Alexander Hamilton (85 page)

Perhaps aware that Hamilton had been blackmailed with some success before, Fraunces wrote to him in early August and threatened to expose everything to “the people” if he did not get paid for his two warrants. Within hours, Hamilton sent back a furious reply. He was not about to repeat the mistake he made with James Reynolds: “Do you imagine that any menaces of appeal to the people can induce me to depart from what I conceive to be my public duty!...I set you and all your accomplices at defiance.”
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The next day, Hamilton did something out of character: he wrote a toned-down letter to Fraunces, apologized for his rash initial response, and merely protested the notion that he had failed to pay for the warrants because of “some sinister motives.”
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The change of tone apparently came about because Washington had received another letter from Fraunces and had asked Hamilton to comment on the case. This must have reminded Hamilton that he was dealing with official business, not just private threats. Hamilton explained the affair to Washington’s satisfaction. At the same time, he sent a pointed letter to Fraunces’s lawyer, warning of legal consequences if any fabricated documents were used against him.

Undeterred, in late August Fraunces published a pamphlet of his correspondence with Hamilton and Washington. On October 11, an irate Hamilton placed a notice in two New York newspapers, informing the public that he had repeatedly asked Fraunces for proof of his charges and that Fraunces had evaded the request. Hamilton called his former employee “contemptible” and a “despicable calumniator.”
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The next day, an unrepentant Fraunces retorted in a rival paper that “if I am a
despicable calumniator,
I have been, unfortunately, for a long time past a pupil of Mr. Hamilton’s.”
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Fraunces kept up his diatribes, and Robert Troup and Rufus King gathered affidavits from prominent people attesting to Hamilton’s innocence. It was testimony to the vile partisanship of the period that a disgruntled former government clerk, tainted by a well-known history of drinking, could sustain such a public assault upon Hamilton’s character. It also testified to Hamilton’s exaggerated need to free his name from the slightest stain that he felt obliged to trade public insults with such an obscure figure.

The Fraunces controversy ended when the former clerk appealed for justice to Congress, citing Hamilton’s supposed mishandling of his warrants. The charges, as Hamilton knew, lacked merit. On February 19, 1794, Congress passed two resolutions rejecting Fraunces’s claims and commending Hamilton’s honorable handling of the matter.
TWENTY-THREE

n March 4, 1793, George Washington was sworn in for his second term as president. Unlike his talkative treasury secretary, the president believed in brevity and delivered a pithy inaugural address of two paragraphs. As he

spoke in the Senate chamber, tension crackled below the surface of American politics that contrasted with the rapturous mood of the first inauguration. Fisher Ames, always a shrewd observer of the scene, mused that “a spirit of faction ...must soon come to a crisis.” He foresaw that congressional Republicans would discard their comparatively decorous criticism of Washington’s first term: “They thirst for vengeance. The Secretary of the Treasury is one whom they would immolate.... The President is not to be spared. His popularity is a fund of strength to that cause which they would destroy. He is therefore rudely and incessantly attacked.”
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Washington’s second term revolved around inflammatory foreign-policy issues. The French Revolution forced Americans to ponder the meaning of their own revolution, and followers of Hamilton and Jefferson drew diametrically opposite conclusions. The continuing turmoil in Paris added to the caution of Hamiltonians, who were trying to tamp down radical fires at home. Those same upheavals encouraged Jeffersonians to stoke the fires anew. Americans increasingly defined their domestic politics by either their solidarity with the French Revolution or their aversion to its incendiary methods. The French Revolution thus served to both consolidate the two parties in American politics and deepen the ideological gulf between them.

Most Americans had applauded the French Revolution as a worthy successor to their own, a fraternal link renewed in August 1792 when the National Assembly in Paris bestowed honorary citizenship upon “Georges Washington,” “N. Madison,” and “Jean Hamilton.”
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When Hamilton received a letter from the French interior minister confirming this, he scribbled scornfully on the back: “Letter from government of French Republic, transmitting me a diploma of citizenship, mistaking the Christian name....Curious example of French finesse.”
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But events in Paris had taken a bloody turn that horrified American representatives there. During the summer of 1792, William Short—Jefferson’s former private secretary in Paris, now stationed in The Hague—wrote to Jefferson of “those mad and corrupted people in France who under the name of liberty have destroyed their own government.” The Parisian streets, he warned, “literally are red with blood.”
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Short described to Hamilton mobs breaking into the royal palace and jailing King Louis XVI. In late August, a guillotine was erected near the Tuileries as Robespierre and Marat launched a wholesale roundup of priests, royalists, editors, judges, tramps, prostitutes—anyone deemed an enemy of the state. When 1,400 political prisoners were slaughtered in the so-called September Massacres, an intoxicated Robespierre pronounced it “the most beautiful revolution that has ever honored humanity.”
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“Let the blood of traitors flow,” agreed Marat. “That is the only way to save the country.”
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For a long time, Jeffersonians had dismissed these reports of atrocities as rank propaganda. Moved by the soul-stirring rhetoric of the French Revolution, they affected the title of “Jacobin” and saluted one another as “citizen” or “citizeness,” in solidarity with their French comrades. After France declared itself a republic on September 20, 1792, American sympathizers feted the news with toasts, cannonades, and jubilation. When Jefferson replied to William Short’s letter, he noted that the French Revolution had heartened American republicans and undercut Hamiltonian “monocrats.” He regretted the lives lost in Paris, he said, then offered this chilling apologia: “The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest.... [R]ather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.”
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For Jefferson, it was not just French or American freedom at stake but that of the entire Western world. To his mind, such a universal goal excused the bloodthirsty means.

On January 21, 1793, more grisly events forced a reappraisal of the notion that the French Revolution was a romantic Gallic variant of the American Revolution. Louis XVI—who had aided the American Revolution and whose birthday had long been celebrated by American patriots—was guillotined for plotting against the Revolution. The death of Louis Capet—he had lost his royal title—was drenched in gore: schoolboys cheered, threw their hats aloft, and licked the king’s blood, while one executioner did a thriving business selling snippets of royal hair and clothing. The king’s decapitated head was wedged between his lifeless legs, then stowed in a basket. The remains were buried in an unvarnished box. England reeled from the news, William Pitt the Younger branding it “the foulest and most atrocious act the world has ever seen.”
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On February 1, France declared war against England, Holland, and Spain, and soon the whole continent was engulfed in fighting, ushering in more than twenty years of combat.

News of the royal beheading reached America in late March 1793, at an inopportune time for the Jeffersonians, who had stressed France’s moral superiority over Britain. Would they condemn or rationalize the action? The answer became clear when Freneau’s
National Gazette
published an article entitled “Louis Capet has lost his caput.” The author qualified his levity in celebrating the king’s death: “From my use of a pun, it may seem that I think lightly of his fate. I certainly do. It affects me no more than the execution of another malefactor.”
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The author said that the king’s murder represented “a great act of justice,” and anyone shocked by such wanton violence betrayed “a strong remaining attachment to royalty” and belonged to “a monarchical junto.”
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In other words, they were Hamiltonians. Once upon a time, Thomas Jefferson had lauded Louis XVI as “a good man,” “an honest man.”
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Now, he asserted that monarchs should be “amenable to punishment like other criminals.”
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Madison admitted to some qualms about “the follies and barbarities” in Paris but was generally no less militant than Jefferson in admiring the French Revolution, describing it as “wonderful in its progress and...stupendous in its consequences”; he denigrated its enemies as “enemies of human nature.”
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Madison agreed with Jefferson that if their French comrades failed it would doom American republicanism. Madison was not fazed by Louis XVI’s murder. If the king “was a traitor,” he said, “he ought to be punished as well as another man.”
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Like Jefferson, Madison filtered out upsetting facts about France and mocked as “spurious” newspaper accounts that talked about the king’s innocence “and the bloodthirstiness of his enemies.”
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One mordant irony of this obstinate blindness was that while Republicans rejoiced in the French Revolution and cited the sacred debt owed to French officers who had fought in the American Revolution, those same officers were being victimized by revolutionary violence. Gouverneur Morris, now U.S. minister to France, informed Hamilton after the king’s execution, “It has so happened that a very great proportion of the French officers who served in America have been either opposed to the Revolution at an early day or felt themselves obliged at a later period to abandon it. Some of them are now in a state of banishment and their property confiscated.”
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With the monarchy’s fall, the marquis de Lafayette was denounced as a traitor. He fled to Belgium, only to be captured by the Austrians and shunted among various prisons for five years. Tossed into solitary confinement, he eventually emerged wan and emaciated, a mostly hairless cadaver. Lafayette’s family suffered grievously during the Terror. His wife’s sister, mother, and grandmother were all executed and dumped in a common grave. Other heroes of the American Revolution succumbed to revolutionary madness: the comte de Rochambeau was locked up in the Conciergerie, while Admiral d’Estaing was executed.

If Republicans turned a blind eye to these events, the pro-British bias of the Federalists perhaps sharpened their vision. As early as March 1792, Jefferson groused in his “Anas” about Washington’s “want of confidence in the event of the French revolution....I remember when I received the news of the king’s flight and capture, I first told him of it at his assembly. I never saw him so much dejected by any event in my life.”
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Washington was indeed sickened by the bloodshed in France, and this widened the breach between him and Jefferson. John Adams was quite prescient about events in France and regretted that many Americans were “so blind, undistinguishing, and enthusiastic of everything that has been done by that light, airy, and transported people.”
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He warned that “Danton, Robespierre, Marat, etc. are furies. Dragons’ teeth have been sown in France and will come up as monsters.”
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No American was to expend more prophetic verbiage in denouncing the French Revolution than Alexander Hamilton. The suspension of the monarchy and the September Massacres, Hamilton later told Lafayette, had “cured me of my goodwill for the French Revolution.”
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Hamilton refused to condone the carnage in Paris or separate means from ends. He did not think a revolution should cast off the past overnight or repudiate law, order, and tradition. “A struggle for liberty is in itself respectable and glorious,” he opined. “When conducted with magnanimity, justice, and humanity, it ought to command the admiration of every friend to human nature. But if sullied by crimes and extravagancies, it loses its respectability.”
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The American Revolution had succeeded because it was “a
free, regular
and
deliberate
act of the nation” and had been conducted with “a spirit of justice and humanity.”
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It was, in fact, a revolution written in parchment and defined by documents, petitions, and other forms of law.

What threw Hamilton into despair was not just the betrayal of revolutionary hopes in France but the way its American apologists ended up justifying a “state of things the most cruel, sanguinary, and violent that ever stained the annals of mankind.”
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For Hamilton, the utopian revolutionaries in France had emphasized liberty to the exclusion of order, morality, religion, and property rights. They had singled out for persecution bankers and businessmen—people Hamilton regarded as agents of progressive change. He saw the chaos in France as a frightening portent of what could happen in America if the safeguards of order were stripped away by the love of liberty. His greatest nightmare was being enacted across the Atlantic—a hopeful revolution giving way to indiscriminate terror and authoritarian rule. His conclusion was categorical: “If there be anything solid in virtue, the time must come when it will have been a disgrace to have advocated the revolution of France in its late stages.”
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Reports that France had declared war against England and other royal powers did not reach American shores until early April, when Hamilton informed Washington, then at Mount Vernon, “there seems to be no room for doubt of the existence of war.”
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Washington rushed back to Philadelphia to formulate policy. He inclined instantly toward neutrality and blanched at rumors that American ships were getting ready to wage war as pro-French privateers. Before Washington’s arrival, Hamilton mulled over a neutrality proclamation and consulted with John Jay, not Thomas Jefferson, who was slowly being shunted aside in foreign policy. The day after his return on April 17, Washington asked his advisers to ponder thirteen questions for a meeting at his residence the next morning. The first question was the overriding one: Should the United States issue a proclamation of neutrality? The next twelve questions related to France, among them: Should America receive an ambassador from France? Should earlier treaties apply? Was France waging an offensive or defensive war? In these queries, with their implicit skepticism of France, Jefferson saw the handiwork of Hamilton, even though Washington had taken pains to write out the questions himself.