From the small, shabby house along the Hudson River in Albany, New York, which he rented for his bride, Betsy, and their infant son, Alexander Hamilton sent off a letter to his old friend the Marquis de Lafayette, back in his palatial hôtel on the rue St. Honoré on Paris’s Right Bank, on November 3, 1782. It had been a year and a few days now since the two comrades-in-arms had led the final glorious assault on Cornwallis’s fortifications at York-town. Lafayette and the French army had passed the winter in Virginia, then, as the French troops sailed back to their base at Newport, Rhode Island, Lafayette had sailed for France to help move along the peace talks in Paris. Washington had marched his victorious army back north to resume the envelopment of the British in New York City. Seeing “no practice but of an inactive campaign,” Hamilton explained to Lafayette, he had left the army, giving up any right to future pay and clinging only to his rank:
I have been employed for the last ten months in rocking the cradle and studying the art of fleecing my neighbors. I am now a grave counselor at law, and shall soon be a grand member of Congress. The Legislature at their last session took it into their heads to name me pretty unanimously one of their delegates. I am going to throw away a few more months in public life and then I retire a simple citizen and good paterfamilias.
But the real reason behind Hamilton’s newsy letter to Lafayette was that only a few days before, he had learned that, in the last land skirmish of the Revolution, in a needless, senseless little fight in the godforsaken backwater swamps of South Carolina, their dear friend John Laurens, indeed Alexander Hamilton’s closest friend, had been killed. “Poor Laurens,” he wrote of their old mess—and dueling-partner. “He has fallen a sacrifice to his ardor in a trifling skirmish.” No one else but Lafayette could quite understand how devoted to each other Laurens and Hamilton had become during the dangerous days of Brandywine and Germantown, in the duel with Lee after Monmouth. “You know how truly I loved him.” Now, at last, Laurens had distinguished himself—as the only one of Washington’s aides to die in battle.1
In that last year of Laurens’s life, Hamilton and his friend had exchanged a burst of letters after a long silence that followed Hamilton’s courtship and marriage. Considering himself shamed by his capture at the fall of Charleston in 1780, Laurens had earned a reputation for desperate recklessness in battle. Wounded four times, Laurens may have survived so long only because Congress had sent him on a diplomatic mission to Paris. But he had returned to the fierce guerrilla warfare in the Carolinas. The crushing defeat of his plan to raise black troops, arm, and free them seemed to make him take even greater risks in combat. First, the legislatures of South Carolina, then Georgia, had rejected his personal appeals. Then southern officers had refused to serve under him. Yet, when Hamilton wrote to Laurens that he planned to eschew further public life, retire to a modest law practice, and enjoy the company of his wife and his firstborn son, his old friend Laurens berated him: “Your private affairs cannot require such immediate and close attention; you speak like a paterfamilias, surrounded by numerous progeny.” When Hamilton failed to respond, Laurens wrote plaintively, presciently to him:
Adieu, my dear friend. While circumstances place so great a distance between us, I entreat you not to withdraw the consolation of your letters. You know the unalterable sentiments of your affectionate Laurens.2
On August 15, 1782, Hamilton finally wrote Laurens to assure him he would assume his seat in Congress. With a peace treaty at hand and British troops already beginning to embark for Europe, Hamilton wrote (from Albany) that “this state has pretty unanimously delegated me to Congress.” His aim was “to make our independence a blessing.” To do this “we must secure our union on solid foundations, a Herculean task.” Hamilton already was pushing for reforms to Congress that would strengthen the new nation’s government, but first “mountains of prejudice must be leveled.” Hamilton urged Laurens to join him in the formidable task of nation building:
It requires all the virtue and all the abilities of the country. Quit your sword, my friend, put on the toga, come to Congress. We know each other’s sentiments, our views are the same. We have fought side by side to make America free. Let us hand in hand struggle to make her happy.3
But Hamilton’s belated plea did not reach Laurens in time. On Sunday evening, August 25, 1782, three hundred British soldiers raided up the Combahee River in South Carolina, landing at Arthur Middle-ton’s plantation, where they began to round up slaves and barrels of rice. The next morning, Colonel Laurens, with only 50 men, set out to attack 150 redcoats entrenched behind felled trees and screened by dense underbrush. Refusing to await reinforcements who were only two miles away, Laurens, “who wanted to do it all himself,” a subordinate wrote, “to gain a laurel for his brow before the cessation of hostilities,” led the charge into deadly British volleys. Laurens collapsed, mortally wounded. His pointless death in the last engagement of a seven-year-long war stunned Americans. “Poor Laurens is fallen in a paltry little skirmish,” wrote Nathanael Greene, commander of the Southern Army. “Our country has lost its most promising character,” wrote John Adams from Paris to his fellow peace commissioner, Henry Laurens. From Albany, Alexander Hamilton poured out his grief seven weeks later when he finally received the news. “I feel the deepest affliction,” he wrote Greene:
How strange are human affairs [that] so many excellent qualities could not ensure a more happy fate. The world will feel the loss of a man who has left few like him behind…of a citizen whose heart realized that patriotism of which others only talk. I feel the loss of a friend I truly and most tenderly loved, and one of a very small number.4
Laurens’s death was a doleful drumbeat at the end of the Revolution, but for Hamilton it was not the last. A few months later, a courier from Washington’s headquarters reached Hamilton at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where he had taken his place behind the green baize-covered table of the New York delegation. The courier reported that Lieutenant Colonel Francis Barber, Hamilton’s classics master at Elizabethtown Academy and his comrade-in-arms at Yorktown, while riding home from headquarters at New Windsor, New York, the afternoon of February 11, 1783, to escort his wife to tea with Martha Washington, was crushed to death by a tree felled by soldiers cutting it down for firewood. Apparently, by this time, Hamilton was too numb to react. No word of his survives to mourn Barber’s death. But by now, Hamilton was caught up in a new career, a new struggle, and he rarely stopped for a minute to look back.
HAMILTON HAD returned to The Pastures, the Schuylers’ Albany mansion, from the decisive victory at Yorktown in time for the birth of his firstborn son, Philip—named for Betsy’s father. The new family lived for a while in a cottage on the grounds of the Schuyler estate, but Hamilton wanted to be free of his father-in-law’s largesse—and the political criticism that would come with it. When the child was seven months old, Hamilton wrote to fellow aide-de-camp Richard Kidder Meade of Virginia that, since his homecoming, he had immersed himself in law books he borrowed from Schuyler’s ample library. “I have been studying the law for some months,” he wrote Meade, “and lately have been licensed as an attorney.”
To his old and recently married friend living in the Shenandoah Valley, Hamilton wrote of his new life as husband and father, relishing his new voice. “I heartily felicitate on the birth of your daughter. I can well conceive your happiness,” because Hamilton had just felt “a similar one.” Philip Schuyler, the first of the Hamiltons’ eight children, had been born on January 22nd. “The sensations of a tender father,” he added, “can only be conceived by those who have experienced them.” Hamilton had never experienced a happy home life before:
You cannot imagine how entirely domestic I am growing. I lose all taste for the pursuits of ambition. I sigh for nothing but the company of my wife and baby.
Five months later, when little Philip was all of seven months old, Hamilton wrote Kidder again after Kidder reproached him for not saying “enough about our little stranger.” Kidder’s daughter, about the same age, “will not consult you about the choice”:
He is truly a very fine young gentleman, the most agreeable in his conversation and manners of any I know—nor less remarkable for his intelligence and sweetness of temper. It is agreed on all hands that he is handsome, his features are good, his eye is not only sprightly and expressive but full of benignity.
Hamilton doted on baby Philip’s every motion in this playful letter. By “connoisseurs of sitting” he was “esteemed graceful.” The infant “has a method of waving his hand that announces the future orator.” The child was trying to stand up “rather awkwardly and his legs have not all the delicate slimness of his father’s. It is feared he may never excel as much in dancing. If he has any fault in manners, he laughs too much.”5
As early as his student days at King’s College, Alexander Hamilton had engrossed himself in the law, surreptitiously carrying out his research for his newspaper attacks on Loyalists in the college’s ample law library. On January 18, 1782, as he was recovering from arriving home seriously ill and exhausted from Virginia, the New York Assembly had passed a law suspending until the last day of April 1782 the 1778 requirement of a rigorous three-year clerkship for
such young gentlemen who had directed their studies to the profession of the law but upon the breaking out of the present war had entered into the army in defense of their country.
As the deadline neared, Hamilton went before the State Supreme Court in the temporary capital at Poughkeepsie on April 26, 1782, and declared that he had, “previous to the war, directed his studies to law” but that his army service had made it impossible to resume his studies in time to meet the new deadline. He was telling the truth, even if he was stretching it: at King’s, he had done a fair amount of reading of the law books donated by a Scottish merchant. His 1775 pamphlet, The Farmer Refuted, specifically cited Sir William Blackstone and Sir Edward Coke, the famous English jurists. Julius Goebel, preeminent authority on Hamilton’s legal career, writes that Hamilton, twenty when he wrote The Farmer Refuted, “not only cites from law books that were standard professional fare but discloses his exposure to works on natural law—Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke and others” on which “the very babes of the Enlightenment were suckled.” At most, however, as a student at King’s he had devoted about two months to his studies between writing political tracts. Even here, he referred only to the opening chapters of Blackstone’s 1763 four-volume Commentaries on the Laws of England. Yet he had also obviously consulted Beawe’s scholarly Lex Mercatoria on mercantile law.
Alexander Hamilton’s first legal filing was to seek a six-month extension for his studies. He succeeded where only one other applicant did, thus winning an advantage over many who had rushed their studies and others without the nerve to ask for more time. The other applicant who was cramming for the bar exams in the Schuyler library at The Pastures was erstwhile New York militia Colonel Aaron Burr. A year younger than Hamilton, the son of the second president of Princeton College and grandson of evangelist Jonathan Edwards, its founder, he had graduated from the college a year before Hamilton applied, studied theology briefly, then began to study law. Serving under Charles Lee at the Battle of Monmouth and briefly a member of Washington’s staff, he had left headquarters because he thought Hamilton had too much influence. He had commanded the troops at West Point briefly, establishing a reputation as a harsh disciplinarian. Once, in a rage, he had lopped off the arm of a rebellious soldier with one strike of his saber. Disgusted after Washington transferred him to command militia in Westchester County, he had resigned from the army in 1779 on grounds of ill health. He studied law in New Jersey, which had a three-year minimum. When he heard New York had waived the rule for veterans, he hurried to Albany, armed with a letter to General Schuyler, who let him share his library with Hamilton. The two had a tug-of-war for law books that ended in both of them passing the exams.6
Hamilton had already begun to read law in the law offices of his in-law James Duane. His bold request for a six-month extension came eleven days after his appointment as the federal tax collector for the State of New York. This, his first political appointment, evidently had less to do with the fact that he was the son-in-law of the influential Philip Schuyler than with his own audacious letters to members of Congress and “The Continentalist” newspaper articles he had published while he was still in the army. On April 15, Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris offered the twenty-seven-year-old war hero the post of Receiver of Continental Taxes for New York. The post normally provided a commission of one fourth of 1 percent of all moneys he collected. Hamilton could not have learned of his appointment, so slow were the mails, until weeks after he won from the Supreme Court his extension to study. Initially, Hamilton wrote Morris that he could not spare any time from his studies. He knew that New York had been devastated by six years of warfare and had little money to pay taxes. Five of fourteen counties, including New York City, were still occupied by the British Army, including its most lucrative port, the source in peacetime, through customs duties, of most federal revenue in the state. Hamilton calculated that the post could not pay much more than about $250 a year at present. But when he refused Morris’s first blandishment, Morris counteroffered. Hamilton’s commission was to be calculated not on what he collected but on what New York State owed the Continental treasury. Morris sweetened the deal by saying that Hamilton would not have to assume his duties until he completed his legal studies. Hamilton, eager to be financially independent of his in-laws, this time accepted. To Robert Morris goes the credit for spotting Alexander Hamilton’s financial genius.7
Hamilton characteristically began to juggle his studies with his first political office. Since there were still no law schools, he persuaded his King’s College roommate, Robert Troup, to come live with him and be his tutor. To make room for his star boarder, wife, baby and a serving maid, Hamilton rented a run-down little house on the Albany waterfront. He was developing a phobia against accepting any financial help from his father-in-law—even as General Schuyler’s prestige and political connections distinguished Hamilton from scores of threadbare legal acolytes trying to carve out livings for themselves—and became, like so many others, a veteran without a pension at war’s end. From his rented house, he could ride each day with his friend Troup over to Duane’s temporary law office in Albany or out on circuit to the courthouses of surrounding counties. Duane, a specialist in land law, had an excellent private law library for the time. His shelves sagged under the leather-bound tomes of theorists of natural law, commentaries, English judicial reports—plus the standard legal reference works of the day. Hamilton’s subsequent writings suggest he familiarized himself with Richardson’s Attorney’s Practice, Jacob’s New Law Dictionary, Bacon’s New Abridgment of the Law, Bathurst’s Introduction to the Law Relative to Trials, and Gilbert’s History and Practice of Civil Courts, all treatises on the laws of England that New York was to follow more closely than any other state. He now shared law books with Troup and John Lansing, another student, until they passed their bar exams in April. In all, Hamilton ranged widely over them for ten months—with Troup and Lansing answering his questions and coaching him for the examination.
Hamilton delved into two authors in particular. One was the conservative William Blackstone, whose four volumes of published 1758 Vinerian Lectures at Oxford approached best-seller status in America, favored by lawyers such as John Adams. But his readings of Emmerich de Vattel’s writings on natural law and the law of nations reshaped his thinking. He also soaked up the Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius’s 1625 book The Rights of War and Peace, and the German Samuel F. Pufendorf’s 1703 Law of Nature and Nations. He also devoured the writings of Jean Jacques Burlamaqui, a Geneva law professor whose Principles of Natural and Political Law drew the criticism of Hamilton’s mentor Duane as “rather an introduction than a system.” Vattel had taken Burlamaqui’s undigested work and, in 1750, transformed it into his own The Law of Nations. Hamilton would soon marshal all these works on international law in pivotal trials in New York’s courts.8
Of all his gleanings, Hamilton seems to have been the most impressed by Blackstone’s commentary on the English parliamentary system. After years of watching a weak national government, he could only applaud Blackstone’s prescription that Parliament, or an effective Congress, “can do everything that is not naturally impossible.” Blackstone was to influence Hamilton to part company with other American Revolutionaries such as Thomas Jefferson, who favored the natural law philosophy of John Locke. In Blackstone, he found a true conservatism, the basis for building on the law of nations and the common law of England and opposing the more radical state constitutions as well as the extremism of the French Revolution:
No human laws suppose a case which at once must destroy all law and compel men to build afresh upon a new foundation. So long as the English constitution lasts, we may venture to affirm that the power of Parliament is absolute and without control.
Hamilton had just risked his life in a long revolution against parliamentary power, but as the fighting sputtered out, he looked around him at confusion and ineptitude and found himself yearning for something like a powerful American parliament. In Blackstone, Hamilton found an answer to the tension he had felt between liberty and freedom. While mankind had the natural right to freedom—”one of the gifts of God to man at his creation when he endowed him with the faculty of free will”—in an orderly society the citizen had to give up “part of his natural liberty as the price of so valuable a purchase.” He had to “conform to those laws which the community has thought proper to establish.” Hamilton admired Blackstone’s felicitous writing. He found wisdom in Blackstone’s logic. “This species of legal obedience and conformity is infinitely more desirable than that wild and savage liberty which is sacrificed to obtain it.” He agreed with Blackstone’s conclusion that “laws, when prudently framed, are by no means subversive but rather [introduce] liberty.” Even John Locke would agree with Blackstone that “where there is no law there is no freedom.”
From Blackstone, Hamilton would draw his theory of federalism, but he would argue with Blackstone’s indivisible sovereignty. Already, in “The Continentalist Number Two,” published July 19, 1781, Hamilton had argued for a division of sovereignty. The English notion of king, lords and commons, of a king in council, must be adapted to an idea of mixed power—president, Senate and House of Representatives. Hamilton differed completely from Blackstone only on one major premise—Blackstone opposed judicial review. Hamilton would champion it.
To synthesize the vast amount of material, he found there was no manual of proper legal procedures to expedite his studies. So he wrote one, the first handbook for the use of practicing lawyers ever written in America. He summarized proper procedures and the essence of the laws in a 177-page manuscript of some forty thousand words under major headings such as Damages, Process, Joint Actions, Judgment and Execution, Pleas, Venue, and Habeas Corpus. So accurate and thorough was his research that modern legal scholars have found only eight minor errors in the lengthy work. Hamilton’s Practical Proceedings in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, the only legal handbook available for law students struggling with the transition from British to American law, has a wry, resigned, almost sarcastic tone perfect for its audience, as in his comment on the needless complexity and jargon of judges’ written decisions:
The court lately acquired some faint idea that the end of suits of law is to investigate the merits of the case and not to entangle in the nets of technical terms.
Hamilton criticized the inconsistency of New York court pleadings as “among the absurdities with which the law abounds.” One section of English common law, on trespass and ejectment, he derided as “a creature of Westminster Hall [that] subsists chiefly upon fiction.” And he freely mocked his future colleagues to be for “the caviling petulance of an attorney.” While he disparaged lawyers, Hamilton loved the law. Hamilton’s manual was to be copied out by numerous law students, including his own, and was to be published a decade later as the standard manual for New York lawyers. Pacing back and forth and reciting aloud from it, Hamilton memorized his own book.9
It was Vattel’s work that Hamilton most admired, for its forceful logic, thoroughness, and terse, clear style. From it he corrected and fortified his already impressive knowledge of the principles of natural law. From the Dutch master, he learned confirmation of his half-formed, intuitive ideas of the difference between natural rights and the more tough-minded natural law, of the laws of states and of nations, a realization that proved crucial in shaping his ever-stronger nationalism. Natural rights, Vattel asserted, were “nothing more than the power of doing what is morally possible,” what is “proper and consistent duty.” For Hamilton, this was too passive a way to build a government.
Hamilton did not need all the time he had asked to study for his bar examinations. Anxious to launch his political career, he stood for his examination and was admitted an attorney in July, three months before the extended deadline, and in October was admitted a “counselor to the bar,” equivalent to an English barrister, allowing him to argue cases in court. He could afford no more time!10
Even as he pored over the law books in the spring of 1782, he had not been able to stay out of public view. In April 1782, only a week before he applied for more time to prepare for his bars, he broke into print again in the New York Packet with “The Continentalist Number Five” in a direct assault on the Articles of Confederation, the new nation’s frame of government. Adopted by Congress in 1777 but ratified by the states only one year before Hamilton’s attack, the Articles were, Hamilton contended, deeply flawed, in great part because they left to the individual states, not Congress, control over commerce. “The power of regulatory trade ought to have been a principal object of the confederation,” Hamilton began his fifth salvo against the weaknesses of the Continental Congress. He boldly took on laissez-faire capitalism:
There are some who maintain that trade will regulate itself and is not to be benefited by the encouragements or restraints of government. Such persons imagine that there is no need of a common directing power. This is one of those wild speculative paradoxes [growing] among us, contrary to the uniform practice and sense of the most enlightened nations.
Unregulated commerce, Hamilton argued, contradicted institutions and laws everywhere “for the benefit of trade.” To discontinue these laws would lead to “palpable evils.” Commerce “has its fixed principles” and “it must be regulated.” If they were violated, American trade would be injured. Principal among these was balance in trade:
To preserve the balance of trade in favor of a nation ought to be a leading aim of its policy. The avarice of individuals may frequently find its account in pursuing channels of traffic prejudicial to that balance.
But the government must impose impediments to individual greed. At the same time, an enlightened national trade policy, “though accompanied with great difficulties” at first, would “amply reward the trouble and expense.” He detailed how France and the Netherlands had grown into international giants of trade under strict government regulation and supervision. To inaugurate such a system in the United States would require, first of all, something else the Articles of Confederation failed to provide—a source of national revenue. “No mode can be so convenient” as moderate import duties on luxury goods, contended the newly appointed Receiver of Continental Taxes for New York.
Hamilton may have been a twenty-seven-year-old neophyte to politics, but he was not naive. Many Americans would object to customs duties, one of the principal irritants that had helped bring on the Revolution. But circumstances had changed. His countrymen, he knew, “characteristically” were “ingenious in finding out and magnifying the minutest disadvantages” and they were equally adept at “reject[ing] measures of evident utility to avoid trivial and sometimes imaginary evils.” But unless the new nation could “overcome this narrow disposition” it would “never be a great or a happy people.”11
The surrender of Cornwallis’s army in Virginia had brought about the fall of the war ministry of Lord North and the collapse of any hope for an English victory in America. British naval defeats in 1781 and early 1782 sped the progress of peace talks in Paris. A new commander-in-chief, Sir Guy Carleton, arrived in New York City in May 1782, just after Hamilton’s latest critique of the American government, but it would be another year before a peace treaty won ratification by Congress and six more months before the final British evacuation of New York. Hamilton was in no hurry to hang out his lawyer’s shingle until the British left Manhattan. Instead, he concentrated on solidifying his political base. With the backing of Philip Schuyler, he now set out to gain the crucial support of Robert Morris, who had emerged as leader of the nationalists in Congress.
In his new post as Continental Receiver, Hamilton lobbied the New York legislature, prodding it to vote the funds owed Congress for arrears in its proportional assessments. He also campaigned unsuccessfully for a better way to collect taxes, but everyone knew that most of New York’s revenues were frozen as long as the British occupied New York City. While obviously treading water, Hamilton, with Schuyler’s backing, in July 1782 persuaded the New York Assembly to pass a series of resolutions he drafted that called for a national convention to buttress the powers of the Continental Congress and amend the Articles of Confederation. Two days after these resolutions passed, the legislature elected Hamilton as one of its four-man congressional delegation. While his call for a federal reform convention fizzled, Alexander Hamilton, at twenty-seven, was appointed to the Continental Congress on July 22, 1781, and took his seat in Congress on November 25.
THE WAR was over, but the long lag in communications while draft treaties crossed the Atlantic Ocean twice in each direction led to a series of crises that awaited the first postwar Continental Congress. The first crisis had been brewing for some time: what to do about the Loyalists. Article Five of the Treaty of Paris, the most fought-over passage of the peace agreement, pledged Congress to “earnestly recommend” to the state legislatures full restitution of the rights and property of the Loyalists. In fact, no state felt bound by this recommendation while Loyalists saw British accession to this weak wording as a complete sellout of Loyalist rights. A welter of wartime anti-Loyalist laws remained on the books in each state after the peace treaty. Nine states had passed acts exiling prominent Loyalists. Those who remained had to pay double or triple taxes. Five states had disenfranchised Loyalists. Every state had barred Loyalists from public office and from the practice of law and medicine. All the states had passed laws confiscating Loyalist lands.
The fury against the Loyalists showed no sign of ending with the peace treaty. Sales of confiscated property continued, debts due to Loyalists were legally withheld. State governments shelved petitions to be allowed to return from banishment or restoration of property. Hamilton would argue in vain against these violations of the peace treaty. If the states did not restrain the violence of mobs, they became responsible for them. Worst were the continuing confiscations “going on in form of law,” breaking Article Six of the treaty, which specifically promised no further injury to the Loyalists. If America repudiated parts of the treaty, so could the British. They could, he warned, refuse to give up their frontier forts, impinge access to Grand Banks fisheries, invoke their Navigation Acts, and cut off American trade with Canada and in the Caribbean.
Worse, he feared the flight of capital from the threadbare new nation. To his friend Gouverneur Morris, he wrote, “We are doing those things which we ought not to do, and leaving undone those things which we ought to do. Instead of wholesome regulations for the improvement of our polity and commerce, we are laboring to continue measures to mortify and punish Tories and to explain away treaties.” Passing through New York City while Congress was in adjournment, Hamilton wrote to former New York Congressman Robert R. Livingston:
The spirit of emigration has greatly increased of late. Some violent papers sent into the city have determined many to depart who hitherto had intended to remain. Many merchants of second class, characters of no political consequence, each of whom may carry away eight or ten thousand guineas [$350,000 to $500,000 in today’s dollars] have, I am told, lately applied for shipping to convey them away. Our state will feel for twenty years at least the effects of the popular frenzy.
Hamilton’s dire forecast proved accurate: on April 26, 1783, more than seven thousand Loyalists, including most of New York’s lawyers, merchants, and Anglican clergy, sailed from New York harbor into exile.12
As the preliminary treaty sped across the Atlantic for ratification by Congress, the first shiploads of Loyalist refugees began to clear New York and Charleston harbors bound for England, Nova Scotia, and the Caribbean. A vast migration began of more than one hundred thousand Americans going into exile, more than 5 percent of the population, probably the highest refugee rate of any revolution. They left because, as a British envoy at the Paris peace talks put it, they faced the choice of fleeing or, if they remained in the United States, being “terrified into submission” by vengeful Revolutionaries, who blamed the length and severity of the war on their damned Tory brothers.
What the Loyalists could expect had been made clear by the time the British surrendered at Yorktown. All through the last two years of Revolution, the British had repeatedly left the Loyalists to Patriot reprisals as they came and went, marching and countermarching, but rarely protecting the Loyalists they left in their wake. The Loyalists had lost thousands of lives in battles with hard-riding, British-hating rebel partisans who, time after time, had cut them off from rescue by the redcoats and slaughtered them piecemeal. Of more than 1,250 military engagements in the eight-year-long struggle, the vast majority were between partisan bands. At the worst debacle, at King’s Mountain in the North Carolina backcountry, more than one thousand Loyalist troops had been killed or wounded in less than an hour. Patriot mountain men had lynched eighteen Loyalist prisoners on the battlefield after they had surrendered. At Yorktown, hundreds of Loyalists rowed frantically after the crowded British sloop Bonetta as it sailed away crammed with British officers. The British captain allowed only fourteen Loyalists on board; the rest were overtaken and hauled back by Washington’s troops. When the Bonetta arrived in New York City, despair swept over refugee camps in the city and on Long Island that were crowded with forty thousand Loyalist refugees from New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.13
In the dying months of the Revolution, Loyalists in New York had organized a Board of Associated Loyalists that sent out partisan bands to take hostages, pillage coastal towns, and disrupt American communications. One raid, allegedly authorized by the board’s president, William Franklin (the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin), took a New Jersey artillery officer, Captain Joshua Huddy, from a prison ship, rowed him ashore, and without the slightest pretense of a court-martial, hanged him from a gallows made of three fence rails. On Huddy’s chest the Loyalist executioners pinned a placard promising to hang “man for man as long as a refugee is left existing: Up goes Huddy for Philip White!”—a Loyalist killed by Patriots.14
When a British court-martial acquitted the leader of the Loyalist band for lack of evidence, General Washington flew into a rage and ordered the hanging of a British officer of equal rank to the Patriot captain unless the British handed over William Franklin, the man Washington was sure had ordered the hanging. On Washington’s orders, ten captains among the British officers taken at Yorktown were instructed to draw lots to see which one of them would be hanged in retaliation. When they refused, Washington ordered that lots be drawn for them. The lot fell to seventeen-year-old Captain Asgill of the Grenadier Guards, son of a member of Parliament. Washington ordered Asgill brought from Virginia to headquarters at Morristown, New Jersey, and placed in solitary confinement. When Washington ordered a gallows built in sight of the prisoner to carry out his threat, the British prisoner’s mother wrote a personal letter to Queen Marie Antoinette of France, appealing to her as a mother to intercede with the king to ask Washington to relent. King Louis XVI immediately complied. The barrage of protests included an appeal from Alexander Hamilton, who wrote judiciously through General Henry Knox, now Washington’s closest confidant. Hamilton knew better than to make a frontal assault on Washington.15
From the Schuyler mansion (making it at least appear that his father-in-law agreed with him), Hamilton wrote Knox a stinging letter, intended for Washington’s eyes, that Asgill’s “execution by way of retaliation” appeared “clearly to be an ill-timed proceeding” that would be “derogatory to the national character” and “entirely repugnant to the genius of the age we live in.” It was “without example in modern history” and in Europe would be considered “wanton and unnecessary”:
So solemn and deliberate a sacrifice of the innocent for the guilty must be condemned, and encourage an opinion that we are in a certain degree in a state of barbarism. It would argue meanness in us. The death of André could not have been dispensed with, but it must still be viewed at a distance as an act of rigid justice. If we wreak our resentment on an innocent person, it will be suspected that we are too fond of executions.
Hamilton argued that Washington’s reputation as “the first and most respectable character among us” would be irreparably damaged. Hamilton made it clear to Knox that he opposed capital punishment as “extreme severity” and trusted Knox’s “liberality and influence” with Washington. Such behavior was “out of season.” The “time for it, if there ever was one, is past.”16
Hamilton’s letter coincided with the plea passed through diplomatic channels from the French monarchs who instructed the French minister in Philadelphia to intercede with Congress. Their letter was “enough to move the heart of a savage.” By now, Washington was only looking for a way out. He bowed to the wishes of Congress and the king of France. Elias Boudinot, now the president of Congress, added that he never saw so much ill blood in Congress as during the three-day debate it sparked. A chastened Washington reluctantly released Asgill, who now seemed, after six months under sentence of death, much older than his seventeen years.17
FOR THE next six years, Alexander Hamilton was essentially a New York politician in and out of Congress. Preparing himself for a prominent role in the first postwar Congress, Alexander Hamilton drew on his seven years of private and public contacts with New York’s Revolutionary leadership and wrote a confidential report to Superintendent of Finance Morris, the man with whom he was most eager to work on framing a stronger national government. Promising a “full view of the situation and temper” of New York, drawing on sources “not disposed to exaggerate its distresses as an excuse for inactivity,” he led off with the shocking statement that the war had cost New York “at least two thirds” of its revenues. Of the nine counties still in American hands, three had revolted against paying any taxes, two had been desolated by “the ravages of the enemy and of our own troops,” and the remaining four were only slightly less badly injured. Much of the manpower had been siphoned off by British and American recruiting; many others had immigrated to the relative safety of neutral Vermont. “The fact is, labor is much dearer than before the war.” The state had become impoverished and fatigued. What trade survived, with New York City still an enemy camp, was lucrative smuggling of luxury goods to the British and Loyalists. It was forbidden by “a severe law,” but, Hamilton said, “what will laws avail against the ingenuity and intrepidity of avarice?” While tea was the hated symbol of the English before the Revolution, New Yorkers spent more to smuggle in this luxury than any other commodity. The state’s only successful—and legal—industry was selling supplies to the American and French armies, a $5.5 million trade, in modern terms.
The political landscape, Hamilton reported, suffered from “the general disease which infects all our constitution, an excess of popularity.” There “is no order.” Politicians only cared “what will please, not what will benefit the people.” The only possible result, Hamilton believed, was “temporary expedient, fickleness and folly.” Yet he reserved his severest criticism for a system of taxation based on “circumstances and abilities collectively considered” out of a “desire for equality.” This attempt “at perfect equality has resulted in total inequality.” It had only succeeded in discriminating against the Loyalists, who formed a majority in many counties and was overburdening them. What a man looked like, “the decency or meanness of his manner of living, [his] personal friendships or the dislikes of the assessor” had more to do with what he paid than his “proportion of property.”
But the “temper” of the state, of its rulers and its people, drew Hamilton’s most acute assessment. Its “zealous” leaders were “jealous of their own power” yet they were willing to part with power “to the Federal Government”—and here he seemed to be using the words for the first time. Many who had served the common cause were disenchanted because they were so little appreciated. They were now determined only to maintain their own state government. The governor, George Clinton, had declined in popularity, partly because, Hamilton felt, he was poorly qualified to rule, partly because he ruled too well, insisting on strict adherence to law and to discipline in the militia. “He is, I believe, a man of integrity,” Hamilton told Morris, adding acidly, “He passes with his particular friends for a statesman.”
Surprisingly, Hamilton reported that his father-in-law, General Schuyler, had great influence in the assembly but not enough to keep his pet projects from “frequently miscarry[ing].” But Hamilton made it clear that Schuyler supported Morris and the nationalists. Hamilton dealt harshly with his fellow delegate to Congress, John Morin Scott: “Nature gave him genius, but habit has impaired it. He never had judgment; he now scarcely has plausibility.” He only embarrassed New York by his “violent professions of popular principles. His views as a statesman are warped.” His principles were “not the purest.” Rating every state senator and judge in this scathing white paper, Hamilton called Senator Abraham Yates, a Clinton lieutenant, “a man whose ignorance and perverseness are only surpassed by his pertinacity and conceit.” He had done so much damage to American credibility that he “deserves to be pensioned by the British Ministry.” Another Clintonian was “pretty remarkable for blunder.” Pointing out what must have become obvious to Robert Morris by now, that “I have neither flattered the state nor encouraged high expectations,” Hamilton closed his confidential critique of his adopted home state: “I thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be.”18
ALEXANDER HAMILTON’S first brief brush with congressional politics, from November 1782 to July 1783, came when Congress was at its weakest, challenged by the states at every turn. Hamilton was not very enthusiastic about the ability of Congress to govern the nation. “God grant the union may last,” he wrote soon after he took his seat. “But it is too frail now to be relied on, and we ought to be prepared for the worst.” But here, during one of the most fertile periods of his intellectual life, Hamilton made friends and built alliances with the brilliant handful of founders left over from the glorious days of 1776. Few of them stayed long amid the disarray of the Confederation Congress, but Hamilton won the respect in that short time of James Madison of Virginia, Robert Morris and James Wilson of Pennsylvania, John Rutledge of South Carolina, and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut. During his entire stay in Philadelphia, Elias Boudinot, his old mentor, presided over Congress. Together, these men worked hard if futilely to buttress the sagging reputation of the Confederation and its feeble Congress.19
As soon as he arrived at the imposing redbrick Independence Hall at Fifth and Chestnut Streets in Philadelphia on December 2, 1782, Hamilton encountered once again, as he had so often in the army, the obstructionism of the individual states. The delegates from Rhode Island brought assembly resolutions in their saddlebags to block the 5 percent general customs duty, approved by Congress early in 1781, the only hope for the solvency of the federal government to pay an increasingly impatient army, which refused to disband without at least part of its back pay and assurances of arrears and pensions. The money also was to pay the interest on foreign loans. The states had voted a $6 million Confederation budget for 1783, with $2 million to come from assessments on the states, and the balance expected to come from foreign loans. President Boudinot immediately appointed Hamilton, Madison, and Thomas Fitz-Simons of Pennsylvania to the congressional committee to report to the full Congress on Rhode Island’s objections. Rhode Island was contending that a national customs duty fell hardest on commercial states and would set up a federal bureaucracy unaccountable to the states, its officials not elected by each state’s citizens.
In his first report to Congress, a form he was to master and make the bedrock of his political career, Hamilton, writing for the committee from its inception, wrote on December 16 that the Revolutionary Congress was trying to preserve “a just measure to the abilities of individuals,” a progressive system of taxation that “promotes frugality and taxes extravagance.” Import duties fell on “the rich and luxurious in proportion to their riches and luxury, the poor and parsimonious in proportion to their poverty and [thrift].” State taxes had not worked. Many states had failed to pay their share of federal expenses, chiefly because they relied on borrowing. Only a central financing authority—”a central will”—could assure the credit of the new nation. If each state constantly revised Congress’s collective will, the United States could not hope for a good reputation among nations, and reputation and credit were inseparable. Already, the actions of individual states “inspired distrust.” Here, he was referring to many states printing their own devalued currency and paying debts with it. Hamilton warned Congress that the British were still “an enemy vigilant, intriguing, [and] well acquainted with our defects and embarrassments.”
At this point, Hamilton seized the opportunity to unveil his ingenious plan for a national debt to pay off the war loans of the confederated states and Congress. Unless interest was paid every year, the default “would stamp the national character with indelible disgrace.” To rely on annual votes of states in their legislatures and by delegations in Congress “will be too precarious.” To fund the national debt and then sell negotiable bonds based on this “active stock of the nation,” as he described such a debt, would increase this stock “by the whole amount of the domestic debt.” He insisted that, with a national debt funded by customs duties and the sale of government bonds instead of individual state debts, “the national credit would revive and stand hereafter on a secure basis.”
Hamilton’s proposal, supported by Madison—it was their first collaboration—came down hard on backsliding Rhode Islanders. For years, Congress had undertaken “the most full and solemn deliberation”:
Under a collective view of all the public difficulties, they recommend a measure which appears to them the cornerstone of the public safety. They see this measure suspended for nearly two years—partially complied with by some of the states, rejected by one of them. The public embarrassments [are] every day increasing, the dissatisfaction of the army growing more serious.
In a long catalogue of vices, Hamilton warned that “the hopes of our enemies” were being rekindled, “encouraged to protract the war” by the states’ pulling apart on basic policy. Not only was the “national character suffering” but the “national safety” was now at the mercy of each state’s self-interests.
Congress reacted to Hamilton’s report by voting to send a delegation to Rhode Island to urge compliance with the customs duty, but Rhode Island’s delegate, David Howell, moved for repeal. The December 17 motion was voted back into Hamilton’s committee, where it stagnated. Frustrated, nearly out of cash himself, Hamilton fired off letters to Poughkeepsie asking Governor Clinton to speed along his pay, preferably in notes drawn on Robert Morris’s Bank of North America. He had little confidence in Continental currency! And he pleaded with his wife to come to Philadelphia. It had been more than a month since he had left her at The Pastures with her family. The trip around enemy-occupied New York City over badly rutted roads in winter had a month earlier dissuaded him from bringing Betsy and their nine-month-old son with him to Philadelphia, only to stay in a boardinghouse. But now he had prepared lodgings. Betsy destroyed all her letters to Hamilton after he died in the course of the fifty years she outlived him, obliterating her intimacies, but a letter from Betsy unleashed all his loneliness: “I thank you, my love, for your precious letter,” so “full of that tender love which I hope will characterize us both to our latest hour.” Yet he felt compelled to reassure her of his constancy: “There never was a husband who could vie with yours in fidelity and affection.” He was beginning to be “insupportably anxious to see you again. I hope this pleasure may not be long delayed.” Winter snows made travel easier—by horse-drawn sleigh. “I wish you to take advantage of the first good snow that promises to carry you through,” the West Indian urged the upstate New Yorker. Betsy and their baby were to stop over at Par-sippany, New Jersey, at the home of one of the Van Cortlandts, relatives of her mother. She was to seek the advice of her friends about the best route, which would depend on how solidly frozen the Hudson River was when she sledded across with her servant and the baby. He did not want her to “make so long a journey alone.” When she reached New Jersey, “write me of your arrival and I will come for you.” Come to think of it, she was to write first when she set out. If his letter did not already terrify her, he did not help matters with his “for God’s sake take care of my child on the journey, I am very apprehensive on his account.”20
BORN IN debt, the United States had not even a rudimentary tax system during the Revolution, raising money by confiscation of Loyalist property, fines of pacifists, forced loans of its citizens, just under $11 million ($140 million in today’s dollars) in foreign loans: $4.4 million from the French, $1.8 million from the Dutch government, $3.6 million in loans from Dutch bankers, and $175,000 from the Spanish treasury. The greatest source of United States cash was its own printing presses. By the end of the war, this fiat money amounted, at face value, to more than $200 million, about $2.5 billion in today’s money. By the time Hamilton took his seat in Congress, it had been forced to revalue earlier issues of Continental dollars at only 2.5 percent of face value—a devaluation of forty to one—thus coining the phrase “not worth a Continental.”
In theory, the financing of the Revolution was simple, the states supplying the funds and the Continental Congress distributing them. In practice, both the states and Congress spent large sums on their own initiatives. The states spent over $100 million ($1.3 billion in today’s money) for the common defense. Each state believed it had spent more than its share and was not receiving fair credit according to congressional accounting methods. New Englanders insisted on receipts for everything and believed Southerners used lax accounting methods to justify fraudulent claims. Southerners relied on slave labor and believed in pay-as-you-go while Northerners believed in investing in debt by discounting government vouchers and notes. Without congressional approval, Virginia, under Governor Thomas Jefferson, had backed George Rogers Clark’s expedition to seize the Ohio Country, and Virginia had been holding it for three years with a costly garrison of one thousand men, while Massachusetts carried out its own operations against the Loyalist stronghold of Penobscot, Maine. Both states insisted that the Union should reimburse them for their costs.
In addition, each state and the Continental Army used what were, in effect, forced loans, requisitioning food and supplies from citizens and promising to pay for the goods with IOUs that quickly depreciated as they passed from hand to hand. While these expedients had, with the help of France, its armies and navies, produced victory, by the time the Treaty of Paris, on September 3rd, 1783, acknowledged American independence from the British Empire, the United States was free, but in complete fiscal chaos. Congress was no longer paying interest on its bonds held by its own citizens, was months in arrears in paying its army, and had defaulted on its foreign debts. The cost of servicing the foreign debt approached $1 million a year, multiplied by a factor of seventeen into $17 million in hard money, or by a factor of forty, or $680 million, if any banker would accept depreciated Continental paper, which no one would.
WHILE CONGRESS quaked at the threat of tiny Rhode Island’s refusal to pay its fair share of the Continental expenses, another marginal New England entity—although no one knew what to call it yet—sprang onto the stage at Independence Hall. Vermont, as settlers between Lake Champlain and the Connecticut River called it, or the New Hampshire grants, as other New Englanders knew it, or the four easternmost counties of New York, as New Yorkers insisted on describing it, demanded to be admitted to the Continental union after five years as a self-proclaimed republic. In 1760, during the French and Indian Wars, the French had blown up their forts in the Champlain Valley and retreated into Canada, which they ceded to the English by the Treaty of Paris of 1763. That started a land rush into the vacuum they left. Two English colonies, New York and New Hampshire, claimed the unnamed territory. In one hour on one day, June 7, 1763, New Hampshire’s corpulent royal governor, Benning Wentworth, signed the papers chartering half a dozen townships with one hand as he pocketed gold coins, his fees for granting lands to investors he never saw, with the other. Between 1749 and 1764, Wentworth issued 135 township grants. Some twenty-five thousand settlers, the overflow population of Connecticut, the most crowded colony by the eve of the Revolution, flowed up the Connecticut River, filling forest clearings on the eastern slopes of the Green Mountains. On the western slopes, settlement was much slower, spreading north from Wentworth’s namesake, Bennington. The reason few settlers put down stakes along the Lake Champlain shore was that New York took issue with New Hampshire grants, arguing that the 1664 royal grant to the Duke of York included “all the lands from the west side of the Connecticut River to the east side of the Delaware Bay.”
Agreeing to turn the dispute over to the King’s Privy Council in London for arbitration, the New Yorkers sent agents to the hearings—who lied by testifying that all the settlers already on the contested ground were amenable to New York government and wouldn’t mind applying for—and paying fees for—second, or confirmatory grants. The 1764 royal ruling was that New York, indeed, extended to the “western bank of the Connecticut River.” At first, the settlers on the grants were not worried. They believed the ruling applied only to future grants. But not so New York’s officials, who declared all the New Hampshire grants null and void. They also annexed the disputed territory to New York’s existing counties, in each of four new counties creating New York courts and appointing sheriffs to enforce New York’s rights. Lord Dunmore, New York’s governor, began to issue new grants and pocket fees for them.
Organizing the settlers already on the land, Ethan Allen and his brothers, who had paid good money for the land, appealed to the New York courts, which ignored them. The Allens wrote pamphlets defending the settlers’ rights while the settlers raised the money to send agents to London to plead their case. As a result the British Crown in 1767 ordered New York to stop making grants to the disputed lands, but New York’s governors ignored the royal order from faraway London and sent sheriffs and posses to evict the settlers. On the eve of the Revolution, the Allens organized the Green Mountain Boys, the largest organized armed force in the colonies at the time, to resist New York’s actions. Unless they ousted the New Yorkers, they believed their lands would be worthless. Declared outlaws by New York, the Green Mountain Boys defended their settlements and evicted the New York sheriffs’ eviction parties. Acting as a provisional government based in a tavern in Bennington, they issued decrees and enforced them, in 1772 holding a convention and ordering that “no person should take grants” from New York. Up to two hundred Boys raided and destroyed settlements the New Yorkers attempted to plant. In 1774, the New York Assembly countered by passing a law “preventing tumultuous and riotous assemblies,” aimed at the Boys. Anyone assaulting a civil New York official or burning or destroying grain or hay would “suffer death.” A 50-pound reward was offered for Ethan Allen or other “ringleaders.” The Boys responded by seizing the Westminster courthouse. Two Boys were killed in the attack.
When the Revolutionary War broke out, the Boys joined the fray within days of Lexington and Concord, seizing Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point. When Ethan Allen led an unauthorized attack on Montreal in an attempt to annex French Canada, he was taken prisoner and shipped to England in chains. As a commissioner for prisoner exchanges, Alexander Hamilton helped arrange his release after three years of harsh treatment. The British counterattack of 1776 had all but emptied Vermont, but diehard settlers had organized their own government and sent delegates to the Continental Congress. There, New York objected to admitting Vermont to the Union. Congress had shelved Vermont’s petition, effectively upholding New York’s claim to control over the territory. Undeterred, Vermonters formed a republic in 1777 and sent troops to support the Continental Army in key battles, but they asserted their independence by negotiating with both the British in Canada and the Americans, managing to stay neutral through much of the war. Vermont again petitioned to join the union in 1777; again New York’s Convention countered by claiming Vermont was trying to “dismember” New York.21
In 1779, a British officer in full regalia appeared one day in Manchester and handed Ethan Allen an envelope. Within minutes, Allen turned it over to Governor Thomas Chittenden and his council. Under the guise of prisoner of war negotiations, Vermont’s leaders secretly brought about a ceasefire with the British in Canada that included New York’s frontier forts. At every step, Chittenden kept Philip Schuyler and through him General Washington, informed, even as Governor Clinton and his ruling New York faction worked hard to turn Congress against Vermont’s appeals for statehood. The controversy deepened when nineteen New Hampshire towns in the Connecticut Valley asked to be annexed by Vermont. When Vermont accepted, New Hampshire threatened to invade unless Vermont handed the towns back. Washington warned that when the territorial integrity of one state—New Hampshire—was violated, all of the United States would be obligated to respond militarily against Vermont.
As if to call Washington’s bluff, Vermont’s governor issued a proclamation declaring that Vermont’s southeastern boundary was the Hudson River. At a stroke of his quill, he added twenty miles of New York State to Vermont, including the Lake George region and a sizable chunk of Philip Schuyler’s lands. Now Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys were driving out New Yorkers living in Vermont, banishing them, telling them that if they returned they would be put to death and their properties confiscated and sold by Vermont. As Congress took up the Vermont crisis again, couriers raced between Vermont and American headquarters at New Windsor, New York. Secretly, Washington provided Chittenden with Congress’s resolutions. Only weeks after his victory at Yorktown, Washington warned Vermont that its “late extension of claim [has] rather diminished than increased the number of your friends [in Congress]. If such extension should be persisted in, it will be made a common cause.” Vermont’s annexations were “too serious to escape the ire of many Americans.” Washington predicted “a calamity”: he knew that, as the commander of New York’s militia, Governor Clinton was chomping at the bit to attack Vermont. This was “more to be dreaded than a necessity of coercion” by Congress and the Continental forces under Washington. The commander-in-chief wrote privately to Philip Schuyler, who had swung his support to Vermont’s independence, a letter Schuyler assuredly shared with Hamilton. Washington said he had shown his “private and confidential” letter to Chittenden “to a number of my friends, members of Congress.” He bluntly warned Governor Clinton that the majority of New Englanders, especially among his officers, supported Vermont statehood. Vermont then decided to return to its former boundaries and sent four agents to Congress to negotiate admission to the Union.22
Few members of Congress could have a more intimate knowledge of the Vermont controversy than Hamilton. His law preceptor, James Duane, was a major speculator in Vermont land; Hamilton’s father-in-law had launched the American attack on Canada in 1775 from Vermont’s shores and had long commanded the Northern Department, which included Vermont. As New York’s delegate to Congress, Hamilton would not be expected to take Vermont’s side, but he naturally arranged, with the support of President of Congress Boudinot, to serve on the key committee that would be considering Vermont’s and New York’s claims.
So “dangerous to the Confederacy” had the Vermont question become that, right after studying how to pay the army, Congress took up the New York Assembly’s demand for “the immediate and decided interposition of Congress.” In a motion Hamilton seconded, and in a report he prepared, Congress resolved that Vermont must give back any lands confiscated from New Yorkers and pay damages to four evicted landlords. At the same time, without mentioning the word Vermont, Congress asserted its authority over “the said district claiming to be independent,” and ordered both New York and Vermont to back away from the brink of an armed clash. Hamilton made Congress’s threat clear, however. “The United States will take effectual measures to enforce” its resolution, but Congress overruled the committee and struck out this menacing language.23 Cautious not to acknowledge the legitimacy of Vermont’s governor—and thus declare Vermont as a de facto legal entity—Hamilton sent a copy of the toothless resolution to “Thomas Chittenden Esquire of Bennington.” Privately, Hamilton wrote to his friend John Laurence, a New York legislator returning to Albany from a business trip to Philadelphia, to urge New York’s governor and assembly to “be moderate by all means.”24
HAMILTON’S FRUSTRATION over the weakness of the Confederation Congress grew as he realized that what he had once considered blundering and corruption by individual members was actually structural. Even the smallest state, Rhode Island, could refuse to pay its fair share of the army’s pay and the interest on foreign loans without fear of repercussions. When Congress did manage to pass a resolution calling for a visit to the Rhode Island Assembly by a congressional delegation to bring pressure on the recalcitrants, it later aborted even that weak maneuver when Virginia’s delegates also demurred from paying the largest state’s requisition for the second consecutive year. Determined to push for some small step toward reform, on December 20, Hamilton made a fresh motion to revise the requisitions on the states. According to the notes of an equally disgusted fellow committeeman, James Madison, that motion, too, met “with little patronage.” Hamilton withdrew it, and it never was entered in the congressional journal. As a result, the veto of the Rhode Island Assembly was enough, in Madison’s word, to “blast” the import duty so vital to funding the Confederation. “They absolutely refuse the only fund which could be satisfactory to lenders,” wrote Madison. His “indignation against this perverse sister is increased by her shameful delinquency in requisitions.”25
Only heavy winter snows in the Hudson Valley slowed the next round of rebuffs by New York in the Vermont controversy. Hamilton, earlier than most other New Yorkers, had come to favor a peaceful settlement. Governor Clinton was anything but mollified by Hamilton’s call for moderation. He was not convinced that Congress, after seven years of postponing any action, could be relied on to use appropriate force to stop the annexations. “If force is necessary,” Clinton told Hamilton, “the longer it is delayed, the more force it will require.” To the contrary, Clinton believed some members of Congress were encouraging Vermonters by “secret assurances that Congress will not direct any coercive measures against them.” Hamilton, aware that the New York Assembly was about to reconvene, hastily fired back a letter to Clinton that it was “of great importance” that New York give up any pretensions to winning its ancient claims to all of Vermont. He, too, had heard the rumors that many New England officers in the Continental Army had taken land grants in Vermont as rewards for their Revolutionary services. But now that Vermont had annexed lands in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, those states, too, would insist on a compromise, an idea Hamilton now urged on Clinton. He recommended that each state send peace commissioners. Once again, he was urging compromise to solve a stubborn problem. One month later, he wrote Clinton again that, in Congress, the Vermont question was “a business in which nobody cares to act with decision.” And the army—that meant Washington—was “much opposed to any experiment of force” where private interests, such as those of New York land speculators versus Vermont settlers, were at stake. “A peace may soon take place!” He urged that the affair should be speedily settled.26
So engrossed had Hamilton become by Congress’s “immediate concerns,” he wrote to his wife, that he had forgotten to tell her a “disagreeable piece of intelligence” he had received from Nathanael Greene when that general informed him of his friend Laurens’s death. The shock of that news, now two months old, had distracted Hamilton from telling his wife that his half brother, Peter Levine, had died in North Carolina. He felt little grief, he told Betsy. “You know the circumstances that abate my distress.” Levine “dies rich but has disposed of the bulk of his fortune to strangers.” Hamilton had not inquired how much Levine had left him, but “I am told he has left me a legacy.” Even after fifteen years, the bitterness of his penniless, orphaned childhood still came through.27
AND STILL Betsy did not come. It had been six weeks since Hamilton had left Albany, and his yearning for her mixed with his anxiety that something had befallen his wife and child along the treacherous roads. Adding to his worry was his knowledge that Loyalist raiders had disrupted the mails, “which deprives me of the pleasure of hearing from you.” Hamilton was “inexpressibly anxious”:
I write this for fear of the worst, but I should be miserable if I thought it would find you in Albany. Lose not a moment in coming to me. I have borne your absence with patience until about a week since. But the period we fixed for our reunion being come, I can no longer reconcile myself to it. Every hour in the day I feel a severe pang. Half my nights are sleepless. Come, my charmer, and relieve me. Bring my darling boy to my bosom.28
The longest-smoldering fuse, as the War for Independence sputtered to an end, was army back pay, always a problem after such a long and costly struggle but especially acute in America, where exports to Europe were blockaded by British warships, the only trade was in war matériel, and the only money was worthless. In early January 1783 a delegation of high-ranking army officers from the camp at Newburgh, New York, arrived in Congress with a petition for back pay. They were all, it turned out, Hamilton’s old friends, including Hamilton’s former mentor, Major General Alexander McDougall; Colonel Mathias Ogden, the brother-in-law of Hamilton’s teacher, Francis Barber; and Colonel John Brooks, who had supported Hamilton when a pernicious preacher libeled him and nearly touched off a duel. President Boudinot understandably appointed Colonel Hamilton to chair the committee, meet with the officers, and prepare recommendations for the full Congress. The army petition, signed by General Knox, among others, was clear, eloquent, and allowed for no more delays:
Shadows have been offered to us while the substance has been gleaned by others. We have borne all that men can bear. Our property is expended. Our private resources are at an end. The uneasiness of the soldiers, for want of pay, is dangerous. Any further experiments on their patience may have fatal effects.
The solemn words of the soldiers at last forced Congress to face squarely its fiscal impotence. It took a soldier sitting in Congress to see how clear and present the danger really was: unless the army was given some of its back pay and reliable documentation that promised back pay someday, it would not lay down its arms, disband, and go home. Hamilton recommended that Superintendent of Finance Morris give the men their present pay. Each state was to pay its line regiments up through August 1780, when they had gone on the national charge. Congress must draw on the states to fund “the whole debt of the United States”—here he was bringing up a national debt again—and the soldiers were to be paid like any other creditor. All officers should have the choice of remaining on half pay for life or accepting a single lump sum buyout. He left the number of years blank, but he had studied the calculations of radical English economist Dr. William Price and he penciled in six years’ pay. Congress should decide how to compensate widows and orphans. On January 25, Congress swiftly adopted Hamilton’s recommendations, although no one had the slightest clue where the money would come from.29
Congress’s willingness to accept his proposal for paying the army fired Hamilton’s confidence and touched off three days of debates that gave Hamilton a pulpit for his first bold plan for paying off the debts of the United States by creating a national debt. Rising at New York’s table on January 27, he gave his colleagues a lecture on how the debt could be apportioned between the nation and each state. A national debt was simpler because it avoided the thorny business of fixing state quotas. Here, everyone could remember the Rhode Island debacle. The current method of collecting state revenues, by confiscations and fines, Hamilton called “a vicious system” that was “more subservient to the [tax collectors’] popularity than to the public revenue.”30 When Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut objected that the states should raise permanent debts that the federal government could then draw on, Hamilton counterattacked on January 28. Hamilton, according to Madison’s notes of the all-day debates, “dwelt long on the inefficacy of state funds.” Tax collectors should be appointed by Congress. Since the federal government, he argued, obviously lacked the “energy” needed for “uniting the states,” it would take professional tax officers dependent on Congress for their pay—and thus interested in supporting its power. Madison considered Hamilton’s comment on Congress’s lack of energy “imprudent and injudicious to the cause it was meant to serve.” The creation of a federal government with its own tax agents and the power to appropriate revenues was the “very source,” Madison wrote, “of jealousy” by the states:
All the members of Congress who concurred in any degree with the states in this jealousy smiled at [Hamilton’s] disclosure. [They] took notice in private conversation that Mr. Hamilton had let out the secret.31
What Hamilton had revealed was what Virginia’s most influential states’ rights delegates had suspected, that Hamilton spoke for Robert Morris and the Northern financial interests. Hamilton had joined Morris’s inner circle of nationalists who were quietly working behind the scenes. His inadvertent revelation touched off a decade-long struggle in Congress over how better to pay off the nation’s staggering wartime debt, which had grown to twenty times the money in circulation.
By February 12, Hamilton, after more than two months of prodding and behind-the-scenes maneuvering, had been able to wrench from Congress only its “opinion,” in the form of a motion, advocating the establishment of some sort of permanent fund. In his first draft, he wrote, “to be collected under the authority of the U.S. in Congress assembled.” After yet another debate, Congress ordered even these words deleted. When Madison’s proposal that taxes be collected by Congress was also defeated in committee, neither version went before the full Congress. It was obvious to both men their plans would only be rejected.32
The very next day, Hamilton wrote to his old commander, George Washington:
The state of our finances was never more critical. There has scarcely been a period of the revolution which called for more wisdom and decision in Congress. Unfortunately for us we are a body not governed by reason [or] foresight but by circumstances. It is probable we will not take the proper measures.
Hamilton forecast “an embarrassing scene” whether the war continued or there was peace.33
On March 4, 1783, a grateful Washington, stunned by the dire note in Hamilton’s letter, wrote back in a new and confiding tone, no longer general to subordinate, high priest to acolyte. He had always been candid with Congress, he said, and he was shocked that Congress had not shared his “free communication of sentiments”:
The public interest might be benefited if the Commander in Chief of the Army was let more into the political and pecuniary state of our affairs than he is. Where there is a want of information, there must be chance medley, and a man may be upon the brink of a precipice before he is aware of his danger—when a little foreknowledge might enable him to avoid it.
All the information Washington had received “of the danger that stares us in the face on account of our funds” he had deduced from newspapers or from Hamilton’s warning. Washington had been given the impression by Congress that “we should be able to rub along” with another loan from Dutch bankers, “so far was I from conceiving that our finances were in so deplorable a state.”
Separated now by distance as they rarely had been, Hamilton and Washington grew closer by letter. “To you, who have seen the danger,” Washington wrote appreciatively to his former aide, “to which the Army has been exposed,” there could be a “political dissolution for want of subsistence.” Just short of victory the army could collapse, the Union dissolve, so “fatal” was the tendency of Congress’s “unhappy spirit of licentiousness.” Unless Congress quickly took prudent measures, “I shall give it as my opinion” that there could be “riots that end in blood! God forbid.” Washington’s “predicament,” he told Hamilton, was “critical and delicate”:
The sufferings of a complaining army on one hand and the inability of Congress and tardiness of the states on the other, are the forebodings of evil.
The threat of renewed mutinies in the army over back pay worried Washington, too. “The old leaven,” and here he meant Horatio Gates, “is again beginning to work under the mask of the most perfect dissimulation and apparent cordiality.” Once again, Gates was plotting behind the scenes—”I have no proof of it”—to oust Washington, who now said he was sure that the “sensible and discerning part of the army” still supported him.
Washington confided to Hamilton that he, in turn, supported Hamilton in his position that there had to be a stronger, firmer federal government:
For it is clearly my opinion [that] unless Congress have powers competent to all general purposes, that the distresses we have encountered, the expenses we have incurred and the blood we have spilled in the course of an eight years’ war will avail us nothing.34
Hamilton responded quickly that he “sincerely wish[ed] ingratitude was not so natural to the human heart as it is.” Yet, he told Washington, some of the distrust swirling around army and Congress, as the war ended, had “too much foundation.”
Republican jealousy has in it a principle of hostility to an army whatever be their merits, whatever be their claims to the gratitude of the community. It acknowledges their services with unwillingness and rewards them with reluctance.35
ONE WEEK later, on March 12, 1783, the American merchant ship Washington arrived in Philadelphia with the news from France that on November 30, 1782, a provisional peace treaty had been signed in Paris granting American independence. It had taken three and a half months for the treaty to cross the Atlantic. Congress had accomplished little during the year-long peace talks. It had handed out contracts to its more influential friends to feed the army. It had appointed Robert Morris as superintendent of finance but thwarted his policies, and he had resigned in disgust. It elected Washington’s second-in-command, General Benjamin Lincoln, as the first secretary of war but made no provision for Washington. In his first foreign policy speech, Hamilton urged coolness and circumspection by Congress when it took up ratification of the treaty. Hamilton rose and delivered a detailed critique. His friend Madison took careful notes. Hamilton “disapproved highly” of the three American negotiators, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay, for “submitting” to the wishes of France. He felt they had procrastinated until French fleets had won back territory and naval battles to gain concessions from the English. Yet he opposed repealing the treaty and he opposed recalling or “reprehending” the American ministers for fear that “they would be disgusted and head and foment [political] parties in this country.” He especially targeted John Jay, his erstwhile ally, characterizing him before the entire Congress as “a man of profound sagacity and pure integrity” but “of a suspicious temper” that “might explain [his] extraordinary jealousies.”36 Finally, Hamilton agreed to commend the peace commissioners and accept the treaty.
His influence in Congress growing, his rapport with his old commander restored, Hamilton had the satisfaction to write Washington frequently now of his progress in the great hall and committee rooms in Philadelphia where Washington had sat so long ago. On March 24, he fired off a salute of his own to Washington:
I congratulate your Excellency on this happy conclusion of your labors. It now only remains to make solid establishments within, to perpetuate our union to prevent our being a ball in the hands of European powers bandied against each other at their pleasure.
Washington borrowed this felicitous phrase from the letter of his erstwhile writing aide when he wrote his last “Circular to the States” warning against “the ill-fated moment for relaxing the powers of the Union,” advising the states to “give such a tone to our Federal government” that it could carry out its “ends”—a “destiny” that would be “a blessing” to “unborn millions”—he cautioned against “annihilating the cement of the Confederation” and becoming “the sport of European politics which may play one state against the other.” Circulated in newspapers all over America and Europe, Hamilton’s thoughts and words in Washington’s dress uniform became known as “Washington’s Legacy.”37
THE “EMBARRASSMENT” that Hamilton had predicted came soon enough. The resentment of officers long underpaid and overpromised by Congress boiled over at headquarters at Newburgh, New York. Washington got wind that someone high up on his staff had anonymously circulated a memo among his officers calling a secret meeting on March 12. He moved quickly. Denouncing “such disorderly proceedings” and postponing the meeting for three days, he marched to the large new officers’ barracks on March 15, his arrival a surprise. He strode to the lectern and pulled a paper from his pocket. For five minutes, obviously agitated, he lectured his officers, urging them not to take any steps which, “taken in the calm light of reason,” would “lessen [their] dignity and sully the glory” they had earned: “Let me request you to rely on the plighted faith of your country and place a full confidence in the purity of intentions of Congress.”38
The so-called Newburgh conspiracy collapsed but, on June 17, far from Washington’s commanding presence, eighty armed Pennsylvania troops under “Mad Anthony” Wayne in Lancaster broke away from their officers and marched to Philadelphia to rendezvous with sergeants and new recruits demonstrating outside Independence Hall against accepting their discharges from the army without getting paid. Inside, the Pennsylvania Executive Council, responsible for keeping order, convened across the hallway from Congress. Council President John Dickinson, a famous Quaker lawyer, a man in a gray satin suit who had signed the Declaration of Independence, transmitted to Congress letters from the mutineers’ commanding officer in Lancaster that said they intended to rob the treasury. Congress’s President Boudinot appointed Hamilton to head a committee to work with the Pennsylvania government. Hamilton urged a firm show of force. Pennsylvania should send out militia to intercept the mutineers before they could reach the city. But the Pennsylvania Council turned down Hamilton’s plea. Unless the mutinous soldiers actually committed some physical violence to congressmen, no force would be threatened or used.
Asserting his newfound congressional authority, Hamilton dispatched the assistant secretary of war, Major William Jackson, to meet the marchers and assure them fair treatment if they returned peacefully to their barracks in Lancaster. The mutineers brushed Jackson aside and kept marching toward Philadelphia. When they reached the city on Friday, June 20, more than seven hundred veterans from the city’s two barracks joined their ranks as Boudinot adjourned Congress for the weekend. Hamilton hurriedly arranged for Robert Morris to pay the men with his own personal notes. General Arthur St. Clair, commander of the Pennsylvania Line, prepared his troops at the Charleston barracks to arrest the mutineers. But on Saturday, the rest of St. Clair’s veterans joined the mutiny amid rumors they were about to break into Morris’s Bank of North America to pay themselves. What members of Congress may or may not have known was that Hamilton had more than one way to influence Morris. The Bank of North America, which had opened its doors only in January 1782 as a private bank under Congress’s auspices, was managed by a twelve-man board of directors who annually selected one of its number as president. Morris was president at the moment, but the second-largest stockholder was John B. Church, who had married Angelica Schuyler, Betsy’s older sister. Church, who had fled England, thinking he had killed a nobleman in a duel, had grown rich selling supplies to the American and French armies. Church had just sailed for France and had turned his legal business over to Hamilton, enabling him to put pressure on Robert Morris.
Posting armed guards at the doors of Independence Hall, Boudinot summoned Congress into an emergency session at one o’clock Saturday afternoon. Delegates had to shoulder their way inside past some three hundred mutineers milling on Chestnut Street. Armed with weapons they had looted from the city’s arsenals, the mutineers, some of them drunk and shouting obscenities, crowded up against the windows of the council chamber, trying to hear the proceedings above the din from the street. Some even poked bayonets through the windows of Independence Hall. A terrified President Dickinson rushed into the congressional chamber with the mutineers’ demand that they be allowed to choose their own officers to negotiate their grievances. Boudinot ordered St. Clair to try again to restore discipline among his troops. When he failed, after three tense hours, congressmen quietly filed out of the building. Only catcalls assaulted them.
After one more fruitless meeting with Pennsylvania authorities, Hamilton and his committee recommended that Congress adjourn and leave the city, to meet at Princeton, New Jersey, the following Thursday, June 26. Boudinot, meanwhile, dispatched an express rider to Washington to bring back troops. Congressmen rode out of the city, shielded by five hundred hastily mustered militia. From Princeton on June 29, Hamilton reported to Governor Clinton on the meeting. He called the Pennsylvania Council’s conduct “to the last degree weak and disgusting.” Their “feebleness” had determined Congress’s decision to flee “a place where they could receive no support.”39 Hamilton was stung, he wrote Madison, that he was being accused of being too precipitous in recommending that Congress flee the capital.
As the ringleaders of the mutiny fled and the troops returned to their barracks, Hamilton turned his thoughts toward home and Betsy, who had never budged from her father’s house. Had Hamilton now some second thoughts about her safety? Winter roads with an infant were one thing, drunken mutineers quite another. On July 22, 1783, more than six months since he had last seen her, Hamilton wrote that the definitive peace treaty had just reached New York, and under the treaty the city was to be immediately evacuated. He wanted to rush north, gather his family and his law books, and move into Manhattan, but so few members of Congress remained at Princeton that he had to stay on to assure a quorum to ratify the peace treaty. “I will not be long from my Betsy. In a very short time I hope we shall be happily settled in New York.”40
One month later, Alexander Hamilton, still only twenty-eight but now one of America’s most controversial and conspicuous leaders, returned to The Pastures for a brief summer vacation in Albany after his first nine-month term in Congress. As he ended that term, Hamilton sagely wrote to John Jay:
We have now happily concluded the great work of independence, but much remains to be done to reach the fruits of it. Our prospects are not flattering. Every day proves the inefficacy of the present confederation. The common danger being removed, we are receding instead of advancing in disposition to mend its defects.
The road to popularity in each state is to inspire jealousies of the power of Congress, though nothing can be more apparent than that they have no power…We, at this moment, experience all the mischiefs of a bankrupt and ruined credit. It is to be hoped that, when prejudice and folly have run themselves out of breath, we may return to reason and correct our errors.41
He left amid charges by Pennsylvania’s Dickinson that he urged Congress to abandon the capital without cause. Madison came to his defense, writing that Hamilton only agreed to the evacuation after every other committee member insisted. James McHenry, Hamilton’s best man and now a congressman from Maryland, soothed him: “No one but believes you are a man of honor and republican principles. Were you ten years older and £20,000 richer, there is no doubt but that you might obtain the [votes] of Congress for the highest office in their gift.”42
AT NOON on November 25, 1783, under a cold bright sky, Colonel Alexander Hamilton, resplendent in his dark blue, gold braided Continental Army uniform, joined General George Washington’s honor guard of handpicked officers that led one thousand shivering soldiers from Harlem south into Manhattan to take the last major post in America from her former British rulers. The peace treaty affirming American independence had been signed more than a year ago but the British commander, Sir Guy Carleton, had refused to leave until he had positive written orders from London. As a result, Washington had refused to disband his army as long as a redcoat remained. For four months since New York had called him home, Hamilton had waited impatiently but not idly in Albany, rehearsing his plans with his father-in-law. He wrote a “Vindication of Congress,” addressed to John Dickinson, but then thought better of mailing it; he started a long “Defense of Congress” to send to the Philadelphia newspapers, but then filed it away. Only the arrival of a brevet promotion to full colonel from Washington in mid-November banished his gloom, and he proudly rode south to join his old commander for the triumphal march into New York City.
At Bull’s Head Tavern in the Bowery, the victory parade ran headlong into a crowd on horseback. The wartime refugees who had fled their homes in 1776 returned now from their long exile in the countryside, sprigs of laurel stuck in their hats. They mingled with old army friends like Hamilton, who wore the black-and-white cockade of the Franco-American union on their chests. A cheering crowd lined Broadway as the victory column swelled and slowed. Not everyone was cheering. One woman wept and went home to write:
We had been accustomed for a long time to military display in all the finish and finery of [British] garrison life. The troops just leaving us were as if equipped for a show, and with their scarlet uniforms and burnished arms made a brilliant display. The troops that marched in, on the contrary, were ill-clad and weather-beaten and made a forlorn appearance. But then, they were our troops and as I looked at them and thought upon all they had done and suffered for us, my heart and my eyes were full.43
The city would long celebrate Evacuation Day and remember the spectacle as the ragged Revolutionaries marched in and the last redcoats paraded down the Bowery to the East River wharves to be rowed out to the fleet. Thirteen guns on the parapets of Fort George saluted as an American soldier scampered up the flagstaff, yanked down the Union Jack, and nailed up the Stars and Stripes.