Alexander Hamilton could think of little but his marriage—and all that it offered. His fiancée, Betsy Schuyler, wanted to elope, as her two older sisters had done, but Hamilton would not have it. Betsy could not face the prospect of marrying Hamilton at home in the very room where she had spent so many happy hours with John André. Hamilton tried in his letters to turn her mind to the day when the war would be over and he would be with his Betsy. Their separation fanned his smoldering correspondence. In early October, he wrote Betsy that she “engross[ed] my thoughts too entirely to allow me to think anything else.” He wrote of his passion in words calculated to stir hers. She was in his thoughts night and day, he said. “You intrude on my sleep,” he told her. “I meet you in every dream.” None of the other beautiful young women who flocked to headquarters social events tempted him any longer. He was, he averred, “monopolized by a little nut brown maid” and he had changed “from a soldier” into “a puny lover.” The months of waiting for his release from duty had become “more and more unhappy.” He had grown “impatient under the hard necessity that keeps me from you.”1
But his chances of leaving headquarters dimmed with the Arnold-André conspiracy. Stunned by the ignominious loss of one of his best generals, Washington had become even more dependent on Hamilton, who had shown such enterprise and quick thinking during the crisis. Washington could not possibly spare Hamilton to go to Betsy’s side. Hamilton was also more valuable than ever as a French-speaking liaison with America’s new ally. He had to keep up a steady correspondence with French officers. Not all of it was official or unpleasant. The Marquis de Fleury was in hot pursuit of Betsy’s younger sister for reasons he made clear while congratulating Hamilton on his engagement to Betsy. “First of all, you will get all that family’s interest,” the marquis wrote, enumerating Hamilton’s blessings, “and a man of your abilities wants a little influence to do good to his country. The second [is] that you will be in a very easy situation. Happiness is not to be found without a large estate.”2
All ambition, Hamilton certainly was not oblivious to his good fortune in marrying Betsy Schuyler, and he did not let his discovery of her first love for a British spy stand in his way to her family fortune. Indeed, he seems to have exploited his unique knowledge. While he bemoaned the delay in his marriage, he used his time and privileged position at headquarters to help his new patron, his future father-in-law. When British, Loyalist, and Indian forces attacked down Lake Champlain again in October 1780, General Schuyler, in command of the Northern Department, wrote to Hamilton, seeking reinforcements from Washington. Three regiments quickly marched north, providing a safe conveyance for Hamilton’s confidential letter to Schuyler. Along with the troops went another long letter to Betsy. British attacks around Albany had disrupted the mails. He had not heard from Betsy in two weeks and he sounded anxious. He would join her in a month, he promised. But when two other aides went home to Virginia to marry, Washington said he could not grant Hamilton a furlough until they returned.
And if Hamilton was yearning to be with Betsy Schuyler, at the same time he was just as certainly doing all he could to pursue laurels that would take him even farther away from her. No longer willing to be put off indefinitely, anxious that the war would end before he could distinguish himself, Hamilton tried to outflank Washington by shifting the grounds of his appeal. In 1779, he had sought a commission to go to South Carolina with his friend Laurens to raise a slave army to attack the British, but Washington had refused him. As it turned out, Hamilton would probably have been captured along with Laurens. Hamilton, in a letter that shows the formality of his relationship with Washington even after four years as his aide, again appealed to Washington on November 22, 1780. This time, he sought a joint command with Lafayette to lead an all-out attack on New York City:
Sometime last fall when I spoke to your Excellency about going to the southward, I explained to you candidly my feelings with respect to military reputation, 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. You were so good as to say you would be glad to furnish me with an occasion. When the expedition to Staten Island was on foot, I made an application for it through the Marquis [de Lafayette] who informed me of your refusal on two principles—one, that giving me a whole battalion might be a subject of dissatisfaction [among other officers], the other that, if an accident should happen to me in the present state of your [official] family, you would be embarrassed for the necessary assistance. The project you now have in contemplation affords another opportunity. I take this method of making the request to avoid the embarrassment of a personal explanation.3
Lafayette, supporting Hamilton, told him to “show me your letter before you give it.” Together they had planned that Hamilton, as part of Lafayette’s attack on Manhattan, would seize strategic Bayard’s Hill, where, four years earlier, Hamilton had commanded an artillery company. This time, Washington did not turn him down per se: he canceled the entire expedition.
Hamilton’s friends kept trying to liberate him from headquarters. Greene and Lafayette nominated him for adjutant general. Hamilton was ideally suited for the post, which involved reorganizing the army, something Hamilton had already been doing for three years. Ironically, Washington had already assigned someone Hamilton had suggested. Yet when Lafayette personally made a pitch to Washington on behalf of his friend Hamilton, Washington objected that he could not possibly have full colonels reporting to a lieutenant colonel. Didn’t it occur to him to promote Hamilton, who had received no promotion in three and a half years even as he had become Washington’s most trusted adviser? It apparently did not cross Washington’s mind to reward Hamilton with a brigadier general’s commission, even though there were younger generals with far less experience or usefulness. Perturbed, Lafayette wrote to Hamilton, “I confess I became warmer than you would perhaps have wished me to be.”4
Hamilton’s next gambit was to nominate Lafayette for a special mission to France to seek more aid. Lafayette was to take Hamilton with him. Instead, Washington dispatched Lafayette to Virginia. As he headed south, Lafayette nominated his French-speaking friend Hamilton to take his place as the new envoy to Versailles. Hamilton’s friend Laurens joined Lafayette in lobbying Congress in his behalf. But it soon became apparent that Hamilton’s brushes with the anti-Washington faction in Congress had seriously damaged his chances of any congressional appointment. Laurens wrote delicately to Washington that “Colonel Hamilton was not sufficiently known to Congress to unite their suffrages in his favor.” The attempt to win Hamilton an appointment to Paris was a “total failure,” Laurens reported to Hamilton just before he himself accepted the post on December 11, 1780. In one of his more generous gestures, Hamilton drafted a warm letter in French to introduce Laurens to the French foreign minister at Versailles. Washington then copied Hamilton’s draft word for word to add the strength of his recognizable handwriting and signature.5
By this time, Hamilton had every reason to be magnanimous. At the end of November 1780, as the army went into winter quarters and all fighting stopped, with his friend James “Mac” McHenry, he rode north to Albany to marry Elizabeth Schuyler. It was his first leave in four and a half years in the army. It was also the first time since his mother had died twelve years earlier that he was heading toward a home and a woman who was eager to see him. And what a home! The three-story dormered brick Schuyler mansion, seven tall windows wide, stood on a handsome bluff overlooking the town of Albany with a ten-mile view of the Hudson River. The house, one of America’s grandest at that time, was fully sixty feet wide with a large northwest wing and handsome horse barn. The general’s sleigh fetched Hamilton and McHenry from headquarters. In the arms of Betsy amid the hospitality of her ample family, Hamilton was instantly made at home. The wedding took place December 17, 1780, in the ballroom-size second-floor hallway (now called the Hamilton Room) where John André had once spent long afternoons playing his flute and sketching Betsy. The clerk of Albany’s Dutch Reformed Church recorded the marriage of “Colonel Hamilton and Elizabeth Schuyler.” (He did not know the groom’s first name.) Best man McHenry read verse that should have made Hamilton and his bride, if not its author, blush. Hamilton was now “embosomed” with “your Queen”:
As thus ye lay, the happiest pair,
A rosy scent enriched the air
While to a music softy sounding,
Breathing, panting, slow rebounding.
But McHenry’s muse imparted a warning:
Know then, dear Ham, a truth confessed,
Soon beauty fades, and love’s a guest,
Love has no settled place on earth;
A very wanderer from his birth…6
Two days later, ensconced in the Schuyler mansion, honeymooner Hamilton took up his pen briefly and turned literary critic, using double entendre to describe both bride and bard, thanking departing “Dear Mac” for “your poetry and your confidence”:
The piece is a good one…It has wit, which you know is a rare thing. I see by perseverance all ladies may be won…You know I have often told you, you write prose well but had no genius for poetry. I retract.7
Ten days later, when Lafayette’s friend the Marquis de Chastellux visited Albany, he found Hamilton living as if he had always been part of the Schuyler family. After six weeks with Betsy, Hamilton had no choice but to return to his duties at Washington’s headquarters, now down the Hudson at New Windsor, New York. On January 13, 1781, he drove with Elizabeth, wrapped in furs, in a sleigh along with a slave to set up housekeeping in rented rooms in the village near headquarters. The weeks away from headquarters had given Hamilton the time to talk at length with his new father-in-law, the frankly approving General Schuyler. Hamilton could now begin to make plans for the war’s end. He would study law, living with the Schuylers in Albany until he was ready to open his practice, probably in New York City. But to help establish himself, he believed more than ever that he needed to win distinction in battle. Repeated setbacks by Congress had convinced him that all his efforts had been too anonymous, that he was perceived to be too much Washington’s lackey, his own name too easily dismissed. He needed a combat command, a conspicuous assignment, a victory. He brooded that, had he stayed in the artillery, by now he would be a senior colonel, on the verge of promotion to general. As it was, his seniority had been suspended when he had joined Washington’s staff. With no promotion in nearly four years, it galled Hamilton whenever Washington used Hamilton’s inferior rank as an excuse to ignore his repeated requests for a combat assignment.
Yet his return to headquarters came at an unpropitious time to press Washington. During his absence, on New Year’s night, 1781, some twenty-five hundred Pennsylvania troops of the Continental Line had mutinied, shot two officers who tried to stop them, and marched toward the capital at Philadelphia to demand that Congress pay them years of back pay. So bad was morale in the army in general—inflation had now reached nine hundred times the 1776 value of the dollar—that Washington did not dare march out to confront the mutineers for fear his own troops would join them. On January 3, the mutineers seized Princeton and ensconced themselves in the ruins of Nassau Hall as five hundred New Jersey troops joined them. The mutiny was finally to end fully six months later when New Jersey troops shot the two leaders of the New Jersey mutiny and “Mad Anthony” Wayne ordered four of his Pennsylvania mutineers executed. But the mutinies were making it clear that Washington had lost the initiative in the North after two years of inactivity.
Washington’s headquarters staff, once numbering eleven, was now down to two, Hamilton and Tench Tilghman of Maryland. To add to Hamilton’s discontent, he was constantly receiving long letters from former compatriots at headquarters, describing their successes. Robert Hanson Harrison had left to become chief justice of Maryland. Richard Kidder Meade had resigned to go home to Virginia to marry. Nathanael Greene had taken command of the Southern Army after Horatio Gates’s rout at Camden, South Carolina. Each former comrade writing to Hamilton complained of desperate shortages and British successes in the South and implored him to use his influence at Washington’s elbow. He was to use “great freedom” in communicating with them. Hamilton’s work had kept piling up even as the driven Washington refused to take even a few days’ rest to accept a sleigh ride to Albany to visit General Schuyler and his wife.8
The odd, isolated, high-gabled one-and-a-half-story Dutch-style house in New Windsor that Washington had chosen as his latest headquarters was, according to one understated French visitor, “not large.” Surrounded by a porch, a kitchen fireplace running the width of the house, it had been chopped up into small rooms. Washington’s office on the second floor had a dormer window and an adjoining bedroom where he slept with Martha. Betsy Hamilton came to headquarters daily and helped Martha pour tea for visitors, serving French officers, as one noted, “with much grace.” The rest of the headquarters family was crowded several to a room, as usual.
At first, the newlyweds seemed content. Five weeks into their marriage, Hamilton felt qualified to give advice on the subject of matrimony to Betsy’s younger sister Margarita. Betsy had written her, “I am the happiest of women. My dear Hamilton is fonder of me every day. Get married, I charge you.” Before posting the letter, Hamilton had added his own advice on choosing a mate in a postscript:
Because your sister has the talent of growing more amiable every day, or because I am a fanatic in love, or both—or if you prefer another interpretation, because I have address enough to be a good dissembler, she fancies herself the happiest woman in the world, and would need persuade all her friends to embark with her in the matrimonial voyage. But I pray you do not let her advice have so much influence as to make you matrimony-mad. ‘Tis a very good thing when their stars unite two people who are fit for each other, who have souls capable of relishing the fruits of friendship.
But it’s a dog’s life when two dissonant tempers meet, and ‘tis ten to one but this is the case. Be cautious in the choice. Get a man of sense, not ugly enough to be pointed at—with some good nature—a few grains of feeling—a little taste—a little imagination—and above all a good deal of decision to keep you in order. If you can find one with all these qualities willing to marry you, marry him as soon as you please. I must tell you in confidence that I think I have been very fortunate.9
Hamilton soon heard back from Albany that the Schuylers were equally pleased with him. Crusty old General Schuyler wrote
You cannot, my dear sir, be more happy at the connection you have made with my family than I am. Until a child has made a judicious choice, the heart of a parent is continually in anxiety. But this anxiety vanished in the moment that I discovered where you and she had placed their affections.10
Betsy’s more beautiful, more sophisticated older sister, Angelica, married to an Englishman who was growing rich by supplying the French army in America, also found her new brother-in-law Hamilton interesting. She goaded her younger sister Betsy to “embrace poor Hamilton for me. I am really so proud of his merit and abilities that even you, Eliza, might envy my feelings.” The comely Angelica had evidently found Hamilton charming when she met him in Morristown two years earlier and had renewed her flirting with him at the wedding in Albany. She would, she wrote Betsy, “pass with you the remainder of my days, that is if you will be so obliging as to permit my brother [Hamilton] to give me his society, for you know how much I love and admire him.”11
ON FEBRUARY 16, 1781, Alexander Hamilton reported to headquarters as usual. He wrote out two sets of orders. When he finished writing, he went downstairs to deliver them to Tench Tilghman. As he went down the stairs, he met Washington on his way up. The commander-in-chief said he wanted to speak to Hamilton. “I answered that I would wait upon him immediately,” Hamilton wrote two days later to his father-in-law. Then Hamilton handed the letter “containing an order of a pressing and interesting nature” to Tilghman. On his way back to Washington’s office, Hamilton stopped again, this time to talk to Lafayette on “a matter of business.” They talked, Hamilton wrote, for no more than a minute. Lafayette would “testify how impatient I was to get back, and that I left him in a manner which but for our intimacy would have been [considered] more than abrupt.” Undoubtedly, they spoke French, which required the customary courtesies and flourishes.
As Hamilton climbed the stairs, he saw Washington pacing back and forth on the landing. Washington “accost[ed] me in a very angry tone,” Hamilton explained to Schuyler. “‘Colonel Hamilton,’ said he, ‘you have kept me waiting at the head of the stairs these ten minutes. I must tell you, sir, you treat me with disrespect.’“ Hamilton was caught completely off-guard. The tedious years of frustration over Washington’s refusal to allow him any field assignment, only staffwork, now welled up inside him. Something snapped. To Schuyler, he recounted, “I replied without petulance but with decision, ‘I am not conscious of it, sir, but since you have thought it necessary to tell me so, we must part.’
“‘Very well, sir,’ said he, ‘if it be your choice.’ Or something to this effect. And we separated.”12
Recoiling downstairs, Hamilton vented his outrage on Lafayette. The horrified marquis soon was writing to Washington, “From the very first moment, I exerted every means in my power to prevent a separation which I knew was not agreeable to Your Excellency.” Hamilton later recounted to Schuyler that “less than an hour after,” Washington’s now sole aide-de-camp, Tilghman, “came to me in the General’s name, assuring me of his great confidence in my abilities, integrity, usefulness, etc., and of his desire in a candid conversation to heal a difference which could not have happened but in a moment of passion.” But Hamilton “requested Mr. Tilghman to tell him that I had taken my resolution in a matter not to be revoked.” Any further “conversation would serve no other purpose than to produce explanations mutually disagreeable.” Hamilton would agree to meet with Washington if he desired “yet I should be happy if he would permit me to decline it.” Hamilton asked Tilghman to assure Washington that he would not leave headquarters until “some other gentlemen who were absent” returned to take his place and that he would continue to behave “as if nothing had happened.” But Hamilton made it clear to Tilghman that he had had enough of Washington. He confided in a letter to “Mac” McHenry that “the Great Man and I have come to an open rupture.” He had rejected Washington’s “proposals of accommodation”:
I pledge my honor to you that he will find me inflexible. He shall for once at least repent his ill-humor. Without a shadow of reason and on the slightest ground, he charged me in the most affrontive manner with treating him with disrespect.
Washington had so offended Hamilton that he might have handed him his commission and resigned from the army on the spot, he told Mac. “I wait till more help arrives. At present there is besides myself only Tilghman, who is just recovering from a fit of illness, the consequence of too close application to business.” Hamilton vowed that, except to “a very few friends,” he would keep his “difference” with Washington secret. “Therefore be silent. I shall continue to support a popularity [Washington’s] that has been essential [and] is still useful.” But he hoped that the time may “come when characters may be known in their true light.”13
It was to his father-in-law that Hamilton was most careful in pouring out his anger and resentment in a long, bold, and biting letter. After only two months as Schuyler’s son-in-law, he must have sweated as he explained not only the rift but its background. Schuyler, after all, had long supported Washington and was the second most senior general to Washington in rank and seniority. The confrontation put Schuyler in a difficult position. Hamilton could now, more than ever, ill-afford Schuyler’s disapproval:
I always disliked the office of an aide-de-camp as having in it a kind of personal dependence. I refused to serve in this capacity with two major generals at an early period in the war. Infected, however, with the enthusiasm of the times, an idea of the General’s character which experience soon taught me to be unfounded overcame my scruples. For three years past I have felt no friendship for him and have professed none.
The truth is, our dispositions are the opposites of each other and the pride of my [temperament] would not suffer me to profess what I did not feel. You are too good a judge of human nature not to be sensible how this conduct in me has operated on a man to whom all the world is offering incense.
But, Hamilton promised, he would keep silent until the war was over. Washington was, he opined, “a very honest man.” His rivals “have slender abilities and less integrity.” His popularity was “essential to the safety of America.” For that reason, “I think it is necessary he should be supported.”14
Hamilton’s weeklong wait for a reply from Schuyler was an excruciating time in the Hamilton household, even if, as is evident, Hamilton had sensed some disaffection toward Washington on Schuyler’s part. Why else would he gamble so much on Schuyler’s agreement with his conduct? When Schuyler’s tactful letter arrived, he first assured Hamilton that he didn’t think he was guilty of “any impropriety,” but he worried that “your quitting your station” would produce “very material injuries to the public.” He wished Hamilton would try to heal “this unhappy breach.” Washington would “if you leave him have not one gentleman left” with good enough French “to convey his ideas.” He urged Hamilton to reconsider: few men “pass through life without one of those unguarded moments which would [hurt] the feelings of a friend.” Yet Schuyler assured the younger man he would understand if Hamilton could not return to Washington’s favor without injuring his “principles of honor.” These were, “if I may use the expression, the test of virtue.”15
Schuyler’s understanding letter persuaded Hamilton to stay on at Washington’s side until another French-speaking aide could be found. More than two months passed and still no relief came. In late April 1781, Hamilton learned that Congress had resolved that his aide-de-camp’s rank of lieutenant colonel was convertible into a similar grade in the Continental Army, with seniority dating back to his appointment four years earlier. This unexpected turn of fortune, no doubt engineered behind congressional doors by his father-in-law’s friends, now opened the way for a fresh appeal. Hamilton anticipated Washington’s reaction: “Unconnected as I am with any regiment, I can have no other command than in a light corps.” Hamilton wrote Washington in a stiff and formal letter on April 27, 1781, “I flatter myself my pretensions to this are good.” By now, Hamilton had been on active duty for more than five years. Had he remained an artillery officer, he pointed out, he would “have been more advanced in rank than I am now.” Hamilton felt he deserved command of a light infantry corps that he knew was being formed to go south in the fast-approaching 1781 campaign.16
Washington’s reply came back swiftly, the same day. While it was conciliatory in tone—”No officer can with justice dispute your merit and abilities”—once again, Washington refused. Other officers with more rank and seniority would object. Yet even as Washington worried that Hamilton might mistake his motives, Hamilton would not accept this latest rebuff without one last attempt to persuade Washington. His case was “peculiar and dissimilar” to other officers, he replied on May 2, 1781. This time he cited not only his service record, but reminded Washington of his “constant course of important and laborious services” at headquarters. And he was sure other officers would remember them.17
This time, he got no reply whatsoever. Even so, he kept faith with his father-in-law by accompanying Washington and Lafayette to Newport, Rhode Island, in mid-May to act as the American interpreter at a conference with the French high command to coordinate the coming campaign. But there was now only cold, formal tension between commander and aide. Hamilton actually took up quarters in a tavern away from Washington’s retinue and they passed notes back and forth by courier. Finally, the strain was too much and Hamilton left without paying his hairdresser’s bill. Instead of riding back to camp with Washington, he rode home to Albany, where he conferred with Betsy and her father. Washington would have to pen his own letters. Hamilton had been careful to send his father-in-law, who had gone to survey his ruined farms at Saratoga, the letters he had exchanged with Washington. On May 30, 1781, Schuyler sent him what was, in effect, the paper that manumitted him from his dependence on Washington. Schuyler wrote that he was preparing to leave for the New York state legislature. He had no doubt he could arrange for Hamilton to be elected a New York delegate to the Continental Congress. Hamilton immediately rode to Washington’s headquarters and resigned his aide-de-camp’s commission.
IN MARCH 1781, only a few weeks after Hamilton had resigned, Washington ordered the two-years-younger Lafayette south in command of troops—the very opportunity Hamilton had pleaded for—to reinforce a fumbling Steuben in Virginia. The Prussian was a better drillmaster than field commander. He had failed to intercept a devastating raid on Richmond led by the turncoat Benedict Arnold, who was now a brigadier general in the British Army. The long, drawn-out war, now entering its seventh year, had shifted south: in the North, Washington and the British were stalemated. Awaiting the promised congressional appointment in the isolated comfort of the Schuyler mansion, Hamilton paced, worrying that the coming campaign could be the final one and that he would not be in at the kill. He also worried that another season of war would be inconclusive.
Subsidized now by the Schuylers, Hamilton had the forced leisure to study the newspapers, forage in his father-in-law’s ample library, and resume writing at length, something he had all but neglected in his four years as Washington’s writing aide. In a lengthy unsolicited letter to Philadelphia financier Robert Morris, the newly appointed United States superintendent of finance, he pondered what would happen if the struggle dragged on with a toothless Congress unable to pay its debts or its troops at a time when soldiers were mutinying, deserting to Arnold’s newly formed Loyalist brigade, the American Legion, or just plain going home in despair:
We have to fear [that] the want of money may disband the army or so enfeeble our operations as to create in the people a general disgust and alarm, which may make them clamor for peace on any terms.
Ever-increasing financial and military aid from France was all that was keeping the Revolution alive, Hamilton believed. In Europe as well as America, many questioned why the Revolution was taking so long. Yet the Americans could still bring off a decisive victory this year. Only a few recent British successes—the fall of Charleston and the rout of Horatio Gates at Camden, South Carolina—had encouraged the British ministry to wring another year’s war subsidy from a disenchanted Parliament. The war-weary and heavily taxed English people were losing their “expectation of success” as Hamilton phrased it, and were increasingly reluctant to continue funding a widening global conflict against the Americans, the French, and their allies. To Morris, Hamilton insisted,
The game we play is a sure game, if we play it with skill. Many events may turn up in the course of the summer to make even the present campaign decisive.
By his own logic, Hamilton could ill afford the splendid isolation of the Schuyler mansion, especially if he intended to make one last attempt to win a share in the final glory of the Revolution. Inactivity gnawed at him. The unaccustomed domestic routine weighed heavily. Betsy was pregnant and so was her mother. Her father was seriously ill with the quinsy (acute tonsillitis) and increasingly depended on Hamilton to stay close to his family. Hamilton enjoyed long hours with Betsy and her sister Angelica, who had come home to help nurse the family. Hamilton and Angelica found each other interesting. Hamilton was coming to consider her livelier, wittier, and more cosmopolitan than his bride, the shy Betsy. By May, with Betsy three months’ pregnant, Hamilton was more than ready to pull himself away and ride off to Fishkill and the American camp. Schuyler seemed far from able to resume his political activities; Hamilton’s political career seemed a-glimmering, his future uncertain unless he found a way to assert himself. While Schuyler tugged at Hamilton to wait patiently at Albany, Lafayette was pulling at him, too, by letter from Virginia—come and join me, command my artillery. Hamilton decided against either course. Instead, he rented rooms in Fishkill near headquarters where he could keep abreast of developments and gather data for a series of newspaper articles.
Styling himself “The Continentalist,” he penned a fifteen-thousand-word letter, which appeared as a four-part series, in about a month, putting it through the printing press of patriot Samuel Louden’s New York Packet, relocated to Fishkill during the British occupation of New York City. Widely influential, the Packet was read especially by officers at headquarters and delegates to Congress. The articles, published in July and August 1781, were Hamilton’s first attempt to influence public opinion since the war had begun six years earlier, when he had only been twenty. The months away from headquarters had given Hamilton the occasion to study the new nation’s political problems and their deleterious effects on the war effort. America’s military shortcomings, “Continentalist” declared, stemmed from a lack of power in Congress, especially from the lack of any independent sources of revenue large and reliable enough to permit the national government to function efficiently:
Our whole system is in disorder, our currency depreciated until, in many places, it will hardly [circulate]. Public credit [is] at its lowest ebb, our army deficient in numbers and unprovided with everything. The government in its present condition [is] unable to command the means to pay, clothe or feed their troops.
Hamilton, despite this pessimistic salvo, had never doubted that America could ultimately win. The British had only fourteen thousand professional English troops on the entire continent. Half of the thirty thousand rented Hessian mercenaries had died or deserted and were employed mostly in garrison duty in coastal towns, rarely trusted on the offensive by the British as the Americans tightened their grip on the countryside. Loyalists also were dwindling, few volunteering. The number of American males of fighting age, meanwhile, increased constantly, their Continental units, supplied by each state, more and more made up of trained veterans who were augmented by five thousand crack French troops. Then why was the Revolutionary struggle taking so long? “Impolicy and mismanagement,” declared Hamilton.
The Alexander Hamilton writing in 1781 had metamorphosed since his precocious schoolboy essay writing of 1775. He still ardently espoused liberty and detested slavery, but he was becoming more ambivalent about basic human nature as the war wore on. At twenty, he had borrowed heavily from conservative Scottish philosopher David Hume. In his 1775 pamphlet, The Farmer Refuted, which echoed Hume’s essay, “On the Independency of Parliament,” Hamilton had written:
In contriving any system of government and fixing the several checks and contracts of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave and to have no other end in all his actions but private interest. By this interest, we must govern him.
Like Hume, Hamilton believed that the people are inherently corrupted by lust for power and greed for property, Government had to be designed to control and put to work those passions “subservient to the public good.” Constitutions, congresses, and laws had to recognize that the people would act in the public interest only if their private interests made it advantageous to them. But Hamilton had read and honored another contemporary Scot, Hume’s friend Adam Smith, who contended that ambition was even more powerful a motive than greed: “That passion, when once it has got entire possession of the breast, will admit neither a rival nor a successor.” Hamilton saw both passions as the powerful engines driving most human behavior.18
Before his break with Washington, as his every scheme failed, his natural optimism had soured into skepticism and then sharpened to pessimism. He had become, he wrote his friend John Laurens, “disgusted with every thing in this world.” He saw the army, the states, and Congress in the control of “a mass of fools and knaves.” But as he found time at Albany and Fishkill in the spring of 1781 to analyze the political problems frustrating the Revolution, his old self-confidence returned and he asserted himself in a brilliant critique that he now fired off to Congress’s superintendent of finance, Morris. He blamed the long impasse on a weak national government. Unless Congress were given greater central authority, even if the Americans won the war, Congress would be too weak to manage the new nation. But to avert a “more general and more obstinate war, which now seemed likely,” wrote Hamilton, the states and their citizens must, without delay, “enlarge the powers of Congress” and create a coherent central government. As it was, the root cause of Congress’s impotence was the states’ refusal to grant Congress the power to tax, leaving Congress and its armies, as Hamilton so well knew, at the mercy of requisitions that the states either could not or would not honor. For instance, Pennsylvania’s Conestoga wagons were vital to supply the armies and transport its war materiel but the army had to plead each year and the state rarely met its quotas. Virginia manufactured cannon and gunpowder but its governor, Thomas Jefferson, insisted that much of its output go to support Virginia’s own forces who had seized British forts in the Illinois country while providing little support for Continental armies north or south.
Its quotas unheeded at home, Congress borrowed heavily in Europe until its credit had been used up. Then it had turned to expropriation and the confiscation and forced sale of the property of Loyalists. Congress printed enormous amounts of paper money; its so-called bills of credit were worth less each year. Paper money issued in 1777 purchased goods worth $16 million; by 1779, only two years later, $125 million yielded only about $6 million worth of supplies. It was obvious, Hamilton wrote Morris, that Congress must be granted a reliable source of revenues. The “separate exertions of the states will never suffice.” All of the states’ resources “must be gathered under a common authority with sufficient power to carry out the stops needed to preserve us from being a conquered people.”19
As early as his 1779 letter to Schuyler, Hamilton had maintained that the nation’s financial mess stemmed from not having a large enough supply of stable currency to pay for the war. The obvious need was creation of a national bank. At the time, there were still no banks of any kind in the country. The problem was only getting worse with the injection of large amounts of French gold and silver used to purchase supplies for French troops. Farmers and suppliers were increasingly reluctant to accept the devalued Continental currency. In his 1779 call for administrative and fiscal reform, Hamilton had argued that a national bank could be funded half by a foreign loan, half by private subscriptions to be paid off in Continental bills of credit at a depreciated value that made it profitable for merchants to accept them. Congress would use the foreign loan to pay half the national bank’s stock. In turn, the bank would help finance the national government by making direct loans. The bank would facilitate taxation by increasing the supply of money in circulation, a result of financing normal business activity. Any nation at war is obliged to borrow money, both at home and abroad. The rebelling United States could not be an exception. Congress needed to borrow $5 million or $6 million annually. To secure these loans, Congress needed sure sources of revenue to pay current interest, each year setting aside the funds to retire the principal. With adequate taxes as national resources, the public debt would be wiped out in twenty years. As Hamilton scholar Forrest McDonald put it, Hamilton’s earliest proposal for a national bank “was a clever one; indeed, it contained many of the principles that would later underlie Hamilton’s workable plan for a national bank. He recognized shrewdly that establishing public credit is partly a matter of creating illusions.”20
When Hamilton wrote to Morris to refine his analysis in mid-1781, his words carried more weight than his earlier suggestions to Congress. He had to be regarded as speaking for Schuyler and other wealthy New Yorkers. In writing to Morris, he was boldly thrusting his financial thinking on the man who not only had weeks earlier been appointed to unravel Congress’s tangled financial affairs, but who was one of its leading financiers and partner in the Philadelphia mercantile house of Willing and Morris, the nations largest. At the same time, he was aligning himself with the nation’s most conservative money men. Many soldiers and civilians accused Morris of “engrossing,” the morally dubious practice of buying up vast amounts of wheat and other scarce supplies and speculating in them by holding on to them until prices soared. But Hamilton had decided to cast his lot with other nationalists like Morris who were taking their seats in Congress and displacing pro-states’ rights members whom he believed had seriously weakened the chances of prevailing against Great Britain. In February 1781, only weeks before Hamilton fired off his missive to Morris, Congress, led by the nationalists, had voted to reorganize its departments along lines which Hamilton believed he had already suggested to New York’s delegates back in 1777. Thus he felt completely entitled to reiterate and expand on his reform ideas to Morris.
“Power without revenue is a bubble,” he wrote Morris. Unless the states gave Congress the means to raise revenues, they should “renounce the vain attempt of carrying on the war.” Congress must “demand an instant, positive and perpetual investiture of an impost [custom duty] on trade, a land tax and a poll tax to be collected by [Congress’s] own agents.” When Hamilton had told his friend Laurens of his “remedies,” Laurens had warned him that they “would not go down at this time.” Hamilton responded, “I tell you, necessity must force them down. If they are not speedily taken, the patient will die.”
Only in Hamilton’s private letters to Laurens, his most trusted friend, did he reveal the depth of his disenchantment. “The birth and education of these states has fitted their inhabitants for the chair,” he had written Laurens in 1779 when his friend proposed to free the slaves to fight. “The only condition they sincerely desire is that it be a golden one.” As he waited for a field command a year before his wedding, he wrote Laurens, “I am a stranger in this country. I have no property here, no connections. If I have talents and integrity (as you say I have) these are justly deemed very spurious titles in these enlightened days.” As Washington rejected all his efforts for a field command, Hamilton at twenty-four confided to Laurens, “I am disgusted with everything in this world but yourself and very few more honest fellows and I have no other wish than, as soon as possible, to make a brilliant exit.”
In June 1780, he had told Laurens, “Our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep…They are determined not to be free and they can neither be frightened, discouraged nor persuaded to change their resolution. If we are saved, France and Spain must save us.” By September 1780, shortly before Benedict Arnold’s defection, he wrote Laurens, “The officers are out of humor and the worst of evils seems to be coming upon us—a loss of our virtue.” To Hamilton’s contemporaries, virtue meant manhood, implying sense of duty, courage and, above all, honor. “I hate Congress—I hate the army—I hate the world—I hate myself. The whole is a mass of fools and knaves.” He had especial scorn for Congress: he told Laurens that “three-fourths of members of Congress were mortal enemies to talent and three-fourths of the remainder had only contempt for integrity.”21
Hamilton’s prose had become strong, self-assured. He was developing the knack of writing in maxims, many of them profound, original—and quotable. To Morris, he opined in memorable phrases:
No wise statesman will reject the good from an apprehension of the ill. The truth is, in human affairs, there is no good, pure and unmixed. Every advantage has two sides, and wisdom consists in availing ourselves of the good and guarding as much as possible against the bad…A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing. It will be powerful cement of our union. It will also create a necessity for keeping up taxation to a degree which, without being oppressive, will be a spur to industry.
Hamilton had come to believe that many Americans were too indolent. He feared American political rhetoric would “incline us to too great parsimony and indulgence.” Why had the war dragged on so long? “We labor less now than any civilized nation of Europe, and a habit of labor in the people is as essential to the health and vigor of their minds and bodies as it is conducive to the welfare of the State. We ought not to suffer our self-love to deceive us.”
Hamilton’s recommendations to Morris in large part were visionary but politically premature. Congress still lacked the authority to carry out his proposals. And his facts were askew because he lacked basic information, as Morris would have recognized. Congress had an immense war debt beyond its bills of credit and there would be few investors interested in subscriptions for more debt. Without accurate facts, Hamilton made inaccurate calculations in coming up with his estimates of the nation’s revenues and expenses. By suggesting the use of land as capital, he mistakenly predicated Congress’s ability to raise far more capital than was actually available. Yet his political principles were sound. Congress “must deal plainly with their constituents,” as he contended, and “power without revenue” was, as he so succinctly put it, “a bubble.” Unless the states yielded up to the national government the sources of revenue it needed to win the war and establish a sound government, it was folly to continue the war. If his proposals to tax trade and property ran counter to public opinion, it was better to bring on the collision now than allow the war to drag on to an ignominious conclusion. Hamilton’s virtuoso recitation to Morris at age twenty-six prefigured his later proposals and policies and showed that, at such an early age, he basically understood the interplay of politics, finance, and war.
In his first double-barreled sortie into influencing the fiscal policy of the national government through public opinion, Hamilton exposed his financial views for public scrutiny for the first time. Pleading for greater congressional power, he proposed a national bank, a national debt, and national taxation, urging strong political medicine on the public. In private, he still believed that Americans were governed more by “passion and prejudice” than “an enlightened sense of their interests.” Yet, from that time on, often in open conflict with his own private views, almost clandestinely optimistic, Hamilton threw himself, his genius, all his energy again and again against the redoubts of indifference he perceived all around him. At twenty-six, he was for the first time sure of his own source of revenue. And, from that time on, no American of the Revolutionary generation spent more of his thought, words, and time to win over the common citizen to an energetic national government.22
DOING ALL he could to inject himself by his writings into national politics, Hamilton maintained his resolve to win a combat command from Washington. Arriving at headquarters on July 8, 1781, he sent a letter to the commander-in-chief through an aide. No reply came. “I wrote the General a letter,” he reported to Betsy, “and enclosed him my commission.” This time, Washington either had to provide an opening for Hamilton or lose his services entirely for the army. Washington decided to keep Hamilton in the army. He sent Tilgh-man to him, urging him to stay on until he could “give me a command nearly such as I could have desired,” he told Betsy. “Though I know my Betsy would be happy to hear that I had rejected this proposal” and would be coming home, “it is a pleasure my reputation would not permit me to afford her.” Proudly, Hamilton announced to the Schuylers that, at last, “I consented to retain my commission and accept my command.”23
Why, with an appointment to Congress promised and the door open to work with Robert Morris on important fiscal reforms, did Hamilton accept an unspecified military assignment? Surely one factor was his satisfaction that Washington, so recently dismissive of him, at last was acting with some consideration. At age twenty he had written in The Farmer Refuted that, above all qualities, he valued “natural intrepidity.” To this man of so many words, action still counted more than anything he could say to prove his worth.
Awaiting assignment, Hamilton shared quarters with General Benjamin Lincoln, Washington’s second-in-command. He had to move closer to headquarters or walk, after his “Old Gray Horse,” wounded at Monmouth three years earlier, died. Schuyler sent him two horses, one for riding, the other a “portmanteau horse” to transport his trunks. A splendid rider, Hamilton for the first time had a suitable mount, one that, in a horse-conscious culture, signaled his new status. He also ordered a new saddle for his orderly’s horse. On July 31, 1781, his long-pursued assignment appeared in general orders. Two light companies drawn from the New York First and Second Regiments and two companies of New York militia “will form a battalion under command of Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton.”24
Once again, Hamilton was to lead New York troops. His battalion was to be attached to the advance guard as it marched south to Virginia. Later, he replaced the New York draftees with two Connecticut companies of regular troops. Major Nicholas Fish, his King’s College classmate, became his second-in-command. Hamilton’s best friend, Laurens, commanded another new battalion in the army’s vanguard. Neither Hamilton’s problems as commander nor his approach changed. His men needed shoes. Headquarters said that was the State of New York’s problem, but this could take time. Hamilton went directly to Washington. He cited a precedent where “the article of shoes” was considered “indispensable” for the advance guard. The soldiers could not afford to buy their own shoes. New York was sending its best troops forward shoeless. Washington promptly ordered the shoes.25
On August 14, a courier arrived from French headquarters at Newport with word that a French fleet under the Comte de Grasse was sailing toward the Chesapeake with twenty-nine ships-of-the-line and three thousand troops. The French already had five thousand troops on Rhode Island. To draw off troops from the beleaguered South, Washington gave out the story that the target of the Franco-American attack was to be New York City, the original plan. A set of those earlier plans had fallen into British hands. Hamilton wrote Betsy there was “little prospect of activity.” The letter may have been a ruse calculated to deceive Loyalists who frequently intercepted mails. He did not write her again until, as part of the twenty-five-hundred-man advance guard, he had been marching south for three days. From Haverstraw, New Jersey, he sent her a letter by military courier through Schuyler’s headquarters, along with his meager savings. He told her not to draw funds from her father. He would be back in October, in two months (the length of time the French fleet was available), three months at the latest, but before their baby was due. Hamilton told her he was pessimistic about their chances of trapping Lord Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown. “It is ten to one that our views will be disappointed by Cornwallis retiring to South Carolina by land.” But this was probably to reassure her he was in little danger. So great was the need for secrecy that Betsy knew more than Hamilton’s own men, who were taking bets on their destination. They moved fast, under Washington’s orders to stay “fit for action and free from every encumbrance.” Women and baggage were sent off to West Point. Hamilton’s spare horse carried only camp equipage that Betsy sent him and a government-issue wall tent from Albany. Hamilton and his troops woke at three every morning, were on the march by four.26
To maintain the element of surprise about their intended destination, the Americans did not amass boats on the Delaware River. Horses and oxen swam across. With no money to pay his men or buy supplies, Washington ordered wagons and forage commandeered on the march. By September 6, Hamilton’s troops had marched through Philadelphia at night. Crowds lined the streets, cheering. In every window, war-scarce candles, often in clusters of thirteen, glimmered. Congress and French diplomats stood side-by-side to review the troops. At Head of Elk, Hamilton wrote Betsy again. He now knew that De Grasse’s French fleet had safely arrived in the Chesapeake and that Robert Morris had been able to borrow $20,000 in French gold to pay the American troops, reluctant to fight unless they received some of their back pay. “Circumstances that have just come to my knowledge assure me that our operations will be expeditious, as well as our success certain,” he wrote Betsy.27
Hamilton and his troops crowded into open boats. Bucking contrary winds that stirred up the notorious “Chesapeake chop,” they took a full week in hurricane season to navigate the bay from its northern tip to Annapolis, still only halfway to Yorktown. It was an especially dangerous crossing because the French fleet under de Grasse had put out to the open Atlantic again to battle a British fleet under Admiral Graves, which had suddenly swooped down from New York in pursuit of a second French squadron carrying French troops and all the siege guns. Not until September 15 did Hamilton learn that the French had beaten back the British fleet and safely returned to the Chesapeake again to screen the American forces from attack when they were most vulnerable crossing the bay. Extremely anxious as he waited for news of the naval battle, Hamilton fired off a less-than-heartening letter to Betsy: “How checkered is human life! How easily do we often part with it for a shadow.” He did not help his now-five-months-pregnant wife’s gloom as he added, by way of encouragement, that “our operations will be so conducted as to economize the lives of men. Exert your fortitude and rely upon heaven.” It would not have improved his mood to receive a letter from Schuyler, written about this time, that he feared Betsy would have a miscarriage. She “was so sensibly affected by your removal to the southward that I apprehended consequences,” Schuyler wrote, hastily adding that “she is now at ease.”28
With his battalion, Hamilton happily joined the advance guard as it clambered aboard larger, faster French vessels dispatched by de Grasse. But even then, Hamilton’s unit stalled. The French ship ran aground in high winds at the mouth of the James River. Among the first to land on the Virginia shore, Hamilton gathered his light troops at College Landing, one mile from Williamsburg, on September 20. It took another week before the full Franco-American force completed the perilous landings. Jubilant to rejoin Lafayette at Williamsburg, Hamilton also found that John Laurens had just returned from his diplomatic mission to France and had assumed Hamilton’s old job as Washington’s writing aide. To his added delight, he found his Eliza-bethtown Academy teacher, Lieutenant Colonel Francis Barber, serving under Lafayette. He had turned “something of the color of an Indian,” Hamilton wrote, from a summer under the Virginia sun.
The time for reunions was brief: at five o’clock the morning of September 27, the army began its twelve-mile march to invest the British at Yorktown. Hamilton’s men stepped off at the head of the right wing, the place of honor of the Franco-American army. Some fifty-five hundred Continental veterans in French-made blue uniforms under “Mad Anthony” Wayne of Pennsylvania, Baron Steuben, Mordechai Gist’s Marylanders, James Clinton and his New Yorkers, Francis Barber and the New Jersey Brigade, all swung off in the early morning breeze, followed by the lumbering artillery of Henry Knox, to begin the slow strangulation of Cornwallis’s army by siege. Another three thousand Virginia troops came ashore across the York River to prevent British escape. Strutting behind the Americans in glistening white uniforms came seventy-two hundred Frenchmen—seven regiments of infantry, eight hundred artillerists, as many cavalry. In all, Washington, the overall commander, had concentrated seventeen thousand troops, the largest army of the war, outnumbering Cornwallis’s defenders inside Yorktown three to one. Hamilton’s advance unit made it to within a mile of the British lines before encountering British dragoons. Taking cover in the woods, Hamilton came under artillery fire. One of the first shots sheared off one man’s leg. Throwing up earthworks, Hamilton’s men rested little that night, their weapons ready beside them.
The British had chosen the village of Yorktown to fortify because it was situated on a bluff thirty-five feet above the narrow York River. Shielded by scuttled merchant ships and by warships anchored offshore, the town was vulnerable from the land. Perched atop a sheer rise, it was protected somewhat by half a mile of open ground, swampy land, and two wide creeks with high steep banks. The narrow corridor between Yorktown and Wormeley’s Creek made it dangerous for attackers to approach the town, the open plain all but impossible. The British had built heavily defended earthworks to sweep the open ground with cannon fire. The French and American allies pitched their camps and installed their siege guns in an arc from riverbank to riverbank a mile from the British guns. It appeared that Cornwallis planned to escape either on roughly anchored vessels or await promised reinforcements from New York. Early September 30, before an allied gun fired, the British evacuated their outer works. The astonished Allies immediately swarmed into the abandoned British works. Hamilton’s immediate superior, Colonel Alexander Scammell, was fatally shot as he examined the works.
Former artillerist Hamilton took charge, showing his men how to construct earthworks and batteries for the siege. Digging in the sandy soil was easy, but the embankments had to be reinforced with gabions (wicker baskets) and saucissons (cylinders) filled with earth to absorb enemy cannon fire, and fascines and pickets for staking down the cylinders. Off guard duty, Hamilton’s men worked in the woods, fashioning their daily quota from uniform widths of wood hacked from the trees. Hamilton directed his men in keeping a constant supply on hand. Day after day, the digging and chopping went on as French engineers cut the first siege trench parallel to the British lines, in one moonless night cutting a mile-long trench seven feet wide and four feet deep across the plain. While French troops created a diversion, forty-three hundred men dug furiously only six hundred yards from British guns. On the right, Hamilton’s troops, each man digging twelve feet of trench, came within eight hundred yards of the two most heavily fortified advanced British redoubts, numbers nine and ten. Within three days, the Allies had their batteries in place within the first parallel. Mortars, howitzers, cannon firing up to twenty-four-pound shot (six pounds heavier than the British could fire back) were ready before the order came to open fire at three o’clock the afternoon of October 9. Accurate French fire splintered British gun emplacements as the day-and-night bombardment commenced. Cornwallis and his staff took refuge in caves in the riverbank. From his post in a siege trench, Hamilton, excited after so many years of waiting to take the offensive again, wrote to Betsy, “Thank heaven, our affairs seem to be approaching fast a happy period.” Five more days, he predicted, “and the enemy must capitulate.”29
After five days’ incessant cannonading, work began on a zigzag trench from the French left flank toward the British lines to permit digging a second parallel trench, halving the distance for cannon to bombard the enemy works. As Hamilton’s parties extended the trench toward the riverbank, deadly fire came from British redoubts numbers nine and ten. Allied cannon pounded these twenty-foot-high earthen fortifications. But the redoubts were surrounded by ditches filled with sharpened logs set at an angle to impale invaders and a further barricade of felled trees, their tangled branches sharpened. Inside each, 120 British and Hessian marksmen and gunners unleashed a galling fire whenever the enemy approached. After a three-day artillery duel, French engineers decided the redoubts were weakened enough to permit an infantry attack. Hamilton, his battalion included in Lafayette’s attack force, now launched his own assault: although a French officer had already been chosen to lead the charge, he wanted the honor.
This was Hamilton’s last chance for glory in what he was sure was the conclusive battle of the Revolution. If the redoubts could be taken by storm, Allied cannon could fire from so close to British headquarters that Cornwallis could not possibly hold out any longer. Hamilton’s long-sought moment of fame, a heroic assault on a dangerous enemy, would slip away unless he fought for it now. He promptly went to his friend Lafayette and asked him to plead for command of the American force attacking Redoubt Number Ten. Hamilton’s unit had “just come from the Northward,” argued Lafayette. The French officer he had assigned had fought the British all summer. Hamilton hauled out his rule book. He was senior to Gimat, the French officer. Besides, he was the duty officer of the day of the attack. Lafayette sympathized with Hamilton’s demand and agreed to go to Washington. Hamilton insisted on accompanying him to plead his own case. Together, they entered Washington’s high-walled, white linen marquee tent, his home since 1776. In only a few minutes, Hamilton erupted from the tent, grabbed Nicholas Fish, waiting anxiously outside, and embraced him. “We have it! We have it!” Hamilton exclaimed.
Returning to Lafayette’s tent, Hamilton and the marquis planned every detail of the night assault. Redoubt Number Ten clung to the edge of the cliff and could not be climbed safely. While the French attacked Redoubt Number Nine simultaneously, Hamilton’s force, divided into three columns, would clear the obstacles in the ditch with axes and charge into Number Ten. Laurens would circle the redoubt to the east with eighty men to block the enemy’s retreat; Major Fish with the main force was to rush up the sloping barricade, as soon as the axmen cleared the ditch, veer off to the west and charge the redoubt at the cliff’s edge. The entire force would attack silently, muskets unloaded, bayonets fixed. Until utter darkness, the men would eat their dinner of boiled beef and rest behind the lines. Shortly before dark, Washington rode over to Hamilton’s battalion and made a short, earnest speech. The army expected “something grand to be done by our infantry.”30
Soon after dark, six quick bursts by French artillery signaled the attack. Hamilton and his men sprang from their trenches and charged. A Hessian guard called a challenge, “Wer da? (“Who goes?”). When he got no answer, the redoubt’s defenders opened fire. At point-blank range before he was discovered, Hamilton, not waiting for the axmen to clear a path through the barricade of pointed trees, led the charge, struggling through the jagged tangle. Leaping into the ditch under heavy fire, he led his swarming troopers up the rampart, then climbing onto the shoulders of a larger man, yelling, swinging his sword, he rode over the parapet, then jumped down. According to Colonel John Lamb, his old New York artillery commander, he was the first American to enter the British redoubt. Laurens, meanwhile, had charged in from the fort’s open rear and captured the British commander. Major Fish, rushing in from the left flank, closed the ring around the enemy. For ten minutes, hand-to-hand bayonet combat raged in the dark. Four Allied officers including his former teacher, Colonel Barber, suffered bullet or bayonet wounds. A sergeant and eight privates died; twenty-five more enlisted men suffered wounds. Of the British and German defenders, eight were killed or wounded, seventeen surrendered, ninety-five escaped. A proud Hamilton had taken the key stronghold in less than half the time it took the French to capture Redoubt Number Nine. With five-to-one casualties, the Franco-American troops had taken the redoubts, enabling Allied artillery to be moved up. The British guns in the redoubts, turned against the British holdouts, hammered them at only two hundred yards now.
Writing a long field report to Lafayette the next day praising each officer by name, Hamilton then wrote Betsy:
Two nights ago, my Eliza, my duty and my honor obliged me to take a step in which your happiness was too much risked. I commanded an attack upon one of the enemy’s redoubts. We carried it in an instant, and with little loss. You will see the particulars in the Philadelphia papers. There will be, certainly, nothing more of this kind. All the rest will be by [entrenching] approach, and if there should be another occasion, it will not fall to my turn to execute it.31
In this moment of his greatest military glory, Hamilton did not elaborate to his six-months-pregnant wife the details of his gallantry, nor did he in his report or in any other way seek praise. But here he was, hinting that his action was without possible parallel at the same time he was apologizing for it and promising not to take such a risk again. It was becoming a pattern, the bold action, then the afterthought of reassurance that he would in future refrain from yielding to his sense of “my duty and my honor.” Most of all, Hamilton was keenly aware that an old wound had healed, that he had redeemed himself with his master, his master with him. He would no longer need to grovel after praise or nurse his prickly doubt of his own honor. Washington himself now praised him in his highest terms: Alexander Hamilton’s “bravery” was “emulous,” the commander-in-chief wrote. (Or was it an aide and Washington signed the words?) “Few cases have exhibited stronger proofs of intrepidity, coolness and firmness” than Hamilton had shown in storming redoubt number ten. And Washington singled him out for bravery in his report to Congress.
ALEXANDER HAMILTON’S last act in the American Revolution came on October 16, 1781, after six years of active duty. Three days later, the British and German regiments marched between lines of American and French troops, their flags cased and their bands playing a popular English tune, “The World Turned Upside Down.” To Betsy, Hamilton wrote tersely, “Cornwallis and his army are ours.” The next day, he would set out for Albany “and I hope to embrace you in three weeks.” Hamilton did not stop as he raced north before winter set in along the Hudson. His father-in-law Schuyler apologized when Hamilton did not even pause to visit their close friend James Duane, who was to be Hamilton’s law preceptor. “He thought of nothing but reaching his wife the soonest possible and, indeed, he tired his horses to accomplish it and was obliged to hire others.”32
Hamilton did not even stop at Philadelphia to convey the news of victory at Yorktown to an anxiously awaiting Congress. The honor of bearing official news of the great event went to Washington’s more steadfast aide, Tench Tilghman. Hamilton would hear soon enough of the embarrassing scene in the capital at Philadelphia. The American treasury was empty. Elias Boudinot reported, “When the messenger brought the news of the capitulation, it was necessary to furnish him with hard money for his expenses. There was not a sufficiency in the Treasury to do it. The Members of Congress each paid a dollar to accomplish it.”33
IN JANUARY 1782, an exhausted Hamilton, “still alternately in and out of bed,” learned that the Continental Congress, on the last day of that annus mirabilis 1781, had voted to retain Hamilton in service as the Revolution came to an end. Benjamin Lincoln, now secretary of war, who had witnessed Hamilton’s bravery at Yorktown and had followed his five-year career as a staff officer, praised Hamilton’s “superior abilities and knowledge.” Congress voted that Hamilton was entitled to continue rank, pay, and pension, in addition to bonuses of land according to his rank. Colonel Hamilton was entitled to one thousand acres of federal land. Hamilton wrote Washington, asking to be put on the inactive list, pledging that he would be “ready to obey the call of the public in any capacity, civil or military,” if the need arose. At the same time, since he saw no real prospect of a new field command, he renounced “any future involvements from my commission during the war or after it.”