Alexander Hamilton (136 page)

But did Hamilton believe sincerely in religion, or was it just politically convenient? Like Washington, he never talked about Christ and took refuge in vague references to “providence” or “heaven.” He did not seem to attend services with Eliza, who increasingly spoke the language of evangelical Christianity, and did not belong formally to a denomination, even though Eliza rented a pew at Trinity Church. He showed no interest in liturgy, sectarian doctrine, or public prayer. The old discomfort with organized religion had not entirely vanished. On the other hand, Eliza was a woman of such deep piety that she would never have married someone who did not share her faith to some degree. Hamilton believed in a happy afterlife for the virtuous that would offer “far more substantial bliss than can ever be found in this checkered, this ever varying, scene!”
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He once consoled a friend in terms that left no doubt of his overarching faith in a moral order: “Arraign not the dispensations of Providence. They must be founded in wisdom and goodness. And when they do not suit us, it must be because there is some fault in ourselves which deserves chastisement or because there is a kind intent to correct in us some vice or failing of which perhaps we may not be conscious.”
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How then did Hamilton interpret God’s lesson after the death of Philip?

The papers of John Church Hamilton provide fresh evidence of his father’s genuine religiosity in later years. He said that Hamilton experienced a resurgence of his youthful fervor, prayed daily, and scribbled many notes in the margin of the family Bible. A lawyer by training, Hamilton wanted logical proofs of religion, not revelation, and amply annotated his copy of
A View of the Evidences of Christianity,
by William Paley. “I have examined carefully the evidence of the Christian religion,” he told one friend, “and if I was sitting as a juror upon its authenticity, I should rather abruptly give my verdict in its favor.”
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To Eliza, he said of Christianity, “I have studied it and I can prove its truth as clearly as any proposition ever submitted to the mind of man.”
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John Church Hamilton believed that the time his father spent at the Grange, strolling about the grounds, broadened his religious awareness. During his final months, he was walking with Eliza in the woods and speaking of their children when he suddenly turned to her and said in an enraptured voice, “I may yet have twenty years, please God, and I will one day build for them a chapel in this grove.”
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The one grim consolation that Hamilton derived from Jefferson’s administration was that Aaron Burr’s ostracism only worsened with time. The vice president’s contacts with the president were confined to fortnightly dinners, and he met with the cabinet once a year. Burr gave a satiric picture of his exclusion from power when he told his son-in-law, “I…now and then meet the [cabinet] ministers in the street.”
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One senator said that Burr presided over the Senate “with great ease, dignity and propriety,” yet it says much about Burr’s estrangement from Jefferson that his most notable achievements came in the legislature.
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John Adams had experienced the same frustration as vice president but not the same hostility from Washington’s administration.

Burr kept up a loyal air to Jefferson until he broke ranks with other Republicans over repeal of the Judiciary Act. With this, Burr knew that he had signed his death warrant with the party and had to curry favor with the Federalists. Burr was now “completely an insulated man in Washington,” declared Theodore Sedgwick, “wholly without personal influence.”
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Just how far Burr would go to woo Federalists became evident on February 22, 1802, when party legislators gathered at Stelle’s Hotel to honor Washington’s birthday, with Gouverneur Morris hosting the festivities. At the end of the dinner, guests heard a modest tapping at the door and were amazed when the vice president slipped into the room and asked if he was intruding. Having been invited by the organizers, he was received civilly, and he offered a bipartisan toast to a “
union
of all
honest
men.”
¹⁹
With that deft gesture, Burr effectively severed ties with Jefferson. Pondering Burr’s appearance, Hamilton asked, “Is it possible that some new intrigue is about to link the Federalists with a man who can never [be] anything else than the bane of a good cause?”
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As Federalists entered a game of mutual manipulation with the vice president, Hamilton did not dismiss Burr’s overture outright, thinking that the best way to engineer Jefferson’s downfall was to drive a wedge between him and Burr and divide Republicans. “As an
instrument,
the person will be an auxiliary of
some
value,” Hamilton wrote of Burr, while noting that “as a chief, he will disgrace and destroy the party.”
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For Hamilton, this strategy was fraught with peril, for Burr might try to replace him as the Federalist chieftain. Thus, a situation arose in which Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, two desperate politicians with fading careers, regarded each other as insuperable obstacles to their respective political revivals.

As Burr eyed a New York comeback—either by taking control of the local Republican party, infiltrating the Federalists, or patching together a coalition of defectors from both parties—press attacks erupted among local factions in what historians have labeled the Pamphlet Wars. After Burr became vice president, a mysterious handbill entitled “A Warning to Libellers” appeared on the walls of New York coffeehouses, accusing him of “abandoned profligacy.” This anonymous sheet claimed that “numerous unhappy wretches” had been victimized by this seasoned “debauchee.”
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It also listed the initials of courtesans whom Burr had left “the prey of disease, of infamy, and [of] wretchedness.”
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Some contemporaries drew parallels between the sexual exploits of Hamilton and those of Burr. Architect Benjamin Latrobe observed that “both Hamilton and Burr were little of stature and both inordinately addicted to the same vice.”
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But the innumerable references to women in Burr’s letters attest to the exotic variety and frequency of his affairs. In comparison, Hamilton was a mere choirboy.
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The unsigned broadside against Burr may have originated with De Witt Clinton, the governor’s rangy, strong-willed nephew, who now controlled state patronage, earning him the unsavory title of “father of the spoils system.”
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Adept at the bare-knuckled style, Clinton was the moving force behind the
American Citizen,
started in 1801 and edited by a former hatter and rabble-rousing English journalist named James Cheetham. It soon became necessary for every New York faction to possess its own newspaper. Hamilton had countered with William Coleman and the
New-York Evening Post
. Burr and his cohorts started the
Morning Chronicle,
which was edited by Peter Irving, the older brother of Washington Irving.

Far more vexing to Burr than exposure of his love affairs was scrutiny of his electoral tie with Jefferson in 1801. James Cheetham and the
American Citizen
pounced on the theme of Burr’s electoral duplicity and drove it home with obsessive frequency. The moment Burr was nominated, Cheetham contended, “he put into operation a most extensive, complicated, and wicked scheme of intrigue to place himself in the presidential chair.”
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At first, Burr reacted to these charges with typical phlegm, but as Cheetham and others stepped up their campaign, he began to sulk about a conspiracy to destroy him. As the Clintonians heaped more abuse on Burr, Robert Troup reported, “The high probability is that Burr is a gone man and that all his cunning, enterprise, and industry will not save him.”
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Not content to smear Burr alone, Cheetham also reviled Hamilton as a traitor to the American Revolution who had reverted to his aristocratic roots. To make this far-fetched claim, Cheetham had to re-create Hamilton’s father as “a merchant of some eminence.”
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The reality of a self-made, enterprising orphan did not suit Cheetham’s needs: “Mr. Hamilton, unfortunately, was a native of that part of the civilized world where tyranny and slavery prevail in a manner even unknown to the despots of Europe. It was utterly impossible that the habits and prejudices he contracted in infancy could ever have been eradicated.”
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Having emigrated from England in 1798, Cheetham knew little and cared less about Hamilton’s abolitionist activities. Cheetham’s main thesis was that Burr planned to run on the
Federalist
ticket in 1804 along with Charles Cotesworth Pinckney: “Viewing the matter then in this light…Mr. Hamilton is evidently in his [Burr’s] way!!”
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In fact, after the Reynolds fiasco and Adams pamphlet, Hamilton would not have been a strong contender for president in 1804 and never implied that he planned to run.

As stunning as the verbal abuse in New York politics was the physical violence. Duels became fashionable for settling political quarrels: historian Joanne Freeman has counted sixteen such affairs of honor between 1795 and 1807, though not all resulted in duels.
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When John Swartwout, a Burr protégé, denounced Cheetham as the mouthpiece of De Witt Clinton, Clinton denounced Swartwout as “a liar, a scoundrel, and a villain.”
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Accordingly, Clinton and Swartwout exchanged rounds of gunfire at the dueling ground in Weehawken, New Jersey. After Swartwout took two bullets in the leg, Clinton strode from the field and would not fire again. Newspaper editors, too, traded bullets as well as words. After James Cheetham accused William Coleman of siring a mulatto child, the two men almost fought a duel before being legally restrained from confronting each other. This did not stop a certain Captain Thompson, a Jeffersonian harbormaster, from accusing Coleman of cowardice and fighting a twilight duel with him in Love Lane (now Twenty-first Street), in which Thompson suffered a mortal wound. After killing his adversary, the unruffled Coleman returned to the
Post
“and got out the paper in good style, although half an hour late,” said a subsequent editor.
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In yet another political fracas, Coleman received a caning that left him paralyzed from the waist down.

President Jefferson was not immune to the gutter journalism that thrived in these years. He and the Republicans had championed James T. Callender, who had criticized President Adams and thus been slapped with a nine-month jail term and a two-hundred-dollar fine under the Sedition Act. Once out of jail, Callender appealed to the president to help pay his fine and solicited an appointment as postmaster of Richmond, Virginia. When Jefferson gave him only a niggardly fifty dollars, the vengeful, heavy-drinking Callender defected to the Federalist camp. Editing a Federalist newspaper in Richmond, he revealed that Jefferson, while vice president, had subsidized him to malign Adams and Hamilton. When Jefferson denied this, Callender published documents showing that Jefferson had sent him money in 1799 and 1800 to assist with publication of
The Prospect Before Us,
in which Hamilton had been denigrated as “the son of a camp-girl.”
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The embarrassed Jefferson lamely described these payments as prompted by “mere motives of charity.”
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Then, on September 1, 1802, Callender broke a story that he had learned about in jail and that was to reverberate down through American history: Jefferson’s scandalous romance with Sally Hemings: “It is well known that the man
whom it delighteth the people to honor,
keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally…. By this wench Sally, our President has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story, and not a few who know it…. The African Venus is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello.”
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Callender mentioned that “Dusky Sally” had five mulatto children and that her son Tom (“yellow Tom”) bore a decided resemblance to Jefferson. Merciless toward his ex-comrades, Callender now referred to the Republicans as the “mulatto party.”
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He also said that he was ready to confront the president in a court of law and debate the truth of his relationship with “the black wench and her mulatto litter.”
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Jefferson preserved a tactful silence on the issue, though he complained to Robert Livingston that “the federalists have opened all their sluices of calumny. Every decent man among them revolts at [Callender’s] filth.”
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James Madison denounced the Sally Hemings story as “incredible,” but Federalist wags whooped with delight and exhorted the president in verse to repent: “Thy tricks, with
sooty Sal,
give o’er. / Indulge thy body, Tom, no more. / But try to save thy
soul.
”
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Another Federalist editor claimed that he had verified that Sally Hemings “has a room to herself at Monticello in the character of a seamstress to the family, if not as housekeeper” and was “treated by the rest of his house as one much above the level” of the other servants.
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Abigail Adams believed that Jefferson had gotten his due and wrote with barely concealed glee to him, “The serpent you cherished and warmed bit the hand that nourished him.”
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John Adams implied that he thought the story was true, while conceding that “there was not a planter in Virginia who could not reckon among his slaves a number of his children.”
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For Adams, the situation was “a natural and almost unavoidable consequence of that foul contagion in the human character—Negro slavery.”
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