Alexander Hamilton (110 page)

Another intricate appointment battle involved Aaron Burr, who had left the U.S. Senate the year before and returned to the New York Assembly. To appease the Republicans, Adams wanted to name Burr a brigadier general. Hamilton was pushing measures to defend seaports against French incursions and sat on a local military committee with Burr to improve New York City’s defenses. For the moment, the mutable Burr was flirting with the Federalists, and Robert Troup was agog that Burr, an enthusiast for the French Revolution, was now helping to equip the city against a possible French assault. Troup told Rufus King that Burr’s “conduct [is] very different from what you would imagine. Some conjecture that he is changing his ground.”
⁸³
Burr and Hamilton were more openly amicable than they had been for some time.

Hamilton was skeptical that Burr would abandon his Republican comrades but was content to see what would happen. He must have been grateful that Burr had used his good offices the previous fall to cool off his confrontation with Monroe. When one military man appeared in New York that summer, he asked if Hamilton would take it amiss if he visited Burr. “Little Burr!” exclaimed Hamilton cheerily, explaining that they had always been on good terms despite political differences. “I fancy he now begins to think he was wrong [in politics] and I was right.”
⁸⁴
So Hamilton took seriously the idea that Burr might be mulling over a switch in party affiliation, and he wished to encourage it cautiously.

Burr mirrored Hamilton in his military daydreams, and he was attracted by an appointment to the new army. This may explain his short-lived political rapport with Hamilton. “I have some reasons for wishing that the administration may manifest a cordiality to him,” Hamilton wrote guardedly to Wolcott when Burr set out for Philadelphia in late June 1798. “It is not impossible he will be found a useful cooperator. I am aware there are different sides, but the case is worth the experiment.”
⁸⁵
Around this time, Hamilton chatted with Burr about an appointment. Aware of bad blood between him and Washington, Hamilton asked Burr whether he could serve faithfully under the general. Burr unhesitatingly replied that “he despised Washington as a man of no talents and one who could not spell a sentence of common English.”
⁸⁶

Having tussled with Washington over Hamilton and William Smith, Adams compounded his mistake by asking the former president to take on Burr as a brigadier general despite their well-known history of friction. Washington refused, pulling no punches: “By all that I have known and heard, Colonel Burr is a brave and able officer, but the question is whether he has not equal talents at intrigue?”
⁸⁷

Years later, Adams still spluttered with emotion at this retort: “How shall I describe to you my sensations and reflections at that moment. [Washington] had compelled me to promote over the heads of Lincoln, Clinton, Gates, Knox, and others and even over Pinckney . . . the most restless, impatient, artful, indefatigable, and unprincipled intriguer in the United States, if not in the world, to be second in command under himself and now dreaded an intriguer in a poor brigadier.”
⁸⁸
In retirement, Adams mused that if Burr had become a brigadier general in 1798, it might have tethered him to the Federalists and assured his own reelection in 1800. Indeed, Adams was right in one respect: Washington blundered by recruiting only Federalists to top military positions, while Adams had wished to include two Republicans—Burr and Frederick Muhlenberg—as brigadiers. Had the army taken on a more bipartisan complexion, it might well have been more popular.

Alexander Hamilton was now addressed as General Hamilton and was so listed in the New York City directory. With his congenital weakness for uniforms, he allowed a painter from the British Isles, P. T. Weaver, to capture him in dazzling military dress, braided with epaulettes. A hardness now sharpened Hamilton’s features—his profile was finer, his gaze more direct than in other pictures—yet he complimented the portrait and, in a sentimental gesture, gave it to his old friend from St. Croix, Edward Stevens.

Ever the master administrator, Hamilton flung himself into the gargantuan task of organizing an army with unflagging energy. For five weeks in November and December 1798, he conferred in Philadelphia with Washington, who made his first resplendent return to the capital in twenty months, appearing in uniform on horseback. Charles C. Pinckney and Secretary of War McHenry joined the planning sessions. Hamilton sketched out this phantom force in microscopic detail, producing comprehensive charts for regiments, battalions, and companies. In a typical passage, Hamilton was to write, “A company is subdivided equally into two platoons, a platoon into two sections and a section into two squads, a squad consisting of four files of three or six files of two.”
⁸⁹
He assigned ranks to officers, set up recruiting stations, stocked arsenals with ammunition, and drew up numerous regulations.

For the moment, Washington delegated plenary power to him. Hamilton told one general, since Washington had “for the present declined actual command, it has been determined ...to place the military force everywhere under the superintendence of Major General Pinckney and myself.”
⁹⁰
Not just the new army but the old one stationed on the western frontier came under Hamilton’s direct command, while Pinckney oversaw the southern troops. Hamilton exercised his far-flung authority from a small office at 36 Greenwich Street in Manhattan. From the outset, his work was often thankless. He drew no salary until November and then earned only $268.35 a month, one-quarter of what he had taken home as a lawyer. More than half of his legal clients, fearing distractions, dropped him when he was made inspector general. Hamilton could not resist government service but could never quite reconcile himself to the pecuniary sacrifice. In pleading for more money with McHenry, he said, “It is always disagreeable to speak of compensations for one’s self, but a man past 40 with a wife and six children and a very
small
property beforehand is compelled to wa[i]ve the scruples which his nicety would otherwise dictate.”
⁹¹

Frequently laid up with poor health that winter, Hamilton had to conjure up an entire army aided by a single aide-de-camp, twenty-year-old Captain Philip Church, Angelica’s eldest son. He was so exceedingly good-looking that Hamilton told Eliza that his presence “gives great pleasure to the ladies who wanted a
beau.
”
⁹²
This Anglo-American young man had led an improbable life. Educated at Eton with young noblemen and trained as a legal apprentice at the Middle Temple in London, he was now handling clerical work for a major general in the U.S. Army. Contemptuous of President Adams for touting his inept son-in-law, Hamilton engaged here in some minor nepotism of his own. He admitted to the president that Church’s appointment was “a personal favour to myself ” and added, “Let me at the same time beg you to be persuaded, Sir, that I shall never on any other occasion place a recommendation to office on a similar footing.”
⁹³
Nevertheless, he pressed James McHenry to name several Schuyler relatives as lieutenants.

A chronic stickler for etiquette, Hamilton entered into the minutiae of protocol and dress, showing an unrestrained love of military matters. The most fastidious tailor could not have dictated more precise instructions for Washington’s uniform: “A blue coat without lapels, with lining collar and cuffs of buff, yellow buttons and gold epaulettes of double bullion tag with fringe, each having three stars. Collar cuffs and pocket flaps to have full embroidered edges and the button holes of every description to be full embroidered.” For Washington’s hat: “A full cocked hat, with a yellow button gold loop, a black cockade with a gold eagle in the center and a white plume.” For his boots: “Long boots, with stiff tops reaching to the center of the knee pan, the whole of black leather lined above with red morocco so as just to appear.”
⁹⁴
Hamilton’s descriptions of other uniforms were no less meticulous.

His mind percolating with ideas, Hamilton also designed huts for each rank. The huts for lieutenant colonels had to measure fourteen by twenty-four feet, while majors were given fourteen by twenty-two feet: “It is contemplated that the huts be roofed with boards, unless where slabs can be had very cheap.”
⁹⁵
After learning the value of training manuals from Steuben during the Revolution, the indefatigable inspector general devised one for drill exercises. What, for instance, should a soldier do when a commander barked “Head right”? Hamilton answered: “At the word ‘right,’ the soldier turns his head to the right, briskly but without violence, bringing his left eye in a line with the buttons of his waistcoat and with his right eye looking along the breasts of the men upon his right.”
⁹⁶
He signed up the German-born John De Barth Walbach to test cavalry systems used in Prussia, France, and Great Britain and to figure out which would work best in an American setting. To identify the ideal length and speed of the marching step, he conducted experiments using pendulums that vibrated at 75, 100, and 120 times per minute.

So encyclopedic was Hamilton’s grasp of military affairs that he laid down the broad outlines of the entire military apparatus. He viewed the new army as the kernel of a permanent military establishment that would free the country from reliance on state militias. To foster a corps of highly trained officers, he pursued an idea that he and Washington had discussed: establishing a military academy. Contrary to many of his compatriots, Hamilton thought America had much to learn from Europe about military affairs. “Self-sufficiency and a contempt of the science and experience of others are too prevailing traits of character in this country,” he wailed to John Jay.
⁹⁷
(This attitude was of a piece with his dismay over the Jeffersonian faith that Americans had much to teach the world but little to learn from it.) He had already pressed a leading French military authority to present him with “a digested plan of an establishment for a military school. This is an object I have extremely at heart.”
⁹⁸
For a military academy, Hamilton wanted a site on navigable water, with easy access to cannon foundries and small-arms manufacturers. A few weeks later, he galloped off to tour the fortress at West Point.

Hamilton’s elaborate plans contemplated five schools specializing in military science, engineering, cavalry, infantry, and the navy. With Hamiltonian thoroughness, he listed the necessary instructors right down to two drawing masters, an architect, and a riding master. He was no less directive when it came to curricula, declaring that the engineering school should teach “fluxions, conic sections, hydraulics, hydrostatics, and pneumatics.”
⁹⁹
Before Adams left office, Hamilton and McHenry had introduced in the House of Representatives “A Bill for Establishing a Military Academy.” Ironically, the academy at West Point was to come into being during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, who had rejected the idea as unconstitutional during Washington’s administration.

Hamilton also devised plans for military hospitals and something very like a veterans’ administration that would tend men wounded in battle and their families: “Justice and humanity forbid the abandoning to want and misery men who have spent their best years in the military service of a country or who in that service had contracted infirmities which disqualify them to earn their bread in other modes.”
¹⁰⁰

Hamilton had a plethora of ideas, but implementing them was tough, partly because of the mediocrity of his old friend James McHenry. From the start, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., had warned Hamilton that if he became inspector general he would have to double as secretary of war because McHenry’s “good sense, industry, and virtues are of no avail without a certain address and skill in business which he has not and cannot acquire.”
¹⁰¹
Washington chimed in that McHenry’s “talents were unequal to great exertions or deep resources.”
¹⁰²
The new army was plagued by bureaucratic problems, and Hamilton ended up lecturing McHenry on how to run a cabinet department. “I observe you plunged in a vast mass of detail,” he told McHenry, admonishing him to delegate more authority. As an old friend of McHenry, Hamilton did not wish to shunt him aside, but his incompetence was too glaring to overlook. Hamilton advised Washington confidentially that “my friend McHenry is wholly insufficient for his place, with the additional misfortune of not having himself the least suspicion of the fact!”
¹⁰³

Hamilton constantly issued directives to the hapless McHenry. That he accepted such guidance from Hamilton makes one suspect that he lacked confidence in his abilities and welcomed the guidance. But McHenry was not a quick pupil, and Hamilton wearied of trying to educate him. Before long, a querulous tone crept into Hamilton’s letters. He opened a back channel to Wolcott, telling his Treasury successor how he might assist McHenry in managing the War Department. All this intrigue thrust Hamilton ever deeper into the inner workings of John Adams’s cabinet. But this wasn’t simply a case of Hamilton’s trying to control the cabinet or alienate it from President Adams; rather, he needed a capable bureaucrat at the helm of the War Department. There was painful irony in the fact that Hamilton was quietly feuding with one of the very people whom Adams would shortly accuse him of controlling.

As Hamilton assembled his army in 1799, the bureaucratic snags only worsened, and recruits began to desert. At moments, Hamilton seemed to be reliving the anguish of the Revolution, when an inefficient Congress seemed deaf to the pleas of the Continental Army. Hamilton complained to McHenry about the lack of pay for his soldiers, the shortage of clothing, his fear that dissatisfied troops might mutiny. But the difficulties went deeper than administrative inadequacy on McHenry’s part; the real problems were political and far more intractable.

Republicans had long viewed Hamilton as a potential despot, but so long as he worked in harness to George Washington these fears had been totally baseless. As a member of Washington’s wartime family and then his cabinet, Hamilton operated within strict bounds. Now, Washington was retreating to a more passive role. As Hamilton drifted away from Washington’s supervision and felt more exasperated by Adams’s undisguised hostility toward him, he began to indulge in wild flights of fantasy and to resemble more the military adventurer of Republican mythology or the epithets that Abigail Adams pinned to him: “Little Mars” and “a second Bonaparty.”
¹⁰⁴
This martial fervor was most apparent in Hamilton’s woefully misguided dream of liberating European colonies in North and South America. If an open break with France came, he wanted to collude with Britain to take over Spanish territory east of the Mississippi, while wresting Spanish America from Spain. “All on this side [of] the Mississippi must be
ours,
including both Floridas,” he had already argued to McHenry in early 1798.
¹⁰⁵