Jefferson and Hamilton

CHAPTER II

HAMILTON: A PORTRAIT

THE genius for whom the Nation had been waiting, who walked briskly and with a martial air[92] into the Treasury, and sat down at the almost effeminate mahogany desk with the women’s faces carved upon the legs, to bring order out of chaos, looked the leader. Not that he was of commanding stature, for he was but five feet seven in height, with a figure of almost boyish slimness. It was rather in his soldierly erectness and the dignity of his bearing that he impressed. If his carriage suggested the camp, the meticulous care of his dress hinted of the court, for he was something of an elegant in his attire. We have one striking picture of him in a blue coat with bright buttons, the skirts unusually long, with a white waistcoat, black silk small-clothes, white silk stockings;[93] another in fine lace ruffles.[94] It is quite impossible to think of him as unfit for an instant summons to a court levee or a ladies’ drawing-room, albeit Wolcott, who saw him first in his office, thought him ‘a very amiable plain man.’[95] It was an age of frills and fancies among the men of the aristocracy and his very conservatism would have dissuaded him from the slightest departure from the conventions.

It was his head and features that denoted the commander. His well-shaped, massive, and symmetrical head, with its reddish fair hair turned back from his forehead, powdered and collected in a queue behind, was not so likely to attract attention as his pronounced features. These were unique in that rarest of all combinations of beauty and strength. He was handsome enough to be attractive to women, with his fair complexion and almost rosy cheeks, his well-moulded lips, and dark, almost violet, deep-set eyes that could smile as sweetly and seductively as any gallant’s.

And yet these lips could be firm and stern, and the soft, mirthful eyes could freeze and flash. If women were to observe the softer nature, the politicians were to note the man of relentless will disclosed in the firm, strong jaw. Graceful and debonair, elegant and courtly, seductive and ingratiating, playful or impassioned, he could have fitted into the picture at the Versailles of Louis XV, or at the dinner table at Holland House. No one born in the atmosphere of courts could have looked the part more perfectly.

And yet, such was his origin that the envious Adams could sneer at him as ‘the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar,’[96] and it was not without reason that Gouverneur Morris, meditating his funeral oration, and his ‘illegitimate birth,’ contrived a mode ‘to pass over this handsomely.’[97] Even the sympathetic researches of Mrs. Atherton have failed to lift the mystery of his origin and family. All we know is that he was born of an irregular relation, without the intervention of the clergy,[98] between an unprosperous Scotch merchant of the West Indies and a brilliant and beautiful daughter of the French Huguenots. Even his parentage by the man named Hamilton was doubted, on circumstantial evidence, by so ardent a friend as Pickering, who thought he had found the father in a physician.[99] Whoever the father—and the Pickering Papers are not convincing—there is no doubt that Hamilton inherited his genius from his brilliant, passionate, high-strung mother.

Nor does the mystery end with his birth. Pickering was half persuaded that the mother lived into the manhood of her son, but the church records at Saint Kitts bear out the claims of the family that she died in 1768. It is not easy to account for the rather morbid relations later between Hamilton and his father and brother. Both appear to have been a worthless sort. For years Hamilton was ignorant of his father’s whereabouts, which does not appear to have bothered him much.[100] Later there was some correspondence looking to a possible reunion in America, out of which nothing came.[101] At intervals money passed from the great man in America to the indigent old man in the West Indies,[102] but at no time does it appear that Hamilton had any thought of visiting his father in the isle of his childhood. It was a long cry from the squalid life in the West Indies to Mrs. Bingham’s drawing-room, and the genius turned his back upon the past.

II

There is nothing so inexplicable in this amazing man as the precocity of his genius. There is a suggestion of it in the younger Pitt, but he had sat from infancy at the feet of Chatham. To the easy-going natives of his natal isle this passionate, fiery-tempered, supersensitive boy, dreaming of power, must have seemed an exotic. As a mere child he appeared to sense that his field of conquest lay across the sea. He was planning a career while his companions were absorbed in childish games. His early range of knowledge and reading was remarkable. In his passion for literature he was unconsciously moulding one of the weapons for his successful assault on fame; through the pages of Plutarch he was lifting himself above the drab slothful surroundings to the companionship of the great.

Sometimes fate was serving his destiny when he felt himself a captive beating against his cage. Thus, in the counting-room at Santa Cruz he was mastering business methods and absorbing the commercial spirit on which he was later to predicate his philosophy of government.[103] The business letters he wrote were preparations for the framing of his ‘Report on the Public Credit.’ Even then it was a peculiarity of his genius that he could write on business matters without clipping the wings of his fancy. He seemed born with a mastery of words, a rare gift of expression. When a hurricane swept the islands the description he wrote for a paper became the talk of the West Indies. Only a little while before he was rebelling against the ‘groveling ambition of a clerk,’ and passionately writing that he ‘would willingly risk his life but not his character to elevate his station.’ These were the aspirings of a boy not yet thirteen. ‘I shall conclude by saying, I wish there was a war.’ Here we have a vivid light upon his character.[104]

The description of the hurricane made his fortune. Dreaming of rising by the sword, it was his pen that rallied friends who raised the money to send him to America for an education. Through all his days he was to aspire to glory through the sword, little knowing that he was winning immortality with his pen.

The Little Corsican touching the soil of France, the little West Indian landing in America—there is a striking analogy: both dreaming of martial glory in the land of strangers; both obsessed with a morbid ambition sustained by the rarest powers of application.

The records of the years preceding the Revolution are but vague, though we get glimpses of the genius forging his weapons in the boy at the grammar school at Elizabethtown poring over books till midnight, to rise at dawn to continue his studies in the quiet of a near-by cemetery; practicing prose composition; writing an elegy on the death of a lady; composing the prologue and the epilogue of a play,[105] and, at Kings College (Columbia), amazing his companions by the energy of his mind, and puzzling pedestrians by talking to himself as he walked for hours each day under the great trees of Batteau (Dey) Street.[106] Here, too, an occasional display of the eloquence of maturity, enriched by the glow of genius, set him apart.

Then came the Revolution. ‘I wish there was a war!’ cried the boy of thirteen. And war came to find the lad of nineteen as eager to seize its opportunities as was the Corsican youth when ordered to clear the streets of Paris.

III

The war was to prove his genius, not as a soldier, but as a writer and constructive thinker on governmental matters. He was a natural journalist and pamphleteer—one of the fathers of the American editorial. His perspicacity, penetration, powers of condensation, and clarity of expression were those of a premier editorial writer. These same qualities made him a pamphleteer without a peer. That he would have shone with equal luster in the reportorial room of a modern paper is shown in his description of the hurricane, and in his letter to Laurens picturing vividly the closing hours of Major André.[107] From the moment he created a sensation, with ‘A Farmer Refuted,’ in his eighteenth year, until, in the closing months of his life, he was meeting Coleman surreptitiously in the night to dictate vigorous editorials for the New York ‘Evening Post’ he had established,[108] he recognized his power. No man ever complained more bitterly of the attacks of the press; none ever used the press more liberally and relentlessly to attack.

In ‘A Farmer Refuted,’ the maturity of the thought, the severity of the reasoning, the vigor of the onslaught, the familiarity with history and governmental processes displayed, denoted the hand of one seasoned in controversy. The sprightliness, wit, humor, sarcasm, suggested more than talent. The evident joy in the combat, with the air of assurance, was that of the fighter unafraid. These are the qualities that were to run through all of Hamilton’s literary work. Nowhere in the literature of invective is there anything more vitriolic than the attack on a war speculator and profiteer, under the signature of ‘Publius.’[109] This tendency to bitter invective will appear, as we proceed, in Hamilton’s attacks on Jefferson and Adams.

But usually he appealed to reason, and then he was at his best. Thus, in ‘The Continentalist,’ urging a more perfect union and a more potent government, and in his letter to James Duer,[110] we are impressed with the writer’s intimate knowledge of conditions, his constructive instinct, his vision.[111] And thus, especially do these appear in ‘The Federalist’—one of the most brilliant contributions to the literature of political science in the world’s history. It will be impossible to comprehend the genius of Hamilton, his domination of his party, and his power, despite his unpopularity with the masses, without a foreknowledge of his force with the pen. It was his scepter and his sword.

IV

His power as an orator was unsurpassed in any assembly that called it forth, but with very few exceptions he did not appear before the multitude. He swayed the leaders and won them to his leadership. There was little of fancy in his speeches, scarcely any appeal to the emotions, but he spoke with enthusiasm and an intensity of conviction. Force, clearness, fire—‘logic on fire’—and a rapid fusillade of impressively directed facts—with these he usually swept all before him. The comparatively few speeches which have come down to us fail to explain his power. The stories of audiences moved to tears are scarcely in keeping with the absence of the slightest attempts at pathos or appeals to the emotions. Kent, who heard him in court, recalled, long after Hamilton was dead, ‘the clear, elegant and fluent style, and commanding manner.’[112] Physically, he was far from imposing, but it is easy to imagine the virility of his manner, the flash of his conqueror’s eye. In the New York Convention called to pass on the Constitution, it was the force and persuasiveness of his arguments that converted a hostile majority. Later Congress was to refuse him permission to present personally his reports on the ground that he might unduly sway its judgment; and Jefferson was to resent his interminable and passionate ‘harangues’ in the Cabinet room. But these exhibitions of his eloquence advanced his political career by impressing the leaders with the brilliancy of his intellect.

V

It is significant that, while he was not vain of his power as a writer and orator, he lived and died firmly convinced of his genius as a soldier. In the earliest of his letters we have his longing for a war. His son and biographer was impressed with the fact that, ‘while arms seemed to be his predominant passion, the world was at peace.’[113] He never faced the prospect of a war without seeing an opportunity for distinction. At a time when he abhorred the French Revolution, and all associated with it, he wrote of Napoleon as ‘that unequalled conqueror, from whom it is painful to detract.’[114]

Was he a military genius? We have nothing on which to base a judgment. In the Revolution we see him attracting the attention of Washington by his military alertness on the heights of Harlem. At Monmouth we see his horse shot under him as he dashes into the fray with a recklessness that looked to the commander like a courting of death. Throughout his services in the military household of Washington, where he became all but indispensable in a secretarial capacity and in diplomacy, he chafed under the conviction that his place was in a position of command. One of his friends declared that ‘the pen of our army was held by Hamilton; and for dignity of manner, pith of matter, and elegance of style, General Washington’s letters are unrivaled in military annals,’ but the youthful Hamilton felt that he should have been the army’s sword.[115] The vision of the renown of the military conqueror was ever before him. The war was an opportunity for glory, and he was missing it. ‘I explained to you candidly my feelings in respect to military reputation,’ he wrote Washington when seeking a separate command, ‘and how much it was my object to act a conspicuous part in some enterprise that might perhaps raise my character as a soldier above mediocrity.’[116] At Yorktown he took desperate chances in an effort for renown.[117] We shall find him leaving the Treasury to command soldiers sent to put down the western insurrection, with no possible occasion for it beyond his preference for the saddle and the sword. And when war with France loomed large, we shall find him resorting to importunity and intrigue to get the command over the protest of the President.

Was Hamilton a Napoleon? He thought himself of the race of military masters. He had the courage, the coolness under fire, and the audacity, but nothing that he did disclosed more genius than was shown by Aaron Burr. Had the chance come, he might have justified his own high pretensions as a military genius—but it did not come. He died with his boyhood ambition to command great armies unrealized—and undimmed.[118]

VI

His association of a strong military establishment with a strong and stable government was due in large measure to his temperament. He was essentially an aristocrat. From the moment of his arrival in America, he cultivated only the élite. His most partisan biographer has painted his portrait in a sentence—‘His sympathies were always aristocratic, and he was born with a reverence for tradition.’[119] There is nothing more contradictory in his career than the lowliness of his origin and his inherent passion for the lofty. This charity student moved in mansions as to the manor born. He had lived on terms of comparative intimacy with the aristocratic Washington of the camp, with Lafayette who brought something of the flavor of Old World aristocracy, and he married into one of the proudest of the manorial families, but his love of grandeur was inherent. He luxuriated in elegant society and fine houses, loved fine laces as an adornment, and, without having ever seen the interior of a gallery, at least affected a partiality for the fine arts, collecting such prints as his purse permitted, painting some himself, and advising Mrs. Washington in the purchase of paintings.[120]

His ideal of government was the rule of ‘gentlemen’—the domination of aristocrats; on the theory that these, with a certain prestige to maintain, were more jealous of their honor and above the vulgar strivings for mere place.[121] Thus it was impossible for him to conceive of a strong and capable government over which the aristocracy did not have sway.[122] Long before the Constitutional Convention we find him writing Morris on financial matters, setting forth the importance of creating an alliance between government and men of wealth.[123] One of his most enthusiastic panegyrists has illustrated his ideal: ‘The nearest approach to it is the popular conception of the empire of Japan—a mass of intelligent humanity, reckless of their lives, yet filled with the joy of life, eager for distinction, hungry for success, alert, practical, and merry; but at the same time subordinate, humbly and piously subordinate, to a pure abstraction.’[124] But this abstraction had to be aristocracy—never democracy; for he believed that democracy could only lead to anarchy.[125] Temperamentally hostile to democracy in the beginning, maintaining that attitude to the end, he never appreciated and always despised public opinion, and in 1794 he frankly confessed to Washington that he ‘long since learned to hold public opinion of no value.’[126] This distrust of the people, contempt for democracy, and reliance on strong government supported by wealth, and, if need be, sustained by standing armies, were carried by him into the Constitutional Convention and there proclaimed with all the tremendous force of his personality.

VII

Unless we divest ourselves of the Hamiltonian myths in reference to the Constitution, an intelligent comprehension of his political character will be impossible. We must rid ourselves of the fallacious notion that he was satisfied with the Constitution or believed it adequate. No one contributed more mightily to making the Constitutional Convention possible. In the preliminary convention at Annapolis, no one did more to crystallize sentiment for it, and it was his persuasive pen that wrote the history-making address there determined upon. About his dining-table in New York he did yeoman service in coaxing skeptical and reluctant members of Congress to call a convention. There, under a simulation of gayety, his eloquence and wit and banter made converts of the most stubborn—a service of immeasurable value.[127]

But in the Convention itself he played no such part as is popularly ascribed to him. After the presentation of his own plan in the early stages, he played an inconspicuous part, and much of the time he was not only absent from the Convention, but out of the State. This was not because of indifference to the event, but to a realization that he could accomplish nothing for his plan.[128]

This plan was a direct contradiction of that which was adopted. There is nothing conjectural about that fact—the records are indisputable. We have the plan, the brilliant five-hour oration in its behalf, the brief from which he spoke. These have come down to us, not from his enemies, but from his partial biographers, his son the editor of his ‘Works,’ and the report of Madison on the authenticity of which he himself passed. This plan provided for the election of a President for life; for Senators for life or during good behavior, and by electors with a property qualification; and for the crushing of the sovereignty of States through the appointment by the President of Governors with a life tenure and the power to veto any act of the State legislatures, though passed unanimously. Not only was the President enabled under this plan to negative any law enacted, but he had the discretionary power to enforce or ignore any law existing.[129] Though his President, serving for life, was not called a king, he was to be armed with more arbitrary power than was possessed by the King of England. His English eulogist does not overstate when he says that ‘what he had in mind was the British Constitution as George III had tried hard to make it,’ and failed because the English people would not tolerate it.[130] This interpretation of Hamilton’s purpose is reënforced by another of his most brilliant disciples who asserts that ‘Hamilton’s governor [President] would have been not dissimilar to Louis XIV and could have said with him, “L’état c’est moi.” ... Thinly veiled, his plan[131] contemplated an elective king with greater powers than those of George III, an imitation House of Lords, and a popular House of Commons with a limited tenure.’[132] Even so this plan confessedly fell far short of his conception of an ideal government. In the brief for his speech[133] we are left in no doubt as to his partiality for a monarchy, in which the aristocracy should have a special power. ‘The monarch ... ought to be hereditary, and to have so much power that it would not be his interest to risk much to acquire more.’ As for the aristocracy, ‘they should be so circumstanced that they can have no interest in a change.’[134] We should be ‘rescued from the democracy.’[135] As to the republican form of government—‘Republics are liable to corruption and intrigue,’[136] and, since ‘a republican government does not admit of a vigorous execution, it is therefore bad.’[137]

Later, in one of his few discussions, he said that ‘those who mean to form a solid republican government ought to proceed to the confines of another government.’[138] His republic, and in his great speech he had conceded that no other form would be accepted by the people, ‘was to be an aristocratic as distinguished from a democratic republic, and the power of the separate States was to be effectually crippled.’[139] In one of his brief Convention talks he said of the States that ‘as States he thought they should be abolished.’[140] Even after the Constitution had been adopted, he believed that one of the objects of administration should be ‘to acquire for the federal government more consistency than the Constitution seems to promise for so great a country,’ to the end that it ‘may triumph altogether over the state governments and reduce them to an utter subordination, dividing the large States into simpler districts.’[141] Such were the ideas urged by Hamilton in the forceful five-hour speech which Gouverneur Morris thought the most brilliant intellectual exhibition he had ever witnessed. After this exhaustive exposition, he took but little part. Toward the close he explained his comparative silence: ‘He had been restrained from entering into the discussions by his dislike of the scheme of government in general.’[142] This distaste did not diminish as the Convention closed its labors, and he accepted the Constitution in the end ‘as better than nothing.’[143] His motive for joining in recommending it to the people is conclusively shown in his last Convention utterance: ‘No man’s ideas are more remote from the plan than my own are known to be; but is it possible to deliberate between anarchy and convulsion on one side, and the chance of good to be expected from the plan on the other?’[144]

Nor did he ever lose faith in his own plan, or gain confidence in the Constitution which was adopted.[145] Just before retiring from the Cabinet he avowed himself a monarchist who had ‘no objections to a trial being made of this thing of a republic.’[146] Two years before his death he wrote bitterly to Morris of his support of a Constitution in which he had never had faith ‘from the beginning,’ in which he described it as ‘a frail and worthless fabric.’[147] And the night of his death, when his bosom friend and confidant was meditating the funeral oration he was to deliver on the steps of Trinity Church, he wrote in his diary, ‘He was in principle opposed to republican and attached to monarchical government, but then his opinions were generally known and have been long and loudly proclaimed. His share in the forming of our Constitution must be mentioned, and his unfavorable opinion cannot therefore be concealed.’[148]

If, however, he was a tremendous factor in making any Constitutional Convention possible, he was to be even more essential in securing the ratification of the document he disliked—and it is here that he rises to the pinnacle of patriotic statesmanship, and earns the eternal gratitude of the Republic. When on that summer day, on a packet floating lazily down the Hudson, he subordinated his personal preferences to the public good, and sat down to the writing of the first number of ‘The Federalist,’ he reached the very acme of his greatness. Had he done nothing else, his fame would have been as eternal as the Nation he helped to make. Thus does he take his rightful place among the greatest nation-builders of all time.

VIII

The qualities of strength and weakness accounting for the successes and failures of his political leadership are easily found in an analysis of his character. As is true of most genius, his was three fourths hard work. From his earliest boyhood he had learned the value of system. Nothing was permitted to disturb the programme by which he regulated his days and nights. We may surmise that he was his own most relentless taskmaster from the rules he wrote for the guidance of his favorite son. This almost monastic schedule denotes the system by which he governed his own life.[149] He never completed his education, and the exactions of politics and his profession never made him a stranger to his library. Here, surrounded by his family, he ministered to an insatiable mind. Never tiring of the classics, he kept pace with the printing-press, and Mrs. Church rummaged about the book-stalls of London to supply him with all the new worth-while publications. Thus the ‘Wealth of Nations’ was in his hands as soon after its appearance as a boat could cross the sea.[150] His manner of study was intensive, absorbing, and he fairly lashed his mind and memory to their allotted tasks. Walking the floor while reading and studying, it was a comment of his friends that with equal exertion he could have walked from one end of the country to the other.[151]

Quite as remarkable as the intensity of his application was his abnormal capacity for sustained exertion. He thought nothing of sitting over a paper ‘until the dawn dimmed his candles.’[152] Talleyrand’s comment on finding lights in his office in the early morning is famous. It was not unusual for him to ponder a problem long and earnestly until he had thought it through, then to retire to sleep regardless of the hour of the night, and after a while to arise, refresh himself with a cup of strong coffee, seat himself at his table, and work on with great rapidity for six, seven, or eight hours without rest. The resulting product of his pen was so perfect, we are assured, such was his felicity of expression, that it seldom required revision.[153]

This tenacity was one of the factors in his leadership. He was never a fair-weather fighter. Opposition only whetted his appetite for battle. Nor was he easily discouraged. Explaining to a friend who wished to carry the news to New York of the situation in the Poughkeepsie Convention, that the members stood two to one against the ratification of the Constitution, he concluded with grim emphasis: ‘Tell them the Convention shall never rise until the Constitution is adopted.’[154]

Along with this tenacity, he had an illimitable moral courage which made it easy for him to fight for a cause without counting the cost. The real Hamilton is seen in his defense of the persecuted Tories at the close of the Revolution; in his fighting his way through a mob eager for the blood of the Tory president of Columbia College to hold it at bay with his indignant eloquence; in his letter to Jay against the destruction of the notorious Rivington Press by a mob.[155] This reverence for law and the constituted authority was the mainspring of his political character, and he always had the moral courage to stand for both when cowardice would have recommended compromise.

To these qualities must be added another which gave character to his leadership—he was personally honest. Called to a station where he might easily have enriched himself, as did many of his friends, he retired to private life poorer than when he entered the public service. Small wonder that Talleyrand was astounded at such disinterestedness and restraint. There was no affectation in his letter lamenting his inability to succor some immigrants from France. ‘I wish I was a Crœsus; I might then afford solid consolation to these children of adversity, and how delightful it would be to do so. But now, sympathy, kind words, and occasionally a dinner are all that I can contribute.’ And at the time he wrote great fortunes had been built on the financial system he had created. So impeccable was he in this regard that his great political protagonist, writing an estimate of his character in the calm of his closet, recorded him as ‘disinterested, honest and honorable in all private transactions.’[156] Profound as a thinker, exhaustive as a student, moving in eloquence, powerful with the pen, logical in his reasoning, constructive in his methods, tenacious in the advancement of his plans, possessed of the courage of his convictions, personally honest in public and private action, he possessed qualities of leadership that drew high-minded men about, and to, him. But he unhappily had the weakness of his strength that was to operate disastrously upon his political fortunes. It is impossible to understand his ultimate failure as a leader without a reference to his temperamental deficiencies.

IX

As a party leader he was singularly lacking in tact, offensively opinionated,[157] impatient and often insulting to well-meaning mediocrity, and dictatorial. He did not consult—he directed. He did not conciliate—he commanded. In the Cabinet he was to offend Jefferson early because Hamilton ‘could not rid himself of the idea that he was really the prime minister.’[158] It was not diplomatic to order Adams back to his post of duty in Philadelphia in the manner of one addressing a subordinate. Nor was it considerate to write to McHenry, who adored him, and was doing the best his limited ability would permit: ‘Pray take a resolution adequate to the emergency and rescue the credit of your department.’[159] These outbursts of impatience and this intolerance of weakness were forgiven by the strong, but treasured against him by smaller and more envious minds, and the time was to come when, with his field marshals loyal, he was to have few colonels and captains, and practically no privates. He was a failure in the management of men, and only his superior genius made it possible for him to dominate so long.

There was much of egotism and some vanity behind this dictatorial disposition. This was inherent and incurable. The lowliness of his origin, the phenomenal rapidity of his rise, the homage properly paid him for the brilliancy of his youthful efforts with voice, pen, and sword, all tended to convince him of his superiority. No one knew or lamented his egotism more than men who loved him. Morris went weeping from his death-bed to write his intimate opinion in his diary that he was ‘vain and opinionated.’[160] Cabot, who clung to him like a lover, wrote him frankly: ‘I am bound to tell you that you are accused by respectable men of egotism.’[161] A descendant and biographer concedes his vanity, taking issue with Hamilton’s son who had foolishly, but naturally, denied it in his biography.[162] His self-sufficiency is evident in his letter to Laurens: ‘It is my desire to preserve myself free from particular attachments, and to keep my happiness independent of the caprices of others.’[163] But were we without these confessions from his friends, we should find them in his letters. What more amazing and amusing than his letter to Schuyler explaining with gusto and some swagger his quarrel with Washington.[164] Even at the age of twenty-three and while serving in a secretarial capacity to one of the foremost figures of all time, he was placing himself on an equality at least with Washington and writing glibly of ‘what we owed to each other.’ This spirit of self-exaltation was to drive many of the minor leaders of his party from him, and to lead him, in the end, to the supreme folly of his pamphlet attack on Adams which was hopelessly to cripple, if not completely destroy, his influence.

Even more serious than his flamboyant egotism was his queer lack of judgment in the handling of men. It was an irreparable blunder to force the election of his father-in-law to the Senate from New York over Chancellor Livingston who had superior claims. It was a temporary triumph that drove one of the most powerful families in the State into the ranks of his enemies.[165] Only the most execrable taste can pardon the undignified writing of anonymous attacks on a colleague of the Cabinet.[166] His blunder in the case of the Schuyler election could be excused by his lack of political experience, but his most sympathetic biographer admits that ‘middle age instead of ripening his judgment, warped it.’[167] His was a nature of eternal youth, and in many respects the indiscretions of boyish exuberance cursed him to the end.

If these personal weaknesses were to weaken him with the leaders of the second rank, his unpopularity with the rank and file was to come from his lack of sympathy for, and understanding of, the American spirit. No one realized it more than he. In justice it must be said that he honestly tried to suppress his doubts of America; but in moments of depression he burst forth with expressions that bear the marks of long incubation. ‘Am I a fool—a romantic Quixote—or is there a constitutional defect in the American mind?’ he wrote King. ‘Were it not for yourself and a few others I would adopt the reveries of De Paux, as substantial truths, and could say with him that there is something in our climate which belittles every animal, human or brute.’[168] And toward the close of his life he wrote Morris: ‘Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me. You, friend Morris, are a native of this country, but by genius an exotic. You mistake if you fancy that you are more of a favorite than myself, or that you are in any sort upon a theatre suited to you.’[169] This touch of the exotic, of which he himself was painfully conscious, was not lost upon his political enemies. ‘Thus ignorant of the character of this nation, of Pennsylvania, and of his own city and State of New York, was Alexander Hamilton,’ wrote Adams.[170] But it was left for another to ‘discover the real secret of his confusion as to the American character—he had never known the spirit, or had the training, of the New England town meeting.[171] A marvelous genius, he thought in terms of world politics at a time when America was creating a new spirit and system of her own. It was not to weaken his work as the creator of credit, but it was to dim his vision as an American leader.

X

If he possessed traits that made him thoroughly hated by some, he had other qualities that bound his friends to him with bonds of steel. He commanded affection because he was himself affectionate. His letters to his wife were uniformly tender and playful. He was idolized by his children. His comrades in the army loved him because he not only shared their hardships, but at times helped them to necessities out of his own all but empty pockets. He was sensitive to the sufferings of many refugees in Philadelphia and New York, and he would often direct his wife to send money and delicacies to the women and children.[172] We have many instances of his generosity, like his attempt to spare Andre the humiliation of the scaffold, and his letter to Knox protesting against the execution of British officers in retaliation for the murder of an American.[173] Among the young French officers he was idolized because of his merry disposition and the cleverness and brilliancy of his conversation. While prone to hold aloof from the mass, he was a ‘good fellow’ among those whom he considered his social equals. In social assemblies of both sexes he fairly sparkled with boyish enthusiasm.[174] In stag affairs, where he was immensely popular, we may be sure that he was nothing of a prude. It is not of record that he often drank to excess, but like most men of his time he loved his wine, and we have it on the best authority that he sometimes took a wee bit too much.[175] On these convivial occasions he could always be prevailed upon to sing his one and only song: