Alexander Hamilton has had a very good year. Not only has he been frequently cited as the leading authority on impeachable offenses, but his conduct in explaining his relations with Maria Reynolds and her blackmailing husband has been justly hailed as befitting a gentleman caught, out in a tawdry affair: forthright, unflinching, and painfully honest.
Richard Brookhiser could not have known this would happen when he set out to write his new profile of our most striking Founding Father, but no one needs a topical reason to explore again the life, mind, and character of this perplexing and beguiling man.
All the Founders are intriguing, but no other had a life, and death, like Hamilton’s. No other was born a bastard on a remote Caribbean island to a wastrel father and a mother who was called a whore; no other had so sharp a rise through the social classes of his adopted country; no other had an adultery so widely publicized; no other had so dramatic a death: Nearly the youngest of the Founders, a perpetual youth among the graybeards, he was nearly the first to die.
Suspected of harboring European sympathies and aristocratic leanings, Hamilton was in fact and example of the New World’s opportunities for social mobility. Figures like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were bred to their powerful places. But Hamilton, like Washington, rose by grit, luck, brains, and ferocious ambition.
Washington came from a marginal family; Hamilton from a disgraced one. Washington had an embarrassing mother; Hamilton had an unmarried one. Washington had lost one parent by the age of eleven; Hamilton had effectively lost both. (His mother died, and his ne’er-do-well father deserted the family.) Washington’s lifeline was his half-brother, Lawrence, who married into the upper-class Fairfax clan and pulled George along with him. Hamilton’s lifeline was Nicholas Cruger, the Caribbean businessman to whom he was apprenticed at nine, who noticed the boy’s talents and arranged to send him to school in New York. The glory Washington found in the French and Indian Wars, Hamilton found in the Revolutionary War, and both men capped their martial glory by marrying well. The fortune of Martha Dandridge Custis made Washington one of the major figures in Virginia society. Philip Schuyler, the father of Hamilton’s wife Betsey, was one of the three most powerful figures in New York.
Both Washington and Hamilton reached power with advanced degrees in social climbing: Their patrons always proved more than willing to help them, and their rich wives thought themselves the fortunate ones in their marriages. This fact alone speaks volumes about their capacity to influences and lead.
But Hamilton remains more of a paradox than Washington, for the younger man was both a roaring successes and a staggering failure. The greatest statesman of his age at innovation and prophesy, he was also its most hapless at everyday politics. Jefferson was born with the skills of a wardheeler, able to plot, wheedle, and spin with the masters. Madison, as Brookhiser observes, had a “fingertip feel for politics — how points are carried, how deals are made, . . . how alliances hang together and disintegrate. . . . At his best, he could push a cause with patience, tact, and cunning. If he was beaten he would keep coming back until the prevailed.”
Alexander Hamilton had none of these talents. He was rash, blunt, unguarded, tactless, impatient, forth-right, and cursed with at in ear for politics. When he attempted intrigue, the effect was invariably pathetic. He could not play to the voters or butter them up: “He had information on all points,” wrote the Duc de Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, “but he often wondered why others did not think and act as he did, the righteous necessities of the case seemingly being so apparent.”
The result was that Hamilton could wield power only when allowed to by others — particularly by Washington, who trusted him and made him what was, in effect, first minister. When Hamilton left the cabinet in 1795, he continued to send instructions to his friends in governments, an arrangement Washington approved of. But John Adams — who, unwisely for himself, kept Washington’s cabinet in place when he became president — did not know it for years, and when he found out, he flew into a tantrum. With this, and the 1800 election of Jefferson, Hamilton’s political power vanished. And he had not a clue how to get it back.
A great deal of Hamilton’s political travails may derive from the fact that he was a man out of his time. The America he inhabited — a small, confederate, coastal, agrarian, partly slave-holding country — was not the America he had in mind: a continental superpower, a diverse economy sprouting new businesses, and a cohesive nation in which the states were merely regional units and slavery was merely a painful memory. Many of Hamilton’s friends, like George Washington and Gouverneur Morris, were also ardent nationalists, but none of them could begin to imagine his plans for the nation.
Hamilton looked forward to seeing a “race of Americans,” not a confederacy of Virginians, Carolinians, and New Yorkers. He looked forward to a country made wholly of freemen. (Save for his good friend Morris, no other Founder spoke with such passion against slavery.) Brookhiser notes his recurring word choices: “Busy, rouse, exert, energy, effort, enterprise, strongest, active, activity, vigor — these are all Hamiltonian touchstones.” He longed to live in a world power, in a country that was key to a series of great international compacts made in the service of freedom. He loved power, responsibility, great chores, and great challenges.
Thomas Jefferson and George Washington lived on their farms, so entwined with their rural homes that they seem to have roots there. Hamilton lived in his mind and in the future. Of all the Founders, he would be the only one at home in the world of 1999, at ease with the computer and the Internet, the giant international conglomerate and the small entrepreneur. He believed in big and small business, and in an active state entity; in individual enterprise and community spirit. He was a big-government liberal who believed in big business and a pro-business conservative who believed that government should think of useful things to do and then do them.
Echoes of Hamilton sound in Ronald Reagan and Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his biographer Theodore Roosevelt, and in John F. Kennedy, with his space probes and Peace Corps. Hamilton would have adored Abraham Lincoln and admired Andrew Jackson for their strong displays of executive power (though he would have detested some of their purposes, such as Jackson’s breaking of the national bank he had helped found). He would have disliked Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, George McGovern, and Jimmy Carter as having been to small for the national britches. For the Clinton-Gore administration, he would have had utter contempt.
Hamilton is typically posed as the money-man in the Founders’ debates, forever arguing about budgets and balance sheets while Jefferson strode the moral heights, contemplating the eternal “pursuit of happiness.” It is Brookhiser’s insight that Hamilton’s concern for financial programs — his hope and belief in diversified enterprise — was his method of expanding freedom and opening new ways that happiness might actually be pursued. “A diverse economy, he argued, develops society,” Brookhiser writes. But,
Equally important, a diverse economy develops individuals. “Minds of the strongest and most powers,” Hamilton said, “fall below mediocrity and labor without effect is confined to uncongenial pursuits, . . . when all the different kinds of industry obtain in a community, each individual can find his proper element, and can call into an activity the whole vigor of his nature.”
Madison and Jefferson knew that men needed to work to sustain themselves and to banish the demons of idleness. But what Hamilton knew as well is that men forced into wrong kinds of labor, forced out of their own bent and into another, could be neither happy nor free.
Work for Hamilton was a moral necessity. It was his talents at work that caused his first employer to send him to school in America. It was his talents at work that caused Washington to give him a place on his staff and then in his government. For Hamilton, work meant both private fulfillment and the opportunity for the natural aristocracy of talents to emerge in an open society.
Born at the top, Madison and Jefferson had no need to use work as a ladder to anything, and, as Brookhiser observes, their concept of labor was “notably static.” Jefferson detested great cities, with their commerce and commotion and industry. Hamilton saw them as seedbeds of enterprise and eventual human liberation. Supposedly the most hardheaded of the Founding Fathers, the most involved with the country’s material structure, Hamilton was also the most romantic about the people and in some ways the most aggressively populist.
Always precocious, Hamilton arrived early at failure and death. His last years were filled with shattering ruin in almost every area of life. In the late 1790s, he lost his political influence. At the end of 1799, he lost George Washington, his protector and substitute father. In 1801, he lost his oldest son, Philip, who at age nineteen was killed in a duel. He also “lost” his oldest daughter, Angelica, who went mad with shock. And then, in 1804, he was called out to a duel by Aaron Burr, a longtime, political and personal rival. He accepted, withheld his first fire, and died.
No one will ever know why Hamilton would toss off life in this fashion, and Brookhiser does not really try to find out. It is possible that Hamilton thought his death would end Burr’s political career and destroy public support for Burr’s secessionist fantasies (as it did). It is possible that his will to live had been fatally sapped by the fates of his son and daughter. It is also possible that this man, who had lived in crisis amid great events from his late adolescence onward, found the prospect of a slow life not worth clinging to.
In his last note to his wife (who lived fifty more years), he said he would rather “die innocent” than “live guilty” of taking another man’s life. He might also have said he preferred to exist life in a dramatic burst and live on in history. He did.
Hamilton is the only Founder one can imagine fighting such a duel; the only one with such sensitivities and so little common sense. But if his death looks back to the romantic past, his policies sprint ahead to the future — and his private failings place him squarely in the present.
The very fact that it was while he was compiling his masterful Report on Manufacturers that he carried on his ill-starred dalliance with Maria Reynolds tells us that public giants can in fact have private lapses and that judgment is not always uniform in every area of life.
The affair might have escaped notice, but it was the sudden flow of hush money from the secretary of the treasury to Maria Reynolds’s husband that drew the attention from members of Congress, among them Jefferson’s ally, James Monroe. Hamilton explained to the congressmen privately that the funds came from him, not the Treasury, and that his sin had been lust, not bribery. But five years later, he was exposed by James Callender (the Larry Flynt of his era), and the familiar story unfolded. Mrs. Hamilton blamed Monroe (and the equivalent of a vast, left-wing conspiracy), while others bemoaned the declined in public morality.
The critical difference between Hamilton’s scandal and Clinton’s however, is in the accused. In his confession, Hamilton did not equivocate, and he blamed himself instead of others. He took responsibility for his private behavior and defended his public probity. He told the truth and didn’t split hairs or resort to bizarre definitions. He did not claim that a long friendship had turned into sex. Instead, he said that one day in 1792, he had been approached by a distraught young woman who claimed that her husband had deserted her and left her penniless. Hamilton took her address and promised to help her. Bearing money, he went to her rooms, where “further conversation ensued, in which it quickly became apparent that other than pecuniary compensation would be acceptable.”
If nothing else, it reads so much better than the Starr Report.
RICHARD BROOKHISER
Alexander Hamilton American
Free Press, 256 pp., $ 25
Noemie Emery is a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and the author of biographies of Hamilton and Washington.
