Authors: Ron Chernow

Alexander Hamilton (80 page)

The first newspaper installment of
The Federalist
. Hamilton turned out the essays in a white heat, publishing up to five or six “numbers” in a single week.

A wary, lugubrious John Jay depicted just before he teamed up with Hamilton on
The Federalist
. He finally had to drop the project because of severe rheumatism.

George Clinton, the seven-time governor of New York State, repeatedly clashed with Hamilton and came to personify for him the perils of state power.

The two faces of Thomas Jefferson. These portraits chart Jefferson’s metamorphosis from the foppish aristocrat of his Parisian years to the seemingly more austere republican vice president under
John Adams.

William Branch Giles, then a fervent young congressman from Virginia, harried Treasury Secretary Hamilton at every turn with resolutions and investigations.

Philip Freneau. A celebrated poet and firebrand recruited by Jefferson and Madison to edit the
National Gazette,
Freneau baited both Hamilton and Washington with anti-administration polemics.

James Monroe as American minister to France. Alexander and Eliza
Hamilton devoutly believed that
after the Federalists demanded
Monroe’s recall from Paris, he
conspired to expose Hamilton’s
adulterous trysts with
Maria Reynolds.

The flamboyant diplomacy of

Citizen Genêt in America precipitated both frenzied support and opposition

and split a nation already deeply torn about the French Revolution.

The wily Charles
Maurice de Talleyrand
Périgord thought that
Hamilton was arguably
the greatest political
figure of the age, while
Hamilton found the
French statesman bril
liant but unprincipled.

This portrait of John Adams as vice president suggests formidable reserves of
strength but also hints at his unyielding pugnacity.

The title page of Hamilton’s 1800 pamphlet denouncing President Adams. Its publication was one of Hamilton’s least inspired ideas and only hastened his political decline.