Jefferson and Hamilton (9 page)

While Jefferson’s essay had an air of the meditative and philosophical about it, Hamilton’s tracts had a slash-and-burn quality. Hamilton was young and seeking recognition, as well as writing to rebut a specific Tory assault on Congress. But those factors hardly mattered. Hamilton’s style never changed significantly over the years. There was a no-holds-barred tone to nearly every pamphlet and essay that he penned. In these two endeavors, Hamilton characterized the foes of Congress as “Bad men” with “mad imaginations” who engaged in “sophistry” as they tried to “dupe” and “dazzle” the American public. The “Farmer” only pretended to have America’s interests at heart, Hamilton charged, while in fact, those who defended Parliament and the ministry bore a “violent antipathy … to the natural rights of mankind.” The reality was, he said, “We are threatened with absolute slavery.”

Despite Hamilton’s hostile tone, his argument was more temperate than Jefferson’s. He recognized Parliament’s right to regulate American commerce and conceded that the colonists’ “dependence … on the King” was “just and rational.” His “favourite wish,” he said, was that the colonies and mother country might be reconciled.

Hamilton’s compositions were redundant and overly long. His initial pamphlet was more than twice the length of
A Summary View
, and his two tracts combined were tenfold longer than Jefferson’s succinct essay. Furthermore, Hamilton said nothing about the imperial crisis that was new or original, or very daring. Unlike Jefferson, he was careful to remain within the general parameters of what American protestors had been saying for the past ten years about parliamentary powers and the rights of the colonists. Hamilton was hoping to make a name for himself in New York, one of the most conservative colonies. So conservative was the province, in fact, that its assembly initially refused to ratify the actions taken by the First Continental Congress or elect delegates to the Second Congress, scheduled to meet in May 1775.
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Viewed from that perspective, it was bold of Hamilton to write the pamphlets. And considering that he had not yet completed college, Hamilton’s achievement was little short of amazing.

Moreover, while his constitutional arguments offered nothing new, he had served up something novel in the literature of the American insurgency. He may have been the first in print to maintain that Britain could not win a war
with the colonists. Hamilton not only predicted that France and Spain would assist America, but he also envisioned that by using Fabian tactics America could prevent a British victory. The colonists could “evade a pitched battle” and instead “harass and exhaust the [British] soldiery” until the enemy’s rate of attrition finally led it to make peace.
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War broke out six weeks after the appearance of
The Farmer Refuted
. The ministry of Frederick Lord North responded to the actions of Congress by ordering the use of force to suppress the colonial rebellion. Fighting began on April 19, 1775, when British regulars carried out a mission to destroy a rebel arsenal in Concord, Massachusetts. As word of the bloodletting spread, a war spirit seized America. Volunteer militia units sprouted like weeds in colony after colony. Hamilton and several fellow students joined one in Manhattan that was called the Corsicans. The proud young soldiers wore brown leather caps bearing the inscription “Liberty or Death” and skin-tight green jackets emblazoned with the words “God and Our Right.” Hamilton pulsated with martial fervor, but in May, when an angry mob descended on the campus bent on roughing up the Tory-inclined president of King’s College, the young student-warrior risked life and limb to address the crowd, delaying its advance until his benefactor could escape to safety.

By late June the Second Continental Congress had created an armed force, the Continental army, and appointed George Washington to be its commander. A second great battle had also been fought, this time on the grassy slopes and scarred peak of Bunker Hill, just outside Boston. Nearly one thousand British regulars were casualties in the engagement. Hamilton had been busy too. Having put aside his studies, he attacked new parliamentary legislation in two short essays for the
New-York Gazetteer
.
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Late in the summer, he faced danger for the first time in the war. Together with more than a dozen collegiate militiamen, Hamilton came under fire from a Royal Navy warship as he and his comrades helped move cannon from the exposed Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan. The college boys fired back ineffectually with their heavy artillery.

As the leaves turned in the fall, Hamilton resumed his studies, though he did not ignore the war and colonial rebellion. Before attending class, he took part in the daily military drill, always conducted in the chilly, faint light of sunrise, on the spacious grounds of St. Paul’s Church. His regimen was demanding—much as Jefferson’s had been when he was the same age. Hamilton was soldiering, studying, and wielding his pen on behalf of the insurgency. Writing under the pseudonym “Monitor,” he ground out fourteen essays in fourteen weeks for the
New-York Journal
. He added little to what he
had said in his responses to the “Farmer,” and in fact, portions of these essays were culled intact from his previous pamphlets.

Hamilton focused on the depredations of Parliament and, unlike Jefferson, said little about the behavior of the Crown. Furthermore, whereas Jefferson saw British actions as stemming from deep-rooted maladies within the British system, Hamilton saw a conspiracy at work. A “few artful men behind the curtain” in London had gained traction. Through “bribery and corruption” these miscreants had pushed the implementation of the new colonial policies. Their object had been to “enrich themselves by the plunder and spoils of their dependent colonies.” If this cabal succeeded, he warned, the colonies someday would be governed by “needy courtiers” who relied on standing armies to maintain their rule. With regard to Parliament, however, Hamilton had made one giant step. Twelve months earlier he, like those in the First Congress, had acquiesced in Parliament’s regulation of American trade. Now Hamilton contended that “All Parliamentary power over them [the colonists] has been mere usurpation.” He was keeping step with Congress, which during the first week of December repudiated all ties to Parliament.
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What Hamilton had written before the war had meshed with the sentiments of most Americans. But hostilities had a jarring impact that made much in the “Monitor” series seem dated. Indeed, “Monitor’s” ideas seemed antiquated next to Jefferson’s in
A Summary View
, which had been penned some eighteen months earlier. With considerable justification, Jefferson once claimed that his prewar pamphlet was “the first publication which carried the claim of our rights their whole length”—that is, to the very doorstep of independence.
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Hamilton had not gone nearly that far, and when Thomas Paine’s
Common Sense
hit the streets early in 1776, in the midst of the “Monitor’s” run, the young New Yorker’s views seemed especially archaic.

Paine, a skilled artisan who had recently emigrated from England to Philadelphia, demystified government, which the citizenry had been taught to believe was so complex that it must be left to the educated and social elite. No good reason existed, Paine declared, why the people should not share in the governing process. He additionally demythologized monarchical rule, showing that it was a system that elevated incompetents and rogues to the throne, where they spent their time making wars and giving away titles to well-placed sycophants. For many colonists—perhaps for most—Paine drove a spike through the heart of the yearning for reconciliation. Why, he asked, should the colonists bequeath sovereignty to a “second hand government” three thousand miles away? The imperial government ruled on behalf of England’s social and economic elite, giving the interests of the colonists only secondary consideration. He insisted that imperial commercial laws were harmful to
colonial prosperity. Furthermore, colonial ties made it certain that Americans would forever be dragged into England’s plundering wars. In contrast, American independence offered the promise of peace, prosperity, freedom, and happiness. Depicting the desperate war that was unfolding as a decisive historic event, Paine promised that victory and independence held the promise of the birthday of a new age of liberty for humankind.
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Hamilton had said next to nothing of American independence. Nor had he written a word about revolutionary change. Only in the wake of
Common Sense
did his gaze turn toward the British monarchy. “Monitor” suddenly mentioned the “black catalogue of royal iniquities” that dotted the historical landscape, a sad chronicle of “ambition and avarice … pride, caprice and cruelty.” If George III was part of the “mischiefs” afflicting America, he “must be a despot.” Yet, Hamilton never charged the British monarch with culpability in the alleged plot to oppress the colonists, and after one essay—the twelfth in the series—he said nothing more about royal authority. His closest approach to the topic of independence came in two oblique statements. The war, he said, had brought the imperial crisis to the “last extremity.” He also said that in the past the colonists had submitted to London’s hegemony “for conveniency sake,” implying that Americans must be given greater autonomy, or else. But the overall tone of the series was that America was waging war to reconcile with Great Britain and its monarch, a happy and fortuitous event that would take place once the “Ministry [was] driven from the post they have occupied.”
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Writing such a large number of essays in such a brief time was an impressive feat, all the more so as the author celebrated his twenty-first birthday in the course of his contribution. Nevertheless, circumstances—not to mention the American outlook—were rapidly changing, and Hamilton’s outlook did not always keep pace. His continued insistence that America owed affection and obedience to the king was in line with the thinking of the most conservative colonists, but to a steadily increasing number of his readers it must have seemed misplaced and obsolete.

If Hamilton’s ideas were slow to change, his life was transforming. Hard on the heels of his last “Monitor” essay, King’s College, which was seen by many as a Tory haven, was seized by patriot forces and turned into a military hospital. At about the same time, in mid-March, Hamilton left his militia unit to enter the Continental army. He had been offered a position as an aide to Lord Stirling, a brigadier general, but Hamilton wanted no part of a desk job. He wanted action, acclaim, glory, and rapid advancement, and to achieve that he set about reading books on gunnery and received some instruction from a former “British bombardier” who lived in Manhattan. Ultimately,
through the influence of well-placed New Yorkers, including John Jay and Alexander McDougall (a longtime Sons of Liberty activist who had married well and prospered), Hamilton accepted a commission as a captain and became the commander of an artillery company raised by the revolutionary government of New York. His decision to soldier was hardly surprising as, ever since he was a boy, he had longed for a war to make his name. At last, he had his war and he was committed to the cause. He was prepared, he said, to “seal with my blood the sentiments defended by my pen.”
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Passionate young Captain Hamilton was ready to serve, and to shine and win laurels.

While Hamilton donned a uniform, Jefferson worked in the House of Burgesses to get Virginia’s militia mobilized, as Congress had requested.
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He also drafted the legislature’s response to a so-called peace plan offered by the British prime minister. Lord North’s Conciliatory Proposal was a sham, and Jefferson treated it as such. Mindful that many legislators prayed for the empire’s salvation, he tempered his composition, seeking to keep it in sync with the declarations of the Continental Congress. But Jefferson did assert that Virginia wished “a free trade with all the world,” which was tantamount to demanding an end to Great Britain’s century-old imperial trade regulations.
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When Jefferson learned in May 1775 of the bloody fighting in Massachusetts, he privately remarked that the advent of war “has cut off our last hopes of reconciliation,” a more radical view than Hamilton would articulate in his
New-York Journal
essays nine months later.
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One only had to read between the lines of
A Summary View
to see that Jefferson was ready for American independence in 1774, and his trenchant view was confirmed once Great Britain resorted to force.

Three weeks after war erupted, the Second Continental Congress convened. A couple of weeks later the Virginia assembly added Jefferson, now in his sixth year in the House of Burgesses, to the colony’s delegation in Congress. Most who served in Congress were unknown to their colleagues when they arrived in Philadelphia. There were exceptions, of course, including Washington, Franklin, Dickinson, and Samuel Adams. Jefferson was now another whose reputation preceded him.

His arrival on June 20, 1775, was a bit conspicuous. He clattered along Philadelphia’s cobbled streets in a handsome phaeton, accompanied by two slaves dressed in livery, four horses, and a guide he had hired in Wilmington. A Rhode Island congressman immediately wrote home that “the famous Mr. Jefferson” had entered Congress. Jefferson’s fame, such as it was, was due to
A Summary View
, which had probably been read by most delegates. John Adams had perused it and called it a “very handsome public Paper” penned
by “a fine Writer.” Later, he recollected that Jefferson entered Congress with a “reputation for literature” and “a happy talent of composition.”
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