderly about this action. Even

amid a state of open warfare, these law-abiding men felt obligated to issue a formal

document, giving a dispassionate list of their reasons for secession. This solemn,

courageous act flew in the face of historical precedent. No colony had ever suc-

ceeded in breaking away from the mother country to set up a self-governing state,

and the declaration signers knew that the historical odds were heavily stacked

against them. They further knew that treason was a crime punishable by death, a

threat that scarcely seemed abstract as reports trickled into Philadelphia of the for-

midable fleet bearing down on New York.

The Declaration of Independence did not achieve sacred status for many years

and was not even officially inscribed on parchment for another two weeks. Instead,

a Philadelphia printer, John Dunlap, ran off about five hundred broadsides that

were distributed by fast riders throughout the colonies. On July 6, while Captain

Hamilton wandered about trying to find a purse with money that he had lost—he

sometimes had a touch of the absentminded genius—the local press announced

independence. Two days later, Washington held a printed copy of the declaration in

his hands for the first time. The next day, the New York Provincial Congress ratified

the document, and at 6:00 p.m. Washington gathered all his troops on the Com-

mon—the very same Common where Hamilton had debuted as a speaker—to hear

the stirring manifesto read aloud. As the rapt soldiers listened, they learned that

“the United Colonies” of America had been declared “Free and Independent States.”54

The long-awaited words triggered a rush of patriotic exuberance. Militiamen

and civilians barreled down Broadway, destroying every relic of British influence in

their path, including royal arms painted on tavern signs. At Bowling Green, at the

foot of Broadway, they mobbed a gilded equestrian statue of George III, portrayed

in Roman garb, that had been erected to celebrate the repeal of the Stamp Act. John

Adams had once admired this “beautiful ellipsis of land, railed in with solid iron, in

the center of which is a statue of his majesty on horseback, very large, of solid lead,

gilded with gold, on a pedestal of marble, very high.”55 Now, for reasons both sym-

78 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

bolic and practical, the crowd pulled George III down from his pedestal, decapitat-

ing him in the process. The four thousand pounds of gilded lead was rushed off to

Litchfield, Connecticut, where it was melted down to make 42,088 musket bullets.

One wit predicted that the king’s soldiers “will probably have melted majesty fired

at them.”56

The action boosted morale in the besieged city at a time of imminent peril. On

July 12, the British decided to throw the fear of God into the rebels and test their de-

fenses by sending the Phoenix, a forty-four-gun battleship, and the Rose, a twenty-

eight-gun frigate, past southern Manhattan with guns blazing. Undeterred by fire

from the Manhattan shore, the two ships raced up the Hudson, peppering several

New York rooftops with cannonballs and sailing by unscathed. The din from the

shelling was deafening. Hamilton commanded four of the biggest cannon in the pa-

triotic arsenal and stood directly in the British line of fire. Hercules Mulligan re-

called, “Capt. Hamilton went on the Battery with his company and his piece of

artillery and commenced a brisk fire upon the Phoenix and Rose then sailing up the

river, when his cannon burst and killed two of his men who . . . were buried in the

Bowling Green.”57 Actually, Hamilton’s exploding cannon may have killed as many

as six of his men and wounded four or five others. Some critics blamed inadequate

training for the mishap, but the general dissipation of troops addicted to whoring

and drinking was more likely to blame. Lieutenant Isaac Bangs reported that many

cannon at the Battery had been abandoned by troops who “were at their cups and

at their usual place of abode, viz., on the Holy Ground.”58 Of the specific incident

involving Hamilton’s men, Bangs wrote that “by the carelessness of our own ar-

tillery men, six men were killed with our own cannon and several others very badly

wounded. It is said that several of the company out of which they were killed were

drunk and neglected to sponge, worm, and stop the vent and the cartridges took

fire while they were ramming them down.”59 (In other words, the men hadn’t

swabbed out the sparks and powder after the previous firing.) That Hamilton was

never reprimanded and that his military reputation only improved suggests that he

was never faulted for the fatal mishap. However, crushed by the incident, he quickly

learned that war was a filthy business.

By August 17, New York’s population stood in such grave danger that Washing-

ton urged residents to evacuate immediately; only five thousand civilians of a pre-

war population of twenty-five thousand remained. With a condescension typical of

the British command, Lord Howe’s secretary, Ambrose Serle, snickered at the rebel

forces as “the strangest that was ever collected: old men of 60, boys of 14, and blacks

of all ages and ragged for the most part, compose the motley crew.”60 Washington

had dispersed his tattered forces across Manhattan and Brooklyn. After crossing the

East River to scout out the terrain, Hamilton doubted that the Continental Army

79 The Pen and the Sword

could defend Brooklyn Heights against a concerted British onslaught. Hercules

Mulligan recalled a dinner at his home at which Hamilton and the Reverend John

Mason agreed on the need for a tactical retreat from Brooklyn, lest the Continental

Army be wiped out. After they had “retired from the table, they were lamenting the

situation of the army on Long Island and suggesting the best plans for its removal

when Mr. Mason and Mr. Hamilton determined to write an anonymous letter to

Gen[era]l Washington pointing out their ideas of the best means to draw off the

army.”61 Mulligan transmitted this plan to one of Washington’s aides, to no avail.

Hamilton proved dolefully accurate in his predictions. On August 22, the British

began to transfer a huge invasion force across the Narrows from Staten Island to

Brooklyn. Within a few days, British redcoats and Hessian mercenaries on Long

Island numbered around twenty thousand, or more than twice the number of able-

bodied Americans. Following a deceptive lull of several days, the British soldiers

then advanced north through quaint Dutch and English farming villages. Moving

through marsh and meadow, they leveled homes, flattened fences, uprooted crops

in their paths, and slaughtered the inexperienced American soldiers. They took

different routes, but their common objective was to reach and breach the patriotic

fortifications erected on Brooklyn Heights. Although Washington rushed in re-

inforcements from Manhattan, the battle of Brooklyn turned into a full-blown fiasco

with the patriots heavily outgunned. About 1,200 Americans were killed or cap-

tured, dwarfing British losses, and it looked as if Washington’s army was now

trapped in a vise, with the British Army in front and the East River at its back. The

British had a chance to smash the revolt with one decisive blow.

It is commonly said that Hamilton took no part in the battle, yet an unnamed

correspondent for the Royal Danish American Gazette submitted a narrative of his

own involvement. One suspects the dispatch was Hamilton’s handiwork, though

the author identified himself only as a member of the “Pennsylvania troops.” Along

with Maryland and Delaware troops, these soldiers were commanded by Hamil-

ton’s hard-drinking former patron, Lord Stirling, and they displayed great valor. In

the words of Stirling’s biographer, “Neither he nor anyone else could have predicted

that this overweight, rheumatic, vain, pompous, gluttonous inebriate would be so

ardent in battle.”62 The St. Croix correspondent credited the bravery of Stirling’s

men, who defended a weak position with “but few cannon to defend them.” He also

explained the strategy behind Washington’s famous nocturnal retreat across the

East River on the night of August 29, saying that Washington feared that British

men-of-war would sail upriver the next day and sever his access to Manhattan. The

author told how in a cold, steady drizzle, “we received orders to quit our station

about two o’clock this morning and had made our retreat almost to the ferry when

General Washington ordered us back to that part of the line we were first at, which

80 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

was reckoned to be the most dangerous post.”63 The reporter’s company, stranded

on a spit of land, crouched within easy musket-fire range of the dozing British

troops but were screened by darkness and thick, rolling fog. At dawn, the author

and his men scurried safely aboard one of the last ships to slide away from the

Brooklyn shore. In an exemplary act of gallant leadership, Washington waited for

one of the last boats before he himself crossed the river.

Despite this stealthy retreat, it seemed to the British that everything was pro-

ceeding according to schedule and that their amateurish American foes would

crumble before force majeure. Instead of pursuing the rebels and pressing their ad-

vantage, the complacent British forces dawdled and botched an opportunity that

might have ended the conflict. On Sunday, September 15, they tardily resumed their

offensive with a sustained, earsplitting bombardment of American positions at Kip’s

Bay (approximately between Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Streets today), on

Manhattan’s eastern shore. “So terrible and so incessant a roar of guns few even in

the army and navy had ever heard before,” said Lord Howe’s secretary.64

As dozens of barges disgorged British and Hessian troops into the hilly, wooded

area, the patriot forces lost their nerve and began to flee in undisguised terror, dis-

carding any semblance of discipline. On horseback, an outraged Washington tried

to stem the disorderly retreat. Though Washington was famous for his composure,

his infrequent wrath was something to behold, and he cursed the panic-stricken

troops and flailed at incompetent officers with his riding crop. Finally, he flung his

hat on the ground in disgust and fumed, “Are these the men with whom I am to de-

fend America?”65 Since the British dragged their feet and failed to give chase to the

Americans rushing northward, most of the patriots found sanctuary in the wilder-

ness of Harlem Heights.

Hamilton stayed cool under fire. Again, the story comes from the garrulous Her-

cules Mulligan: “Capt[ain] H[amilton] commanded a post on Bunker Hill near

New York and fought with the rear of our army.”66 Hamilton later confirmed this

story indirectly when he testified, “I was among the last of our army that left the

city.”67 Hamilton showed great fortitude and did not reach Harlem Heights until af-

ter dark, having walked the entire length of a thickly forested Manhattan in a

drenching rain. He was very dispirited, later telling Mulligan that “in retiring he

lost . . . his baggage and one of his cannon, which broke down.”68 He had surren-

dered his heavy guns, and his company’s weaponry had now been whittled down to

two mobile fieldpieces that could be pulled along by horse or hand.

As New York fell to the British, Hamilton and the ragged remnants of the Con-

tinental Army had little notion that they would be exiled from the city for seven

years. Redcoats poured into Manhattan and went on a rampage, annihilating the

81 The Pen and the Sword

hated vestiges of dissent. They slashed paintings and torched books at King’s Col-

lege, which they used for a hospital. After midnight on September 21, a fire started

at the Fighting Cocks Tavern near the Battery, the flames leaping from house to

house until this blazing conflagration consumed a quarter of the city’s housing.

Nobody ever solved the mystery of whether the culprit was nature or a renegade ar-

sonist. The British, however, were convinced of rebel mischief and rounded up two

hundred suspects, including an American spy, Captain Nathan Hale, who was hung

from the gallows at a spot thought to be near the present Third Avenue and Sixty-

sixth Street. Much of New York had been reduced to charred rubble. Despite this,

thousands of desperate Tories flocked to the city for refuge, swelling its population

and setting the stage for later conflicts with returning patriots.

After the humiliating loss of New York, Washington thought the craggy, wooded

area of Harlem Heights would shelter his army as a natural fortress. He nearly

yielded to despair as he bemoaned the drunkenness, looting, desertions in the

ranks, and short-term enlistments. In pleading with Congress for a permanent

army, he voiced arguments that were echoed by Hamilton and that united the two

men in future years: “To place any dependence upon militia is assuredly resting on

a broken staff.”69 According to Hamilton’s son, it was at Harlem Heights that Wash-

ington first recognized Hamilton’s unique organizational gifts, as he watched him

supervise the building of an earthwork. It was also at Harlem Heights that Hamil-

ton’s company first came under the direct command of Washington, who “entered

into conversation with him, invited him to his tent, and received an impression of

his military talent,” wrote John C. Hamilton.70 It was yet another striking example

of the instantaneous rapport that this young man seemed to develop with even the

most seasoned officers.

In late October, Hamilton fought alongside Washington at White Plains in yet

another bruising defeat for the patriots. The war was beginning to look like a farci-

cal mismatch. The patriots were a slovenly, dejected bunch, while the redcoats, in

their trim uniforms and brandishing polished bayonets, stepped smartly into battle

to the inspirational strains of a military band. At White Plains, Washington posted

the bulk of his troops on high ground while sending a separate detachment of

about one thousand men to the west on Chatterton’s Hill, above the Bronx River.

John C. Hamilton says that his father planted his two fieldpieces upon a rocky ledge

at Chatterton’s Hill and sprayed Hessian and British columns with fire as they

struggled to wade across the river. “Again and again Hamilton’s pieces flashed,” he

wrote, sending “the ascending columns down to the river’s edge.”71 Soon the British

regrouped, forcing Hamilton and his comrades to abandon the hill and finally the

82 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

entire area. Nevertheless, at White Plains, the British forces suffered larger losses

than did the Americans, which provided a fillip to the dejected spirits of Washing-

ton’s men.

After White Plains, the patriots, exposed to British seapower as well, had only a

tenuous hold left on Manhattan. In the spring, they had built twin forts on oppo-

site sides of the Hudson: Fort Washington on the Manhattan side and Fort Lee on

the New Jersey side. On November 16, as he manned an observation post at Fort

Lee, Washington gazed in dismay as a huge force of British and Hessian troops

overran Fort Washington. Along with staggering losses of men, muskets, and sup-

plies, the surrender of Fort Washington dealt another devastating, nearly mortal,

blow to the fragile morale of the Continental Army. Washington was widely casti-

gated for his failure to safeguard the men, not to mention all the cannon and gun-

powder stored at the fort. Four days later, the patriots had to surrender Fort Lee

hastily to Lord Cornwallis. With his army having dwindled to fewer than three

thousand forlorn men, Washington had no choice but to retreat across New Jersey,

with the vile epithets of his critics ringing in his ears.

FIVE

T H E L I T T L E L I O N

P lagued by foul weather and abysmal morale and with the British tailing his

movements, George Washington led the bedraggled Continental Army

across New Jersey. The losses he had sustained in New York strengthened his

sense that he had to dodge large-scale confrontations that played to the enemy’s

strength. “We should on all occasions avoid a general action or put anything to the

risk,” he told Congress, “unless compelled by a necessity into which we ought never

to be drawn.”1 Instead, he would opt for small-scale, improvisational skirmishes,

the very sort of mobile, risk-averse war of attrition that Hamilton had expounded

in his undergraduate article. Hamilton continued to believe in his theory. “By hang-

ing upon their rear and seizing every opportunity of skirmishing,” the situation of

the British could “be rendered insupportably uneasy,” he wrote.2 The rugged terrain

and dense forests of America would make it difficult for the British to wage con-

ventional warfare.

Washington had occasion to marvel anew at Hamilton’s prowess during the re-

treat. The general hoped to make a stand at the Raritan River, near New Brunswick,

then decided that his straggling troops could not withstand an enemy offensive and

decided to push ahead. Posted with guns high on a riverbank, Hamilton ably pro-

vided cover for the retreating patriots. According to Washington’s adopted grand-

son, the commander “was charmed by the brilliant courage and admirable skill”

Hamilton displayed as he “directed a battery against the enemy’s advanced columns

that pressed upon the Americans in their retreat by the ford.”3 In an early Decem-

ber letter to Congress, Washington, though not mentioning Hamilton by name,

hailed the “smart cannonade” that allowed his men to escape.4 In yet another blun-

der, General Howe occupied New Jersey but permitted Washington and his men to

84 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

cross the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. As he pondered his scruffy, poorly clad

men, Washington warned Congress on December 20, “Ten days more will put an

end to the existence of our army.”5 With the enlistment periods of many soldiers

about to expire, he needed to assay something daring to rally his despondent

troops, who lacked winter clothing and blankets.

In his waning days as an artillery captain, Hamilton confirmed his reputation for

persistence despite recurring health problems. He lay bedridden at a nearby farm

when Washington decided to recross the Delaware on Christmas night and pounce

on the besotted Hessians drowsing at Trenton. Hamilton referred vaguely to his

“long and severe fit” of illness, but he somehow gathered up the strength to leave his

sickbed and fight.6 Through death and desertion, Hamilton’s company had now

been pared to fewer than thirty men. As part of Lord Stirling’s brigade, they were

summoned to move out after midnight, huddling in cargo boats caked with ice as

they poled their way across the frigid Delaware.

After an eight-mile march through a thickening snowfall, Hamilton and his

troops, equipped with two cannon, glimpsed the metal helmets and glinting bayo-

nets of a Hessian detachment. When they exchanged fire, Hamilton narrowly es-

caped cannonballs, which whizzed by his ears. With snow muffling their footsteps,

Washington and his men crept up on the main body of Hessians, groggy from their

Christmas festivities the night before, and captured more than one thousand of

them. The fire from Hamilton’s artillery company helped to force the surrender of

many enemy soldiers. Patriots everywhere rejoiced at the news, which had a psy-

chological impact far out of proportion to its slim military significance.

Eager to capitalize on his triumph, Washington then attempted a stunning foray

against British forces at Princeton on January 3, 1777—another minor but hugely

inspiring triumph that revived faith in Washington’s leadership. As his men rounded

up two hundred British prisoners, an exultant Washington exclaimed, “It is a fine

fox chase, my boys!”7 A senior officer recalled Hamilton and his rump company

marching into the village. “I noticed a youth, a mere stripling, small, slender, almost

delicate in frame, marching beside a piece of artillery, with a cocked hat pulled

down over his eyes, apparently lost in thought, with his hand resting on a cannon,

and every now and then patting it, as if it were a favorite horse or a pet plaything.”8

A mythic gleam began to cling to the young captain. People had already noticed his

special attributes during the retreat across New Jersey. “Well do I recollect the day

when Hamilton’s company marched into Princeton,” said a friend. “It was a model

of discipline. At their head was a boy and I wondered at his youth, but what was my

surprise when that slight figure . . . was pointed out to me as that Hamilton of whom

we had already heard so much.”9 Hamilton found himself back at the college that had

spurned him a few years earlier, only this time one regiment of enemy troops occu-

85 The Little Lion

pied the main dormitory. Legend claims that Hamilton set up his cannon in the col-

lege yard, pounded the brick building, and sent a cannonball slicing through a por-

trait of King George II in the chapel. All we know for certain is that the British soldiers

inside surrendered. Hamilton believed that the Continental Army had regained its

esprit de corps, showing that green patriots could outwit well-trained British troops.

He later referred to “the enterprises of Trenton and Princeton . . . as the dawnings of

that bright day which afterwards broke forth with such resplendent luster.”10

With these back-to-back victories, Washington saved Philadelphia from enemy

forces and gained several months to restore his depleted army. He moved his

three thousand men into winter quarters at Morristown, New Jersey, thirty miles

from New York and cupped in a beautiful valley that formed a protective perime-

ter around his men. When a vacancy opened on Washington’s staff, Hamilton was

ideally suited to fill it. By now, the boy genius had been “discovered” by four

generals—Alexander McDougall, Nathanael Greene, Lord Stirling, and Washing-

ton himself—any one of whom might have been responsible for his promotion.

Robert Troup ascribed the foremost influence to Henry Knox, artillery commander

of the Continental Army and Hamilton’s nominal superior. A former Boston book-

seller of Scotch-Irish ancestry, the three-hundred-pound Knox was a jolly fellow

with a bulbous nose, a warm spirit, and an earthy sense of humor. He was already

renowned for his heroism, having dragged artillery captured at Fort Ticonderoga

across snow-covered expanses to defend Boston. Like many people Hamilton be-

friended in these years, the self-made Knox had known early hardship. His father

died when he was twelve, and he had become his mother’s sole support. Like

Hamilton, Knox was a voracious reader who had tutored himself in warfare by di-

gesting books on military discipline and quizzing British officers who visited his

bookshop.

On January 20, 1777, slightly more than two weeks after the fighting at Prince-

ton, Washington penned a note to Hamilton, personally inviting him to join his

staff as an aide-de-camp. Five days later, The Pennsylvania Evening Post inserted this

item: “Captain Alexander Hamilton, of the New York company of artillery, by ap-

plying to the printer of this paper, may hear of something to his advantage.”11 This

cryptic sentence must have referred to Washington’s note. The appointment was

announced officially on March 1, and from that date Hamilton was jumped up to

the rank of lieutenant colonel. By then, Hamilton was already encamped with

Washington, who had set up his headquarters at Jacob Arnold’s tavern on the vil-

lage green at Morristown.

In fewer than five years, the twenty-two-year-old Alexander Hamilton had risen

from despondent clerk in St. Croix to one of the aides to America’s most eminent

man. Yet Hamilton did not react with jubilation. Such was his craving for battlefield

86 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

distinction that he balked at taking a job that would chain him to a desk, preclud-

ing a field command. Washington once wrote that those around him were “con-

fined from morning to evening, hearing and answering . . . applications and

letters.”12 More than twenty years later, when capable of much greater candor with

Washington, Hamilton told him of his early disappointment on this score: “When

in the year 1777 the regiments of artillery were multiplied, I had good reason to ex-

pect that the command of one of them would have fallen to me had I not changed

my situation and this in all probability would have led further.”13 Hamilton may

have underrated the signal importance of his promotion in March 1777, for that

job won him the patronage of America’s leading figure and ushered him into the

presence of military officers who were later to form a critical sector of his political

following. In many respects, the political alignments of 1789 were first forged in the

appointment lists of the Revolution.

Still recuperating from illness, Hamilton was fortunate to take up his assignment

with Washington at a slack moment in the campaign. The British fought at a

leisurely pace, even though time worked to the Americans’ advantage. Several weeks

after reporting to Morristown, Hamiliton told his New York associates of daily skir-

mishes but “with consequences so trifling and insignificant as to be scarcely worth

mentioning.”14 He informed Hugh Knox in St. Croix that for several months after

his appointment the war had produced “no military event of any great impor-

tance.”15 Yet if Hamilton sounded faintly bored at first, he took charge of Wash-

ington’s staff with characteristic, electrifying speed. On March 10, he wrote to

Brigadier General Alexander McDougall that Washington had been ill and that he

had hesitated to disturb him. Now that Washington had recovered, Hamilton went

on, “I find he is so much pestered with matters which cannot be avoided that I am

obliged to refrain from troubling him on the occasion, especially as I conceive the

only answer he would give may be given by myself.”16 How rapidly Hamilton had

acquired the confidence to function as Washington’s proxy! He already spoke in an

authoritative voice and seemed to have few qualms about exercising his own judg-

ment in Washington’s absence.

The pause in the fighting that spring gave Hamilton plenty of time to study his

new boss. The superficial contrast between the tall forty-five-year-old Virginian

and his slight twenty-two-year-old aide was striking. Washington towered over

Hamilton by at least seven inches. This physical contrast, among other things, be-

lies the moldy canard that Washington had fathered the illegitimate Hamilton on a

trip to Barbados in 1751, four years before Hamilton was actually born. Many

events in Washington’s early years might have engendered sympathy in him for

Hamilton. Washington’s patrician aura could be misleading. Though the son of a

87 The Little Lion

wealthy tobacco planter who died when George was only eleven, leaving him at the

mercy of an imperious mother, Washington had limited formal schooling, never at-

tended college, and had trained as a surveyor as an adolescent. Famous later on for

granite self-control, he had been a hot-tempered youth. “I wish that I could say that

he governs his temper,” Lord Fairfax wrote to the mother of the sixteen-year-old

Washington. “He is subject to attacks of anger and provocation, sometimes without

just cause.”17

As a teenager who knew the insecurities of an outsider and was eager to earn

respect, Washington tried to advance into polished society through a strenuous

program of self-improvement. He learned to dance and dress properly, read biog-

raphies and histories, and memorized rules of deportment from a courtesy manual.

Like Hamilton, the young Washington saw military fame as his vehicle for ascend-

ing in the world. By age twenty-two, he was already a precocious lieutenant colonel

in the Virginia militia, showing a brash courage during the French and Indian War.

“I have heard the bullets whistle,” he said after experiencing battle, “and believe

me there is something charming in the sound.”18 Sensitive to slights, Washington

chafed under the British condescension toward colonial officers and never forgot

his experience as aide-de-camp to the abusive, pigheaded General Edward Brad-

dock. Early disappointments with people left Washington with a residual cynicism

that was to jibe well with Hamilton’s views.

By a swift, unforeseen series of events, Washington had been catapulted from

frustrated young officer to prosperous planter. The death of his half brother

Lawrence after their visit to Barbados eventually left him sole owner of the family

estate, Mount Vernon. His prospects were further enhanced by marriage at twenty-

six to the wealthy widow Martha Dandridge Custis. Though Custis had two surviv-

ing children from her previous marriage, she never had children with Washington,

prompting speculation that he was sterile, possibly as a by-product of smallpox he

contracted on the Barbados trip. Perhaps from unfulfilled paternal instincts, Wash-

ington had several surrogate sons during the Revolution, most notably the marquis

de Lafayette, and he often referred to Hamilton as “my boy.”

Washington proved an excellent businessman, first as a canny speculator in

western lands, then as lord of Mount Vernon. Sometimes buying human cargo di-

rectly from the holds of slave ships, he came to own more than one hundred slaves

by the Revolution and expanded his estate until it encompassed thirteen square

miles. An innovative farmer, he invented a plough and presided over a small indus-

trial village at Mount Vernon that included a flour mill and a shop for manufactur-

ing cloth, an entrepreneurial bent that appealed to Hamilton. Washington also

brought extensive political experience to his military command, having served for

fifteen years in the Virginia House of Burgesses and having attended the First and

88 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

Second Continental Congresses. In a supreme act of patriotism, he refused to take

a salary for his services during the Revolution, accepting money only for expenses.

The relationship between Washington and Hamilton was so consequential in

early American history—rivaled only by the intense comradeship between Jeffer-

son and Madison—that it is difficult to conceive of their careers apart. The two

men had complementary talents, values, and opinions that survived many strains

over their twenty-two years together. Washington possessed the outstanding judg-

ment, sterling character, and clear sense of purpose needed to guide his sometimes

wayward protégé; he saw that the volatile Hamilton needed a steadying hand.

Hamilton, in turn, contributed philosophical depth, administrative expertise, and

comprehensive policy knowledge that nobody in Washington’s ambit ever matched.

He could transmute wispy ideas into detailed plans and turn revolutionary dreams

into enduring realities. As a team, they were unbeatable and far more than the sum

of their parts.

Nonetheless, the two men had clashing temperaments and frequently showed

more mutual respect than true affection. When Charles Willson Peale painted

Washington in 1779, he presented a manly, confident figure with a quiet swagger

and an easy air of command. In fact, Washington wasn’t nonchalant and could be

exacting and quick to take offense. While he had a dry wit, his mirth was restrained

and seldom expressed in laughter. He did not encourage familiarity, fearing it

would encourage laxity in subordinates, and held himself aloof with a grave sobri-

ety that gave him power over other people. In addition, over time he became such a

prisoner of his own celebrity that people couldn’t relax in his presence. Gilbert

Stuart noted the fierce temper behind the fabled self-control, and his later paintings

of Washington show something hooded and wary in the hard, penetrating eyes.

The self-control was something achieved, not inherited, and often masked com-

bustible emotions that could explode in fury. “His temper was naturally irritable

and high-toned, but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual as-

cendancy over it,” Jefferson later said perceptively. “If ever, however, it broke its

bonds, he was most tremendous in his wrath.”19

Those who met Washington in social situations were usually taken with his gal-

lantry and convivial charm. Abigail Adams fairly cooed when she met him, reas-

suring John that “the gentleman and soldier look agreeably blended in him.”20

Working with him in cramped quarters, however, Hamilton had many chances to

see Washington’s irritable side and sometimes ungovernable temper. Washington

was extremely fond of Hamilton, preferring him to his other aides, but he did not

express his affection openly. Hamilton always addressed him as “Your Excellency,”

and it irked him that he could not penetrate the general’s reserve. But Lafayette

noted that Hamilton, in turn, held something back. The notion that Hamilton was

89 The Little Lion

a surrogate son to Washington has some superficial merit but fails to capture fully

the psychological interplay between them. If Hamilton was a surrogate son, some

suppressed Oedipal rage entered into the mix. Hamilton was so brilliant, so coldly

critical, that he detected flaws in Washington less visible to other aides. One senses

that he was the only young member of Washington’s “family” who felt competitive

with the general or could have imagined himself running the army. It was tempera-

mentally hard for Alexander Hamilton to subordinate himself to anyone, even

someone with the extraordinary stature of George Washington. At the same time,

he never doubted for an instant that Washington was a great leader of special gifts

and the one irreplaceable personage in the early American pageant. He had the

deepest admiration for Washington, even if he didn’t wallow in hero worship. He

had misgivings about Washington as a military leader—the general did lose the

majority of battles he fought in the Revolution—but not about him as a political

leader. Having hitched his star to Washington, Hamilton struck a bargain with him-

self that he honored for the remainder of his career: he would never openly criticize

Washington, whose image had to be upheld to unify the country.

So diffident was George Washington in speech that John Adams described him as a

great actor with “the gift of silence.”21 Washington knew that he lacked verbal flow,

once writing, “With me it has always been a maxim rather to let my designs appear

from my works than by my expressions.”22 Yet this taciturn man had to cope with

an unending flood of paperwork as he dealt with Congress and state legislatures

while also issuing orders and arbitrating disputes among deputies. All the mana-

gerial problems of a protracted war—recruiting, promotions, munitions, clothing,

food, supplies, prisoners—swam across his desk. Such a man sorely needed a fluent

writer, and none of Washington’s aides had so facile a pen as did Hamilton.

Being Washington’s chief secretary was much more than a passive, stenographic

task. “At present my time is so taken up at my desk,” Washington had written to

Congress in September, “that I am obliged to neglect many other essential parts of

my duty. It is absolutely necessary . . . for me to have persons that can think for me,

as well as execute orders.”23 Washington further explained that his letters were

drafted by aides, subject to his revision. Hamilton’s advent was thus a godsend for

Washington. He was able to project himself into Washington’s mind and intuit

what the general wanted to say, writing it up with instinctive tact and deft diplo-

matic skills. It was an inspired act of ventriloquism: Washington gave a few general

hints and, presto, out popped Hamilton’s letter in record time. Most of Washing-

ton’s field orders have survived in Hamilton’s handwriting. “The pen for our army

was held by Hamilton and for dignity of manner, pith of matter, and elegance of

style, General’s Washington’s letters are unrivalled in military annals,” wrote Robert

90 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

Troup.24 Hamilton was loath to admit that he served as a military adviser to Wash-

ington, lest this cast doubt on his boss’s abilities, but he offered him opinions on

many matters. Another aide, James McHenry, said that Hamilton “had studied mil-

itary service, practically under General Washington, and his advice in many in-

stances (a fact known to myself ) had aided our chief in giving to the machine that

perfection to which it had arrived previously to the close of the revolutionary war.”25

Pretty soon, the twenty-two-year-old alter ego was drafting letters to Congress,

state governors, and the most powerful generals in the Continental Army. Before

long, he had access to all confidential information and was allowed to issue orders

from Washington over his own signature. Timothy Pickering, then adjutant gen-

eral, was later adamant that Hamilton was far more than the leading scribe at head-

quarters. “During the whole time that he was one of the General’s aides-de-camp,

Hamilton had to think as well as to write for him in all his most important corre-

spondence.”26

As Hamilton evolved from private secretary to something akin to chief of staff,

he rode with the general in combat, cantered off on diplomatic missions, dealt with

bullheaded generals, sorted through intelligence, interrogated deserters, and nego-

tiated prisoner exchanges. This gave him a wide-angle view of economic, political,

and military matters, further hastening his intellectual development. Washington

was both military and political leader of the patriots, already something of a de

facto president. He had to placate the Continental Congress, which insisted on su-

pervising the army, and coordinate plans with thirteen bickering states. Both Wash-

ington and Hamilton came to think in terms of the general welfare, while many

other officers and politicians got bogged down in parochial squabbles. In their mu-

tual desire for a professional army and a strong central authority that would miti-

gate local rivalries, the two men felt the first stirrings of an impulse that would

someday culminate in the Constitution and the Federalist party. Like Washington,

Hamilton was scandalized by the dissension and cowardice, the backstabbing and

avarice, of the politicians in Philadelphia while soldiers were dying in the field.

During his first weeks on Washington’s staff, Hamilton began building a net-

work that became the foundation of his future political base at home. He agreed to

update New York politicians about military affairs and exchanged twice-weekly re-

ports with a newly appointed body called the New York Committee of Correspon-

dence, placing him in regular contact with leaders such as Gouverneur Morris, John

Jay, and Robert R. Livingston. On April 20, 1777, when the New York State Consti-

tution was approved, Hamilton expressed general satisfaction with it. In comment-

ing to Morris, Hamilton foreshadowed his later views, arguing that the election for

governor “requires the deliberate wisdom of a select assembly and cannot be safely

lodged with the people at large.” On the other hand, he still showed the radical in-

91 The Little Lion

fluence of his student days when he worried that a separate senate, elected solely by

propertied voters, will “degenerate into a body purely aristocratical.”27 In fact, the

state’s aristocratic landowners were hugely disappointed when General Philip

Schuyler of Albany was defeated for governor by General George Clinton, the

champion of the small farmers. Hamilton’s future father-in-law was stung by the

defeat, and, while expressing admiration for Clinton, Schuyler complained that “his

family and connections do not entitle him to so distinguished a predominance.”28

One day, Hamilton was to inherit this Schuyler-Clinton feud as his own.

Shortly after Hamilton joined Washington’s staff, Charles Willson Peale visited the

New Jersey headquarters and executed the first portrait of Hamilton, a miniature

on ivory. It shows him in a blue-and-buff uniform with gold epaulets and the green

ribbon of an aide-de-camp. He has close-cropped hair and a long, sharp nose and

fixes the viewer with an intense gaze. He had not yet acquired the urbane self-

assurance that later marked his demeanor. There was something still lean and un-

formed about his face, which gradually widened with age and came to look almost

too large for his trim, dapper body.

Quartered at Jacob Arnold’s tavern, Hamilton lived in cheek-by-jowl intimacy

with his new military family. So that he could summon his aides at any hour, Wash-

ington preferred to have them shelter under one roof. Sometimes, on frosty nights,

the general would wrap himself in a blanket and lie thinking on a couch until in-

terrupted by a sudden messenger on horseback. “The dispatches being opened and

read,” recalled his adopted grandson, “there would be heard in the calm deep tones

of that voice . . . the command of the chief to his now watchful attendant, ‘Call

Colonel Hamilton.’ ”29

The four to six young aides usually slept in one room, often two to a bed, then

worked long days in a single room with chairs crowded around small wooden ta-

bles. Washington typically kept a small office off to the side. During busy periods,

the aides sometimes wrote and copied one hundred letters per day, an exhausting

grind relieved by occasional dances, parades, and reviews. At night, the aides pulled

up camp stools to a dinner table and engaged in lively repartee. Hamilton, though

the youngest family member, was nevertheless Washington’s “principal and most

confidential aide,” as the general phrased it.30 Instead of resenting him, the other

aides treated Hamilton affectionately and nicknamed him “Ham” or “Hammie.”31

For an orphaned boy from the Caribbean, what better fate than to become part of

this elite family?

Once again, the young immigrant had been transported to another sphere.

Though past horrors would always lurk somewhere in his psyche, he spent the rest

of his life in the upper stratum of American society, a remarkable transformation

92 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

for someone with his rootless past. Unlike tradition-bound European armies, top-

heavy with aristocrats, Washington’s army allowed for upward mobility. Though

not a perfect meritocracy, it probably valued talent and intelligence more highly

than any previous army. This high-level service completed Hamilton’s rapid meta-

morphosis into a full-blooded American. The Continental Army was a national in-

stitution and helped to make Hamilton the optimal person to articulate a vision of

American nationalism, his vision sharpened by the immigrant’s special love for his

new country.

Hamilton won admirers for his sprightly personality as well as intelligence. Gen-

eral Nathanael Greene remembered his presence at headquarters as “a bright gleam

of sunshine, ever growing brighter as the general darkness thickened.”32 Such com-

ments were echoed by those who knew Hamilton in after years. Harrison Gray Otis,

later a senator, wrote: “Frank, affable, intelligent and brave, young Hamilton be-

came the favorite of his fellow soldiers.”33 Lawyer William Sullivan likewise found

Hamilton eloquent, high-minded, and openhearted but also noted that he always

had his fair share of detractors: “He was capable of inspiring the most affectionate

attachment, but he could make those whom he opposed fear and hate him cor-

dially.”34 With a ready tongue and rapier wit, Hamilton could wound people more

than he realized, and he was so nimble in debate that even bright people sometimes

felt embarrassingly tongue-tied in his presence.

Hamilton was surrounded by a congenial group of young aides for whom he felt

a familial warmth. He shared correspondence with Robert H. Harrison of Alexan-

dria, Virginia, a respected lawyer and a neighbor of Washington. Ten years older

than Hamilton, Harrison treated him fondly and nicknamed him “the little Lion.”35

Another early comrade was Tench Tilghman, who started out with a light-infantry

company in Philadelphia. For nearly five years, Washington said, Tilghman was his

“faithful assistant,” and he later applauded him as “a zealous servant and slave to the

public” and as a man of “modesty and love of concord.”36 Richard Kidder Meade

joined the staff around the same time as Hamilton and elicited warm praise from

him: “I know few men estimable, fewer amiable and when I meet with one of the

last description it is not in my power to withhold affection.”37

The following year, James McHenry became an aide to Washington. Born and

educated in Ireland, McHenry had studied medicine with Dr. Benjamin Rush of

Philadelphia. He was able to minister to Hamilton’s various maladies, including a

malarial infection that recurred every summer, probably a legacy of his tropical

boyhood. To correct Hamilton’s constipation, McHenry instructed him to skip

milk and go easy on the wine. “When you indulge in wine let [it] be sparingly—

never go beyond three glasses—but by no means every day.”38 (That three glasses of

wine was considered abstemious says much about the immoderate consumption of

93 The Little Lion

the day.) Warmhearted, with a touch of the poet, McHenry wrote heroic verse and

often accompanied Hamilton in entertaining Washington’s family with songs.

Hamilton referred to “those fine sounds with which he and I are accustomed to re-

gale the ears of the fraternity.”39

From McHenry’s diary, we can see that many of Washington’s aides sneaked in

romantic flings during inactive intervals that spring. In February, many wives of

high-ranking officers—Mrs. Washington, Mrs. Knox, and Mrs. Greene, as well as

Lady Stirling and her daughter, Lady Kitty—arrived and organized dainty little tea

parties in the evening. One visitor, Martha Bland of Virginia, cast admiring eyes on

the handsome young aides, finding them “all polite, sociable gentlemen who make

the day pass with a great deal of satisfaction to the visitors.”40 One day, she joined a

riding party headed by George and Martha Washington and was clearly taken with

Hamilton, “a sensible genteel polite young fellow, a West Indian.”41 In this socially

fluid situation, Hamilton could meet and court well-bred young women as social

equals. Colonel Alexander Graydon recalled a self-possessed Hamilton surrounded

by several adoring ladies at dinner, saying that he “acquitted himself with an ease,

propriety and vivacity, which gave me the most favorable impression of his talents

and accomplishments,” as he displayed “a brilliancy which might adorn the most

polished circles of society.”42

One thing grew crystal clear at Morristown: Hamilton was girl crazy and brim-

ming with libido. Throughout his career, at unlikely moments, he tended to grow

flirtatious, almost giddy, with women. No sooner had he joined Washington’s staff

than he began to woo his old friend Catherine Livingston, daughter of his former

patron, William Livingston, now the first governor of an independent New Jersey.

In an April 11 letter to Kitty, Hamilton struck the note of badinage favored by

young rakes of the day:

After knowing exactly your taste and whether you are of a romantic or dis-

creet temper as to love affairs, I will endeavour to regulate myself by it. If you

would choose to be a goddess and to be worshipped as such, I will torture my

imagination for the best arguments the nature of the case will admit to prove

you so. . . . But if . . . you are content with being a mere mortal, and require

no other license than is justly due to you, I will talk to you like one [in] his

sober senses.

That Hamilton was being more than playful with Kitty Livingston is shown in his

declaration in the letter that the end of the Revolution would “remove those obsta-

cles which now lie in the way of that most delectable thing called matrimony.”43

When Hamilton received Livingston’s belated reply to his rather forward letter,

94 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

he passed it around among the other aides. “Hamilton!” one confided. “When you

write to this divine girl, it must be in the style of adoration. None but a goddess, I

am sure, could have penned so fine a letter!” In his response to Livingston, Hamil-

ton made clear that some family members thought he was excessively preoccupied

by the opposite sex. “I exercise [my pen] at the [risk] of being anathematized by

grave censors for dedicating so much of my time to so trifling and insignificant a

toy as—woman.” Though Livingston, apparently, had spurned his advances—he

chides her apathy—he concludes philosophically that “I shall probably be in a fine

way” and tells her that “ALL FOR LOVE is my motto.”44 We can discern Hamilton’s

ambivalence toward fashionable young women as he alternately flatters and belit-

tles Kitty. As in his first boyish love poems in St. Croix, Hamilton could fancy young

women as chaste goddesses or naughty little vixens. Which type he ultimately pre-

ferred, he still may not have known.

In the late spring of 1777, Hamilton began the most intimate friendship of his life,

with an elegant, blue-eyed young officer named John Laurens, who formally joined

Washington’s family in October. One portrait of Laurens shows a short, command-

ing figure in a pose of supreme assurance, with one arm akimbo and the other rest-

ing on the hilt of a long, curved sword. He was the son of one of South Carolina’s

most influential planters, Henry Laurens, who succeeded John Hancock as presi-

dent of the Continental Congress that November. Hamilton and Laurens, both

French Huguenot on one side of their families and English on the other, seemed

like kindred spirits, spiritual twins. Both were bookish and ambitious, bold and en-

terprising, and hungered for military honor. Both were imbued with a quixotic

sense that it was noble to die in a worthy cause. Like Hamilton, Laurens was so sure

of himself that he could seem brusquely overbearing to those who disagreed with

him. More than any friend Hamilton ever had, Laurens was his peer, and the two

were long paired in the fond memories of many who fought in the Revolution.

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, a few months before Hamilton was born in

Nevis, Laurens had a privileged upbringing on one of the state’s biggest slave plan-

tations. In 1771, while Hamilton toiled away as a clerk in St. Croix, Laurens’s father

enrolled him in a cosmopolitan school in Geneva, Switzerland. He was a versatile,

accomplished student, who excelled in the classics, fenced, drew, and rode. While

breathing in the republican atmosphere of Geneva, he prepared to become a bar-

rister. In 1774, he studied law at the Middle Temple in London. This was a time of

antislavery ferment, spurred by Lord Mansfield’s legal decision that a slave became

free by being brought to England. Laurens became a passionate convert to aboli-

tionism, which was to create a strong ideological bond with Hamilton.

After Lexington and Concord, Laurens clamored to return home but was de-

95 The Little Lion

terred by his fretful father, who worried about his son’s youthful lust for combat.

Henry Laurens always had a strange foreboding that his impetuous son would die

in battle. After reading Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in 1776, John Laurens grew

ever more impatient to recross the Atlantic but remained trapped in England by an

unexpected circumstance. He had impregnated a young woman, Martha Manning,

whose wealthy father, William Manning, was a close friend of Henry Laurens. With

his chivalric sense of honor, John Laurens married Manning in a clandestine cere-

mony in October 1776. Four months later, after Martha gave birth to a daughter,

Laurens immediately boarded a ship back to Charleston. Not long after he returned,

he signed on with the Continental Army and won the absolute trust of Washington,

who invited him to join his family and gave him confidential missions “which nei-

ther time nor propriety would suffer me to commit to paper,” Washington wrote.45

Hamilton and Laurens took an instant liking to each other and became insepa-

rable. Hamilton later lauded his friend’s “zeal, intelligence, enterprise.”46 As the war

progressed, Hamilton wrote to Laurens with such unbridled affection that one

Hamilton biographer, James T. Flexner, has detected homoerotic overtones in their

relationship. Because the style of eighteenth-century letters could be quite florid,

even between men, one must tread gingerly in approaching this matter, especially

since Laurens’s letters to Hamilton were warm but proper. It is worth noting here,

however, how frequently people used the word feminine to describe Hamilton—

the more surprising given his military bearing and virile exploits. When John C.

Hamilton was preparing his father’s authorized biography, he omitted a loose sheet

that has survived in his papers and that describes the relationship between Hamil-

ton and Laurens thus: “In the intercourse of these martial youths, who have been

styled ‘the Knights of the Revolution,’ there was a deep fondness of friendship,

which approached the tenderness of feminine attachment.”47 Hamilton had cer-

tainly been exposed to homosexuality as a boy, since many “sodomites” were trans-

ported to the Caribbean along with thieves, pickpockets, and others deemed

undesirable. In all thirteen colonies, sodomy had been a capital offense, so if Hamil-

ton and Laurens did become lovers—and it is impossible to say this with any cer-

tainty—they would have taken extraordinary precautions. At the very least, we can

say that Hamilton developed something like an adolescent crush on his friend.

Hamilton and Laurens formed a colorful trio with a young French nobleman

who was appointed an honorary major general in the Continental Army on July 31,

1777. The marquis de Lafayette, nineteen, was a stylish, ebullient young aristocrat

inflamed by republican ideals and eager to serve the revolutionary cause. “The gay

trio to which Hamilton and Laurens belonged was made complete by Lafayette,”

Hamilton’s grandson later wrote. “On the whole, there was something about them

rather suggestive of the three famous heroes of Dumas.”48 Lafayette always spoke of

96 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

his two American friends in the most affectionate terms. Of Laurens, he wrote that

“his openness, integrity, patriotism, and splendid gallantry have made me his de-

voted friend.”49 In describing Hamilton, Lafayette was still more effusive, calling

him “my beloved friend in whose brotherly affection I felt equally proud and

happy.”50 Eliza Hamilton confirmed that “the marquis loved Mr. Hamilton as a

brother; their love was mutual.”51

Portraits of Lafayette show a slender, handsome youth in a powdered wig with a

long face, rosy lips, and delicately arched eyebrows. Like Hamilton’s, his life was

shadowed by early sorrow: his father had died when he was two, his mother when

he was thirteen, making him an orphan at the same age as Hamilton. At sixteen, he

had married the fourteen-year-old Adrienne de Noailles, the daughter of one of

France’s most august families, and he offered America invaluable contacts with the

snobbish court of Louis XVI. His meteoric ascent in the Continental Army owed

much to a letter that Benjamin Franklin wrote to George Washington from Paris,

urging the political expediency of welcoming this well-connected young man.

Lafayette agreed to serve without pay, brought a ship to America outfitted at his

own expense, and spent lavishly from his own purse to clothe and arm the patriots.

Many people warmed to Lafayette, finding him full of poetry and fire and fine

liberal sentiments. Franklin implored Washington to befriend “that amiable young

nobleman” and expressed fear that people would take advantage of his goodness.52

Franklin need not have worried about Washington’s affections. When the young

Frenchman was wounded in battle, Washington instructed the surgeon, “Treat him

as though he were my son.” For Lafayette, Washington became a revered paternal

presence, and he named his only son George Washington Lafayette. Lafayette always

had his quota of critics, who regarded him as vain, suspicious, and self-seeking.

Thomas Jefferson pinpointed one especially flagrant fault: “His foible is a canine

appetite for popularity and fame.”53 For all his love of Lafayette, even Hamilton

mocked the “thousand little whims” to which the marquis was prey.54 Whatever his

flaws, however, Lafayette proved to be a valiant officer of surprisingly mature judg-

ment and more than rewarded the faith of his admirers.

The bilingual Hamilton befriended Lafayette with the almost instantaneous

speed of all his early friendships and was soon assigned to him as a liaison officer.

As in the case of John Laurens, there was such unabashed ardor in Hamilton’s rela-

tionship with the marquis that James T. Flexner has wondered whether it pro-

gressed beyond mere friendship. Did Hamilton’s grandson mean much or little

when he wrote, “There is a note of romance in their friendship, quite unusual even

in those days, and Lafayette, especially during his early sojourn in this country, was

on the closest terms with Hamilton”?55 Late in the war, Lafayette wrote to his wife,

“Among the general’s aides-de-camp is a (young) man whom I love very much and

97 The Little Lion

about whom I have occasionally spoken to you. That man is Colonel Hamilton.”56

Where Hamilton was the more extravagant partner in corresponding with Laurens,

Lafayette outshone Hamilton when it came to rapturous prose. “Before this cam-

paign, I was your friend and very intimate friend agreeable to the ideas of the

world,” Lafayette wrote to him in 1780. But since returning from France, “my senti-

ment has increased to such a point the world knows nothing about.”57 Was this just

a specimen of flowery French writing, voguish at the time, or something more? As

with John Laurens, we will never know. But the breathless tone of the letters that

Hamilton exchanged with Laurens and Lafayette is unlike anything in his later let-

ters. This may simply have been a by-product of youth and wartime camaraderie.

The broader point is that Alexander Hamilton, the outsider from the West Indies,

had a rare capacity for friendship and was already attracting a circle of devoted,

well-placed people who were to help to propel him to the highest political plateau.

In early July 1777, Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York fell to the British, prompt-

ing King George III to clap his hands and exclaim, “I have beat them! Beat all the

Americans.”58 It was a potential calamity for the patriots, since it opened a corridor

for General John Burgoyne and his invading army from Canada to push south to

New York City, slicing the rebel army in half and isolating New England—an over-

arching objective of British war policy. Livid at this defeat, Hamilton was unsparing

in his censure of the commander held responsible, Philip Schuyler. “I have always

been a very partial judge of General Schuyler’s conduct and vindicated it frequently

from the charges brought against it,” he wrote to Robert R. Livingston, “but I am at

last forced to suppose him inadequate.”59 Historians have proved more charitable

toward Schuyler, who was weakened by desertions and the settled malice that his

New England troops bore against him as a New York leader and a tough discipli-

narian. The British had also pulled off a masterful plan by scaling the steep moun-

tain that overlooked Ticonderoga, permitting its unlikely capture. After suffering

many slurs, Schuyler was replaced as head of the army’s Northern Department by

Horatio Gates, whom he jeered at as the “idol” of the New Englanders.60 Even

though he was exonerated for the loss of Ticonderoga in a subsequent court-

martial that he himself demanded, Schuyler never completely recuperated from the

wounding debacle.

In Hamilton’s upset over Ticonderoga one can see that this stateless young man

had developed proprietary feelings toward New York. He told Livingston that he

was disturbed by the threat to “a state which I consider, in a great measure, as my

political parent. . . . I agree with you that the loss of your state would be a more af-

fecting blow to America than any that could be struck by Mr. Howe to the south-

ward.”61 The reference to “your state” suggests, however, that if Hamilton already

98 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

identified with New York, he still had not committed himself irrevocably to any al-

legiance to it.

Hamilton already showed a solid grasp of military strategy. As he surveyed the

British forces that summer, he hazarded several predictions that later sounded

clairvoyant. First, he thought Burgoyne would be tempted to move down the Hud-

son toward New York—“The enterprising spirit he has credit for, I suspect, may

easily be fanned by his vanity into rashness”—and that this would prove ruinous

for him unless Sir William Howe rushed redcoats north from New York City to beef

up his forces.62 He didn’t think Howe would be that smart, however, the British

having “generally acted like fools.” Instead, he prophesied, again with startling ac-

curacy, that Howe would undertake “a bold effort against our main army” and

rashly try to seize Philadelphia.63

In an era of primitive communications, even a massive armada could vanish at

sea for long stretches. When General Howe departed from New York harbor in late

July, commanding 267 ships and eighteen thousand soldiers, he dropped out of

sight, materialized in Delaware Bay a week later, disappeared again, then resurfaced

in the bay in late August. Hamilton was spoiling for a fight to thwart Howe’s en-

trance into Philadelphia and told Gouverneur Morris in rousing tones, “Our army

is in high health and spirits. . . . I would not only fight them, but I would attack

them, for I hold it an established maxim that there is three to one in favour of the

party attacking.”64 That Hamilton was much too sanguine became woefully evident

on September 11 during a bloody clash between British and American troops at

Brandywine Creek, outside of Philadelphia. Despite stouthearted resistance by the

patriots, the savage fighting ended in a panic-stricken rout and terrible slaughter,

with a final tally of 1,300 Americans killed, wounded, or captured—twice the losses

inflicted on the British.

It now seemed futile to try to halt a British advance upon the capital. Wash-

ington dispatched Hamilton, Captain Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee (father of

Robert E. Lee), and eight cavalrymen to burn flour mills on the Schuylkill River be-

fore they fell into enemy hands. While Hamilton and others were destroying flour

at Daviser’s (or Daverser’s) Ferry, their sentinels fired a warning shot indicating the

approach of British dragoons. To guarantee an escape route, Hamilton had moored

a flat-bottomed boat at the river’s edge. He and three comrades now leaped into the

craft and pushed off from shore, while Lee and others took off on horseback. Lee

recalled the British raking Hamilton’s boat with repeated volleys from their car-

bines, killing one of Hamilton’s men and wounding another. All the while, the in-

trepid Hamilton was “struggling against a violent current, increased by the recent

rains.”65 Hamilton and his men finally dove from the boat into the swirling waters

and swam to safety. Scarcely stopping for breath, Hamilton dashed off a message to

99 The Little Lion

John Hancock that urged the immediate evacuation of the Continental Congress

from Philadelphia. Just before Hamilton returned to headquarters, Washington re-

ceived a letter from Captain Lee announcing Hamilton’s death in the Schuylkill.

There were tears of jubilation, as well as considerable laughter, when the sodden

corpse himself sauntered through the door.

After the Continental Congress adjourned that night, John Hancock read Hamil-

ton’s letter predicting that the enemy might pounce on Philadelphia by daybreak.

Many members decided to abandon the city and exited posthaste after midnight.

In his diary, John Adams told of being awakened at 3:00 a.m. and informed of

Hamilton’s dire forecast. Adams grabbed his belongings, mounted his horse, and

sped away with other congressmen before dawn. “Congress was chased like a covey

of partridges from Philadelphia to Trenton, from Trenton to Lancaster,” Adams

wrote with his usual gift for evocative language.66

It turned out that Hamilton’s warning had been premature, as the British stalled

for more than a week before entering the city. Washington took advantage of this

interlude to resupply his troops, who were desperately short of blankets, clothing,

and horses. With reluctance, he invested Hamilton with tyrannical powers and

placed one hundred men at his disposal, authorizing him to requisition supplies

from Philadelphia residents. It was an assignment of the utmost gravity, and Wash-

ington feared that if it miscarried it would “involve the ruin of the army, and per-

haps the ruin of America.” As his orders to Hamilton specified:

Painful as it is to me to order and as it will be to you to execute the measure,

I am compelled to desire you immediately to proceed to Philadelphia and

there procure from the inhabitants contributions of blankets and clothing

and materials to answer the purposes of both. . . . This you will do with as

much delicacy and discretion as the nature of the business demands.67

This extraordinary grant of power to his twenty-two-year-old aide demanded of

him both exquisite tact and unyielding firmness. In a war being fought for democ-

racy, the preservation of popular support was all-important. Hamilton had to im-

pose discipline and importune citizens with sufficient tact to arouse sympathy

instead of resentment. His training as a clerk helped him to keep careful accounts

and issue receipts to residents. Washington wanted him to evacuate any horses that

could be commandeered by the British, and Hamilton drew up a sensible list of the

people who should be exempt from the edict: the poor, the transient, those about to

leave the city, and those dependent on horses for their livelihood. Working at a non-

stop pace for two days, Hamilton loaded up so many vessels with military stores

and sent them up the Delaware “with so much vigilance, that very little public

100 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

property fell with the city into the hands of the British general,” wrote John Mar-

shall, later chief justice of the Supreme Court.68 Aided by these supplies, Washing-

ton engaged the British at Germantown on October 4. Although another thousand

patriots were killed, wounded, or captured, General Howe was at least pinned down

in Philadelphia and prevented from moving north to reinforce General Burgoyne.

In many ways, “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne—a dissolute, vainglorious man who

was fond of mistresses and champagne and craved a knighthood—was more suited

for the pleasures of peace than the arts of war. The renowned British actor David

Garrick had starred in his play The Maid of the Oaks in Drury Lane. Burgoyne and

his army marched down the Hudson Valley in early October 1777 with all the cum-

bersome pomp of royalty. As if proceeding to a coronation, not a battle, Burgoyne

loaded up no fewer than thirty carts with his personal belongings, dragged by horses

through fly-ridden bogs and swamps. Burgoyne epitomized the snobbery rife among

the British officers. If anything, he believed that the British had shown too much

clemency toward the American upstarts. “I look upon America as our child,” he had

said in 1774, “which we have already spoiled by too much indulgence.”69

The original British battle plan for severing New England from other rebel

colonies had envisioned Burgoyne’s force from the north converging with those of

Lieutenant Colonel Barrimore St. Leger from the west and General Howe from the

south. Instead, with Howe in Philadelphia, Burgoyne found himself fighting alone,

isolated in the upper Hudson Valley against patriot troops led by General Horatio

Gates. Burgoyne’s surrender of his entire army of 5,700 men at Saratoga in mid-

October was the pivotal moment of the war: a victory so large, so thrilling, and

so decisive that it emboldened the wavering France to enter the conflict on the

patriotic side.

The victory meant that Washington could siphon off some of Gates’s troops to

strengthen his own shaky position to the south. The continental ranks had been

thinned by the expiration of one-year enlistments—a recurring problem. Not long

after receiving the wonderful news from Saratoga, Washington summoned a war

council of five major generals and ten brigadiers, with Hamilton drafting the min-

utes. Word had begun to make the rounds that this young aide was far more than

some docile clerk. Benjamin Rush, the radical Pennsylvania congressman, grum-

bled that Washington had allowed himself to be “governed by General Greene, Gen-

eral Knox, and Colonel Hamilton, one of his aides, a young man of twenty-one

years.”70 At the meeting, the generals agreed that Gates must transfer a hefty chunk

of his troops to Washington, since the Saratoga victory had drastically curtailed the

British threat in New York. The emissary chosen to impart this most unwelcome

piece of news to Gates was Alexander Hamilton.

101 The Little Lion

It is remarkable that Washington would have drafted his young aide for such a

tough assignment. After Saratoga, Horatio Gates was the hero of the day, the dar-

ling of New England politicians, and this only deepened the mutual antipathy be-

tween him and Washington. Gates had even snubbed Washington by refusing to

inform him directly of his victory. Thus, Hamilton’s mission was fraught with a

multitude of perils. From a general at the zenith of his popularity, he had to pry

loose a sizable number of troops and to do so, if possible, without issuing any or-

ders. Hamilton would have to ride three hundred miles and then bargain with

Gates without any further opportunity to consult with Washington. Clearly, the im-

perious Gates would feel demeaned by having to negotiate with a diminutive

twenty-two-year-old. Hamilton would need to tap all the cunning and diplomacy

in his nature.

To invest Hamilton with a suitable aura of power, Washington drafted a letter to

Gates in which he introduced his aide and defined his mission: “to lay before you a

full state of our situation and that of the enemy in this quarter. He is well in-

formed . . . and will deliver my sentiments upon the plan of operations . . . now

necessary.”71 The discretion delegated to Hamilton was impressive. If Hamilton

found Gates using the requested troops in a manner that benefited the patriotic

cause, “it is not my wish to give any interruption,” Washington wrote. If that was

not the case, however, “it is my desire that the reinforcements before mentioned . . .

be immediately put in motion to join this army.”72 If there was a single moment

during the Revolution when its outcome hinged on spontaneous decisions made by

Alexander Hamilton, this was it.

Instructions in hand, Hamilton rode off to Albany at a furious pace, covering

sixty miles a day for five consecutive days, riding like a man possessed. En route, he

stopped on the eastern shore of the Hudson at Fishkill and lectured General Israel

Putnam on the need for him to shift two brigades southward to help Washington.

Hamilton did not shrink from exercising his own judgment. Acting on his own ini-

tiative, he induced Putnam to promise an additional seven hundred members of a

New Jersey militia. He explained to Washington that “I concluded you would not

disapprove of a measure calculated to strengthen you, though but for a small time,

and have ventured to adopt it on that presumption.” Eager to move on, he told

Washington that a quartermaster was “pressing some fresh horses for me. The mo-

ment they are ready I shall recross the [Hudson] River in order to fall in with the

troops on the other side and make all the haste I can to Albany to get the three

brigades there sent forward.”73

The instant Hamilton arrived in Albany on November 5, 1777, he arranged a

hasty meeting with Horatio Gates. For Hamilton, it was Benedict Arnold, not

Gates, who had merited the real laurels at Saratoga. He regarded Gates as a vain,

102 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

cowardly, inept general, and subsequent events were to bear out his scathing judg-

ment. With gray hair and spectacles set low on his long, pointed nose—he was later

derided by his men as “Granny Gates”—the heavyset Gates was a much less impos-

ing presence than Washington. The illegitimate son of a duke’s housekeeper, he had

studied at British military academies and fought in the French and Indian War.

Now swollen with pride from his victory, Gates was reluctant to cede any of the

brigades under his command. Instead of listening meekly, Hamilton spoke to Gates

in a firm tone and told him how many troops he should spare. Gates retorted that

Sir Henry Clinton, the British commander in New York, might still march up the

Hudson and endanger New England. As a sop, Gates finally agreed to send Wash-

ington a single brigade, commanded by a General Patterson, instead of the three

Hamilton had stipulated. After the meeting, Hamilton snooped about and discov-

ered that Patterson’s six-hundred-man brigade was “by far the weakest of the three

now here,” as he then wrote candidly to General Gates. “Under these circumstances,

I cannot consider it either as compatible with the good of the service or my in-

structions from His Excellency, General Washington, to consent that that brigade

be selected from the three to go to him.”74 Hamilton was careful to be neither too

forward nor too deferential as he skillfully blended his own opinions with those of

Washington. “I used every argument in my power to convince him of the propriety”

of sending troops, an exasperated Hamilton told Washington, “but he was inflexi-

ble in the opinion that two brigades at least of Continental troops should remain in

and near this place.”75 Hamilton later reproached Gates for “his impudence, his

folly and his rascality.”76

It irked Gates that he had to negotiate with this cocksure, headstrong aide. In a

draft letter to Washington, Gates crossed out an allusion to Hamilton that showed

just how much he seethed over the situation: “Although it is customary and even

absolutely necessary to direct implicit obedience to be paid to the verbal orders of

aides-de-camp in action, or while upon the spot, yet I believe it is never practiced to

delegate that dictatorial power to one aide-de-camp sent to an army 300 miles dis-

tant.”77 In the end, Hamilton extracted a promise from Gates to surrender two of

the brigades he wanted. It was a bravura performance by Hamilton, who had shown

consummate political skill.

During the tense impasse with Gates, Hamilton tarried long enough in Albany

to see his old friend Robert Troup and dine at the mansion of Philip Schuyler. Hav-

ing preceded Gates as head of the Northern Department, General Schuyler felt

cheated of the Saratoga triumph for which he had laid the groundwork. General

Nathanael Greene seconded this appraisal, calling Gates “a mere child of fortune”

and asserting that the “foundation of all the northern success was laid before his ar-

rival there.”78 During this visit to Schuyler’s mansion, Hamilton met for the first

103 The Little Lion

time the general’s second daughter, twenty-year-old Eliza, a relationship that was to

resume more than two years later.

After his exhausting talks with Gates, Hamilton headed back down the Hudson,

only to discover that his mission was not over. Having stopped at the home of New

York governor George Clinton in New Windsor, he was taken aback to find that two

of the brigades promised by General Israel Putnam had been withheld. A bluff,

jowly farmer and former tavern keeper from Connecticut, Putnam was much

beloved by his aide, Aaron Burr, who referred to him as “My good old general.”79 It

was Putnam who supposedly told his men at Bunker Hill, “Don’t fire until you see

the whites of their eyes. Then, fire low.”80 When Hamilton saw that Putnam had

reneged on his promise, he sent him a letter throbbing with anger. Hamilton cast

aside the usual caution of an aide-de-camp and delivered a tongue-lashing to a vet-

eran officer more than twice his age:

Sir, I cannot forbear confessing that I am astonished. And alarmed beyond

measure to find that all his Excellency’s views have been hitherto frustrated

and that no single step of those I mentioned to you has been taken to afford

him the aid he absolutely stands in need of and by delaying which the cause

of America is put to the utmost conceivable hazard. . . . My expressions may

perhaps have more warmth than is altogether proper. But they proceed from

the overflowing of my heart in a matter where I conceive this continent es-

sentially interested.81

Hamilton had to issue direct orders to Putnam to send all of his Continental Army

troops (that is, minus state militias) to Washington immediately. The fault was not

entirely Putnam’s, however, for the two brigades had not been paid in months and,

mutinously, refused to march.

Having gone out on a limb, Hamilton expressed great trepidation in his reports

to Washington that he might have exceeded his authority. It was therefore deeply

gratifying when Washington sent him an unqualified endorsement of his work: “I

approve entirely of all the steps you have taken and have only to wish that the exer-

tions of those you have had to deal with had kept pace with your zeal and good in-

tentions.”82 As in Philadelphia in September, Washington had given his wunderkind

huge autonomy, and the gamble had paid off handsomely. The young aide-de-

camp was revealed as a forceful personality in his own right, not just a proxy for the

general. For Hamilton, his encounters with the two obdurate generals strengthened

his preference for strict hierarchy and centralized command as the only way to ac-

complish things—a view that was to find its political equivalent in his preference

for concentrated federal power instead of authority dispersed among the states.

104 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

The frantic rides up and down the Hudson damaged Hamilton’s always fragile

health. On November 12, he wrote to Washington from New Windsor to explain his

delay in returning: “I have been detained here these two days by a fever and violent

rheumatic pains throughout my body.”83 Despite his illness, Hamilton continued to

direct the movement of troops slated to join Washington and went downriver to

Peekskill to apply maximum pressure on Putnam’s brigades. There, in late Novem-

ber, a haggard Hamilton climbed into bed at the home of Dennis Kennedy. It seemed

uncertain whether he would recover. In a letter to Governor Clinton, Captain

I. Gibbs wrote that he feared that the combined fevers and chills might prove mor-

tal. On November 25, he reported that Hamilton “seemed to have all the appear-

ance of drawing nigh his last, being seized with a coldness in his extremities, and he

remained so for a space of two hours, then survived.” On November 27, when the

chill again invaded his legs from feet to knees, the attending physician thought he

wouldn’t last. However, “he remained in this situation for near four hours, after

which the fever abated very much and from that time he has been getting much bet-

ter.” Hamilton had been so blistering in dealing with General Gates that not

everyone welcomed his recovery. On December 5, Colonel Hugh Hughes wrote to

his friend General Gates, “Colonel Hamilton, who has been very ill of a nervous dis-

order at Peekskill, is out of danger, unless it be from his own sweet temper.”84

Right before Christmas, Hamilton set out to rejoin Washington, only to collapse

again near Morristown. He was taken back in a hired coach for further rest in Peeks-

kill, where he was nourished on a hearty diet of mutton, oranges, potatoes, quail,

and partridge. Not until January 20, 1778, did Hamilton rejoin his colleagues at win-

ter quarters in Valley Forge, near Philadelphia—a bleak place that could scarcely

have elevated the spirits of the convalescing colonel.

Such was the inimitable luster of Horatio Gates after Saratoga that it was whispered

in certain quarters that he ought to supplant Washington as commander in chief.

The unhappiness with Washington was understandable. His military performance

in New York and Philadelphia had been lackluster, and his setbacks at Brandywine

and Germantown were fresher in people’s memories than his spirited raids at Tren-

ton and Princeton. The rivalry between Washington and Gates mirrored a political

split in Congress. John and Samuel Adams, Richard Henry Lee, and others who

wanted tighter congressional control over the war were sympathetic to Gates. In his

diary that fall, John Adams had expressed dismay over Washington’s generalship:

“Oh, Heaven! grant us one great soul! . . . One active, masterly capacity would

bring order out of this confusion and save this country.”85 Though he did not en-

dorse Gates outright, Adams fretted that idolatry of Washington might end in mil-

itary rule, and he was glad when the Saratoga victory cast something of a cloud over

105 The Little Lion

the commander in chief. Meanwhile, John Jay, Robert R. Livingston, Robert Morris,

and other conservatives wanted to invest great executive power in the commander

in chief and stood solidly arrayed behind Washington.

One of Gates’s avid partisans was a moody Irishman named Thomas Conway,

who had been educated in France, had served in the French Army, and had joined

the Continental Army that spring. Hamilton made no secret of his contempt for the

new brigadier general: “There does not exist a more villainous calumniator or in-

cendiary,” he wrote.86 Conway aired freely to Gates his low opinion of General

Washington’s military talents and wrote to him after Saratoga, “Heaven has been

determined to save your country or a weak general and bad counsellors would have

ruined it.”87 Gates did not muzzle such treacherous talk. When a copy of this letter

came into Washington’s possession in November, he sent Gates a terse, angry note,

quoting the line that referred to him and demanding an explanation.

Caught red-handed, Gates tried to deflect attention from his own disloyalty by

searching out the culprit who had leaked the letter to Washington. His colleague

Major James Wilkinson floated the idea that the conduit had been Robert Troup.

Gates, recalling his testy exchanges with Hamilton, decided that Washington’s young

aide was the blackguard. “Colonel Hamilton was left alone an hour in this room,”

he told Wilkinson “during which time he took Conway’s letter out of that closet

and copied it and the copy has been furnished to Washington.” Gates now em-

barked on a vendetta against Hamilton, still at this time recuperating in Peekskill.

Gates said that he had adopted a plan “which would compel General Washington to

give [Hamilton] up” so that “the receiver and the thief would be alike disgraced.”88

On December 8, Gates wrote a tactless letter to Washington with a thinly veiled

accusation against Hamilton. “I conjure your excellency to give me all the assistance

you can in tracing out the author of the infidelity which put extracts from General

Conway’s letters to me into your hands. Those letters have been stealingly copied,”

Gates informed Washington, stating that it was in his power to “do me and the

United States a very important service by detecting a wretch who may betray me

and capitally injure the very operations under your immediate direction.”89

It turned out that Hamilton was blameless and that the source of the disclosure

was the raffish James Wilkinson, who had fingered Troup and Hamilton. While

carrying dispatches to Congress, Wilkinson—a flamboyant character with an in-

curable weakness for liquor, intrigue, and bombast—had paused for alcoholic

refreshment in Reading, Pennsylvania, and told an aide to Lord Stirling about the

Conway letter to Gates. Lord Stirling then relayed the news to his friend Washing-

ton. Hamilton never forgot Gates’s attempt to blacken his reputation: “I am his en-

emy personally,” he wrote two years later, “for unjust and unprovoked attacks upon

my character.”90

106 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

Whether an actual conspiracy—the so-called Conway Cabal—ever existed with

an explicit intention to displace Washington has long been fodder for historians.

There was clearly some movement afoot, a loose network of critics, who wanted to

replace Washington with Gates, even if they never entered into a formal pact. At

first, it looked as if the cabal might succeed. In late November, Congress had ap-

pointed Horatio Gates president of the Board of War, which acquired new powers

to supervise Washington. In mid-December, over Washington’s protest, Conway

was promoted to inspector general. Hamilton now believed that malevolent con-

spirators menaced Washington. “Since I saw you,” he wrote to George Clinton, “I

have discovered such convincing traits of the monster that I cannot doubt its real-

ity in the most extensive sense.”91

Countervailing forces had already begun to rein in the Conway conspirators. In

early January 1778, Hamilton’s dear friend John Laurens alerted his father to a de-

sign against Washington. Henry Laurens, now president of Congress, assured his

son, “I will attend to all their movements and have set my face against every wicked

attempt, however specious.”92 In the last analysis, Washington’s popularity was

unassailable, and the blatant scheming of his foes only solidified his reputation for

integrity. By April 1778, Congress gladly accepted Conway’s resignation as inspec-

tor general; Horatio Gates gradually lost his reputation on the battlefield. In the af-

termath of the cabal, both Conway and Gates faced challenges to duels. James

Wilkinson turned on his mentor and challenged Gates, but when the latter broke

down and cried apologetically, the duel was called off. Because Conway persisted in

maligning Washington, he was summoned to the dueling ground by General John

Cadwalader, who fired a ball through Conway’s mouth that came out the back of

his head. Cadwalader showed no regret. “I have stopped the damned rascal’s lying

tongue at any rate,” he observed as his opponent lay in agony on the ground.93

Somehow, Conway managed to survive, but his career in the Continental Army was

definitely over.

SIX

A F R E N Z Y O F VA LO R

W hen Hamilton, debilitated from illness, rejoined his comrades at Val-

ley Forge in January 1778, he must have shuddered at the mud and

log huts and the slovenly state of the men who shivered around the

campfires. There was a dearth of gunpowder, tents, uniforms, and blankets. Hideous

sights abounded: snow stained with blood from bare, bruised feet; the carcasses of

hundreds of decomposing horses; troops gaunt from smallpox, typhus, and scurvy.

Washington’s staff was not exempt from the misery and had to bolt down cornmeal

mush for breakfast. “For some days past there has been little less than a famine in

the camp,” Washington said in mid-February. Before winter’s end, some 2,500 men,

almost a quarter of the army, perished from disease, famine, or the cold.1 To endure

such suffering required stoicism reminiscent of the ancient Romans, so Washington

had his favorite play, Addison’s Cato, the story of a self-sacrificing Roman states-

man, staged at Valley Forge to buck up his weary men.

That winter, Hamilton worked alongside Washington in the stone house of Isaac

Potts, whose iron forge gave the area its name. Snappish and depressed over the

Conway Cabal and unsettled by the wretched state of his men, Washington was

more temperamental than usual. “The General is well but much worn with fatigue

and anxiety,” Martha Washington told a friend. “I never knew him to be so anxious

as now.”2 Washington sometimes vented his rage at Hamilton, and tensions crept

into their relationship. Hamilton yearned for a field command, but Washington

could not afford to sacrifice his most valuable aide. It was Hamilton, after all, who

wrote many of the pointed pleas to Congress asking for urgently needed provisions,

and the young aide shared Washington’s frustration. “For God’s sake, my dear sir,”

108 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

Hamilton wrote to one colonel when authorizing him to collect wagons, “exert

yourself upon this occasion. Our distress is infinite.”3

Hamilton began to meditate on the deeper causes of the surrounding misery.

Because the colonies had been forced to rely on England for textiles, the patriots

lacked clothing. Because the colonies had relied on England for munitions, they

lacked weapons. Hamilton also saw in graphic terms the inflationary dangers of

printing too much paper money. Forced to accept at face value the depreciated pa-

per issued by Congress and the states, farmers and merchants balked at selling food

and clothing to the army and often ended up hawking their wares instead to the

well-fed, well-clad redcoats carousing in Philadelphia. The situation at Valley Forge

was scandalous: American soldiers were starving in the midst of fertile American

farmland. Hamilton was also sickened by the bungling Commissary Department.

He wrote to New York governor George Clinton in mid-February:

At this very day, there are complaints from the whole line of having been

three or four days without provisions. Desertions have been immense and

strong features of mutiny begin to show themselves. It is indeed to be won-

dered at that the soldiers have manifested so unparalleled a degree of patience

as they have. If effectual measures are not speedily adopted, I know not how

we shall keep the army together or make another campaign.4

Hamilton cast a critical eye on the whole revolutionary effort. However upset by

profiteering, he knew that the central weakness of the continental cause was politi-

cal in nature. In his letter to Clinton, he scoffed at the rank favoritism shown by

Congress in showering promotions on “every petty rascal who comes armed with

ostentatious pretensions of military merit and experience.”5 Unable to enforce its

requests for money and troops, an impotent Congress was reduced to begging from

the states, which selfishly hoarded soldiers for their own home guards. The only

way the Continental Army could lure soldiers was through expensive cash bounties

and promises of future land. The republican partiality for state militias in lieu of a

strong central army threatened to undermine the entire Revolution.

The disillusioned Hamilton also struggled to fathom why a Congress that had

once boasted such distinguished figures was now glutted with mediocrities. Where

had the competent members gone? Hamilton concluded that the talent had been

drained off by state governments. “However important it is to give form and effi-

ciency to your interior [i.e., state] constitutions and police,” he told Clinton, “it is

infinitely more important to have a wise general council. . . . You should not beggar

the councils of the United States to enrich the administration of the several mem-

bers.”6 Such statements presaged Hamilton’s later nationalism. Ironically, George

109 A Frenzy of Valor

Clinton became his bête noire, exemplifying the very parochial state power against

which he inveighed.

Hamilton, just turned twenty-three, was already spouting civics lessons to state

governors. His views were also solicited by his commander in chief. When Wash-

ington had to report to a congressional committee about a proposed army reor-

ganization, he sought his aide’s advice, and Hamilton enumerated a long list of

abuses to be curbed. He urged that officers who overstayed their furloughs by ten

days be court-martialed, recommended surprise inspections to keep sentries alert,

and even prescribed the manner in which they should sleep: “Every man must have

his haversack under his head and, if the post is dangerous, his arms in his hand.”

Hamilton also displayed an unbending sense of military discipline and seemed

something of a martinet. Any dragoon who allowed another person to ride his

horse without first notifying the inspector general should “receive one hundred

lashes for such neglect.”7

That Hamilton already contemplated America’s political future was evident in

March, when Washington assigned him to negotiate a prisoner exchange with the

British. Having already questioned many British and Hessian deserters, Hamilton

was a natural choice for the job and was joined by his former Elizabethtown men-

tor, Elias Boudinot, now the commissary general of prisoners. Some in Congress

not only opposed negotiations but wanted them to fail so that Britain could be

blamed. Shocked by this duplicity, Hamilton wrote to George Clinton, “It is thought

to be bad policy to go into an exchange. But admitting this to be true, it is much

worse policy to commit such frequent breaches of faith and ruin our national char-

acter.”8 Hamilton saw America’s essential nature being forged in the throes of bat-

tle, and that made honest action imperative.

Shortly after Hamilton penned his report on army reorganization, a Prussian sol-

dier with a drooping face and ample double chin appeared at Valley Forge. He billed

himself as a German baron and acted the part with almost comical pomposity. Al-

though the baron and the honorific “von” were likely fictitious, Frederick William

August von Steuben came from a military family and had served as an aide to Fred-

erick the Great. He came to America at his own expense and waived all pay unless

the patriots triumphed. Washington appointed him a provisional inspector general,

with a mandate to instill discipline in the army. Since Steuben’s English was tenta-

tive at best, he relied on French as his lingua franca, bringing him into immediate

contact with the bilingual Hamilton and John Laurens, who acted as interpreters.

Though Steuben was forty-eight and Hamilton twenty-three, they became fast

friends, united by French and their fondness for military lore and service.

Soon Steuben was strutting around Valley Forge, teaching the amateur troops to

110 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

march in formation, load muskets, and fix bayonets and sprinkling his orders with

colorful goddamns and plentiful polyglot expletives that endeared him to the

troops. Wrote one young private: “Never before or since have I had such an impres-

sion of the ancient fabled god of war as when I looked on the baron. He seemed to

me a perfect personification of Mars. The trappings of his horse, the enormous hol-

sters of his pistols, his large size, and his strikingly martial aspect, all seemed to fa-

vor the idea.”9 Steuben overhauled the army’s drill manual or “Blue Book” and

created a training guide for company commanders, with Hamilton often recruited

as editor and translator. Hamilton eyed the drillmaster with wry affection. “The

Baron is a gentleman for whom I have a particular esteem,” Hamilton said, though

he chided his “fondness for power and importance.”10 He never doubted that

Steuben had worked wonders for the élan of the Continental Army. “ ’Tis unques-

tionably [due] to his efforts [that] we are indebted for the introduction of disci-

pline in the army,” he later told John Jay.11 On May 5, 1778, Steuben was recognized

for his superlative efforts and awarded the rank of major general.

During the winter encampments, Hamilton constantly educated himself, as if

equipping his mind for the larger tasks ahead. “Force of intellect and force of will

were the sources of his success,” Henry Cabot Lodge later wrote.12 From his days as

an artillery captain, Hamilton had kept a pay book with blank pages in the back;

while on Washington’s staff, he filled up 112 pages with notes from his extracurric-

ular reading. Hamilton fit the type of the self-improving autodidact, employing all

his spare time to better himself. He aspired to the eighteenth-century aristocratic

ideal of the versatile man conversant in every area of knowledge. Thanks to his pay

book we know that he read a considerable amount of philosophy, including Bacon,

Hobbes, Montaigne, and Cicero. He also perused histories of Greece, Prussia, and

France. This was hardly light fare after a day of demanding correspondence for

Washington, yet he retained the information and applied it to profitable use. While

other Americans dreamed of a brand-new society that would expunge all traces of

effete European civilization, Hamilton humbly studied those societies for clues to

the formation of a new government. Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never saw the cre-

ation of America as a magical leap across a chasm to an entirely new landscape, and

he always thought the New World had much to learn from the Old.

Probably the first book that Hamilton absorbed was Malachy Postlethwayt’s

Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, a learned almanac of politics, eco-

nomics, and geography that was crammed with articles about taxes, public debt,

money, and banking. The dictionary took the form of two ponderous, folio-sized

volumes, and it is touching to think of young Hamilton lugging them through the

111 A Frenzy of Valor

chaos of war. Hamilton would praise Postlethwayt as one of “the ablest masters of

political arithmetic.”13 A proponent of manufacturing, Postlethwayt gave the aide-

de-camp a glimpse of a mixed economy in which government would both steer

business activity and free individual energies. In the pay book one can see the future

treasury wizard mastering the rudiments of finance. “When you can get more of

foreign coin, [the] coin for your native exchange is said to be high and the reverse

low,” Hamilton noted.14 He also stocked his mind with basic information about the

world: “The continent of Europe is 2600 miles long and 2800 miles broad”;15

“Prague is the principal city of Bohemia, the principal part of the commerce of

which is carried on by the Jews.”16 He recorded tables from Postlethwayt showing

infant-mortality rates, population growth, foreign-exchange rates, trade balances,

and the total economic output of assorted nations. Hamilton’s notes from Postle-

thwayt showcase his exemplary discipline in undertaking private courses of study.

Like the other founding fathers, Hamilton rummaged through the wisdom of

antiquity for political precedents. From the First Philippic of Demosthenes, he

plucked a passage that summed up his conception of a leader as someone who

would not pander to popular whims. “As a general marches at the head of his

troops,” so should wise politicians “march at the head of affairs, insomuch that they

ought not to wait the event to know what measures to take, but the measures which

they have taken ought to produce the event.”17 Nearly fifty-one pages of the pay

book contain extracts from a six-volume set of Plutarch’s Lives. Thereafter, Hamil-

ton always interpreted politics as an epic tale from Plutarch of lust and greed and

people plotting for power. Since his political theory was rooted in his study of hu-

man nature, he took special delight in Plutarch’s biographical sketches. And he

carefully noted the creation of senates, priesthoods, and other elite bodies that gov-

erned the lives of the people. Hamilton was already interested in the checks and bal-

ances that enabled a government to tread a middle path between despotism and

anarchy. From the life of Lycurgus, he noted:

Among the many alterations which Lycurgus made, the first and most im-

portant was the establishment of the senate, which having a power equal to

the kings in matters of consequence did . . . foster and qualify the imperious

and fiery genius of monarchy by constantly restraining it within the bounds

of equity and moderation. For the state before had no firm basis to stand

upon, leaning sometimes towards an absolute monarchy and sometimes

towards a pure democracy. But this establishment of the senate was to the

commonwealth what the ballast is to a ship and preserved the whole in a just

equilibrium.18

112 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

Hamilton was especially attentive to the amorous stories and strange sexual cus-

toms reported by Plutarch. He registered in the pay book how in ancient Rome two

naked young noblemen whipped young married women during the celebration of

Lupercalia and “how the young married women were glad of this kind of whipping

as they imagined it helped conception.”19 Hamilton was also intrigued that Lycur-

gus allowed a worthy man to ask permission of another husband to impregnate his

wife, so that “by planting in a good soil he might raise a generous progeny to pos-

sess all the valuable qualifications of their parents.”20 This same Lycurgus tried to

make the married women “more robust and capable of vigorous offspring” by al-

lowing selected virgins and young men to “go naked and dance in their presence at

certain festive occasions.”21

For anyone studying Hamilton’s pay book, it would come as no surprise that he

would someday emerge as a first-rate constitutional scholar, an unsurpassed treas-

ury secretary, and the protagonist of the first great sex scandal in American politi-

cal history.

Restless at his desk, Hamilton longed to spring into combat, and he found a dra-

matic chance to do so in June 1778. The direction of the war had shifted in Febru-

ary when the French, heartened by the victory at Saratoga, decided to recognize

American independence and signed military and commercial treaties with the

fledgling nation. An ebullient John Adams spoke for many Americans when he ex-

ulted that Great Britain “is no longer mistress of the ocean.”22

As part of their response to French entry into the war, the British replaced Gen-

eral Howe with Sir Henry Clinton as commander of their forces. Hamilton had

been unimpressed by Howe’s leadership. “All that the English need to have done was

to blockade our ports with twenty-five frigates and ten ships of the line,” Hamilton

told a French visitor. “But, thank God, they did nothing of the sort.”23 If anything,

he was even less dazzled by General Clinton. One day, Henry Lee broached to Wash-

ington an ingenious plan for kidnapping Clinton, who was quartered in a house on

Broadway in New York. He had a large garden out back, overlooking the Hudson

River, where he napped in a small pavilion each afternoon. Lee wanted to sneak

men across the Hudson at low tide and snatch Clinton as he dozed. Hamilton

spiked the plan with a cogent objection, telling Washington that if Clinton was

taken prisoner “it would be our misfortune, since the British government could

not find another commander so incompetent to send in his place.”24

When General Clinton learned in mid-June that a French fleet had sailed for

America, he feared that it might team up with the Continental Army and entrap his

occupation force in Philadelphia. To avert this, he decided to evacuate the city and

concentrate his troops in the more easily defensible New York. This meant that a

113 A Frenzy of Valor

huge British army of nine thousand men, laden with provisions filling fifteen hun-

dred wagons—the baggage train stretched for twelve miles—would need to troop

across New Jersey with perilous slowness. With supply lines stretched dangerously

thin, these lumbering British forces would be exposed to the fire of the Continental

Army. Washington saw an opportunity to score a telling blow against a vulnerable

adversary and highlight the gains made by his men at Valley Forge under Steuben’s

vigorous stewardship.

Washington had survived the Conway Cabal only to have his authority chal-

lenged by General Charles Lee, an experienced officer who had been captured by the

British in a tavern in late 1776 and had only recently been released after a fifteen-

month captivity. Lee was a thin, quarrelsome, eccentric bachelor who spoke four

foreign languages, had lost two fingers in an Italian duel, and traveled everywhere

with his pack of dogs at his heels. He had briefly married an Indian woman, leading

the Mohawks to nickname him, with good reason, Boiling Water. He was a talented

but impossibly temperamental man who believed devoutly in his own military ge-

nius. Arrogant and indiscreet, he told Elias Boudinot that “General Washington was

not fit to command a sergeant’s guard.”25 He also ridiculed efforts made by Steuben

and Hamilton to bring professional order to the army.

On June 24, 1778, Washington convened a council of war to debate whether to

pounce on the retreating British Army. Hamilton took minutes. The opinionated

Lee immediately poured scorn on Washington’s plan, saying the Americans would

be trounced by the superior Europeans and that it was foolhardy to court trouble

when the French were soon to arrive. Hamilton—who dismissed Lee as “a driveler

in the business of soldiership or something much worse”—writhed quietly.26 To his

astonishment, the officers agreed with Lee’s views and in a manner, scoffed Hamil-

ton, that “would have done honor to the most honorable society of midwives.”27

Washington preferred to operate by consensus, but he decided to override this vote

and give orders to strike at the enemy “if fair opportunity offered.”28 Lee refused to

serve as second in command for what he deemed a misguided maneuver. Only af-

ter Washington called his bluff and assigned the position to Lafayette did Lee back

down and consent to ride out and take command of the advancing forces.

For the next few days, Hamilton, as a liaison officer to Lafayette, was constantly

in motion, riding through muggy nights to reconnoiter enemy lines and convey in-

telligence among the officers. By the night of June 27, the British were encamped

near Monmouth Court House in Freehold, New Jersey, with Lee and his soldiers ly-

ing only six miles away. Washington ordered Lee to attack in the early morning “un-

less there should be very powerful reasons to the contrary.”29 Washington, three

miles farther back, would then bring up the rear with the army’s main contingent.

Hamilton drafted Washington’s directive to Lee that night, telling the latter to “skir-

114 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

mish with [the enemy] so as to produce some delay and give time for the rest of the

troops to come up.”30

June 28, 1778, was to be an unforgettable day because of, among other things,

the stifling heat. The thermometer reached the high nineties, and some soldiers

rode naked from the waist up. During this day, horses and riders alike expired from

heat prostration. The battle was supposed to start with Lee taking on the British

rear guard. After hearing small-arms fire that morning, Hamilton was sent ahead by

Washington to scout Lee’s movements, and he was stunned by the tumult he found:

far from engaging the enemy, as directed, Lee’s men were in a full-blown retreat.

Not a word of this had been communicated to Washington. Hamilton rode up to

Lee and shouted, “I will stay here with you, my dear general, and die with you! Let

us all die rather than retreat!”31 Once again the young aide did not hesitate to talk

to a general as a peer. Hamilton also spotted a threatening movement by a British

cavalry unit and prevailed upon Lee to order Lafayette to charge them.

When Washington got wind of the chaotic flight of his troops, he galloped up to

Lee, glowered at him, and demanded, “What is the meaning of this, sir? I desire to

know the meaning of this disorder and confusion!”

Lee took umbrage at the peremptory tone. “The American troops would not

stand the British bayonets,” he replied.

To which Washington retorted, “You damned poltroon, you never tried them!”32

Washington did not ordinarily use profanities, but, faced with Lee’s insubordina-

tion that morning, he swore “till the leaves shook on the trees,” said one general.33

America’s idolatry of George Washington may have truly begun at the battle of

Monmouth. One of America’s most accomplished horsemen, Washington at first

rode a white charger, given to him by William Livingston, now governor of New Jer-

sey, in honor of his recrossing of the Delaware. This beautiful horse dropped dead

from the heat, and Washington instantly switched to a chestnut mare. By sheer

force of will, he stopped the retreating soldiers, rallied them, then reversed them.

“Stand fast, my boys, and receive your enemy,” he shouted. “The southern troops are

advancing to support you.”34 Washington’s steady presence had a sedative effect on

the flying men. He summarily ordered Lee to the rear and goaded the troops into

driving the British from the field. As he watched this legendary performance,

Lafayette thought to himself, “Never had I beheld so superb a man.”35

Hamilton, not prone to hero worship, was awed by Washington’s unflinching

courage and incomparable self-command. “I never saw the general to so much ad-

vantage,” he told Elias Boudinot. “His coolness and firmness were admirable. He in-

stantly took maneuvers for checking the enemy’s advance and giving time for the

army, which was very near, to form and make a proper disposition. . . . By his own

115 A Frenzy of Valor

good sense and fortitude he turned the fate of the day. . . . [H]e directed the whole

with the skill of a master workman.”36

Hamilton’s bravery likewise left an enduring image. Famished for combat, he

was in “a sort of frenzy of valor,” Lee contended.37 He seemed ubiquitous on the

battlefield. When Hamilton found one brigade in retreat and feared the loss of its

artillery, he ordered them to line up along a fence and then charge with fixed bayo-

nets. Riding hatless in the sunny field, Hamilton was exhausted from the heat by the

time his horse was shot out from under him. He toppled over, badly injured, and

had to retire from the field. Aaron Burr and John Laurens also had horses shot from

under them that day. So severe was Burr’s sunstroke that it rendered him effectively

unfit for further combat duty in the Revolution. Suffering from violent headaches,

nausea, and exhaustion and probably irked by his lack of promotion under Wash-

ington, Burr took a temporary leave of absence in October.

Many people were struck by Hamilton’s behavior at Monmouth, which showed

more than mere courage. There was an element of ecstatic defiance, an indifference

toward danger, that reflected his youthful fantasies of an illustrious death in battle.

One aide said that Hamilton had shown “singular proofs of bravery” and appeared

“to court death under our doubtful circumstances and triumphed over it.”38 John

Adams later said that General Henry Knox told him stories of Hamilton’s “heat and

effervescence” at Monmouth.39 At moments of supreme stress, Hamilton could

screw himself up to an emotional pitch that was nearly feverish in intensity.

The battle of Monmouth was not an outright victory for the patriots, and the

British Army escaped intact the next day. Most observers termed it a draw. Still, the

ragtag continentals had killed or wounded more than one thousand troops—four

times the number of American casualties—proving to naysayers that they could per-

form admirably against tip-top European soldiers. “Our troops, after the first im-

pulse from mismanagement, behaved with more spirit and moved with greater

order than the British troops,” Hamilton rejoiced. “I assure you I never was pleased

with them before this day.”40 Enraged that Lee had fumbled a tremendous oppor-

tunity, Hamilton applauded Washington when he arrested Lee for disobeying or-

ders and making a shameful retreat. Hamilton was an eager witness against Lee

during a court-martial that took place at New Brunswick in July under Lord Stir-

ling’s supervision. “Whatever a court-martial may decide,” Hamilton warned Elias

Boudinot, “I shall continue to believe and say his conduct was monstrous and un-

pardonable.”41 Among Charles Lee’s sympathizers was Aaron Burr, who missed no

chance to belittle Washington’s military talents.

On July 4 and 13, Hamilton gave damaging testimony at the court-martial, re-

calling that Lee had taken no measures to stop the enemy’s advance, even after be-

116 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

ing told to do so by Washington. He told of troops fleeing in wild disorder and of

Lee’s failure to notify Washington of this retreat. In a dramatic finale, Lee cross-

examined Hamilton and accused him of having expressed in the field a contrary

opinion of his conduct. “I did not,” rejoined Hamilton. “I said something to you in

the field expressive of an opinion that there appeared in you no want of that degree

of self-possession, which proceeds from a want of personal intrepidity.” Hamilton

further informed the general that there had appeared in him “a certain hurry of

spirits, which may proceed from a temper not so calm and steady as is necessary to

support a man in such critical circumstances.”42 It was a curious clash indeed: the

youthful aide pontificating to a veteran general on the ideal mental state of a field

commander.

In the end, Charles Lee was found guilty on all counts but given a relatively le-

nient sentence: suspension from the army for one year. In October, the disgraced

general assured Burr that he planned “to resign my commission, retire to Virginia,

and learn to hoe tobacco.”43 But he did not let matters drop there, and he and his

minions continued to vilify Washington and even Hamilton for having testified in

the court-martial. In late November, Hamilton encountered Major John Skey Eu-

stace, a worshipful young aide-de-camp to Lee and almost his adopted son. Hamil-

ton tried to approach him in a conciliatory manner, even though Eustace was

telling people that Hamilton had perjured himself in the court-martial. Eustace

later described to General Lee his encounter with Hamilton:

[Hamilton] advanced towards me, on my entering the room, with presented

hand—I took no notice of his polite intention, but sat down without bowing

to him. . . . He then asked me if I was come from camp—I said, shortly, no,

without the usual application of Sir, rose from my chair—left the room and

him standing before the chair. I could not treat him much more rudely—I’ve

reported my suspicions of his veracity on the trial so often that I expect the son

of a bitch will challenge me when he comes.44

In early December, Lee heaped further abuse upon Washington in print, and

John Laurens urged Hamilton to rebut it. “The pen of Junius is in your hand and I

think you will, without difficulty, expose . . . such a tissue of falsehood and incon-

sistency as will satisfy the world and put him forever to silence.”45 Perhaps because

he was a party to the dispute, Hamilton, in a rare act of reticence, declined to lift his

pen. Instead, Laurens challenged Lee to a duel to avenge the slurs against Washing-

ton. Hamilton agreed to serve as his second, the first of many such “affairs of

honor” in which he participated.

Dueling was so prevalent in the Continental Army that one French visitor de-

117 A Frenzy of Valor

clared, “The rage for dueling here has reached an incredible and scandalous point.”46

It was a way that gentlemen could defend their sense of honor: instead of resorting

to courts if insulted, they repaired to the dueling ground. This anachronistic prac-

tice expressed a craving for rank and distinction that lurked beneath the egalitarian

rhetoric of the American Revolution. Always insecure about his status in the world,

Hamilton was a natural adherent to dueling, with its patrician overtones. Lacking a

fortune or family connections, he guarded his reputation jealously throughout his

life, and affairs of honor were often his preferred method for doing so. The man

born without honor placed a premium on maintaining his.

Late in the wintry afternoon of December 23, 1778, Hamilton accompanied

John Laurens to the duel in a wood outside Philadelphia. Lee chose for his second

Major Evan Edwards. By prearranged rules, Laurens and Lee strode toward each

other and fired their pistols when they stood five or six paces apart. After Laurens

shot Lee in the right side, Laurens, Hamilton, and Edwards rushed toward the gen-

eral, who waved them away and requested a second round of fire. Neither Hamilton

nor Edwards wanted Lee to continue, as they made clear in a joint account they is-

sued the next day. “Col. Hamilton observed that unless the General was influenced

by motives of personal enmity, he did not think the affair ought to be pursued any

further. But as General Lee seemed to persist in desiring it, he was too tender of his

friend’s honor to persist in opposing it.”47 But no second round ensued. The duel

ended with Lee declaring that he “esteemed General Washington” as a man and had

never spoken of him in the abusive manner alleged.48 For Laurens, this made suffi-

cient amends, and the four men quit the woods. In their summary, Hamilton and

Edwards praised the conduct of the two principals as “strongly marked with all the

politeness, generosity, coolness, and firmness that ought to characterize a transac-

tion of this nature.”49

How was Hamilton affected by his first duel? He saw two gentlemen who had ex-

hibited exemplary behavior and fought for ideals rather than just personal animos-

ity. The object had not been to kill the other person so much as to resolve honorably

a lingering dispute. Both Laurens and Lee walked away with their dignity more or

less intact. Dueling may well have struck the young Hamilton less as a barbaric relic

of a feudal age than as a noble affirmation of high honor. It was the last act of Charles

Lee’s military career. He withdrew from the scene and lived in seclusion with his

beloved dogs, first in Virginia and then in Philadelphia, where he died of tubercu-

losis in October 1782.

One possible reason that Hamilton refrained from attacking Charles Lee in print

that autumn was that he had just administered a stern rebuke to Maryland con-

gressman Samuel Chase. A signer of the Declaration of Independence and later a

118 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

Supreme Court justice, Chase was a tall, ungainly man with a resemblance to Dr.

Samuel Johnson and a face so broad and ruddy that he was dubbed “Bacon Face.”

He could be overbearing and blustered his way into controversies throughout his

career.

Hamilton had published anonymous diatribes against Chase after noticing that

the price of flour needed by the newly arrived French fleet had more than doubled.

He claimed that Chase had leaked knowledge of a secret congressional plan to buy

up flour for the French to his associates, who then cornered the market. To expose

Chase, Hamilton resumed his acquaintance with New-York Journal publisher John

Holt, who now printed a newspaper from Poughkeepsie during the British occupa-

tion of New York.

Using the pen name “Publius”—a lifelong favorite—Hamilton castigated Chase

in three long letters in Holt’s paper between October and November 1778. Chase

didn’t know the author was an adjutant to Washington. These essays belie the later

caricature of Hamilton as a reflexive apologist for business, an uncritical exponent

of the profit motive. After pointing to the punishment inflicted on traitors to the

patriotic cause, he noted that “the conduct of another class, equally criminal, and,

if possible, more mischievous has hitherto passed with that impunity. . . . I mean

that tribe who . . . have carried the spirit of monopoly and extortion to an excess

which scarcely admits of a parallel. When avarice takes the lead in a state, it is com-

monly the forerunner of its fall. How shocking is it to discover among ourselves,

even at this early period, the strongest symptoms of this fatal disease?”50

The first “Publius” letter pointed out that greed can corrupt a state and that a

public official who betrays his trust “ought to feel the utmost rigor of public re-

sentment and be detested as a traitor of the worst and most dangerous kind.”51 In

the second letter, Hamilton lapsed into gratuitous calumny against Chase. “Had

you not struck out a new line of prostitution for yourself, you might still have re-

mained unnoticed and contemptible,” he hectored Chase. “It is your lot to have the

peculiar privilege of being universally despised.”52 In the third letter, Hamilton gave

a possible clue to his overwrought style: he was already thinking ahead. “The station

of a member of C[ongre]ss is the most illustrious and important of any I am able

to conceive. He is to be regarded not only as a legislator but as the founder of an em-

pire.”53 Hamilton expected that someday the struggling confederation of states

would be welded into a mighty nation, and he believed that every step now taken by

politicians would reverberate by example far into the future.

It was fitting that Hamilton should have mused about America’s future greatness in

the fall of 1778, for the struggle with the British had expanded into a sweeping

transatlantic conflict. Spain had entered the war on the colonial side after failing to

119 A Frenzy of Valor

regain control of Gibraltar from England. France had also decided to wage war on

Britain for reasons having to do less with ideological solidarity with America—it

scarcely behooved Louis XVI to encourage revolts against royal authority—than

with a desire to subvert Britain and even the score after losing the French and In-

dian War. The French also sought better access to Caribbean sugar islands and

North American ports. This early lesson in Realpolitik—that countries follow their

interests, not their sympathies—was engraved in Hamilton’s memory, and he often

reminded Jeffersonians later on that the French had fought for their own selfish

purposes. “The primary motives of France for the assistance which she gave us was

obviously to enfeeble a hated and powerful rival by breaking in pieces the British

Empire,” he wrote nearly two decades later. “He must be a fool who can be credu-

lous enough to believe that a despotic court aided a popular revolution from regard

to liberty or friendship to the principles of such a revolution.”54

According to his King’s College classmate Nicholas Fish, Hamilton had a direct

hand in prodding Lafayette to advocate bringing a French army to America. Before

Admiral Jean Baptiste d’Estaing came with his fleet in July 1778, Hamilton played

on Lafayette’s vanity by touting the merits of having a French ground force with

Lafayette as its commander. “The United States are under infinite obligations to

[Lafayette] beyond what is known,” Hamilton told Fish later, “not only for his val-

our and good conduct as major general of our army, but for his good offices and in-

fluence in our behalf with the court of France. The French army now here . . .

would not have been in this country but through his means.”55

Hamilton was posted to greet Admiral d’Estaing aboard his majestic flagship

and became a frequent emissary to the French. He often served as interpreter for

Washington, who did not speak the language and considered himself too old to

learn. Hamilton also provided impeccable translations of diplomatic correspon-

dence into French, with just the right dash of high-flown language. In this manner,

the alliance with France further enhanced Hamilton’s stature in the Continental

Army.

Many French radicals who flocked to the Revolution were descended from

nobility and were enchanted by Hamilton’s social grace, ready humor, and erudi-

tion. J. P. Brissot de Warville recalled Hamilton as “firm and . . . decided[,] . . .

frank and martial” and later had him named an honorary member of the French

National Assembly.56 The marquis de Chastellux marveled that such a young man

“by a prudence and secrecy still more beyond his age than his information justi-

fied the confidence with which he was honored” by Washington.57 The duc de La

Rochefoucauld-Liancourt observed of Hamilton, “He united with dignity and feel-

ing, and much force and decision, delightful manners, great sweetness, and was in-

finitely agreeable.”58 At the same time, the duke noticed that some things were so

120 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

blindingly self-evident to Hamilton that he was baffled when others didn’t grasp

them quickly—an intellectual agility that could breed intolerance for less quick-

witted mortals.

Though Hamilton was adored by the French officers in their royal blue-and-

scarlet uniforms, he also nursed grievances against them. Familiarity bred contempt

along with affection. Hamilton deplored many French aristocrats as vainglorious

self-promoters who wanted to snatch a particle of fame from the Revolution and

parlay it into a superior rank at home. He had to endure in silence insults from

them about incompetent continentals. “The French volunteers, generally speaking,

were men of ordinary talents and skills in the military arts,” remarked Robert

Troup, “and yet most of them were so conceited as to suppose themselves Caesars

or Hannibals in comparison with the American officers.”59

The self-made Hamilton was offended by favoritism shown toward the French,

a situation that demoralized many in the continental ranks who fought at consid-

erable personal sacrifice. “Congress in the beginning went upon a very injudicious

plan with respect to Frenchmen,” he informed one friend. “To every adventurer that

came without even the shadow of credentials they gave the rank of field officers.”60

It often fell to Hamilton to smooth ruffled feelings between the allies, as when he

arbitrated an early dispute between General John Sullivan and Admiral d’Estaing.

It was the bane of Hamilton’s service that he had to draft numerous letters to

Congress, requesting promotions for undeserving Frenchmen. If Congress spurned

these requests, then he had to apply balm to the wounded suitors through oily com-

pliments. Hamilton once told John Jay that he wrote these letters to shield Wash-

ington from the inevitable resentment of rejected Frenchmen. In private, nobody

railed more against the preferential treatment of French aristocrats than Hamilton,

who was later so freely branded an “aristocrat” by rivals. At the same time, he saw

that an aristocratic class could contain progressive members and that republican

wisdom wasn’t a monopoly held by mechanics and tradesmen.

Though Hamilton often regarded the French allies as a royal nuisance, he never

denied the decisive nature of their intervention. From the start, they had smuggled

weapons and supplies to the patriots. Many were also fine soldiers, and Hamilton

later paid tribute to the “ardent, impetuous, and military genius of the French.”61

By the spring of 1779, he could say categorically of these sometimes trying allies,

“Their friendship is the pillar of our security.”62

The status-conscious Hamilton was also sensitive to perceived inequities among

Washington’s staff, even when it pertained to his closest friend, John Laurens. In

November 1778, just before Henry Laurens stepped down as its president, Congress

tried to promote John Laurens to lieutenant colonel as a reward for valorous con-

duct. Laurens declined but accepted the offer when it was renewed in March 1779.

121 A Frenzy of Valor

Hamilton didn’t urge Laurens to reject the commission, but he was dismayed

nonetheless. “The only thing I see wrong in the affair is this,” Hamilton wrote to his

friend. “Congress by their conduct . . . appear to have intended to confer a privi-

lege, an honor, a mark of distinction . . . which they withhold from other gentle-

men in the [military] family. This carries with it an air of preference, which, though

we can all truly say we love your character and admire your military merit, cannot

fail to give some of us uneasy sensations.”63

Hamilton and Laurens shared an idealism about the Revolution that yoked them

tightly together. They were both unwavering abolitionists who saw emancipation of

the slaves as an inseparable part of the struggle for freedom as well as a source of

badly needed manpower. “I think that we Americans, at least in the Southern

col[onie]s, cannot contend with a good grace for liberty until we shall have enfran-

chised our slaves,” Laurens told a friend right before the signing of the Declaration

of Independence.64 This represented a courageous stand for the son of a very sig-

nificant South Carolina slaveholder. From the time he joined Washington’s family,

Laurens unabashedly championed a plan in which slaves would earn their freedom

by joining the Continental Army. (About five thousand blacks eventually did serve

alongside the patriots, though they were frequently relegated to noncombat situa-

tions; short of soldiers, Rhode Island raised a black regiment in 1778 by promising

slaves their freedom.) Laurens offered more than lip service to his scheme, telling

his father that he was willing to take his inheritance in the form of a black battalion,

freed and equipped to defend South Carolina.

At the end of the year, Laurens’s proposal acquired increased urgency as the

British redirected their military operations southward, hoping to rouse Loyalist

sympathies. By January 1779, they had captured both Savannah and Augusta and

threatened South Carolina. Laurens resigned from Washington’s family and re-

turned to defend his home state, stopping in Philadelphia to solicit congressional

approval for two to four black battalions for the Continental Army. Hamilton

drafted an eloquent, supportive letter for his friend to deliver to John Jay, who had

succeeded Henry Laurens as president of Congress. In the letter, Hamilton plainly

revealed what he thought of the slave system that had surrounded him since birth:

“I have not the least doubt that the negroes will make very excellent soldiers with

proper management and I will venture to pronounce that they cannot be put in

bettter hands than those of Mr. Laurens.” Hamilton brushed aside the fallacies that

slaves were not smart enough to turn into soldiers and were genetically inferior:

“This is so far from appearing to me a valid objection that I think their want of cul-

tivation (for their natural faculties are probably as good as ours) joined to that habit

of subordination which they acquire from a life of servitude will make them sooner

become soldiers than our white inhabitants.”

122 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

In a typical Hamiltonian manner, he placed political realism at the service of a

larger ethical framework, stressing that both humanity and self-interest argued for

the Laurens proposal:

The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks makes us fancy

many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience; and an un-

willingness to part with property of so valuable a kind will furnish a thou-

sand arguments to show the impracticability or pernicious tendency of a

scheme which requires such a sacrifice. But it should be considered that if we

do not make use of them in this way, the enemy probably will and that the

best way to counteract the temptations they will hold out will be to offer

them ourselves. An essential part of the plan is to give them their freedom

with their muskets. This will secure their fidelity, animate their courage, and

I believe will have a good influence upon those who remain by opening a

door to their emancipation.65

Unfortunately, despite a supportive congressional resolution, Laurens’s battle in

the South Carolina legislature to enact his program proved futile. South Carolina

had a special stake in the slave trade, with Charleston acting as the largest port of

entry for slaves arriving in North America. As in many places, planters lived in

dread of slave insurrections, constantly inspected slave quarters for concealed

weapons, and sometimes themselves refused to serve in the Continental Army out

of fear that in their absence their slaves might rise up and massacre their families.

The northern states were not about to override their southern brethren on the

slavery issue. All along, the American Revolution had been premised on a tacit bar-

gain that regional conflicts would be subordinated to the need for unity among the

states. This understanding dictated that slavery would remain a taboo subject.

There was also the ticklish matter that many slave owners had joined the Revolution

precisely to retain slavery. In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of

Virginia, had issued a proclamation offering freedom to slaves willing to defend the

Crown—an action that sent many panicky slaveholders stampeding into the patriot

camp. “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Ne-

groes?” Samuel Johnson protested from London.66 Horace Walpole echoed this sen-

timent: “I should think the souls of the Africans would sit heavily on the swords of

the Americans.”67

Many on the patriot side recognized the hypocrisy of the American position.

Even before the Declaration of Independence, Abigail Adams had bewailed the sit-

uation: “It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me—to fight for ourselves

123 A Frenzy of Valor

for what we are robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to

freedom as we have.”68 And yet, to the everlasting disgrace of the rebel colonists, it

was General Sir Henry Clinton in June 1779 who promised freedom to runaway

slaves defecting to the British side. The defeat of the Laurens plan left Hamilton ut-

terly dejected. “I wish its success,” he wrote to Laurens later in the year, “but my

hopes are very feeble. Prejudice and private interest will be antagonists too power-

ful for public spirit and public good.”69

After Laurens despaired of securing legislative action on his proposal, he turned to

military service in South Carolina under Brigadier General William Moultrie. He

was so fearless yet foolhardy in one rearguard action—without authority, he led his

men across an exposed river position and suffered heavy casualties—that Moultrie

later called Laurens “a young man of great merit and a brave soldier, but an impru-

dent officer. He was too rash and impetuous.”70 A story, perhaps apocryphal, says

that when the British subsequently besieged Moultrie and his men at Charleston,

Laurens vowed to run his sword through the first civilian who proposed surrender-

ing the city and further refused to carry terms of capitulation to the enemy.

During Laurens’s southern sojourn, Hamilton wrote to him some of the most

personally revealing letters of his life. He knew the south was endangered by the

British and that atrocities were being committed on both sides. Perhaps he won-

dered whether he would ever see his friend again. In one April 1779 letter, Hamil-

ton expressed such open affection for Laurens that an early editor, presumably

Hamilton’s son, crossed out some of the words and scrawled across the top, “I must

not publish the whole of this.” Besides fondness for Laurens, the letter shows how

much Hamilton, scarred by his past, was afraid to entrust his emotional security to

anyone:

Cold in my professions, warm in friendships, I wish, my dear Laurens, it

m[ight] be in my power by action rather than words [to] convince you that I

love you. I shall only tell you that till you bade us adieu, I hardly knew the

value you had taught my heart to set upon you. Indeed, my friend, it was not

well done. You know the opinion I entertain of mankind and how much it is

my desire to preserve myself free from particular attachments and to keep my

happiness independent of the caprice of others. You s[hould] not have taken

advantage of my sensibility to ste[al] into my affections without my consent.71

Other letters that Hamilton wrote to Laurens betray the tone of a jealous, love-

sick young man who was quick to chide his friend for failing to write frequently

124 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

enough. “I have written you five or six letters since you left Philadelphia and I

should have written you more had you made proper return,” Hamilton wrote to

Laurens in September. “But, like a jealous lover, when I thought you slighted my ca-

resses, my affection was alarmed and my vanity piqued.”72

Many things beyond the absence of Laurens troubled Hamilton that summer,

especially the shortsighted failure of the states to grant mandatory taxing power to

Congress in the Articles of Confederation, which had been approved as the new

nation’s governing charter on November 15, 1777, and submitted to the states for

ratification. As a result, Congress had resorted to flimsy financial expedients—

borrowing and printing reams of paper money—that were fast destroying Amer-

ica’s credit. The paper currency was depreciating rapidly. Hence, for the first time,

Hamilton began to fiddle with ideas for creating a national bank, through a mixture

of foreign loans and private subscriptions.

Hamilton may have been more vocal in his criticism of Congress than he real-

ized. In early July, he received a letter from a Lieutenant Colonel John Brooks,

who reported derogatory comments that Congressman Francis Dana made about

Hamilton at a Philadelphia coffeehouse. According to Brooks, Dana quoted Hamil-

ton as saying “that it was high time for the people to rise, join General Washington,

and turn Congress out of doors. To render this account in the highest degree

improbable, he further observed that Mr. Hamilton could be no ways interested in

the defence of this country and, therefore, was most likely to pursue such a line of

conduct as his great ambition dictated.”73 These charges set an early pattern for fu-

ture Hamilton controversies. People would assume that Hamilton, as an “outsider”

or “foreigner,” could not possibly be motivated by patriotic impulses. Hence, he

must be power mad and governed by a secret agenda. In response, Hamilton would

display a deep insecurity that he normally kept well hidden behind his confident

demeanor. If struck, he tended to hit back hard.

Within days, Hamilton wrote to Dana and demanded either a retraction of the

story or disclosure of its source. He intimated that he would demand a duel if the

charges had actually been made, noting that “they are [of] so personal and illiberal

a complexion as will oblige me to make them the subject of a very different kind of

discussion from the present at some convenient season.”74 After a lengthy corre-

spondence, Hamilton traced the rumor back to a critic of Washington named

William Gordon, a Congregational minister in Jamaica Plains, Massachusetts. At

first, Gordon pretended that he was merely repeating the story. He would name the

source, he said, if Hamilton promised not to challenge him to a duel, a practice

Gordon said he opposed on religious grounds. Even though Hamilton had served

as a second for Laurens in the Charles Lee duel and had hinted at his own readiness

to duel in the current matter, he told Gordon:

125 A Frenzy of Valor

It often happens that our zeal is at variance with our understanding. Had it

not been for this, you might have recollected that we do not now live in the

days of chivalry and you would have judged your precautions, on the subject

of duelling at least, useless. The good sense of the present times has happily

found out that to prove your own innocence, or the malice of an accuser, the

worst method you can take is to run him through the body or shoot him

through the head. And permit me to add, that while you felt an aversion to

duelling, on the principles of religion, you ought, in charity, to have sup-

posed others possessed of the same scruples—of whose impiety you had no

proofs.75

Aware that it clashed with his religious beliefs, Hamilton always retained some

nagging reservations about dueling, which became more pronounced in later years.

Hamilton never met Gordon on the field of honor, even though he did finally iden-

tify him as the source of the libel. Throughout the fall, he plied Gordon with com-

bative letters, saying that he could not possibly have made the statements about

Congress attributed to him. Yet Hamilton had been sniping at congressional inep-

titude all year, and he may well have said something critical of Congress that was ei-

ther misconstrued by his enemies or reported faithfully.

That September, Hamilton sent Laurens a letter that showed him steeped in in-

consolable gloom. He told Laurens that he still yearned for the success of his virtu-

ous scheme for black battalions but worried that private greed, indolence, and

public corruption would undermine this good work. “Every [hope] of this kind my

friend is an idle dream,” he warned Laurens in a despairing tone that was to crop up

throughout his life. He added, “There is no virtue [in] America. That commerce

which preside[d over] the birth and education of these states has [fitted] their in-

habitants for the chain and . . . the only condition they sincerely desire is that it

may be a golden one.”76

What a dark, weary view for a twenty-four-year-old fighting for glorious ideals.

It was to be a recurring paradox of Hamilton’s career that he grew enraged when

accused of being an outsider and then sounded, in response, very much like the

outsider evoked by his critics. The virulent charges made against him sometimes

alienated him from his adopted country, leaving him feeling that perhaps his critics

had a point after all.

SEVEN

T H E LOV E S I C K CO LO N E L

T he American Revolution unfolded in a leisurely enough manner to allow

Hamilton a fairly rich social life amid the grim necessities of war. With a

young man’s need for diversion, he continued to flirt with the fashionable

ladies who stopped by army headquarters—not for nothing did Martha Washing-

ton nickname her large, lascivious tomcat “Hamilton”—and they warmed to his

high spirits, savoir faire, and dancing ability. The Continental Army had a sizable

following of “camp ladies,” and John Marshall was scandalized by the open de-

bauchery that he encountered when visiting the army that September: “Never was I

a witness to such a scene of lewdness,” he complained to a friend.1

Hamilton once told a friend that a soldier should have no wife other than the

military, yet he began to contemplate marriage in the spring of 1779, following the

growing alliance with France, which improved the prospects of American victory.

He knew that once the war ended, he had no family. That April, Hamilton com-

posed a long letter to John Laurens, outlining his requirements for a wife. Probably

from childhood experience, he thought that most marriages were unhappy, and he

dreaded making the wrong choice. Parts of his letter were sophomoric, with Hamil-

ton making bawdy references to the size of his nose—jocular eighteenth-century

shorthand for his penis—but much of it was thoughtful, showing that Hamilton

had given serious consideration to the elements of a stable marriage.

She must be young, handsome (I lay most stress upon a good shape), sensible

(a little learning will do), well-bred (but she must have an aversion to the

word ton), chaste and tender (I am an enthusiast in my notions of fidelity and

fondness), of some good nature, a great deal of generosity (she must neither

127 The Lovesick Colonel

love money nor scolding, for I dislike equally a termagant and an economist).

In politics, I am indifferent what side she may be of; I think I have arguments

that will easily convert her to mine. As to religion, a moderate streak will sat-

isfy me. She must believe in god and hate a saint. But as to fortune, the larger

stock of that the better. You know my temper and circumstances and will

therefore pay special attention to this article in the treaty. Though I run no

risk of going to purgatory for my avarice, yet as money is an essential ingre-

dient to happiness in this world—as I have not much of my own and as I am

very little calculated to get more either by my address or industry—it must

needs be that my wife, if I get one, bring at least a sufficiency to administer to

her own extravagancies.2

In describing his ideal wife, Hamilton sketches something of a self-portrait as he

tries to strike a balance between worldliness and morality. He frankly admits to a

desire for money yet is not a slave to greed. A believer in conventional morality and

marital fidelity, he nevertheless hates a prig. He likes religion in moderation.

Clearly, he dislikes fanaticism and sanctimony. And instead of a sex goddess or a

nubile coquette—types that had always titillated him—he opts for a solid, sensible,

reasonably attractive wife.

When Washington took his troops to winter headquarters at Morristown that

December, Hamilton had extra time to dwell on his future plans. Washington and

his staff occupied the mansion of the late Judge Jacob Ford, a stately white house

with green trim. Hamilton worked in a log office annexed to the mansion and slept

in an upstairs bedroom with Tench Tilghman and James McHenry. The elements

conspired against the Continental Army that winter, said to be the most frigid of

the century. In New York Bay, the ice froze so thick that the British Army was able

to wheel heavy artillery across it. Twenty-eight snowstorms pounded the Morris-

town headquarters, including a January blizzard that lasted three days, piling snow

in six-foot-high banks.

For Washington, it was the war’s nadir, a winter even more depressing than the

one at Valley Forge. The snowstorms shut off roads and blocked provisions, leading

to looting among troops freezing in log huts. Men mutinied and deserted in large

numbers. On January 5, 1780, Washington sent Congress a dreary account: “Many

of the [men] have been four or five days without meat entirely and short of bread

and none but on very scanty supplies. Some for their preservation have been com-

pelled to maraud and rob from the inhabitants and I have it not in my power to

punish or repress the practice.”3 These problems were compounded by the struc-

tural inability of Congress to tax the states or establish public credit. The memories

of Valley Forge and Morristown would powerfully affect the future political agen-

128 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

das of both Washington and Hamilton, who had to grapple with the defects of a

weak central government.

In January, when Washington didn’t allow Hamilton to join Laurens for a com-

bat command in the south, Hamilton tumbled into the darkness of depression. “I

am chagrined and unhappy, but I submit,” he wrote to Laurens. “In short, Laurens,

I am disgusted with everything in this world but yourself and very few more honest

fellows and I have no other wish than as soon as possible to make a brilliant exit.

’Tis a weakness, but I feel I am not fit for this terrestrial country.”4 It was not the first

time that Hamilton had glancingly alluded to suicide or emigration or suggested

that he was miscast on the American scene.

Salvation, it turned out, was at hand, as the Morristown winter proved unex-

pectedly sociable. The marquis de Chastellux remembered one convivial dinner

with George Washington at which the lively Hamilton doled out food, refilled

glasses, and proposed gallant toasts. Sleighing parties full of pretty young women

succeeded in crossing the snowdrifts to attend receptions. Hamilton subscribed to

“dancing assemblies”—fancy-dress balls attended by chief officers—held at a nearby

storehouse. Washington, in a black velvet suit, danced and cut a dashing figure with

the ladies, while Steuben flashed with medals, and French officers glistened with

gold braid and lace. In this anomalous setting, the women courted these revolu-

tionaries in powdered hair and high heels. To the vast amusement of Washington’s

family, Hamilton was infatuated that January with a young woman named Cornelia

Lott. Colonel Samuel B. Webb even wrote a humorous verse, mocking how the

young conqueror had himself been conquered: “Now [Hamilton] feels the inex-

orable dart / And yields Cornelia all his heart!”5 The fickle Hamilton soon moved

on to a young woman named Polly.

On February 2, 1780, hard on the heels of Cornelia and Polly, Elizabeth Schuyler

arrived in Morristown, accompanied by a military escort, to stay with relatives. She

carried introductory letters to Washington and Steuben—“one of the most gallant

men in the camp”—from her father, General Philip Schuyler.6 The general’s sister,

Gertrude, had married a well-established physician, Dr. John Cochran, who had

moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey, to have a safe, pleasant spot to inoculate

people against smallpox. Not only was Cochran an excellent doctor—he also trav-

eled with the army as Washington’s personal physician, and Lafayette had dubbed

him “good doctor Bones”—but he was later appointed director general of the army’s

medical department. During the winter encampment at Morristown, Cochran and

his wife stayed at the neat white house of their friend Dr. Jabez Campfield, a quar-

ter mile down the road from Washington’s headquarters. So Schuyler found herself

in close proximity to her future husband.

129 The Lovesick Colonel

Hamilton’s place on Washington’s staff enabled him to socialize with Eliza

Schuyler on equal terms. He had already met her on his flying visit to Albany in

1777 when he coaxed General Horatio Gates into surrendering troops to Washing-

ton. Even without this prior meeting, Hamilton would have met Schuyler because

she came with their mutual friend, Kitty Livingston, long a favorite object of flirta-

tion with Hamilton. Hamilton, twenty-five, was instantly smitten with Schuyler,

twenty-two. Fellow aide Tench Tilghman reported: “Hamilton is a gone man.”7 Pretty

soon, Hamilton was a constant visitor at the two-story Campfield residence, spend-

ing every evening there. Everyone noticed that the young colonel was starry-eyed

and distracted. Although a touch absentminded, Hamilton ordinarily had a faultless

memory, but, returning from Schuyler one night, he forgot the password and was

barred by the sentinel. “The soldier-lover was embarrassed,” recalled Gabriel Ford,

then fourteen, the son of Judge Ford. “The sentinel knew him well, but was stern in

the performance of his duty. Hamilton pressed his hand to his forehead and tried to

summon the important words from their hiding-place, but, like the faithful sentinel,

they were immovable.”8 Ford took pity on Hamilton and supplied the password.

By the time Hamilton left Morristown in early March to negotiate a prisoner ex-

change with the British in Amboy, New Jersey—scarcely more than a month after

the courtship began—he and Schuyler had decided to wed. Hamilton must have

been struck by the coincidence that his paternal grandfather, Alexander Hamilton,

had also married an Elizabeth who was the daughter of a rich, illustrious man.

For Hamilton, Eliza formed part of a beautiful package labeled “the Schuyler

Family,” and he spared no effort over time to ingratiate himself with the three sons

(John Bradstreet, Philip Jeremiah, and Rensselaer) and five daughters (Angelica,

Eliza, Margarita, Cornelia, and the as yet unborn Catherine). The daughters in par-

ticular—all smart, beautiful, gregarious, and rich—must have been the stuff of fan-

tasy for Hamilton. Each played a different musical instrument, and they collectively

charmed and delighted all visitors to the Schuyler mansion in Albany. After spend-

ing a week with the family in April 1776, Benjamin Franklin expressed pleasure

“with the ease and affability with which we were treated and the lively behaviour of

the young ladies.”9 Tench Tilghman was likewise captivated: “There is something in

the behavior of the gen[eral], his lady, and daughters that makes one acquainted

with them instantly. I feel easy and free from restraint at his seat.”10 The daughters

had enough spunky independence that four of the five eventually eloped, Eliza be-

ing the significant exception. Cornelia enacted the most colorful escape, later steal-

ing off with a young man named Washington Morton by climbing down a rope

ladder from her bedroom and fleeing in a waiting coach.

With fairy-tale suddenness, the orphaned Hamilton had annexed a gigantic and

130 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

prosperous clan. After seeing pictures of Eliza’s younger sister Margarita (always

called Peggy), he sent her a long, rambling letter in which he poured out his love for

her older sister:

I venture to tell you in confidence that by some odd contrivance or other your

sister has found out the secret of interesting me in everything that concerns

her. . . . She is most unmercifully handsome and so perverse that she has none

of those pretty affectations which are the prerogatives of beauty. Her good

sense is destitute of that happy mixture of vanity and ostentation which would

make it conspicuous to the whole tribe of fools and foplings. . . . She has good

nature, affability, and vivacity unembellished with that charming frivolous-

ness which is justly deemed one of the principal accomplishments of a belle.

In short, she is so strange a creature that she possesses all the beauties, virtues,

and graces of her sex without any of those amiable defects which . . . are es-

teemed by connoisseurs necessary shades in the character of a fine woman.11

In this letter, Hamilton endows Schuyler with traits exactly consistent with the list

he had prepared for John Laurens ten months earlier: she was handsome, sensible,

good-natured, and free from vanity or affectation. And since she was the daughter

of one of New York’s wealthiest, most powerful men, Hamilton would not have to

choose between love and money.

Born on August 9, 1757, Elizabeth Schuyler—whom Hamilton called either

Eliza or Betsey—remains invisible in most biographies of her husband and was cer-

tainly the most self-effacing “founding mother,” doing everything in her power to

focus the spotlight exclusively on her husband. Her absence from the pantheon of

early American figures is unfortunate, since she was a woman of sterling character.

Beneath an animated, engaging facade, she was loyal, generous, compassionate,

strong willed, funny, and courageous. Short and pretty, she was utterly devoid of

conceit and was to prove an ideal companion for Hamilton, lending a strong home

foundation to his turbulent life. His letters to her reflected not a single moment of

pique, irritation, or disappointment.

Everybody sang Eliza’s praises. “A brunette with the most good-natured, lively

dark eyes that I ever saw, which threw a beam of good temper and benevolence over

her whole countenance,” Tench Tilghman wrote in his journal.12 She was no pam-

pered heiress. An athletic woman and a stout walker, she moved with a determined

spring in her step. On one picnic excursion, Tilghman watched her laughingly

clamber up a steep hillside while less plucky girls required male assistance. The

marquis de Chastellux liked her “mild agreeable countenance,” while Brissot de

Warville credited her with being “a delightful woman who combines both the

131 The Lovesick Colonel

charms and attractions and the candor and simplicity typical of American woman-

hood.”13 Like others, James McHenry sensed intense passion throbbing beneath her

restraint; she could be impulsive. “Hers was a strong character with its depth and

warmth, whether of feeling or temper controlled, but glowing underneath, bursting

through at times in some emphatic expression.”14

In 1787, Ralph Earl painted a perceptive portrait of Eliza Hamilton. It shows her

with strikingly alert black eyes—the feature that most attracted Hamilton—that

glowed with inner strength. She flaunts one of the powdered bouffant hairdos so

popular among society women at the time—what one of her friends called her

“Marie Antoinette coiffure.”15 Her gaze is frank and open, as if she were ready to

chat amiably with the viewer. Beneath her white silk taffeta dress, she has a shapely

body but not a delicate femininity. Her makeup is so understated as to be scarcely

noticeable. She seems robust and energetic, and one can imagine her having been a

tomboy. All in all, she seems a cheerful, modest soul, blessed with gumption.

Schuyler’s unassuming character is plain in her own admiring description of

Martha Washington, whom she met at Morristown that winter:

She received us so kindly, kissing us both, for the general and papa were very

warm friends. She was then nearly fifty years old, but was still handsome. She

was quite short: a plump little woman with dark brown eyes, her hair a little

frosty, and very plainly dressed for such a grand lady as I considered her. She

wore a plain, brown gown of homespun stuff, a large white handkerchief, a

neat cap, and her plain gold wedding ring, which she had worn for more than

twenty years. She was always my ideal of a true woman.16

As soon as Schuyler arrived in Morristown, she gave Martha Washington a pair

of cuffs as a gift, and the latter reciprocated with some powder. In time, the rela-

tionship between Schuyler and the older woman ripened into something akin to a

mother-daughter bond.

Schuyler had received some tutoring but little formal schooling. Her spelling

was poor, and she didn’t write with the fluency of other Schuylers. One doesn’t

imagine her dipping into Hume or Hobbes or the weighty philosophers regularly

consulted by her husband. On the other hand, as the daughter of a soldier and

statesman, she was well versed in public affairs and had been exposed to many po-

litical luminaries. At thirteen, she accompanied her father to a conclave of chiefs of

the Six Nations at Saratoga and received an Indian name meaning “One-of-us.”17

She had been taught backgammon by none other than Ben Franklin in April 1776

when he visited General Schuyler en route to his diplomatic mission to Canada.

Like Hamilton, Eliza was avidly interested in the world around her.

132 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

One intriguing question about Eliza Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton concerns

their religious beliefs. An active member of the Dutch Reformed Church, Schuyler

was a woman of such indomitable Christian faith that Tench Tilghman called her

“the little saint” in one letter. Washington’s staff was slightly taken aback that the

rakish Hamilton chose this pious wife.18 Hamilton had been devout when younger,

but he seemed more skeptical about organized religion during the Revolution.

Soon after meeting Schuyler, he wrote a letter of recommendation for a military

parson, Dr. Mendy. “He is just what I should like for a military parson except that

he does not whore or drink,” Hamilton said. “He will fight and he will not insist

upon your going to heaven, whether you will or not.”19 Eliza never doubted her

husband’s faith and always treasured his sonnet “The Soul Ascending into Bliss,”

written on St. Croix. On the other hand, Hamilton refrained from a formal church

affiliation despite his wife’s steadfast religiosity.

Hamilton wooed Schuyler that winter with all the verbal resources at his dis-

posal. He even composed a romantic sonnet entitled “Answer to the Inquiry Why I

Sighed.” Its couplets included these lines: “Before no mortal ever knew / A love like

mine so tender, true . . . No joy unmixed my bosom warms / But when my angel’s

in my arms.”20 Though Schuyler knew that Hamilton was a figure of awesome in-

telligence, he won her more with his kindly nature than with his intellect. She was

to recollect fondly one of his favorite sayings: “My dear Eliza[,] . . . I have a good

head, but thank God he has given me a good heart.”21 In later years, when harvest-

ing anecdotes about her husband, Eliza Hamilton gave correspondents a list of his

qualities that she wanted to illustrate, and it sums up her view of his multiple tal-

ents: “Elasticity of his mind. Variety of his knowledge. Playfulness of his wit. Excel-

lence of his heart. His immense forbearance [and] virtues.”22

When he wrote to John Laurens on March 30, 1780, Hamilton neglected to men-

tion either Schuyler or his abrupt decision to marry her—a curious lack of candor.

Then, on June 30, he broke down and confessed all to his friend: “I give up my lib-

erty to Miss Schuyler. She is a good-hearted girl who, I am sure, will never play the

termagant. Though not a genius, she has good sense enough to be agreeable, and

though not a beauty, she has fine black eyes, is rather handsome, and has every other

requisite of the exterior to make a lover happy.” Hamilton knew that he sounded

less than enraptured and that Laurens might suspect him of marrying Schuyler for

her money, so he continued, “And believe me, I am [a] lover in earnest, though I do

not speak of the perfections of my mistress in the enthusiasm of chivalry.”23 Lest

Laurens experience a jealous pang, Hamilton added a few months later: “In spite of

Schuyler’s black eyes, I have still a part for the public and another for you,” and he

promised he would be no less devoted to his friend after marriage than before.24

133 The Lovesick Colonel

. . .

Hamilton delighted in the company of all the Schuyler sisters. Eliza’s younger sister

Peggy was very beautiful but vain and supercilious. She married Stephen Van Rens-

selaer, six years her junior, the eighth patroon of Rensselaerswyck and the largest

landowner in New York State. Starting with that first winter in Morristown, Hamil-

ton was drawn almost magnetically to Eliza’s married older sister, Angelica, and

spent the rest of his life beguiled by both Eliza and Angelica, calling them “my dear

brunettes.”25 Together, the two eldest sisters formed a composite portrait of Hamil-

ton’s ideal woman, each appealing to a different facet of his personality. Eliza re-

flected Hamilton’s earnest sense of purpose, determination, and moral rectitude,

while Angelica exhibited his worldly side—the wit, charm, and vivacity that so de-

lighted people in social intercourse.

The attraction between Hamilton and Angelica was so potent and obvious that

many people assumed they were lovers. At the very least, theirs was a friendship of

unusual ardor, and it seems plausible that Hamilton would have proposed to An-

gelica, not Eliza, if the older sister had been eligible. Angelica was more Hamilton’s

counterpart than Eliza. James McHenry once wrote to Hamilton that Angelica

“charms in all companies. No one has seen her, of either sex, who has not been

pleased with her and she pleased everyone, chiefly by means of those qualities

which made you the husband of her sister.”26

John Trumbull’s portrait of Angelica shows a fetching woman with a long, pale

face, dark eyes, and a pretty, full-lipped mouth who is voguishly dressed and looks

more sophisticated than Eliza. Angelica had a more mysterious femininity than her

sister, the kind that often exerts a powerful hold on the male imagination. A playful

seductress, she loved to engage in repartee, discuss books, strum the guitar, and talk

about current affairs. She was to serve as muse to some of the smartest politicians

of her day, including Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston, and, most of all,

Hamilton. Angelica was one of the few American women of her generation as com-

fortable in a European drawing room as in a Hudson River parlor, and there was a

gossipy irreverence about her that seemed very European. Unlike Eliza, she learned

to speak perfect French. Where Eliza bowed reluctantly to the social demands of

Hamilton’s career, Angelica applauded his ambitions and was always famished for

news of his latest political exploits.

For the next twenty-four years, Angelica expressed open fondness for Hamilton

in virtually every letter that she sent to her sister or to Hamilton himself. Hamilton

always wrote to her in a buoyant, flirtatious tone. Especially as his mind grew bur-

dened with affairs of state, Angelica provided an outlet for his boyish side. To Eliza

134 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

he wrote tenderly and lovingly, but seldom in the arch voice of gallantry. It is hard

to escape the impression that Hamilton’s married life was sometimes a curious mé-

nage à trois with two sisters who were only one year apart. Angelica must have sensed

that her incessant adoration of Hamilton, far from annoying or threatening her

beloved younger sister, filled her with ecstatic pride. Their shared love for Hamilton

seemed to deepen their sisterly bond. Ironically, Eliza’s special attachment to An-

gelica gave Hamilton a cover for expressing affection for Angelica that would cer-

tainly have been forbidden with other women.

For a daring woman drawn to intellectual men, Angelica made a strange choice

in marrying John Barker Church, a short man with shining eyes and thick lips who

only grew fatter with the years. In 1776, he had been sent to Albany by Congress to

audit the books of the army’s Northern Department, then commanded by General

Schuyler. While there, he managed both to woo Angelica and antagonize her father.

John B. Church was then using the pseudonym of John B. Carter, and Schuyler

scented something suspicious. Schuyler’s instincts proved correct: Church had

changed his name and fled to America, possibly after a duel with a Tory politician

in London; some accounts have him on the lam from creditors after a bankruptcy

brought on by gambling and stock speculation. Knowing that he would be denied

parental consent, Church eloped with Angelica in 1777, and the Schuylers were pre-

dictably incensed.

Church amassed fantastic wealth during the Revolution. “Mr. Carter is the mere

man of business,” James McHenry told Hamilton, “and I am informed has riches

enough, with common management, to make the longest life comfortable.”27 He

and his business partner, Jeremiah Wadsworth, negotiated lucrative contracts to sell

supplies to the French and American forces. Hamilton spoke highly of Church as “a

man of fortune and integrity, of strong mind, very exact, very active, and very much

a man of business.”28 Yet Church’s letters present a cold businessman, devoid of

warmth or humor. Very involved in politics, he could be tactless in expressing his

opinions. One observer remembered him as “revengeful and false” after General

Howe burned several American villages and towns. Church said he wanted to cut

off the heads of the British generals and to “pickle them and to put them in small

barrels, and as often as the English should again burn a village, to send them one

[of] these barrels.”29 He lacked the intellectual breadth and civic commitment that

made Hamilton so compelling to Angelica. On the other hand, he provided Angel-

ica with the opulent, high-society life that she apparently craved.

Hamilton’s relationship with his father-in-law was to be an especially happy part of

his marriage to Eliza Schuyler. Tall and slim, with a raspy voice and bulbous nose,

Philip Schuyler, forty-six, was already hobbled by rheumatic gout when he arrived

135 The Lovesick Colonel

in Morristown that April to investigate army reform as chairman of a congressional

committee. It is testimony to Hamilton’s gifts that he was readily embraced by

someone with Schuyler’s rigid sense of social hierarchy. “Be indulgent, my child, to

your inferiors,” Schuyler once advised his son John, “affable and courteous to your

equals, respectful not cringing to your superiors, whether they are so by superior

mental abilities or those necessary distinctions which society has established.”30 Yet

this same status-conscious man enjoyed an instant rapport with the illegitimate

young West Indian. Both Hamilton and Schuyler spoke French, were well-read,

appreciated military discipline, and had a common interest in business and internal-

development schemes, such as canals. They also shared a common loyalty to Wash-

ington and impatience with congressional incompetence, even though Schuyler

was a member of the Continental Congress.

Descended from an early Dutch settler who arrived in New York in 1650 (the

surname may have been German), Schuyler was counted among those Hudson

River squires who presided over huge tracts of land and ruled state politics. The

Schuylers had intermarried with the families of many patroons or manor lords.

Philip Schuyler’s mother was a Van Cortlandt. His elegant Georgian brick mansion,

the Pastures, sat on an Albany hilltop, surrounded by eighty acres dotted with

barns, slave quarters, and a smokehouse. The enterprising Schuyler also built a two-

story house on the fringe of the Saratoga wilderness, where he created an industrial

village with four water-power mills, a smithy, and storehouses that employed hun-

dreds of people. (It evolved into the village of Schuylerville.) In all, this Schuyler es-

tate extended for three miles along the Hudson, encompassing somewhere between

ten and twenty thousand acres. As if this were not enough, Philip Schuyler had

married Catherine Van Rensselaer, an heiress to the 120,000-acre Claverack estate

in Columbia County.

The image of Philip Schuyler varied drastically depending upon the observer.

His enemies viewed him as cold, arrogant, and petulant when people crossed him

or when his pride was offended. Alexander Graydon left this unpleasant vignette of

a Schuyler dinner during the Revolution: “A New England captain came in upon

some business with that abject servility of manner which belongs to persons of the

meanest rank. He was neither asked to sit or take a glass of wine, and after an-

nouncing his wants, was dismissed with that peevishness of tone we apply to a low

and vexatious intruder.”31 Graydon admitted, however, that the man might have

forced his way into Schuyler’s presence.

Schuyler’s friends, in contrast, found him courteous and debonair, a model of

etiquette, and very amiable in mixed company. He could behave magnanimously

toward his social peers. During the battle of Saratoga, General Burgoyne burned

Schuyler’s house and most other buildings on his property for military reasons.

136 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

When, after the surrender, Burgoyne apologized, Schuyler replied graciously that

his conduct had been justified by the rules of war and that he would have done the

same in his place. Baroness Riedesel, the wife of the Hessian commander Major

General Friedrich von Riedesel, also recalled Schuyler’s chivalry after the Saratoga

debacle: “When I drew near the tents, a good looking man advanced towards me

and helped the children from the calash and kissed and caressed them. He then of-

fered me his arm and tears trembled in his eyes.”32 Schuyler invited the baroness,

the defeated Burgoyne, and his twenty-member entourage to stay in his Albany

mansion and furnished them with excellent dinners for days. At the time, Schuyler

did not yet realize that Burgoyne’s destruction of his Saratoga estate had dealt a

crippling blow to his finances.

Hamilton knew that Schuyler could be a strict father to his sometimes ram-

bunctious daughters and that John Barker Church had been ostracized for not

obeying protocol in marrying Angelica. So while Hamilton negotiated a prisoner

exchange, he patiently awaited the Schuylers’ consent for their daughter’s hand. In

the meantime, he relished Eliza’s letters. “I cannot tell you what ecstasy I felt in cast-

ing my eye over the sweet effusions of tenderness it contains,” he said of one mid-

March letter. “My Betsey’s soul speaks in every line and bids me be the happiest of

mortals. I am so and will be so.”33

On April 8, 1780, Philip Schuyler sent Hamilton a businesslike letter, saying he

had discussed the marriage proposal with Mrs. Schuyler, and they had accepted it.

Hamilton was overjoyed. A few days later, he wrote to Mrs. Schuyler and thanked

her for accepting his proposal, making sure to lay on the flattery with a trowel: “May

I hope, madam, you will not consider it as a mere profession when I add that,

though I have not the happiness of a personal acquaintance with you, I am no

stranger to the qualities which distinguish your character and these make the rela-

tion in which I stand to you not one of the least pleasing circumstances of my union

with your daughter.”34

General Schuyler had taken a temporary house in Morristown and brought

down Mrs. Schuyler from Albany. They stayed until the Continental Army de-

camped in June. Hamilton visited the Schuylers each evening, and the mutual af-

fection between him and the family waxed steadily. In the end, the Schuylers felt

flattered that the ex-clerk from the West Indies had chosen them. Two years later,

Philip Schuyler sent Eliza a delighted report on her amazing husband:

Participate afresh in the satisfaction I experience from the connection you

have made with my beloved Hamilton. He affords me happiness too exquisite

for expression. I daily experience the pleasure of hearing encomiums on his

virtue and abilities from those who are capable of distinguishing between real

137 The Lovesick Colonel

and pretended merit. He is considered, as he certainly is, the ornament of his

country.35

The marriage to Eliza Schuyler was another dreamlike turn in the improbable

odyssey of Alexander Hamilton, giving him the political support of one of New

York’s blue-ribbon families.

Thoughts of both love and money coursed through Hamilton’s brain during that

arctic winter in Morristown. The paper currency issued by the Continental Con-

gress continued to sink precipitously in value, as inflation undercut the patriotic

cause. During one ghastly period in 1779, the continental dollar shed half its value

in three weeks. Silver coins disappeared, driven out by nearly worthless paper

money, and state governments were also going broke. In March 1780, Congress

tried to restore monetary order by issuing one new dollar in exchange for forty old

ones, a move that wiped out the savings of many Americans. The need for financial

reform had grown urgent. James Madison worried in a letter to Thomas Jefferson,

“Believe me, sir, as things now stand, if the states do not vigorously proceed in col-

lecting the old money and establishing funds for the credit of the new . . . we are

undone.”36

In his spare time, Hamilton pored over financial treatises. As Washington’s aide,

he was not at liberty to issue controversial plans that might jeopardize congres-

sional relations, so he drafted a clandestine letter to an unidentified congressman

and outlined a new currency regime. “The present plan,” he started humbly, “is the

product of some reading on the subjects of commerce and finance[,] . . . but a want

of leisure has prevented its being examined in so many lights and digested so ma-

turely as its importance requires.”37 If the recipient wished further explanation,

Hamilton indicated that “a letter directed to James Montague Esqr., lodged in the

post office at Morristown, will be a safe channel for any communications you may

think proper to make and an immediate answer will be given.”38 “James Montague”

may have been a name devised by Hamilton to cloak his own identity.

Hamilton’s six-thousand-word letter attests to staggering precocity. He saw that

inflation had originated with wartime shortages, which had led, in turn, to the wan-

ing value of money. Over time, the inflation had acquired a self-reinforcing mo-

mentum. Economic fundamentals alone could not account for this inflation,

Hamilton noted, detecting a critical psychological factor at work. People were “gov-

erned more by passion and prejudice than by an enlightened sense of their inter-

ests,” he wrote. “The quantity of money in circulation is certainly a chief cause of its

decline. But we find it is depreciated more than five times as much as it ought to

be. . . . The excess is derived from opinion, a want of confidence.”39

138 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

How to remedy this want of confidence? Hamilton submitted a twelve-point

program, a fully realized vision of a financial system that reflected sustained think-

ing. Congress should create a central bank, owned half by the government and half

by private individuals, that could issue money and make public and private loans.

Drawing on European precedents, Hamilton cited the Bank of England and the

French Council of Commerce as possible models. Taxes and domestic loans could

not finance the war alone, he argued, and he pressed for a foreign loan of two mil-

lion pounds as the centerpiece of his program: “The necessity of a foreign loan is

now greater than ever. Nothing else will retrieve our affairs.”40 He recognized that

French and British political power stemmed from those countries’ ability to raise

foreign loans in wartime, and this inextricable linkage between military and finan-

cial strength informed all of his subsequent thinking.

For Hamilton the American Revolution was a practical workshop of economic

and political theory, providing critical object lessons and cautionary tales that

charted the course for his career. In May 1780, he had fresh cause to meditate on the

failings of Congress when news came of a calamitous defeat: the British had taken

Charleston, capturing an American garrison of 5,400 soldiers, including John Lau-

rens. The year 1780 was to be a dismal one for the patriots. In August, Cornwallis

inflicted a stinging loss on General Horatio Gates in Camden, South Carolina, kill-

ing nine hundred Americans and taking one thousand prisoners. For Hamilton, the

terrible drubbings at Charleston and Camden drove home the need for longer en-

listment periods and an end to reliance on state militias. He found some consola-

tion in the fact that Gates had fled from Camden in terror, barely containing his

glee at this sign of cowardice. “Was there ever an instance of a general running away,

as Gates has done, from his whole army?” he gloated to New York congressman

James Duane. “One hundred and eighty miles in three days and a half. It does ad-

mirable credit to the activity of a man at his time of life.”41 By October, General

Nathanael Greene had replaced the disgraced Gates as commander of the South-

ern Army.

To the setbacks in South Carolina, Hamilton reacted with stoic resignation as

well as schadenfreude. “This misfortune affects me less than others,” he told Eliza

Schuyler, “because it is not in my temper to repine at evils that are past but to en-

deavour to draw good out of them, and because I think our safety depends on a

total change of system. And this change of system will only be produced by

misfortune.”42 He did not mention that he had just rushed off a seven-thousand-

word letter to James Duane that showed that the future American government was

already fermenting in his hyperactive brain. He now subjected the Articles of Con-

federation to a searching critique. He thought the sovereignty of the states only en-

feebled the union. “The fundamental defect is a want of power in Congress,” he

139 The Lovesick Colonel

declared. He favored granting Congress supreme power in war, peace, trade, fi-

nance, and foreign affairs.43 Instead of bickering congressional boards, he wanted

strong executives and endorsed single ministers for war, foreign affairs, finance, and

the navy: “There is always more decision, more dispatch, more secrecy, more re-

sponsibility where single men than when bodies are concerned. By a plan of this

kind, we should blend the advantages of a monarchy and of a republic in a happy

and beneficial union.”44 Hamilton was especially intent upon subjecting all military

forces to centralized congressional control: “Without a speedy change, the army

must dissolve. It is now a mob, rather than an army, without clothing, without pay,

without provision, without morals, without discipline.”45 Then, in the most star-

tling, visionary leap of all, Hamilton recommended that a convention be summoned

to revise the Articles of Confederation. Seven years before the Constitutional Con-

vention, Alexander Hamilton became the first person to propose such a plenary

gathering. Where other minds groped in the fog of war, the twenty-five-year-old

Hamilton seemed to perceive everything in a sudden flash.

At the end of the letter, Hamilton apologized to Duane for having written down

his ideas so hastily. The wonder, of course, is that he had recorded them at all. In

mid-July, a French fleet had arrived off Newport, Rhode Island, with an army of

5,500 men commanded by the short, stocky comte de Rochambeau. This was the

French army that Hamilton had suggested to Lafayette as necessary to the war effort

and that Lafayette had successfully urged at Versailles. As soon as the French ar-

rived, Hamilton was worn down with tremendous duties. Before meeting with

Rochambeau at Hartford in late September, Washington asked his aide-de-camp to

draw up three scenarios for joint military operations with the French. Hamilton

must have been exhausted as he scratched out his long letter to Duane by candelight

at day’s end.

One might have thought that Hamilton, despite all the military uncertainty,

would feel hopeful about his life. He was effectively Washington’s chief of staff, was

soon to be married to Elizabeth Schuyler, and was drafting high-level strategy pa-

pers and comprehensive blueprints for government. Yet, underneath his high spir-

its still lurked the pessimism from his West Indian boyhood, and he sometimes

viewed the world with a jaundiced, even misanthropic, eye. Perhaps too much had

happened too soon and it had all been disorienting. He was critical of his compa-

triots. “My dear Laurens,” he had written to his friend that spring, “our countrymen

have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep in their composi-

tions.”46 As he became more outspoken in his views, he discovered his own capac-

ity for making enemies. On September 12, he told Laurens that everybody was

angry with him. Some people thought he was “a friend to military pretensions,

however exorbitant,” while others chided him for not being militant enough in de-

140 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

fending army power: “The truth is I am an unlucky honest man that speaks my sen-

timents to all and with emphasis. I say this to you because you know it and will not

charge me with vanity. I hate congress—I hate the army—I hate the world—I hate

myself. The whole is a mass of fools and knaves. I could almost except you and

[Richard Kidder] Meade. Adieu. A. Hamilton.”47

Throughout his career, Hamilton had a knack for being present at historic mo-

ments; in September 1780, he was eyewitness to the treachery of General Benedict

Arnold. Born in Norwich, Connecticut, Arnold had started out as a druggist and

bookseller and expanded into speculative business ventures. A brave soldier and a

student of military history, Arnold had distinguished himself in numerous clashes

with the British and was wounded by a musket ball in the winter assault on Quebec.

He fought so lustily at Saratoga, where he was injured again, that Hamilton and

others had hailed him as the true, unacknowledged hero of the victory. As military

governor of Philadelphia during the patriot occupation, however, Arnold was har-

ried by charges of corruption, which he indignantly dismissed as “false, malicious,

and scandalous.”48 He was exonerated of all but two minor charges by a court-

martial and got off with a reprimand from Washington. Yet by this point, the em-

bittered Arnold, increasingly dubious about American prospects, had decided to

engage in treason, relaying secret information about troop movements to the

British. After being named the new commandant of West Point, he colluded to de-

liver plans of the fortifications to the British, making the stronghold vulnerable to

attack. In exchange, Arnold was promised money and a high-level appointment in

the British Army.

Arnold took up his West Point command during the summer of 1780 and let

its defenses fall into disrepair. On the morning of September 25, Washington and

a retinue that included Hamilton and Lafayette were passing through the Hud-

son Valley as they returned from the conference in Hartford with the comte de

Rochambeau. They planned to see Arnold and inspect West Point. Hamilton and

James McHenry were sent ahead to prepare for Washington’s reception at Arnold’s

headquarters in the Beverley Robinson house, a couple of miles downriver from

West Point, on the east bank of the Hudson. During breakfast with the two aides, a

flustered Arnold received a message indicating that a spy known as “John Ander-

son” had been seized north of New York City with descriptions of West Point’s de-

fenses tucked into his boot. Hamilton and McHenry were perplexed by Arnold’s

sudden agitation. Aghast that his plot had been foiled, Arnold raced upstairs to say

good-bye to his wife, then slipped out of the house, hopped onto a barge, and fled

downriver toward the British warship Vulture. Not long after, Washington showed

141 The Lovesick Colonel

up with his officers, noted Arnold’s absence with puzzlement, had breakfast, then

rowed across the Hudson for his West Point tour.

Hamilton stayed behind to sort through dispatches and was unnerved by inter-

mittent shrieks from Mrs. Arnold upstairs. When Arnold’s aide, Richard Varick,

went up to investigate, he found her in a gauzy morning gown with disheveled hair.

“Colonel Varick,” the distraught woman demanded, “have you ordered my child to

be killed?”49 She then babbled on incoherently about hot irons being placed on her

head. Twenty years younger than her husband, Margaret “Peggy” Shippen came

from a Tory family in Philadelphia and had married Benedict Arnold at age eigh-

teen the year before. She was a petite, ringleted blonde with small features and large

social ambitions. When Hamilton went upstairs, he found her clutching her baby

and accusing everyone in sight of wanting to murder her child.

Late in the afternoon, Washington returned to the house, befuddled by Arnold’s

absence from West Point and its negligent defenses. Hamilton gave Washington a

thick packet of dispatches, including papers discovered on the captured “John An-

derson.” Hamilton then went off to confer with Lafayette. When the two young men

returned, they found their usually composed commander fighting back tears.

“Arnold has betrayed us!” Washington said with profound emotion. “Whom can we

trust now?”50 He sent Hamilton and McHenry off on horseback, careering down

the Hudson for a dozen miles, in the futile hope that they could overtake Arnold

before he reached the safety of British lines. They arrived too late: Arnold was al-

ready aboard the Vulture and had been whisked off to New York City.

On the spot, Hamilton displayed uncommon self-reliance. Aware that West

Point lay in imminent peril, he sent directions to the Sixth Connecticut Regiment

to reinforce the fortress. Once again, he did not seem bashful about bossing around

generals. “There has been unfolded at this place a scene of the blackest treason,” he

wrote to General Nathanael Greene. “I advise you putting the army under march-

ing orders and detaching a brigade immediately this way.”51

Hamilton hurried to Washington a letter just received from Arnold in which he

blamed American ingratitude for his betrayal and sought to exonerate his wife: “She

is as good and as innocent as an angel and is incapable of doing wrong.”52 Mrs.

Arnold was still behaving bizarrely. After Varick ushered Washington into the

room, the sobbing woman refused to believe it was the general: “No, that is not

General Washington. That is the man who was a-going to assist Colonel Varick in

killing my child.”53 Washington sat by the bedside and tried to console the hysteri-

cal woman. Washington, Hamilton, and Lafayette were all duped by Peggy Arnold’s

command performance. They attributed her sudden raving to grief over her hus-

band’s traitorous behavior. To their gullible minds, this behavior was proof that she

142 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

must be a blameless victim of Arnold’s perfidy. In fact, she had been privy to the

plot, having acted as conduit for some of her husband’s correspondence with the

British, and she played her mad scene to perfection.

For all his supposed sophistication about womanly wiles, Hamilton was com-

pletely hoodwinked by Mrs. Arnold’s brazen charade. As always, he was hypersen-

sitive to female charms, and well-bred ladies in distress especially brought out his

chivalry. In a letter to Eliza that day, one can see how taken Hamilton was with

Peggy Arnold:

It was the most affecting scene I ever was witness to. She for a considerable

time entirely lost her senses. . . . One moment she raved, another she melted

into tears. Sometimes she pressed her infant to her bosom and lamented its

fate, occasioned by the imprudence of its father, in a manner that would have

pierced insensibility itself. All the sweetness of beauty, all the loveliness of in-

nocence, all the tenderness of a wife and all the fondness of a mother showed

themselves in her appearance and conduct. . . . She received us in bed with

every circumstance that could interest our sympathy. Her sufferings were so

eloquent that I wished myself her brother to have a right to become her de-

fender.54

Hamilton was totally credulous in the face of this designing woman. Instead of be-

ing wary in a wartime situation, he converted Peggy Arnold’s situation into a stage

romance. His tenderness for an abandoned wife may have owed something to his

boyhood sympathy for his mother, and this episode prefigured a still more damag-

ing event in which he evinced misplaced compassion for a seemingly abandoned

woman.

Washington issued a passport to Mrs. Arnold that allowed her to return home to

Philadelphia. She made a stop in Paramus, New Jersey, where she stayed at the Her-

mitage, the home of Mrs. Theodosia Prevost, whose husband was a British colonel

sent to the West Indies. Once the two women were alone, Mrs. Arnold told her

friend how she had made fools of Washington, Hamilton, and the others and that

she was tired of the theatrics she had been forced to affect. She expressed disgust

with the patriotic cause and told of prodding her husband into the scheme to sur-

render West Point. The source of this story, printed many years later, was the man

who was to be Theodosia Prevost’s next husband: Aaron Burr.

That Hamilton adhered to a code of gentlemanly honor was confirmed in yet an-

other sideshow of the Benedict Arnold affair: the arrest of Major John André, adju-

143 The Lovesick Colonel

tant general of the British Army and Arnold’s contact, traveling under the nom de

guerre John Anderson. As he awaited a hearing to decide his fate, he was confined

at a tavern in Tappan, New York. Though seven years younger than André, Hamil-

ton developed a sympathy for the prisoner born of admiration and visited him

several times. A letter that Hamilton later wrote to Laurens reveals his nearly wor-

shipful attitude toward the elegant, cultured André, who was conversant with

poetry, music, and painting. Hamilton identified with André’s misfortune in a per-

sonal manner, as if he saw his own worst nightmare embodied in his fate:

To an excellent understanding, well improved by education and travel, [An-

dré] united a peculiar elegance of mind and manners and the advantage of a

pleasing person. . . . By his merit, he had acquired the unlimited confidence

of his general and was making a rapid progress in military rank and reputa-

tion. But in the height of his career, flushed with new hopes from the execu-

tion of a project the most beneficial to his party that could be devised, he was

at once precipitated from the summit of prosperity and saw all the expecta-

tions of his ambition blasted and himself ruined.55

Did Hamilton think that he, too, having attained such eminence, would suddenly

plunge headlong back to earth?

The fate of Major André became the subject of a heated dispute between Hamil-

ton and Washington over whether he had acted as a spy or as a liaison officer be-

tween the British command and Arnold. This semantic debate had practical

significance. If André was a spy, he would hang from the gallows like a common

criminal; whereas if he was merely an unlucky officer, he would be shot like a gen-

tleman. Such distinctions mattered both to André and to Hamilton. Hamilton ar-

gued that André wasn’t a spy, since he had planned to meet Arnold on neutral

territory and was lured by Arnold behind patriotic lines against his intentions. A

board of general officers convened by Washington disagreed, ruling that because

André had come ashore secretly, assuming a fake name and civilian costume, he had

functioned as a spy and should die like one. Washington certified the board’s deci-

sion. He was adamant that André’s mission could have doomed the patriotic cause

and feared that anything less than summary execution would imply some lack of

conviction about his guilt.

It may have been Hamilton who sent a secret letter to Sir Henry Clinton on Sep-

tember 30, proposing a swap of André for Arnold. The author tried to disguise his

handwriting and signed the letter “A.B.” (coincidentally, Aaron Burr’s initials). But

Clinton had no doubt of its provenance and scrawled across it, “Hamilton, W[ash-

144 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

ington] aide de camp, received after A[ndré] death.”56 Clinton refused to consider a

trade, which would have meant instant death for Arnold at the hands of vengeful

patriots.

The decision to execute Major André was not the only time Hamilton regretted

a choice by Washington, yet it was one time when he disagreed openly and consis-

tently. “The death of André could not have been dispensed with,” Hamilton con-

ceded to Major General Henry Knox nearly two years later, “but it must still be

viewed at a distance as an act of rigid justice.”57 Hamilton’s dissent betrayed grow-

ing frustration with Washington’s inflexibility, frustration that was presently to

flare into open rebellion.

Major André faced his end with grace and valor. At five o’clock in the afternoon

on the day after the board’s decision, he was led to a hilltop gibbet outside of Tap-

pan. When he saw the gallows, he reeled slightly. “I am reconciled to my death,” he

said, “though I detest the mode.”58 Unaided, he mounted a coffin that lay in a wagon

drawn up under the scaffold. With great dignity, he tightened the rope around his

own neck and blindfolded himself with his own handkerchief. Then the wagon

bolted away, leaving André swinging from the rope. He was buried on the spot.

Hamilton left a moving if romanticized description of his death:

In going to the place of execution, he bowed familiarly as he went along to all

those with whom he had been acquainted in his confinement. A smile of

complacency expressed the serene fortitude of his mind. . . . Upon being told

the final moment was at hand and asked if he had anything to say, he an-

swered, “Nothing but to request you will witness to the world that I die like a

brave man.”59

Hamilton’s description shows his abiding fascination with a beautiful, noble death.

“I am aware that a man of real merit is never seen in so favourable a light as seen

through the medium of adversity,” he concluded in his letter to Laurens. “The

clouds that surround him are shades that set off his good qualities.”60

Major John André represented some beau ideal for Hamilton. The reverse side of

this adulation, however, was a lacerating sense of personal inadequacy that the

world seldom saw. However loaded with superabundant talent, Hamilton was a

mass of insecurities that he usually kept well hidden. He always had to fight the

residual sadness of the driven man, the unspoken melancholy of the prodigy, the

wounds left by his accursed boyhood. Only to John Laurens and Eliza Schuyler did

he confide his fears. Right after André’s death, Hamilton wrote to Schuyler that he

wished he had André’s accomplishments.

145 The Lovesick Colonel

I do not, my love, affect modesty. I am conscious of [the] advantages I pos-

sess. I know I have talents and a good heart, but why am I not handsome?

Why have I not every acquirement that can embellish human nature? Why

have I not fortune, that I might hereafter have more leisure than I shall have

to cultivate those improvements for which I am not entirely unfit?61

It was a peculiar outburst: Hamilton was expressing envy for a man who had just

been executed. Only in such passages do we see that Hamilton, for all his phenom-

enal success in the Continental Army, still felt unlucky and unlovely, still cursed by

his past.

During the summer and fall preceding Hamilton’s wedding in December 1780, he

sometimes mooned about in a romantic haze, very much the lovesick swain. “Love

is a sort of insanity,” he told Schuyler, “and every thing I write savors strongly of

it.”62 In frequent letters to “his saucy little charmer,” he reassured her that he

thought about her constantly.63 “ ’Tis a pretty story indeed that I am to be thus mo-

nopolized by a little nut brown maid like you and [am] from a soldier metamor-

phosed into a puny lover.”64 He would steal away from crowds, he told her, and

stroll down solitary lanes to swoon over her image. “You are certainly a little sor-

ceress and have bewitched me, for you have made me disrelish everything that used

to please me.”65

As the wedding approached, Hamilton succumbed to anxieties about the fu-

ture, and he sent Schuyler the most candid letters of his life. He was now optimistic

about the war and thought the Continental Army, backed by French naval power,

might yet snatch victory by year’s end. Should the patriots lose, however, Hamilton

suggested that they live in “some other clime more favourable to human rights” and

suggested Geneva as a possibility. He then made a confession: “I was once deter-

mined to let my existence and American liberty end together. My Betsey has given

me a motive to outlive my pride.”66 The sweet, retiring Schuyler would rescue him

from the self-destructive fantasies that had long held sway over his imagination.

At the same time, the jittery Hamilton was beset by serious doubts about the

wedding. All along, he had saluted Schuyler’s beauty, frankness, tender heart, and

good sense. Now he wanted more. “I entreat you, my charmer, not to neglect the

charges I gave you, particularly that of taking care of yourself and that of employ-

ing all your leisure in reading. Nature has been very kind to you. Do not neglect

to cultivate her gifts and to enable yourself to make the distinguished figure in all

respects to which you are entitled to aspire.”67 As he tutored Schuyler in self-

improvement, there was a Pygmalion dimension to his wishes, but he also worried

146 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

that her love might cool and scuttle the wedding. In one letter, he related to her a

dream he’d had of arriving in Albany and finding her asleep on the grass, with a

strange gentleman holding her hand. “As you may imagine,” he wrote, “I reproached

him with his presumption and asserted my claim.”68 To his relief, Schuyler in the

dream awoke, flew into his arms, and allayed his fears with a convincing kiss.

Those who saw Hamilton as shrewdly marrying into a great fortune would have

been surprised that he did not count on the Schuyler money and beseeched Eliza to

consider whether she could endure a more austere life. Referring to the subscrip-

tion fund set up by his St. Croix sponsors, he lamented the “knavery” of those man-

aging his money. “They have already filed down what was in their hands more than

one half, and I am told they go on diminishing it.” Thus, Schuyler should be pre-

pared for anything: “Your future rank in life is a perfect lottery. You may move in an

exalted, you may move in a very humble sphere. The last is most probable. Exam-

ine well your heart.” Pressing the matter further, he then asked her:

Tell me, my pretty damsel, have you made up your mind upon the subject of

housekeeping? Do you soberly relish the pleasure of being a poor man’s wife?

Have you learned to think a homespun preferable to a brocade and the rum-

bling of a wagon wheel to the musical rattling of a coach and six? Will you

be able to see with perfect composure your old acquaintances, flaunting it in

gay life, tripping it along in elegance and splendor, while you hold a humble

station and have no other enjoyments than the sober comforts of a good

wife? . . . If you cannot, my dear, we are playing a comedy of all in the wrong

and you should correct the mistake before we begin to act the tragedy of the

unhappy couple.69

There is no hint here that Eliza was the daughter of a man whom Hamilton de-

scribed as a gentleman of “large fortune and no less personal and public conse-

quences.”70 Hamilton was too proud to sponge off the Schuylers—who would turn

out, in any event, to be less affluent than legend held.

Hamilton’s prenuptial letters to Schuyler hint at a young man exposed to depri-

vation at an early age. He had seen too much discontent to approach marriage op-

timistically. In one letter, he delivered a cynical view of both sexes and asked

whether she could endure a hard life:

But be assured, my angel, it is not a diffidence of my Betsey’s heart but of a fe-

male heart that dictated the questions. I am ready to believe everything in

favour of yours, but am restrained by the experience I have had of human na-

ture and the softer part of it. Some of your sex possess every requisite to

147 The Lovesick Colonel

please, delight, and inspire esteem, friendship, and affection. But there are too

few of this description. We are full of vices. They are full of weaknesses[,] . . .

and though I am satisfied whenever I trust my senses and my judgment that

you are one of the exceptions, I cannot forbear having moments when I feel a

disposition to make a more perfect discovery of your temper and charac-

ter. . . . Do not, however, I entreat you, suppose that I entertain an ill opinion

of all your sex. I have a much worse [opinion] of my own.71

Throughout this correspondence, George Washington’s exacting presence hov-

ered in the background. “I would go on, but the General summons me to ride,”

Hamilton ended one letter.72 Since both he and Washington frowned on laxity dur-

ing military campaigns, he refused to take a leave of absence to visit Schuyler. When

Hamilton rode off to Albany in late November 1780 for the wedding, it was the first

vacation he had taken in nearly five years of warfare.

Situated on a bluff above the Hudson River, Albany was still a rough-hewn town

of four thousand inhabitants, about one-tenth of them slaves, and was enclosed by

stands of virgin pine. Even as English influence overtook New York City, Albany

retained its early Dutch character, reflected in the gabled houses. Dutch remained

the chief language, and the Schuylers sat through long Dutch sermons at the Re-

formed Church every Sunday. In many respects, Eliza, who loved to sew and gar-

den, was typical of the young Dutch women of her generation who were domestic

and self-effacing, thrifty in managing households, and eager to raise large broods of

children.

We have little sense of what Hamilton truly thought of his mother-in-law,

Catherine Van Rensselaer Schuyler. Not long after marrying Philip Schuyler during

the French and Indian War, she sat for a portrait that shows a striking, dark-eyed

woman with a long, elegant neck and broad bosom. One contemporary described

her as a “lady of great beauty, shape, and gentility.”73 By the time of Hamilton’s wed-

ding, however, she had settled into being a stout Dutch housewife. When the mar-

quis de Chastellux visited the Schuylers that snowy December, he left with an

indelible impression of Mrs. Schuyler as a dragoness who governed the house, in-

timidating her husband. The wary Frenchman decided that it was “best not to treat

her in too cavalier a fashion” and concluded that General Schuyler was “more ami-

able when he is absent from his wife.”74 If Mrs. Schuyler, forty-seven, was less than

hospitable, it may have been because she was seven months pregnant with her

youngest daughter, Catherine, the last of twelve times she endured childbirth. She

was visibly pregnant at the time of her daughter’s wedding.

Hamilton had few people to invite to the wedding. His brother, James, was still

alive, probably on St. Thomas, but he didn’t come. Hamilton contacted his father,

148 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

who was on Bequia in the Grenadines, but he didn’t show up either, possibly be-

cause of problems posed by wartime travel for British subjects. Before the wedding,

Alexander told Eliza:

I wrote you, my dear, in one of my letters that I have written to our father but

had not heard of him since. . . . I had pressed him to come to America after

the peace. A gentleman going to the island where he is will in a few days af-

ford me a safe opportunity to write again. I shall again present him with his

black-eyed daughter and tell him how much her attention deserves his affec-

tion and will make the blessing of his gray hairs.75

Whether from shame, illness, or poverty, James Hamilton never met Eliza, the

Schuylers, or his grandchildren, despite Alexander’s sincere entreaties that he come

to America.

At noon on December 14, 1780, Alexander Hamilton, twenty-five, wed Elizabeth

Schuyler, twenty-three, in the southeast parlor of the Schuyler mansion. The inte-

rior of the two-story brick residence was light and airy and had a magnificent curv-

ing staircase with beautifully carved balusters. During the ceremony, the parlor was

likely radiant with sunshine reflected from the snow outside. The ceremony fol-

lowed the Dutch custom of a small family wedding in the bride’s home. At the local

Dutch Reformed Church, the clerk recorded simply: “Colonel Hamilton & Elisa-

beth [sic] Schuyler.”76 After the ceremony, the guests probably adjourned to the en-

trance hall, which was nearly fifty feet long and twenty feet wide and flanked by tall,

graceful windows. Except for James McHenry, Hamilton’s friends on Washington’s

staff were too busy with wartime duties to attend. For all the merriment and high

spirits, few guests could have overlooked the mortifying contrast between the enor-

mous Schuyler clan, with their Van Cortlandt and Van Rensselaer relatives, and the

lonely groom, who didn’t have a single family member in attendance.

The newlyweds spent their honeymoon at the Pastures and stayed through the

Christmas holidays. They were joined by four French officers from Rochambeau’s

army who crossed the ice-encrusted Hudson and arrived in sleighs. Even the fussy

French officers complimented the food, the Madeira, and the engaging company.

Nothing marred the perfection of the experience for Hamilton. A few weeks later,

he wrote to Eliza’s younger sister Peggy, “Because your sister has the talent of grow-

ing more amiable every day, or because I am a fanatic in love, or both . . . she fan-

cies herself the happiest woman in the world.”77

Hamilton probably felt, for the moment, that he was the happiest man in the

world. The wedding to Eliza Schuyler ended his nomadic existence and embedded

149 The Lovesick Colonel

him in the Anglo-Dutch aristocracy of New York. His upbringing, instead of mak-

ing him resent the rich, had perhaps made him wish to reclaim his father’s lost no-

bility. Through marriage, he acquired an important base in a state in which

politics revolved around the dynastic ambitions of the foremost Hudson River fam-

ilies. For the first time in his life, Alexander Hamilton must have had a true sense of

belonging.

His friendship with Philip Schuyler was to prove of inestimable value to Hamil-

ton’s career. At one point, when asking for Eliza’s hand, Hamilton evidently told the

general of his illegitimacy. “I am pleased with every instance of delicacy in those

who are dear to me,” Schuyler wrote in response, “and I think I read your soul on

that occasion you mention.”78 Having come from opposite ends of the social spec-

trum, the two men had arrived at similar political conclusions and proved steadfast

allies. Like Hamilton, Schuyler chafed at the impotence of Congress and the Articles

of Confederation and wanted to invest George Washington with “dictatorial pow-

ers,” if necessary, to win the war.79 He distrusted the yeomen and artisans who had

elected the populist George Clinton as New York’s first governor instead of him.

Having felt scapegoated for the fall of Fort Ticonderoga, Schuyler urged Hamilton

to respond emphatically to personal attacks. “A man’s character ought not to be

sported with,” he once wrote, “and he that suffers stains to lay on it with impunity

really deserves none nor will he long enjoy one.”80 Such a man was not likely to curb

Hamilton’s predilection for feuds and duels.

Hamilton’s wedding may have heightened the frustrations that he was quietly ex-

periencing with Washington. The general could be a tetchy boss, and Hamilton

witnessed the anger he choked down in public. One observer remarked, “The hard-

ships of the revolutionary struggle . . . had shaken the masterly control Washington

had gained over his passions, and the officers of his staff . . . had to suffer, not un-

frequently, from the irritable temper and punctilious susceptibility of their com-

mander.”81 Hamilton was too proud and gifted, too eager to advance in rank, to

subordinate himself happily to anyone for four years, even to the renowned Wash-

ington.

Hamilton still hungered for a field command. He wanted fluttering flags, boom-

ing cannon, and bayonet charges, not a desk job. That October, as Lafayette pre-

pared to mount a raid on Staten Island, he had asked Washington if Hamilton could

lead a battalion. Washington vetoed the idea, saying he could not afford to give up

Hamilton. Right before the wedding, Hamilton applied to lead a charge against

British posts in northern Manhattan. “Sometime last fall when I spoke to your Ex-

cellency about going to the southward,” he reminded Washington, “I explained to

150 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

you candidly my feelings with respect to military reputation and how much it was

my object to act a conspicuous part in some enterprise that might perhaps raise my

character as a soldier above mediocrity.”82 Again, Washington spurned Hamilton.

Then Alexander Scammell tendered his resignation as adjutant general. Two

generals—Nathanael Greene and the marquis de Lafayette—lobbied to have Hamil-

ton replace him. Washington again balked, saying that he could not promote the

young lieutenant colonel over full colonels. Washington’s predicament was clear. He

had plenty of combat officers, but nobody could match Hamilton’s French or his

ability to draft subtle, nuanced letters. After almost hourly contact with Washing-

ton for four years, Hamilton had become his alter ego, able to capture his tone on

paper or in person, and was a casualty of his own success.

It would be a time rich in political disappointments for Hamilton. Right before

his wedding, Congress decided to send an envoy extraordinary to the court of

Versailles to join Benjamin Franklin in raising a substantial loan and expediting

supply shipments. General John Sullivan nominated Hamilton, who had been a

proponent of such a loan; Lafayette also took up the cudgels for him. Three days

before Hamilton’s wedding, John Laurens was unanimously chosen instead, even

though he stubbornly maintained that Hamilton was better qualified. Laurens

thought Hamilton’s nomination faltered only because he was insufficiently known

in Congress. Earlier in the year, when Laurens had tried to secure Hamilton a post

as secretary to the American minister in France, Hamilton had analyzed his own re-

jection thus: “I am a stranger in this country. I have no property here, no connec-

tions. If I have talents and integrity . . . these are justly deemed very spurious titles

in these enlightened days.”83 These disappointments only buttressed his belief in

meritocracy, not aristocracy, as the best system for government appointments.

The day after Hamilton’s wedding, Congressman John Mathews of South Car-

olina nominated him as minister to Russia. Again, he was passed over. Hamilton

now feared that he would be shackled to his desk for the duration of the conflict—

for him, a degrading form of drudgery. He wanted one last chance for battlefield

honor, which would be a useful credential in the postwar political world. Perhaps

the marriage to Eliza Schuyler emboldened Hamilton to challenge Washington and

assert his independence. After all, he was no longer a penniless young immigrant,

lacking in property and connections.

After Hamilton returned to military service in early January 1781, he hired a

guide to lead him south through the narrow mountain passes to Washington’s

headquarters, now located at a Dutch farmhouse on the Hudson River at New

Windsor. Eliza soon joined him, and they shared lodgings in the nearby village. The

young bride often assisted Martha Washington in entertaining officers, and she

151 The Lovesick Colonel

observed George Washington in a vignette of domestic heroism that remained

engraved on her memory. A fire broke out in a shed adjoining his headquarters,

and Washington instantly bounded down the stairs from his second-floor office,

grabbed a washtub full of suds from the farmer’s wife, dumped the suds on the

blaze, then dashed back and forth with other tubs until the fire was extinguished.

Meanwhile, Eliza’s new husband felt less than enamored of Washington. He had

been snubbed over too many appointments and meditated an open break. He re-

solved that “if there should ever happen [to be] a breach between us,” he was deter-

mined “never to consent to an accommodation.”84

It was an inauspicious moment for Hamilton to clash with Washington. The

Continental Army was experiencing another abominable winter. That January, mu-

tinies erupted among Pennsylvania and New Jersey troops, who had not been paid

for more than a year and protested the eternal shortages of clothing, shoes, horses,

wagons, meat, flour, and gunpowder. Many wanted to return home at the expira-

tion of their three-year enlistments but were prevented from doing so by their offi-

cers. So demoralized were these troops that some officers feared they might even

defect to the British. Hamilton applauded when Washington took draconian steps

to suppress the mutineers and refused to negotiate until they had laid down their

weapons. On February 4, Hamilton wrote to Laurens that “we uncivilly compelled

them to an unconditional surrender and hanged their most incendiary leaders.”85

With this uprising quelled, Hamilton was now ready for a showdown with

Washington, who remained edgy after the uprising of his men. On February 15, the

two men worked till midnight as they readied dispatches for the French officers

at Newport. The next day, a frazzled Hamilton was going downstairs in the New

Windsor farmhouse as the general mounted the steps. Washington said curtly that

he wanted to speak to Hamilton. Hamilton nodded, then delivered a letter to Tench

Tilghman and paused to converse briefly with Lafayette on business before heading

back upstairs. In a letter written to Philip Schuyler two days later, Hamilton nar-

rated the confrontation that ensued:

Instead of finding the General as usual in his room, I met him at the head of

the stairs, where accosting me in a very angry tone, “Col[onel] Hamilton,”

(said he), “you have kept me waiting at the head of the stairs these ten min-

utes. I must tell you, sir, you treat me with disrespect.” I replied without petu-

lancy, but with decision “I am not conscious of it, sir, but since you have

thought it necessary to tell me so, we part.” “Very well, sir,” (said he), “if it be

your choice,” or something to this effect and we separated. I sincerely believe

my absence, which gave so much umbrage, did not last two minutes.86

152 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

Remarkably enough, it was Washington who made the largehearted, conciliatory

gesture after this altercation and within an hour sent Tilghman to see Hamilton.

Tilghman said that Washington regretted his fleeting temper and encouraged

Hamilton to come and patch things up. Hamilton, now twenty-six, had the colossal

courage, or colossal cheek, to turn down cold the commander in chief. Where oth-

ers were awed by the godlike Washington, Hamilton knew too well his mortal

foibles. “I requested Mr. Tilghman to tell him that I had taken my resolution in a

manner not to be revoked; that as a conversation could serve no other purpose than

to produce explanations mutually disagreeable, though I certainly would not refuse

an interview if he desired it, yet I should be happy [if] he would permit me to de-

cline it.”87 Washington reluctantly honored Hamilton’s decision to leave his staff.

Hamilton knew these events would shock Philip Schuyler, Washington’s warm

friend, who had been thrilled to have the general’s aide-de-camp as his son-in-law.

Hamilton told Schuyler that he wanted to command artillery or light infantry, but

he knew a fuller explanation was required. He had not acted rashly, he insisted. He

had long hated the personal dependence that accompanied his position and had

found Washington to be much more temperamental than his exalted reputation al-

lowed. Their working relationship had done “violence to my feelings.”88 Then

Hamilton made a stunning revelation: Washington had wanted to be closer all

along. It was Hamilton who had rebuffed him:

For three years past, I have felt no friendship for him and have professed

none. The truth is our own dispositions are the opposites of each other and

the pride of my temper would not suffer me to profess what I did not feel. In-

deed when advances of this kind [have been made] to me on his part, they

were rec[eived in a manner] that showed at least I had no inclination [to

court them, and that] I wished to stand rather upon a footing of m[ilitary

confidence than] of private attachment. You are too good a judge of human

nature not to be sensible how this conduct in me must have operated on a

man to whom all the world is offering incense.89

The same day, Hamilton wrote to James McHenry in a more vindictive tone,

showing that he was severely disillusioned with Washington and tired of feeling

browbeaten. “The great man and I have come to an open rupture. . . . He shall, for

once at least, repent his ill-humour. Without a shadow of reason and on the slight-

est ground, he charged me in the most affrontive manner with treating him with

disrespect.”90 Hamilton acknowledged that Washington’s popularity was necessary

to the patriots, and he promised to keep their rift a secret, but he had no intention

of revising his decision.

153 The Lovesick Colonel

The rupture with Washington highlights Hamilton’s egotism, outsize pride, and

quick temper and is perhaps the first of many curious lapses of judgment and tim-

ing that detracted from an otherwise stellar career. Washington had generously of-

fered to make amends, but the hypersensitive young man was determined to teach

the commander in chief a stern lesson in the midst of the American Revolution.

Hamilton exhibited the recklessness of youth and a disquieting touch of folie de

grandeur. On the other hand, Hamilton believed that he had been asked to sacrifice

his military ambitions for too long and that he had waited patiently for four years

to make his mark. And he was only asking to risk his life for his country. If Hamil-

ton were simply the brazen opportunist later portrayed by his enemies, he would

never have risked this breach with the one man who would almost certainly lead the

country if the Revolution succeeded.

Fortunately, Washington and Hamilton recognized that each had a vital role to

play in the war and that this was too important to be threatened by petty annoy-

ances. Despite their often conflicted feelings for each other, Washington remained

unwaveringly loyal toward Hamilton, whom he saw as exceptionally able and intel-

ligent, if sometimes errant; one senses a buried affection toward the younger man

that he could seldom manifest openly. Where Hamilton had reservations about

Washington as a general, he never underestimated his prudence, character, patriot-

ism, and leadership qualities. In the last analysis, the durable bond formed between

Hamilton and Washington during the Revolution was based less on personal inti-

macy than on shared experiences of danger and despair and common hopes for

America’s future. From the same situation, they had drawn the same conclusions:

the need for a national army, for centralized power over the states, for a strong ex-

ecutive, and for national unity. Their political views, forged in the crucible of war,

were to survive many subsequent attempts to drive them apart.

EIGHT

G LO RY

F or a month after their feud, Washington and Hamilton performed their

charade admirably, pretending that nothing had happened between them.

Hamilton requisitioned two horses—one for him, one for his baggage—and

rode off with Washington in early March to perform his last stint as interpreter in a

conference with the comte de Rochambeau and other French officers at Newport.

On March 8, Washington, Hamilton, and their French counterparts rode out on

horseback for a sunset review of the French fleet, and that same day Hamilton

drafted his last letter under Washington’s signature. A few days later, Washington

departed for what he called “my dreary quarters at New Windsor,” and Hamilton

headed off to the Schuyler mansion in Albany.1 One of the most brilliant, produc-

tive partnerships of the Revolution had ended.

If Washington expected relief from Hamilton badgering him for an appoint-

ment, he soon learned otherwise. Hamilton was fully prepared to become a pest.

In mid-April, he found quarters for himself and Eliza in a brick-and-stone Dutch

dwelling at De Peyster’s Point on the east bank of the Hudson, by no coincidence

opposite Washington’s headquarters at New Windsor. He even ordered “a little boat

which two people can manage” so that he could scoot back and forth on short no-

tice.2 No sooner was Hamilton unpacked than he told General Nathanael Greene

that he was scouting for “anything that fortune may cast up. I mean in the military

line.”3 Hamilton seemed ubiquitous in New Windsor. One evening, a New England

visitor, Jeremiah Smith, found himself discussing topical events with strangers at a

local tavern. “I was struck with the conversation, talents . . . and with the superior

reasoning powers of one who seemed to take the lead. It exceeded anything I had

Glor y 155

before heard and even my conceptions. When the company retired, I found it was

Colonel Hamilton I admired so much.”4

On April 27, the amazingly persistent young colonel addressed a formal letter to

Washington, requesting a position in the vanguard force to be sent south. Remind-

ing Washington of his earlier exploits as artillery captain, he noted, “I began in the

line and, had I continued there, I ought in justice to have been more advanced in

rank than I now am.”5 One can almost feel Washington growing hot under the col-

lar in his reply. He was still dealing with extreme discontent in the ranks; now he

had to deal with Hamilton. “Your letter of this date has not a little embarrassed me,”

he replied, referring to the upheavals produced in the past when he had jumped ju-

nior officers above those of higher rank. Lest Hamilton suspect that his intransi-

gence stemmed from their contretemps, Washington cautioned: “My principal

concern arises from an apprehension that you will impute my refusal of your re-

quest to other motives than these I have expressed.”6

While awaiting a military assignment, Hamilton, never idle, refined his thoughts

about the financial emergency gripping the states. With the collapse of the conti-

nental currency, Congress conquered its fears of the centralized power that might

be wielded by a finance minister. Power had begun to flow from congressional com-

mittees to individual department heads—for war, foreign relations, and finance—

just as Hamilton had recommended to James Duane. General John Sullivan, now

back in Congress, wanted to nominate Hamilton as the new superintendent of fi-

nance and sounded out Washington on his qualifications. However incredible it

now seems, Washington confessed that he had never discussed finance with his

aide, but he did volunteer: “This I can venture to advance from a thorough knowl-

edge of him that there are few men to be found of his age who has [sic] a more gen-

eral knowledge than he possesses, and none whose soul is more firmly engaged in

the cause, or who exceeds him in probity and sterling virtue.”7 A glowing tribute

from a man who had observed Hamilton at close range for four years.

In the end, Sullivan withheld Hamilton’s nomination due to overwhelming con-

gressional support for Robert Morris, who took office in May 1781. A native of

Liverpool, Morris had served in the Continental Congress and reluctantly signed

the Declaration of Independence. He was an impressive-looking man with a wide,

fleshy face, an ample paunch, and the sharp, shrewd gaze of a self-made merchant

prince. He lived in a sumptuous Philadelphia mansion, tended by liveried servants,

and reputedly was the richest man in town. He brought a somewhat mixed legacy

to the new post. Lacking federal taxing power and a central bank, the patriots had

to rely on private credit, and Morris, more than anyone else, had sustained the

cause by drawing on his own credit to pay troops and even government spies. On

156 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

the other hand, critics had accused him of exploiting his government connections

for personal gain.

A lowly figure beside the august Morris, Hamilton wanted to establish his intel-

lectual bona fides with the new superintendent of finance. Before writing to him,

Hamilton brushed up on money matters and had Colonel Timothy Pickering send

him some primers: David Hume’s Political Discourses, tracts written by the English

clergyman and polemicist Richard Price, and his all-purpose crib, Postlethwayt’s

Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce. On April 30, 1781, Hamilton sent a

marathon letter to Morris—it runs to thirty-one printed pages—that set forth a

full-fledged system for shoring up American credit and creating a national bank.

Portions of this interminable letter exist in Eliza’s handwriting (complete with her

faulty spelling), as if Hamilton’s hand ached and he had to pass the pen to his bride

at intervals. Hamilton started out sheepishly enough: “I pretend not to be an able

financier. . . . Neither have I had leisure or materials to make accurate calcula-

tions.”8 Then he delivered a virtuoso performance as he asserted the need for fi-

nancial reforms to complete the Revolution. “ ’Tis by introducing order into our

finances—by restoring public credit—not by gaining battles that we are finally to

gain our object.”9

Hamilton forecast a budget deficit of four to five million dollars and doubted

that foreign credit alone could trim it. His solution was a national bank. He traced

the riches of Venice, Genoa, Hamburg, Holland, and England to their flourish-

ing banks, which enhanced state power and facilitated private commerce. Once

again, he plumbed the deep sources of British power. Where others saw only lofty

ships and massed bodies of redcoats, Hamilton perceived a military establishment

propped up by a “vast fabric of credit. . . . ’Tis by this alone she now menaces our

independence.”10 America, he argued, did not need to triumph decisively over the

heavily taxed British: a war of attrition that eroded British credit would nicely do

the trick. All the patriots had to do was plant doubts among Britain’s creditors

about the war’s outcome. “By stopping the progress of their conquests and reduc-

ing them to an unmeaning and disgraceful defensive, we destroy the national ex-

pectation of success from which the ministry draws their resources.”11 This was an

extremely subtle, sophisticated analysis for a young man immersed in wartime de-

tails for four years: America could defeat the British in the bond market more read-

ily than on the battlefield. Hamilton had developed a fine appreciation of English

institutions while fighting for freedom from England. In the letter’s finale, he con-

tended that America should imitate British methods and exploit the power of bor-

rowing: “A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing. It will

be powerful cement of our union.”12

Clearly, Hamilton was in training to superintend American finance someday. In

Glor y 157

late May, Morris sent him a flattering reply, informing him that many of his opin-

ions tallied precisely with his own. Congress had just approved Morris’s plan for the

Bank of North America, a merchant bank that he hoped would be expanded after

the war to encourage commerce. This exchange of letters initiated an important

friendship. During the next few years, Hamilton and Morris were kindred spirits in

their efforts to establish American finance on a sound, efficient basis.

Hamilton continued to stew about the Articles of Confederation, which had been

ratified belatedly by the last state on February 27, 1781. Hamilton thought this

loose framework a prescription for rigor mortis. There was no federal judiciary, no

guiding executive, no national taxing power, and no direct power over people as in-

dividuals, only as citizens of the states. In Congress, each state had one vote, and

nine of the thirteen states had to concur to take significant actions. The Articles of

Confederation promised little more than a fragile alliance of thirteen miniature re-

publics. Hamilton had already warned that if the ramshackle confederacy fostered

the illusion that Congress had sufficient power, “it will be an evil, for it is unequal

to the exigencies of the war or to the preservation of the union hereafter.”13 Again,

Hamilton appealed for a convention to bring forth a more durable government.

That the thirteen states would someday coalesce into a single country was far

from a foregone conclusion. Indeed, the states had hampered many crucial war

measures, such as long-term enlistments, from fear that their troops might shed

their home-state allegiances. People continued to identify their states as their

“countries,” and most outside the military had never traveled more than a day’s

journey from their homes. But the Revolution itself, especially the Continental

Army, had been a potent instrument for fusing the states together and forging an

American character. Speaking of the effect that the fighting had on him, John Mar-

shall probably spoke for many soldiers when he said, “I was confirmed in the habit

of considering America as my country and Congress as my government.”14 During

the war, a sense of national unity seeped imperceptibly into the minds of many Amer-

ican diplomats, administrators, congressmen, and, above all, the nucleus of officers

gathered around Washington. These men had gotten many dismaying glimpses of

the shortcomings of the Articles of Confederation, and many later emerged as con-

firmed advocates of a tight-knit union of the states.

As a member of Washington’s family, Hamilton had stumbled upon the crown-

ing enterprise of his life: the creation of a powerful new country. By dint of his

youth, foreign birth, and cosmopolitan outlook, he was spared prewar entangle-

ments in provincial state politics, making him a natural spokesman for a new

American nationalism. As soon as he left Washington’s staff, he began to convert his

private opinions into cogently reasoned newspaper editorials. In July and August

1781, he published a quartet of essays in The New-York Packet entitled “The Conti-

158 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

nentalist” that were signed A.B.—the same initials as in the letter written to Sir

Henry Clinton, proposing the trade of Major André for Benedict Arnold.

These four articles seem spirited precursors to The Federalist Papers. Instead of

carping at problems in random fashion, Hamilton delivered a systematic critique

of the current political structure. He introduced a critical theme: that the dynamics

of revolutions differed from those of peacetime governance; the postwar world had

to be infused with a new spirit, respectful of authority, or anarchy would reign: “An

extreme jealousy of power is the attendant on all popular revolutions and has sel-

dom been without its evils. It is to this source we are to trace many of the fatal mis-

takes which have so deeply endangered the common cause, particularly that defect

which will be the object of these remarks, a want of power in Congress.”15 Where

revolutions, by their nature, resisted excess government power, the opposite situa-

tion could be equally hazardous. “As too much power leads to despotism, too little

leads to anarchy, and both eventually to the ruin of the people.”16

Unless the central government’s hand was strengthened, asserted Hamilton, the

states would amass progressively more power until the union disintegrated into se-

cessionist movements, smaller confederacies, or civil war. He especially feared that

populous states would indulge in separatist designs and take advantage of commer-

cial rivalries or boundary disputes as pretexts to wage war against smaller states. To

avert this situation, Hamilton listed a litany of powers that Congress needed to

strengthen the union, especially the powers to regulate trade, levy enforceable taxes

on land and individuals, and appoint military officers of every rank. Only unity

could wring from skittish foreign creditors the large loans necessary to conclude the

war. In closing, Hamilton applauded the national bank proposed by Morris, which

would wed the “interest of the monied men with the resources of government.”17

This alliance would help to prop up a shaky government.

Hamilton’s life was to be all of a piece, and the kernel of many of his later theo-

ries first germinated in these essays. His views did not change greatly over time so

much as expand in richness, depth, and scope. Vernon Parrington later observed of

Hamilton, “Singularly precocious, he matured early; before his twenty-fifth year he

seems to have developed every main principle of his political and economic philos-

ophy, and thereafter he never hesitated or swerved from his path.”18 To a peculiar

extent, his mind was already focused on the problems that were to dominate the

postwar period.

During the spring and early summer of 1781, Hamilton never slackened in his ef-

forts to wrest a field command from Washington. And yet he refused to admit his

bulldog tenacity. In May, he told Washington, with no apparent irony, “I am inca-

pable of wishing to obtain any object by importunity.”19 Eliza worried about his

Glor y 159

safety if he received a field command, while sister Angelica entered into Hamilton’s

elaborate ambitions. When Angelica’s husband, John Barker Church, got wind of

rumors that Hamilton might obtain an appointment, he coyly informed his brother-

in-law that “a certain lady (who has not yet made her appearance this morning)

is very anxious for your happiness and glory.”20

In early July, still panting for a combat role, Hamilton tempted fate by sending

Washington a letter containing his commission, thus tacitly threatening to resign if

he didn’t get his desired command. It says much about Washington’s high esteem

for Hamilton that instead of bridling at this effrontery, he sent Tench Tilghman to

him in an accommodating spirit. “This morning Tilghman came to me in his

[Washington’s] name, pressed me to retain my commission, with an assurance that

he would endeavor by all means to give me a command,” Hamilton told Eliza, who

had gone to stay with her family in Albany. “Though I know my Betsey would be

happy to hear I had rejected this proposal, it is a pleasure my reputation would not

permit me to afford her.”21 Finally, on July 31, Hamilton succeeded in his long-

standing quest when he received command of a New York light-infantry battalion

and chose Nicholas Fish, his King’s College classmate, as his second in command.

With the war nearing its climax, Hamilton knew that Washington had vouchsafed

one last coveted chance for battlefield laurels.

If Eliza brooded about her husband’s well-being, Hamilton returned the favor,

especially after learning in late spring that Eliza was pregnant with their first child.

The New York frontier around Albany had been plundered repeatedly by Tory and

Indian raids—in one infamous massacre in 1778, they had mutilated and dismem-

bered thirty-two patriots—and General Schuyler lamented to his son-in-law in

May 1781 that the area was “one general scene of ruin and desolation.”22 Schuyler

himself was especially vulnerable. He had overseen a spy network with such effi-

ciency that the British were plotting to kidnap him at home, as he learned that

spring, and he made special arrangements to have an Albany guard hasten to his aid

in case of emergency.

On August 7, about twenty Tories and Indians barged into the Schuyler man-

sion, overpowered the sleeping guards, seized weapons in the cellar, and sur-

rounded the house. (Angelica had removed some weapons to the cellar when she

found her little boy playing with them.) General Schuyler retreated to an upstairs

bedroom, where, using a prearranged signal, he fired his pistol out the window to

summon help. Mrs. Schuyler and her daughters were so horrified—“some hanging

on [General Schuyler’s] arms and others embracing his knees in the most distress-

ing terror and uncertainty,” reported one eyewitness—that the general was trapped

by his clinging family.23 Then the women remembered that Mrs. Schuyler’s infant

daughter, Catherine, had been left in a cradle by the front door. Since both Eliza and

160 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

Angelica were pregnant, sister Peggy crept downstairs to retrieve the endangered

child. The leader of the raiding party barred her way with a musket.

“Wench, wench! Where is your master?” he demanded.

“Gone to alarm the town,” the coolheaded Peggy said.24

The intruder, fearing that Schuyler would return with troops, fled in alarm.25

Legend maintains that one Indian hurled a tomahawk at Peggy’s head as she trotted

up the stairs with the baby in her arms; to this day the mahogany banister bears

what are thought to be scars from the blade. Hamilton was shocked by the news: “I

have received, my beloved Betsey, your letter informing me of the happy escape of

your father. He showed an admirable presence of mind. . . . My heart . . . has felt all

the horror and anguish attached to the idea of your being yourself and seeing your

father in the power of ruffians.”26

Until early August, Washington had been planning a siege of New York City, so

Hamilton did not expect to be too distant from Eliza during her pregnancy. Then

in mid-August, Washington learned that the comte de Grasse, admiral of the

French fleet in the West Indies, planned to sail for Chesapeake Bay. This sensational

piece of news dovetailed with another that promised a decisive military action:

Lafayette informed him that General Cornwallis was now entrenched at Yorktown,

surrounded by water on three sides. This made the spot, from one perspective, a

perfect fortress—and from another a perfect trap. Washington had wanted to deal

the coup de grâce to the British in New York and recoup his earlier losses by re-

claiming Manhattan and Long Island. The comte de Rochambeau dashed this plan,

citing problems posed by shallow waters outside New York harbor and the British

fortifications on Manhattan. So with some reluctance, Washington agreed to haz-

ard all by moving additional men to the Chesapeake to link up with Lafayette and

de Grasse’s fleet in choking off Cornwallis’s army.

In late August, Hamilton informed Eliza indiscreetly that he and part of the

army would be moving to Virginia. (The move was still a military secret.) He re-

fused to quit his troops or request a leave to see his bride. “I must go without seeing

you,” he wrote three days after the New York troops began to march south. “I must

go without embracing you. Alas I must go.” He remained, however, the dreamy

newlywed. “I am more greedy of your love” than a miser of his gold, he continued.

“It is the food of my hopes, the object of my wishes, the only enjoyment of my

life.”27 On September 6, he divulged to Eliza the army’s destination—“tomorrow we

embark for Yorktown”—and sounded confident of victory. In a poetic conceit that

he often played with but never acted upon, he toyed with abandoning worldly pur-

suits to luxuriate in her company: “Every day confirms me in the intention of re-

nouncing public life and devoting myself wholly to you. Let others waste their time

and their tranquillity in a vain pursuit of power and glory. Be it my object to be

Glor y 161

happy in a quiet retreat with my better angel.”28 Like other founders and Enlight-

enment politicians, Hamilton could never quite admit the depth of his ambition,

lest it cast doubts on his revolutionary purity. In the midst of such rarefied goals as

freedom and independence, who could admit to baser motives or any thoughts of

personal gain?

Washington had also balked at the Yorktown plan because he wondered how he

could move his hungry, bedraggled troops long distances along muddy roads with-

out advertising his intentions to the British. He solved this dilemma ingeniously,

marching foot soldiers southward in parallel lines, at staggered intervals, to mislead

the enemy about his intentions. Washington knew that he had a singular chance to

strike a mortal blow against the British if he could coordinate the massive move-

ments of men and ships. With unerring precision, he guided his two thousand men

and de Rochambeau’s four thousand so they would rendezvous in Virginia with

twenty-nine large “ships of the line” and three thousand troops brought from the

West Indies by Admiral de Grasse, supplemented by seven thousand Americans

already in place under Lafayette. To Washington’s jubilation, Admiral de Grasse

showed up even before he did, a fact that made the reserved Washington literally

jump for joy. When Washington boarded the admiral’s flagship, the Ville de Paris—

a resplendent triple decker with 120 guns—the Frenchman teased his towering

American counterpart by calling him “Mon cher petit général!”29

In late September, Hamilton and his light infantry reached Williamsburg, the

staging area for the Yorktown siege, where he enjoyed an exuberant reunion with a

trio of old friends: Lafayette, then convalescing from malaria; John Laurens, just

back from Paris with arms, ammunition, and a large French subsidy negotiated by

Benjamin Franklin; and Lieutenant Colonel Francis Barber, his teacher from Eliza-

bethtown days, who had been wounded at Monmouth and had fought valiantly

throughout the war.

On September 28, Hamilton and his men trudged toward Yorktown, through

deep woods that opened intermittently to reveal fields of corn and tobacco. When

they arrived the next day, the siege had just commenced. Dug in on high ground,

Cornwallis had been throwing up earthwork redoubts since early August, employ-

ing thousands of slaves who had defected to the British lines in expectation of earn-

ing their freedom. In all, he built ten outlying defensive strongholds; two would

have caught the attention of Hamilton and his men at once: numbers nine and ten

stood closer to allied troops than the others. It was here that Hamilton was finally

to have his oft-postponed appointment with military glory.

By October 6, expert French engineers, aided by fine autumnal weather, began to

carve out two deep, parallel trenches about six hundred yards from the British lines,

162 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

to seal Cornwallis and his famished, fever-racked men inside a trap. Military cus-

tom dictated a small celebration when the first trench was completed. Hamilton

and his men were drafted for this honor and had no sooner disappeared into the

long ditch, amid swirling flags and thudding drums, than the British let loose can-

non fire. With a bit of completely unnecessary bravado, Hamilton issued an out-

landish order. Perhaps knowing his men were beyond the range of small-arms fire,

he brought them out of the trench and onto exposed ground, where he put them

through parade-ground drills before the flabbergasted British. Luckily, the British

didn’t—or couldn’t—mow them down. Of this irresponsible performance, one

subordinate, Captain James Duncan, wrote in his diary: “Colonel Hamilton gave

these orders, and, although I esteem him one of the first officers in the American

army, must beg in this instance to think he wantonly exposed the lives of his men.”30

By October 9, the allies began to bombard Cornwallis, with Washington himself

touching off the first volley of cannon fire. Day and night, the cannonade exploded

with such unrelenting fury that one lieutenant in the Royal Navy said, “It seemed as

though the heavens should split.” As the din grew “almost unendurable,” this British

officer saw “men lying nearly everywhere who were mortally wounded, whose

heads, arms, and legs had been shot off. The distressing cries of the wounded and

the lamentable suffering of the inhabitants whose dwellings were chiefly in flames”

added to an omnipresent sense of danger.31

By October 14, the second parallel trench had been nearly completed and only

redoubts nine and ten needed to be overrun to complete it. These defenses bristled

with sharpened trees poised to impale any invading troops. Addressing his men on

horseback, Washington explained that the siege could not advance farther unless

these two positions were taken by simultaneous bayonet attacks. Any delay would

only enhance the likelihood that British rescue vessels might arrive in time to evac-

uate Cornwallis. Washington fraternally decided that one redoubt would be taken

by a light-infantry brigade commanded by the French and the other by the Conti-

nental Army under Lafayette. Lafayette tapped his personal aide, Jean-Joseph Sour-

bader de Gimat, to spearhead the charge, a selection that scarcely produced the

bipartisan Franco-American amity intended by Washington.

For Hamilton, who had envisioned this moment since his clerkship on St. Croix,

Lafayette’s choice of Gimat threatened to rob him of his last great chance to fight.

Mustering all his fire and eloquence, he pleaded again with Washington by letter,

pointing out that he had seniority over Gimat and that, as officer of the day pro-

jected for the attack, he enjoyed priority. At this point, Washington decided either

that Hamilton was an implacable force or that Gimat was too French to represent

the Continental Army. Nicholas Fish shared a tent with Hamilton at Yorktown and

Glor y 163

remembered his friend bursting in gleefully after visiting Washington. “We have it!”

Hamilton shouted. “We have it!”32 Hamilton was to command three battalions led

by Gimat, Fish, and Laurens.

Hamilton’s appointment at Yorktown has been shadowed by scurrilous gossip,

mostly peddled by John Adams. Years later, Adams told his friend Benjamin Rush

that Hamilton blackmailed Washington to get the command: “Hamilton flew into

a violent passion and demanded the command of the party for himself and de-

clared, if he had it not, he would expose General Washington’s conduct in a pam-

phlet.”33 It is true that Hamilton sometimes spoke disparagingly about Washington’s

military abilities, but only in private. It is inconceivable that Hamilton would have

resorted to threats against Washington or that the latter would have yielded to them

or that their relationship would have survived such extortion for another eighteen

years of the most intimate collaboration.

A portrait by Alonzo Chappell of Hamilton at the Yorktown siege presents him

in an unexpected pose. He stands by a cannon in a plumed hat, sunk in thought, his

arms folded, and his eyes downcast. More the man of thought than of action, he

gives no clue to the theatrics he was shortly to perform in the frenzy of battle. Two

days before exposing himself to enemy fire, Hamilton wrote to Eliza, now five

months pregnant, a lighthearted letter that attempted to assuage her worries. He

chided her for not matching his output of twenty letters in seven weeks and said she

could make amends only one way: “You shall engage shortly to present me with a

boy. You will ask me if a girl will not answer the purpose. By no means. I fear, with

all the mother’s charms, she may inherit the caprices of her father and then she will

enslave, tantalize and plague one half [the] sex.”34

To expedite the siege, Washington decided to seize redoubts nine and ten with

bayonets instead of pounding them slowly into submission with cannon. French

soldiers were to overrun the redoubt on the left while Hamilton’s light infantry

stormed the one on the right. After nightfall on October 14, the allies fired several

consecutive shells in the air that brilliantly illuminated the sky. Hamilton and his

men then rose from their trenches and raced with fixed bayonets toward redoubt

ten, sprinting across a quarter-mile of landscape pocked and rutted from exploding

shells. For the sake of silence, surprise, and soldierly pride, they had unloaded their

guns to take the position with bayonets alone. Dodging heavy fire, they let out war

whoops that startled their enemies. “They made such a terrible yell and loud cheer-

ing,” said one Hessian soldier, “that one believed the whole wild hunt had broken

out.”35 Hamilton and his men ran so fast that they almost overtook the sappers,

who were snapping off the edges of the sharpened tree branches and opening a

breach through which the infantry rushed. Hamilton, hopping on the shoulder of a

164 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

kneeling soldier, sprang onto the enemy parapet and summoned his men to follow.

Their password was “Rochambeau”—“a good one,” said one American, because it

“sounds like ‘Rush-on-boys’ when pronounced quick.”36

Once inside the fallen redoubt, Hamilton assembled his men quickly in forma-

tion. The whole operation had consumed fewer than ten minutes. Hamilton had

accomplished the capture handily, suffering relatively few casualties; the French

brigade met stiffer resistance and suffered heavy losses. Hamilton was exemplary in

his treatment of the enemy. Some of his men clamored for revenge against the cap-

tives, and one captain was about to run a British officer through the chest with a

bayonet when Hamilton interceded to prevent any bloodshed. He later reported

proudly, “Incapable of imitating examples of barbarity and forgetting recent provo-

cations, the soldiers spared every man who ceased to resist.”37 Besides showing hu-

manity, Hamilton in his leniency toward his prisoners expressed his belief that

wars, like duels, were honorable rituals, conducted by gentlemen according to sa-

cred and immutable rules.

The taking of the two redoubts enabled the allied troops to outfit them with

howitzers and finish the second parallel trench. As Hamilton and Henry Knox in-

spected the captured redoubt, they engaged in an academic controversy that af-

forded a humorous interlude. Washington had given orders that whenever soldiers

spotted a shell, they should exclaim, “A shell!” Hamilton didn’t think this order sol-

dierly, whereas Knox thought it reflected Washington’s prudent regard for his men’s

welfare. Amid this learned dispute, two enemy shells burst inside the redoubt. The

soldiers present screamed, “A shell! A shell!” Instinctively, Hamilton sought shelter

by grabbing the obese Knox, who had to wrestle him off. “Now what do you think,

Mr. Hamilton, about crying ‘shell’?” Knox protested. “But let me tell you not to

make a breastwork of me again!”38

Completion of the second trench snuffed out the last remnants of resistance

among the British. Cornwallis had grown so desperate that he infected blacks with

smallpox and forced them to wander toward enemy lines in an attempt to sicken the

opposing forces. He knew that he lay in grave peril and wrote to Sir Henry Clinton,

“My situation now becomes . . . critical. . . . [W]e shall soon be exposed to an as-

sault in ruined works, in a bad position, and with weakened numbers.”39 After dark

on October 16, Cornwallis tried to evacuate his men by sea, but a drenching mid-

night storm made that impossible. All the while, the allied artillery pummeled his

position without mercy.

On the warm morning of October 17, a red-coated drummer boy appeared on

the parapet, followed by an officer flapping a white handkerchief. The guns fell

silent. Cornwallis had surrendered. “Tomorrow Cornwallis and his army are ours,”

Hamilton rejoiced to Eliza on October 18. “In two days after, I shall in all probabil-

Glor y 165

ity set out for Albany and I hope to embrace you in three weeks from this time.”40

Tens of thousands of onlookers gaped in amazement as the shattered British troops

marched out of Yorktown and, to the tune of an old English ballad, “The World

Turned Upside Down,” moved between parallel rows of handsomely outfitted

French soldiers and battered, ragged American troops.

Hamilton calmly surveyed the final ceremony on horseback. His chat with many

defeated British soldiers left him with a bitter aftertaste. To the vicomte de Noailles

he confided, “I have seen that army so haughty in its success[,] . . . and I observed

every sign of mortification with pleasure.” He was outraged by the British soldiers’

taunts of future revenge against America: “Cruel in its vengeance, England will not

believe that every project of conquest in America is vain.”41 Indeed, although the

lopsided Franco-American victory at Yorktown put the eventual outcome of the

war beyond dispute, the British still occupied New York City, fighting persisted in

the West Indies, and the war was to drag on for another two years.

Within a week, Colonel Hamilton had sped off to join Eliza in Albany, riding so

hard that he exhausted his horses and had to hire another pair. He was ill and fa-

tigued from more than five years of fighting and spent much of the next two

months recovering in bed. On January 22, 1782, Eliza rewarded him with a son,

christened Philip in tribute to her father. “Mrs. Hamilton has given me a fine boy,”

Hamilton wrote jovially to the vicomte de Noailles, “whose birth, as you may imag-

ine, was attended with all the omens of future greatness.”42 In case further heavy

fighting should flare up, Hamilton did not resign from the army right away and got

a furlough from Washington. Only after visiting Washington in Philadelphia in

March did Hamilton retire; he preserved his rank yet surrendered “all claim to the

compensations attached to my military station during the war or afterwards.”43

Among other things, Hamilton renounced a pension that ultimately was to equal

five years of full pay. His motives were certainly laudable—he wanted to remove the

slightest conflict of interest as the army was demobilized and its members’ future

compensation debated—but his widow and offspring were to one day rue his deci-

sion and work hard to reverse it.

Because of his valiant performance at Yorktown, Hamilton became a certified

hero. Yet it rankled that Congress never honored his bravery as Louis XVI did the

heroism of the Frenchman who seized the other redoubt. Though he lacked official

recognition, Hamilton gained something infinitely more precious for his political

future: legendary status. At Yorktown, Hamilton established his image as a roman-

tic, death-defying young officer, gallantly streaking toward the ramparts. Take away

that battle, and Hamilton would have gone down as the most prestigious of Wash-

ington’s aides, but not a hero. And without that cachet, he might never have been

appointed a major general later on.

166 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

The American Revolution transformed Hamilton from an insecure outsider to a

consummate insider who was married to the daughter of General Schuyler and

stood on easy terms with the leaders of the Continental Army. In a eulogy that he

later delivered for General Nathanael Greene, Hamilton talked about the personal

opportunities that accompany revolutions. He said of them that “it has very prop-

erly been ranked not among the least of the advantages which compensate for the

evils they produce that they serve to bring to light talents and virtues which might

otherwise have languished in obscurity or only shot forth a few scattered and wan-

dering rays.”44 Who could doubt that the comment had an autobiographical ring?

NINE

R AG I N G B I L LOW S

W ith the British still clinging to New York City after Yorktown, Hamil-

ton adopted the Schuyler mansion in Albany as his temporary home

for the next two years. His lifelong wanderings ended as he formally

became a citizen of New York State in May 1782. As he rocked the cradle and dan-

dled the infant Philip, the twenty-seven-year-old war veteran projected the image

of a contented paterfamilias. “You cannot imagine how entirely domestic I am

growing,” he told ex–Washington aide Richard Kidder Meade.1 In a letter veined

with whimsy, Hamilton described Philip at seven months:

It is agreed on all hands that he is handsome, his features are good, his eye is

not only sprightly and expressive, but it is full of benignity. His attitude in sit-

ting is by connoisseurs esteemed graceful and he has a method of waving his

hand that announces the future orator. He stands however rather awkwardly

and his legs have not all the delicate slimness of his father’s. . . . If he has any

fault in manners, he laughs too much. 2

Hamilton so savored this unaccustomed domestic role that he informed Meade,

“I lose all taste for the pursuits of ambition. I sigh for nothing but the company of

my wife and my baby.”3 Meade must have known this was poppycock and that

Hamilton’s career would move forward with its own furious inner propulsion. He

had lost time in the Caribbean, plus another five years in the Revolution, so as he

resumed the legal studies suspended at King’s he wanted to adhere to a speeded-up

timetable. For Hamilton, the law arose as the shortest route to political power—the

profession claimed thirty-four delegates at the Constitutional Convention—and it

168 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

would enable him to make a tolerable, even lucrative, living. Ordinarily, the New

York Supreme Court stipulated that would-be lawyers serve a three-year appren-

ticeship before appearing in court. However, responding to a petition from Aaron

Burr that January, the rule was temporarily waived for returning veterans who had

begun their law studies before the war. Having waded through the tomes of all the

major legal sages at King’s, Hamilton qualified for this exemption and set about

mastering the law in short order.

Unlike other aspiring lawyers of the time, Hamilton declined to clerk under a

practicing attorney and planned to instruct himself. After serving Washington, he

probably did not wish to be subservient to another boss and could not bear the

prospect of copying out legal documents for some self-styled mentor. He had access

to the superlative law library in Albany owned by his friend James Duane, its shelves

stocked with treatises on British law, which closely paralleled New York law. “In this

state, our judicial establishments resemble more nearly than in any other those of

Great Britain,” Hamilton later wrote in Federalist number 83. For Hamilton and

other New York law students, British thought crept into their minds in this sublim-

inal fashion and exerted a conservative, Anglophile influence. Particularly influen-

tial were Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries, first published in America ten

years earlier, which endowed British law with a more systematic coherence. Forrest

McDonald has observed, “Blackstone taught Hamilton a reverential enthusiasm for

the law itself. . . . Moreover, the law as Blackstone spelled it out resolved once and

for all the tension Hamilton had felt between liberty and law.”4

In that era, law students often cobbled together workbooks that arranged legal

precedents, statutes, and procedures by category. John Marshall kept a digest that

covered 238 manuscript pages, spanning more than seventy topics; he drew on it

extensively in his practice. Hamilton prepared his own manual, entitled “Practical

Proceedings in the Supreme Court of the State of New York.” This compendium of

177 manuscript pages and thirty-eight topics is the earliest surviving treatise that

captures New York law as it shifted away from British and colonial models. Hamil-

ton did not just transcribe dry extracts; he poked fun at legal pretensions. In one

place, he said facetiously that the courts had lately acquired “some faint idea that

the end of suits at law is to investigate the merits of the cause and not to [get] en-

tangle[d] in the nets of technical terms.”5 Later the source of famous proclamations

about the law’s majesty, Hamilton could also be quite waspish about his chosen

profession, telling Lafayette that he was busy “rocking the cradle and studying the

art of fleecing my neighbours.”6 “Practical Proceedings” was so expertly done, its

copious information so rigorously pigeonholed, that it was copied by hand and cir-

culated among New York law students for years until it was superseded by William

Wyche’s 1794 manual, New York Supreme Court Practice, which was itself based in

169 Raging Billows

part on Hamilton’s outline. Even then, some attorneys continued to prefer Hamil-

ton’s seminal version.

Hamilton raced through his legal studies with quicksilver speed. By July, just six

months after starting his self-education, he passed the bar exam and was licensed as

an attorney who could prepare cases before the New York State Supreme Court. In

October, he further qualified as a “counsellor” who could argue cases, a status akin

to an English barrister. He had to sign an allegiance oath, which showed the extent

to which states held sovereign sway under the Articles of Confederation: “I re-

nounce . . . all allegiance to the King of Great Britain; and . . . will bear true faith

and allegiance to the State of New York, as a free and independent state.”7

In acquiring these credentials, Hamilton lagged six months behind Aaron Burr,

who had opened an Albany law office in July 1782. Aside from having sacrificed

time to warfare, both young men were rushing to set up practices because it was

widely known that patriotic lawyers would inherit the lion’s share of legal work af-

ter the peace. This had been confirmed in November 1781 when the New York leg-

islature enacted a law barring Tory lawyers from state courts, a certain bonanza for

republican attorneys. Even though Hamilton was to hotly contest anti-Tory bias, he

and other young attorneys who had sided with the patriots profited from it during

the more than four years that the law stayed in effect.

There is little doubt that Hamilton and Burr socialized a good deal in Albany.

While Hamilton was still at Yorktown, Burr had shown up on the Schuyler doorstep

with a letter of introduction from General Alexander McDougall: “This will be

handed to you by Lieutenant Col. Burr, who goes to Albany, to solicit a license in

our courts.”8 It was probably at this point that a pregnant Eliza first smiled and

shook hands with her husband’s future executioner. Hamilton’s old classmate

Robert Troup was studying for the bar in Albany with his friend Burr, and the two

were licensed at the same time. During the summer of 1782, Troup resided at the

Schuyler mansion, helping Hamilton with whatever legal tutoring he needed.

Thus, from the outset of their careers, Hamilton and Burr were thrust into close

proximity and a competitive situation. Both were short and handsome, witty and

debonair, and fatally attractive to women. Both young colonels had the self-

possession of military men, liked to flaunt their titles, and seemed cut out to assume

distinguished places at the New York bar. Yet in the political sphere, Burr already

trailed his upstart acquaintance, who was now a hero of Yorktown and basked in

the reflected aura of General Washington. Hamilton also inhabited the splendid

Schuyler mansion, while Burr settled for a frugal life until he could build up a legal

clientele. That July, Burr married Theodosia Prevost, the confidante of Peggy Ship-

pen Arnold, in the Dutch Reformed Church frequented by the Schuylers. (Theo-

dosia’s husband, a British officer, had died in Jamaica the previous fall.) They had a

170 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

daughter, also named Theodosia, the following year. The elder Theodosia was ten

years older than Burr and was never mistaken for a beauty, but she was charming,

pleasant, and conversant in both French and English literature. As much as any man

of his day, Burr appreciated smart, accomplished women, which made his later

roguish antics all the more inexplicable to admirers.

However impressive it was that Hamilton could compress three years of legal train-

ing into nine months, he juggled several other balls at once. After Yorktown, he

wrote two more installments of the “Continentalist” essays, which he then lost or

misplaced. “He has lately recovered them,” The New-York Packet informed readers

in April 1782 in introducing “The Continentalist No. V.” The paper said he had

published the essays “more to finish the development of his plan than from any

hope that the temper of the times will adopt his ideas.”9 In a sweeping historical

tour, Hamilton showed how the English government had fostered trade starting in

the reign of Queen Elizabeth and how Louis Colbert had accomplished the like as

Louis XIV’s finance minister. He alluded to David Hume’s essays in endorsing gov-

ernment guidance of trade, which he denied was self-regulating and self-correcting.

Previewing his Treasury tenure, he advocated duties on imported goods as Amer-

ica’s best form of revenue. For a nation still fighting a revolution over unjust duties

on tea and other imports, this was, to put it mildly, a loaded topic. To those who

feared oppressive taxes, Hamilton made an argument that anticipated “supply-side

economics” of the late twentieth century, saying that officials “can have no tempta-

tion to abuse this power, because the motive of revenue will check its own extremes.

Experience has shown that moderate duties are more productive than high ones.”10

At the time, many states were loath to transfer control over their own import du-

ties to Congress, and Hamilton feared that the resulting economic rivalries would

threaten political unity. His qualms were shared by Robert Morris, who sketched

the broad contours of a program—establishing a national bank, funding the war

debt, and ending inflation—that was the forerunner of Hamilton’s work as treasury

secretary. To strengthen the central government, Morris decided to appoint a tax

receiver in each state who would be free from dependence on local officials. On

May 2, 1782, he asked Hamilton to become receiver of continental taxes for New

York. As an inducement, he assured Hamilton that he could pocket one-quarter of

1 percent of any monies collected. Hamilton, feeling harried, turned him down flat.

“Time is so precious to me that I could not put myself in the way of any interrup-

tions unless for an object of consequence to the public or to myself,” he replied.11

Hamilton may have suspected that with five New York counties still in enemy

hands, the job would not be that remunerative. In early June, Morris sweetened the

pot by guaranteeing Hamilton a percentage of the money owed, not just collected.

171 Raging Billows

This evidently persuaded Hamilton to accept the offer, and he further volunteered

to lobby the state legislature for Morris’s tax measures. Whether the self-taught

Hamilton knew it or not—and one suspects that he very much did—he was now

squarely positioned to succeed Robert Morris as America’s preeminent financial

figure.

The few months that Hamilton spent trying to gather taxes demonstrated anew

the perils of the Articles of Confederation. States regarded their payments to Con-

gress, in effect, as voluntary and often siphoned off funds for local purposes before

making any transfers. This situation, combined with a lack of independent federal

revenues, had forced the patriots to finance the Revolution by either borrowing or

printing paper money. On July 4, in his sixth “Continentalist” essay, Hamilton, with

a nod to Morris, applauded the appointment of federal customs and tax collectors

to “create in the interior of each state a mass of influence in favour of the federal

government.”12 This essay makes clear that, in the Revolution’s waning days, Hamil-

ton had to combat the utopian notion that America could dispense with taxes alto-

gether: “It is of importance to unmask this delusion and open the eyes of the people

to the truth. It is paying too great a tribute to the idol of popularity to flatter so in-

jurious and so visionary an expectation.”13

In mid-July, while still cramming for his next bar exam, Hamilton traveled to

Poughkeepsie and pleaded successfully with state legislators to form a special com-

mittee to expedite tax collection. Working with Philip Schuyler, he got the legisla-

ture to adopt a set of resolutions (likely authored by Hamilton himself ) calling for

more congressional taxing power and a national conference to overhaul the Articles

of Confederation—the first such appeal issued by a public body. Hamilton’s deter-

mined pursuit of reform won plaudits from Morris, and in his correspondence with

Hamilton, Morris let down his guard and confided his frustration at congressional

ineptitude. Hamilton repaid the candor. “The more I see, the more I find reason for

those who love this country to weep over its blindness,” Hamilton wrote.14 He re-

coiled at the cowardice and selfishness he saw rampant in the New York legislature.

“The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people,” he told

Morris. “In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fick-

leness, and folly.”15 Increasingly Hamilton despaired of pure democracy, of politi-

cians simply catering to the popular will, and favored educated leaders who would

enlighten the people and exercise their own judgment.

Whatever his disdain for state legislators, Hamilton made a favorable impression

at Poughkeepsie. Jurist James Kent recalled that “his animated and didactic conver-

sation, far superior to ordinary discourse in sentiment, language, and manner, and

his frank and manly deportment, interested my attention.”16 The legislators were so

taken with Hamilton’s presentation that he was chosen as one of five members of

172 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

New York’s delegation to the Continental (or Confederation) Congress that was to

convene in November. With typical dexterity, Hamilton had parlayed the techno-

cratic job of tax collector into a congressional seat.

For Hamilton, nobody in his generation showed a more genuine love of country or

more salient leadership traits than his friend John Laurens. In January 1782, at a

time when the British still held Charleston and Savannah, Laurens had addressed

the South Carolina legislature in a futile last bid for his star-crossed scheme to re-

cruit black troops. That July, he wrote a warm letter to Hamilton, expressing hope

that his friend would “fill only the first offices of the republic.” (Once again, a por-

tion of Laurens’s letter is missing, perhaps sanitized by Hamilton’s family.) The

note concluded, “Adieu, my dear friend. While circumstances place so great a dis-

tance between us, I entreat you not to withdraw the consolation of your letters. You

know the unalterable sentiments of your affectionate Laurens.”17 Hamilton be-

lieved fervently that, once the war ended, he and Laurens, like figures from classical

antiquity, would embark jointly on a new political crusade to lay the foundations

for a solid republican union. In mid-August, he told Laurens that the state legisla-

ture had named him to Congress. Striking an uplifting note, he made a stirring ap-

peal for his old comrade to join him there. “Quit your sword my friend, put on the

toga, come to Congress. We know each other’s sentiments, our views are the same.

We have fought side by side to make America free. Let us hand in hand struggle to

make her happy.”18

We do not know whether Laurens ever set eyes on this message. In late August

1782, a British expedition from Charleston was foraging for rice near the Comba-

hee River when the impetuous Laurens flouted orders and tried to ambush them

with a small force. The enemy was tipped off and squatted in the high grass waiting

for him. Once they stood up to fire, Laurens began to charge and exhorted his men

to follow. He was instantly cut down by a bullet. John Laurens was one of the last

casualties of the American Revolution. Many thought he had foolishly risked his life

and those of his men in a trivial action against a superior force after real hostilities

had ended. His death vindicated Washington’s judgment that the patriotic Laurens

had only one serious fault: “intrepidity bordering on rashness.”19 He was mourned

by many who thought he had had the makings of a fine leader. “Our country has

lost its most promising character in a manner, however, that was worthy of the

cause,” John Adams consoled Henry Laurens.20

For Hamilton, the news was crushing. “Poor Laurens, he has fallen a sacrifice to

his ardor in a trifling skirmish in South Carolina,” he wrote sadly to Lafayette, the

other member of their war triumvirate. “You know how truly I loved him and will

judge how much I regret him.”21 The death deprived Hamilton of the political peer,

173 Raging Billows

the steadfast colleague, that he was to need in his tempestuous battles to consolidate

the union. He would enjoy a brief collaboration with James Madison and never

lacked the stalwart if often aloof patronage of George Washington. But he was more

of a solitary crusader without Laurens, lacking an intimate lifelong ally such as

Madison and Jefferson found in each other. On a personal level, the loss was even

more harrowing. Despite a large circle of admirers, Hamilton did not form deep

friendships easily and never again revealed his interior life to another man as he had

to Laurens. He became ever more voluble in his public life but somehow less intro-

spective and revelatory in private. Henceforth, his confessional remarks were re-

served for Eliza or Angelica Church. After the death of John Laurens, Hamilton shut

off some compartment of his emotions and never reopened it.

In late November 1782, Alexander Hamilton, after trotting on horseback all the way

from Albany, arrived in Philadelphia to take up his place in the Confederation Con-

gress. The city of forty thousand people that he encountered was larger and more

affluent than New York or Boston. Having grown up in seaside towns, he must have

found something pleasingly familiar about this seaport with its tall-masted ships

and extensive wharves. Compared to the raucous commercial chaos of New York,

Philadelphia was a more orderly place, abounding in elegant homes tucked tidily

behind garden walls. On sunny days, fashionable ladies strolled with parasols. Many

tree-shaded streets had brick sidewalks swept clean by a sanitation department and

illuminated nightly by whale-oil lamps. Though Presbyterians and Baptists now

outnumbered Quakers, a trace of their old austerity lingered. By 11:00 p.m., one

young English visitor grumbled, “there is no city in the world, perhaps, so quiet. At

that hour, you may walk over half the town without seeing the face of a human be-

ing, except the watchman.”22

Hamilton had left Eliza and baby Philip behind but was still the starry-eyed

newlywed and did not wander the streets in search of nocturnal adventure. He as-

sured his wife several weeks after arriving that “there never was a husband who

could vie with yours in fidelity and affection.”23 At first, he tolerated Eliza’s absence

well and did not yearn for her presence until early January, when he began arrang-

ing her trip to Philadelphia—then he could not wait to see her. “Every hour in the

day I feel a severe pang on this account and half my nights are sleepless,” he told her.

“Come my charmer and relieve me. Bring my darling boy to my bosom.”24

In Philadelphia, Hamilton found himself part of a Congress whose inadequacy

he had long ridiculed. The whole jerry-built structure—the endless ad hoc com-

mittees, the voting rules that encouraged states to veto vital measures, the term

limits that restricted congressmen to three one-year terms in a six-year period—

guaranteed paralysis. As Hamilton complained, the undemocratic voting rules put

174 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

it in the power “of a small combination to retard and even to frustrate the most nec-

essary measures.”25 For someone with his reverence for efficiency, it was an exas-

perating situation. The problems only worsened after November 30, 1782, when

American peace commissioners signed a provisional peace treaty with Great Brit-

ain, sapping incentives for further unity. Local leaders such as Sam Adams in Mas-

sachusetts and Patrick Henry in Virginia eloquently asserted the sovereignty of the

states. So magnetic was the allure of state governments that many members of Con-

gress stayed home, making it difficult to muster quorums. The caliber of delegates

suffered accordingly, and their jealous discords infuriated Hamilton.

He was saved from despondency by a like-minded delegate who also foresaw a

mighty nation and had a richly furnished mind to match his own: James Madison.

They shared a continental perspective, enjoyed a congruent sense of missions, and

served together on numerous committees. Having been thrown on his own re-

sources at an early age, Hamilton, twenty-seven, was far more worldly than Madi-

son, thirty-one, who had led a cosseted life. On the other hand, Madison, laboring in

Congress since 1780, was already a seasoned legislator. He was so conscientious that

he set a congressional endurance record by scarcely missing a day during three years

of service. The French minister rated Madison “the man of soundest judgment in

Congress. . . . He speaks nearly always with fairness and wins the approval of his

colleagues.”26

In many ways, Madison was a pivotal figure in Hamilton’s career, their early col-

laboration and later falling-out demarcating distinct stages in Hamilton’s life. Peo-

ple tended either to embrace Hamilton or to abhor him; Madison stands out for

having alternated between the usual extremes. Small and shy, James Madison had a

formidable mind, but he was unprepossessing in manner and appearance. He usu-

ally dressed in black, had the bookish pallor of a scholar, and cut a somber figure.

Seldom did he smile in public, and the wife of one Virginia politician chided him

for being “a gloomy stiff creature.”27 Another female observer found Madison en-

tertaining in private but “mute, cold, and repulsive” in company.28 He did not court

publicity and lacked the charismatic sparkle that made the brashly confident Hamil-

ton a natural leader. If Hamilton seemed born to rule, then Madison seemed born

to reflect. Still, Madison’s diffidence could be deceptive, and his indomitable force

showed when he opened his mouth. He was a queer mixture of intellectual assur-

ance, bordering on conceit, and social timidity and awkwardness. Lacking Hamil-

ton’s social ease and fluency, he could also be funny and a superb raconteur among

warm companions, even telling the occasional bawdy tale. At the time they met,

Madison was a priggish bachelor and tight-lipped about his private affairs. No per-

sonal gossip ever smudged the severe rectitude of James Madison’s image.

Madison came from a family that had lived comfortably in Virginia’s Piedmont

175 Raging Billows

region for a century and was related to many local landowners. Madison’s grand-

father owned 29 slaves, and his father boosted that number to 118, making him the

largest slaveholder in Orange County, Virginia. The family also owned up to ten

thousand acres in the county. Until age fifty, Madison, the oldest of ten children,

lived in economic dependence on his father and even in Congress fell back on in-

come from the family plantation. Like Jefferson, he could not escape his depen-

dence on slavery, whatever his private qualms, and told his father during his last

year in Congress that unless the delegates got a pay raise, “I shall be under the ne-

cessity of selling a Negro.”29

Against an incongruous backdrop of black hands stooping in the fields, Madison

passed his cloistered childhood. Suffering from a nervous disorder reminiscent of

epilepsy, he was prone to hypochondria and, like many sickly children, took to

reading. He received a fine classical education: five years at a boarding school, fol-

lowed by two years of private tutoring on his plantation. At Princeton, he absorbed

prodigious heaps of books and slept only four or five hours per night. President

Witherspoon, who had rejected Hamilton, remarked of Madison that “during the

whole time he was under [my] tuition [I] never knew him to do, or to say, an im-

proper thing.”30 Madison retained the air of a perennial student and always im-

mersed himself in laborious study before major political events.

Because of poor health, Madison served only briefly as a colonel in the Orange

County militia and then became a member of the Virginia House of Delegates and

the governor’s Council of State before being named the youngest member of Con-

gress in 1780. Hamilton and Madison represented a new generation of postwar

leaders whose careers were wholly identified with the new republic. At this junc-

ture, they had a similar vision of the structural reforms needed by the government.

Madison favored a standing army, a permanent navy, and other positions later as-

sociated with the Hamiltonians. If anything, Madison was even more militant than

Hamilton in asserting central authority and wanted Congress to be able to apply

force against states that refused to pay their requested contributions.

Despite the thorny complexities, it was a heady time for these two young men

who saw themselves striving for mankind. As Madison phrased it in April 1783, the

rights for which America contended “were the rights of human nature,” and its cit-

izens were “responsible for the greatest trust ever confided to a political society.”31

To galvanize the new country, Hamilton and Madison concentrated on the crying

need for revenue—a need alleviated only partially when John Adams had arranged

a large loan from Holland on June 11, 1782. They believed that Congress required

a permanent, independent revenue source, free from reliance on the capricious

whims of the states. Only then could Congress retire the huge war debt and stem a

nascent movement to repudiate it. Hamilton stressed this in a resolution that read

176 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

like a fervent trumpet blast: “Resolved, that it is the opinion of Congress that com-

plete JUSTICE cannot be done to the creditors of the United States, nor restoration

of PUBLIC CREDIT be effected, nor the future exigencies of the war provided for,

but by the establishment of permanent and adequate funds to operate generally

throughout the United States, to be collected by Congress.”32

Hamilton joined Madison in a campaign to introduce a federal impost—a 5 per-

cent duty on all imports—that would finally grant Congress autonomy in money

matters. For Hamilton, the overriding goal was to institute a federal power of taxa-

tion. The most heated opposition came from Rhode Island, and Hamilton and

Madison sat on a committee that dealt with the maverick state. They issued a joint

statement, almost entirely in Hamilton’s handwriting, that reiterated his now stan-

dard plea of the importance of public credit to national honor. Then came a state-

ment still more fraught with large consequences: “The truth is that no federal

constitution can exist without powers that, in their exercise, affect the internal pol-

icy of the component members.”33

Hamilton was throwing down a gauntlet: the central government had to have

the right to enact laws that superseded those of the states and to deal directly with

their citizens. In late January, he made a still more heretical speech: he wanted to as-

sign federal tax collectors to the states as a way of “pervading and uniting” them.34

Hamilton was now aiming openly not at a makeshift confederation of states but at

a unitary nation. Taken aback by this excessive candor, Madison noted that some

members “smiled at the disclosure” and gloated privately “that Mr. Hamilton had

let out the secret.”35 The incident again showed that Hamilton, far from being a

crafty plotter, often could not muzzle his opinions. He was not one to traffic in half-

hearted measures—Congress was setting enduring precedents for peacetime—and

he opposed a compromise bill in April that limited the scope of the imposts and

left revenue collection to each state. Hamilton’s quarrel with New York governor

George Clinton over the impost was to blossom into full-blown mutual animosity

and profoundly affect the rest of his career.

Money was needed urgently to mollify the disaffected officers of the Continental

Army, who threatened to turn mutinous at their winter camp in Newburgh, New

York. The provisional peace treaty raised the unsettling prospect that the army

might disband without officers receiving either back pay—as much as six years

owed, in some cases—or promised pensions. The officer corps buzzed with threats

of mass resignations, and a three-man delegation went to Philadelphia to negotiate

a solution. On January 6, 1783, they presented Congress with a petition that ex-

pressed festering grievances: “We have borne all that men can bear—our property

is expended—our private resources are at an end.”36 Some soldiers had been left so

177 Raging Billows

indebted by the fighting and the devalued currency that they feared they would be

jailed upon their discharge from the army. Hamilton and Madison met with the

disgruntled officers and were assigned to a subcommittee to devise a solution. The

two men seized the chance to admonish Congress to fund the entire national war

debt and satisfy the soldiers along with other creditors. The sad reality was that, de-

prived of real taxing power, Congress could offer the soldiers little but rhetorical

solace.

Hamilton held out slim hope that the states would replenish the general coffers

and appease the officers’ demands. With his pessimistic imagination, he dwelled

on the dangers inherent in situations, and he feared that civil strife, even disunion,

would follow peace with Britain. In mid-February, he wrote apprehensively to Gov-

ernor Clinton, outlining a plan to resettle military officers in New York State: “I

wish the legislature would set apart a tract of territory and make a liberal allowance

to every officer and soldier of the army at large who will become a citizen of the

state.” As a leading “continentalist,” Hamilton knew that such a suggestion might

seem to counter his image. “It is the first wish of my heart that the union may last,”

he explained, “but feeble as the links are, what prudent man would rely upon it?

Should a disunion take place, any person who will cast his eyes upon the map will

see how essential it is to our state to provide for its own security.”37 In this case,

Clinton heeded Hamilton’s advice and handed out lucrative land grants in New

York State to willing officers.

Hamilton knew that the final arbiter of the deadly stalemate between restive of-

ficers and an impotent Congress was George Washington, with whom he had not

corresponded in more than a year. On February 13, presuming on their former

trust, Hamilton addressed a confidential letter to him. Writing now as a peer, he

dared to advise Washington on how to handle the threatened uprising. For Hamil-

ton, such a threat had its uses if it could prod a lethargic Congress into bolstering

national finances: “The claims of the army, urged with moderation but with firm-

ness, may operate on those weak minds which are influenced by their appre-

hensions more than their judgments. . . . But the difficulty will be to keep a

complaining and suffering army within the bounds of moderation.”38 For Washing-

ton to maintain his standing among both the army and the citizenry at large,

Hamilton urged him to badger Congress through surrogates.

Hamilton was coaxing Washington to dabble in a dangerous game of pretending

to be a lofty statesman while covertly orchestrating pressure on Congress. The let-

ter shows Hamilton at his most devious, playing with combustible forces. (He

wasn’t alone in this strategy: Gouverneur Morris in Philadelphia was also writing to

General Nathanael Greene that the states would never pay the army “unless the

army be united and determined in the pursuit of it.”)39 Hamilton feared that the

178 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

cautious Washington might be thrust aside by more militant officers and told him

of whispering in the army that he did not uphold his soldiers’ interests “with suffi-

cient warmth. The falsehood of this opinion no one can be better acquainted with

than myself, but it is not the less mischievous for being false.”40

A week later, Hamilton and Madison met at the home of Thomas FitzSimons to

discuss the growing officer militance. Madison’s notes give us Hamilton’s unexpur-

gated view of Washington at the time. It jibes with his earlier statements about

Washington’s sometimes irritable personality but absolute rectitude:

Mr. Hamilton said that he knew Gen[era]l Washington intimately and per-

fectly, that his extreme reserve, mixed sometimes with a degree of asperity of

temper, both of which were said to have increased of late, had contributed to

the decline of his popularity. But that his virtue, his patriotism, and his firm-

ness would . . . never yield to any dishonorable plans into which he might be

called. That he would sooner suffer himself to be cut into pieces; that he (Mr.

Hamilton), knowing this to be his true character, wished him to be the con-

ductor of the army in their plans for redress in order that they might be mod-

erated and directed to proper objects.41

On March 4, Washington thanked Hamilton for his frank letter and confessed

that he had not fathomed the abysmal state of America’s finances. He referred

gravely to the “contemplative hours” he had spent on the subject of the soldiers’

pay: “The sufferings of a complaining army on one hand, and the inability of Con-

gress and tardiness of the states on the other, are the forebodings of evil.” Washing-

ton then obliquely rebuffed Hamilton’s misguided suggestion that he exploit army

discontent to goad Congress into action on public finance, saying it might “excite

jealousy and bring on its concomitants.”42 With unerring foresight, Washington

perceived the importance of enshrining the principle that military power should be

subordinated to civilian control.

The Newburgh situation grew only more incendiary. In the following days, two

anonymous letters made the rounds in camp, fomenting opposition to Washington

and rallying the officers to apply force against Congress. One document warned

darkly, “Suspect the man who would advise to more moderation and longer for-

bearance.”43 It seemed as if the new nation might be lurching toward a military

putsch. On March 12, Washington, alarmed by this state of affairs, told Hamilton

that he would attend an officers’ meeting on March 15 to stop them from “plung-

ing themselves into a gulf of civil horror from which there might be no receding.”44

Washington kept his diplomatic balance, trying to head off rash action by his offi-

179 Raging Billows

cers while pleading for timely congressional relief. “Let me beseech you therefore,

my good sir,” he told Hamilton, “to urge this matter earnestly and without further

delay. The situation of these gentlemen, I do verily believe, is distressing beyond de-

scription.”45

On March 15, Washington addressed the officers, determined to squash a re-

ported scheme to march on Congress. For the first time, he confronted a hostile au-

dience of his own men. Washington sternly rebuked talk of rebellion, saying it

would threaten the liberties for which they had fought. An insurrection would only

“open the floodgates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood.”46 He

then staged the most famous coup de théâtre of his career. He was about to read

aloud a letter from a congressman when the words swam before his eyes. So he

fished in his pockets for his glasses. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you will permit me to

put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service to

my country.”47 The mutinous soldiers, inexpressibly moved, were shamed by their

opposition to Washington and restored to their senses. Washington agreed to lobby

Congress on their behalf, and a committee chaired by Hamilton granted the officers

a pension payment equivalent to five years’ full pay. Whether Congress could really

make good on such payments without its own taxing power was another question.

As soon as he heard of Washington’s virtuoso performance, Hamilton ap-

plauded him: “Your Excellency has, in my opinion, acted wisely. The best way is ever

not to attempt to stem a torrent but to divert it. You coincide in opinion with me on

the conduct proper to be observed by yourself.”48 Washington had heeded Hamil-

ton’s advice in assuming a leadership role but had pointedly ignored his advice

about inflaming the situation for political ends. Hamilton still clung to the notion

that a convincing bluff of armed force could help spur congressional action, but

that was as far as he would venture. “As to any combination of force,” he observed,

“it would only be productive of the horrors of a civil war, might end in the ruin of

the country, and would certainly end in the ruin of the army.”49

The feared mutiny at Newburgh deepened but also complicated relations be-

tween Hamilton and Washington. It reinforced their mutual conviction that the

Articles of Confederation had to be revised root and branch and Congress strength-

ened. “More than half the perplexities I have experienced in the course of my com-

mand, and almost the whole of the difficulties and distress of the army, have their

origin here,” Washington wrote of congressional weakness.50 At the same time,

Washington saw a certain Machiavellian streak in Hamilton and bluntly told him of

grumbling in the army about congressmen who tried to use the soldiers as “mere

puppets to establish continental funds.” He lectured Hamilton: “The army . . . is a

dangerous instrument to play with.”51 Washington must have seen that Hamilton,

180 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

for all his brains and daring, sometimes lacked judgment and had to be supervised

carefully. On the other hand, Hamilton had employed his wiles in the service of

ideals that Washington himself endorsed.

In the spring of 1783, Alexander Hamilton, twenty-eight, already stood near the

pinnacle of national affairs. He chaired a military committee that hatched the first

plan for a peacetime army under the aegis of the federal government. In early April,

Congress named him chairman of the committee in charge of peace arrangements,

equipped with a spacious mandate to investigate ways to “provide a system for for-

eign affairs, for Indian affairs, for military and naval peace establishments,” in

Madison’s words. That month, Congress ratified the provisional peace treaty with

Britain, marking an end to eight years of hostilities—news that only amplified the

menacing clamor among soldiers who wanted to pocket their pay before going

home. “And here, my dear Colo[nel] Hamilton,” Washington wrote, “let me assure

you that it would not be more difficult to still the raging billows in a tempestuous

gale than to convince the officers of this army of the justice or policy of paying men

in civil offices full wages when they cannot obtain a sixtieth part of their dues.”52

Even though Congress enacted a new system of import duties that April, Hamilton

still feared that it would lack the requisite funds to pacify the army. When Robert

Morris threatened to quit as superintendent of finance in May, Hamilton was

among those enlisted to persuade him to stay until the army could be safely dis-

banded. He introduced an emergency resolution, asking the states to send money to

the common treasury so the soldiers could be paid and demobilized.

In mid-June, the raging billows that Washington had warned about still surged

and foamed. Rebellious troops in Philadelphia sent a petition to Congress, couched

in threatening language, demanding their money. Two days later, word came that

eighty armed soldiers were marching from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to Philadelphia

to pry loose the pay owed to them. Their surly ranks swelled as they advanced.

Hamilton, now Congress’s man for all seasons, was swiftly drafted into a three-man

committee to fend off the threat. He and his colleagues appealed to Pennsylvania’s

Supreme Executive Council to send local militiamen to stop these soldiers before

they reached Philadelphia and made common cause with troops in local barracks.

Hamilton was irate when the state refused to act until some outrage was perpe-

trated. Unafraid to lead, he stepped into the void fearlessly and directed Major

William Jackson, assistant secretary at war, to intercept the rowdy protesters before

they reached the city line. “You will represent to them with coolness but energy the

impropriety of such irregular proceedings,” he instructed, “and the danger they will

run by persisting in an improper conduct.”53

The troops, brushing Jackson aside, poured into Philadelphia on June 20, banded

181 Raging Billows

together with fractious troops in city barracks, and seized control of several arse-

nals. The next day, Elias Boudinot, president of Congress and Hamilton’s erstwhile

sponsor, convened a special Saturday-afternoon session of Congress to deal with

the worsening crisis. That morning, Boudinot heard reports that rebel troops might

sack the local bank. The congressmen were scarcely seated when about four hun-

dred rebel soldiers, bayonets stabbing the air, encircled the State House, where

Congress and the state’s Supreme Executive Council occupied separate chambers.

Things looked ominous: the mutineers far surpassed in number loyal troops guard-

ing the doors. The symbolism was especially troubling: a mob of drunken soldiers

had besieged the people’s delegates in the building where the Declaration of Inde-

pendence had been signed.

The congressmen did not fear “premeditated violence,” Madison reported, “but

it was observed that spiritous drink from the tippling houses adjoining began to be

liberally served out to the soldiers and might lead to hasty excesses.”54 The increas-

ingly drunken troops sent a scolding petition to the delegates inside, insisting that

they be allowed to choose their own officers and threatening to unleash an “enraged

soldiery” unless their demands were met within twenty minutes. The delegates re-

fused to submit to such blackmail, shorten their session, or negotiate with rabble.

After three hours, the embattled congressmen marched out of the State House to

the sneers and taunts of rioters. As he emerged, Hamilton saw embodied his worst

nightmare: a portion of the revolutionary army had broken down into a mob that

was intimidating an enfeebled central government. Now it was Hamilton, like

Washington three months before, who made a vigorous case for military subor-

dination to civilian rule. “The licentiousness of an army is to be dreaded in every

government,” he later commented, “but in a republic it is more particularly to be re-

strained, and when directed against the civil authority to be checked with energy

and punished with severity.”55 The situation made him again wonder how a spirited

young democracy could generate the respect necessary for the rule of law to endure.

That evening, Elias Boudinot assembled congressmen at his home. They passed

a defiant resolution, written by Hamilton, claiming that government authority had

been “grossly insulted” by the rioters and demanding that “effectual measures be

immediately taken for supporting the public authority.”56 If Pennsylvania persisted

in its spineless inaction, Congress would relocate to Trenton or Princeton—by no

coincidence, the scenes of famous patriotic victories. The next morning, Hamilton

and Oliver Ellsworth delivered this blunt ultimatum to John Dickinson, now the

president of the Supreme Executive Council. If Pennsylvania could not guarantee

the safety of Congress, then it would suspend all further meetings in the city.

After his encounter with the council, Hamilton lost all hope that the state would

send out the militia, and he submitted a chilling report to Congress. The mutineers,

182 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

he noted, had selected their own officers to present their grievances and authorized

them to use force, even threatening them “with death in case of their failing to exe-

cute their views.”57 Aghast at the “weak and disgusting” behavior of Pennsylvania’s

leaders at a moment demanding unequivocal action, Hamilton reluctantly con-

cluded and Congress agreed that they should adjourn to Princeton by Thursday.58

In short order, Congress fled across the state line and set up a movable capital in

Princeton. The delegates settled crankily into cramped, makeshift quarters, Madi-

son sharing a bed with another delegate in a room scarcely larger than ten feet

square. Most shocking to this bibliophile, it lacked a desk. “I am obliged to write in

a position that scarcely admits the use of any of my limbs,” he complained.59 So

primitive were the Princeton lodgings that one month later Congress, like a French

medieval court in the hunting season, packed up again and moved to Annapolis,

followed by Trenton one year later, then New York City in 1785. Of this runaway

Congress, hounded from its home, Benjamin Rush said that it was “abused, laughed

at, and cursed in every company.”60 True to Hamilton’s prediction, the insurrection

collapsed as soon as resolute action was undertaken. The Pennsylvania council

tardily called up five hundred militiamen; once the mutineers learned of an ap-

proaching detachment, they laid down their arms, and the Lancaster contingent

trudged back to its base.

A perpetual magnet for controversy, Hamilton was stung by charges that he had

conspired to move the capital from Philadelphia as part of a plot to transfer it to

New York. In fact, Hamilton had feared that if Congress decamped, it would dilute

domestic respect for its authority and sully America’s image abroad. On July 2, he

seconded a resolution that Congress should return to Philadelphia and prodded

Madison for a statement confirming that he had postponed the flight to Princeton

until the very last instant. Like an attorney collecting affidavits in a lawsuit, Hamil-

ton asked his colleague, “Did I appear to wish to hasten it, or did I not rather show

a strong decision to procrastinate it?”61 Madison obliged with a letter: yes, Hamil-

ton had stalled until the last moment. Once again, the thin-skinned Hamilton was

quick to refute insinuations of duplicity or self-interest. Convinced that appear-

ances, not reality, ruled in politics, he never wanted to allow misimpressions to

linger, however briefly, in the air.

The Philadelphia mutiny had major repercussions in American history, for it

gave rise to the notion that the national capital should be housed in a special fed-

eral district where it would never stand at the mercy of state governments. For

Hamilton, the episode only heightened his dismay over the Confederation Con-

gress and the folly of relying on state militias. On the other hand, he thought

Congress had been unfairly blamed for failing to fulfill its duties when it was con-

183 Raging Billows

sistently deprived of the means of doing so. Its flagrant weaknesses stemmed from

its constitution, not from its administration.

By the time the Pennsylvania mutineers dispersed, Hamilton had endured seven

weary months in Congress, a period that had taxed his energy and patience. That

three of New York’s five delegates had been absent much of the time only added to

his heavy burden. He had concluded that the country was not ready to amend the

risible Articles of Confederation, because local and state politics exerted too domi-

nant an influence. “Experience must convince us that our present establishments

are utopian before we shall be ready to part with them for better,” he told Nathanael

Greene.62 While marking time in Princeton in July, Hamilton drafted a resolution

that again called for a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. This pre-

scient document encapsulated many features of the 1787 Constitution: a federal

government with powers separated among legislative, executive, and judicial branches,

and a Congress with the power to levy taxes and raise an army. Hamilton again

questioned the doctrine of free trade when he argued for federal regulation of trade

so that “injurious branches of commerce might be discouraged, favourable branches

encouraged, [and] useful products and manufactures promoted.”63 With his hyper-

active mind, Hamilton was already fleshing out a rough draft of America’s future

government.

Yet with the war ending, many advocates of state sovereignty wanted Congress

dismantled as a permanent body. They thought the current Congress was too

strong. “The constant session of Congress cannot be necessary in times of peace,”

said Thomas Jefferson, who wanted to replace it with a committee.64 Slowly but in-

exorably, the future battle lines were being drawn between those who wanted an en-

ergetic central government and those who wanted rights to revert to the states.

When his draft resolution foundered, Hamilton saw no need to dawdle any longer

in this dwindling, demoralized Congress. On July 22, he informed Eliza that once

the definitive peace treaty arrived, he would join her: “I give you joy, my angel, of

the happy conclusion of the important work in which your country has been en-

gaged. Now, in a very short time, I hope we shall be happily settled in New York.”65

Hamilton was dragooned into riding back to Albany with the dour Mrs.

Schuyler, who insisted on making a detour through New York City. This stopover

gave Hamilton a queasy foretaste of the tensions brewing between returning patri-

ots and British sympathizers. He was scandalized by the flight of Tory business-

men—seven thousand had sailed for Nova Scotia in April alone—and feared the

economic wreckage that might ensue from this large-scale exodus. When he got

back to Albany, a shaken Hamilton wrote to Robert R. Livingston, “Many mer-

chants of second class, characters of no political consequence, each of whom may

184 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

carry away eight or ten thousand guineas have, I am told, applied for shipping to

convey them away. Our state will feel for twenty years at least the effect of the pop-

ular frenzy.”66

For more than a century, November 25, 1783, was commemorated in New York

City as Evacuation Day, the blessed end to seven years of British rule and martial

law. At the southern tip of Manhattan, in a spiteful parting gesture, sullen redcoats

greased the fort’s flagpole as the last British troops were ferried out to transport

ships waiting in the harbor. Once the British had relinquished their hold over this

last outpost of occupied soil, the procession of American worthies entered, led by

General Henry Knox, who hoisted the American flag up a newly pitched pole. Can-

non rattled off a thirteen-gun salute, flags flapped, and crowds cheered in delirium

as George Washington and Governor George Clinton, guarded by Westchester light

cavalry, rode side by side into the city, followed by throngs of citizens and soldiers

marching eight abreast. The long, triumphant procession wound down to the Bat-

tery, taking in the roars of the ecstatic crowds packing the streets. America had been

purged of the last vestiges of British rule. It had been a long and grueling experi-

ence—the eight years of fighting counted as the country’s longest conflict until

Vietnam—and the cost had been exceedingly steep in blood and treasure. Gordon

Wood has noted that the twenty-five thousand American military deaths amounted

to nearly 1 percent of the entire population, a percentage exceeded only by the

Civil War.67

As Washington gazed at the crowds, he could observe on every street corner de-

bris left by the war. The British had never rebuilt those sections of the town blighted

by the giant conflagration of September 1776. The city was now a shantytown of

tents and hovels, interspersed with skeletal ruins of mansions and hollowed-out

dwellings. Cows roamed weedy streets rank with garbage. When the future mayor

James Duane saw his old properties, he moaned that they “look as if they had been

inhabited by savages or wild beasts.”68 To provide firewood for British troops, the

city had been denuded of fences and trees, and the wharves stood rotting and de-

cayed. “Noisome vapours arise from the mud left in the docks and slips at low wa-

ter,” said one visitor, “and unwholesome smells are occasioned by such a number of

people being crowded together in so small a compass, almost like herrings in a bar-

rel, most of them very dirty and not a small number sick of some disease.”69 Hamil-

ton was already meditating a plan for removing this devastation. Instead of

patching up derelict houses and building huts on vacant lots, he expressed hope

that the city’s mechanics and artisans would find “profitable and durable employ-

ment in erecting large and elegant edifices.”70

Less apparent but no less momentous than the physical change was the huge de-

185 Raging Billows

mographic shift triggered by the approaching peace. As British hopes of victory

faded, many Loyalists had crowded aboard convoys and escaped to Britain, Canada,

and Bermuda. At the same time, there was a countervailing influx of patriots that

doubled New York City’s population from about twelve thousand on Evacuation

Day to twenty-four thousand just two years later, making it a booming metropolis

that surpassed Boston and Baltimore in size. The surge of new and returning resi-

dents drove up prices sharply for food, fuel, and lodging.

During his stay of a little more than a week in New York, Washington salvaged

the reputations of several suspected Tories who had engaged in espionage for the

patriots. Whether coincidentally or not, two were old acquaintances of Hamilton

from King’s College days. The morning after he entered New York, Washington

breakfasted with the loquacious tailor, Hercules Mulligan, who had spied on British

officers visiting his shop. To wipe away any doubts about Mulligan’s true loyalties,

Washington pronounced him “a true friend of liberty.”71

Washington also strolled into the bookshop of the urbane printer James Riving-

ton, who had been attacked by Isaac Sears and the Sons of Liberty when Hamilton

was at King’s. With the war over, Rivington tried to stay in business by deleting the

world Royal from his newspaper’s name and the British arms from its masthead,

but he finally had to suspend publication. In reality, he had done yeoman’s work for

the patriots, having stolen the British fleet’s signal book, which had been transmit-

ted to Admiral de Grasse. Washington disappeared into a back room with Riving-

ton under the guise of consulting some agricultural books and rewarded him with

a bag of gold pieces.

On December 4, Washington made his tearful farewell to his officers at Fraunces

Tavern at the corner of Broad and Pearl Streets, again underscoring that military of-

ficers were merely servants of the republic. Washington resisted all calls to become

a king. There is no proof that Hamilton attended the historic valedictory, in spite of

his having been at Washington’s side for four years of war. His absence, which must

have been noted, suggests that he still nursed some secret wound because of his

treatment by Washington. Certainly Washington, of all people, would not have

lacked the magnanimity to invite him. Afterward, trailed by speechless admirers,

Washington strolled down Whitehall Street and boarded a barge that carried him to

the New Jersey shore.

Just a few days earlier, Alexander and Eliza Hamilton, along with baby Philip,

had begun to rent a house at 57 (later 58) Wall Street, not far from Fraunces Tavern.

For the first time, the vagabond young man from the West Indies had a real home-

town, a permanent address. By the standards of the day, Wall Street was a broad, el-

egant thoroughfare, and many of the best-known merchant families resided there.

The Hamiltons lived on the less fashionable eastern end, which was full of shops

186 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

and offices, while Aaron and Theodosia Burr lived at tony 3 Wall Street—“next

door but one to the City Hall,” at Wall and Broad, as Burr proudly put it.72 The lives

of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr continued in parallel. Both had passed the

bar in Albany at almost the same time, and they now occupied the same New York

street and inaugurated their legal practices at almost the same time.

After so many years of war, Hamilton had a pressing need to earn money and

tried to keep full-time politics at bay. A month after Evacuation Day, he spotted a

newspaper item stating that he had been nominated for the New York Assembly.

Hamilton politely but firmly deflected the honor. “Being determined to decline

public office,” he wrote to the paper, “I think it proper to declare my determination

to avoid in any degree distracting the votes of my fellow citizens.”73 Local populists

associated with the Sons of Liberty scored lopsided victories in the election, result-

ing in a spate of punitive measures against Tories. As a fierce opponent of such

vengeance, Hamilton busied himself defending persecuted Tories and halting their

banishment.

Perhaps no individual was identified more with the postwar resurgence of New

York City—not to mention the city’s future greatness—than Alexander Hamilton.

He was destined to excel in what was to emerge as America’s commercial and fi-

nancial metropolis, and he articulated the most expansive vision of its future.

Nonetheless his vision was imperfect. At a dinner party soon after Evacuation Day,

Hamilton and some other educated young men fated to lead the city debated

whether to invest in local real estate or unspoiled forestland upstate. Hamilton’s son

James told the tale:

John Jay was in favor of New York and made purchases there and as his means

enabled him to hold his lots. His speculation made him rich. . . . Some of the

others, including my father, took the opposite view and invested in the lands

in the northern counties of the state. The wild lands were purchased at a few

cents an acre, but they were not settled very rapidly.74

This last sentence was a gross understatement. That Alexander Hamilton opted to

purchase land in the far northern woods and bungled the chance to buy dirt-cheap

Manhattan real estate must certainly count as one of his few conspicuous failures of

economic judgment.

TEN

A G R AV E , S I L E NT, ST R A N G E

S O RT O F A N I M A L

F rom the time he started out as a young lawyer in postwar New York, Hamil-

ton presented a dashing figure in society. He was trim and stylish, though not

showy in dress. His account books reflect a concern with fashion, as shown

by periodic visits to a French tailor, and his sartorial elegance is confirmed in por-

traits. In one painting, he wears a double-breasted coat with brass buttons and

gilt-edged lapels, his neck swathed delicately in a ruffled lace jabot. One French

historian remarked, “He belonged to the age of manners and silk stockings and

handsome shoe-buckles.”1 He was as fastidious as a courtier in caring for his

reddish-brown hair, and his son James recorded his daily ritual with the barber: “I

recollect being in my father’s office in New York when he was under the hands of his

hair-dress[er] (which was his daily course). His back hair was long. It was plaited,

clubbed up, and tied with a black ribbon. His front hair was pomatumed [i.e., po-

maded], powdered, and combed up and back from his forehead.”2 Many artists who

painted Hamilton picked up the quiet smile that suffused his ruddy cheeks and

shined in his close-set blue eyes, conveying an impression of mental keenness, in-

ner amusement, and debonair insouciance. His strong, well-defined features, espe-

cially the sharply assertive nose and chin, made for a distinctive profile. Indeed, his

family thought a profile—not a portrait—done by James Sharples the best likeness

of him ever done.

Hamilton’s friends liked to rhapsodize his charm. His Federalist ally Fisher Ames

was to eulogize his great capacity for friendship by saying that he was “so entirely

the friend of his friends . . . that his power over their affections was entire and

lasted through his life.”3 For Judge James Kent, who often rendered him in superla-

tives, Hamilton “was blessed with a very amiable, generous, tender, and charitable

188 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

disposition, and he had the most artless simplicity of any man I ever knew. It was

impossible not to love as well as respect and admire him.”4 Yet close observers also

detected something contradictory in the way the mobile features shifted quickly

from gravity to mirth. Boston lawyer William Sullivan noted the contrasting ex-

pressions of his face: “When at rest, it had rather a severe and thoughtful expres-

sion, but when engaged in conversation, it easily assumed an attractive smile.”5 This

mixture of the grave and the playful was the very essence of his nature. His grand-

son wrote that Hamilton’s personality was “a mixture of aggressive force and infi-

nite tenderness and amiability.”6

In his early years, Hamilton drew much of his social sustenance from the small,

clubby circle of New York lawyers. The New York Directory for 1786 listed approxi-

mately forty people under the rubric “Lawyers, Attorneys, and Notary-Publics.” The

departure of many Tory lawyers had cleared the path for capable, ambitious men in

their late twenties and early thirties, including Burr, Brockholst Livingston, Robert

Troup, John Laurance, and Morgan Lewis. They were constantly thrown together in

and out of court. Much of the time they rode the circuit together, often accompa-

nied by the judge, enduring long journeys in crude stagecoaches that jolted along

bumpy upstate roads. They stayed in crowded, smoky inns and often had to share

beds with one another, creating a camaraderie that survived many political battles.

To assist with a caseload of mostly civil but also criminal work, Hamilton struck

a partnership with Balthazar de Haert, who was either his colleague or his office

manager for three years. Though he had just passed the bar himself, Hamilton was

swamped with requests to coach aspiring lawyers, and he trained the sons of many

prominent men, including John Adams. Hamilton struck his young charges as an

exacting boss. One early trainee, Dirck Ten Broeck, recruited straight from Yale,

wrote a former classmate a mournful letter about clerking for the little dynamo:

“But now, instead of all the happiness once so near to view, I am deeply engaged in

the study of law, the attaining of which requires the sacrifice of every pleasure [and]

demands unremitted application. . . . [H]eavy for the most part have been the

hours to me.”7

Notwithstanding later conspiracy talk that he had stashed away bribes from the

British, Hamilton seemed relatively indifferent to money, and many contempo-

raries expressed amazement at his reasonable fees. The duc de La Rochefoucauld-

Liancourt commented, “The lack of interest in money, rare anywhere, but even

rarer in America, is one of the most universally recognized traits of Mr. Hamilton,

although his current practice is quite lucrative. I’ve heard his clients say that their

sole quibble with him is the modesty of the fees that he asks.”8 Robert Troup said

that Hamilton rejected fees if they were larger than he thought warranted and gen-

erally favored arbitration or amicable settlements in lieu of lawsuits.

189 A Grave, Silent, Strange Sort of Animal

Hamilton’s son James related two incidents that show his father’s legal scruples.

In one case, the executor of a Long Island estate tried to retain Hamilton to defend

him against some heirs who were suing him. To soften him up, the man pushed a

pile of gold pieces across Hamilton’s writing table before stating his case. When he

was done, “Hamilton pushed the gold back to him and said, ‘I will not be retained

by you in such a cause. Take your money, go home, and settle without delays with

the heirs, as in justice you are bound to do.’ ”9 Another time, he flatly refused the

business of a certain Mr. Gouverneur after learning he had made disparaging re-

marks about the “attorneylike” way somebody had padded his bill. In a caustic note,

Hamilton lectured Gouverneur that his behavior “cannot be pleasing to any man in

the profession and [that it] must oblige anyone that has proper delicacy to decline

the business of a person who professedly entertains such an idea of the conduct of

this profession.”10

As a lawyer in a humming seaport and financial hub, Hamilton dealt with innu-

merable suits over bills of exchange and maritime insurance. He also gravitated

toward cases that established critical points of constitutional law. It would be a mis-

take, however, to think of Hamilton only as a cloud-wreathed, Olympian lawyer. He

sometimes represented poor people in criminal cases on a pro bono basis or was

paid with just a barrel of ham. He had an incorrigible weakness for aiding women

in need. In December 1786, he defended a spinster, Barbara Ransumer, who was in-

dicted for stealing fans, lace, and other costly items. “I asked her what defence she

had,” Hamilton recollected. “She replied that she had none.”11 Unlike many modern

lawyers, Hamilton represented clients only if he believed in their innocence. But he

disobeyed his personal rule with Ransumer. In a speech dripping with shameless

pathos, he managed to persuade the jury of her innocence. “Woman is weak and re-

quires the protection of man,” Hamilton summed up. “And upon this theme, I at-

tempted to awaken the sympathies of the jury and with such success that I obtained

a verdict of ‘not guilty.’ I then determined that I would never again take up a cause

in which I was convinced I ought not to prevail.”12 That same year, Hamilton rep-

resented George Turner, who was indicted as a “dueller, fighter, and disturber of the

peace,” again suggesting that Hamilton was perhaps less averse to dueling than he

later intimated.13

Hamilton was regarded as one of the premier lawyers of the early republic and

was certainly preeminent in New York. Judge Ambrose Spencer, who watched many

legal titans pace his courtroom, pronounced Hamilton “the greatest man this coun-

try ever produced. . . . In power of reasoning, Hamilton was the equal of [Daniel]

Webster and more than this could be said of no man. In creative power, Hamilton

was infinitely Webster’s superior.”14 A no less glowing encomium came from Joseph

Story, a later Supreme Court justice: “I have heard Samuel Dexter, John Marshall,

190 A L E X A N D E R H A M I L T O N

and Chancellor [Robert R.] Livingston say that Hamilton’s reach of thought was so

far beyond theirs that by his side they were schoolboys—rush tapers before the sun

at noonday.”15

Whence the source of this legendary reputation? Hamilton had a taste for court-

room theatrics. He had a melodious voice coupled with a hypnotic gaze, and he

could work himself up into a towering passion that held listeners enthralled. In

January 1785, jurist James Kent watched Hamilton square off against Chancellor

Robert R. Livingston, who was representing himself in a lawsuit claiming addi-

tional land south of his vast estate on the Hudson. (The post of chancellor was one

of the top judicial positions in the state.) A member of New York’s most powerful

family, Livingston was tall and confident and moved with the natural grace of a

born aristocrat. In comparison, Hamilton’s style seemed almost feverish. “He ap-

peared to be agitated with intense reflection,” Kent recalled. “His lips were in con-

stant motion and his pen rapidly employed during the Chancellor’s address to the

court. He rose with dignity and spoke for perhaps two hours in support of his mo-

tion. His reply was fluent and accompanied with great earnestness of manner and

emphasis of expression.”16

In speech no less than in writing, Hamilton’s fluency frequently shaded into ex-

cess. Hamilton had the most durable pair of lungs in the New York bar and could

speak extemporaneously in perfectly formed paragraphs for hours. But it was not

always advantageous to have a brain bubbling with ideas. Robert Troup complained

that the prolix Hamilton never knew when to stop: “I used to tell him that he

was not content with knocking [his opponent] in the head, but that he persisted

until he had banished every little insect that buzzed around his ears.”17 Troup also

speculated that Hamilton was so distracted by public matters later on that he never

had the chance to become deeply read in the law. This was probably true. On the

other hand, the myriad claims on his time forced Hamilton to avoid trivia and

plumb the basic principles of a case. “With other men, law is a trade, with him it was

a science,” said Fisher Ames.18 He forced other lawyers to fight on his turf, starting

out with a painstaking definition of terms and then reciting a long string of prece-

dents. He brought into court lengthy lists of legal authorities and Latin quotations

he wished to cite. His sources were varied, esoteric, and unpredictable. His legal ed-

itor, Julius Goebel, Jr., has observed: “Hamilton’s reading was not confined to En-

glish law, for in addition to citations to basic Roman law texts we find him

proffering passages from exotics like the Frenchman Domat, the Dutchman Vin-

nius, and the Spaniard Perez.”19

A good-natured legal rivalry arose between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.

Sometimes they worked on the same team, more often on opposing sides. Hamil-

191 A Grave, Silent, Strange Sort of Animal

ton did not drag political feuds into dinner parties and drawing rooms, and so he

mingled with Burr cordially. Later on, Hamilton said that in their early relationship

they had “always been opposed in politics but always on good terms. We set out in

the practice of the law at the same time and took opposite political directions. Burr

beckoned me to follow him and I advised him to come with me. We could not

agree.”20 Burr’s friend Commodore Thomas Truxtun verified this rapport in non-

political matters: “I always observed in both a disposition when together to make

time agreeable . . . at the houses of each other and of friends.”21 Burr and Hamilton

supped at each other’s homes, and Burr’s wife, Theodosia, visited Eliza. In 1786, the

two men helped to finance the Erasmus Hall Academy in Flatbush, the forerunner

of Erasmus Hall High School, today the oldest secondary school in New York State.

Many weird coincidences stamped the lives of Hamilton and Burr, yet their ori-

gins were quite dissimilar. Burr embodied the old aristocracy, such as it then existed

in America, and Hamilton the new meritocracy. Born on February 6, 1756, one year

after Hamilton, Burr boasted an illustrious lineage. His maternal grandfather was

Jonathan Edwards, the esteemed Calvinist theologian and New England’s foremost

cleric. Edwards’s third daughter, Esther, married the Reverend Aaron Burr, a classi-

cal scholar and theologian who became president of Princeton.

The infant Burr was born into the most secure and privileged of childhoods, yet

it was steeped in horror. At the time of Burr’s birth, the college was moving from

Newark to Princeton, and in late 1756 the family took up residence in the new pres-

ident’s house. Then came a nightmarish chain of events. In September 1757, Aaron

Burr, Sr., died at forty-two and was replaced five months later as president by his

father-in-law, Jonathan Edwards. Soon after arriving, Edwards was greeted with the

news that his own father, a Connecticut clergyman, had died. Princeton had re-

cently been struck by smallpox, which Edwards promptly contracted by inocula-

tion, dying two weeks after settling in. Then Burr’s mother, Esther, came down with

smallpox and died two weeks after her father. Dr. William Shippen took Burr and

his orphaned sister into his Philadelphia home. When Grandmother Edwards came

to reclaim the children, she contracted virulent dysentery and died shortly after-

ward. Thus, by October 1758, two-year-old Aaron Burr had already lost a mother, a

father, a grandfather, a grandmother, and a great-grandfather. Though he lacked

any memory of these gruesome events, Burr was even more emphatically orphaned

than Hamilton.

Raised in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and Elizabethtown, New Jersey, by his un-

cle, the Reverend Timothy Edwards, Burr attended the same Presbyterian academy

that later educated Hamilton. Entering Princeton at thirteen, he developed into a

first-rate scholar and delivered a commencement speech entitled “Building Castles

in the Air,” in which he declaimed against frittering away energy on idle dreams.