Chapter FOURTEEN
“What May This Lead To?”

Alexander Hamilton left New York City for the Annapolis trade talks on September 1, 1786, traveling with the “profane bachelor” Egbert Benson, state attorney general and a henchman of Governor Clinton. Betsy Hamilton was already tired of her husband’s political friends, and, at her request, Hamilton ducked a farewell dinner invitation from his good friend Richard Varick. He sent a note to his former comrade-in-arms, explaining that “Mrs. Hamilton insists on my dining with her today, as this is the day of departure.” The state of Virginia had chosen the small-town Maryland capital as the convention site instead of holding it in any of the large commercial towns, Madison wrote Jefferson, “to avoid charges of undue influence by local merchants.” Hamilton had been ill as he often was from the pollution generated by thousands of cook fires. He always revived when he rode out into the countryside, this time for a canter of some two hundred miles at harvest time, averaging a brisk thirty-five miles a day in the saddle. “My health has been improved by traveling,” he wrote Betsy when he arrived in Annapolis after a week on the road. He promised Betsy he would only be detained at the conference “for eight or ten days perhaps a fortnight.”¹

He almost left even before the convention began. Delegates from only five states had arrived—New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia. Representatives of four other states had promised to attend but would arrive too late, after the conference broke up. Here, in Annapolis, as Hamilton was well aware, nearly three years earlier Washington had foreseen the danger of congressional weakness. When the commander-in-chief had ridden south from New York City in December 1783, after a tearful farewell to his officers—how could Hamilton forget the moment and their embrace-he had come here, to the State House at Annapolis, to tender his resignation to the Congress that had appointed him. The Revolution was now complete. Washington was there to give up his military power to affirm Congress as the sole source of power. And yet they had kept him waiting for three days because not enough congressmen were in town to make up a quorum. When at last Washington had been ushered into the vast redbrick capitol building and, under its overpowering dome, had breathed life into America’s civilian government, he had issued a challenge, which now, nearly three years later, remained unfulfilled. In a toast hardly anyone understood at the time, Washington had uttered: “Competent powers to Congress for general purposes.”²

When the Annapolis Convention opened on September 11, 1786, John Dickinson, Hamilton’s nemesis from his days in Congress, became chairman. Because only twelve delegates from a handful of states appeared, Hamilton could see it would be useless to undertake any systematic study of the interstate commercial crisis or to try and work out, on the spot, an interstate agreement. Instead, he offered a resolution declaring the task impossible in such few hands, in so little time. After only three days, when the other delegates still had not arrived, Hamilton grabbed the initiative. He wrote a brief report that seized on the broader powers given New Jersey’s delegates to delve into not only trade but “other important matters [that] might be necessary to the common interest and permanent harmony of the several states.” Hamilton had examined the written instructions of delegates from Virginia and Pennsylvania. They were, he found, similar to the far-reaching New York Assembly authorization, which he himself had drafted. This allowed him “to take into consideration the trade and commerce of the United States [and] to consider how far a uniform system in their commercial intercourse and regulations might be necessary to their common interest and perfect harmony.”³

Hamilton, noting that delegates from only five of thirteen states had arrived, now pushed hard for the Annapolis Convention to call for a wider conference, then adjourn before the other delegates could arrive. Supported by Madison and, to his surprise, Dickinson, in his written declaration Hamilton underscored what should have been obvious, “that there are important defects in the system of the Federal government.” Foreign and domestic “embarrassments” demanded a “deliberate and candid” discussion by representatives of all the states. In a second draft of his report, he called for a convention in Philadelphia the following May “to devise such further provisions as shall appear to them necessary to render the Constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.” His first draft, now lost, had irked Virginia’s governor, Edmund Randolph, who considered it “too strong.” Madison warned Hamilton, “You had better yield to this man, for otherwise all Virginia will be against you.” Already learning political compromise, Hamilton rewrote the convention’s report to Congress and the states, “toning it down to suit tender stomachs.” Three years later, Hamilton remembered that all the delegates at Annapolis, frustrated in their stated purpose, demanded some more radical reform and unanimously recommended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to overhaul or thoroughly change the Confederation form of government. When Congress, in session in New York City Hall, received Hamilton’s “Address of the Annapolis Convention” on October 11, 1786, it referred it to committee, where it remained bottled up for four months.⁴

As THE months ticked by and the crisis deepened, Alexander Hamilton saw all around him evidence that, unless the Confederation government underwent a drastic overhaul, the thirteen states would degenerate into a helpless collection of squabbling debtors ripe for foreign exploitation or even reconquest. Hamilton knew many New Yorkers were suffering from the refusal of the British to evacuate their Great Lakes forts. As further proof of American impotence, Spain had been able to flout the 1783 Treaty of Paris by closing off the Mississippi River to Americans. No longer could barges or canoes from the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys transport furs or other commodities downriver to the French port at New Orleans. After a year of fruitless negotiations between John Jay, the emissary for Congress, and Don Diego de Gardoqui, Spanish minister to the United States, in August 1786, just as state commissioners converged on Annapolis, Congress, after a bitter debate, split seven states to five in favor of giving up rights to the Mississippi in exchange for a trade treaty with Spain. Federal feebleness had now closed off trade on the western border of the United States.

And it was on the frontier that the revolt Hamilton had so long dreaded finally broke out. Only two weeks after the Annapolis Convention ended so abruptly and inconclusively, debt-ridden farmers in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts rebelled. Because many of the region’s farmers—a considerable number of them veterans of the Revolutionary War—could not pay their debts to storekeepers or tax collectors, they faced imprisonment or eviction with their families from their farms. The rebels, as Massachusetts politicians quickly denominated them, were especially bitter because the Massachusetts legislature had adjourned on July 8 without heeding their petitions for issuance of paper money or passage of “stay” laws that would halt foreclosures on farms and homes. At a town meeting at Worcester on August 15, discontent boiled over into angry calls for action that led to a Hampshire county convention of some fifty towns at Hatfield only a week later.

In a tense gathering that lasted longer than the Annapolis Convention, town delegates condemned the Massachusetts Senate, lawyers, the high costs of obtaining justice, the entire tax system, and the lack of paper money. While the conventioneers advised against the use of force, armed violence broke out. One week after the Hatfield convention, an angry crowd of armed men on August 31 prevented the sitting of the court at Northampton; another week and a mob closed the September session of courts at Worcester. Mobs barred judges and lawyers from entering the courthouses at Concord and Great Barrington, chasing away the sheriffs and stopping the sheriffs’ sales. Near panic, Governor James Bowdoin dispatched six hundred militiamen to guard the state Supreme Court in Springfield.

There, Daniel Shays, a destitute farmer who had attained the rank of captain in the Revolutionary army and had since held town offices in Pelham, had gathered about six hundred armed men who had taken down their flintlocks and were ready to fight. On September 26, they confronted an inferior force of state militia, obliging it to back away. The Supreme Court adjourned. In panic, Secretary of War Henry Knox reported with wild exaggeration to Congress that Shays commanded ten to fifteen thousand men and they were besieging the federal arsenal at Springfield. Civil war appeared imminent. Thoroughly alarmed at reports that the armed rebels were about to seize cannon from the Springfield arsenal, Congress did the one thing it had clear-cut authority to do under the Confederation. On October 20, it voted to raise an army, even if it did it on tiptoes. Congress authorized the gargantuan secretary of war himself, three-hundred-pound Henry Knox, to raise 1,340 men, ostensibly to serve against the Indians. But the federal forces gathered so slowly that they never saw combat. The insurrection suffered a severe setback with the capture of one of its organizers, Job Shattuck, on November 30.

As snow blanketed the Berkshires, Captain Shays gathered his own army of about twelve hundred men in November and December. The day after Christmas, 1786, he led a march to Springfield on the Connecticut River to join forces with other insurgents under the command of Luke Day. They aimed to intimidate the small militia force already guarding the federal arsenal. Their march thoroughly alarmed Governor Bowdoin, who now called up forty-four hundred men and put them under the command of the veteran General Benjamin Lincoln. Authorized for one month, it was the largest armed force mustered in the United States since the Revolution. But Shays and Day made the classic mistake of keeping their forces divided by the Connecticut River as they rushed toward Springfield and attempted to scatter the arsenal’s guard before Lincoln could reinforce it. When Shays proposed a joint attack, Day’s reply that he could not attack for another two more days was intercepted. Shays pressed on, attacking the arsenal in West Springfield, confident that Day would strike simultaneously. The Shaysites marched up within one hundred yards before the arsenal’s gunners unleashed a volley of cannon fire. Four rebels dropped dead; the rest broke and fled. When Lincoln arrived with his army, he pursued Day, splitting off his force. Day fled to the hills of New Hampshire. Hard-marching all night, Lincoln and his army surprised Shays at dawn of February 4 and captured 150 insurgents. The rest fled, Shays and two of his aides disappearing across the Vermont border to seek refuge in Bennington.

THE SHAYS Rebellion thoroughly alarmed many Americans who were worried that the fragile Union was on the verge of collapse. Shays’s escape into Vermont threatened to ignite another tinderbox of rebellion. Alexander Hamilton had steeped himself in land law and had followed Vermont’s claims for independence from New York both as a lawyer with clients in the Green Mountains and as a vigilant member of the New York Assembly. He had once been one of the Continental officers supporting Vermont’s request to join the Continental Congress. Increasingly, he had opposed Governor Clinton’s belligerent insistence that New York militia should be mobilized to crush resistance in Vermont and force it back to its claimed status as part of New York.

The arrival of Shaysites leaders in Vermont alarmed Hamilton, who feared that the rebellion now would spread because it followed four months of turmoil in the Green Mountains. In the half-dozen years since Yorktown, the population of the little republic, scarcely a hundred miles wide and only its southern third inhabited, had been filling up with New England veterans, eager to cut down the hardwood trees, build houses and barns, and plant the rich soil with wheat for export to New York, Massachusetts, and Canada. By the 1791 Vermont census, the mountainous republic would have the highest per acre wheat yield in the United States. One reason its land was so coveted, as a Boston newspaper printed shortly after Shays’s arrival noted, that “more families have moved into [Vermont] for six months past than has done in the same space of time since the first settlement of that country.” More than any other place in America, they came to stay: 95 percent who arrived before the Revolution remained in the Green Mountains for the Vermont census of 1791. Still, those two thirds of Vermonters who had migrated, mostly from Massachusetts, since the Revolution had run up more debts than the original settlers and were being sued as a consequence. And that attracted lawyers. One unpopular Princeton-educated lawyer, Isaac Tichenor, who came to Bennington to hang out his shingle, had earned the nickname “Jersey Slick.” As Vermont’s courts filled with debt cases and still more attorneys rushed in, dozens of petitioners besieged the assembly, complaining of outrageous legal fees and court costs. Tensions boiled over in 1786 as settlers demanded expulsion of all lawyers and cancellation of all debts. Angry crowds milled outside courthouses. In October, only a sheriff’s posse had persuaded debtors in Windsor in the Connecticut Valley not to close the courthouse. Nine towns petitioned the assembly that month for relief from taxes and lawyers—called “pickpockets” and “banditti” in court papers—and begged to have court costs lowered. The hard-pressed assembly passed a series of temporary laws requiring creditors to accept payment in kind and providing that creditors from any state where Vermonters could not bring suit (specifically New York) were barred from suing Vermonters. Ethan Allen offered partial restitution for one debt with cattle. But still the crowds cordoned off the courthouses. In Rutland in late November, as Shaysites gathered armed forces just across the border in the Berkshires, one hundred Vermont veterans seized the county courthouse, dispersing only at the approach of hundreds of state militia, who arrested forty-seven of them.⁵

What added urgency to Hamilton’s sense of foreboding was still another smoldering brushfire of revolt in the Wyoming Valley of northwestern Pennsylvania. Before the Revolution, hundreds of settlers overflowing Connecticut’s crowded hills had bought land from the Susquehannah Company in the Pocono Mountains. After the war, in yet another example of the feebleness of diplomacy between states under the Confederation, Pennsylvania laid claim to the region and insisted the Wyoming Valley settlers did not hold clear title to the lands unless they repurchased them—exactly as New York had done in Vermont before the Revolution. Irate settlers appealed their plight to Congress. On December 30, 1782, a five-man congressional tribunal ruled unanimously that the disputed lands belonged to Pennsylvania because its territory was contiguous. Without waiting to settle individual claims, the Pennsylvania Assembly approved plans to evict the Connecticut settlers. Only the denunciation of the assembly’s plans prevented military action against the settlers.

In desperation, some of the Wyoming Valley settlers turned to that legendary defender of local autonomy, Ethan Allen of Vermont. Allen had resigned his command of Vermont troops during the Revolution to take part in secret negotiations with the British in Canada that dangled the possibility that the Republic of Vermont, if not granted statehood by the United States, would become a separate province of Canada loyal to the British. By 1786, the time of Shays’s Rebellion, he had left Bennington and retired to a thirty-five-hundred-acre farm in Burlington, in northern Vermont. The Wyoming Valley settlers became convinced that Allen and his rough-riding Green Mountain Boys would be “particularly serviceable” in their cause by striking terror into the hearts of lawyers and lawmakers in Philadelphia. Allen’s presence in the Poconos with some of his Boys would coerce Pennsylvania into negotiations. To lure Allen, they offered him the two commodities he loved the most, land and command. He declared that the Wyoming Valley cause—”our cause”—was “just.” Writing from Vermont, Allen promised to fight to the death the “avaricious men [who] make interest their God.” On his advice, the Wyoming Valley settlers procured guns and ammunition and recruited more Connecticut settlers, as many as they could crowd in. By late December 1785, Wyoming Valley’s armed forces amounted to four hundred men waiting for the arrival of the “head doctor from the North with his glister pipe” (a device for giving an enema) to lead their little army. But first Allen warned a Connecticut delegate to Congress that he intended to “speedily repair to Wyoming with a small detachment of Green Mountain Boys to vindicate” their claims. Confident that Congress could hardly respond quickly enough, Allen rode into Pennsylvania on April 27, 1786, boasting to a crowd “that he had formed one new state” and now would do it again “in defiance of Pennsylvania.” One anxious official reported to Philadelphia that “since [his] arrival every idea of submission to the laws of Pennsylvania has vanished.”

When Alexander Hamilton passed through Pennsylvania on horseback to attend the Annapolis Convention, Philadelphians were reading a broadside reminiscent of Allen’s rhetoric before he led his Boys to seize Fort Ticonderoga a decade earlier. He scorned Congress’s “tribunal of land monopolizers.” Addressing “the court of conscience, of the people at large,” he declared that the Wyoming settlers—and he now counted himself one of them—”will not tamely surrender our farms, orchards, tenements, neighbors and right to soil to a junta of land thieves.” He threatened to “smoke it out at the muzzle of the firelock.” Did Philadelphia’s “pious legalists” believe that the farmers had fought the Revolution in vain, only for Pennsylvania and Congress to “cram their laws down our throats”? As panicky rumors of the approach of an army of Green Mountain Boys flew through the streets of Philadelphia, the state legislature hastily convened inside Independence Hall. Terrified lawmakers reported that “bandittis [are] rising up against law and good order in all quarters of our country,” declaring Ethan Allen and Daniel Shays part of the same lawlessness that threatened to destroy the Union.⁶

NEW YORK’S legislature finally reconvened in Manhattan in January 1787 after Governor Clinton had ignored for five months the emergency call by Congress to hold a special session to consider a national customs duty that supposedly rescued the national government from insolvency. In a pair of indignant speeches to a packed gallery in New York City Hall on January 19, Alexander Hamilton hammered hard at Clinton’s refusal on the grounds it violated the state’s constitution:

What kind of emergency must exist? Is the preservation of our national faith a matter of such trivial moment? Is the fulfillment of [our] public engagements [debts], domestic and foreign, of no consequence? Must we wait for the fleets of the Netherlands or France to enforce them?⁷

As Shays and his followers melted into the hills of New England and Ethan Allen menaced the Pennsylvania legislature, at the New York Assembly session of 1787, Governor Clinton’s supporters still balked at even considering Congress’s call for funding the national government. Hamilton, who attended Congress daily now, lashed out in frustration:

Sir, are we not to respect federal decisions? Are we, on the contrary, to take every opportunity of holding up their resolutions and requests in a contemptible and insignificant light? And tell the world their calls, their requests are nothing to us? That we are bound by none of their measures? Do not let us add to their embarrassment, for it is but a slender tie that at present holds us [together].

You see, alas, what contempt we are falling into since the peace. You see to what our commerce is exposed on every side. You see us the laughing stock, the sport of foreign nations. And what may this lead to? I dread, sir, to think.⁸

In his two brief visits to the Wyoming Valley, Ethan Allen eventually managed to jolt Pennsylvania’s legislature into confirming the settlers’ claims to their lands and forming their settlements into a separate county. But, in the short term, Allen’s threats and Shays’s attacks electrified discontented frontiersmen all up and down the Appalachian backcountry. At Mount Vernon, George Washington became convinced that the rebellion could spread into a full-scale resumption of the Revolution. His fears of congressional helplessness confirmed, he decided to join Virginia’s delegation to the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention. He feared that the “levelers” were seeking agrarian reforms that would reapportion wealth. Washington had good reason to fear. His estate had dwindled by 50 percent due to currency depreciation and the curtailment of trade, and he had recently failed to collect rents during a personal inspection of his western Pennsylvania lands. His western partner was so heavily in debt that he could pay Washington only 5 percent of what he owed. When Washington tried to auction off a mill in which he had invested 1,200 pounds (about $50,000 today), no one could afford to bid on it. Before he rode home to Virginia, Washington stopped off at the courthouse of Fayette county and instituted eviction proceedings against squatters on his lands, many of them his former troops. When he arrived home at Mount Vernon, he wrote to Madison, “We are fast verging to anarchy and confusion.”⁹

After General Benjamin Lincoln scattered the Shaysites in western Massachusetts in early February 1787, Governor Bowdoin decided to hunt down and punish the rebels. He called on the governors of neighboring states to arrest the “malcontents.” The governors of Connecticut and New Hampshire promised aid; New York’s Governor Clinton marched with three regiments of militia to reinforce Lincoln. Twice, Lincoln called for Vermont’s Governor Chittenden, whose state was closest to the rebellion, to help. Chittenden promised to see what he could do. Vermont’s white-haired legislators dreaded being dragged into the war with their neighboring states even as they sought their neighbors’ support for their petition for statehood. More radical Vermonters, including Ethan Allan and Governor Chittenden, thought that promises to intervene in Massachusetts would actually increase Vermont’s leverage in Congress. A scant majority of the Vermont legislature voted to disavow the Shays Rebellion, and at the end of February, after Shays fled to Vermont, Chittenden, his tongue planted firmly in his cheek, issued a proclamation warning citizens not to “harbor, entertain or conceal” Shays and the three other rebel leaders—who were staying on the farm next door to Chittenden’s.

But Vermont’s waffling only led worried leaders in New York and Massachusetts to believe that Vermonters were planning, once again, to annex the rebellious border regions of both states. In Boston, Governor Bowdoin heard that hundreds of Shaysites were massing near Ethan Allen’s homestead. Allen openly sympathized with the rebels. Fresh from his triumph in Pennsylvania, he tongue-lashed Bowdoin, Lincoln, and the Adamses. Those who “held the reins of government in Massachusetts [are] a pack of damned rascals and there is no virtue among them,” he bellowed. In February, Shays sent two fellow insurgents, Luke Day and Eli Parsons, to Allen to offer him command of a “revolutionary army.”¹⁰

By February 1787, as civil war loomed along the Vermont-Massachusetts-New York borders, Assemblyman Alexander Hamilton rose at his desk in City Hall in New York City to propose one of his most important compromises. Hamilton had already drawn hisses from Clinton’s camp whenever he championed the rights of women. Hamilton acquiesced, temporarily at least, in a divorce bill rejected by the state’s Council of Revision. Under a bill passed by the assembly, a marriage partner convicted of adultery would not be allowed to remarry. Unless such “offenders” were to be confined in a “cloister,” it was foolish to expect them to live celibate. Under the Danish law of St. Croix, Hamilton’s mother had been unable to remain legally married to his father, as she no doubt would have done, because she had been unable to contest Levine’s charge of adultery. As it was in the New York Assembly climate of 1787, Hamilton let the punishment stand without a fight, perhaps unwilling to call further attention at the time to his illegitimate status. He decided to wait to introduce a better law in a higher-toned legislative gathering. An illegitimate son—and all the assembly knew it—Hamilton objected to forcing a woman “to publish her shame to the world.” In his own notes, he wrote that he “expatiated feelingly on the delicate situation” until the assembly voted to remove the draconian punishment.¹¹

Gathering support in the assembly, he pushed hard, in a one-hundred-minute speech, for New York’s support for federal customs duties. In a brilliant compromise, he proposed New York would appoint tax collectors to collect duties, and then turn the money over to Congress. Overcoming Clinton’s objection that a federal customs service in New York intruded on its independence, Hamilton succeeded. Emboldened, he pressed for the appointment of five New York delegates to the August 1787 convention in Philadelphia “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.” Here, Hamilton suffered a setback. Despite Schuyler’s support, the Senate voted for a three-man delegation, not the five Hamilton had hoped for. Outvoted two-to-one in the House, Hamilton had to content himself with his appointment as one of three, knowing full well that Clinton would send two supporters who would neutralize his votes at the convention. It was no surprise when Clinton chose two devout Clintonians, John Lansing and Robert Yates.

In the months before the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton distinguished himself in the New York Assembly in a series of debates and resolutions. He led a crusade to end the twenty-year-old confrontation with Vermonters, introducing a bill directing the states’ congressional delegates to support independence for Vermont. “Vermont is in fact independent,” he contended, “but she is not confederated.” He understood Vermont’s shrewd efforts to exploit the Shays Rebellion. “Is it not natural for a free people, irritated by neglect, to provide for their own safety by seeking connections?” Vermont had turned first to the British, now to Shays. New York must finally settle the controversy. “They are useless to us now,” he said of Vermont, “and if they continue as they are, they will be formidable to us hereafter.” The New York Assembly agreed, but the Senate refused.¹²

Hamilton’s support in New York struck Ethan Allen like a lightning bolt, coming just when Shays was offering him command of a revolution. Allen had to choose between the independence for Vermont he had pursued for more than twenty years or a brief, glorious command that might end on the gallows. He chose statehood. He “contemptuously refused” Shays’s offer of command and ordered him and his lieutenants to leave Vermont. Alexander Hamilton had long ago helped prisoner of war Ethan Allen to escape from British confinement in a New York provost jail by arranging his exchange. Now, Allen gave Hamilton the political victory he needed. Allen would not live to see it, but Hamilton, four years later, would usher Vermont into the Union as the fourteenth state, a free state, an antislavery state, just before Kentucky, the stepchild of Virginia, a slave state, could be admitted by its slave-owning stepfather, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson.¹³

Accustomed now to giving shocking speeches, being voted down by lawmakers, and then appealing over their heads to the electorate through persuasive essays in New York’s newspapers, Hamilton next set out to devise a system of taxation that would eliminate inequalities and the favoritism of tax assessors. Once again, he was rejected by the Clinton party. But they could not deprive him of the experience, for the first time, of crafting a complicated financial system.

ARRIVING IN Philadelphia in the blistering first burst of a Philadelphia summer on May 18, 1787, Alexander Hamilton checked into the Indian Queen Tavern on Third Street between Market and Chestnut, a short walk to Independence Hall. At thirty, he was half the age of most delegates, many of whom were famous leaders of the Revolution. Inside Independence Hall, as the old Pennsylvania State House was renamed, he took his place at the green baize-covered table designated for New York beside one of the state house fireplaces. Before the debates began in earnest, he had time to visit the airy, high-ceilinged wing on the south side of the building, where he had always been able to find virtually any law book he needed for his arguments on constitutional law. Probably the largest library in America, it contained glass-covered bookcases with hundreds of gold-stamped, calfskin-bound volumes on colonial, British, and international law. Here, the real work of the convention would be performed by committees meeting before and after each day’s plenary session, and here Hamilton probably drew up the detailed notes of each of his speeches and comments, as he always prepared for court cases.

Alexander Hamilton’s principal contributions to the drafting of the Constitution of the United States came before, during, and after the Philadelphia convention. He was the first to recognize the defects in the Articles of Confederation and, after the Constitution was drafted, he proclaimed those weaknesses to the public in the Federalist Papers to bring about popular ratification of the new Constitution. For the first four weeks in Philadelphia, he said little, observing and then deferring to the more famous delegates. Then, gradually, he began to point out the flaws in their proposals. Appointed to the key rules committee, he agreed to set aside his belief that public discussions should be held in public. In his first stint in Congress in 1783, he had written the nation’s first “sunshine” law. All through the Revolution, when there had been the danger of spying, Congress had kept the doors and windows closed and its debates secret. Now, Hamilton considered the health of the nation once again in just such critical condition. Many delegates would fear that their ideas, if aired prematurely, would provoke controversy—and probably wouldn’t be adopted anyway: time enough for public scrutiny after the document was drafted and presented to the individual states.

The convention achieved a quorum of seven states by May 25. The delegates ranged in age from twenty-six-year-old Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey to the venerable statesman and inventor Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, so feeble at eighty-one from gout and kidney stones that he had to be carried in a sedan chair by prisoners and seemed always to be asleep, partially because he had to be dosed with laudanum (a mixture of opium and honey) to mute his pain. Most of the delegates were already outstanding public figures. Washington presided from a raised dais; his next-door neighbor on the Potomac, legal scholar George Mason, graced Virginia’s table along with thirty-six-year-old James Madison. As a member of Congress, Madison, like Hamilton, was a proponent of customs duties on imports to raise federal revenues. An accomplished compromiser, as Governor Thomas Jefferson’s floor manager in the Virginia House of Delegates, Madison had worked out Virginia’s cession of the western lands it had claimed for nearly two centuries to the federal government, setting the example for other states to turn over their conflicting claims to form a vast federal territory called the Old Northwest. Madison had maneuvered for ten years to win adoption of a statute on religious freedom that had been written by Jefferson before he had gone to France as a diplomat. That act ended state subsidies for the support of clergy and established the doctrine of separation of church and state. Hamilton’s friend Gouverneur Morris and famed Scottish legal expert James Wilson joined Franklin at Pennsylvania’s table. Of the fifty delegates, twenty-nine were college-educated.

Robert Morris nominated Washington as president. As president, he could not speak, only direct the debate and exert influence by his mere presence. Wilson nominated William Temple Franklin, grandson of Dr. Franklin and illegitimate son of exiled Loyalist leader William Franklin, as the convention secretary. Young Franklin had served as secretary of the American delegation at the Paris peace talks and was better qualified than the man Hamilton nominated, former assistant secretary of war William Jackson. Jackson had assisted Hamilton during the mutiny of Pennsylvania troops in 1783, and Hamilton was repaying the favor. The convention accepted Hamilton’s recommendation but it turned out to be a poor choice. Jackson kept erratic and incomplete notes of the Constitutional Convention. Five delegates took notes: Hamilton’s fellow New Yorkers Yates and Lansing, and Rufus King of Massachusetts took down what could embarrass Hamilton and provided the notes to Clinton. No one’s notes came close to Madison’s for care and comprehension.

The convention came to life on May 25 when Edmund Randolph introduced the Virginia Plan of Union. A series of fifteen resolutions, it went far beyond the convention’s revisionary mission, as authorized by Congress, and proposed a totally new national government. It featured a two-house national legislature, representing the states proportionately, with the lower house elected by the people and the upper house elected by the lower house from nominees proposed by the state legislatures. The national legislature was to choose a chief executive. There was to be a federal judiciary, including a supreme court and inferior federal courts. Bills enacted by the national legislature were to be subject to review by a council of revision made up of the chief executive and several judges, with veto power over the legislature’s acts. On May 30, the convention resolved itself into a committee of the whole and for two solid weeks debated the Virginia Plan.

At the outset of this heated debate, Alexander Hamilton made a motion to revise one feature of the Virginia Plan. Whereas Randolph wanted voting rights to be proportionate to the tax contributions of the states or to the number of their free inhabitants, Hamilton could see that deciding the vote according to a state’s tax payments would be totally unacceptable to the smaller states. He moved that Randolph’s plan be altered to provide the vote strictly on the basis of the number of freemen in each state. Despite a second by a Southerner from North Carolina, the convention postponed consideration of Hamilton’s resolution.

After more than two weeks of speeches on the Virginia Plan—which had become known as the large-state plan—William Paterson introduced the New Jersey Plan on June 16. Robert Lansing of New York, a Clintonian, seconded it. Paterson, a revolutionary lawyer and jurist, led the opposition to the Virginia Plan, which centered chiefly on the provision for proportional representation, as Hamilton had predicted. The New Jersey, or small-state plan, called for equal representation of the states in both houses. Paterson’s nine resolutions stressed retaining the Confederation but granting Congress the powers to tax and regulate foreign and interstate commerce. The New Jersey Plan also called for naming a plural executive, not a single chief executive, but without veto power, and a supreme court appointed by Congress. As Hamilton had so long demanded, U.S. treaties and acts of Congress were to be the supreme law in the states. The lines were now drawn for a battle between delegates willing to content themselves with amendments to the Articles of Confederation and advocates like Hamilton of scrapping the Confederation and drawing up the framework of an entirely new national government.

Two days into an intense three-day debate on the New Jersey Plan, Hamilton asked President Washington if he could have the floor. It was early in the session of June 18 when the tall, thin, angular-faced New Yorker in elegant black and white stood and began a six-hour speech. Carefully prepared notes lay beside him, but he did not have to consult them. Madison, deeply impressed, recorded the scene:

Mr. Hamilton [said that he] had been hitherto silent on the business before the Convention, partly from respect to others whose superior abilities, age and experience rendered him unwilling to bring forward ideas dissimilar to theirs and partly from his delicate situation with respect to his own state.

Madison was wrong about Hamilton’s silence. He had already made two key motions. But, as it would later turn out, Madison was dead right about Hamilton’s delicate situation in the New York delegation, where he was sure to be outvoted—and in bloc voting that meant nullified—by the pro-Clinton delegates. But that also meant he had nothing to lose. While Hamilton declared that he could not possibly accede to the views of his fellow New Yorkers, he said that the crisis “which now marked our affairs was too serious to permit any scruples whatever to prevail over the duty imposed on every man to contribute his efforts for the public safety and happiness.”

Hamilton felt he was “obliged therefore to declare himself unfriendly” to both the Virginia and New Jersey plans. He was “particularly opposed” to Paterson’s small-state plan. No amendment of the Confederation that left the states sovereign “could possibly answer.” Yet he was “much discouraged” by the “amazing” number of delegates who expected the “desired blessings” by merely substituting a federal national government for a loose-knit confederation of sovereign states. He agreed with Randolph of Virginia that “we owe it to our country to do in this emergency whatever we should deem essential to its happiness.” To do anything less, just because it was “not clearly within our powers, would be to sacrifice the means to the end.”

To Hamilton, all the defects lay with the states. Massachusetts was feeling the lack of a “certain portion of military force that is absolutely necessary”:

All the passions we see, of avarice, ambition, interest, which govern most individuals and all public bodies, fall into the current of the states and do not flow into the stream of the general [national] government…How then are all these evils to be avoided? Only by such a complete sovereignty in the general government as will turn all the strong principles and passions [to] its side.

Hamilton argued that Paterson’s plan provided no remedy. Small states like New Jersey and North Carolina, “not being commercial states and [only] contributing to the wealth of the commercial ones,” could never meet proportional tax quotas as Randolph of Virginia had proposed. “They will and must fail in their duty, their example will be followed, and the Union itself will be dissolved.” What, then, was to be done? The expense of a national government over so great an extent of land would be “formidable” unless the cost of state government diminished. He did not mean to shock public opinion but he favored “extinguishing” the state governments: “they are not necessary for any of the great purposes of commerce, revenue or agriculture.” What would work better would be “district tribunals: corporations for local purposes.” The “only difficulty of a serious nature” which he foresaw was in drawing public officials from the edges to the center of the national community. “Moderate wages” would only “be a bait to little demagogues.” Hamilton’s views “almost led him to despair,” Madison noted, “that a republican government could be established over so great an extent.” In his private opinion, Madison wrote of Hamilton, “he had no scruple in declaring, supported as he was by so many of the wise and good, that the British government was the best in the world.” He dared to say this because, he said, he had seen a profound shift in public opinion as the members of Congress who were the most tenacious republicans were as loud as anyone in declaiming against “the vices of democracy.” He agreed with Necker, the French finance minister, who viewed the British Parliament as “the only government in the world ‘which unites public strength with individual security.’”

Many in his audience reeling at such heresy in a Revolutionary council, Hamilton raced on:

In every community where industry is encouraged, there will be a division of it into the few and the many. Hence, separate interests will arise. There will be debtors and creditors. Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many. Both, therefore, ought to have power, that each may defend itself against the other.

Hamilton submitted “a sketch of his plan” to the Committee of the Whole, warning that “the people” outside the convention’s walls would not adopt either the Virginia or New Jersey plans. Hamilton said he saw the Union dissolving. “He sees evils in the states which must soon cure the people of their fondness for democracies,” reported Madison.

Hamilton then read aloud his own plan of government. He proposed a two-house Supreme Legislative Power “in two distinct bodies of men”: an elected assembly, elected by free men, serving three-year terms, and a lifetime senate, like the English House of Lords but not hereditary, serving “during good behavior.” The senators would be chosen by electors chosen by the people, would form “a permanent barrier against every pernicious innovation.” Judges also would be elected by the people and serve during good behavior. The supreme executive would be a governor chosen in the same fashion, for life, but only during good behavior: could there be “a good government without a good executive”? This “governor”—Hamilton did not use the word “president”—would be able to veto “all laws about to be passed” and would be in charge of executing the laws. He would be “the commander in chief of the land and naval forces and of the militia.” He would have “with the advice and approbation of the Senate” the power of making all treaties. He would appoint the heads of the departments of finance, war, and foreign affairs. He would nominate all ambassadors subject to Senate approval, and he would “have the power of pardoning all offenses but treason,” which would require the assent of Congress.¹⁴

In one brilliant, six-hour, standup oration that left the convention stunned, Alexander Hamilton, with only the exception of term limits and the rules and qualifications for voters, laid out what would become the basic framework of the United States government. Off and on for the next few days, he rose to defend portions of his plan. Hamilton’s plan coincided with the Virginia Plan on the major premise that there should be three branches of a national government, legislative, executive, and judiciary. On June 19, when the revised Virginia Plan came out of committee, he rose to elaborate on where his plan differed. His suggestion that the states should be abolished had drawn sharp criticism overnight. By “abolish,” he meant their authority must be lessened. It should be “indefinite,” but they should be left as “subordinate jurisdictions,” as Persia within the Roman Empire. That same day, he rose again to contest a part of the Virginia Plan written by Luther Martin of Maryland that said the thirteen states were “in a state of nature,” the old argument of philosopher John Locke. But Hamilton found James Wilson of Pennsylvania’s resolution more palatable: the states had won their independence from Great Britain not individually but collectively. He did not fear combinations of states. The large states, Virginia and Massachusetts, were separated by too great distance.

Once again, on June 21, he rose to challenge Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, who wanted Congress to be elected by the state legislatures. Without direct election by the people, Congress would be “engrafted” to state governments that could dwindle and die. The same day, he remained adamant on the term of representatives to the lower house. Three years in office was better than a shorter term because too frequent elections made the “people listless to them.” He argued against letting state governments pay national salaries: “Those who pay are the masters of those who are paid.” And he argued vigorously against the holding of more than one public office:

Take mankind in general, they are vicious—their passions may be operated upon. Take mankind as they are, and what are they governed by? Their passions. There may be in every government a few choice spirits, who may act from more worthy motives [but] one great error is that we suppose mankind more honest than they are. Our prevailing passions are ambition and interest. Wise government should avail itself of those passions, to make them subservient to the public good.¹⁵

And then, sure that no one at the convention would follow his advice, he went home.

BEFORE HE left Philadelphia, Hamilton went for a “long afternoon’s walk” with James Madison. Five years later, Hamilton still remembered how the two men discussed the vexing problem of the state debts and agreed perfectly that all outstanding state debts must be assumed by a stronger national government when and if it was formed. They also agreed that this problem should be kept out of the Constitution because it would multiply the obstacles to its reception. Madison came away more deeply impressed by Hamilton than were most other of his convention colleagues. Major William Pierce of Georgia called Hamilton “rather a convincing speaker than a blazing orator” who “requires time to think—he enquires into every part of his subject with the searchings of philosophy.” But Southern officer Pierce found Hamilton’s manners “tinctured with stiffness and sometimes with a degree of vanity that is highly disagreeable.” William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut put it more laconically. Hamilton was “praised by everybody but supported by none.”¹⁶

Pleading urgent legal business, Hamilton rode back to New York City, expecting to return to the convention in ten days or so. Curiously, he was delayed because Major Pierce, despite his sharp-penned description of Hamilton, his friend, had apparently been cut by remarks made by one of Hamilton’s clients. Pierce asked Hamilton to be the second in a duel between two acquaintances, both merchants and public figures, which he spent several days trying to avert. In a note to his opposite second, Hamilton spelled out his reluctance to be a second in a duel until he had failed as a mediator. He then enunciated his justification for any duel. The only excuse was a “necessary sacrifice to the prejudices of public opinion.”

As he had ridden home, Hamilton had stopped to sound out many people. On July 3, he fired off a letter to George Washington that he intended as encouragement. His own faith that reforms could emerge from Independence Hall that summer had faltered as he listened to the endless motions and resolutions, but a summer’s canter through the countryside and a chance to talk to people outside the process made him more confident the convention would develop some useful plan. To Washington, he spoke bluntly. He was “more and more convinced” that this was the “critical opportunity” to establish “the prosperity of this country on a solid foundation.” Hamilton had talked to many New Yorkers and had found

an astonishing revolution for the better in the minds of the people. The prevailing apprehension among thinking men is that the Convention, from a fear of shocking the popular opinion, will not go far enough.

While Clinton and his cronies were “taking all possible pains” to slight the reformers, “the current seems to be running the other way.” Hamilton clung to no illusion, he told Washington, that the public was ready “for such a plan as I advocate” but were sympathetic to one “equally energetic.”

Retreating from ebullience to formality, Hamilton acknowledged he “cannot judge how far our sentiments agree” but his own “anxiety,” his distress at the convention when he left, made him “fear that we shall let slip the golden opportunity of preserving the American empire from disunion, anarchy and misery.” No “feeble measure” would succeed or win public support. “Decision is true wisdom.”¹⁷

Washington shot back a letter that, while assuring Hamilton he was grateful for his candor, filled Hamilton with even greater apprehension. “The state of the councils” was “if possible, in a worse train than ever.” Washington gloomily reported “little ground” for “the hope of a good establishment.” Hamilton’s alarm grew as he read on: “I almost despair of seeing a favorable issue” and “do therefore repent” having anything to do with the convention. The opponents of “a strong and energetic government” were, to Washington, “narrow minded politicians.” But Hamilton should not be discouraged to the point of abandoning the fight. “I am sorry you went away, I wish you were back,” Washington wrote simply. “The crisis is equally important and alarming.”

Before returning to Philadelphia, however, Hamilton published in the New York Daily Advertiser an angry rebuke to Governor Clinton for his public attack on the Constitutional Convention. Once, during the Revolution, they had been friends, Clinton providing medical care for the young officer when he fell desperately ill; Hamilton, in return, recommending Clinton for promotion. But since Clinton had obstructed Hamilton’s efforts to raise revenue for Congress, he and Hamilton had become bitter rivals. Now Hamilton castigated Clinton for “greater attachment to his own power than to the public good”:

If there be any man among us who acts so unworthy a part, it becomes a free and enlightened people to observe him with a jealous eye and [to] examine whether they have not more to apprehend from himself.¹⁸

As soon as he returned to the convention, Hamilton found himself again on the defensive. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts tried to restrict eligibility for a seat in the proposed Congress to “natives,” a provision that would have excluded Hamilton. He knew he could not vote for New York at the convention—his two fellow delegates had walked out, hoping to wreck the convention—but he decided to speak out. As the nitpicking continued in Philadelphia, he dashed home again in August to attend to business but, when the two Clinton delegates refused to return to the convention, Hamilton arranged with Rufus King to send him a courier “to let me know when your conclusion is at hand.” New York would not be shut out. “I choose to be present,” he wrote, “to sign the new Constitution.”

Still opposed to either the Virginia or New Jersey plan, Hamilton was only slightly less cool to the compromise put forward by Roger Sherman of Connecticut. Using a compromise concocted by Madison that each state’s representation in the lower house should be based on the total of its white population and three-fifths of its black population, the so-called Connecticut Compromise also provided that each state should be equally represented in the Senate. Hamilton returned right in the middle of the “great debate” in time for Washington to appoint him to a five-man Committee on Style and Arrangement, which also included his allies, Madison, King, and Gouverneur Morris.

Hamilton rose on September 6 and said he had restrained himself from entering the discussions by his “dislike of the scheme of government in general” but he intended to support it “as better than nothing.” He objected to the “Monster” powers to be given the president and feared he “would be tempted to make use of corrupt influence”—and here he meant bribes and political appointments—”to be continued in office.” What was the remedy? The greatest number of votes possible.¹⁹

In the last day’s debate, he espoused enlarging the House of Representatives to affect the combined interests of the president and the Senate. He also called for a dual mode of amending the Constitution, with amendments emanating either from the states or from Congress. On both these major points he prevailed, supporting Madison’s motions. With Washington’s tacit support and with Madison at his side, Hamilton succeeded in arranging for adoption of the Constitution once two thirds, or nine of the thirteen states, ratified it in specially called conventions.

On the last day of the four-month-long constitutional convention, three of the forty-two members present remained so bitterly opposed to it that they refused to sign. Irked, Hamilton sprang to Washington’s desk, where the document lay, and wrote the names of each state in a column to the left, allowing room for each signature. Still, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, and Edmund Randolph and George Mason of Virginia, refused. Madison recorded Hamilton’s agitation. “Mr. Hamilton expressed his anxiety that every member should sign. A few characters of consequence, by opposing or even refusing to sign, might do infinite mischief.” Hamilton said that he himself was signing despite the fact that “no man’s ideas were more remote from the plan than his were known to be. But is it possible to deliberate between anarchy and convulsion on one side and the chance of good?”

And then Hamilton scratched his name, the only New Yorker to sign the Constitution of the United States.²⁰

As HE returned to New York, his home and his law firm, over the last two weeks in September, Hamilton assessed the chances for ratification. The “very great weight” of the framers headed the list, particularly “the universal popularity of General Washington.” The good will of the “commercial interest,” of “most men of property,” the “hopes of the creditors,” he listed before “a strong belief in the people at large” that the Confederation form of government was “insufficient” to “preserve the Union.” Against all of this he worried about “the dissent of two or three important men” who “think their characters pledged” to defeat the new government. Hamilton predicted a fight. “The causes operating against its adoption are powerful.” He would not be astonished at its defeat but, if the framers succeeded, Washington probably would become the president, assuring “a wise choice of men to administer the government and a good administration.” Hamilton was already imagining himself in that administration. Savoring the “promise” of “so great a country” by “triumph altogether over the state governments,” he set to work to “reduce them to an entire subordination.” He expected the fight would take “eight or nine months,” and he set to work to marshal a war of words in the nation’s newspapers and state conventions.²¹

HAMILTON WAS not prepared for the ferocity of the fight over the Constitution. He returned to New York to find himself personally attacked by “Inspector” in the New York Journal. Stung, he wrote to Washington in October, enclosing a copy of the diatribe. Hamilton told Washington the opposition was doing anything it could “to diminish whatever credit or influence I may possess.” His opponents “stick at nothing.” It may have been “Inspector’s” attack that made Hamilton decide to devote most of the next seven months to his own newspaper crusade, not only against Clinton’s party but against anyone who stood in the way of state-by-state ratification. According to “Inspector,” an “upstart attorney” had “palmed himself upon a great and good man [as a] youth of extraordinary genius and, under the shadow of such a patronage, make himself at once known and respected. But, being sifted and bolted to the bran, he was at length found to be a superficial, self-conceited coxcomb and was of course, turned off and disregarded by his patron.” Washington wrote back immediately: “I do therefore explicitly declare that both charges are entirely unfounded.” But he was distressed that, “when the situation of this country calls for unanimity and vigor, “such talented gentlemen should disagree.” Washington was sure, however, that there would be “violent opposition” in Virginia “by some characters of weight.” Hamilton set out at once to recruit his allies, James Madison and John Jay, to write a series of newspaper articles that were to become famous as the Federalist Papers.²²

As HAMILTON mounted his most important political campaign, he received a letter from London from Angelica Church. His heart must have raced as he read that she was writing to him alone, not to either of her sisters or her father, and had spirited the letter off to the New York packet boat while her husband, once again, was out of town. “Church’s head is full of politics. He is so desirous of making once in the British House of Commons, and where I should delight to see him if he possessed your eloquence.” Again, she used the pinprick of a comma, or, in this case, the absence of one, to communicate her strong emotions: “Indeed my dear, Sir, if my path was strewed with as many roses.” She could not bear to write to her family. “It is too melancholy an employment today.” Her husband “is not here.” He had gone off campaigning to Newmarket. In a postscript, anxious that Hamilton, her brother-in-law, her sister’s husband, might still be enamored of his first love, she asked, “Is Kitty Livingston married?” In the Churches’ town house, The Albany, on Sackville Street in fashionable Piccadilly, Angelica pulled the silk cord to summon her footman and sent him off to meet the weekly mail.²³

GOVERNOR CLINTON’S decision to attack the Federalists—as the party favoring ratification of the new Constitution was being called—made Hamilton certain he must organize a newspaper campaign to win over the public before the New York State ratifying convention. Clinton had decided to split off New York from states farther south where Federalist support was strong. Taking the penname of the Roman censor “Cato,” he attacked the Constitution. Combined with the vicious ad hominem attack of “Inspector” against Hamilton, Clinton’s “Cato” letter prompted Hamilton to gather a group of Federalists for what he projected as twenty-five newspaper articles, but the bitter controversy led to far more essays than Hamilton envisaged while fewer leading Federalist writers volunteered or stayed the course. Initially Hamilton, who conceived the idea of the Federalist Papers, thought there would be five writers dividing the work equally. Gou-verneur Morris declined; financier William Duer decided to write his own occasional pieces. That left Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay, the former congressional secretary of foreign affairs.

Each author was to write to his own strength. Jay was to write on foreign affairs, but after writing four pieces, he was stricken by a severe bout of rheumatism and contributed only one more essay. So, in all, Jay wrote five pieces. Madison, in New York and busy as a Virginia delegate to Congress, became the historian of the team, writing on the failures of ancient and modern confederacies. His most famous contribution, Federalist Number 10, attacked the popular myth that confederations could thrive only in small geographical areas such as Switzerland. To Hamilton, who had his law practice and his growing family but who had studied the laws and constitutions of every state by now, fell the awesome task of writing on the military and fiscal affairs of a national government. At Hamilton’s suggestion, the Federalist authors intended to publish their articles once or twice a week in New York City newspapers, each going over the others’ drafts before publication. According to Hamilton’s plan for the project, after the essays appeared in newspapers Hamilton would write a preface and put them through the press in book form, with a fancy binding for a few luminaries such as Washington but a cheaper version binding that sold for six shillings so that they could quickly distribute them in Virginia or any other state where strong opposition materialized, and where they could be reprinted in local newspapers. He outlined broad topics to cover: “The Utility of the Union,” “Insufficiency of the Present Confederation,” “The Need for an Energetic Constitution,” “The Constitution’s Conformity to True Principles of Republican Government.” Under this last heading, they laid out the “general form of the government and its powers,” and “the government’s structure and its distribution of powers in general.” Under that heading, he listed the House of Representatives, Senate, executive, and judiciary branches of the proposed government.

As a nom de plume for the Federalists, it was probably Hamilton who chose “Publius.” He had used this sobriquet in attacking Samuel Chase of Maryland in 1778. Publius Valerius had been instrumental in overthrowing the last Roman king and establishing the Roman Republic. His name was familiar to the readers of Plutarch’s Lives as one who had “resolved to render the government as well as himself familiar and pleasant to the people.”

The work expanded as the number of writers dwindled. When Jay bowed out, Madison and Hamilton stuck to their original charges but gave up any hope of editing each other’s drafts or collaborating. Addressing their newspaper articles “To the People of the State of New York,” they accepted Clinton’s Anti-Federalist challenge and, deciding to eschew personal attacks, settled on a calm, patient, expository tone. Hamilton led off, writing Federalist Number 1 on a sloop returning him to New York City from arguing a case before the state Supreme Court at Albany in late October 1787. It appeared in the October 27 issue of the New York Independent Journal, taking up a full column on page two—the only page without advertising—and then jumping to a third-of-a-column runover on page three. (This turned out to be the usual layout.)

As Hamilton set to work writing his introduction to the Federalist Papers, a letter from his friend Lafayette in Paris, on growing turmoil in Europe, was crossing the Atlantic. The flame of revolution appeared to be igniting all of Europe. In February, a debt-ridden Louis XVI had summoned the Assembly of Notables at Versailles. Lafayette sat in his marquis’s robes as he heard the king’s finance minister, Calonne, outline his bold plans for fiscal reforms. “Great reforms are taking place at Court,” Lafayette wrote Hamilton. Calonne, calling for regional assemblies and an end to the tax-exempt status of the nobles and the Church, was quickly dismissed, but the kings and queens of Europe would not long be able “to extinguish a fire that is catching at every [assembly] of Europe.” When the king’s new finance minister, de Brienne, tried to have new taxes registered by the Parliament of Paris, it refused, and its members were sent into exile by the king. Howls of protest came from parlements all over France, and mobs began to riot in Paris. In the Netherlands, the stadtholder, William V, had to call in Prussian troops to restore order, the English fleet standing by to assure the revolt did not spread while the Prussians routed the rebels. Lafayette predicted renewed war between England and France and urged Hamilton to maintain “a friendly, helping neutrality.”

The October 17 Independent Journal on page one gave its own spin to the news from France. A dangerous mob had assembled at the Tuileries Palace when the king exiled the Parliament. At home, on the Georgia frontier, Indians had shot a girl “in three places” and scalped her “notwithstanding which it is expected she will recover.” The Federalists’ first essay was surrounded by pages of advertisements for imports ranging from Swedish bar iron to Madeira wine, calicoes, mohair shags, breeches, and gloves from London made “in a far superior manner to any yet manufactured in this country.” For the men, there also was Kitefoot “smoaking” tobacco and a “new invented vegetable waistcoat in patterns vastly elegant”; for madame, “muffs of marten throat and real ermine.”

But the big news was Federalist Number 1, and the gossip on the street was that its author was Alexander Hamilton. New Yorkers recognized his familiar style. They had followed his political argument for thirteen years now. His rich vocabulary combined with a colloquial directness, drawing them in on the first line:

After a full experience of the insufficiency of the existing federal government, you are invited to deliberate upon a new Constitution for the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance, comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the UNION, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world.

Using a broad brush and speaking directly to his fellow citizens, Hamilton appealed to their historical sense of duty, confiding in them that they shared with him a bold destiny. It was up to “the people of this country to decide by their conduct and example the important question whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice” or whether they would forever depend “on accident and force.” If they made the “wrong election” at this point, it would be “the general misfortune of mankind.”²⁴

What man on the street could miss the urgency of Hamilton’s impatient, dead-level appeal? Who could duck the responsibility it carried? He attacked the state bureaucracy and the upstate politicians at the outset, not opponents by name, but warned that it was in “the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every state” to resist anything that diminished “the power, emoluments and consequences of the offices they hold under the States.” He had decided to attack publicly state governments, but he also went after profiteers and land speculators, the “perverted ambition of another class of men aggrandizing themselves amid the confusions.” And he warned that the “great national discussion” would unleash “a torrent of angry and malignant passions.” Was not “jealousy the usual concomitant of violent love”? The “noble enthusiasm of liberty” carried with it “a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust.” Knowing he was gambling not only the dissolution of the Union but his own political future, Hamilton anticipated the question: “My motives must remain in the depository of my own breast.” But Publius’s “arguments will be open to all and may be judged by all.”²⁵

As Federalists and Anti-Federalists waged a wintertime war of words for minds and votes in the upcoming New York Assembly elections that would, in turn, decide the assembly’s vote on the Constitution, news came from other states where there was less opposition. In Philadelphia, where the Constitution had been argued all summer, Federalists from the city and other commercial towns had to defeat a series of Anti-Federalist amendments and delays in the Pennsylvania convention until they finally won on December 12 by a forty-six to twenty-three vote. Less than a week later, on December 18, New Jersey, a Federalist stronghold, needed only a one-week convention to ratify. But to Delaware went the honor of being the first state to ratify the Constitution by a unanimous vote, on December 7, 1787.

After John Jay wrote four essays on foreign affairs and, unable to write rapidly, withdrew from the grind of preparing and proofing articles that appeared once or twice a week, Hamilton jumped into the gap. He produced seven essays in six weeks while Madison wrote one, his Federalist Number 10. But there seemed no jealousy between them. Hamilton sensed how important it was for Madison to dispel Montesquieu’s widely believed dictum, and a popular Anti-Federalist argument, that a federal government could not work in such a large and expanding country, in anything but a small republic. In numbers 15 through 22, first Hamilton, then Madison pointed out the inadequacy of confederacies throughout history. Hamilton called the Confederation government’s record over the past four years since the Treaty of Paris “the last stage of national humiliation.” His pen dripping sarcasm, he said the “imbecility” of the American government made embassies abroad “mere pageants of mimic sovereignty.” Enumerating the weaknesses of the Confederation, he ticked off the government’s inability to make laws for individuals, its complete lack of sanctions against the excesses or insults of member states, its good-faith dependence on state quotas for revenues, its inability to regulate commerce, and its lack of authority to adjudicate interstate disputes. Moving on in essays numbers 23 to 36, Hamilton single-handedly laid out “the necessity of a Constitution” which would be at least as energetic as the one devised in Philadelphia.²⁶

By late winter, Madison began to withdraw from the writing and prepared to return to Virginia to run for a seat at that embattled state’s ratifying convention. Hamilton wrote, in numbers 59 through 61, regulations for elections, then Madison and Jay, writing their last Federalist essays in February 1788, each wrote one on the Senate (Madison had already analyzed the House of Representatives). But from that point on, it was all Hamilton’s thought, sweat, effort as he produced the final twenty-one essays himself in three months, putting down his quill and pushing the last galley proof across the stone to the printer in time for the May 28, 1788 edition. In Federalist Numbers 65 and 66, he wrote about impeachments. In the final essay, Federalist Number 85, he defended the overall effect of the Constitution. “I am persuaded that it is the best which our political situation, habits and opinions will admit.” The new system, which he had come to like better as he wrote about it, “may not be perfect in every part [but it] is, upon the whole, a good one.”²⁷ In all, Hamilton had written fifty-one of the eighty-five Federalist Papers, produced them in book form, and sent them off all over America by courier in seven months. It was his greatest political achievement. Receiving his copy at Mount Vernon, Washington wrote, “When the transient circumstances and fugitive performances [of] this crisis have disappeared, that work will merit the notice of posterity because in it are candidly and ably discussed the principles of freedom and the topics of government, which will be always interesting to mankind.” But the Constitution was still in peril in New York, and Hamilton was still the unappreciated prophet in his adopted land as each state jostled to be last, and most decisive, in the battle over ratification.²⁸

On January 2, Georgia had become the fourth ratifier and the third to do so unanimously. Two days later, Connecticut convened its delegates, and voted a lopsided 128-40 for ratification on January 9. That same day, Massachusetts met. Anti-Federalists counted 192 votes against 144 for ratification when the convention opened, but by January 30, when Federalists promised a list of amendments would immediately follow ratification, Sam Adams dropped his opposition, and the Constitution passed February 6, along with nine recommended amendments. The first state to reject the Constitution outright did so despite the fact it never sent a delegate either to Annapolis or to Philadelphia. Refusing to have a convention, Rhode Island put the question by referendum on March 24. The count was 2,945 against ratification, only 237 in favor. Three states still were needed to make up the two-thirds majority for ratification. Maryland said yes on April 28; South Carolina, by a wide 149-73 margin, on May 23. When New Hampshire’s delegates met, they decided to adjourn until late June, throwing the decision to the two largest and most divided states, New York and Virginia.

THE ELECTIONS for delegates to New York’s ratifying convention sharply divided the state into greater New York City and everywhere else. Federalists Hamilton, Jay, and Robert R. Livingston carried Manhattan, Richmond, West Chester, and Kings County, but split the rest of Long Island with Clinton’s Anti-Federalists. The Anti-Federalists swept the rest of the state, going into the convention with a forty-six to nineteen margin, nearly three to one against ratifying the Constitution. Clinton’s majority party in the assembly had shrewdly relaxed the usual property qualification for voters, for the first time allowing every free male citizen above the age of twenty-one to vote. In a rural state where many farmers had land but little cash and resented the moneyed voters of New York City and its suburbs, the Anti-Federalists promised to be unsympathetic to Hamilton and his allies, many of them bankers, lawyers, and merchants. The city dwellers, on the other hand, desperately sought an end to the commercial crisis and were whispering threats of seceding from New York State and forming a new state that would affirm the Constitution rather than face isolation from the rest of the United States.

When two of the city’s delegates—Hamilton and Jay, still the supposedly anonymous authors of the Federalist Papers—sailed upriver to attend the convention, a thirteen-gun salute from the Battery saw them off. When they arrived at the booming Hudson River port of Pough-keepsie, they confronted a less enthusiastic reception. Capital of the state since the British had burned Kingston in 1777, Poughkeepsie was the seat of Dutchess County, with a population of thirty-two thousand, the state’s second most populous county and Clinton’s power base. A thriving supply depot during the Revolution, it had armed all New York and even outfitted expeditions against Canada and a naval battle on Lake Champlain. Here, there would be little horse trading. The farmers and country lawyers who packed the handsome, two-story, one-year-old courthouse (on the west side of Market Street between Main and Union) were not easily swayed by the city-slick Federalists. Added to their natural reticence, they were in an ugly mood because of their sixth bad harvest in a row, and their perception that the city traders and lawyers were also partly traitors grew worse with every wheat-destroying Hessian fly they found ravaging their fields. The voracious insects laying their larvae among the stubble of each year’s harvest had been spreading north since they had arrived on Staten Island in the holds of British supply ships, ravaging more of the state’s wheat and rye crops every year. Although it would be another three years before two Virginia farmers, Jefferson and Madison, unraveled the mysterious pattern of the hated Hessian fly, farmers watching a hundred of the insects on every blade of wheat were finding it hard to think of the benefits of treaties and renewed trade with the wartime enemy that had left this winged plague behind. Had Hamilton and his colleagues ridden north and talked to the farmers as he had en route south to Annapolis the year before, he might have been less shocked at the intransigence of Clinton’s backers at the convention.

Hamilton and his eight fellow urban dwellers in the assembly would have to grow a majority, and in arguments over the next six steamy weeks in the packed courtroom—some two hundred spectators plus sixty-five lawmakers jammed the small chamber—Hamilton employed every trick he knew and some that were new to obtain unconditional ratification. Realizing it would probably not be possible for New York to become the ninth ratifier, he arranged for express riders from New Hampshire and Virginia to rush him news if either state approved the Constitution. And he wrote out the first New York Assembly motion to assure that the Constitution did not come to a hasty up-or-down vote. Until it had been thoroughly debated, the Constitution would be considered by a Committee of the Whole. Confidently, Clinton agreed to Hamilton’s motion.

A young attorney in Poughkeepsie, James Kent, who attended every debate and became New York’s chancellor, would write out for Hamilton’s widow a detailed account of Hamilton’s role. It corroborates the shorthand notes of journalist Francis Childs, editor of the New York Daily Advertiser, which had published many of the Federalist Papers. Hamilton and his Federalists faced Clinton’s best Anti-Federalist minds. They included John Lansing, who had studied law beside Hamilton in Albany only six years earlier and was anything but awed by him, and who had, with Robert Yates, now at his elbow, made up the two-thirds majority of the state’s delegation to the Constitutional Convention that had all but neutered Hamilton’s efforts. Both pro-Clinton lawyers knew firsthand the holes in Hamilton’s arguments. Other Clintonian lawyers not known for compromising included Melancthon Smith of Dutchess County and Samuel Jones of Queens.

For the Federalists, Chancellor Livingston led off by pointing out the dangers of isolation, but among the Federalists, it was Hamilton who was on his feet most often, some twenty-six times. His opponents rose to fight back even more often, Smith forty-five times, often to offer crippling amendments, and Lansing thirty times over six weeks. As the drama unfolded, it became clear that the Anti-Federalists hoped to block ratification by making a long list of amendments that could be approved only by another national convention before New York would ratify. Hamilton did not speak until the second day, and then his comments were terse and impatient. He had hardly been able to endure the slurs against the Constitution. “I will not agree with gentlemen who trifle with the weaknesses of our country,” he declared. “No, I believe these weaknesses to be real, and pregnant with destruction.” He considered it absolutely necessary “to dwell upon the imbecility of our Union and to consider whether we, as a state, could stand alone.” Now he had tightened the agenda to two key issues, at the same time raising the tone above the personal attacks of the Anti-Federalists.²⁹

Shrewdly appealing to the memories of New Yorkers whom he knew had shouldered far more of their share of the burden of the war than many other states, Hamilton won over Clinton by having the secretary of the convention read Clinton’s own complaints about the weakness of Congress and its inability to enforce quotas in speeches to the assembly in 1780, 1781, and 1782. But so stubborn was the Anti-Federalist resistance that, even when news came by express rider on June 24 that New Hampshire had ratified on June 21 by fifty-seven to forty-seven, the debate in Poughkeepsie raged on. Shortly after noon on July 2, Governor Clinton was making one of his rare comments on the Constitution when the respectful silence was broken by “such a buzz through the House that little of His Excellency’s speech was heard.” Colonel William S. Livingston had ridden eighty-two miles of rough road from New York City in ten hours (changing horses only twice). He jumped down from his foam-flecked bay horse with dispatches for Hamilton. Madison had mailed the news to Congress. Virginia, over the powerful objections of Patrick Henry, had ratified. As the doorkeeper handed a beaming Hamilton Madison’s letter and convention president Edmund Pendleton’s certification, a Federalist crowd cheered and, following the ragtag music of a fife and drum, marched around the courthouse.³⁰

But the fight inside was still not over. As both sides menaced each other with New York’s isolation from the Union, for two days Hamilton and Lansing attacked each other bitterly. Lansing reminded Hamilton that he had proposed the annihilation of the states at the Philadelphia convention. Hamilton interrupted him, denying he was inconsistent. “I am not one of those indifferent mortals who either never form opinions or never make them known.” But a “warm personal altercation” filled up two already searing summer days before Clinton stepped in and played the peacemaker. After a series of resolutions in favor of amending the Constitution made it clear that a Bill of Rights would have to be appended, the Constitution passed by a thirty to twenty-seven vote. Clinton saw that its opponents probably never would be satisfied but he pledged to “keep up peace and good order.”³¹

Two days later, Hamilton returned to New York City and personally carried the ratified document to Congress. He arrived too late to witness his moment of public triumph. Ten days before, a huge crowd could be restrained no longer from paying its homage. The victory parade was led by a mock frigate, the name “Hamilton” emblazoned across its capstan. Firing a thirteen-gun salute from real cannon, the federal ship led the procession [which] “made a very pompous appearance.” The “Hamilton’s” sailmakers followed with a float pulled by four matched horses and bearing “in the center, Colonel Hamilton, the new constitution on his right hand and the [Articles of] Confederation in his left.” Everywhere, there were nationalist symbols. Eagles and stars plastered tavern signs and would soon decorate furniture, clocks, and doorknockers. Thirteen thirteen-year-old coopers’ apprentices led other apprentices sporting green oak branches in their hats. Workmen on the coopers’ float showed how impossible it was to repair a broken barrel of thirteen staves and made a new cask for the roaring crowd. Between marching bands, tailors wore fig-leaf aprons and flanked naked effigies of Adam and Eve while Rhode Island wore mourning clothes. Furriers had a would-be Indian delivering pelts while a brewer’s wagon carrying a three-hundred-gallon cask of ale topped by a live Bacchus bore a banner reading, “Ale, proper drink for Americans.” Five years earlier, through the wreckage of the Revolution, Alexander Hamilton had ridden down this same route to City Hall in a crowd of horsemen accompanying George Washington. Now the crowd cheered for Hamilton.³²