Alexander Hamilton (43 page)

The son of Scotch-Irish immigrants, George Clinton started out as a country lawyer from Ulster County and a rabble-rouser in the New York Assembly, followed by a period in the Continental Congress. As a brigadier general, he defended the Hudson Highlands during the war. He became the indomitable champion of the local yeomen, who saw him as a bulwark against the patrician families that had ruled colonial New York: the Livingstons, Schuylers, Rensselaers, and other Hudson River potentates. Theodore Roosevelt later observed, with the knowing eye of a veteran politician, that Clinton knew how to capitalize on the “cold, suspicious temper of small country freeholders” with their “narrow” jealousies.
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Yet for all his aura of republican simplicity, Clinton was not the salt of the earth. He owned eight slaves and put together a fortune in office. If he lived frugally, it was less from lack of money than from notoriously miserly habits. During most of his time in office, this poohbah of the people sported the pretentious title “His Excellency George Clinton, Esquire, the Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief of all the militia, and Admiral of the Navy of the State of New-York.”
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Hamilton and Clinton did not begin at loggerheads. Though Clinton was sixteen years older, he and Hamilton had kept up a friendly wartime correspondence and agreed on the need to bolster Congress. Hamilton applauded Washington’s choice of Clinton to command American forces in the Hudson Valley. But when Hamilton married Eliza Schuyler, he inherited Clinton’s special nemesis as his father-in-law. By 1782, while Hamilton still lauded Clinton as a “man of integrity,” he had come to believe that Clinton pandered to popular prejudice “especially when a new election approaches.”
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As the decade progressed, Hamilton’s critique of Clinton grew more venomous. He found the governor rude and petulant, his frank manner a cloak for infinite calculation. Clinton was “circumspect and guarded” and seldom acted “without premeditation or design.”
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Alexander Hamilton was haunted by George Clinton for reasons that transcended his political style. Hamilton’s besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism. George Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, and Aaron Burr all came to incarnate that dread for Hamilton. Clinton also disapproved of banks, regarding them as devices to enrich speculators and divert money from hardworking farmers. Hamilton was further chagrined by Clinton’s punitive postwar stance toward the Loyalists. One Tory chronicler said of Clinton: “He tried, condemned, imprisoned, and punished the Loyalists most unmercifully. They were by his orders tarred and feathered, carted, whipped, fined, banished, and in short, every kind of cruelty, death not excepted, was practised by this emissary of rebellion.”
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Hamilton might have tolerated such flaws had it not been for one unforgivable sin: Clinton favored New York to the detriment of national unity. Clinton was well aware of Hamilton’s ardent nationalist orientation. In time, he praised Hamilton as “a great man, a great lawyer, a man of integrity, very ambitious,” but “anxious to effect that ruinous measure, a
consolidation of the states.
”
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Much of Hamilton’s cynicism about state politics can be traced to his growing disenchantment with George Clinton. At the governor’s urging, New York State imposed a stiff duty on British goods entering from the West Indies, a tax that infuriated city merchants and shippers alike. Many of these imports ended up in neighboring New Jersey and Connecticut, but New York kept all of the taxes. New York also laid an “import” tariff on farm produce from New Jersey and lumber from Connecticut. Addicted to this financial racket and unwilling to share the booty, Governor Clinton had opposed the 5 percent federal tax on imports proposed by the Confederation Congress and supported by Hamilton.

So grave were the interstate tensions over trade that Nathaniel Gorham, named president of Congress in 1786, feared that clashes between New York and its neighbors might degenerate into civil war. Similarly acrimonious trade disputes erupted between other states with major seaports and neighbors who imported goods through them. The states were arrogating a right that properly belonged to a central government: the right to formulate trade policy. This persuaded Hamilton that unless a new federal government with a monopoly on customs revenues was established, disunion would surely ensue. As individual states developed interests in their own taxes, they would be less and less likely to sacrifice for the common good.

In April 1786, amid a worsening economic crisis, Hamilton agreed that the time had come to act and was elected to a one-year term in the New York Assembly. Later on, he told a Scottish relative that he had been involved in a lucrative legal practice “when the derangement of our public affairs by the feebleness of the general confederation drew me again reluctantly into public life.”
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His zeal for reform signaled anything but reluctance. He was seized with a crusading sense of purpose and had a momentous, long-term plan to enact. Hamilton told Troup he had stood for election because he planned to “render the next session” of the Assembly “subservient to the change he meditated” in the structure of the national government.
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Indeed, his election to the Assembly was a preliminary step in an extended sequence of events that led straight to the Constitutional Convention.

The road leading to the Constitutional Convention was a long, circuitous one. It began at Mount Vernon in 1785 when commissioners from Maryland and Virginia resolved a heated dispute over navigation of the Potomac River. Virginia hoped this might serve as a pattern for settling other interstate disputes and in early 1786 called for a convention at Annapolis “for the purpose of framing such regulations of trade as may be judged necessary to promote the general interest.”
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The tutelary spirit, James Madison, was no less despondent than Hamilton about the trade and border disputes riling the states. In March 1786, Madison wrote to Jefferson, then the American minister in Paris, about “the present anarchy of our commerce” and described the way the predominant seaport states were fleecing their neighbors.
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Appalled by selfish laws issuing from state legislatures, Madison warned Jefferson that they had become “so frequent and so flagrant as to alarm the most steadfast friends of republicanism.”
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In May 1786, the New York legislature named six commissioners to the Annapolis conference; in the end, only Hamilton and his friend Egbert Benson, the state attorney general, attended. This seemingly minor appointment was to have the most far-reaching ramifications for Hamilton. If he had missed Annapolis, he might not have attended the Constitutional Convention or ended up as the editorial impresario of
The Federalist Papers.
Robert Troup later claimed that Hamilton knew that Annapolis would serve as the prelude to bigger things and had no interest in “a commercial convention otherwise than as a stepping stone to a general convention to form a general constitution.”
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Whether through luck, premeditation, or a knack for making things happen, Hamilton continued to demonstrate his unique flair for materializing at every major turning point in the early history of the republic.

On September 1, Hamilton set out for Annapolis, paying his own way. After his nomadic youth and wartime roaming, Hamilton had retained little wanderlust and now traversed scenery he had last viewed as a soldier. Ailing during the journey, he was relieved to arrive at Annapolis one week later. Eliza had recently given birth to their third child, Alexander, and Hamilton sorely missed his growing family. The moment he arrived in Maryland, he dashed off an affectionate note to Eliza, suffused with melancholy:

Happy, however, I cannot be, absent from you and my darling little ones. I feel that nothing can ever compensate for the loss of the enjoyments I leave at home or can ever put my heart at tolerable ease....In reality, my attachments to home disqualify me for either business or pleasure abroad and the prospect of a detention here for eight or ten days, perhaps a fortnight, fills me with an anxiety which will best be conceived by my Betsey’s own impatience....Think of me with as much tenderness as I do of you and we cannot fail to be always happy.
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Clearly, the love between Alexander and Eliza had not cooled in the time since courtship and matrimony had tamed the libidinous young man into something of a homebody.

By choosing the relatively secluded town of Annapolis, Madison explained, the conference organizers had purposely bypassed the main commercial towns and congressional precincts to guard against any accusations that the commissioners were in the thrall of outside parties. They stayed at George Mann’s City Tavern, a large, hundred-bed hostelry, and held working sessions in the old senate chamber at the State House. The turnout was meager—only twelve delegates showed up from five states—yet the paltry attendance proved a blessing, weeding out potential foes of a more centralized government. The intimacy of this group of nationalists allowed the talks to range far beyond commercial disputes to a richer, more trenchant critique of the crumbling Articles of Confederation.

Arriving at Annapolis several days before Hamilton, Madison approached the meeting with his matchless, professorial thoroughness. Jefferson had shipped him a “literary cargo” of treatises on politics and history, and his mind was already stuffed with precedents about republics and confederations. Hamilton probably had not seen his friend since their congressional days, Madison having studied law and served in the Virginia Assembly in the interim. He must have been pleased to renew ties with the small, bookish, balding man with the deep-set eyes and beetle brows. Though we know few details of the Annapolis sessions, it seems certain that Hamilton and Madison commenced the joint philosophical inquiries that yielded
The Federalist Papers
two years later. At this point, they were kindred spirits in their common distaste for the parochial tendencies of the states.

The Annapolis attendees soon agreed that the commercial disputes among the states were symptomatic of underlying flaws in the political framework, and they arrived at a breathtaking conclusion: they would urge the states to send delegates to a convention in Philadelphia the following May to amend the Articles of Confederation. Evidently, Hamilton wrote a hot-blooded first draft of this appeal, an indictment so scorching that Virginia governor Edmund Randolph asked him to tone it down. Hamilton flared up in righteous disagreement, and Madison had to take him aside and urge a tactical retreat. “You had better yield to this man,” Madison cautioned, “for otherwise all Virginia will be against you.”
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Hamilton cooled off and consented.

In its final version, Hamilton’s communiqué explained that the commissioners had ventured beyond their original commercial mandate because “the power of regulating trade is of such comprehensive extent” that fixing the problem required corresponding adjustments in other parts of the political system. Upon closer examination, the defects of the present system had been found “greater and more numerous” than previously imagined.
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The Annapolis address, with its conception of the political system as a finely crafted mechanism, composed of subtly interrelated parts, had a distinctly Hamiltonian ring. It reflected his penchant for systemic solutions, his sense of the fine interconnectedness of things.

Madison and Hamilton had diametrically opposite experiences when their home states pondered the Annapolis resolution. The Virginia legislature gave it enthusiastic approval and tapped George Washington to head its delegation to the Constitutional Convention. By contrast, Governor George Clinton immediately played the spoilsport. He expressed “a strong dislike” for the idea, denied the need for reform, and affirmed “that the confederation as it stood was equal to the purposes of the Union.”
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For the next two years, George Clinton obstructed reform, even though many members of his own legislature welcomed the Annapolis appeal.

In 1776, John Adams had predicted accurately that “the most intricate, the most important, the most dangerous and delicate business” of the postwar years would be the creation of a central government.
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Hamilton was now fully committed to that task, and after Annapolis he was strategically poised to pursue it. Paying homage to Hamilton’s campaign for a closer union, Catherine Drinker Bowen later wrote in her classic account of the Constitutional Convention, “Among those who began early to work for reform three names stand out: Washington, Madison and Hamilton. And of the three, evidence points to Hamilton as the most potent single influence toward calling the Convention of ’87.”
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Madison’s admirers might respectfully beg to differ.

Money problems pervaded all others under the Articles of Confederation. America was virtually bankrupt as the federal government and state governments found it impossible to retire the gargantuan debt inherited from the Revolution. On European securities exchanges, investors expressed skepticism about America’s survival by trading its securities at a small fraction of their face values. “The fate of America was suspended by a hair,” Gouverneur Morris was to say.
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Many Americans were as debt-burdened as their legislatures. Even as the Annapolis conference unfolded, rural turmoil erupted in western Massachusetts as thousands of indebted farmers, struggling with soaring taxes and foreclosures on their lands, grabbed staves and pitchforks, shut down courthouses, and thwarted land seizures by force. As Hamilton had feared, after eight years of war violent protest against authority had become habitual. The farmers’ uprising was dubbed Shays’s Rebellion after one of its leaders, Daniel Shays, a former militia captain and suddenly a folk hero. At moments, it looked like a reprise of the American Revolution, now reenacted as a civil war. The rebels donned their old Continental Army uniforms and wore sprigs of hemlock in their hats in the spirit of ’76. By February 1787, the state militia had quashed the disorder, but its influence lingered when Massachusetts passed debt-relief legislation. Many creditors and property owners were disturbed by the mounting power of state governments and dismayed by the impotent federal government, which had sold off its last warship and let its army shrink to an insignificant force of seven hundred soldiers.