Alexander Hamilton (21 page)

In many ways, “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne—a dissolute, vainglorious man who was fond of mistresses and champagne and craved a knighthood—was more suited for the pleasures of peace than the arts of war. The renowned British actor David Garrick had starred in his play
The Maid of the Oaks
in Drury Lane. Burgoyne and his army marched down the Hudson Valley in early October 1777 with all the cumbersome pomp of royalty. As if proceeding to a coronation, not a battle, Burgoyne loaded up no fewer than thirty carts with his personal belongings, dragged by horses through fly-ridden bogs and swamps. Burgoyne epitomized the snobbery rife among the British officers. If anything, he believed that the British had shown too much clemency toward the American upstarts. “I look upon America as our child,” he had said in 1774, “which we have already spoiled by too much indulgence.”
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The original British battle plan for severing New England from other rebel colonies had envisioned Burgoyne’s force from the north converging with those of Lieutenant Colonel Barrimore St. Leger from the west and General Howe from the south. Instead, with Howe in Philadelphia, Burgoyne found himself fighting alone, isolated in the upper Hudson Valley against patriot troops led by General Horatio Gates. Burgoyne’s surrender of his entire army of 5,700 men at Saratoga in midOctober was the pivotal moment of the war: a victory so large, so thrilling, and so decisive that it emboldened the wavering France to enter the conflict on the patriotic side.

The victory meant that Washington could siphon off some of Gates’s troops to strengthen his own shaky position to the south. The continental ranks had been thinned by the expiration of one-year enlistments—a recurring problem. Not long after receiving the wonderful news from Saratoga, Washington summoned a war council of five major generals and ten brigadiers, with Hamilton drafting the minutes. Word had begun to make the rounds that this young aide was far more than some docile clerk. Benjamin Rush, the radical Pennsylvania congressman, grumbled that Washington had allowed himself to be “governed by General Greene, General Knox, and Colonel Hamilton, one of his aides, a young man of twenty-one years.”
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At the meeting, the generals agreed that Gates must transfer a hefty chunk of his troops to Washington, since the Saratoga victory had drastically curtailed the British threat in New York. The emissary chosen to impart this most unwelcome piece of news to Gates was Alexander Hamilton.

It is remarkable that Washington would have drafted his young aide for such a tough assignment. After Saratoga, Horatio Gates was the hero of the day, the darling of New England politicians, and this only deepened the mutual antipathy between him and Washington. Gates had even snubbed Washington by refusing to inform him directly of his victory. Thus, Hamilton’s mission was fraught with a multitude of perils. From a general at the zenith of his popularity, he had to pry loose a sizable number of troops and to do so, if possible, without issuing any orders. Hamilton would have to ride three hundred miles and then bargain with Gates without any further opportunity to consult with Washington. Clearly, the imperious Gates would feel demeaned by having to negotiate with a diminutive twenty-two-year-old. Hamilton would need to tap all the cunning and diplomacy in his nature.

To invest Hamilton with a suitable aura of power, Washington drafted a letter to Gates in which he introduced his aide and defined his mission: “to lay before you a full state of our situation and that of the enemy in this quarter. He is well informed . . . and will deliver my sentiments upon the plan of operations...now necessary.”
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The discretion delegated to Hamilton was impressive. If Hamilton found Gates using the requested troops in a manner that benefited the patriotic cause, “it is not my wish to give any interruption,” Washington wrote. If that was not the case, however, “it is my desire that the reinforcements before mentioned . . . be immediately put in motion to join this army.”
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If there was a single moment during the Revolution when its outcome hinged on spontaneous decisions made by Alexander Hamilton, this was it.

Instructions in hand, Hamilton rode off to Albany at a furious pace, covering sixty miles a day for five consecutive days, riding like a man possessed. En route, he stopped on the eastern shore of the Hudson at Fishkill and lectured General Israel Putnam on the need for him to shift two brigades southward to help Washington. Hamilton did not shrink from exercising his own judgment. Acting on his own initiative, he induced Putnam to promise an additional seven hundred members of a New Jersey militia. He explained to Washington that “I concluded you would not disapprove of a measure calculated to strengthen you, though but for a small time, and have ventured to adopt it on that presumption.” Eager to move on, he told Washington that a quartermaster was “pressing some fresh horses for me. The moment they are ready I shall recross the [Hudson] River in order to fall in with the troops on the other side and make all the haste I can to Albany to get the three brigades there sent forward.”
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The instant Hamilton arrived in Albany on November 5, 1777, he arranged a hasty meeting with Horatio Gates. For Hamilton, it was Benedict Arnold, not Gates, who had merited the real laurels at Saratoga. He regarded Gates as a vain, cowardly, inept general, and subsequent events were to bear out his scathing judgment. With gray hair and spectacles set low on his long, pointed nose—he was later derided by his men as “Granny Gates”—the heavyset Gates was a much less imposing presence than Washington. The illegitimate son of a duke’s housekeeper, he had studied at British military academies and fought in the French and Indian War. Now swollen with pride from his victory, Gates was reluctant to cede any of the brigades under his command. Instead of listening meekly, Hamilton spoke to Gates in a firm tone and told him how many troops he should spare. Gates retorted that Sir Henry Clinton, the British commander in New York, might still march up the Hudson and endanger New England. As a sop, Gates finally agreed to send Washington a single brigade, commanded by a General Patterson, instead of the three Hamilton had stipulated. After the meeting, Hamilton snooped about and discovered that Patterson’s six-hundred-man brigade was “by far the weakest of the three now here,” as he then wrote candidly to General Gates. “Under these circumstances, I cannot consider it either as compatible with the good of the service or my instructions from His Excellency, General Washington, to consent that that brigade be selected from the three to go to him.”
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Hamilton was careful to be neither too forward nor too deferential as he skillfully blended his own opinions with those of Washington. “I used every argument in my power to convince him of the propriety” of sending troops, an exasperated Hamilton told Washington, “but he was inflexible in the opinion that two brigades at least of Continental troops should remain in and near this place.”
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Hamilton later reproached Gates for “his impudence, his folly and his rascality.”
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It irked Gates that he had to negotiate with this cocksure, headstrong aide. In a draft letter to Washington, Gates crossed out an allusion to Hamilton that showed just how much he seethed over the situation: “Although it is customary and even absolutely necessary to direct implicit obedience to be paid to the verbal orders of aides-de-camp in action, or while upon the spot, yet I believe it is never practiced to delegate that dictatorial power to one aide-de-camp sent to an army 300 miles distant.”
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In the end, Hamilton extracted a promise from Gates to surrender two of the brigades he wanted. It was a bravura performance by Hamilton, who had shown consummate political skill.

During the tense impasse with Gates, Hamilton tarried long enough in Albany to see his old friend Robert Troup and dine at the mansion of Philip Schuyler. Having preceded Gates as head of the Northern Department, General Schuyler felt cheated of the Saratoga triumph for which he had laid the groundwork. General Nathanael Greene seconded this appraisal, calling Gates “a mere child of fortune” and asserting that the “foundation of all the northern success was laid before his arrival there.”
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During this visit to Schuyler’s mansion, Hamilton met for the first time the general’s second daughter, twenty-year-old Eliza, a relationship that was to resume more than two years later.

After his exhausting talks with Gates, Hamilton headed back down the Hudson, only to discover that his mission was not over. Having stopped at the home of New York governor George Clinton in New Windsor, he was taken aback to find that two of the brigades promised by General Israel Putnam had been withheld. A bluff, jowly farmer and former tavern keeper from Connecticut, Putnam was much beloved by his aide, Aaron Burr, who referred to him as “My good old general.”
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It was Putnam who supposedly told his men at Bunker Hill, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes. Then, fire low.”
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When Hamilton saw that Putnam had reneged on his promise, he sent him a letter throbbing with anger. Hamilton cast aside the usual caution of an aide-de-camp and delivered a tongue-lashing to a veteran officer more than twice his age:

Sir, I cannot forbear confessing that I am astonished. And alarmed beyond measure to find that all his Excellency’s views have been hitherto frustrated and that no single step of those I mentioned to you has been taken to afford him the aid he absolutely stands in need of and by delaying which the cause of America is put to the utmost conceivable hazard....My expressions may perhaps have more warmth than is altogether proper. But they proceed from the overflowing of my heart in a matter where I conceive this continent essentially interested.
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Hamilton had to issue direct orders to Putnam to send all of his Continental Army troops (that is, minus state militias) to Washington immediately. The fault was not entirely Putnam’s, however, for the two brigades had not been paid in months and, mutinously, refused to march.

Having gone out on a limb, Hamilton expressed great trepidation in his reports to Washington that he might have exceeded his authority. It was therefore deeply gratifying when Washington sent him an unqualified endorsement of his work: “I approve entirely of all the steps you have taken and have only to wish that the exertions of those you have had to deal with had kept pace with your zeal and good intentions.”
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As in Philadelphia in September, Washington had given his wunderkind huge autonomy, and the gamble had paid off handsomely. The young aide-decamp was revealed as a forceful personality in his own right, not just a proxy for the general. For Hamilton, his encounters with the two obdurate generals strengthened his preference for strict hierarchy and centralized command as the only way to accomplish things—a view that was to find its political equivalent in his preference for concentrated federal power instead of authority dispersed among the states.

The frantic rides up and down the Hudson damaged Hamilton’s always fragile health. On November 12, he wrote to Washington from New Windsor to explain his delay in returning: “I have been detained here these two days by a fever and violent rheumatic pains throughout my body.”
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Despite his illness, Hamilton continued to direct the movement of troops slated to join Washington and went downriver to Peekskill to apply maximum pressure on Putnam’s brigades. There, in late November, a haggard Hamilton climbed into bed at the home of Dennis Kennedy. It seemed uncertain whether he would recover. In a letter to Governor Clinton, Captain I. Gibbs wrote that he feared that the combined fevers and chills might prove mortal. On November 25, he reported that Hamilton “seemed to have all the appearance of drawing nigh his last, being seized with a coldness in his extremities, and he remained so for a space of two hours, then survived.” On November 27, when the chill again invaded his legs from feet to knees, the attending physician thought he wouldn’t last. However, “he remained in this situation for near four hours, after which the fever abated very much and from that time he has been getting much better.” Hamilton had been so blistering in dealing with General Gates that not everyone welcomed his recovery. On December 5, Colonel Hugh Hughes wrote to his friend General Gates, “Colonel Hamilton, who has been very ill of a nervous disorder at Peekskill, is out of danger, unless it be from his own sweet temper.”
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Right before Christmas, Hamilton set out to rejoin Washington, only to collapse again near Morristown. He was taken back in a hired coach for further rest in Peekskill, where he was nourished on a hearty diet of mutton, oranges, potatoes, quail, and partridge. Not until January 20, 1778, did Hamilton rejoin his colleagues at winter quarters in Valley Forge, near Philadelphia—a bleak place that could scarcely have elevated the spirits of the convalescing colonel.

Such was the inimitable luster of Horatio Gates after Saratoga that it was whispered in certain quarters that he ought to supplant Washington as commander in chief. The unhappiness with Washington was understandable. His military performance in New York and Philadelphia had been lackluster, and his setbacks at Brandywine and Germantown were fresher in people’s memories than his spirited raids at Trenton and Princeton. The rivalry between Washington and Gates mirrored a political split in Congress. John and Samuel Adams, Richard Henry Lee, and others who wanted tighter congressional control over the war were sympathetic to Gates. In his diary that fall, John Adams had expressed dismay over Washington’s generalship: “Oh, Heaven! grant us one great soul!...One active, masterly capacity would bring order out of this confusion and save this country.”
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Though he did not endorse Gates outright, Adams fretted that idolatry of Washington might end in military rule, and he was glad when the Saratoga victory cast something of a cloud over the commander in chief. Meanwhile, John Jay, Robert R. Livingston, Robert Morris, and other conservatives wanted to invest great executive power in the commander in chief and stood solidly arrayed behind Washington.