Alexander Hamilton (46 page)

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.

Shays’s Rebellion thrust to the fore economic issues—the very issues in which Hamilton specialized—as did an extremist movement in Rhode Island that beat the drum for abolishing debt and dividing wealth equally. The Massachusetts uprising shocked many who wondered just how far the rebels would go. “Good God!” Washington proclaimed of the rebellion, aghast that some protesters regarded America’s land “to be the
common property
of all.”
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James Madison confessed to similar trepidation about the rebels to his father: “They profess to aim only at a reform of the constitution and of certain abuses in the public administration, but an abolition of debts public and private and a new division of property are strongly suspected in contemplation.”
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Where Madison thought a weak republic would only invite disorder, Jefferson reacted to the turmoil with aplomb. “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” he told Madison loftily from Paris, “and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”
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To Colonel William Smith, Jefferson sent his famous reassurance: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
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While Hamilton feared that disorder would feed on itself, the more hopeful and complacent Jefferson thought that periodic excesses would correct themselves.

Ordinarily a veritable Niagara of opinion, Hamilton was initially mute about Shays’s Rebellion. He kept silent because he sympathized with the farmers’ grievances, however much he despised their methods. Hamilton wanted the federal government to take over state debts left from the war. Instead, Massachusetts, by trying to settle its own debt, had crushed the farmers with onerous taxes. “The insurrection was in a great degree the offspring of this pressure,” he later wrote.
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In
Federalist
number 6, he argued that “if Shays had not been a
desperate debtor,
it is much to be doubted whether Massachusetts would have been plunged into a civil war.”
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The rural uprising vindicated his sense that the federal government had to distribute the tax burden equitably across the states.

Many Americans wondered whether the fragile confederation could withstand the accumulating strains between rich and poor, creditors and debtors. In February 1787, Hamilton made a heroic stand in the New York Assembly to arrest the country’s deteriorating finances, supporting the 5 percent import tax proposed by Congress. Hamilton was not sanguine about defeating the Clintonians, with their popular catchphrases about states’ rights. Assemblyman Samuel Jones said of Hamilton’s campaign, “He told me during the session that the citizens expected it of him and he thought he ought not to disappoint them, otherwise he did not think he should bring the question again before the Assembly.”
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Hamilton delivered a marathon speech of one hour and twenty minutes that unfurled a grim panorama of America under the confederation. He lashed out at Congress’s reliance upon thirteen states for effectively voluntary payments and noted that some stingy states paid a fraction of their quotas or nothing at all. With the federal treasury empty, no surplus remained to service debt or establish American credit abroad. Domestic creditors might show patience, but foreign creditors would not. “They have power to enforce their demands,” Hamilton warned, “and sooner or later they may be expected to do it.”
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Hamilton thought the warnings of inordinate federal power misplaced: “If these states are not united under a federal government, they will infallibly have wars with each other and their divisions will subject them to all the mischiefs of foreign influence and intrigue.”
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Hamilton’s masterly exposition met with stony stares from the Clintonians, who responded in insulting fashion. They demanded a vote on the issue without bothering to rebut Hamilton’s speech. The federal tax was soundly defeated, as Hamilton had expected. His sustained eloquence left him bent over with exhaustion, though he was quickly buoyed by acclaim from supporters and recuperated sufficiently to attend the theater. “Hamilton went to the play after his famous speech in the House in favor of the impost,” Margaret Livingston told her son, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, “and when he came in he was called the great man. Some say he is talked of for G[overnor].”
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During his Assembly tenure that spring, Hamilton voted on two measures that suggested ambivalent feelings about his childhood. Oddly enough, he supported a bill making it impossible for people divorced due to adultery to remarry. Such a draconian statute in the Danish West Indies had prevented Hamilton’s parents from legitimizing his birth. If this vote suggests some latent hostility toward his mother, another vote betokens tenderness for her. The Assembly was debating a bill that aimed to deter mothers of illegitimate children from killing them at birth. One controversial clause stipulated that if the child died, the unwed mother had to produce a witness who could corroborate that the child had been stillborn or died from natural causes. It bothered Hamilton that the mother would have to admit openly that she had given birth to an illegitimate child. One newspaper account showed Hamilton’s empathy: