Jefferson and Hamilton (27 page)

Three weeks after Chastellux departed, Martha gave birth for the seventh time. The baby was named Lucy Elizabeth, the same name that had been bestowed on the little girl who had died thirteen months before—a naming practice not uncommon in eighteenth-century America. If Martha’s pregnancy had been planned, it was a terribly unwise decision. She had experienced difficulties
with earlier pregnancies, and she does not appear to have been in robust health since the spring of 1780. She had not only curtailed her management of household operations but also, in the summer of 1780, had begged off participating in a drive to raise and make clothing for soldiers. Little is known of Martha’s health after the birth of the first Lucy Elizabeth, but the six months that followed had been harrowing: On three occasions she and her daughters had been compelled to flee approaching enemy armies. Above all else, perhaps, Martha had been pregnant about half the time that she had been married to Jefferson, rarely experiencing more than eight months between the birth of one child and the conception of the next. All knew that childbirth was fraught with risks, and no one knew this better than Martha, whose own mother had perished as a result of childbirth.

Only Thomas and Martha Jefferson knew what went into the decision to have Lucy Elizabeth. Two weeks after her birth on May 2, Jefferson said that his wife had been “dangerously ill” since the child’s arrival. Martha lived until September 6, and she appears to have remained bedfast the entire time. According to one of their daughters, Jefferson supposedly stayed with her continuously and nursed her with “tenderness.” By July, if not earlier, Martha’s recovery was thought unlikely, and weeks before the end she seems to have known that she faced death. She was only thirty-three, and she had been Jefferson’s wife for eleven years. Jefferson himself said that he was a “state of dreadful suspense” for weeks. Joined by his widowed sister, a sister-in-law, and six household slaves, Jefferson kept vigil through the last moments of what his daughter called the “closing scene.”

A quarter century later, Jefferson’s overseer claimed to have been told by several who were present that toward the end, Martha expressed the wish that her husband would never remarry, and that Jefferson pledged that he would not. The story seems implausible, if for no other reason than that Martha herself had remarried following the demise of her first husband. But given the emotion-laden situation, and the possibility that pain or pain medication might have dulled Martha’s lucidity, it cannot be ruled out.

Just before Martha died—what Jefferson called “the catastrophe”—he “was led from the room almost in a state of insensibility.” With “great difficulty,” his sister “got him into his library where he fainted and remained so long insensible that they feared he never would survive.” In speaking of his “long fainting fit,” his daughter mentioned the “violence of his emotion,” and Edmund Randolph, a relative and friend who visited him a few days later, said that Jefferson’s “grief … [was] so violent” that he believed the “circulating report of his swooning away whenever he sees his children.” His despair was so enveloping that Jefferson did not leave his room for three weeks, and he
“walked almost incessantly night and day only lying down occasionally when … completely exhausted.” After a month, he spent nearly all day every day riding about his estate, past cultivated fields and through thick forests, often seeing and talking to no one, though each day he circled back by the mansion at some point and gathered up Martha, his ten-year-old daughter, who accompanied him on horseback for a few miles. She later recollected these “melancholy rambles” as a time when she was “a solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief” by her father.
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Jefferson had inscribed on Martha’s tombstone that she had been “torn from him by death.” His bereavement was so protracted that some feared he was suicidal, and for a time he may have been. A month after his wife’s death, he wrote that he was experiencing a “miserable kind of existence … too burdensome to bear.” That he had suicidal thoughts seems confirmed by his confession that he would take his own life were it not for “the infidelity of deserting” his children. Desolated by his loss, Jefferson remained for weeks in a such a state of black depression that he was “absolutely unable” to tend to any business. Marriage and family had been crucial for Jefferson, liberating him from the reclusive and solitary existence that he had endured as a young adult. Now, he said, all “comfort and happiness” had been taken from him. He would not end his life, but his life appeared to be at an end.
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While Jefferson grieved, Hamilton conspired. Like Jefferson, Hamilton had gone home in 1781, and like his counterpart in Virginia, he proclaimed that he had lost “all taste for the pursuits of ambition,” adding: “I sigh for nothing but the company of my wife and my baby.”
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Otherwise, Hamilton’s first objective was to settle on a means of supporting his family. He had a background in business, but no appetite for it. Nor was practicing medicine, a pursuit he had considered while a college student, any longer appealing. Hamilton turned to the law. A good legal practice could support a comfortable lifestyle and, should his passion for distinction and power return, a legal career would do the most to facilitate his aspirations. After a month at home, he took up the study of the law, joking that he was “studying the art of fleecing my neighbors.” Hamilton had completed his college preparatory studies and learned economics on his own. Now, he eschewed the common practice of apprenticing himself to a licensed lawyer and opted for solitary study. His friend James Duane made available his law library, and John Lansing, who had been General Schuyler’s military secretary, agreed to help as need be.
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Hamilton completed his studies with extraordinary speed. Within six months he was certified to prepare cases. After another ninety days, he was authorized to argue in court.

While still studying, Hamilton also accepted Superintendent Morris’s offer to become collector of continental taxes for New York, a post that required he lobby the state legislature to streamline the collection process. Both experiences only deepened his contempt for the Articles of Confederation, which he had blasted in his “Continentalist” essays during the summer before Yorktown. He saw abundant evidence that the state was snatching funds that should have gone into the national treasury. Indeed, of the eight million dollars Congress requested from the states in 1782, it received only four hundred thousand. Hamilton additionally came away convinced that state legislatures were repositories of “fickleness and folly.” Unable to see beyond local interests, the state legislators lacked all sense of national well-being. Hamilton rushed out two more installments of his “Continentalist,” though he added little to what he had advocated a year earlier. He urged that Congress be given the power of taxation, and he called for an impost of foreign imports, land and poll taxes, taxation of certain commodities in interstate commerce, and a national bank. America would be happy, he declared, only if it could shake loose of the hegemony of “petty states” and create a truly “great Federal Republic.” Then, it would be “tranquil and prosperous at home, respectable abroad.”
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Hamilton’s vision was distinctly different from that of Jefferson. The Virginian’s emphasis had been on the preservation and expansion of the individual’s freedom and independence. Hamilton emphasized the well-being and strength of the nation. Jefferson had become a revolutionary largely in the hope of securing, enlarging, and sustaining personal liberties. Hamilton’s hard experience in the Revolutionary War led him to believe that liberty could never exist unless the nation was strong and secure. From Valley Forge onward, Hamilton had grown steadily more convinced that the nation’s strength required the consolidation of supreme power at the national level.

About a month before Martha Jefferson died, the New York assembly, which had just adopted resolutions urging the revision of the Articles of Confederation to strengthen the powers of the national government, added Hamilton to its five-member congressional delegation in Philadelphia. His selection was hardly a surprise. Both Hamilton and his father-in-law, General Schuyler, had spoken openly in favor of retiring the debt owed to public creditors, those owed money by the state and national governments for indebtedness incurred through sustaining the cause during the Revolutionary War. Committed to providing “compensation to the sufferers,” Hamilton urged trying the “only expedient … still unattempted”—vesting the national government with the capability of raising revenue. He was a public advocate of what he termed the “luminous” policies of Superintendent Morris, including funding the national
debt as a means of establishing an enduring stream of revenue for the national government. Despite his cynical view of Congress, Hamilton was surprisingly optimistic. “I am going to throw away a few months more in public life and then I retire a simple citizen” and family man, he remarked, indicating a belief that the campaign to strengthen the national government would not be a protracted undertaking.
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The movement to endow Congress with authority to raise revenue had a long pedigree. During 1780 not only had some Continental army officers signed a manifesto urging an increase in congressional powers, but the Hartford Convention, composed of delegates from New England and New York, had advocated an impost—a federal tax on imports. The following year, while Hamilton penned his initial essays on economic matters, Congress sent to the states for ratification an amendment that would vest it with authority to enact an impost. Just as Hamilton arrived in Philadelphia, the amendment failed. Rhode Island’s concurrence had always been doubtful, but even before it could act, Virginia rescinded its earlier affirmation. Congress was left with no means of raising revenue other than to requisition money from the states, a system that had always been ineffectual. To make matters worse, France, which had sustained the United States with a series of loans during the past several years, indicated that no further loans would be forthcoming.

Hamilton had not come to Congress to be passive. Never one to take a back seat, he emerged as a leader with remarkable speed, soon joining young James Madison to revive the campaign for an impost. Only four years older than Hamilton, Madison came from a privileged background in Virginia. A sickly youth, he had led a troubled and undirected life until the American Revolution inspired him to enter politics. Within five years he had risen from a local Committee of Safety to a seat in Congress, which he entered eighteen months before the siege at Yorktown. By the time Hamilton arrived in Philadelphia, Madison had become one of the leaders in Congress. Like Hamilton, he was bright, diligent, persistent, energetic, and above all, industrious. Temperamentally, however, the two were as dissimilar as night and day. Hamilton was outgoing; Madison reserved. Hamilton dressed in bright, colorful clothing; Madison habitually wore black. One foreign observer characterized Hamilton as “decided” and Madison as “meditative.” Madison thought Hamilton “rigid” and inflexible.
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In 1782 both men favored a stronger national government. That had not always been the case for Madison. Like most Virginians, he had initially feared a powerful centralized government as much as he had apprehended London’s absolute dominion over the colonies, but the series of military disasters in the southern theater—and the dangers they posed for the Old
Dominion—converted him into a supporter of a robust United States government. Although the war was nearly over after Yorktown, Madison remained committed to increasing federal authority.

Soon after Hamilton reached Philadelphia, Madison declared in a speech that to save “national independence” and the Union, Congress must have the means of securing revenue. Hamilton could not have put it better, and at this juncture he and Madison supported a federal impost and funded debt. Still, differences existed. Madison was not keen on a national bank, and he probably never agreed with the wide range of national taxes that Hamilton favored.
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The starting point for the collaborators was to launch a new campaign to secure an impost amendment. Whether or not Madison knew it—and he probably did—Hamilton wanted more, for the revenue from the impost would simply cover the interest on the foreign debt. The impost was “a Tub for the whale,” was how Superintendent Morris put it, meaning that a tax on imports would raise some revenue, but not enough to help the public creditors.
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Yet it was a first step, and some among the backers of an impost conspired to find the means to win its approval. The conspirators naturally cloaked their activities in nearly impenetrable secrecy, leaving both contemporaries and historians to guess at the dark corners of the intrigue. But two things appear certain: Hamilton was among the conspirators, and Madison was not. In addition, the plot came together when the schemers realized that they might use disaffection within the corps of officers in the Continental army to secure their ends.

The army’s officers had real grievances, and for months they had been discussing remedies among themselves. Despite having “borne all that men can bear,” as they would put it, the officers had not been paid for months. They also feared they would never receive their promised pensions. During the Valley Forge winter, Congress had promised the officers half-pay pensions for seven years. Two years later, pressured both by threats of mass resignations by the officers and Washington’s warnings that the “temper of the Army … requires great caution,” Congress extended the half-pay pensions for life. Late in 1782, just prior to the failure of the impost amendment, the officers decided to petition Congress for their pay and pensions. General Henry Knox drafted their petition, which was carried to Philadelphia in January by a three-member delegation of officers.