Alexander Hamilton (33 page)

If Washington expected relief from Hamilton badgering him for an appointment, 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 notice.
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 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. Reminding 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 collar 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 junior officers above those of higher rank. Lest Hamilton suspect that his intransigence stemmed from their contretemps, Washington cautioned: “My principal concern arises from an apprehension that you will impute my refusal of your request 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 continental currency, Congress conquered its fears of the centralized power that might be wielded by a finance minister. Power had begun to flow from congressional committees 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 finance 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 knowledge of him that there are few men to be found of his age who has [
sic
] a more general 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 congressional 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 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 intellectual 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 calculations.”
⁸
Then he delivered a virtuoso performance as he asserted the need for financial 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 flourishing 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 ourindependence.”
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 reducing them to an unmeaning and disgraceful defensive, we destroy the national expectation of success from which the ministry draws their resources.”
¹¹
This was an extremely subtle, sophisticated analysis for a young man immersed in wartime details for four years: America could defeat the British in the bond market more readily 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 contended that America should imitate British methods and exploit the power of borrowing: “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 late May, Morris sent him a flattering reply, informing him that many of his opinions 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 individuals, 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 republics. 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 Marshall 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 American 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 confirmed advocates of a tight-knit union of the states.

As a member of Washington’s family, Hamilton had stumbled upon the crowning 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 entanglements 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 Continentalist” 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 seldom been without its evils. It is to this source we are to trace many of the fatal mistakes 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 situation 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 secessionist movements, smaller confederacies, or civil war. He especially feared that populous states would indulge in separatist designs and take advantage of commercial 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 theories 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 philosophy, 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 efforts 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 incapable of wishing to obtain any object by importunity.”
¹⁹
Eliza worried about his 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.