Alexander Hamilton (35 page)

Hamilton knew that the final arbiter of the deadly stalemate between restive officers and an impotent Congress was George Washington, with whom he had not corresponded in more than a year. On February 13, presuming on their former trust, Hamilton addressed a confidential letter to him. Writing now as a peer, he dared to advise Washington on how to handle the threatened uprising. For Hamilton, such a threat had its uses if it could prod a lethargic Congress into bolstering national finances: “The claims of the army, urged with moderation but with firmness, may operate on those weak minds which are influenced by their apprehensions more than their judgments....But the difficulty will be to keep a
complaining
and
suffering army
within the bounds of moderation.”
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For Washington to maintain his standing among both the army and the citizenry at large, Hamilton urged him to badger Congress through surrogates.

Hamilton was coaxing Washington to dabble in a dangerous game of pretending to be a lofty statesman while covertly orchestrating pressure on Congress. The letter shows Hamilton at his most devious, playing with combustible forces. (He wasn’t alone in this strategy: Gouverneur Morris in Philadelphia was also writing to General Nathanael Greene that the states would never pay the army “unless the army be united and determined in the pursuit of it.”)
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Hamilton feared that the cautious Washington might be thrust aside by more militant officers and told him of whispering in the army that he did not uphold his soldiers’ interests “with sufficient warmth. The falsehood of this opinion no one can be better acquainted with than myself, but it is not the less mischievous for being false.”
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A week later, Hamilton and Madison met at the home of Thomas FitzSimons to discuss the growing officer militance. Madison’s notes give us Hamilton’s unexpurgated view of Washington at the time. It jibes with his earlier statements about Washington’s sometimes irritable personality but absolute rectitude:

Mr. Hamilton said that he knew Gen[era]l Washington intimately and perfectly, that his extreme reserve, mixed sometimes with a degree of asperity of temper, both of which were said to have increased of late, had contributed to the decline of his popularity. But that his virtue, his patriotism, and his firmness would...never yield to any dishonorable plans into which he might be called. That he would sooner suffer himself to be cut into pieces; that he (Mr. Hamilton), knowing this to be his true character, wished him to be the conductor of the army in their plans for redress in order that they might be moderated and directed to proper objects.
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On March 4, Washington thanked Hamilton for his frank letter and confessed that he had not fathomed the abysmal state of America’s finances. He referred gravely to the “contemplative hours” he had spent on the subject of the soldiers’ pay: “The sufferings of a complaining army on one hand, and the inability of Congress and tardiness of the states on the other, are the forebodings of evil.” Washington then obliquely rebuffed Hamilton’s misguided suggestion that he exploit army discontent to goad Congress into action on public finance, saying it might “excite jealousy and bring on its concomitants.”
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With unerring foresight, Washington perceived the importance of enshrining the principle that military power should be subordinated to civilian control.

The Newburgh situation grew only more incendiary. In the following days, two anonymous letters made the rounds in camp, fomenting opposition to Washington and rallying the officers to apply force against Congress. One document warned darkly, “Suspect the man who would advise to more moderation and longer forbearance.”
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It seemed as if the new nation might be lurching toward a military putsch. On March 12, Washington, alarmed by this state of affairs, told Hamilton that he would attend an officers’ meeting on March 15 to stop them from “plunging themselves into a gulf of civil horror from which there might be no receding.”
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Washington kept his diplomatic balance, trying to head off rash action by his officers while pleading for timely congressional relief. “Let me beseech you therefore, my good sir,” he told Hamilton, “to urge this matter earnestly and without further delay. The situation of these gentlemen, I do verily believe, is distressing beyond description.”
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On March 15, Washington addressed the officers, determined to squash a reported scheme to march on Congress. For the first time, he confronted a hostile audience of his own men. Washington sternly rebuked talk of rebellion, saying it would threaten the liberties for which they had fought. An insurrection would only “open the floodgates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood.”
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He then staged the most famous coup de théâtre of his career. He was about to read aloud a letter from a congressman when the words swam before his eyes. So he fished in his pockets for his glasses. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service to my country.”
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The mutinous soldiers, inexpressibly moved, were shamed by their opposition to Washington and restored to their senses. Washington agreed to lobby Congress on their behalf, and a committee chaired by Hamilton granted the officers a pension payment equivalent to five years’ full pay. Whether Congress could really make good on such payments without its own taxing power was another question.

As soon as he heard of Washington’s virtuoso performance, Hamilton applauded him: “Your Excellency has, in my opinion, acted wisely. The best way is ever not to attempt to stem a torrent but to divert it. You coincide in opinion with me on the conduct proper to be observed by yourself.”
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Washington had heeded Hamilton’s advice in assuming a leadership role but had pointedly ignored his advice about inflaming the situation for political ends. Hamilton still clung to the notion that a convincing bluff of armed force could help spur congressional action, but that was as far as he would venture. “As to any combination of
force,
” he observed, “it would only be productive of the horrors of a civil war, might end in the ruin of the country, and would certainly end in the ruin of the army.”
⁴⁹

The feared mutiny at Newburgh deepened but also complicated relations between Hamilton and Washington. It reinforced their mutual conviction that the Articles of Confederation had to be revised root and branch and Congress strengthened. “More than half the perplexities I have experienced in the course of my command, and almost the whole of the difficulties and distress of the army, have their origin here,” Washington wrote of congressional weakness.
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At the same time, Washington saw a certain Machiavellian streak in Hamilton and bluntly told him of grumbling in the army about congressmen who tried to use the soldiers as “mere puppets to establish continental funds.” He lectured Hamilton: “The army . . . is a dangerous instrument to play with.”
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Washington must have seen that Hamilton, for all his brains and daring, sometimes lacked judgment and had to be supervised carefully. On the other hand, Hamilton had employed his wiles in the service of ideals that Washington himself endorsed.

In the spring of 1783, Alexander Hamilton, twenty-eight, already stood near the pinnacle of national affairs. He chaired a military committee that hatched the first plan for a peacetime army under the aegis of the federal government. In early April, Congress named him chairman of the committee in charge of peace arrangements, equipped with a spacious mandate to investigate ways to “provide a system for foreign affairs, for Indian affairs, for military and naval peace establishments,” in Madison’s words. That month, Congress ratified the provisional peace treaty with Britain, marking an end to eight years of hostilities—news that only amplified the menacing clamor among soldiers who wanted to pocket their pay before going home. “And here, my dear Colo[nel] Hamilton,” Washington wrote, “let me assure you that it would not be more difficult to still the raging billows in a tempestuous gale than to convince the officers of this army of the justice or policy of paying men in civil offices full wages when
they
cannot obtain a sixtieth part of their dues.”
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Even though Congress enacted a new system of import duties that April, Hamilton still feared that it would lack the requisite funds to pacify the army. When Robert Morris threatened to quit as superintendent of finance in May, Hamilton was among those enlisted to persuade him to stay until the army could be safely disbanded. He introduced an emergency resolution, asking the states to send money to the common treasury so the soldiers could be paid and demobilized.

In mid-June, the raging billows that Washington had warned about still surged and foamed. Rebellious troops in Philadelphia sent a petition to Congress, couched in threatening language, demanding their money. Two days later, word came that eighty armed soldiers were marching from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to Philadelphia to pry loose the pay owed to them. Their surly ranks swelled as they advanced. Hamilton, now Congress’s man for all seasons, was swiftly drafted into a three-man committee to fend off the threat. He and his colleagues appealed to Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council to send local militiamen to stop these soldiers before they reached Philadelphia and made common cause with troops in local barracks. Hamilton was irate when the state refused to act until some outrage was perpetrated. Unafraid to lead, he stepped into the void fearlessly and directed Major William Jackson, assistant secretary at war, to intercept the rowdy protesters before they reached the city line. “You will represent to them with coolness but energy the impropriety of such irregular proceedings,” he instructed, “and the danger they will run by persisting in an improper conduct.”
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The troops, brushing Jackson aside, poured into Philadelphia on June 20, banded together with fractious troops in city barracks, and seized control of several arsenals. The next day, Elias Boudinot, president of Congress and Hamilton’s erstwhile sponsor, convened a special Saturday-afternoon session of Congress to deal with the worsening crisis. That morning, Boudinot heard reports that rebel troops might sack the local bank. The congressmen were scarcely seated when about four hundred rebel soldiers, bayonets stabbing the air, encircled the State House, where Congress and the state’s Supreme Executive Council occupied separate chambers. Things looked ominous: the mutineers far surpassed in number loyal troops guarding the doors. The symbolism was especially troubling: a mob of drunken soldiers had besieged the people’s delegates in the building where the Declaration of Independence had been signed.

The congressmen did not fear “premeditated violence,” Madison reported, “but it was observed that spiritous drink from the tippling houses adjoining began to be liberally served out to the soldiers and might lead to hasty excesses.”
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The increasingly drunken troops sent a scolding petition to the delegates inside, insisting that they be allowed to choose their own officers and threatening to unleash an “enraged soldiery” unless their demands were met within twenty minutes. The delegates refused to submit to such blackmail, shorten their session, or negotiate with rabble.

After three hours, the embattled congressmen marched out of the State House to the sneers and taunts of rioters. As he emerged, Hamilton saw embodied his worst nightmare: a portion of the revolutionary army had broken down into a mob that was intimidating an enfeebled central government. Now it was Hamilton, like Washington three months before, who made a vigorous case for military subordination to civilian rule. “The licentiousness of an army is to be dreaded in every government,” he later commented, “but in a republic it is more particularly to be restrained, and when directed against the civil authority to be checked with energy and punished with severity.”
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The situation made him again wonder how a spirited young democracy could generate the respect necessary for the rule of law to endure.

That evening, Elias Boudinot assembled congressmen at his home. They passed a defiant resolution, written by Hamilton, claiming that government authority had been “grossly insulted” by the rioters and demanding that “effectual measures be immediately taken for supporting the public authority.”
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If Pennsylvania persisted in its spineless inaction, Congress would relocate to Trenton or Princeton—by no coincidence, the scenes of famous patriotic victories. The next morning, Hamilton and Oliver Ellsworth delivered this blunt ultimatum to John Dickinson, now the president of the Supreme Executive Council. If Pennsylvania could not guarantee the safety of Congress, then it would suspend all further meetings in the city.

After his encounter with the council, Hamilton lost all hope that the state would send out the militia, and he submitted a chilling report to Congress. The mutineers, he noted, had selected their own officers to present their grievances and authorized them to use force, even threatening them “with death in case of their failing to execute their views.”
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Aghast at the “weak and disgusting” behavior of Pennsylvania’s leaders at a moment demanding unequivocal action, Hamilton reluctantly concluded and Congress agreed that they should adjourn to Princeton by Thursday.
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In short order, Congress fled across the state line and set up a movable capital in Princeton. The delegates settled crankily into cramped, makeshift quarters, Madison sharing a bed with another delegate in a room scarcely larger than ten feet square. Most shocking to this bibliophile, it lacked a desk. “I am obliged to write in a position that scarcely admits the use of any of my limbs,” he complained.
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So primitive were the Princeton lodgings that one month later Congress, like a French medieval court in the hunting season, packed up again and moved to Annapolis, followed by Trenton one year later, then New York City in 1785. Of this runaway Congress, hounded from its home, Benjamin Rush said that it was “abused, laughed at, and cursed in every company.”
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True to Hamilton’s prediction, the insurrection collapsed as soon as resolute action was undertaken. The Pennsylvania council tardily called up five hundred militiamen; once the mutineers learned of an approaching detachment, they laid down their arms, and the Lancaster contingent trudged back to its base.