Alexander Hamilton (118 page)

By early 1799, Hamilton advocated the South American operation far more openly, telling Harrison Gray Otis, who chaired the House committee on defense, “If universal empire is still to be the pursuit of France, what can tend to defeat the purpose better than to detach South America from Spain, which is only the channel th[r]ough which the riches of
Mexico
and
Peru
are conveyed to France? The executive ought to be put in a situation to embrace favorable conjunctures for effecting that separation.”
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As it happened, the chief executive rightly thought the whole plan an unspeakable piece of folly that would tear the country apart. “I do not know whether to laugh or weep,” Adams said of the intended scheme. “Miranda’s project is as visionary, though far less innocent, than…an excursion to the moon in a cart drawn by geese.”
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Adams then extrapolated a legitimate concern into a full-fledged conspiracy theory, telling Elbridge Gerry that “he thought Hamilton and a party were endeavoring to get an army on foot to give Hamilton the command of it and then to proclaim a regal government, place Hamilton at the head of it, and prepare the way for a province of Great Britain.”
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Adams later swore that he would have resigned before approving the Miranda plan, which would have produced “an instantaneous insurrection of the whole nation from Georgia to New Hampshire.”
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Hamilton believed that the United States should preemptively seize Spanish Florida and Louisiana, lest they fall into hostile French hands. To accomplish this, he directed General James Wilkinson to assemble an armada of seventy-five river-boats. The son of a Maryland planter, the hard-drinking Wilkinson was always ready for any mayhem. It later turned out that he had pocketed stipends from the Spanish government to incite a transfer of the Kentucky Territory to Spain. John Randolph of Roanoke called Wilkinson “the mammoth of iniquity…. [T]he only man I ever saw who was from the bark to the very core a villain.”
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The plump, ruddy Wilkinson made a showy appearance, wearing medals and gold buttons on his braided uniform. Even in the backwoods, he rode around in gold stirrups and spurs while seated on a leopard saddlecloth. He was happy to assist Hamilton in his expansionist plans. Wilkinson wanted to create a string of forts along the western edge of American settlement—measures that even Hamilton thought excessive. “The imbecility of the Spanish government on the Mississippi is as manifest as the ardor of the French fanatics of Louisiana is obvious,” Wilkinson told Hamilton.
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Hamilton never carried out his plans for Louisiana or Florida, much less for Spanish America. As the original rationale for his army—defense against a French invasion—was increasingly undercut by peace negotiations, such plans seemed increasingly pointless, preposterous, and irrelevant. Still, the episode went down as one of the most flagrant instances of poor judgment in Hamilton’s career.

THIRTY-TWO

REIGN OF WITCHES

T
he period of John Adams’s presidency declined into a time of political savagery with few parallels in American history, a season of paranoia in which the two parties surrendered all trust in each other. Like other Federalists infected with war fever, Hamilton increasingly mistook dissent for treason and engaged in hyperbole. In one newspaper piece, he blasted the Jeffersonians as “more
Frenchmen
than Americans” and declared that to slake their ambition and thirst for revenge they stood ready “to immolate the independence and welfare of their country at the shrine of France.”
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Republicans behaved no better, interpreting policies they disliked as the treacherous deeds of men in league with England and bent on bringing back George III. The indiscriminate use of pejorative labels—“Jacobins” for Republicans, “Anglomen” for Federalists—reflected the rancorously unfair emotions. During this melancholy time, the founding fathers appeared as all-too-fallible mortals.

An episode at Congress Hall in January 1798 symbolized the acrimonious mood. Representative Matthew Lyon of Vermont, a die-hard Republican, began to mock the aristocratic sympathies of Roger Griswold, a Federalist from Connecticut. When Griswold then taunted Lyon for alleged cowardice during the Revolution, Lyon spat right in his face. Griswold got a hickory cane and proceeded to thrash Lyon, who retaliated by taking up fire tongs and attacking Griswold. The two members of Congress ended up fighting on the floor like common ruffians. “Party animosities have raised a wall of separation between those who differ in political sentiments,” Jefferson wrote sadly to Angelica Church.
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The publication of the XYZ dispatches led to an even more militant atmosphere in Philadelphia. Violent clashes arose between roving bands of Federalists, sporting black cockades, and Republicans wearing French tricolor cockades. Actors singing “The Marseillaise” were booed off one stage. A Federalist gang descended upon the Republican newspaper the
Aurora
and not only smashed the windows of editor Benjamin Franklin Bache but smeared a statue of his revered grandfather with mud. As rumors gathered that French saboteurs might torch the city, John Adams stationed guards outside the presidential residence and laid in a store of arms.

The low point of his presidency came in June and July 1798. While Adams wrestled with Hamilton over the ranking of Washington’s major generals, Congress enacted four infamous laws designed to muzzle dissent and browbeat the Republicans into submission. They were known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Naturalization Act, passed on June 18, lengthened from five to fourteen years the period necessary to become a naturalized citizen with full voting rights. The Alien Act of June 25 gave the president the power to deport, without a hearing or even a reasonable explanation, any foreign-born residents deemed dangerous to the peace. The Alien Enemies Act of July 6 granted the president the power to label as enemy aliens any residents who were citizens of a country at war with America, prompting an out-flow of French émigrés. Then came the capstone of these horrendous measures: the Sedition Act of July 14, which rendered it a crime to speak or publish “any false, scandalous, or malicious” writings against the U.S. government or Congress “with intent to defame…or to bring them…into contempt or disrepute.”
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If found guilty, the perpetrators could face up to two thousand dollars in fines and two years in prison.

The Federalist-controlled Congress was maneuvering for partisan advantage and betraying an unbecoming nativist streak. Federalists wanted to curb an influx of Irish immigrants, who were usually pro-French and thus natural adherents to the Republican cause. Congressman Harrison Gray Otis of Boston set a strident tone when he declared that America should no longer “wish to invite hordes of wild Irishmen, nor the turbulent and disorderly parts of the world, to come here with a view to disturb our tranquillity after having succeeded in the overthrow of their own governments.”
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Another grievance rife among Federalists was reckless press behavior. During the 1790s, as the number of American newspapers more than doubled, many partisan sheets specialized in vituperative character attacks. Jefferson acknowledged the strategic power of these papers for Federalists and Republicans alike. “The engine is the press,” he told Madison. “Every man must lay his purse and his pen under contribution.”
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John Adams had learned to loathe many members of the Republican press. After Benjamin Franklin Bache died at twenty-nine in September 1798 in a yellow-fever epidemic (which also claimed the life of Federalist rival John Fenno), Adams described Bache as a “malicious libeller” and said “the yellow fever arrested him in his detestable career and sent him to his grandfather, from whom he inherited a dirty, envious, jealous, and revengeful spite against me.”
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Embittered by published screeds against her husband, Abigail Adams wrote perfervid letters in support of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Until Congress passed a sedition bill, she warned her sister-in-law, nothing would halt the “wicked and base, violent and calumniating abuse” of the Republican papers.
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She added that in “any other country, Bache and all his papers would have been seized long ago.”
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She hoped the Alien Act would be invoked to oust the Swiss-born Albert Gallatin, the House Republican leader after Madison’s departure. She considered Gallatin and his Jeffersonian colleagues little more than “traitors to their country.”
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She also distrusted immigrants, averring that “a more careful and attentive watch ought to be kept over foreigners.”
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Of course, the supreme bugaboo of Republican scribes was Alexander Hamilton. On May 21, 1798, William Keteltas, a Republican lawyer in New York, chastised him for ingratitude to a nation that had embraced him as a young man. Keteltas likened him to Caesar: “But like Caesar, you are ambitious and for that ambition to enslave his country, Brutus slew him. And are ambitious men less dangerous to American than Roman liberty?”
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Replying in the same newspaper the next day, Hamilton drew a dire inference about the author. “By the allusion to
Caesar
and
Brutus,
he plainly hints at assassination.”
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John Adams always tried to sidestep responsibility for the Alien and Sedition Acts, the biggest blunder of his presidency. He did not shepherd these punitive laws through Congress, but they were passed by a Federalist-dominated Congress during his tenure and with his tacit approval. After Hamilton was dead, Adams did not hesitate to blame
him
for these unfortunate measures. Upon taking office in 1797, Adams maintained, he had gotten a memo from Hamilton recommending an alien and sedition law. Embroidering this recollection in 1809, Adams thumped his chest proudly at his principled rejection of Hamilton’s advice: “I recommended no such thing in my speech. Congress, however, adopted both these measures. I knew there was need enough of both and therefore consented to them. But as they were then considered as war measures and intended altogether against the advocates of the French and peace with France, I was apprehensive that a hurricane of clamour” might be raised against them.
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Adams straddled two positions here, presenting himself as both prescient critic and reluctant advocate of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The truth is that Hamilton never espoused any such laws in the memos he drew up after Adams’s inauguration.

So what
did
Hamilton think of the notorious laws? Fearing an American fifth column, he now wanted to throttle the flow of immigration. “My opinion is that the mass [of aliens] ought to be obliged to leave the country”—a disappointing stance from America’s most famous foreign-born citizen and once an influential voice for immigration. He did argue for exceptions, however, and admonished Pickering, “Let us not be cruel or violent.”
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In contrast, he was stunned by his first glance at the Sedition Act, protesting to Treasury Secretary Wolcott, “There are provisions in this bill which according to a cursory view appear to me highly exceptionable and such as more than anything else may endanger civil war…. I hope sincerely the thing may not be hurried through. Let us not establish a tyranny. Energy is a very different thing from violence.”
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Unfortunately, once they were amended, Hamilton supported the Alien and Sedition Acts. Among other things, he was still outraged by the cutthroat behavior of the Scottish-born James T. Callender, who had exposed the Reynolds scandal. By late 1799, Hamilton exhorted Senator Jonathan Dayton to prosecute such foreign-born journalists, claiming that “in open contempt and defiance of the laws they are permitted to continue their destructive labours. Why are they not sent away? Are laws of this kind passed merely to excite odium and remain a dead letter?”
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Hamilton was never an automatic press critic, however much he deplored its abuses. And he justly applauded one meritorious idea buried in the Sedition Act: that in libel cases, the truth of an allegation should be allowed as a defense. Before, it had been necessary for the prosecution to prove only that the charges were defamatory, not that they were true. Hamilton would have much more to say about this issue in a dramatic legal case that was to expand press freedom in the United States. For this reason, he later said that “the sedition law, branded indeed with epithets the most odious[,]…will one day be pronounced a valuable feature in our national character.”
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For Republicans, however, the most salient feature of the Sedition Act was that it violated the First Amendment of the Constitution.

Republicans knew the unashamedly partisan nature of the new bills. “The Alien bill proposed in the Senate is a monster that must forever disgrace its parents,” Madison told Jefferson, who quickly agreed that it was “a most detestable thing.”
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So he would not have to preside over a Senate enacting legislation that he found hateful, Jefferson slipped away from Philadelphia and took refuge at Monticello for four and a half months. Beyond indignation, Jefferson professed a serene faith that the common sense of the people would rectify such errors. He told a fellow Virginian, “A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolved, and the people, recovering their true sight, restoring their government to its true principles.”
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He would not rely upon patience alone. He believed that Washington had checked the most harmful tendencies of the Federalists but that under Adams the party had “mounted on the car of state and, free from control, like Phaethon on that of the sun, drove headlong and wild.”
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