Alexander Hamilton (123 page)

On October 3, 1800, the American envoys concluded a treaty with France at Château Môrtefontaine, ending the Quasi-War, which had so bedeviled the Adams presidency. Most Americans had grown tired of the undeclared war and were happy to close this chapter. The diplomatic breakthrough was not reported in American newspapers until November, and the treaty itself arrived at the Senate in midDecember. Unlike many die-hard Federalists, Hamilton favored the treaty, or at least realized the futility of opposing it, telling Gouverneur Morris that “it will be of consequence to the Federal cause in future to be able to say, ‘The Federal Administration steered the vessel through all the storms raised by the contentions of Europe into a peaceable and safe port.’ ”
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Hamilton was, shall we say, a belated convert to this more peaceable approach to the conflict.

For John Adams, who had defied the High Federalists and stuck to his policy, it was a stunning vindication of his stubborn faith in diplomacy against Hamilton’s saber rattling. He established a vital precedent that timely, well-executed diplomacy can forestall the need for military force. In fact, Adams had won such a major diplomatic victory that many historians have tended to condone the antic, unreasonable behavior that preceded it. Even Hamilton biographer Broadus Mitchell has called Adams “the hero of the piece. His annoying inconsistencies drop away because when resolution was needed he was right. He saved the country from war with France as Hamilton and others had saved it shortly before from war with Britain.”
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Adams described the preservation of peace during his presidency as the “most splendid diamond in my crown” and requested that the following words be incised on his tombstone: “Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of peace with France in the year 1800.”
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Adams later cited the “diabolical intrigues” of Hamilton and his colleagues, contending that he had pursued negotiations with France “at the expense of all my consequence in the world and their unanimous and immortal hatred.”
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Adams’s success came too late to sway the presidential election and therefore bore a bittersweet flavor. The bad timing only exacerbated his sense of being unlucky, unloved, and unappreciated. His admirers have echoed his view that he had acted in a noble, self-sacrificing manner, but his motives were not entirely saintly. He had adopted a hawkish stance toward France when that was popular early in his administration and then taken a more conciliatory posture to curry favor with Republicans as the 1800 election beckoned. By that point, his moderation was popular with electors in some critical states. George Clinton said that Adams having “sent a special mission to France and effected a peace came very near preventing the election of Mr. Jefferson to the Presidency. If the Republicans had not already named Jefferson for president, we should have supported Mr. Adams.”
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The peace mission to France was unquestionably the supreme triumph of the Adams presidency, but it testifies to political agility as well as wisdom.

By mid-December 1800, it was evident that Jefferson and Burr would garner an equal number of electoral votes, throwing the presidential contest into a lame-duck House of Representatives that was still dominated by Federalists. While no constitutional mechanism differentiated between the votes for president and vice president, it had been understood among Republicans that Jefferson was the presidential candidate. Afraid of jeopardizing Burr’s chances for the vice presidency, Jefferson had held back from asking Republican electors to drop a few votes for Burr to insure that he himself would come out on top. At first, Burr reacted to the tie vote in a gracious, honorable way, just as Jefferson had expected. He wrote to Republican Samuel Smith and renounced the sacrilegious thought of challenging Jefferson for the presidency: “It is highly improbable that I shall have an equal number of votes with Mr. Jefferson, but if such should be the result, every man who knows me ought to know that I should utterly disclaim all competition.”
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At least one knowledgeable observer doubted that Burr’s intentions were quite so benign. Hamilton was privy to rumors that Federalists in Congress might prefer Burr to Jefferson. So when he learned of the projected tie vote, he fired off a letter to Oliver Wolcott, Jr., to nip trouble in the bud:

As to
Burr,
there is nothing in his favour. His private character is not defended by his most partial friends. He is bankrupt beyond redemption, except by the plunder of his country. His public principles have no other spring or aim than his own aggrandizement....If he can, he will certainly disturb our institutions to secure to himself
permanent power
and with it
wealth.
He is truly the
Catiline
of America.
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This was a powerful indictment: in ancient Rome, Catiline was notorious for his personal dissipation and treacherous schemes to undermine the republic. In order to stop Burr, Hamilton decided to back his perpetual rival, Thomas Jefferson, telling Wolcott that Jefferson “is by far not so dangerous a man and he has pretensions to character.”
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He also thought that Jefferson was much more talented than the overrated Burr and that the latter was “far more cunning than wise, far more dexterous than able. In my opinion he is inferior in real ability to Jefferson.”
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Hamilton’s endorsement of Jefferson was the most improbable reversal in an improbable career. Nobody enjoyed Hamilton’s embarrassing predicament in having to choose between his two enemies more than John Adams. “The very man— the very two men—of all the world that he was most jealous of are now placed above him,” Adams said with pardonable gloating.
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Even in the thick of the campaign that summer, Hamilton had noted Burr’s electoral intrigues in New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont and surmised that he was only feigning deference to Jefferson. Burr alone had engaged in open electioneering, while Jefferson, Adams, and Pinckney stuck to the gentlemanly protocol of avoiding the stump. The alliance between Burr and Jefferson had been a marriage of convenience to pull New York into the Republican camp. “I never indeed thought him an honest, frank-dealing man,” Jefferson later said of Burr, “but considered him as a crooked gun or other perverted machine, whose aim or shot you could never be sure of.”
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That Jefferson twice recruited this crooked gun for his running mate indicates just how cynical he could be. Burr, in turn, still believed that he had been betrayed by Jefferson in the 1796 election, when he got only one vote in Virginia. “As to my Jeff,” he wrote with mordant whimsy, “after what happened at the last election (et tu Brute!) I was really averse to having my name in question ...but being so, it is most obvious that I should not choose to be trifled with.”
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Despite Burr’s declaration that he would yield the presidency to Jefferson, Federalist leaders pelted Hamilton with letters about the expediency of supporting Burr and ending Virginia’s political hegemony. Because Burr lusted after money and power, they thought they could strike a bargain with him. They worried less about Burr’s loose morals than about what they perceived as Jefferson’s atheism (clergymen were telling their congregations that if Jefferson became president, they would need to hide their Bibles) and his doctrinaire views. Better an opportunist than a dangerous ideologue, many Federalists thought. Fisher Ames feared that Jefferson was “absurd enough to believe his own nonsense,” while Burr might at least “impart vigor to the country.”
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John Marshall and others thought Burr a safer choice than Jefferson, who might try to recast the Constitution to conform to his “Jacobin” tenets.

If forced to choose, Hamilton preferred a man with wrong principles to one devoid of any. “There is no circumstance which has occurred in the course of our political affairs that has given me so much pain as the idea that Mr. Burr might be elevated to the Presidency by the means of the Federalists,” Hamilton told Wolcott. If the party elected Burr, it would be exposed “to the disgrace of a defeat in an attempt to elevate to the first place in the government one of the worst men in the community.”
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Hamilton had never spoken about Adams and Jefferson in these terms. “The appointment of Burr as president would disgrace our country abroad,” he informed Sedgwick. “No agreement with him could be relied upon.”
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Unlike other Federalists, Hamilton did not think Burr would be a harmless, lackadaisical president. “He is sanguine enough to hope everything, daring enough to attempt everything, wicked enough to scruple nothing,” Hamilton told Gouverneur Morris.
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From his legal practice, Hamilton knew that Burr had exorbitant debts and might be susceptible to bribes from foreign governments. He briefed Federalists about the scandals involving Burr and the Holland Company and the gross trickery behind the Manhattan Company.

While inspector general, Hamilton had had a disturbing conversation with Burr that he now repeated to Robert Troup and two other friends. “General, you are now at the head of the army,” Burr had told him. “You are a man of the first talents and of vast influence. Our constitution is a miserable paper machine. You have it in your power to demolish it and give us a proper one and you owe it to your friends and the country to do it.” To which Hamilton said he replied, “Why Col. Burr, in the first place, the little army I command is totally inadequate to the object you mention. And in the second place, if the army were adequate, I am too much troubled with that thing called morality to make the attempt.” Reverting to French, Burr poohpoohed this timidity: “General, all things are moral to great souls!”
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So unalterably opposed was Hamilton to Burr that he told Federalist friends that he would withdraw from the party or even from public life if they installed Burr as president. By endorsing Burr, he warned, the Federalists would be “signing their own death warrant.”
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Hamilton feared that Burr might supplant him as de facto party head or might even foster a third party composed of disenchanted elements from the other two. Either way, Hamilton feared he would be shunted aside. Had he risked his career to block Adams’s reelection only to have Aaron Burr fill the void?

By late December 1800, as Hamilton had forewarned, Burr changed his mind: he would not seek the presidency, but neither would he reject it if the House chose him over Jefferson. Burr told Samuel Smith that he was offended by the presumption that he should resign if elected president. It bothered him that Republicans, who had embraced him for expediency as vice president, now blanched at him becoming president. By adopting this defiant stand, Burr pushed the situation to the brink of crisis. In early January, Hamilton heard of a Burr bandwagon gaining force among Federalists. By late January, his sources were saying that the Federalists were decidedly, even unanimously, in favor of Burr over Jefferson.

Faced with this terrifying vision of a Burr presidency, Hamilton was forced to come up with his most candid, fair-minded, and perceptive appraisal of Jefferson. During the 1800 campaign, Federalists had vilified Jefferson as a coward, a spendthrift, and a voluptuary, not to mention a potential demagogue wedded to noxious dogmas. Federalist Robert G. Harper mocked Jefferson as fit to be “a professor in a college or president of a philosophical society ...but certainly not the first magistrate of a great nation.”
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Now Hamilton had to combat rooted notions that he himself had helped to propagate.

In one letter, Hamilton confessed to having said many unflattering things about Jefferson: “I admit that his politics are tinctured with fanaticism[,]... that he is crafty and persevering in his objects, that he is not scrupulous about the means of success, nor very mindful of truth, and that he is a contemptible hypocrite.”
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At the same time, he admitted that Jefferson was often more fervent in rhetoric than in action and would be a more cautious president than his principles might suggest. He predicted, accurately, that Jefferson’s penchant for France, once it was no longer politically useful, would be discarded. (In an abrupt volte-face, on January 29, 1800, Jefferson, after learning that Napoleon had made himself dictator, wrote, “It is very material for the...[American people] to be made sensible that their own character and situation are materially different from the French.”
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Hamilton had been saying this for a decade.) Hamilton was also dubious about Jefferson’s past preference for congressional power. He shrewdly noted that, whenever it suited his views, Jefferson had supported executive power, as if he knew he would someday inherit the presidency and did not wish to weaken the office. Hamilton told James A. Bayard of Delaware, “I have more than once made the reflection that viewing himself as the reversioner [i.e., one having a vested right to a future inheritance], he was solicitious to come into possession of a good estate.”
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The fierce debates about Jefferson and Burr took place amid a welter of reports that the Federalists would refuse to yield power. One Republican scenario hypothesized that desperate Federalists would prevent
both
Republican candidates from being elected and that President Adams would choose a Federalist successor to head an interim government. One of Hamilton’s adversaries from the Whiskey Rebellion, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, envisioned Hamilton descending upon the capital with an army that would seize control of the government during the deadlock. Governor Thomas McKean of Pennsylvania swore that if Republicans were denied their victory, the Pennsylvania militia, twenty thousand strong, would march upon the capital and arrest any congressman who named someone other than Jefferson or Burr as president. Burr concurred that any Federalist attempt to subvert the election should be met by “a resort to the sword.”
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Nobody was more upset by talk of extralegal schemes than Hamilton, who thought that any interference with the election would be “most dangerous and unbecoming.”
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The Federalists nourished their own fantasies of Republican plots, and Hamilton himself later claimed that Republican groups had colluded to “cut off the leading Federalists and seize the government” if Jefferson did not make it to the presidency.
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One Federalist newspaper quoted Jefferson’s partisans as issuing shrill threats that, if Burr became president, “we will march and
dethrone him as an usurper.
” If Federalists dared to “place in the presidential chair any other than the philosopher of Monticello...ten thousand republican
swords will instantly leap from their scabbards
in defence of the violated rights of the people!!!”
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This hysterical atmosphere only intensified as congressmen tried to resolve the stalemate between Jefferson and Burr.