On a clear April day in 1789, young girls and their mothers from Trenton, New Jersey, wearing long white gowns, gathered under garlands of laurel at the bridge over Assun-pink Creek where British grenadiers with fixed bayonets had tried to dislodge Alexander Hamilton’s artillery a dozen years before. Today, the women, led by Annis Boudinot Stockton, sister of Hamilton’s old friend and former president of Congress, strewed flower petals at the feet of George Washington’s horse as Philadelphia’s First City Troop of Cavalry escorted him toward his inauguration in New York City. Washington hated the adulation of people who wanted to treat him like a king. He had not wanted to be president, preferring to remain, retired and beloved, on his farm at Mount Vernon. But Alexander Hamilton would not leave him alone. If Washington didn’t accept the presidential nomination, Hamilton feared that an Anti-Federalist—George Clinton or, even worse, John Adams, the man Washington and Hamilton had despised and distrusted ever since the Conway cabal—would carry the electoral college and become the president, and the Union would not survive.
In midAugust 1788, only a few weeks after his victory in the battle for ratification, Hamilton had sent Washington a handsomely bound set of the Federalist Papers. He was sure Washington “understood that the writers of these papers are chiefly Mr. Madison and myself with some aid from Mr. Jay.” As if offhandedly, Hamilton said he took it “for granted, Sir,” that Washington would “comply with the general call of your country.” Hamilton had learned of Washington’s reluctance but “it was indispensable you should lend yourself to its first operations.” George III had said that if Washington could give up power, he would be the greatest man of the eighteenth century. So enormous was Washington’s reputation that his mere presence at the Annapolis Convention in 1786 and the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had assured serious consideration for the bloodless revolution that had, in turn, overthrown the first United States government and replaced it with a far more conservative institution. But the new federal government faced apparently insurmountable financial, diplomatic, and political obstacles. If it foundered with Washington at its helm, his reputation would be dashed. In a confident, uncompromising tone, the former aide-de-camp now lectured his general: “It is to little purpose to have introduced a system if the weightiest influence is not given to its firm establishment at the outset.”1
Writing back to praise “the triumvirate” of the Federalist Papers, Washington told Hamilton, “It is my great and sole desire to live and die on my farm.” Washington’s letter astonished Hamilton. He shot back that he was “deeply pained” but not surprised. He urged Washington to defer a final decision. But he was certain that Washington would have to acquiesce to “the unanimous wish of your country even if the absolute retreat which you meditated at the close of the late war was natural and proper.” But, after Confederation had not worked smoothly, by coming “again into the public view” to review the structure of government, Hamilton was “clear in the opinion that you are, by that act, pledged to take part in the execution of the government”:
In a matter so essential to the well-being of society, as the prosperity of a newly instituted government, a citizen of so much consequence as yourself to its success has no option but to lend his services if called for.
If the new government should miscarry because Washington did not follow through on the pledge implied by his signature to the new Constitution, there would be “a greater hazard to your fame” by not offering “indispensable” aid.2
Far from being taken aback by Hamilton’s bold new tone, Washington replied by the next mail, thanking Hamilton for his “frankness” and for his “manly tone of intercourse.” He was “particularly glad” that Hamilton had spoken “freely and like a friend.” Washington had otherwise foregone the “counsel of my best friends” and maintained a “guarded silence” because any “premature display of anxiety” about his nomination “might be construed into a vainglorious desire of pushing myself into notice as a candidate.” But Washington hastened to add his fervent wish that the electoral college would vote for someone else and “save me from the dreaded dilemma of being forced to accept or refuse.” He told Hamilton of “a kind of gloom” about the decision, which was giving him “more diffidence and reluctance than ever I experienced before in my life.” He would only consent to accepting the office if, “at an early period,” he would once again be “permitted” to retire, “to pass an unclouded evening after the stormy day of life.” Yet Washington was equally worried by the possibility that many Anti-Federalists, concerned that he would strengthen the new government, would run for seats in the electoral college just to block him. He believed the Anti-Federalists planned “systematic” opposition. What Washington was not saying was that he believed George Clinton had organized secret support for his own candidacy for president. One reason Washington hesitated to show any public interest in the presidency was that he feared that Anti-Federalists in Virginia and in other states would punish him for his support of the new Constitution by voting against him.3
Next, Hamilton shared with Madison his analysis of comparative Federal and Anti-Federalist strength. “If pains are taken, the danger of an Anti-Federal vice president might itself be rendered the instrument of Union.” They discussed three vice presidential candidates bluntly. John Adams would be a strong candidate in New England, New York, and New Jersey, but not from Pennsylvania south. Hamilton did not think Clinton would exchange the governorship of New York for the office “or risk his popularity by holding both.” Henry Knox simply couldn’t afford the office: “A salary must of necessity be a primary object with him.” Hamilton had decided to support Adams “though I am not without apprehension.” Adams, wrote Hamilton, would put off passing necessary constitutional amendments. A Bill of Rights had been promised in several major states as a condition of constitutional ratification. And, Hamilton thought, an Easterner was needed to balance the ticket with the Southerner Washington. Unless Adams received the vice presidential nomination, Hamilton predicted, he would “become a malcontent.” Adams could “possibly espouse, and give equal weight, to the opposition.” Hamilton had obviously told Madison how strongly he and Washington disliked Adams for his open support in Congress of Horatio Gates’s attempt to fire Washington as commander-in-chief in the Conway cabal. If Adams and Clinton joined forces, Clinton could deprive Washington of a substantial margin of victory. It was better, Hamilton counseled Madison, to give Adams the vice presidency under Washington.
There was another dreadful possibility, Hamilton reminded Madison: a flaw in the Constitution “rendering it doubtful who is appointed President.” The candidate they intended for vice president, if he garnered more electoral votes than the presidential candidate, could win the presidency. Either Clinton or Adams could declare that he was a candidate for the second-highest office, but if more electors voted for one of them and fewer for Washington, or if there were a tie vote, “the Constitution has not provided the means of distinguishing.” Before the Twelfth Amendment was adopted in 1803, electors did not cast one vote for a two-man ticket but two votes for two candidates. The candidate with the most votes became president; the runner-up, vice president. The likelihood was slim, but, Hamilton said, “It would be disagreeable even to have a man treading close upon the heels of the person we wish as President.” Could not the “malignity” of the opposition lead the Anti-Federalists against Washington?
Hamilton and Madison would have to wait until they knew who the electors were and then “we must in our different circles take our measures accordingly.” The last Congress under the Articles of Confederation had chosen New York as the temporary capital and set the date for appointment of presidential electors as January 7, 1789, and for their balloting, February 4. The first Congress under the new Constitution would meet on March 4 and the first president would be sworn in on April 30. In the meantime, Hamilton said he was chagrined to hear that Madison did not want a cabinet office. Without Madison, the new government would “severely” suffer from not enough men with the skills and the zeal to parry “the machinations of its enemies.”4
Just what measure Hamilton would take while he waited for the election became clear when he launched a brutal series of newspaper attacks on Clinton. Hamilton clearly intended eight letters signed “H.G.” to the New York Daily Advertiser to discredit Clinton both as a vice presidential candidate and for reelection as governor of New York. Governor Clinton, and Hamilton maligned him by name, was “artful,” he was “CUNNING” (he capitalized the entire word), he was a “source of the greatest mischief.” Hamilton attacked Clinton’s Revolutionary War record. Clinton, he averred, had been in “actual combat” only once, had been defeated after a “feeble” defense, and had beaten a hasty retreat while his troops fell captive. And he had failed to prevent the burning of the Revolutionary capital at Kingston. Hamilton flailed Clinton for stirring up mobs against the Loyalists at war’s end, but his most serious charges were that Clinton “prejudged and condemned” the new Constitution and now opposed New York City as the nation’s capital. Hamilton’s hard-hitting campaign journalism once again succeeded in the short run, but it made him even more personal enemies in New York.5
To constitutional law expert James Wilson, whom Hamilton would keep from high office, Hamilton nevertheless intimated his anxiety over
That defect in the constitution that renders it possible that the man intended for Vice President may in fact turn up President. Everybody sees that unanimity [for] Adams as Vice President and a few votes insidiously withheld from Washington might substitute the former to the latter.
Hamilton worried to Wilson that “personal caprice or hostility to the new system” would lead half a dozen electors to withhold their votes from Washington while Adams won what was supposedly the vice presidential slot unanimously. Hamilton suggested that Wilson urge Pennsylvanians to throw away their votes—”say 7 or 8”—rather than vote for Adams, giving them “to persons otherwise not thought of.” He told Wilson he had urged Federalists in Connecticut and New Jersey likewise to throw away two electoral votes each. He suggested that Wilson “prudently” arrange for Pennsylvania to throw away three or four. “For God’s sake, let not our zeal for a secondary object defeat or endanger a first.” He feared Adams would become “a formidable head to the Antifederalists.” He urged Wilson to pass along his suggestion to Federalists in Maryland “to qualify matters there.”6
In the first presidential election, held in New York on February 4, 1789, George Washington swept the electoral college with all sixty-nine votes cast by electors from ten of the eleven states that had ratified the Constitution. Only New York State, Clinton’s anti-Federalist stronghold, failed to send electors to cast their ballots at New York City Hall. John Adams, running second with thirty-four ballots, became vice president. Hamilton and Madison’s successful campaign to win ratification of the Constitution followed by their behind-the-scenes maneuvering to help Washington win election unanimously in the electoral college probably made it inevitable that Washington would defer to their judgment on setting up his government. Adams may have won the vice presidency but, from the outset, he was not consulted on the makeup of the cabinet. For almost every post, it was Hamilton or Madison, with the concurrence of Henry Knox, Washington’s oldest friend, and to a lesser extent, John Jay, who made up Washington’s inner circle, but John Adams never successfully influenced Washington’s choices. Working behind the scenes, Hamilton more than any of the others arranged for his own candidates to fill the key posts of government and excluded the enemies of his friends.
In several cases, this meant antagonizing some of his own allies. Robert R. Livingston had helped Hamilton win the battle for ratification in New York and, as chief justice of such an important state, expected to become the first chief justice of the United States, but Hamilton remembered Livingston’s land-grabbing in New York at the end of the Revolution at the expense of Loyalist businessmen. Hamilton, with Madison’s aid, kept Livingston out of office. To save Livingston’s face, they arranged for him, as New York’s chief justice, to administer the oath of office to Washington at his inauguration. That cost nothing politically, especially since no federal judicial appointments had yet been made and there was no United States chief justice.
In several cases, Hamilton and Madison manipulated Washington to put together the team they thought would best serve him. Washington wanted John Jay, secretary of foreign affairs under the Confederation government, as his secretary of state, but Jay told Hamilton he preferred to be chief justice and he got that post. So a Livingston in-law garnered the top judicial job at the expense of a Livingston, in part appeasing the large Livingston clan, Hamilton’s father-in-law’s principal political allies. As a consequence, Washington appointed Madison’s closest friend and political ally, Thomas Jefferson, as secretary of state without consulting him. Jefferson would not discover the appointment until he came home on leave from his post as minister plenipotentiary to France. If he had refused it, Jefferson would probably have been replaced in Paris by Hamilton’s old friend Gou-verneur Morris, who soon afterward became the top American diplomat in Europe.
Two expectant Founding Fathers received no appointment at all. James Wilson of Pennsylvania, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, had been a member of Congress through most of the Revolution and Confederation years but had opposed Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Constitution as too democratic and had aligned himself with Robert L. Livingston and John Dickinson, both anathema to Hamilton. The fact that, as chief legal adviser to Robert Morris’s Bank of North America, he had received, while the bank’s attorney, almost $100,000 in loans on questionable security, made him odious to Hamilton who had learned of the deal as proxy for the bank’s largest shareholder, his brother-in-law John Church. One other shareholder Hamilton blocked from office was Congressman Arthur Lee of Virginia, not only a well-known enemy of Madison but a borderline paranoiac who bought Bank of North America stock just so he could spy on Robert Morris. Lee coveted a federal district judgeship. He didn’t get it. Lee also was the longtime enemy of Benjamin Franklin, onetime British postmaster general for America, who had been publicly humiliated and fired after he opened sensitive mails between royal officials. Under the new Constitution, Franklin became the first postmaster general of the United States.
FOR THE key post of secretary of the treasury, Washington’s first choice was Robert Morris, superintendent of finance under the Confederation, the nation’s leading financier and founder of its first bank, the Bank of North America. When Washington inquired delicately who Morris thought should have the top treasury job, Morris recommended Hamilton. Hamilton was “damned sharp,” Morris told the president-elect. According to a persistent legend, Washington had broached the subject of the public debts and what to do about them, expecting Morris, as in the past, to offer his services. To Washington’s surprise, Morris replied, “There is but one man in the United States who can tell you. That is Alexander Hamilton.” Washington had all the confirmation he needed of his own judgment after working with Hamilton for five years of war.7
But while Washington wanted Hamilton, Hamilton, too, remembered the years as aide-de-camp. He evidently took his time making up his mind. He was already trying to repair the damage of three years of relative neglect to his law practice from his political crusading. He was seriously considering concentrating his talents on making money. He had just taken on Charles Adams, the vice president’s second son, as a law clerk, something that required Hamilton’s physical presence in his office and in New York courtrooms. His cashbook shows that John Adams had paid a deposit on Hamilton’s fee.
Hamilton’s wallet was flat and his family growing. Philip, his firstborn, was seven years old by now; Angelica, nearly three. While Hamilton had been away serving in Congress in 1786, a second son, Alexander Hamilton, Jr., was born. A third son, James Alexander, came while Hamilton was churning out the Federalist Papers. Betsy had some modest income from rents on farms on fifteen hundred acres of Schuyler lands at Saratoga, which provided the collateral Aaron Burr had demanded when the Hamiltons bought their Manhattan house and office, but for most of their expenses they depended on Hamilton’s earnings as New York City’s leading marine lawyer. When the new Congress got around to creating the executive departments of the federal government, the secretary of the treasury’s salary was fixed at a niggardly $3,500, only one seventh of the president’s salary. A further check to Hamilton’s best-laid plan for an alliance with Madison in the Senate came when he learned that a vengeful Patrick Henry, former governor of Virginia and the principal opponent of ratification in the South, had used his influence to punish Madison for his successful constitutional crusade by blocking Madison’s election to the Senate by the Virginia legislature. Madison had already turned down a cabinet office. He entered the new government as a lowly freshman congressman. Publius had lost his left hand.
ON APRIL 22, 1789, George Washington arrived at Elias Boudinot’s house in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and met with a joint delegation from the new House of Representatives, the Senate, and his putative cabinet. The visit to the Boudinots held added significance for Hamilton, who, fifteen years earlier, had begun his American odyssey in these rooms. Washington had exchanged worry for gloominess. He learned it would take another six weeks to gather a congressional quorum that could create executive departments so he could, in turn, appoint his cabinet. Congressman Hamilton, still undecided on a Treasury post, could only add to Washington’s concern: unless the new legislative body established the Treasury Department under the new Constitution before the spring fleets from Europe arrived in America, he pointed out, upward of $300,000 in customs duties, the bulk of the federal budget he projected for the year, would be lost. Washington set the date of his inauguration for only one week later. Meanwhile, Adams and the Congress had to be sworn in so that government business, at a standstill since the old Confederation Congress had adjourned sine die more than six months earlier, could resume.
While Washington traveled the last fifteen miles to Manhattan through a parade of ships in a thirteen-oared barge, painters and carpenters were rushing last-minute renovations to City Hall, renamed Federal Hall, at the intersection of Broad and Wall Streets. The city council, eager to keep the capital in Manhattan, had hired the French architect Major Pierre L’Enfant to carry out $65,000 of alterations so that the building could accommodate the House on the first floor and the Senate on the second, creating space for committee rooms, a library, and a “machinery room” to display and promote inventions. The Supreme Court would meet in a separate building on nearby Broad Street, above a sheep market.
At noon on April 30, Hamilton and Washington’s other advisers arrived in carriages and took their places behind Washington’s cream-colored, garland-festooned state carriage as it set off between troops and marching bands and a long line of the carriages of congressmen and foreign ambassadors. Hamilton and three other former aides-de-camp escorted Washington into Federal Hall and up the stairs to the Senate chamber. Washington bowed to Adams, then to Congress, then stepped out onto a small balcony. Chancellor Livingston administered the oath of office. Washington’s left hand rested on a Bible held by his old aide, Colonel Samuel Blachley Webb. He added the words, “So help me God” to the oath Livingston dictated, bowed twice to the huge crowd roaring “God bless our Washington! Long live our beloved President!,” then stepped back inside and, hand trembling, read a twelve-hundred-word inaugural speech, the shortest on record. He recommended swift passage of a Bill of Rights and then walked out.
Leading the House and Senate on a seven-hundred-yard march past houses and storefronts illuminated by hundreds of candles to St. Paul’s Chapel of Trinity Church at the foot of Broadway, he sat on a high-backed gold brocade chair set off to the left of pews packed with dignitaries for a thanksgiving service and “Te Deum.”8
After a private dinner that night, Washington took aside Hamilton and Adams and asked their advice. The day’s rituals, the adulation of the crowd vexed him. He was already so anxious that many Americans wanted him to behave like a king while others objected to the creation of the hereditary Society of the Cincinnati, causing his decision to boycott that organization’s first national convention. He asked Hamilton and Adams to make recommendations on presidential protocol. His query led to the first presidential crisis. What should the president be called? How formal should be his conduct? Should he go out for drives, for visits or dinners at the homes of congressmen, ambassadors, private citizens?
A chasm instantly opened between Hamilton and Adams. On May 5, Hamilton wrote Washington “on the etiquette proper to be observed by the President.” It was essential that “the dignity of the office” be put above “momentary dissatisfaction.” Americans were “prepared for a pretty high tone” in presidential demeanor but there were already too many “notions of equality.” But Washington should avoid creating too much distance between the president and “other branches of the government.” The president should hold a levee “once a week for receiving visits.” Invited visitors should assemble first. The president should “remain half an hour,” conversing on “indifferent subjects,” then “disappear.” No visits were to be returned. The president was to accept no invitations but give “formal entertainments two to four times a year on the anniversaries of important events in the Revolution: if twice, on the Fourth of July and the anniversary of his inauguration; if four times, add the anniversaries of the Treaty of Alliance with France and the peace treaty with England. Congressional and government leaders, ambassadors and “distinguished strangers” were to attend these state dinners. Hamilton’s prescriptions were precise, minute. “There may be separate tables in separate rooms.” On levee days, there should be smaller dinners for six or eight congressmen or other officials. But the president should never “remain long at table.” On the question of “the door of access” for official business, cabinet officers and foreign ministers alone should “have this privilege.” Senators had a stronger claim than mere congressmen because the Constitution made senators “his counselors” on “certain executive functions, treaties and appointments.”9
Hamilton was nervous about his “frankness,” but the same day he received Washington’s “unfeigned thanks.” The president’s note was short. He liked Hamilton’s written answer. “It is my wish to act right.” Hamilton had become the first presidential adviser. From experience, he knew what Washington wanted: thoughtful, timely advice, the exact opposite of what he was getting from Federal Hall. It would take two weeks of debate before the Senate could decide what to call the president. In the meantime, Adams wrote Washington that he was opposed to state dinners and thought the president should be free to call on and entertain anyone he wanted. But his recommendations on what to call the president, especially since he always assumed he would succeed Washington, made him, as president of the Senate, slow down crucial government business for two weeks. First, Vice President Adams, presiding over the Senate, thought there had to be a Senate committee to ponder the great question: Should the president be called “the Honorable,” “His Elective Highness,” or “Majesty,” “His Exalted High-Mightiness?” Adams first favored “His Majesty the President,” then “His Highness the President of the United States and Protector of the Rights of Same,” which the committee recommended to the full Senate. In the safety of his diary, Senator William Maclay, a rough-cut lawyer from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, called Adams “silly.” Rising to read from the Constitution, Maclay repeatedly reminded his colleagues, “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States.” To his diary, Maclay confided that whenever he looked up at Adams, “I cannot help thinking of a monkey just put into breeches.”
Finally, on May 14, the Senate voted to follow exactly what the House had recommended. Washington’s only title would be “the President of the United States.” Washington himself simplified what he should be called in person: “Mr. President.” He took Hamilton’s advice on protocol almost to the letter. He would receive “visits of compliment” two afternoons each week, each an hour. He would not go out of the President’s House to be a dinner guest at any private residence. He would hold a public levee for suitably dressed men, but not women, for an hour every Tuesday afternoon. The first lady would preside over a public tea for ladies and gentlemen every Friday night and host a small dinner by invitation every Tuesday, where the president would join her. The first couple followed this tradition for the next eight years. For most of that time, Washington sought and followed Alexander Hamilton’s advice over that of any other adviser.
IN THE interregnum between the death of the Confederation and the creation of new federal departments, Hamilton set about repairing his own finances, quickly becoming one of America’s highest-paid lawyers. His principal client was his brother-in-law John Church, who had decided to stay in England, pursue parliamentary politics, and sell off his American holdings with Hamilton acting as his agent. Hamilton’s account books show him advertising Broadway real estate, trying to sell Church’s 140 shares of Bank of North America stock to Robert Morris—and handling the increasingly private affairs of Angelica Schuyler Church, who arrived from Europe with the spring fleet early in March 1789. She arrived without her husband, her children, or any money. For the first two months of her eight-month sojourn, she stayed with the Hamiltons but, by mid-May, her further stay had become uncomfortable and Hamilton rented her a town house apartment nearby. Hamilton drew heavily on his savings. On May 15 he advanced Angelica a whopping 500 pounds (about $20,000 today); Betsy contributed 100 pounds (about $4,000) from her savings. He rented Angelica a coach and matched pair of horses, and paid the coachman for driving and boarding and for the bran that fed them. He hired her a valet de chamber, converting his accounts from dollars to pounds sterling so that he could reimburse himself later from Church’s earnings. At first, Hamilton was careful to extract advances from a Church business associate as well, keeping up the appearance of propriety, of a businesslike transaction. Angelica went shopping; Hamilton paid her tailor’s bills. He paid for goods she ordered and imported from Europe.
But then, in mid-August, the precise bookkeeping became mysteriously vague. It was the time of summer when Betsy took the children to her parents’ Saratoga farm. Hamilton remained in the city and hired a different (and unrecognizable) carriage, paid off the first landlady through October 7, tipping her handsomely, and then paid 23 pounds, nine shillings, three pence (about $900 today) for damages done by Hamilton’s servants when they hastily transferred Angelica’s belongings to a second apartment. This time, no landlord is mentioned in Hamilton’s cashbook, no address listed. But now, Hamilton was no longer billing Angelica’s husband for her expenses. The money was coming from his own bank account. By the time he paid 40 pounds (about $800) for a mysterious “Music Master” (could this be for the rental of a harpsichord?), and paid for Angelica’s and her servant’s ship passage back to England and gave her 200 pounds (about $8,000) of the 377 pounds, 66 shillings he still had left in his private account, his wallet was nearly flat. But from the tone of his letters, he had enjoyed some of the happiest and most productive months of his life.10
ALEXANDER HAMILTON’S affection for his wife’s older, more sophisticated sister had been growing since the first day he met her. More beautiful, worldlier, Angelica was impressed by the dashing young Hamilton and, because of her travels in the haut monde of London and Paris, she was able to appreciate the high pitch of his charm and intelligence. Angelica was, by now, thoroughly bored with her rich and neglectful husband, as bored as Hamilton was with his shy, plain country wife. Angelica loved music and literature, was widely read in the classics, knowledgeable about politics. She loved the city and the salon, wrote passionate letters—and, in the exile imposed by her husband, yearned for the company of the man she accurately called, until that summer of 1789, her “brother,” as was then the custom. She loved to talk about her travels and the people she met while Hamilton soaked up every detail. Betsy refused to travel farther from Albany than New York City or, under the duress of her husband’s political appointments, at farthest Philadelphia.
Angelica knew Hamilton’s friends probably better than Betsy, who detested political entertainment. Angelica could tell Hamilton the latest gossip from New Yorkers who had gone to Europe, from Lafayette in Paris. She had lived in Paris for two years near the Opéra, a short carriage ride from the Hôtel de Langeac, at the head of the Champs Elysées, where Thomas Jefferson, who had replaced Franklin as minister, lived, and where her friend and Hamilton’s, artist John Trumbull, was painting portraits of French officers Hamilton knew for his Surrender of Lord Cornwallis. She sent her daughter to the Panthemont School with widower Jefferson’s daughters; she visited Jefferson inside his walled garden, where she no doubt met Jefferson’s paramour, and Angelica’s “dearest sister,” Maria Cosway. Angelica conveyed political gossip that Hamilton wanted to hear, enough to last through the summer and into the autumn of 1789, as news arrived from turmoil-wracked France on the eve of revolution.
Hamilton liked his father-in-law, the old Dutch patroon, better than his wife. Betsy, often pregnant, gave birth to eight children in eighteen years, not counting the miscarriages. Nervous, probably depressive, she was bedridden for long periods. She loved to do needlepoint, embroidering whole sofas and chairs, while her husband and her sister played the harpsichord and sang Revolutionary War songs together. Betsy hated the filth and noise of New York City, where pigs roamed the unpaved streets harvesting the garbage that the rains didn’t wash away. She was never happier than when she took her children to the hearthside provincial circle of her upstate New York home, more and more without her Hamilton.
WHILE HAMILTON waited for Congress to create the Treasury office, he dabbled again in New York politics, working to have his father-in-law, Schuyler, and his friend Rufus King appointed as New York’s first U.S. senators by its legislature. Schuyler won unanimously; King also won, running second, defeating James Duane, Hamilton’s former law preceptor and a Livingston in-law. When Hamilton tried to assure that Duane, who was mayor of New York City, would not be succeeded by “some very unfit” Clintonian, he locked horns with state attorney general Aaron Burr. There had been a special assembly caucus that chose the senators. The Federalists in the legislature had taken care of everything, Burr wrote, warning Hamilton to stay away from the city elections.
FILLING HIS workdays with lucrative legal business, his evenings and weekends with the women who loved him, Hamilton atypically wrote few letters that summer. He still had not answered the question that could not yet be officially asked when, on July 21, Vice President Adams asked him if he did not “become a minister of state or some other thing better, or worse” in the new government, would he tutor his Harvard-educated second son, Charles. Was Adams trying to draw out Hamilton about his plans? The feisty Adams said his son would live at home outside the city. “He may go into town and come out with me every day.” Adams dictated his son’s hours to Hamilton from ten to eleven in the morning, from three to four in the afternoon. Rather than tip his hand, Hamilton signed up Adams’s son and pocketed the customary fee for precepting. He was soon happy to return it. On September 11, 1789, President Washington submitted the name of “Alexander Hamilton of New York” as secretary of the treasury to the Senate, John Adams presiding.11
The nomination was approved the same day. The Senate approved four other Treasury officials that day, all former Revolutionary officers, as were virtually all the one thousand men Washington personally hired. Hamilton immediately set to work administering the largest government department, with five hundred federal employees, most of them customs collectors. And within forty-eight hours, he set to work to liquidate the United States’ original sin, its enormous war debt. President Washington’s first command to his thirty-four-year-old treasury minister was to design a new federal financial system and submit it, in writing, to Congress, in only 110 days.
Congress left to Hamilton the hiring of an assistant secretary of the treasury. He chose his friend William Duer, perhaps the clearest exhibit of Hamilton’s fatal flaw in his judgment of people. A vain man, Alexander Hamilton repeatedly chose as friends and colleagues people who responded strongly to him, his ideas, and his appearance, and people he perceived to have things in common with him. Like Hamilton, Duer was an outsider. Born in England, educated at Eton, he had served briefly as an aide to Lord Clive in India before finding his way to the West Indies, where his family owned slave-labor sugar plantations on Antigua and Dominica. He first came to New York in 1768 to buy lumber and met Philip Schuyler. On his advice, Duer bought up land east of the Hudson opposite Saratoga, made it his home, and over the next six years, until the Revolution, made a fortune from timbering, supplying masts for Royal Navy ships. He also became a leading speculator in New York lands. In 1776, he became the main supplier of Continental forces in New York State, profiting handsomely from selling thousands of dollars a month in provisions and war matériel. He married Kitty Alexander, the daughter of General William Alexander, self-styled Lord Stirling, who had first offered Hamilton a staff job. Duer paid off his huge prewar debts with depreciated Continental currency.
Selling to both combatants, he used flags of truce to sell flour, cattle, and other supplies to the British inside occupied New York City, making 500 percent profits. Conniving with his father-in-law, a leading New Jersey ironmaster, he sold iron shot manufactured at Lord Stirling’s foundry to the British when the American Congress balked at his father-in-law’s high prices. He helped himself to $200,000 in Continental appropriations funds meant to buy food for American troops, passed the money through his personal accounts, and bought Continental Loan Office certificates, lending the supply money back to the government at a sizable profit. Just how much Hamilton knew, or cared, about Duer’s reputation when he appointed him to the number two treasury post is uncertain, but he surely must have been aware that Duer was considered by some members of Congress and army officers, as historians Burrows and Wallace call him, “the kingpin of corruption among military suppliers.” At the time, the appointment seemed logical enough: Duer, secretary of the treasury board since 1786, supposedly knew more about the nation’s muddled affairs than anyone else.12
IF HAMILTON had any sense of foreboding, it was less about American finances and his role in their future than about the news he was hearing from Paris. He had listened to Angelica’s descriptions of riots in the provinces as politicians jostled to become delegates to the first meeting of the French Estates-General since 1648. He had talked to Brissot de Warville, assigned to a diplomatic post in Philadelphia during the Revolution and recently returned to New York to speculate in its financial market. He had talked at length with the Comte de Moustier, the departing French ambassador to the United States. Hamilton knew from official correspondence that Jefferson, before leaving his Paris post for a home leave, had attended the Estates General at Versailles every day, writing in dispatches to John Jay, “Abundance are affrighted and think all is lost.” By the time Hamilton wrote Lafayette on October 6, 1789, that he had been appointed secretary of the treasury, Lafayette, as head of the Patriot Party, had failed to unite the different factions clamoring for reform. Hamilton, like Jefferson, supported the call of Necker, once again the king’s minister of finance, to create a two-house parliament like England’s. Secretly, Lafayette and Jefferson had worked together to frame the French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizens at the American mission. But there was a three-month lag for a message to sail from Paris to New York and back, and Hamilton did not know that Lafayette and Necker were at odds now.
In July, the American mission in Paris had been robbed three times and Jefferson was seeking police protection. On July 12, the Customs House at the head of the Champs Elysées, right outside Jefferson’s front window, a hated symbol of taxation, was burned by rioters after the king again dismissed the popular Necker. That same day, Jefferson was driving his distinctively tall black phaeton through the present-day Place de la Concorde when he encountered a crowd gathered at the entrance to the Tuileries Gardens menacing the royal cavalry guarding the king and queen. The crowd had picked up paving stones and were hurling them at the horsemen. The crowd parted to let Jefferson pass “but the moment after I passed, the people attacked the cavalry.”13
George Washington’s acolytes only a dozen years earlier, Hamilton and Lafayette now addressed each other in letters from their new eminences with “a mixture of pleasure and apprehension,” as Hamilton put it, drawing on his own recent experiences:
You will ask why this foreboding of ill when all the appearances have been so much in your favor. I will tell you: I dread disagreements among those who are now united…about the nature of your constitution. I dread the vehement character of your people, whom I fear you may find it easier to bring [out] than to keep within proper bounds after you have put them in motion. I dread the interested refractoriness of your nobles, who cannot be gratified and who may be unwilling to submit to the requisite sacrifices.
Hamilton’s letter could not have been more prophetic.
Hamilton was sure that, by now, Lafayette knew Hamilton had been “appointed to the head of finances of this country.” In a rare confession, he told his oldest friend, “in undertaking the task, I hazard much.” But if Congress supported him, “the public may be satisfied.”
Hamilton was really writing to ask for help of a kind he felt only Lafayette could provide by ameliorating the American debt to France. On his second day in office, Hamilton had met unofficially with Ambassador Moustier. As yet, there was no American secretary of state, but still the talk had to be unofficial, and Hamilton was taking his first step across the line between executive branch departments. The United States was far in arrears in payments of both interest and principal on the loans France had advanced during the Revolution. Hamilton was seeking a breather before strapping further the limited revenues of his treasury. He could not publicly seek a deferral of loan payments without undermining public confidence. Even news of such an official request would depress American credit, especially in Amsterdam where the United States owed more than half of its war debt and where interest rates were set. At first in private conversation with Moustier, then in his letter to Lafayette, he was seeking an “unsolicited” offer, “as a fresh mark of goodwill,” to forgo temporarily France’s claims for principal if the arrears of interest were paid. Historian Forrest McDonald notes, “There is no surviving evidence as to whether Hamilton made these moves known to Washington.”14
FIRING OFF volleys of letters seeking knowledge about counterfeiters, smugglers, ships and shipping lighthouses, packet boats, the French national debt, the duties on tea and brandy, Hamilton designed inquiries to his customs officials, in the process inventing the socioeconomic questionnaire to gather up-to-the-minute data, informing his correspondents, to make his Treasury Department work. He needed timely information. He was developing his own administrative style. To run the largest federal department, he worked long hours. John Marshall wrote, years later, that Hamilton had “a patient industry, not always the companion of genius.” The Prince de Talleyrand, recommended to Hamilton’s hospitality and protection during the Reign of Terror by his friend Angelica, strolled past Hamilton’s offices on Wall Street late one evening and was astonished to see the secretary of the treasury hunched at his desk, working by candlelight. “I have just come from viewing a man who made the fortune of his country but now is working all night in order to support his family.”15
Hamilton broadly patterned himself, as America’s first lord of the Treasury, on the principles of the French reformer Necker, and based the financial system he devised on English institutions created in the preceding century. From Necker’s works he studied the qualities of a great minister of state: regularity, prudence, firmness, and encyclopedic knowledge. Necker had written in his three-volume memoirs, which Hamilton read and reread, that the genius of administration was to have the capacity to grasp, simultaneously, an entire system and the relationships of its parts to one another and to the whole, then to be able to notice a change in any part. To encourage regularity, a minister not only had to apportion his time and his tasks but also discipline the habits of his thinking. For a finance minister, prudence, knowing when to act and when to stop acting, was paramount: he “must not commit any errors” but must carry out his reforms slowly, methodically, to avoid alarm. By firmness, Necker meant to be inflexible: worse than a dishonest finance minister was a weak one. Finally, a finance minister had to know the nation microscopically while following events and innovations in the rest of the world. Necker nowhere mentioned humility in his rules for a finance minister: “If men are made in the image of God,” he wrote, “then the minister of finance, next to the king, must be the man who most closely approx-imates that image.” Hamilton was to follow Necker’s principles with one great exception: prudence. He was innovative and adaptive and he knew he had to act quickly. Event and circumstance would not wait. For prudence, he substituted a combination of prodigious effort, originality, and secretiveness.
An apostle of the revolutionary eighteenth-century idea of national credit, Hamilton set to work taking an inventory of the extent of America’s financial problems. The public debt was in three categories, foreign, national, and state. The United States had borrowed slightly more than $10 million during the war, roughly $4.4 million from the French royal treasury, $1.8 million from Dutch bankers in loans guaranteed by the French, $3.6 million in direct loans from Dutch bankers, and $1.75 million from the Spanish royal treasury. By the time Hamilton became treasury secretary, the United States was $1.6 million in arrears on the interest payments and $1.4 million in arrears on scheduled principal payments. The cost of servicing the foreign debt was $1 million a year. The cost of current and overdue debt service alone would eat up all the revenues from the 1789 customs duties, still the national government’s only tax. Nothing would be left to pay domestic debts, let alone the expenses of the new national government. Considering that British taxation had led to the American Revolution, to raise taxes adequately to pay off debts was not a sane possibility. If the French would be satisfied with interest payments alone, Hamilton believed the annual interest of roughly $500,000 could be met. That would make possible a new Dutch loan that could repay all existing foreign debts. What Hamilton had in mind was debt consolidation. In his report to Congress, he budgeted $542,599 for foreign debt.
To pin down the domestic debt, Hamilton found, was trickier. The Continental Congress had raised wartime revenues in three ways. To pay and supply the army, Congress had issued unsecured paper money—”not worth a Continental”—bonds called loan office certificates yielding 6 percent interest, and promissory notes. Some $200 million in paper money—at least that was its face value—had depreciated so badly that it had been devalued at a rate of forty to one. It was replaced by new paper, which was virtually worthless. About $11 million in loan office certificates was outstanding, held by speculators such as William Duer. Instead of paying interest, Congress issued certificates of interest, paying them with a portion of its requisitions on the states. The states, in turn, had levied taxes paid in part by indents: as a result, about $1.5 million had been returned to the national treasury and canceled. Several states accepted as taxes the army requisitions handed out when the quartermasters or commissaries helped themselves to necessities for the troops: about $10 million had been paid into the Continental treasury and thus canceled, but $16 million in requisitions were outstanding. Adding up the $13 million in arrears of interest due, Hamilton calculated that the national debt was roughly $40 million. Several states complicated matters further by speculating in Continental securities. As a consequence, state governments owned about one third of the national debt.
On top of this whopping national war debt, the individual states had spent about $100 million on the war. Some states, like Massachusetts and South Carolina, paid as they went as honestly as they could but were hopelessly behind; others, like Rhode Island, Virginia, and North Carolina, paid bills with worthless depreciated currency. Hamilton estimated that the combined outstanding state debt was somewhere between $21 million and $25 million. The state debts usually carried 6 percent interest. In all, the combined American war debts amounted to $76 million. The interest bill now due was $4.5 million, about three times what Hamilton thought could be raised by taxation and tariff duties.16
Congress had given Hamilton the power not only to appoint his staff but to superintend the collection of revenues, create the forms of accounts he would need, and prepare and report budget estimates to either branch of Congress. His most important mandate, in fact indispensable, was “to digest and prepare plans for the improvement and management of the revenue and for the support of public credit.”
Since he had been a boy in a St. Croix countinghouse, Hamilton had practiced order and system, keeping careful books. He set out to bring to the U.S. Customs Service standardized procedures of collection, calculation, and reporting that all offices had to follow. Yet he fought overrigid bureaucracy. He allowed collectors in major ports some discretion to allow for local practice. He required weekly reports on collections and payments, the volume of shipping of exports and imports on every port, but he also asked for the ideas of Treasury employees on what worked and he wanted to hear the complaints of the merchants. The forms that he required to be filled out also provided room for essays. The results poured in, making him undoubtedly the best-informed federal official, or American citizen, for that matter.
If Hamilton analyzed the federal debt in per capita terms, it was staggering. Out of a population of nearly four million Americans, only 160,000 white males over age twenty-one had property enough to qualify to vote in the constitutional ratification elections. With a combined war debt of $76 million, it meant that the average voter owed $475 in 1789 currency which, factored out, in today’s money would mean a debt of $6,175 per voter, more than the vast majority made in a year in a country short on cash.
Once Hamilton knew the depth of the hole the United States was in, he had to think hard about the least unpopular way to fill it. While the new Constitution spelled out the taxing power of the federal government, Hamilton knew he was limited in carrying out his task by political and economic reality. His success depended in large part on how well he knew and gauged national and international economic conditions and financial institutions and how well he played them off to the advantage of the United States. His first careful step to raise sufficient revenue was to decide which forms of taxes to recommend to Congress.
Hamilton basically had only three categories of taxes to choose from. The most unpopular would be direct taxes on people or their property: here his hands were tied by the constitutional requirement that such taxes be apportioned among the states according to population rather than property holdings. It was for this reason that Hamilton eschewed direct taxes, preferring to let the states collect them. Hamilton liked customs duties, a form of tax exclusively reserved to the federal government, as they were the easiest to collect and fell on those who could best afford to pay them. Both federal and state governments could collect excise taxes on particular goods, but, as Hamilton would soon learn, excise taxes were the least popular. While some congressmen, including Madison, thought the states could levy them, Hamilton believed that taxes sought by two different governments could be evaded more easily than if both were collected by two agencies of the same government, the Federal government. It was this kind of double Federal scrutiny, without the possibility of state interference or profiteering, that Hamilton wanted. The federal government would then be forced to assume full responsibility for the states’ debts, exactly what Hamilton wanted. He could expect the states that benefited most to espouse his principle of “assumption”: Massachusetts, Connecticut, and South Carolina owed almost half of all state debt. New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland would have to support any effort to raise revenues because the federal government owed them so much money. Only two states, Virginia and North Carolina, had nothing to gain from assumption of their debts because they had paid them, albeit largely with depreciated currency. And these two states held nearly one in four seats in the House as well as some of the most outspoken spokesmen for states’ rights.
How to raise revenue was only slightly less thorny than who would pay. Excise taxes fell on liquor, and there were two basic kinds distilled in America: rum in New York and New England, whiskey in the backcountry. The rum distillers, mostly wealthy, were already creditors of the federal government through speculation, but whiskey came down from countless small stills in the hills from Pennsylvania south, and they were run by Scots-Irish frontiersmen with little interest in supporting the remote federal treasury’s needs. Far easier to police would be imports of wine from Spain and Portugal, manufactured goods from England, and sugar and its products from the West Indies. Most of the imports would come through six ports: Charleston and Norfolk from Europe, Boston and Baltimore from the West Indies, and New York and Philadelphia in general. Where Hamilton could expect opposition was in the North, where manufacturers wanted protective tariffs that undercut foreign imports. Eager to appease this powerful voting bloc, Hamilton planned to promise adjustments to the tariff schedule after letting in all the imports he could to pay off the national debt. Again, he faced Madison, the spokesman for Southern tobacco planters, who blamed Robert Morris for monopolizing the tobacco trade with France. In fact, while planters expected to be able to grow rich exporting their crops directly to Europe, England remained the main importer of American tobacco. Hamilton’s old collaborator was to be his greatest obstacle as he went about forming an anti-British coalition in Congress that included Southern planters, New England shippers, whalers and fishermen, and Northern manufacturers.
By far the busiest congressional lobbyists were the least popular men in America, the speculators. Generally regarded as unscrupulous, they were not considered investors. Among the bulls were the original holders of public paper paid for service in the army or for supplies. Somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of them still held their securities by 1789. But far more soldiers, their families, or suppliers had sold their paper at deep discounts to one of several hundred merchants who paid as little as 10 cents on the dollar to the hard-pressed original holders. These same speculators, mostly importers, had customers for warehouses crammed with imported goods and, as British creditors cracked down, faced ruin unless the public securities they had bought up were made whole by the new government. One dilemma Hamilton faced was the vexing question whether original holders of public securities or current holders, if they were speculators, should be treated equally. To some Americans, it was a moral as well as an economic question. Hamilton, no doubt with some relish, wrote to John Witherspoon, the president of Princeton who had rejected his plan to go through college on the fast track, to ask him to give some advice to his would-be former pupil. Witherspoon, signer of the Declaration of Independence as a congressman in 1776, had reentered politics as a New Jersey assemblyman. He also had long been the leader of Presbyterians in America. Did Hamilton know (and he possibly had heard from his friend Elias Boudinot, a longtime Princeton trustee) that Witherspoon was speculating in Vermont real estate? In his research, Hamilton may have learned that Witherspoon had taken part in banking systems in the 1750s in Scotland and had, as Witherspoon now wrote Hamilton, “read much and wrote some” on banking theory. Witherspoon agreed to meet Hamilton in New York City, but in the meantime unburdened himself on the “proper provision for public debt.” He reared back and told the young treasury secretary, “The evil that has pervaded our whole affairs in America has been the want of a just sense of the sacredness of public credit.” He did not approve of distinguishing between debtors. He pointed to the 25 percent discounts paid in England for “sailors tickets and Navy debentures,” and continued:
Now if any minister in Parliament or any person in the pay office should say to one bringing a number of them, “Where did you get these? You are a speculator. You never drew a rigging rope on a ship. You did not pay the full value of them and we will not pay you the full value of them.” Such a thing reported and believed on the Exchange of London would bring the whole national debt to the ground in two hours.17
Behind this speculative binge was the American belief in land. If only the speculators could make a killing in discounted securities, they could reinvest it in far safer landholdings to the West. Benjamin Franklin had tried to corner millions of acres in the Midwest before the Revolution and now owned thousands of acres in Pennsylvania. Washington had bought up nearly five hundred thousand acres of frontier land; Henry Knox was on his way to going bust on speculations in Maine. Some speculators, such as William Duer, were actually gambling that the value of government securities would stay depressed so that, if they could buy impoverished Continental soldiers’ pay certificates for 10 cents on the dollar and then buy unclaimed government land at a dollar an acre, they could parlay an investment of $100,000 into one million acres of western lands to sell to future settlers as fast as the government cleared out the Indians.
But Hamilton was facing east and hoping to establish a more stable financial climate. He knew that, in Amsterdam, the financial capital of the world in 1789, the Dutch had been dumping their British investments and investing in American and French loans since 1780, when the British provoked a four-year war with them. With France sliding into revolution, the Dutch had lent more money each year that kept the United States from defaulting on its loans to France, and by 1789, the Dutch had also bought $1 million in Continental securities on the New York open market. To achieve the sort of stability the United States needed to attract more foreign investment that would, in turn, pay off the American debt, Hamilton turned to the English model. While Necker had sought to build up France’s credit by cutting royal waste and streamlining its tax system, England for a century had been encouraging a national debt.
During the past century since the founding of the Bank of England in 1694 by the Dutchman King William III, while British tax revenues sextupled, the national debt rose fifteen fold. Up to 40 percent of the national debt was covered by loans, and military spending devoured as much as 14 percent of national income. Yet, as the national debt grew, Britain rose from a marginal, civil war-torn state to an empire with colonies on three continents and the financial resources to subsidize the world’s largest navy and—except for the aberration of losing the American Revolution—most successful armies. A series of brilliant finance ministers from Horace Walpole to William Pitt the Younger had turned its national debt into a great asset. The Bank of England was able to raise money, once extracted from land taxes as high as 20 percent in wartime, by issuing long-term bonds that could be traded on the open market. The British government was able to raise money at relatively low rates of interest whenever it needed it, thus making war possible at virtually all times without bringing on revolution by unhappy taxpayers.
As he studied the English financial system in 1789, Hamilton also struck on the latest British expedient, the sinking fund. Earmarking a portion of tax revenues each year to pay off the national debt, the sinking fund was the brainchild of the current treasury lord and first minister, William Pitt the Younger (the term “prime minister” did not exist yet). Introduced in 1787, the 1-million-pound annual sinking fund had restored investor confidence even as the Dutch dumped British investments. In November 1789, Hamilton heard back from William Bingham, the richest merchant in Philadelphia, in answer to a query marked “private” asking for “any thoughts” Bingham might have on American “finances and debts.” Bingham wrote a long and detailed analysis of the British system that Hamilton no doubt leaned on heavily as he set about writing his own report to Congress at the end of November 1789. But these words jumped out of Bingham’s letter: since Pitt had introduced the sinking fund, putting 1 million pounds a year out of reach of the government, “This stroke of finance [has] operated like a charm.” Hamilton needed little more persuasion. As long ago as 1778, his friend Gouverneur Morris had advocated a sinking fund using the profits of the post office to reduce national debt. Bingham, probably America’s most respected businessman, strongly encouraged Hamilton to pursue his own plans:
Much dependence is placed on your exertions, and I am happy to find that there is a general disposition to give you credit by anticipation for the soundness of your systems and the honesty of your views.18
Hamilton’s reputation for honesty went beyond his opinions; he demanded a higher standard for himself than his friends or employees. Yet it was impossible to order the affairs of his family. While he developed the nation’s financial plans, he represented his brother-in-law John Church in selling 140 shares of Bank of North America stock to Robert Morris, even though he himself owned no bank stock. When his friend and mentor Robert Morris tried to put up public securities for collateral for the shares, Hamilton insisted on more conventional collateral in the form of real estate mortgages. His father-in-law, General Schuyler, owned or would soon acquire $67,000 in public securities (roughly $1 million today).
And when his old army friend Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, in November 1789, wrote him to ask if it would be proper for Hamilton to advise him on investing in public securities, Hamilton responded, “You remember the saying with regard to Caesar’s wife. The spirit of it [applies] to every man concerned in the administration of the finances of a country. Suspicion is ever eagle-eyed. And the most innocent things are apt to be misinterpreted.”19
THE TIME to prepare his plan for rescuing the American economy quickly eroding, Alexander Hamilton faced a crisis in his personal life that almost wrecked his marriage. All through the summer and autumn, he had slipped away from the frenetic activity of organizing the treasury and studying the data he had gathered from all over the new nation to participate in the tense drama of Angelica Schuyler’s return to England. For all that Betsy knew, Angelica would be leaving America forever. With revolution in France, and England once again menacing her ancient enemy, Atlantic voyages were becoming too dangerous. Betsy’s depression deepened as she anticipated her sister’s departure. Bedridden for weeks, she demanded constant attention until, finally, it was decided that she should remain in Albany at the end of her usual summer visit, where her parents could care for her. That left Hamilton and Angelica alone together in New York City.
In a town of thirty-five thousand people, their long strolls through the streets and evening promenades on the Battery, his frequent arrival at her rented house, and her comings and goings in a now-familiar carriage were bound to lead to gossip. The dashing Hamilton had become a local celebrity, Angelica his elegant constant companion. The couple—and, according to the persistent gossip, they had become a couple sometime that fall—took to clandestine meetings. To all but the most discerning, once Congress adjourned, Hamilton had left town with his family. Hamilton’s personal papers, later heavily edited by Betsy, and his cash book fail to reveal exactly where he and Angelica made their love nest, but Hamilton’s records of unreimbursed expenses hint that he was trying hard to avoid scrutiny.
But by November, Angelica would either have to leave on the last ship for England before winter—or stay, which would have been a very serious step. To remain with Hamilton, or even with her family, would represent a serious break with her husband, who had no intention of returning from England. Even if they had wanted one, divorce was out of the question either for Dutch Reformed like Angelica or an Anglican like John Church. The scandal of Hamilton and Angelica remaining together and apart from their spouses could wreck three political careers—of Senator Schuyler, member of Parliament John Church, and the new secretary of the treasury. By November, the situation had become so awkward that both Philip Schuyler and his wife were writing letters to Angelica. Schuyler, offended and outraged that Betsy and the children had arrived in Albany while Angelica remained with Hamilton, bluntly told Angelica she must break it off, leave, return to her husband. Betsy, returning from Albany, became inconsolable, poured out her grief at her older sister’s departure. In a letter full of yearning that Hamilton wrote to Angelica on November 8, 1789, he recounted how he, his seven-year-old son Philip, and their star boarder Baron Steuben had watched from the Battery as Angelica’s ship sailed past the tip of Manhattan, out of sight toward the Narrows. Hamilton, his boy, his baron, all wept:
After taking leave of you on board the packet, I hastened home to soothe and console your sister. I found her in bitter distress, though much recovered from the bitter agony in which she had been. After composing her by a flattering picture of your prospects for the voyage and a strong infusion of hope that she had not taken a last farewell of you, the Baron, little Philip and myself, with her consent, walked down to the Battery where, with aching hearts and anxious eyes, we saw your vessel, in full sail, swiftly bearing our loved friend from our embraces! Imagine what we felt. We gazed, we sighed, we wept; and casting “many a lingering longing look behind,” returned home to give scope to our sorrows and mingle without restraint our tears and our regrets…
In quoting from Virgil, their favorite poet, Hamilton evoked their memories of reading, in Latin, about Aeneas’s fated parting from his lover, Dido, as he left Carthage behind to found Rome. Hamilton could not restrain his pen. In a letter he would send on the next ship with a trusted friend, Hamilton asked, “Why should I alloy the happiness that covets you?” But he would not make their loneliness worse: “However difficult or little natural it is to me to suppress what the fullness of my heart would utter, the sacrifice shall be made to your ease and satisfaction.” He reassured Angelica that he had smoothed things over with her father, still irate that his daughter had taken an apartment away from her family. “I have no doubt the arguments I used with him will go far towards reconciling his mind to the unexpected step you took.” And he enclosed two letters from her mother and father that he had undoubtedly intercepted from Schuyler but not let her see before she sailed. “They arrived the day after you set sail,” he added blandly. Sealing the envelope with wax, Hamilton returned to the pile of papers that he now, in two months, must transform into an outline for an economic miracle. In addition to gathering information from all over America, that same day the former spymaster devised a scheme for entrapping counterfeiters in Connecticut. More and more, he worked in secret now, confiding in no one until he was ready. Sometimes, that was too late.20