Alexander Hamilton (36 page)

A perpetual magnet for controversy, Hamilton was stung by charges that he had conspired to move the capital from Philadelphia as part of a plot to transfer it to New York. In fact, Hamilton had feared that if Congress decamped, it would dilute domestic respect for its authority and sully America’s image abroad. On July 2, he seconded a resolution that Congress should return to Philadelphia and prodded Madison for a statement confirming that he had postponed the flight to Princeton until the very last instant. Like an attorney collecting affidavits in a lawsuit, Hamilton asked his colleague, “Did I appear to wish to hasten it, or did I not rather show a strong decision to procrastinate it?”
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Madison obliged with a letter: yes, Hamilton had stalled until the last moment. Once again, the thin-skinned Hamilton was quick to refute insinuations of duplicity or self-interest. Convinced that appearances, not reality, ruled in politics, he never wanted to allow misimpressions to linger, however briefly, in the air.

The Philadelphia mutiny had major repercussions in American history, for it gave rise to the notion that the national capital should be housed in a special federal district where it would never stand at the mercy of state governments. For Hamilton, the episode only heightened his dismay over the Confederation Congress and the folly of relying on state militias. On the other hand, he thought Congress had been unfairly blamed for failing to fulfill its duties when it was consistently deprived of the means of doing so. Its flagrant weaknesses stemmed from its constitution, not from its administration.

By the time the Pennsylvania mutineers dispersed, Hamilton had endured seven weary months in Congress, a period that had taxed his energy and patience. That three of New York’s five delegates had been absent much of the time only added to his heavy burden. He had concluded that the country was not ready to amend the risible Articles of Confederation, because local and state politics exerted too dominant an influence. “Experience must convince us that our present establishments are utopian before we shall be ready to part with them for better,” he told Nathanael Greene.
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While marking time in Princeton in July, Hamilton drafted a resolution that again called for a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. This prescient document encapsulated many features of the 1787 Constitution: a federal government with powers separated among legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and a Congress with the power to levy taxes and raise an army. Hamilton again questioned the doctrine of free trade when he argued for federal regulation of trade so that “injurious branches of commerce might be discouraged, favourable branches encouraged, [and] useful products and manufactures promoted.”
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With his hyperactive mind, Hamilton was already fleshing out a rough draft of America’s future government.

Yet with the war ending, many advocates of state sovereignty wanted Congress dismantled as a permanent body. They thought the current Congress was
too
strong. “The constant session of Congress cannot be necessary in times of peace,” said Thomas Jefferson, who wanted to replace it with a committee.
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Slowly but inexorably, the future battle lines were being drawn between those who wanted an energetic central government and those who wanted rights to revert to the states. When his draft resolution foundered, Hamilton saw no need to dawdle any longer in this dwindling, demoralized Congress. On July 22, he informed Eliza that once the definitive peace treaty arrived, he would join her: “I give you joy, my angel, of the happy conclusion of the important work in which your country has been engaged. Now, in a very short time, I hope we shall be happily settled in New York.”
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Hamilton was dragooned into riding back to Albany with the dour Mrs. Schuyler, who insisted on making a detour through New York City. This stopover gave Hamilton a queasy foretaste of the tensions brewing between returning patriots and British sympathizers. He was scandalized by the flight of Tory businessmen—seven thousand had sailed for Nova Scotia in April alone—and feared the economic wreckage that might ensue from this large-scale exodus. When he got back to Albany, a shaken Hamilton wrote to Robert R. Livingston, “Many merchants of second class, characters of no political consequence, each of whom may carry away eight or ten thousand guineas have, I am told, applied for shipping to convey them away. Our state will feel for twenty years at least the effect of the popular frenzy.”
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For more than a century, November 25, 1783, was commemorated in New York City as Evacuation Day, the blessed end to seven years of British rule and martial law. At the southern tip of Manhattan, in a spiteful parting gesture, sullen redcoats greased the fort’s flagpole as the last British troops were ferried out to transport ships waiting in the harbor. Once the British had relinquished their hold over this last outpost of occupied soil, the procession of American worthies entered, led by General Henry Knox, who hoisted the American flag up a newly pitched pole. Cannon rattled off a thirteen-gun salute, flags flapped, and crowds cheered in delirium as George Washington and Governor George Clinton, guarded by Westchester light cavalry, rode side by side into the city, followed by throngs of citizens and soldiers marching eight abreast. The long, triumphant procession wound down to the Battery, taking in the roars of the ecstatic crowds packing the streets. America had been purged of the last vestiges of British rule. It had been a long and grueling experience—the eight years of fighting counted as the country’s longest conflict until Vietnam—and the cost had been exceedingly steep in blood and treasure. Gordon Wood has noted that the twenty-five thousand American military deaths amounted to nearly 1 percent of the entire population, a percentage exceeded only by the Civil War.
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As Washington gazed at the crowds, he could observe on every street corner debris left by the war. The British had never rebuilt those sections of the town blighted by the giant conflagration of September 1776. The city was now a shantytown of tents and hovels, interspersed with skeletal ruins of mansions and hollowed-out dwellings. Cows roamed weedy streets rank with garbage. When the future mayor James Duane saw his old properties, he moaned that they “look as if they had been inhabited by savages or wild beasts.”
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To provide firewood for British troops, the city had been denuded of fences and trees, and the wharves stood rotting and decayed. “Noisome vapours arise from the mud left in the docks and slips at low water,” said one visitor, “and unwholesome smells are occasioned by such a number of people being crowded together in so small a compass, almost like herrings in a barrel, most of them very dirty and not a small number sick of some disease.”
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Hamilton was already meditating a plan for removing this devastation. Instead of patching up derelict houses and building huts on vacant lots, he expressed hope that the city’s mechanics and artisans would find “profitable and durable employment in erecting large and elegant edifices.”
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Less apparent but no less momentous than the physical change was the huge demographic shift triggered by the approaching peace. As British hopes of victory faded, many Loyalists had crowded aboard convoys and escaped to Britain, Canada, and Bermuda. At the same time, there was a countervailing influx of patriots that doubled New York City’s population from about twelve thousand on Evacuation Day to twenty-four thousand just two years later, making it a booming metropolis that surpassed Boston and Baltimore in size. The surge of new and returning residents drove up prices sharply for food, fuel, and lodging.

During his stay of a little more than a week in New York, Washington salvaged the reputations of several suspected Tories who had engaged in espionage for the patriots. Whether coincidentally or not, two were old acquaintances of Hamilton from King’s College days. The morning after he entered New York, Washington breakfasted with the loquacious tailor, Hercules Mulligan, who had spied on British officers visiting his shop. To wipe away any doubts about Mulligan’s true loyalties, Washington pronounced him “a true friend of liberty.”
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Washington also strolled into the bookshop of the urbane printer James Rivington, who had been attacked by Isaac Sears and the Sons of Liberty when Hamilton was at King’s. With the war over, Rivington tried to stay in business by deleting the world
Royal
from his newspaper’s name and the British arms from its masthead, but he finally had to suspend publication. In reality, he had done yeoman’s work for the patriots, having stolen the British fleet’s signal book, which had been transmitted to Admiral de Grasse. Washington disappeared into a back room with Rivington under the guise of consulting some agricultural books and rewarded him with a bag of gold pieces.

On December 4, Washington made his tearful farewell to his officers at Fraunces Tavern at the corner of Broad and Pearl Streets, again underscoring that military officers were merely servants of the republic. Washington resisted all calls to become a king. There is no proof that Hamilton attended the historic valedictory, in spite of his having been at Washington’s side for four years of war. His absence, which must have been noted, suggests that he still nursed some secret wound because of his treatment by Washington. Certainly Washington, of all people, would not have lacked the magnanimity to invite him. Afterward, trailed by speechless admirers, Washington strolled down Whitehall Street and boarded a barge that carried him to the New Jersey shore.

Just a few days earlier, Alexander and Eliza Hamilton, along with baby Philip, had begun to rent a house at 57 (later 58) Wall Street, not far from Fraunces Tavern. For the first time, the vagabond young man from the West Indies had a real hometown, a permanent address. By the standards of the day, Wall Street was a broad, elegant thoroughfare, and many of the best-known merchant families resided there. The Hamiltons lived on the less fashionable eastern end, which was full of shops and offices, while Aaron and Theodosia Burr lived at tony 3 Wall Street—“next door but one to the City Hall,” at Wall and Broad, as Burr proudly put it.
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The lives of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr continued in parallel. Both had passed the bar in Albany at almost the same time, and they now occupied the same New York street and inaugurated their legal practices at almost the same time.

After so many years of war, Hamilton had a pressing need to earn money and tried to keep full-time politics at bay. A month after Evacuation Day, he spotted a newspaper item stating that he had been nominated for the New York Assembly. Hamilton politely but firmly deflected the honor. “Being determined to decline public office,” he wrote to the paper, “I think it proper to declare my determination to avoid in any degree distracting the votes of my fellow citizens.”
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Local populists associated with the Sons of Liberty scored lopsided victories in the election, resulting in a spate of punitive measures against Tories. As a fierce opponent of such vengeance, Hamilton busied himself defending persecuted Tories and halting their banishment.

Perhaps no individual was identified more with the postwar resurgence of New York City—not to mention the city’s future greatness—than Alexander Hamilton. He was destined to excel in what was to emerge as America’s commercial and financial metropolis, and he articulated the most expansive vision of its future. Nonetheless his vision was imperfect. At a dinner party soon after Evacuation Day, Hamilton and some other educated young men fated to lead the city debated whether to invest in local real estate or unspoiled forestland upstate. Hamilton’s son James told the tale:

John Jay was in favor of New York and made purchases there and as his means enabled him to hold his lots. His speculation made him rich....Some of the others, including my father, took the opposite view and invested in the lands in the northern counties of the state. The wild lands were purchased at a few cents an acre, but they were not settled very rapidly.
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This last sentence was a gross understatement. That Alexander Hamilton opted to purchase land in the far northern woods and bungled the chance to buy dirt-cheap Manhattan real estate must certainly count as one of his few conspicuous failures of economic judgment.
TEN

rom the time he started out as a young lawyer in postwar New York, Hamilton presented a dashing figure in society. He was trim and stylish, though not showy in dress. His account books reflect a concern with fashion, as shown

by periodic visits to a French tailor, and his sartorial elegance is confirmed in portraits. In one painting, he wears a double-breasted coat with brass buttons and gilt-edged lapels, his neck swathed delicately in a ruffled lace jabot. One French historian remarked, “He belonged to the age of manners and silk stockings and handsome shoe-buckles.”
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He was as fastidious as a courtier in caring for his reddish-brown hair, and his son James recorded his daily ritual with the barber: “I recollect being in my father’s office in New York when he was under the hands of his hair-dress[er] (which was his daily course). His back hair was long. It was plaited, clubbed up, and tied with a black ribbon. His front hair was pomatumed [i.e., pomaded], powdered, and combed up and back from his forehead.”
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Many artists who painted Hamilton picked up the quiet smile that suffused his ruddy cheeks and shined in his close-set blue eyes, conveying an impression of mental keenness, inner amusement, and debonair insouciance. His strong, well-defined features, especially the sharply assertive nose and chin, made for a distinctive profile. Indeed, his family thought a profile—not a portrait—done by James Sharples the best likeness of him ever done.

Hamilton’s friends liked to rhapsodize his charm. His Federalist ally Fisher Ames was to eulogize his great capacity for friendship by saying that he was “so entirely the friend of his friends... that his power over their affections was entire and lasted through his life.”
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For Judge James Kent, who often rendered him in superlatives, Hamilton “was blessed with a very amiable, generous, tender, and charitable disposition, and he had the most artless simplicity of any man I ever knew. It was impossible not to love as well as respect and admire him.”
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Yet close observers also detected something contradictory in the way the mobile features shifted quickly from gravity to mirth. Boston lawyer William Sullivan noted the contrasting expressions of his face: “When at rest, it had rather a severe and thoughtful expression, but when engaged in conversation, it easily assumed an attractive smile.”
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This mixture of the grave and the playful was the very essence of his nature. His grandson wrote that Hamilton’s personality was “a mixture of aggressive force and infinite tenderness and amiability.”
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