Alexander Hamilton (95 page)

Among the casualties claimed by the yellow-fever epidemic was John Todd, Jr., whose widow, Dolley Payne Todd, married James Madison the following year. Another victim was the
National Gazette.
The epidemic had cost the paper money, as had Freneau’s rhapsodies about Citizen Genêt. On October 11, Freneau stepped down as State Department translator and two weeks later announced the suspension of his paper. The following month, Hamilton and Rufus King took up a collection to assist his competitor, John Fenno, and his ailing Federalist paper, the
Gazette of the United States.
Hamilton abused his position as treasury secretary by appealing for help to Thomas Willing, president of the Bank of the United States, who could scarcely rebuff a request from Hamilton. It was a hypocritical lapse for a man who had so often chided Jefferson for exploiting his office to assist Freneau.

It was perhaps fitting that the demise of the
National Gazette
preceded the year’s most satisfying event for Hamilton: Thomas Jefferson’s resignation as secretary of state on December 31, 1793. The Virginian had failed to eject Hamilton from the cabinet and had lost the contest for Washington’s favor. For a long time, he had felt estranged from the cabinet and had labored “under such agitation of mind” as he had never known, he confided to his daughter.
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To Angelica Church, Jefferson groaned about the dreary “scenes of business” in Philadelphia and commented, “Never was any mortal more tired of these than I am.”
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In returning to his beloved Monticello, he was to be “liberated from the hated occupations of politics and sink into the bosom of my family, my farm, and my books.”
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Jefferson proclaimed that he would now be a “stranger” to politics and would limit his statements to a single topic: “the shameless corruption of a portion” of Congress and “their implicit devotion to the treasury.”
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Jefferson projected the image of a contemplative philosopher, yearning for his mountain retreat, but the magnitude of his ambition was sharply debated. It irked John Adams that Republicans considered Jefferson’s resignation to be the sign of a pure, self-effacing man: “Jefferson thinks by this step to get the reputation as an humble, modest, meek man, wholly without ambition or vanity…. But if the prospect opens, the world will see and he will feel that he is as ambitious as Oliver Cromwell.”
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He thought Jefferson’s resignation a shrewd tactical move to position him better for a later run at the presidency. Following Jefferson’s departure from Philadelphia, he wrote to Abigail, “Jefferson went off yesterday and a good riddance of bad ware.”
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Hamilton was no less convinced of Jefferson’s hidden aspirations. In the spring of 1792, he had written, “’Tis evident beyond a question, from every movement, that Mr. Jefferson aims with ardent desire at the presidential chair.”
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When Hamilton’s son John wrote his father’s biography, he left out one story that is contained in his papers. The authenticity of the anecdote cannot be verified, but it jibes with other things Hamilton said. According to this story, soon after Jefferson announced his plans to step down, Washington and Hamilton were alone together when Jefferson passed by the window. Washington expressed regret at his departure, which he attributed to his desire to withdraw from public life and devote himself to literature and agriculture. Staring at Washington with a dubious smirk, Hamilton asked, “Do you believe, Sir, that such is his only motive?” Washington saw that Hamilton was biting his tongue and urged him to speak. Hamilton explained that he had long entertained doubts about Jefferson’s character but, as a colleague, had restrained himself. Now he no longer felt bound by such scruples. Hamilton offered this prediction, as summarized by his son:

From the very outset, Jefferson had been the instigation of all the abuse of the administration and of the President; that he was one of the most ambitious and intriguing men in the community; that retirement was not his motive; that he found himself from the state of affairs with France in a position in which he was compelled to assume a responsibility as to public measures which warred against the designs of his party; that for that cause he retired; that his intention was to wait events, then enter the field and run for the plate; that if future events did not prove the correctness of this view of his character, he [Hamilton] would forfeit all title to a knowledge of mankind.

John C. Hamilton continued that in the late 1790s Washington told Hamilton that “not a day has elapsed since my retirement from public life in which I have not thought of that conversation. Every event has proved the truth of your view of his character. You foretold what has happened with the spirit of prophecy.”
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The story’s likely veracity is bolstered by the fact that Jefferson exchanged no letters with Washington during the last three and a half years of the general’s life.

For Hamilton, the triumph over Jefferson was a bittersweet victory that he scarcely had time to savor. He was besieged by enemies, worried about his health, and felt unappreciated by the public. In a letter to Angelica Church, Hamilton, nearly thirty-nine, struck again a world-weary note: “But how oddly are all things arranged in this sublunary scene. I am just where I do not wish to be. I know how I could be much happier, but circumstances enchain me.”
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In another letter, he said, “Believe me, I am heartily tired of my situation and wait only the opportunity of quitting it with honor and without decisive prejudice to the public affairs.”
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The Republicans had captured majorities in the Congress that convened in December 1793 and that would render a final verdict over Hamilton’s conduct as treasury secretary. He had already told Washington that he would stay in office only as long as it took to clear his name. In mid-December 1793, in a rare political spectacle, Hamilton asked House Speaker Muhlenberg to
resume
the Giles inquiry. While he had been exonerated by the first Giles investigation, the examination had been rushed by the short deadline, and Hamilton wanted to erase any last doubts about his probity. Whatever private melancholy he poured out to Angelica Church, he sounded buoyantly combative when he told Muhlenberg of the probe, “the more comprehensive it is, the more agreeable it will be to me.”
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The Republicans were happy to oblige him. Even before Giles got down to business, Senator Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania submitted resolutions asking for a comprehensive account of Treasury operations. He demanded reams of paper from Hamilton, ranging from a full statement of foreign and domestic debt to an itemized list of revenues. This oppressive investigation was scrapped when the foreign-born Gallatin lost his Senate seat after charges were made that he had not met the nine-year citizenship requirement. Hamilton, meanwhile, chafed at the dilatory tactics of Giles, who did not revive the Treasury inquiry until late February, even as Hamilton made threatening noises that he would resign.

Hamilton was being badgered from all sides. He was still deluged with questionable petitions, often marred by fraud or missing paperwork, from people claiming compensation for services provided during the Revolution. He felt so harassed by accusations of negligence from the Senate that on February 22 he complained to Vice President Adams in an anguished letter. Hamilton alluded to burdensome petitions, the disruptions of the yellow-fever epidemic, and eternal congressional studies of his conduct. As a conscientious public servant, he felt he should be spared petty censure over his handling of the petitions: “I will only add that the consciousness of devoting myself to the public service, to the utmost extent of my faculties and to the injury of my health, is a tranquillizing consolation of which I cannot be deprived by any supposition to the contrary.”
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Nine days later, Hamilton delivered to Congress his decisions on no fewer than thirty complex petitions for wartime compensation.

On February 24, the House assembled a select committee with sweeping powers to investigate the Treasury Department. Reflecting the new composition of Congress, the bulk of the committee was Republican. The members drew up an exhausting schedule to drain any energy Hamilton had left. Until their work was complete, they planned to meet every Tuesday and Thursday evening and Saturday morning. For three months, the committee stuck to this punitive schedule, and Hamilton testified at about half the sessions. Besides providing extensive official information, he had to disclose all of his
private
accounts with the Bank of the United States and the Bank of New York, as Republicans tried to prove that Hamilton had exploited his office to extort credits from the two banks.

The select committee, finding it hard to fix blame on Hamilton, fell back on the one charge that Giles had made stick: that he had exercised too much discretion in shifting government funds between the United States and Europe. When the committee asked Hamilton to cite his authority for transferring money abroad to the Bank of the United States, he cited both “verbal authority” and a letter from the president. The committee, suspecting a bluff, demanded proof, and Hamilton asked Washington for a letter to back up his assertions. Washington obliged Hamilton with a mealymouthed letter that was so bland—“from my general recollection of the course of proceedings, I do not doubt that it was substantially as you have stated it”—as to undercut Hamilton’s position.
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His enemies guffawed. “The letter from the P[resident] is inexpressibly mortifying to his [Hamilton’s] friends,” Madison wrote to Jefferson, “and marks his situation to be precisely what you always described it to be.”
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As delicately as possible, a crestfallen Hamilton advised Washington that his letter might seem a lukewarm endorsement to cynics. He worried that “false and insidious men” would use it to “infuse doubts and distrusts very injurious to me.”
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In fact, Washington
was
beginning to balk at Hamilton’s requests to transfer money in ways not tightly tied to specific legislative acts. Whether he thought the Jeffersonian arguments had merit or merely popular backing, Washington subtly distanced himself from Hamilton, insisting that he segregate funds from different sources. Once again, he proved that he was not a rubber stamp for Hamilton’s policies. At the same time, he hardly wished to repudiate his treasury secretary and promised to help out with Congress. In the end, the select committee found no wrongdoing in the way Hamilton had used European loans for domestic purposes.

In its final report in late May, the Republican-dominated committee could not deliver the comeuppance it had craved. Instead, it confessed that all the charges lodged against Hamilton were completely baseless, as the treasury secretary had insisted all along. And what of the endless Jeffersonian insinuations that Hamilton had used public office to extract private credits? The report concluded that it appears “that the Secretary of the Treasury never has, either directly or indirectly, for himself or any other person, procured any discount or credit, from either of the said banks [Bank of New York and Bank of the United States] upon the basis of any public monies which, at any time, have been deposited therein under his direction.”
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The vindication was so resounding that Hamilton withdrew his long-standing resignation, and his cabinet position grew more impregnable than ever. Nevertheless, it frustrated him that after this exhaustive investigation his opponents still rehashed the stale charges of misconduct. He had learned a lesson about propaganda in politics and mused wearily that “no character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated attacks, however false.” If a charge was made often enough, people assumed in the end “that a person so often accused cannot be entirely innocent.”
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Once again, the best clue to Hamilton’s mood comes from his confiding letters to Angelica Church, who still felt trapped in England by her husband’s position in Parliament. In one letter, Hamilton offered Church a whimsical but rueful meditation on the nature of public office. This previously overlooked letter is contained in the papers of Hamilton’s son James, who tore off and crossed out other portions, making one wonder whether it contained evidence of the long-rumored affair between Hamilton and his sister-in-law. Hamilton observed:

Truly this trade of a statesman is but a sorry thing. It plagues a man more than enough and, when it obliges him to sacrifice his own pleasure, it is very far from fitting him the better to please other people…. I speak from experience. You will ask why I do not quit this disagreeable trade. How can I? What is to become of my fame and glory[?] How will the world go on without me? I am sometimes told very gravely it could not and one ought not, you know, to be very difficult of faith about what is much to our advantage. Besides, you would lose the pleasure of speaking of your brother[-in-law as] “The Chancellor of the Exchequer” if I am to give up the trade…. There is no fear that the minister will spoil the man. I find by experience that the man is every day getting the upper hand of the minister.
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TWENTY-FIVE

SEAS OF BLOOD

A
fter Jefferson left the cabinet, Washington did not conduct a purge of Republicans. On the contrary, the unity-minded president turned to the foremost congressional Republican, James Madison, as his first choice as secretary of state. Only when Madison rejected the job did Washington hand it to Attorney General Edmund Randolph, who was succeeded in
his
post by William Bradford of Philadelphia. This sequence of events did not stop Jefferson and Madison from complaining that Washington was a captive of crafty, manipulative Federalists.