Alexander Hamilton (50 page)

Mr. Hamilton expressed his anxiety [i.e., eagerness] that every member should sign. A few characters of consequence, by opposing or even refusing to sign the Constitution, might do infinite mischief by kindling the latent sparks which lurk under an enthusiasm in favor of the Convention, which may soon subside. No man’s ideas were more remote from the plan than his were known to be. But is it possible to deliberate between anarchy and convulsion on one side and the chance of good to be expected from the plan on the other.
¹⁰²

After signing, the delegates adjourned to the City Tavern, which John Adams described as the “most genteel tavern in America,” for a farewell dinner.
¹⁰³
Behind the conviviality lurked unspoken fears, and Washington, for one, doubted that the new federal government would survive twenty years.

The delegates decided that the Constitution would take effect when nine state conventions approved it. For tactical and philosophical reasons, state legislatures were bypassed in favor of independent ratifying conventions. This would prevent state officials hostile to the new federal government from killing it off. Also, by having autonomous conventions approve the Constitution, the new republic would derive its legitimacy not from the statehouses but directly from the citizenry, enabling federal law to supersede state legislation.

With the possible exception of James Madison, nobody had exerted more influence than Hamilton in bringing about the convention or a greater influence afterward in securing passage of its sterling product. His behavior at the convention itself was another matter. It would long seem contradictory—and, to Jeffersonians, downright suspicious—that Hamilton could support a document that he had contested at such length. In fact, the Constitution represented a glorious compromise for every signer. This flexibility has always been honored as a sign of political maturity, whereas Hamilton’s concessions have often been given a conspiratorial twist. For the rest of his life, Hamilton remained utterly true to his pledge that he would do everything in his power to see the Constitution successfully implemented. He never wavered either in public or in private. And there was a great deal in the document that was compatible with ideas about government that he had expressed since 1780. His reservations had less to do with the powers of the new government than with the tenure of the people exercising them. In the end, nobody would do more than Alexander Hamilton to infuse life into this parchment and make it the working mandate of the American government.

THIRTEEN

PUBLIUS

F
or all its gore and mayhem, the American Revolution had unified the thirteen states, binding them into a hopeful, if still restive, nation. The aftermath of the Constitutional Convention, by contrast, turned ugly and divisive, polarizing the populace. Four days after Hamilton affixed his signature to the Constitution,
The Daily Advertiser
gave New Yorkers their first glimpse of it, and many blanched in amazement. This charter went far beyond Congress’s instructions to rework the Articles of Confederation: it brought forth a brand-new government. The old confederation had simply gone up in smoke. Marinus Willett, once a stalwart of the Sons of Liberty and now New York’s sheriff, echoed the consternation among Governor Clinton’s entourage when he lambasted the new Constitution as “a monster with open mouth and monstrous teeth ready to devour all before it.”
¹

Amid great uproar and incessant debate, the country began to divide into two groups. Those in favor of the new dispensation and a dominant central government were called, somewhat illogically, federalists—a name ordinarily applied to supporters of a loose confederation. Opponents of the Constitution, who feared encroachments on state prerogatives, were now termed antifederalists. The two sides projected competing nightmares of what would happen if the other side prevailed. The federalists evoked disunion, civil war, and foreign intrigue, along with flagrant repudiation of debt and assaults on property. The antifederalists talked darkly of despotism and a monarchy, the ascendancy of the rich, and the outright abolition of the states. If both sides trafficked in hyperbole, we must remember how much was at stake. The Revolution had focused on independence from Britain and sidestepped the question of what sort of society America ought to be—a question that could no longer be postponed. Did the Revolution herald a new social order, or would it perpetuate something closer to the status quo ante? And didn’t the new Constitution, by fostering a dominant central government, imitate the British model against which the colonists had rebelled? The brevity and generality of the Constitution made it susceptible to many interpretations. One could imagine almost anything about a government that existed only on paper. Paranoid thinking seems to be a legacy of all revolutions, with purists searching for signs of heresy, and the American experience was no exception.

Given the well-organized opposition in large states such as Virginia and New York, it seemed likely that it would be an uphill battle to get the Constitution ratified. As often incredulous citizens studied the document in taverns and coffeehouses, many rejected it at first blush. The convention’s secrecy encouraged suspicions of a wicked cabal at work. Patrick Henry, for one, railed against “the tyranny of Philadelphia” and compared the new charter to “the tyranny of George III.”
²
Objections to the Constitution ranged from the noble (insistence upon a bill of rights or the mandatory rotation of presidents) to the base (a desire to protect local politicians or preserve slavery from an intrusive federal government). The tariff issue held special force in New York, where state customs revenues made other taxes unnecessary. Under the new Constitution, customs collection would become a federal monopoly. By the fall of 1787, the debate over the new dispensation obsessed New Yorkers. In the words of one newspaper, “The rage of the season is…Jack, what are you, boy, federal or antifederal.”
³

The rancor ushered in a golden age of literary assassination in American politics. No etiquette had yet evolved to define the legitimate boundaries of dissent. Poison-pen artists on both sides wrote vitriolic essays that were overtly partisan, often paid scant heed to accuracy, and sought a visceral impact. The inflamed rhetoric once directed against Britain was now turned inward against domestic adversaries.

The Clintonians were still smarting over Hamilton’s midsummer invective against the governor. Their animosity was further riled in early September when a newspaper scribe called “Rough Carver” ridiculed Clinton as the “thick-skulled and double-hearted chief” of those “who will coolly oppose everything which does not bear the marks of
self.
”
⁴
For several weeks, a violent press battle raged between federalists and antifederalists. The Clintonian response to “Rough Carver” appeared under “A Republican” and took deadly aim at Hamilton and the “lordly faction” that wanted to “establish a system more favorable to their aristocratic views.”
⁵
This led to a federalist rebuttal by “Aristides” that sketched a heroic portrait of Hamilton as a sublime human being “impelled from pure principles,” who had sounded “a
noble
and
patriotic alarm
” against the dangers of the Articles of Confederation.
⁶

Never one to dodge controversy, Hamilton admitted that he had written the anonymous summer attack on Clinton. But then, far from laying the feud to rest, he renewed the offensive. For Hamilton, Clinton epitomized the flaws of the old confederation, and he denounced “the pernicious intrigues of a man high in office to preserve power and emolument to himself at the expense of the union, the peace, and the happiness of America.”
⁷
Hamilton presented himself as a paragon of virtue—a tactic that later came back to haunt him. Writing of himself in the third person, he issued this challenge to his opponents: “Mr. Hamilton can, however, defy all their malevolent ingenuity to produce a single instance of his conduct, public or private, inconsistent with the strict rules of integrity and honor.”
⁸

George Clinton responded to Hamilton’s declaration of war on two levels. The governor almost certainly authored seven essays signed “Cato” that set forth reasoned objections to the Constitution. “Cato” wanted a stronger Congress, more members in the House of Representatives, and a weak president restricted to one term. Then a pair of newspaper articles styled “Inspector” showed just how vicious the calumny against Hamilton would be. Hamilton was portrayed as the uppity “Tom S
^**
t” (Tom Shit) and introduced as a “mustee”—the offspring of a white person and a quadroon. This was the first time that Hamilton’s opponents tried to denigrate him with charges of mixed racial ancestry. Tom Shit is mocked for his “Creolian” writing. In a soliloquy, Tom, a conceited upstart and British lackey, says, “My dear masters, I am indeed leading a very hard life in your service…. Consider the great sacrifices I have made for you. By birth a subject of his Danish Majesty, I quitted my native soil in the torrid zone and called myself a North American for your sakes.” Tom is accused of having sent his “Phocion” essays, defending persecuted Tories, straight from the king’s printer in England. After castigating Hamilton as a treacherous foreigner, the author refers to Washington as Hamilton’s “immaculate daddy,” a snide reference to Hamilton’s illegitimacy.
⁹
Thus began the baseless mythology, which persists to this day, that Hamilton was Washington’s “natural” child.

“Inspector” seemed to know all about Hamilton’s notorious June 18 speech at the convention, but the secret nature of the deliberations made it impossible to print anything directly. So, in the next installment, he concocted an allegory in which a “Mrs. Columbia” asks Tom Shit how best to run her plantation. Tom replies that the plantation superintendent should be installed for life instead of for four-year terms. The author concludes, “Such strides [Tom] had already made in emerging from obscurity that he conceived nothing was beyond the reach of his good fortune.”
¹⁰
Evidently, Clintonians thought the time had come to chop Hamilton down to size by jeering at his foreign birth, his supposed racial identity, his illegitimacy, and his putative links to the British Crown—attacks that set a pattern for the rest of Hamilton’s career. Since critics found it hard to defeat him on intellectual grounds, they stooped to personal attacks.

In late September, Hamilton jotted down some unpublished reflections on the Constitution. He was guardedly hopeful that it would be ratified as men of property closed ranks to stop “the depredations which the democratic spirit is apt to make on property.” He thought it would also be supported by creditors eager to see government debt repaid. On the other hand, it would be resisted by state politicians who feared a decrease in their power and citizens who dreaded new taxes. If the Constitution was not ratified, Hamilton expected a “dismemberment of the Union and monarchies in different portions of it” or else several republican confederacies. If civil war came, he foresaw a possible reversion to colonial status: “A reunion with Great Britain, from universal disgust at a state of commotion, is not impossible, though not much to be feared. [Presumably, Hamilton meant that it was not likely.] The most plausible shape of such a business would be the establishment of a son of the present [British] monarchy in the supreme government of this country with a family compact.”
¹¹

Impelled by such fears, Hamilton flung himself into defending the Constitution. Throughout his career, he operated in the realm of the possible, taking the world as it was, not as he wished it to be, and he often inveighed against a dogmatic insistence upon perfection. Being a lawyer may have eased his transition from arch skeptic to supreme admirer of the Constitution, for he had the attorney’s ability to make the best case for an imperfect client. He was not alone in making this transition: all the delegates at Philadelphia had adopted the final document in a spirit of compromise. They approached it as a collective work and championed it as the best available solution. What Jefferson said of George Washington could easily have applied to Hamilton: “He has often declared to me that he considered our new constitution as an experiment on the practicability of republic government…[and] that he was determined the experiment should have a fair trial and would lose the last drop of his blood in support of it…. I do believe that General Washington had not a firm confidence in the durability of our government.”
¹²
Hamilton was no less hopeful, no less committed, and certainly no less skeptical.

By early October 1787, Hamilton conceived an ambitious writing project to help elect federalist delegates to the New York Ratifying Convention: a comprehensive explication of the entire document, written by New Yorkers for a New York audience. In early October 1787, James Kent encountered Hamilton at a dinner party at the Schuyler mansion in Albany, where Hamilton was attending the fall session of the state supreme court. Philip Schuyler expatiated on the need for a national revenue system while Hamilton listened quietly. “Mr. Hamilton appeared to be careless and desultory in his remarks,” Kent recalled, “and it occurred to me afterwards…that he was deeply meditating the plan of the immortal work of
The Federalist.
”
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Tradition claims that Hamilton wrote the first installment of the masterpiece known as
The Federalist Papers
in the cabin of a Hudson River sloop as he and Eliza returned to New York from Albany. Eliza recalled going upriver, not down, and said Hamilton laid out the contours of the project as they sailed: “My beloved husband wrote the outline of his papers in
The Federalist
on board of one of the North River sloops while on his way to Albany, a journey…which in those days usually occupied a week. Public business so filled up his time that he was compelled to do much of his studying and writing while traveling.”
¹⁴
Whether he was sailing downriver or upriver, it is pleasant to picture Hamilton scratching out his plan as the tall, single-masted schooner slipped past the Hudson Highlands and the Palisades. This first essay appeared in
The Independent Journal
on October 27, 1787.