Alexander Hamilton (129 page)

Far more vexing to Burr than exposure of his love affairs was scrutiny of his electoral tie with Jefferson in 1801. James Cheetham and the
American Citizen
pounced on the theme of Burr’s electoral duplicity and drove it home with obsessive frequency. The moment Burr was nominated, Cheetham contended, “he put into operation a most extensive, complicated, and wicked scheme of intrigue to place himself in the presidential chair.”
²⁷
At first, Burr reacted to these charges with typical phlegm, but as Cheetham and others stepped up their campaign, he began to sulk about a conspiracy to destroy him. As the Clintonians heaped more abuse on Burr, Robert Troup reported, “The high probability is that Burr is a gone man and that all his cunning, enterprise, and industry will not save him.”
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Not content to smear Burr alone, Cheetham also reviled Hamilton as a traitor to the American Revolution who had reverted to his aristocratic roots. To make this far-fetched claim, Cheetham had to re-create Hamilton’s father as “a merchant of some eminence.”
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The reality of a self-made, enterprising orphan did not suit Cheetham’s needs: “Mr. Hamilton, unfortunately, was a native of that part of the civilized world where tyranny and slavery prevail in a manner even unknown to the despots of Europe. It was utterly impossible that the habits and prejudices he contracted in infancy could ever have been eradicated.”
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Having emigrated from England in 1798, Cheetham knew little and cared less about Hamilton’s abolitionist activities. Cheetham’s main thesis was that Burr planned to run on the
Federalist
ticket in 1804 along with Charles Cotesworth Pinckney: “Viewing the matter then in this light...Mr. Hamilton is evidently in his [Burr’s] way!!”
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In fact, after the Reynolds fiasco and Adams pamphlet, Hamilton would not have been a strong contender for president in 1804 and never implied that he planned to run.

As stunning as the verbal abuse in New York politics was the physical violence. Duels became fashionable for settling political quarrels: historian Joanne Freeman has counted sixteen such affairs of honor between 1795 and 1807, though not all resulted in duels.
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When John Swartwout, a Burr protégé, denounced Cheetham as the mouthpiece of De Witt Clinton, Clinton denounced Swartwout as “a liar, a scoundrel, and a villain.”
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Accordingly, Clinton and Swartwout exchanged rounds of gunfire at the dueling ground in Weehawken, New Jersey. After Swartwout took two bullets in the leg, Clinton strode from the field and would not fire again. Newspaper editors, too, traded bullets as well as words. After James Cheetham accused William Coleman of siring a mulatto child, the two men almost fought a duel before being legally restrained from confronting each other. This did not stop a certain Captain Thompson, a Jeffersonian harbormaster, from accusing Coleman of cowardice and fighting a twilight duel with him in Love Lane (now Twenty-first Street), in which Thompson suffered a mortal wound. After killing his adversary, the unruffled Coleman returned to the
Post
“and got out the paper in good style, although half an hour late,” said a subsequent editor.
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In yet another political fracas, Coleman received a caning that left him paralyzed from the waist down.

President Jefferson was not immune to the gutter journalism that thrived in these years. He and the Republicans had championed James T. Callender, who had criticized President Adams and thus been slapped with a nine-month jail term and a two-hundred-dollar fine under the Sedition Act. Once out of jail, Callender appealed to the president to help pay his fine and solicited an appointment as postmaster of Richmond, Virginia. When Jefferson gave him only a niggardly fifty dollars, the vengeful, heavy-drinking Callender defected to the Federalist camp. Editing a Federalist newspaper in Richmond, he revealed that Jefferson, while vice president, had subsidized him to malign Adams and Hamilton. When Jefferson denied this, Callender published documents showing that Jefferson had sent him money in 1799 and 1800 to assist with publication of
The Prospect Before Us,
in which Hamilton had been denigrated as “the son of a camp-girl.”
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The embarrassed Jefferson lamely described these payments as prompted by “mere motives of charity.”
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Then, on September 1, 1802, Callender broke a story that he had learned about in jail and that was to reverberate down through American history: Jefferson’s scandalous romance with Sally Hemings: “It is well known that the man
whom it delighteth the people to honor,
keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally....By this wench Sally, our President has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story, and not a few who know it.... The African Venus is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello.”
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Callender mentioned that “Dusky Sally” had five mulatto children and that her son Tom (“yellow Tom”) bore a decided resemblance to Jefferson. Merciless toward his ex-comrades, Callender now referred to the Republicans as the “mulatto party.”
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He also said that he was ready to confront the president in a court of law and debate the truth of his relationship with “the black wench and her mulatto litter.”
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Jefferson preserved a tactful silence on the issue, though he complained to Robert Livingston that “the federalists have opened all their sluices of calumny. Every decent man among them revolts at [Callender’s] filth.”
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James Madison denounced the Sally Hemings story as “incredible,” but Federalist wags whooped with delight and exhorted the president in verse to repent: “Thy tricks, with
sooty Sal,
give o’er. / Indulge thy body, Tom, no more. / But try to save thy
soul.
”
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Another Federalist editor claimed that he had verified that Sally Hemings “has a room to herself at Monticello in the character of a seamstress to the family, if not as housekeeper” and was “treated by the rest of his house as one much above the level” of the other servants.
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Abigail Adams believed that Jefferson had gotten his due and wrote with barely concealed glee to him, “The serpent you cherished and warmed bit the hand that nourished him.”
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John Adams implied that he thought the story was true, while conceding that “there was not a planter in Virginia who could not reckon among his slaves a number of his children.”
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For Adams, the situation was “a natural and almost unavoidable consequence of that foul contagion in the human character—Negro slavery.”
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Hamilton and his family were irate that Jefferson had paid Callender to libel him. “If Mr Jefferson has really encouraged that wretch Callender to vent his calumny against you and his predecessors in office, the head of the former must be abominably wicked and weak,” Philip Schuyler complained to his son-in-law.
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As early as his 1796 “Phocion” essays, Hamilton had suggested that he knew about the Sally Hemings affair. Now, having seen his own love life merchandised in print, he urged Federalist editors to ignore the scandal and stick to the high road in political matters. In the
New-York Evening Post
he declared that his editorial sentiments were “adverse to all personalities not immediately connected with public considerations.”
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This did not stop the
Post
from calling Callender “a reptile” and running a twelve-part series entitled “Jefferson and Callender.”
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The Jeffersonians also accused Hamilton of leaking to the
Gazette of the United States
the musty charge that the twenty-five-year-old Jefferson had tried to seduce Betsey Walker, the wife of his friend and neighbor, John Walker. Callender picked up this story and sensationalized it to the point where John Walker felt obliged to challenge Jefferson to a duel.

In July 1803, James T. Callender died in an abrupt, murky manner that has fed speculation for two centuries. The Jeffersonian press had begun to issue death threats against him, and he had also been accused of sodomy. Meriwether Jones of the
Richmond Examiner
editorialized, “Are you not afraid, Callender, that some avenging fire will consume your body as well as your soul?”
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In another open letter to Callender, Jones imagined Callender drowning: “Oh, could a dose of James River, like Lethe, have blessed you with forgetfulness, for once you would have neglected your whiskey.”
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After Callender spent a night in heavy drinking, his sodden corpse was found bobbing in three feet of water in the James River on July 17, 1803. A coroner’s jury concluded that it was the accidental death of an inebriated man. Yet such was the venomous atmosphere of the day that more than one Federalist wondered if Callender had been bludgeoned by vindictive Jeffersonians, then dumped in the river.
FORTY

lexander Hamilton experienced conflicting moods in his final, bittersweet years. At moments, he seemed engrossed by his political future. At other times, he was so dismayed by Jefferson’s triumph that he seemed

ready to make good on his recurrent pledge to retire to the country and forget all about politics. No longer regarded as the Federalist leader, he had acquired the uncomfortable status of a glorified has-been. He still had a law office in lower Manhattan—in 1803, he moved it from 69 Stone Street to 12 Garden Street—and maintained a pied-à-terre at 58 Partition Street (now Fulton Street), but he spent as much time as possible drinking in the tranquillity of the Grange. In November 1803, Rufus King recorded this impression of Hamilton’s new rustic life and state of mind:

Hamilton is at the head of his profession and in the annual rec[eip]t of a handsome income. He lives wholly at his house nine miles from town, so that on an average he must spend three hours a day on the road going and returning between his house and town, which he performs four or five days each week. I don’t perceive that he meddles or feels much concerning politics. He has formed very decided opinions of our system as well as of our administration and, as the one and the other has the voice of the country, he has nothing to do but to prophesy!
¹

Hamilton concentrated on law and political theory rather than everyday politics. He initially balked at a project to publish
The Federalist Papers
in book form, telling the publisher that he was sure he could outdo it. “
Heretofore
I have given the people
milk; hereafter
I will give them
meat.
”
²
In the end, Hamilton cooperated with the project, proofreading and agreeing to the corrections in the new bound edition that appeared in 1802. He showed little interest in identifying the authors of the various essays, even though he had composed the bulk of them. When Judge Egbert Benson asked him to do so, Hamilton responded in a curiously indirect fashion, as if discomfited by the request. Stopping at Benson’s office one morning, he inserted without comment the desired list in a sheaf of legal papers. Madison left his own, sometimes contradictory, list, spawning a future cottage industry of scholars.

Hamilton’s intellectual ambitions were still far from sated. Chancellor James Kent recalled the grave thoughts that preoccupied his host during a visit to the Grange in the spring of 1804. Hamilton’s house stood on high ground and was struck by a storm so furious that it “rocked like a cradle,” Kent said.
³
Perhaps stirred by this tempestuous setting, Hamilton embarked upon “a more serious train of reflections on his part than I had ever before known him to indulge....[He] viewed the temper, disposition, and passions of the times as portentous of evil and favorable to the sway of artful and ambitious demagogues.”
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Hamilton disclosed to Kent his plans for a magnum opus on the science of government that would surpass even
The Federalist.
He wished to survey all of history and trace the effects of governmental institutions on everything from morals to freedom to jurisprudence. As with
The Federalist,
Hamilton planned to function as general editor and assign separate volumes to six or eight authors, including John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and Rufus King. The Reverend John M. Mason might write one on ecclesiastical history and Kent another on law. Then Hamilton would compose a grand synthesis of the preceding books in a prodigious, climactic volume. “The conclusions to be drawn from these historical reviews,” Kent said, “he intended to reserve for his own task and this is the imperfect scheme which then occupied his thoughts.”
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On this visit, Kent was struck by a new mildness in Hamilton. He noted the affectionate father, the tenderly solicitous host: “He never appeared before so friendly and amiable. I was alone and he treated me with a minute attention that I did not suppose he knew how to bestow.”
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It was probably on this visit that Hamilton performed a small courtesy that Kent never forgot. Feeling poorly, Kent retired early to bed. Anxious about his guest, Hamilton tiptoed into his room with an extra blanket and draped it over him delicately. “Sleep warm, little judge, and get well,” Hamilton told him. “What should we do if anything should happen to you?”
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Hamilton was increasingly plagued by ailments, especially stomach and bowel problems, and his mind could not escape thoughts of mortality. For years, he had experienced all the self-imposed pressures of the prodigy, the autodidact, the selfmade man. At moments, his life had seemed one fantastic act of overcompensation for his deprived upbringing. No longer was he the cocky wunderkind from the Caribbean, and he sounded older and more subdued. Alexander and Eliza had already suffered terrible tribulations: the death of Philip, the attendant madness of Angelica, and the death of Eliza’s younger sister, Peggy. Much more suffering lay ahead. On March 7, 1803, Eliza’s mother, Catherine Van Rensselaer Schuyler, died of a sudden stroke and was buried at the family grave in Albany. Philip Schuyler, a dashing major general when Hamilton first met him, had turned into a sad, hypochondriacal man, pestered by gout. Eliza stayed in Albany to comfort her father while Hamilton took care of the children at the Grange. “Now [that] you are all gone and I have no effort to make to keep up your spirits, my distress on his account and for the loss we have all sustained is very poignant,” Hamilton wrote to her.
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A few days later, he added stoically, “Arm yourself with resignation. We live in a world full of evil. In the later period of life, misfortunes seem to thicken round us and our duty and our peace both require that we should accustom ourselves to meet disasters with Christian fortitude.”
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