Alexander Hamilton (25 page)

At the end of the year, Laurens’s proposal acquired increased urgency as the British redirected their military operations southward, hoping to rouse Loyalist sympathies. By January 1779, they had captured both Savannah and Augusta and threatened South Carolina. Laurens resigned from Washington’s family and returned to defend his home state, stopping in Philadelphia to solicit congressional approval for two to four black battalions for the Continental Army. Hamilton drafted an eloquent, supportive letter for his friend to deliver to John Jay, who had succeeded Henry Laurens as president of Congress. In the letter, Hamilton plainly revealed what he thought of the slave system that had surrounded him since birth: “I have not the least doubt that the negroes will make very excellent soldiers with proper management and I will venture to pronounce that they cannot be put in bettter hands than those of Mr. Laurens.” Hamilton brushed aside the fallacies that slaves were not smart enough to turn into soldiers and were genetically inferior: “This is so far from appearing to me a valid objection that I think their want of cultivation (for their natural faculties are probably as good as ours) joined to that habit of subordination which they acquire from a life of servitude will make them sooner become soldiers than our white inhabitants.”

In a typical Hamiltonian manner, he placed political realism at the service of a larger ethical framework, stressing that both humanity and self-interest argued for the Laurens proposal:

The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience; and an unwillingness to part with property of so valuable a kind will furnish a thousand arguments to show the impracticability or pernicious tendency of a scheme which requires such a sacrifice. But it should be considered that if we do not make use of them in this way, the enemy probably will and that the best way to counteract the temptations they will hold out will be to offer them ourselves. An essential part of the plan is to give them their freedom with their muskets. This will secure their fidelity, animate their courage, and I believe will have a good influence upon those who remain by opening a door to their emancipation.
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Unfortunately, despite a supportive congressional resolution, Laurens’s battle in the South Carolina legislature to enact his program proved futile. South Carolina had a special stake in the slave trade, with Charleston acting as the largest port of entry for slaves arriving in North America. As in many places, planters lived in dread of slave insurrections, constantly inspected slave quarters for concealed weapons, and sometimes themselves refused to serve in the Continental Army out of fear that in their absence their slaves might rise up and massacre their families.

The northern states were not about to override their southern brethren on the slavery issue. All along, the American Revolution had been premised on a tacit bargain that regional conflicts would be subordinated to the need for unity among the states. This understanding dictated that slavery would remain a taboo subject. There was also the ticklish matter that many slave owners had joined the Revolution precisely to
retain
slavery. In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, had issued a proclamation offering freedom to slaves willing to defend the Crown—an action that sent many panicky slaveholders stampeding into the patriot camp. “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?” Samuel Johnson protested from London.
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Horace Walpole echoed this sentiment: “I should think the souls of the Africans would sit heavily on the swords of the Americans.”
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Many on the patriot side recognized the hypocrisy of the American position. Even before the Declaration of Independence, Abigail Adams had bewailed the situation: “It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me—to fight for ourselves for what we are robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”
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And yet, to the everlasting disgrace of the rebel colonists, it was General Sir Henry Clinton in June 1779 who promised freedom to runaway slaves defecting to the British side. The defeat of the Laurens plan left Hamilton utterly dejected. “I wish its success,” he wrote to Laurens later in the year, “but my hopes are very feeble. Prejudice and private interest will be antagonists too powerful for public spirit and public good.”
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After Laurens despaired of securing legislative action on his proposal, he turned to military service in South Carolina under Brigadier General William Moultrie. He was so fearless yet foolhardy in one rearguard action—without authority, he led his men across an exposed river position and suffered heavy casualties—that Moultrie later called Laurens “a young man of great merit and a brave soldier, but an imprudent officer. He was too rash and impetuous.”
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A story, perhaps apocryphal, says that when the British subsequently besieged Moultrie and his men at Charleston, Laurens vowed to run his sword through the first civilian who proposed surrendering the city and further refused to carry terms of capitulation to the enemy.

During Laurens’s southern sojourn, Hamilton wrote to him some of the most personally revealing letters of his life. He knew the south was endangered by the British and that atrocities were being committed on both sides. Perhaps he wondered whether he would ever see his friend again. In one April 1779 letter, Hamilton expressed such open affection for Laurens that an early editor, presumably Hamilton’s son, crossed out some of the words and scrawled across the top, “I must not publish the whole of this.” Besides fondness for Laurens, the letter shows how much Hamilton, scarred by his past, was afraid to entrust his emotional security to anyone:

Cold in my professions, warm in friendships, I wish, my dear Laurens, it m[ight] be in my power by action rather than words [to] convince you that I love you. I shall only tell you that till you bade us adieu, I hardly knew the value you had taught my heart to set upon you. Indeed, my friend, it was not well done. You know the opinion I entertain of mankind and how much it is my desire to preserve myself free from particular attachments and to keep my happiness independent of the caprice of others. You s[hould] not have taken advantage of my sensibility to ste[al] into my affections without my consent.
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Other letters that Hamilton wrote to Laurens betray the tone of a jealous, lovesick young man who was quick to chide his friend for failing to write frequently enough. “I have written you five or six letters since you left Philadelphia and I should have written you more had you made proper return,” Hamilton wrote to Laurens in September. “But, like a jealous lover, when I thought you slighted my caresses, my affection was alarmed and my vanity piqued.”
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Many things beyond the absence of Laurens troubled Hamilton that summer, especially the shortsighted failure of the states to grant mandatory taxing power to Congress in the Articles of Confederation, which had been approved as the new nation’s governing charter on November 15, 1777, and submitted to the states for ratification. As a result, Congress had resorted to flimsy financial expedients— borrowing and printing reams of paper money—that were fast destroying America’s credit. The paper currency was depreciating rapidly. Hence, for the first time, Hamilton began to fiddle with ideas for creating a national bank, through a mixture of foreign loans and private subscriptions.

Hamilton may have been more vocal in his criticism of Congress than he realized. In early July, he received a letter from a Lieutenant Colonel John Brooks, who reported derogatory comments that Congressman Francis Dana made about Hamilton at a Philadelphia coffeehouse. According to Brooks, Dana quoted Hamilton as saying “that it was high time for the people to rise, join General Washington, and turn Congress out of doors. To render this account in the highest degree improbable, he further observed that Mr. Hamilton could be no ways interested in the defence of this country and, therefore, was most likely to pursue such a line of conduct as his great ambition dictated.”
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These charges set an early pattern for future Hamilton controversies. People would assume that Hamilton, as an “outsider” or “foreigner,” could not possibly be motivated by patriotic impulses. Hence, he must be power mad and governed by a secret agenda. In response, Hamilton would display a deep insecurity that he normally kept well hidden behind his confident demeanor. If struck, he tended to hit back hard.

Within days, Hamilton wrote to Dana and demanded either a retraction of the story or disclosure of its source. He intimated that he would demand a duel if the charges had actually been made, noting that “they are [of] so personal and illiberal a complexion as will oblige me to make them the subject of a very different kind of discussion from the present at some convenient season.”
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After a lengthy correspondence, Hamilton traced the rumor back to a critic of Washington named William Gordon, a Congregational minister in Jamaica Plains, Massachusetts. At first, Gordon pretended that he was merely repeating the story. He would name the source, he said, if Hamilton promised not to challenge him to a duel, a practice Gordon said he opposed on religious grounds. Even though Hamilton had served as a second for Laurens in the Charles Lee duel and had hinted at his own readiness to duel in the current matter, he told Gordon:
It often happens that our zeal is at variance with our understanding. Had it not been for this, you might have recollected that we do not now live in the days of chivalry and you would have judged your precautions, on the subject of duelling at least, useless. The good sense of the present times has happily found out that to prove your own innocence, or the malice of an accuser, the worst method you can take is to run him through the body or shoot him through the head. And permit me to add, that while you felt an aversion to duelling, on the principles of religion, you ought, in charity, to have supposed others possessed of the same scruples—of whose impiety you had no proofs.
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Aware that it clashed with his religious beliefs, Hamilton always retained some nagging reservations about dueling, which became more pronounced in later years. Hamilton never met Gordon on the field of honor, even though he did finally identify him as the source of the libel. Throughout the fall, he plied Gordon with combative letters, saying that he could not possibly have made the statements about Congress attributed to him. Yet Hamilton had been sniping at congressional ineptitude all year, and he may well have said something critical of Congress that was either misconstrued by his enemies or reported faithfully.

That September, Hamilton sent Laurens a letter that showed him steeped in inconsolable gloom. He told Laurens that he still yearned for the success of his virtuous scheme for black battalions but worried that private greed, indolence, and public corruption would undermine this good work. “Every [hope] of this kind my friend is an idle dream,” he warned Laurens in a despairing tone that was to crop up throughout his life. He added, “There is no virtue [in] America. That commerce which preside[d over] the birth and education of these states has [fitted] their inhabitants for the chain and... the only condition they sincerely desire is that it may be a golden one.”
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What a dark, weary view for a twenty-four-year-old fighting for glorious ideals. It was to be a recurring paradox of Hamilton’s career that he grew enraged when accused of being an outsider and then sounded, in response, very much like the outsider evoked by his critics. The virulent charges made against him sometimes alienated him from his adopted country, leaving him feeling that perhaps his critics had a point after all.
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he American Revolution unfolded in a leisurely enough manner to allow Hamilton a fairly rich social life amid the grim necessities of war. With a young man’s need for diversion, he continued to flirt with the fashionable

ladies who stopped by army headquarters—not for nothing did Martha Washington nickname her large, lascivious tomcat “Hamilton”—and they warmed to his high spirits, savoir faire, and dancing ability. The Continental Army had a sizable following of “camp ladies,” and John Marshall was scandalized by the open debauchery that he encountered when visiting the army that September: “Never was I a witness to such a scene of lewdness,” he complained to a friend.
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Hamilton once told a friend that a soldier should have no wife other than the military, yet he began to contemplate marriage in the spring of 1779, following the growing alliance with France, which improved the prospects of American victory. He knew that once the war ended, he had no family. That April, Hamilton composed a long letter to John Laurens, outlining his requirements for a wife. Probably from childhood experience, he thought that most marriages were unhappy, and he dreaded making the wrong choice. Parts of his letter were sophomoric, with Hamilton making bawdy references to the size of his nose—jocular eighteenth-century shorthand for his penis—but much of it was thoughtful, showing that Hamilton had given serious consideration to the elements of a stable marriage.

She must be young, handsome (I lay most stress upon a good shape), sensible (a little learning will do), well-bred (but she must have an aversion to the word
ton
), chaste and tender (I am an enthusiast in my notions of fidelity and fondness), of some good nature, a great deal of generosity (she must neither love money nor scolding, for I dislike equally a termagant and an economist). In politics, I am indifferent what side she may be of; I think I have arguments that will easily convert her to mine. As to religion, a moderate streak will satisfy me. She must believe in god and hate a saint. But as to fortune, the larger stock of that the better. You know my temper and circumstances and will therefore pay special attention to this article in the treaty. Though I run no risk of going to purgatory for my avarice, yet as money is an essential ingredient to happiness in this world—as I have not much of my own and as I am very little calculated to get more either by my address or industry—it must needs be that my wife, if I get one, bring at least a sufficiency to administer to her own extravagancies.
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