Alexander Hamilton (109 page)

A[dams]: “Whom shall we appoint Commander-in-Chief?”
P[ickering]: “Colonel Hamilton.”
Then on a subsequent day:
A: “Whom shall we appoint Commander-in-Chief?”
P: “Colonel Hamilton.”
Then on a third day:
A: “Whom shall we appoint Commander-in-Chief?”
P: “Colonel Hamilton.”
A: “Oh no! It is not his turn by a great deal. I would sooner appoint Gates or Lincoln or Morgan.”
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Adams preferred these three senior veterans of the battle of Saratoga. Pickering explained wearily to Adams that the ailing Daniel Morgan had “one foot in the grave,” that Horatio Gates was “an old woman,” and that Benjamin Lincoln was “always asleep.” Pickering later drew the moral for Hamilton’s son: “It was from these occurrences that I first learned Mr. Adams’s extreme aversion to or hatred of your father.”
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Such petulant talks occurred two years before Adams’s “discovery” of Hamilton’s influence over his cabinet.

On June 22, President Adams sent an ambiguously worded inquiry to Washington, asking for advice about leadership of any new army: “In forming an army, whenever I must come to that extremity, I am at an immense loss whether to call out the old generals or to appoint a young set.”
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Adams told Washington that he hoped to consult him periodically. In a striking example of political gaucheness, Adams then nominated Washington to command the new army before he had a chance to register an opinion. On July 3, the Senate hastily approved the choice. With a few conspicuous exceptions, Hamilton had always treated Washington with punctilious courtesy and was taken aback that Adams had made the appointment without first securing Washington’s consent. On July 8, he wrote to the first president from Philadelphia, “I was much surprised on my arrival here to discover that your nomination had been without any previous consultation of you.” Yet he urged Washington to accept: “Convinced of the goodness of the motives, it would be useless to scan the propriety of the step.”
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To ensure Washington’s acceptance, Adams dispatched James McHenry on a three-day mission to Mount Vernon. The secretary of war toted a batch of communiqués, including Washington’s commission and a letter from the president. Unbeknownst to Adams, McHenry also bore a message from Hamilton that was anything but friendly toward the president and faulted his expertise in military affairs: “The President has no
relative
ideas and his prepossessions on military subjects in reference to such a point are of the wrong sort....Men of capacity and exertion in the higher stations are indispensable.”
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Because of his advancing age, Washington did not intend to take the field until a war actually arrived, so his chief deputy would be the effective field commander. Both McHenry and Pickering knew of Adams’s dislike of Hamilton and schemed behind their boss’s back to get Washington to choose Hamilton. As it happened, Washington did not need coaching, telling McHenry that he would entertain only Hamilton or Charles Cotesworth Pinckney as his deputy. In a confidential letter, Washington bluntly advised Pickering that Hamilton’s “services ought to be secured at
almost
any price.”
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Before McHenry returned to Philadelphia, Washington slipped him a sheet naming the three men he wished to see as his major generals, listed in order: Alexander Hamilton, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and Henry Knox. Writing to Adams, Washington made the appointment of his general officers a precondition for accepting the commanding post.

What a world of trouble was packed into the seemingly inoffensive list. John Quincy Adams later identified the feud over this list as the “first decisive symptom” of a schism in the Federalist party.
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Ideally, Washington wanted the three men ranked in exactly the order he had given—that is, with Hamilton given precedence as his second in command. There were complications aplenty, however, not the least that Adams wished to reverse the order and have Knox and Pinckney supersede the upstart Hamilton. For Adams, this was a straightforward assertion of presidential prerogative. After all, Washington had not named his own subordinates during the Revolution. To Washington, however, it seemed a rough slap in the face and violated his basic conditions for taking the assignment.

Though Washington rated Hamilton’s abilities above those of Knox and Pinckney, he knew they had some legitimate claims to preference. During the Revolution, Knox had been a major general and Pinckney a brigadier general, while Hamilton had been a lowly lieutenant colonel. Washington claimed that this outdated hierarchy no longer counted. This was a touchy matter for the hearty, affable Henry Knox. The three-hundred-pound former secretary of war had been a brigadier general when Hamilton was a mere collegian and captain of an artillery company. Knox had been an early booster of Hamilton, perhaps even instrumental in getting him the job on Washington’s staff, and Hamilton told McHenry how pained he was by any conflict with Knox, “for I have truly a warm side for him and a high value for his merits.”
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All the same, their relative stations had shifted in the intervening years. It was Hamilton who had been preeminent in Washington’s cabinet and Hamilton who had overseen the military campaign during the Whiskey Rebellion when Knox was distracted by real-estate dealings in Maine. Afterward, Knox had thanked Hamilton profusely: “Your exertions in my department during my absence will never be obliterated.”
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Nevertheless, Knox was stung to learn that Washington now planned to demote him below Hamilton and Pinckney. Washington laid greater stress on the recruitment of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina. He calculated that the French might invade the south, hoping to gain the support of local Francophiles and arm the slave population. He thought it politic to have a southerner and worried that Pinckney might refuse a place inferior to Hamilton.

Adams seemed dazed, infuriated, and plain befuddled by the frantic jockeying around him. On July 18, 1798, he submitted the nominations for general officers to the Senate in the order Washington had noted them, but he hoped their relative ranks would be reversed. Within a week, when Hamilton accepted appointment as inspector general, Republicans were aghast. The
Aurora
loudly ridiculed Adams’s religion and morality in promoting the self-confessed lover of Maria Reynolds: “He has appointed Alexander Hamilton inspector general of the army, the same Hamilton who published a book to prove that he is AN ADULTERER....Mr. Adams ought hereafter to be silent about
French
principles.”
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Adams fled to Quincy and stayed there for the rest of the controversy, then complained that his cabinet had plotted behind his back to foist Hamilton on him. He saw himself as a decent, helpless man, tangled in byzantine plots dreamed up by the devious mind of Alexander Hamilton. The controversy simmered throughout the summer. Henry Knox, refusing to be subordinated to Hamilton, complained to McHenry on August 8: “Mr. Hamilton’s talents have been estimated upon a scale of comparison so transcendent that all his seniors in rank and years of the late army have been degraded by his elevation.”
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Fuming, Adams informed McHenry in mid-August that, even though the three nominations had been confirmed, he wanted Knox to take the lead: “General Knox is legally entitled to rank next to General Washington and no other arrangement will give satisfaction.” For good measure, he added that Pinckney “must rank before Hamilton.”
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In early September, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., reminded Adams that Washington had made Hamilton’s appointment his prerequisite for taking command and concluded that “the opinion of General Washington and the expectation of the public is that General Hamilton will be confirmed in a rank second only to the commander in chief.”
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In his reply to Wolcott, Adams let all his bile gush to the surface in a tirade against Hamilton. Even though Hamilton had tendered more than twenty years of outstanding service to his country, he was still blackballed in Adams’s eyes for being foreign born. The president daubed him in demonic colors:

If I should consent to the appointment of Hamilton as a second in rank, I should consider it as the most [ir]responsible action of my whole life and the most difficult to justify. He is not a native of the United States, but a foreigner and, I believe, has not resided longer, at least not much longer, in North America than Albert Gallatin. His rank in the late army was comparatively very low. His merits with a party are the merits of John Calvin—

“Some think on Calvin heaven’s own spirit fell, While others deem him [an] instrument of hell.”
I know that Knox has no popular character, even in Massachusetts. I know, too, that Hamilton has no popular character in any part of America.
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Adams was ventilating his frustration and decided, on second thought, not to send the unfair letter. What he actually wrote to James McHenry was: “Inclosed are the commissions for the three generals signed and all dated on the same day.”
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It was a victory for Hamilton and a humiliating surrender for Adams, who later griped, “I was no more at liberty than a man in prison.”
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By this point, Washington was smarting at how badly Adams had botched things. He told Adams pointedly, “You have been pleased to order the last to be first and the first to be last.”
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Addressing the question of whether Hamilton’s former service entitled him to high military position, he remarked that, as his principal wartime aide, Hamilton had “the means of viewing everything on a larger scale than those who have had only divisions and brigades to attend to, who know nothing of the correspondences of the commander in chief or of the various orders to or transactions with the general staff of the army.”
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In other words, Hamilton had been his chief of staff, not a high-ranking secretary. Adams’s patent displeasure with Hamilton afforded Washington an opportunity to pay his protégé a huge compliment. Washington said that some people considered Hamilton “an ambitious man and therefore a dangerous one. That he is ambitious I readily grant, but it is of that laudable kind which prompts a man to excel in whatever he takes in hand. He is enterprising, quick in his perceptions, and his judgment intuitively great.” In sum, Hamilton’s loss would be “irreparable.”
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Far from weakening Washington’s faith in Hamilton, Adams had drawn the two old allies closer together. On October 15, Adams yielded grudgingly to the appointment of Hamilton as inspector general. Knox refused to serve under him, but Charles Cotesworth Pinckney agreed and praised Hamilton. “I knew that his talents in war were great,” he told McHenry, “that he had a genius capable of forming an extensive military plan, and a spirit courageous and enterprizing, equal to the execution of it.”
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Adams’s defeat over Hamilton’s appointment only added to his dislike of the younger man, and the incident never ceased to rankle. To be sure, Hamilton had been cunning, quick-footed, and manipulative and had placed Adams in an awkward spot. But Adams had made the classic mistake of committing his presidential prestige to a fight he could not win. He could not accept that most observers, from Washington to Jay, thought Hamilton the most highly qualified man for the job.

While trying to fend off Hamilton as inspector general, Adams became correspondingly unyielding in his desire to name his son-in-law, Colonel William Smith, a brigadier general, a rank one rung below major general. The handsome young colonel had given John and Abigail Adams no end of grief. He was chronically indebted from speculation and a year earlier had temporarily abandoned their daughter, Nabby. Smith had mostly survived on sinecures doled out by President Washington. Later on, he was imprisoned twice: once for debt and once for enlisting in a scheme to liberate Venezuela. Despite Smith’s irresponsible shenanigans, Adams now wanted to fob him off on America as a brigadier general, and Washington was flabbergasted. “What in the name of military prudence could have induced the appointment of [William Smith] as brigadier?” Washington asked Secretary of State Pickering. “The latter never was celebrated for anything that ever came to my knowledge except the murder of Indians.”
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At first, Pickering tried to dissuade Adams from this disastrous choice, but the stubborn president “pronounced his son-in-law a military character far, very far, superior to Hamilton!!!” Pickering recalled.
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Dusting off an old proverb, Pickering said, “Mr. Adams has always
thought his own geese swans.
”
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Pickering secretly lobbied the Senate to veto the appointment—another instance of disloyalty, if a pardonable one. When the Senate duly rejected Smith, Abigail Adams detected “secret springs at work” and thought some senators were “tools of they knew not who.”
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Pickering contended that Adams’s disdain for him dated from that event.

Two years later, Adams again tried to elevate his son-in-law to a regimental command. Hamilton chided him, as gingerly as possible, that the appointment might look like favoritism: “There are collateral considerations affecting the expediency of the measure, which I am sure will not escape your reflection....I trust this remark will not be misunderstood.”
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Adams wrote back blind with rage: “I see no reason or justice in excluding him from all service, while his comrades are all ambassadors or generals, merely because he married my daughter. I am, Sir, with much regard your most obedient and humble Servant John Adams.”
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John Adams had a long memory when it came to slights. On May 9, 1800, Benjamin Goodhue, a Federalist senator from Massachusetts, found himself in an unforgettable tête-à-tête with an apoplectic president. Adams returned to the Senate’s rejection of William Smith for brigadier general and blamed Goodhue, Pickering, and Hamilton. As Goodhue related this remarkable outburst, Adams claimed that “we had killed his daughter [metaphorically] by doing this; that rejection originated with Hamilton, and from him to Pickering, who he said (with extreme agitation and anger) influenced me and others to reject him; that Col. Smith was a man of the first military knowledge in the U.S. and was recommended to the appointment by Genl. Washington.” (Washington’s letter directly belies this assertion.) Goodhue went on to state that Adams’s “resentment appeared implacable towards the conduct of the Senate in those instances which resulted, as he said, with no other view than to wound his feelings and those of his
family.
” Throughout the discussion, Goodhue said, Adams exhibited “a perfect rage of passion that I could not have expected from the supreme executive.”
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Many such stories circulated among the Federalists about Adams’s incontinent wrath.