Alexander Hamilton (37 page)

Against an incongruous backdrop of black hands stooping in the fields, Madison passed his cloistered childhood. Suffering from a nervous disorder reminiscent of epilepsy, he was prone to hypochondria and, like many sickly children, took to reading. He received a fine classical education: five years at a boarding school, followed by two years of private tutoring on his plantation. At Princeton, he absorbed prodigious heaps of books and slept only four or five hours per night. President Witherspoon, who had rejected Hamilton, remarked of Madison that “during the whole time he was under [my] tuition [I] never knew him to do, or to say, an improper thing.”
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Madison retained the air of a perennial student and always immersed himself in laborious study before major political events.

Because of poor health, Madison served only briefly as a colonel in the Orange County militia and then became a member of the Virginia House of Delegates and the governor’s Council of State before being named the youngest member of Congress in 1780. Hamilton and Madison represented a new generation of postwar leaders whose careers were wholly identified with the new republic. At this juncture, they had a similar vision of the structural reforms needed by the government. Madison favored a standing army, a permanent navy, and other positions later associated with the Hamiltonians. If anything, Madison was even more militant than Hamilton in asserting central authority and wanted Congress to be able to apply force against states that refused to pay their requested contributions.

Despite the thorny complexities, it was a heady time for these two young men who saw themselves striving for mankind. As Madison phrased it in April 1783, the rights for which America contended “were the rights of human nature,” and its citizens were “responsible for the greatest trust ever confided to a political society.”
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To galvanize the new country, Hamilton and Madison concentrated on the crying need for revenue—a need alleviated only partially when John Adams had arranged a large loan from Holland on June 11, 1782. They believed that Congress required a permanent, independent revenue source, free from reliance on the capricious whims of the states. Only then could Congress retire the huge war debt and stem a nascent movement to repudiate it. Hamilton stressed this in a resolution that read like a fervent trumpet blast: “
Resolved,
that it is the opinion of Congress that complete JUSTICE cannot be done to the creditors of the United States, nor restoration of PUBLIC CREDIT be effected, nor the future exigencies of the war provided for, but by the establishment of permanent and adequate funds to operate generally throughout the United States,
to be collected by Congress.
”
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Hamilton joined Madison in a campaign to introduce a federal impost—a 5 percent duty on all imports—that would finally grant Congress autonomy in money matters. For Hamilton, the overriding goal was to institute a federal power of taxation. The most heated opposition came from Rhode Island, and Hamilton and Madison sat on a committee that dealt with the maverick state. They issued a joint statement, almost entirely in Hamilton’s handwriting, that reiterated his now standard plea of the importance of public credit to national honor. Then came a statement still more fraught with large consequences: “The truth is that no federal constitution can exist without powers that, in their exercise, affect the internal policy of the component members.”
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Hamilton was throwing down a gauntlet: the central government had to have the right to enact laws that superseded those of the states and to deal directly with their citizens. In late January, he made a still more heretical speech: he wanted to assign federal tax collectors to the states as a way of “pervading and uniting” them.
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Hamilton was now aiming openly not at a makeshift confederation of states but at a unitary nation. Taken aback by this excessive candor, Madison noted that some members “smiled at the disclosure” and gloated privately “that Mr. Hamilton had let out the secret.”
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The incident again showed that Hamilton, far from being a crafty plotter, often could not muzzle his opinions. He was not one to traffic in halfhearted measures—Congress was setting enduring precedents for peacetime—and he opposed a compromise bill in April that limited the scope of the imposts and left revenue collection to each state. Hamilton’s quarrel with New York governor George Clinton over the impost was to blossom into full-blown mutual animosity and profoundly affect the rest of his career.

Money was needed urgently to mollify the disaffected officers of the Continental Army, who threatened to turn mutinous at their winter camp in Newburgh, New York. The provisional peace treaty raised the unsettling prospect that the army might disband without officers receiving either back pay—as much as six years owed, in some cases—or promised pensions. The officer corps buzzed with threats of mass resignations, and a three-man delegation went to Philadelphia to negotiate a solution. On January 6, 1783, they presented Congress with a petition that expressed festering grievances: “We have borne all that men can bear—our property is expended—our private resources are at an end.”
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Some soldiers had been left so indebted by the fighting and the devalued currency that they feared they would be jailed upon their discharge from the army. Hamilton and Madison met with the disgruntled officers and were assigned to a subcommittee to devise a solution. The two men seized the chance to admonish Congress to fund the entire national war debt and satisfy the soldiers along with other creditors. The sad reality was that, deprived of real taxing power, Congress could offer the soldiers little but rhetorical solace.

Hamilton held out slim hope that the states would replenish the general coffers and appease the officers’ demands. With his pessimistic imagination, he dwelled on the dangers inherent in situations, and he feared that civil strife, even disunion, would follow peace with Britain. In mid-February, he wrote apprehensively to Governor Clinton, outlining a plan to resettle military officers in New York State: “I wish the legislature would set apart a tract of territory and make a liberal allowance to every officer and soldier of the army at large who will become a citizen of the state.” As a leading “continentalist,” Hamilton knew that such a suggestion might seem to counter his image. “It is the first wish of my heart that the union may last,” he explained, “but feeble as the links are, what prudent man would rely upon it? Should a disunion take place, any person who will cast his eyes upon the map will see how essential it is to our state to provide for its own security.”
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In this case, Clinton heeded Hamilton’s advice and handed out lucrative land grants in New York State to willing officers.

Hamilton knew that the final arbiter of the deadly stalemate between restive officers and an impotent Congress was George Washington, with whom he had not corresponded in more than a year. On February 13, presuming on their former trust, Hamilton addressed a confidential letter to him. Writing now as a peer, he dared to advise Washington on how to handle the threatened uprising. For Hamilton, such a threat had its uses if it could prod a lethargic Congress into bolstering national finances: “The claims of the army, urged with moderation but with firmness, may operate on those weak minds which are influenced by their apprehensions more than their judgments…. But the difficulty will be to keep a
complaining
and
suffering army
within the bounds of moderation.”
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For Washington to maintain his standing among both the army and the citizenry at large, Hamilton urged him to badger Congress through surrogates.

Hamilton was coaxing Washington to dabble in a dangerous game of pretending to be a lofty statesman while covertly orchestrating pressure on Congress. The letter shows Hamilton at his most devious, playing with combustible forces. (He wasn’t alone in this strategy: Gouverneur Morris in Philadelphia was also writing to General Nathanael Greene that the states would never pay the army “unless the army be united and determined in the pursuit of it.”)
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Hamilton feared that the cautious Washington might be thrust aside by more militant officers and told him of whispering in the army that he did not uphold his soldiers’ interests “with sufficient warmth. The falsehood of this opinion no one can be better acquainted with than myself, but it is not the less mischievous for being false.”
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A week later, Hamilton and Madison met at the home of Thomas FitzSimons to discuss the growing officer militance. Madison’s notes give us Hamilton’s unexpurgated view of Washington at the time. It jibes with his earlier statements about Washington’s sometimes irritable personality but absolute rectitude:

Mr. Hamilton said that he knew Gen[era]l Washington intimately and perfectly, that his extreme reserve, mixed sometimes with a degree of asperity of temper, both of which were said to have increased of late, had contributed to the decline of his popularity. But that his virtue, his patriotism, and his firmness would…never yield to any dishonorable plans into which he might be called. That he would sooner suffer himself to be cut into pieces; that he (Mr. Hamilton), knowing this to be his true character, wished him to be the conductor of the army in their plans for redress in order that they might be moderated and directed to proper objects.
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On March 4, Washington thanked Hamilton for his frank letter and confessed that he had not fathomed the abysmal state of America’s finances. He referred gravely to the “contemplative hours” he had spent on the subject of the soldiers’ pay: “The sufferings of a complaining army on one hand, and the inability of Congress and tardiness of the states on the other, are the forebodings of evil.” Washington then obliquely rebuffed Hamilton’s misguided suggestion that he exploit army discontent to goad Congress into action on public finance, saying it might “excite jealousy and bring on its concomitants.”
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With unerring foresight, Washington perceived the importance of enshrining the principle that military power should be subordinated to civilian control.

The Newburgh situation grew only more incendiary. In the following days, two anonymous letters made the rounds in camp, fomenting opposition to Washington and rallying the officers to apply force against Congress. One document warned darkly, “Suspect the man who would advise to more moderation and longer forbearance.”
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It seemed as if the new nation might be lurching toward a military putsch. On March 12, Washington, alarmed by this state of affairs, told Hamilton that he would attend an officers’ meeting on March 15 to stop them from “plunging themselves into a gulf of civil horror from which there might be no receding.”
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Washington kept his diplomatic balance, trying to head off rash action by his officers while pleading for timely congressional relief. “Let me beseech you therefore, my good sir,” he told Hamilton, “to urge this matter earnestly and without further delay. The situation of these gentlemen, I do verily believe, is distressing beyond description.”
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On March 15, Washington addressed the officers, determined to squash a reported scheme to march on Congress. For the first time, he confronted a hostile audience of his own men. Washington sternly rebuked talk of rebellion, saying it would threaten the liberties for which they had fought. An insurrection would only “open the floodgates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood.”
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He then staged the most famous coup de théâtre of his career. He was about to read aloud a letter from a congressman when the words swam before his eyes. So he fished in his pockets for his glasses. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service to my country.”
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The mutinous soldiers, inexpressibly moved, were shamed by their opposition to Washington and restored to their senses. Washington agreed to lobby Congress on their behalf, and a committee chaired by Hamilton granted the officers a pension payment equivalent to five years’ full pay. Whether Congress could really make good on such payments without its own taxing power was another question.

As soon as he heard of Washington’s virtuoso performance, Hamilton applauded him: “Your Excellency has, in my opinion, acted wisely. The best way is ever not to attempt to stem a torrent but to divert it. You coincide in opinion with me on the conduct proper to be observed by yourself.”
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Washington had heeded Hamilton’s advice in assuming a leadership role but had pointedly ignored his advice about inflaming the situation for political ends. Hamilton still clung to the notion that a convincing bluff of armed force could help spur congressional action, but that was as far as he would venture. “As to any combination of
force,
” he observed, “it would only be productive of the horrors of a civil war, might end in the ruin of the country, and would certainly end in the ruin of the army.”
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The feared mutiny at Newburgh deepened but also complicated relations between Hamilton and Washington. It reinforced their mutual conviction that the Articles of Confederation had to be revised root and branch and Congress strengthened. “More than half the perplexities I have experienced in the course of my command, and almost the whole of the difficulties and distress of the army, have their origin here,” Washington wrote of congressional weakness.
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At the same time, Washington saw a certain Machiavellian streak in Hamilton and bluntly told him of grumbling in the army about congressmen who tried to use the soldiers as “mere puppets to establish continental funds.” He lectured Hamilton: “The army…is a dangerous instrument to play with.”
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Washington must have seen that Hamilton, for all his brains and daring, sometimes lacked judgment and had to be supervised carefully. On the other hand, Hamilton had employed his wiles in the service of ideals that Washington himself endorsed.