Alexander Hamilton (45 page)

This petition was signed by an illustrious cavalcade of dignitaries who would shortly be divided by bitter partisan wrangling over the Constitution and other issues. At this juncture, Hamilton, John Jay, and James Duane could still join hands in political amity with Robert R. Livingston, Melancton Smith, and Brockholst Livingston. In glancing at the signers of this petition, one is struck by how many would join the Federalist ranks in the 1790s and be roundly vilified as “aristocrats” by southern planters. One is further impressed by the sheer number of people in the Manumission Society who had been close to Hamilton since his arrival in America, among them Robert Troup, Nicholas Fish, Hercules Mulligan, William Livingston, John Rodgers, John Mason, James Duane, John Jay, and William Duer. The founding of the Manumission Society and antislavery societies in other states in the 1780s represented a hopeful moment in American race relations, right before the Constitutional Convention and the new federal government created such an overriding need for concord that even debating the divisive slavery issue could no longer be tolerated.

Even as Hamilton’s involvement in the Manumission Society threw into relief his sympathy for the oppressed, his engagement in another society prompted accusations that he was conniving to foist a hereditary aristocracy on America. In the spring of 1783, General Henry Knox proposed creation of the Society of the Cincinnati for officers who had served with honor for at least three years. The fraternal society’s name was a tribute to Cincinnatus, the general of ancient Rome who twice relinquished his sword after defending the republic and returned to his humble plow. The group had overriding political objectives (promoting liberty, a strong union of the states), charitable aims (providing for families of impoverished officers), and a social agenda (maintaining camaraderie among dispersed officers)—all of which seemed commendable enough, and George Washington was appointed the first president general. Having already left the army, Hamilton was not among the original signers, yet he soon became, with characteristic gusto, active in the New York branch headed by his friend Baron von Steuben.

The society stirred a hornet’s nest of controversy because of a provision that eldest sons could inherit their fathers’ memberships, as if they were receiving titles of nobility. For Americans still fuming against anything that smacked of decadent European courts, the Society of the Cincinnati raised the dreaded specter of a military cabal or a hereditary aristocracy. Samuel Adams, the Boston firebrand of the Revolution’s early days and a second cousin of John Adams, was quick to declare that the society embodied “as rapid a stride toward a hereditary military nobility as was ever made in so short a time.”
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Reactions to the society exposed deep fissures among men who had cooperated to win the war and prefigured sharp cleavages in coming years. Franklin, Jay, Jefferson, and John Adams inveighed against the scheme as dangerous and preposterous.

Washington was so stung by the uproar that at the society’s first general meeting in Philadelphia in May 1784 he prevailed upon the members to delete the provision for hereditary membership. The states balked at this and Hamilton was deputized by the New York chapter to formulate a response to these ideas. In December 1785, Washington wrote to him from Mount Vernon and pleaded “that if the Society of the Cincinnati mean to live in peace with the rest of their fellow citizens, they must subscribe to the alterations” adopted in Philadelphia.
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The ever conciliatory Washington feared an outbreak of virulent partisanship and wanted to elevate the new society above political strife. Hamilton, by contrast, viewed the Cincinnati as a potentially useful tool for meshing the states into a stable union.

In July 1786, Baron von Steuben, president of the New York branch, and Philip Schuyler, its vice president, presided over two meetings. The first inducted new members and contained an extraordinary amount of nonsensical pomp. Baron von Steuben strutted into the room to a fanfare of kettledrums and trumpets. The treasurer and deputy treasurer stepped forth, bearing two white satin cushions, the first holding golden eagle insignias and the second parchments for new members. In his opening oration, Hamilton challenged the society’s critics: “To heaven and our own bosoms, we recur for vindication from any misrepresentations of our intentions.”
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He insisted that the society existed only to maintain bonds of friendship and aid the families of fallen comrades. In the style of the day, innumerable toasts were raised and bumpers drained to honor the U.S. Congress, Louis XVI, and George Washington, while thirteen cannon boomed their approval after each toast. Toast number eight bore Hamilton’s special imprint and showed that he had weightier political intentions in mind: “May the powers of Congress be adequate to preserve the general Union.”
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At a second meeting at the City Tavern two days later, Hamilton delivered his report on the society’s proposed changes. His speech contained remarks that would have surprised those who regarded him as a simpleminded agent of aristocracy or any form of favoritism. He admitted that he did not see how the society could survive without the hereditary feature. On the other hand, he opposed the use of primogeniture since it was “liable to this objection—that it refers to birth what ought to belong to merit only, a principle inconsistent with the genius of a society founded on friendship and patriotism.”
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As the second-born son in his family, Hamilton knew that the eldest son might not be the most able and was all too well acquainted with his father’s sorry tale of being the fourth son of a Scottish laird. Somewhat paradoxically, he explicitly endorsed merit, not birth, as the motive force of the hereditary society and wanted to apply this operating principle to the larger society as well. As would often occur in the future, his avowed preference for an elite based on merit was misconstrued by enemies into a secret adoration of aristocracy.

TWELVE

AUGUST AND RESPECTABLE ASSEMBLY

A
fter the Revolution, New York experienced a brief flush of prosperity that faded and then vanished in 1785, snuffed out by swelling debt, scarce money, and dwindling trade. Falling prices hurt indebted farmers, forcing them to repay loans with dearer money. As a Bank of New York director, Hamilton worried that defaulting debtors would also feign poverty and ruin their creditors. He later said of the deteriorating business climate, “confidence in pecuniary transactions had been destroyed and the springs of industry had been proportionably relaxed.”
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In the coming months, Hamilton fell prey to lurid visions that the have-nots would rise up and dispossess the haves. Men of property would be held hostage by armies of the indebted and unemployed. Sensing a crisis on the horizon, he told one member of the Livingston family that “those who are concerned for the
security of property
or the prosperity of government” must “endeavour to put men in the legislature whose principles are not of the
levelling kind.
”
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Despite his reservations about this rambunctious new democracy, Hamilton was not yet prepared to run for the legislature. When he came upon his name on a list of potential candidates for the state assembly published by
The New-York Packet
in April 1785, he hurriedly asked the publisher to strike his name from consideration “at the present juncture.”
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Reluctant to foreclose options, Hamilton did not rule out serving at a more auspicious time.

For Hamilton, the major threat to the state could now be summed up in three words: Governor George Clinton. As wartime governor, Clinton had emerged from the Revolution with unmatched popularity and had been reelected three times. He was a short, thickset man with broad shoulders and a protruding paunch. His coarse features—shaggy brows, unkempt hair, and fleshy jowls—gave him the brawny air of a fishmonger or stevedore. Everything about him suggested bullheaded persistence. For most of Hamilton’s career, George Clinton was an immovable presence in New York, a craggy, forbidding mountain that loomed over the political landscape. If uncouth in appearance, he was a wily politician who clung tenaciously to power. Destined to serve seven terms as governor and two as vice president, Clinton represented what would become a staple of American political folklore: the local populist boss, not overly punctilious or savory yet embraced warmly by the masses as one of their own. As his biographer John Kaminski put it, “George Clinton’s friends considered him a man of the people; his enemies saw him as a demagogue.”
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The son of Scotch-Irish immigrants, George Clinton started out as a country lawyer from Ulster County and a rabble-rouser in the New York Assembly, followed by a period in the Continental Congress. As a brigadier general, he defended the Hudson Highlands during the war. He became the indomitable champion of the local yeomen, who saw him as a bulwark against the patrician families that had ruled colonial New York: the Livingstons, Schuylers, Rensselaers, and other Hudson River potentates. Theodore Roosevelt later observed, with the knowing eye of a veteran politician, that Clinton knew how to capitalize on the “cold, suspicious temper of small country freeholders” with their “narrow” jealousies.
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Yet for all his aura of republican simplicity, Clinton was not the salt of the earth. He owned eight slaves and put together a fortune in office. If he lived frugally, it was less from lack of money than from notoriously miserly habits. During most of his time in office, this poohbah of the people sported the pretentious title “His Excellency George Clinton, Esquire, the Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief of all the militia, and Admiral of the Navy of the State of New-York.”
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Hamilton and Clinton did not begin at loggerheads. Though Clinton was sixteen years older, he and Hamilton had kept up a friendly wartime correspondence and agreed on the need to bolster Congress. Hamilton applauded Washington’s choice of Clinton to command American forces in the Hudson Valley. But when Hamilton married Eliza Schuyler, he inherited Clinton’s special nemesis as his father-in-law. By 1782, while Hamilton still lauded Clinton as a “man of integrity,” he had come to believe that Clinton pandered to popular prejudice “especially when a new election approaches.”
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As the decade progressed, Hamilton’s critique of Clinton grew more venomous. He found the governor rude and petulant, his frank manner a cloak for infinite calculation. Clinton was “circumspect and guarded” and seldom acted “without premeditation or design.”
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Alexander Hamilton was haunted by George Clinton for reasons that transcended his political style. Hamilton’s besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism. George Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, and Aaron Burr all came to incarnate that dread for Hamilton. Clinton also disapproved of banks, regarding them as devices to enrich speculators and divert money from hardworking farmers. Hamilton was further chagrined by Clinton’s punitive postwar stance toward the Loyalists. One Tory chronicler said of Clinton: “He tried, condemned, imprisoned, and punished the Loyalists most unmercifully. They were by his orders tarred and feathered, carted, whipped, fined, banished, and in short, every kind of cruelty, death not excepted, was practised by this emissary of rebellion.”
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Hamilton might have tolerated such flaws had it not been for one unforgivable sin: Clinton favored New York to the detriment of national unity. Clinton was well aware of Hamilton’s ardent nationalist orientation. In time, he praised Hamilton as “a great man, a great lawyer, a man of integrity, very ambitious,” but “anxious to effect that ruinous measure, a
consolidation of the states.
”
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Much of Hamilton’s cynicism about state politics can be traced to his growing disenchantment with George Clinton. At the governor’s urging, New York State imposed a stiff duty on British goods entering from the West Indies, a tax that infuriated city merchants and shippers alike. Many of these imports ended up in neighboring New Jersey and Connecticut, but New York kept all of the taxes. New York also laid an “import” tariff on farm produce from New Jersey and lumber from Connecticut. Addicted to this financial racket and unwilling to share the booty, Governor Clinton had opposed the 5 percent federal tax on imports proposed by the Confederation Congress and supported by Hamilton.

So grave were the interstate tensions over trade that Nathaniel Gorham, named president of Congress in 1786, feared that clashes between New York and its neighbors might degenerate into civil war. Similarly acrimonious trade disputes erupted between other states with major seaports and neighbors who imported goods through them. The states were arrogating a right that properly belonged to a central government: the right to formulate trade policy. This persuaded Hamilton that unless a new federal government with a monopoly on customs revenues was established, disunion would surely ensue. As individual states developed interests in their own taxes, they would be less and less likely to sacrifice for the common good.

In April 1786, amid a worsening economic crisis, Hamilton agreed that the time had come to act and was elected to a one-year term in the New York Assembly. Later on, he told a Scottish relative that he had been involved in a lucrative legal practice “when the derangement of our public affairs by the feebleness of the general confederation drew me again reluctantly into public life.”
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His zeal for reform signaled anything but reluctance. He was seized with a crusading sense of purpose and had a momentous, long-term plan to enact. Hamilton told Troup he had stood for election because he planned to “render the next session” of the Assembly “subservient to the change he meditated” in the structure of the national government.
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Indeed, his election to the Assembly was a preliminary step in an extended sequence of events that led straight to the Constitutional Convention.