Alexander hamilton, p.10
Alexander Hamilton, page 10
When his speech ended, the crowd stood transfixed in silence, staring at this spellbinding young orator before it erupted in a sustained ovation. “It is a collegian!” people whispered to one another. “It is a collegian!”41 Hamilton, nineteen, looked young for his age, which made his performance seem even more inspired. From that moment on, he was treated as a youthful hero of the cause and recognized as such by Alexander McDougall, John Lamb, Marinus Willett, and other chieftains of the Sons of Liberty. It is worth remarking that at this juncture Hamilton sided with the radical camp, along with the artisans and mechanics, rather than with the more circumspect merchant class he later led. Hamilton had immigrated to North America to gratify his ambition and successfully seized the opportunity to distinguish himself. Both then and forever after, the poor boy from the West Indies commanded attention with the force and fervor of his words. Once Hamilton was initiated into the cause of American liberty, his life acquired an even more headlong pace that never slackened.
As rumors of the militant commotion at the Common filtered back to the college, Dr. Myles Cooper must have been appalled that the orphan whom he had treated so indulgently was now fraternizing with disreputable elements. Cooper maligned the Sons of Liberty as the “sons of licentiousness, faction, and confusion.”42 The situation was an awkward one for Cooper, who was tugging his forelock at royal authority while Hamilton was thumbing his nose at it. Exactly three months before, the college president had published an obsequious open letter to William Tryon, the departing royal governor, that was a classic of unctuous prose and that concluded, “We can only say, that as long as the society shall have any existence and wherever its voice can extend, the name of TRYON will be celebrated among the worthiest of its benefactors.”43
Hamilton contended that he was “greatly attached” to Cooper, and in ordinary times he might have been a fond disciple.44 Cooper was a witty published poet, a Greek and Latin scholar, and a worldly bachelor with epicurean tastes. In a portrait by John Singleton Copley, he has a smooth, well-fed face and stares sideways at the viewer in a smug, self-assured manner. On the tiny King’s faculty, it was Cooper who likely tutored Hamilton in Latin, Greek, theology, and moral philosophy.
Cooper had been recommended for the King’s presidency by the archbishop of Canterbury and was in many respects an outstanding choice. In little more than a decade, he had inaugurated a medical school, enlarged the library, added professors, and even launched an art collection. Like John Witherspoon, he boasted a roster of distinguished pupils, including John Jay, Robert R. Livingston, Gouverneur Morris, Benjamin Moore, and Hamilton. In 1774, Cooper had intensified the overriding quest of his presidency, for a charter that would convert King’s College into a royal university. Then the Revolution blasted his hopes. He found the revolt at first an irritant, then an outrage, then a mortal threat to his ambitions. He could not afford to be a neutral bystander and began to flay the protesters in caustic essays, claiming that the tea tax was exceedingly mild. “The people of Boston are a crooked and perverse generation... and deserve to forfeit their charter,” he wrote.45 With such retrograde views, he became one of New York’s most despised Loyalists and was increasingly assailed by his students. Samuel Clossy also grew disgusted with the turmoil and returned to the British Isles.
Colonial resistance began to assume a more organized shape. By late August 1774, all the colonies save Georgia had picked their delegates to the First Continental Congress. The New York delegates, among them John Jay and James Duane, departed for Philadelphia amid stirring fanfare. One newspaper reported, “They were accompanied to the place of their departure by a number of the inhabitants, with colours flying and music playing and loud huzzas at the end of each street.”46 It was not an assembly of dogmatic extremists who sat in Windsor chairs for six weeks in the red-and-black brick structure known as Carpenters’ Hall. Far from being bent on fighting for independence, these law-abiding delegates offered up a public prayer that war might be averted. They reaffirmed their loyalty as British subjects, hoped for a peaceful accommodation with London, and scrupulously honored legal forms. Yet there were limits to their patience. The congress formed a Continental Association to enforce a total trade embargo—no exports, no imports, not even consumption of British wares—until the Coercive Acts were repealed. Every community was instructed to assemble committees to police the ban, and when New York chose its members that November, many of Hamilton’s friends, including Hercules Mulligan, appeared among their numbers.
Even though John Adams had found Jay and Duane far too timid for his tastes, the Continental Congress’s actions stunned Tory sentiment in New York. For Myles Cooper, the meeting had been a satanic den of sedition, which he acidly condemned in two widely read pamphlets. He informed the startled colonists that “subjects of Great Britain are the happiest people on earth.”47 Far from criticizing Parliament, he maintained that “the behavior of the colonies has been intolerable.”48 He then poured vitriol on the congress’s initiatives: “To think of succeeding by force of arms or by starving the nation into compliance is a proof of shameful ignorance, pride, and stupidity.”49 Like many people, he scorned the notion that the colonies could ever defeat Britain’s invincible military. “To believe America able to withstand England is a dreadful infatuation.”50
Myles Cooper was not the only Anglican clergyman in New York to rail against the Continental Congress. He formed part of a Loyalist literary clique that included Charles Inglis, later rector of Trinity Church, and Samuel Seabury, the Anglican rector of the town of Westchester. Seabury was a redoubtable man of massive physique and learned mind. Educated at Yale and Oxford, he was very pompous and wrote prose that bristled with energetic intelligence. Because Westchester had been granted special privileges by a royal charter, local farmers felt especially threatened by the trade embargo. So after the Continental Congress adjourned, Seabury, with the full knowledge of Myles Cooper, launched a series of pamphlets under the pseudonym “A Westchester Farmer.” (The title cunningly echoed John Dickinson’s famous polemic against parliamentary taxation, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania.) Seabury’s blistering essays reviled the officers of the new Continental Association as “a venomous brood of scorpions” who would “sting us to death,” and he suggested that they be greeted with hickory sticks.51 He appealed cleverly to farmers by warning that they would be the major casualties of any trade boycott against Britain. If merchants could not import goods from Britain, would they not then hike their prices to farmers? As he wrote, “From the day the exports from this province are stopped, the farmers may date the commencement of their ruin. Can you live without money?”52
After the first installment of Seabury’s invective was published by James Rivington in the New-York Gazetteer, the paper reported a febrile patriotic response, especially among Hamilton’s newfound companions: “We can assure the public that at a late meeting of exotics, styled the Sons of Liberty,” the “Farmer” essay was introduced, “and after a few pages being read to the company, they agreed ...to commit it to the flames, without the benefit of clergy, though many, very many indeed, could neither write nor read.”53 To drive home the point, some copies were tarred and feathered and slapped on whipping posts. Nonetheless, the essay made a huge popular impression and demonstrated that the patriots were being outgunned by Tory pamphleteers and needed a literary champion of their own.
Seabury gave Hamilton what he always needed for his best work: a hard, strong position to contest. The young man gravitated to controversy, indeed gloried in it. In taking on Seabury, Hamilton might have suspected—and may well have enjoyed—the little secret that he was combating an Anglican cleric in Myles Cooper’s inner circle. He had to tread stealthily and keep his name out of print. (Most political essays at the time were published anonymously anyway.) Eager to make his mark, Hamilton was motivated by a form of ambition much esteemed in the eighteenth century—what he later extolled as the “love of fame, the ruling passion of the noblest minds, which would prompt a man to plan and undertake extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit.”54 Ambition was reckless if inspired by purely selfish motives but laudable if guided by great principles. In this, his first great performance in print, Hamilton placed his ambition at the service of lofty ideals.
On December 15, 1774, the New-York Gazetteer ran an advertisement for a newly published pamphlet entitled “A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress” that promised to answer “The Westchester Farmer.” The farmer’s sophistry would be “exposed, his cavils confuted, his artifices detected, and his wit ridiculed.”55 This thirty-five-page essay had been written in two or three weeks by Hamilton, as he entered the fray with all the grandiloquence and learning at his disposal. He showed himself proficient at elegant insults, an essential literary talent at the time, and possessing a precocious knowledge of history, philosophy, politics, economics, and law. In retrospect, it was clear that he had found his calling as a fearless, swashbuckling intellectual warrior who excelled in bare-knuckled controversy.
By the time of “A Full Vindication,” Hamilton had clearly assumed the coloring of his environment. Few immigrants have renounced their past more unequivocally or adopted their new country more wholeheartedly. “I am neither merchant, nor farmer,” he now wrote, just a year and a half after leaving St. Croix. “I address you because I wish well to my country”: New York.56 Hamilton reviewed the Boston Tea Party and the punitive measures that had ensued in Boston, including “license [of] the murder of its inhabitants” by British troops.57 Hamilton supported the Tea Party culprits and faulted the British for punishing the whole province instead of just the perpetrators. He voiced the increasingly popular complaints about taxation without representation and defended the trade embargo, insisting that England would suffer drastic harm. Sounding more like the later Jefferson than the later Hamilton, he evoked an England burdened by debt and taxes and corrupted by luxuries.
In many places, “A Full Vindication” was verbose and repetitive. What foreshadowed Hamilton’s mature style was the lawyerly fashion in which he grounded his argument in natural law, colonial charters, and the British constitution. He already showed little patience with halfway measures that prolonged problems instead of solving them crisply. “When the political salvation of any community is depending, it is incumbent upon those who are set up as its guardians to embrace such measures as have justice, vigor, and a probability of success to recommend them.”58 Most impressive was Hamilton’s shrewd insight into the psychology of power. Of the British prime minister, Lord North, he wrote with exceptional acuity:
The Premier has advanced too far to recede with safety: he is deeply interested to execute his purpose, if possible....In common life, to retract an error even in the beginning is no easy task. Perseverance confirms us in it and rivets the difficulty....To this we may add that disappointment and opposition inflame the minds of men and attach them still more to their mistakes.59
After Seabury rebutted “A Full Vindication,” Hamilton struck back with “The Farmer Refuted,” an eighty-page tour de force that Rivington brought out on February 23, 1775. More than twice the length of its predecessor, this second essay betrayed a surer grasp of politics and economics. Seabury had mocked Hamilton’s maiden performance and now suffered the consequences. “Such is my opinion of your abilities as a critic,” Hamilton addressed him directly, “that I very much prefer your disapprobation to your applause.”60 As if Seabury were the young upstart and not vice versa, Hamilton taunted his riposte as “puerile and fallacious” and stated that “I will venture to pronounce it one of the most ludicrous performances which has been exhibited to public view during all the present controversy.”61 This slashing style of attack would make Hamilton the most feared polemicist in America, but it won him enemies as well as admirers. Unlike Franklin or Jefferson, he never learned to subdue his opponents with a light touch or a sly, artful, understated turn of phrase.
Like most colonists, Hamilton still hoped for amity with England and complained that the colonists were being denied the full liberties of British subjects. In justifying American defiance of British taxation, he elaborated the fashionable argument that the colonies owed their allegiance to the British king, not to Parliament. The point was critical, for if the colonies were linked only to the king, they could, theoretically, wriggle free from parliamentary control while creating some form of commonwealth status in the British empire. Indeed, Hamilton cast himself as “a warm advocate for limited monarchy and an unfeigned well-wisher to the present royal family.”62 In what became his trademark style, he displayed exhaustive research, tracing royal charters for North America back to Queen Elizabeth and showing that no powers had been reserved to Parliament. In one glowing passage, Hamilton invoked the colonists’ natural rights: “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of the divinity itself and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”63 These lines echo John Dickinson, who had written that the essential rights to happiness are bestowed by God, not man. “They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals.”64 Hamilton added beauty and rhythm to the expression.
Clearly, Hamilton was reading the skeptical Scottish philosopher David Hume, and he quoted his view that in framing a government “every man ought to be supposed a knave and to have no other end in all his actions but private interests.” The task of government was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good. In starting to outline the contours of his own vision of government, Hamilton was spurred by Hume’s dark vision of human nature, which corresponded to his own. At one point, while talking about the advantages that England derived from colonial trade, he said, “And let me tell you, in this selfish, rapacious world, a little discretion is, at worst, only a venial sin.”65 That chilling aside—a “selfish, rapacious world”—speaks volumes about the darkness of Hamilton’s upbringing.
With “The Farmer Refuted,” the West Indian student became an eloquent booster of his chosen country and asserted the need for unity to resist British oppression. “If the sword of oppression be permitted to lop off one limb without opposition, reiterated strokes will soon dismember the whole body.”66 He already took the long view of American destiny, seeing that the colonies would someday overtake the mother country in economic power. “If we look forward to a period not far distant, we shall perceive that the productions of our country will infinitely exceed the demands, which Great Britain and her connections can possibly have for them. And as we shall then be greatly advanced in population, our wants will be proportionably increased.”67 Here, in embryonic form, is his vision of the vast, diversified economy that was to emerge after independence.
“The Farmer Refuted” was a bravura performance, flashing with prophetic insights. While the British disputed that America could win a war of independence, Hamilton accurately predicted that France and Spain would aid the colonies. The twenty-year-old student anticipated the scrappy, opportunistic military strategy that would defeat the British:
Let it be remembered that there are no large plains for the two armies to meet in and decide the conquest.... The circumstances of our country put it in our power to evade a pitched battle. It will be better policy to harass and exhaust the soldiery by frequent skirmishes and incursions than to take the open field with them, by which means they would have the full benefit of their superior regularity and skills. Americans are better qualified for that kind of fighting which is most adapted to this country than regular troops.68
This was Washington’s strategy, compressed into a nutshell and articulated even before the fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord. This was more than just precocious knowledge: this was intuitive judgment of the highest order.
As rumors went around that Hamilton had authored the two “Farmer” essays, many New Yorkers, Myles Cooper included, dismissed the notion as preposterous. “I remember that in a conversation I once had with Dr. Cooper,” said Robert Troup, “he insisted that Mr. Jay must be the author[,]...it being absurd to imagine [that] so young a man” as Hamilton could have written it.69 Others attributed the pieces to much more established figures, such as William Livingston. Hamilton must have been flattered by the fuss and his literary club deeply amused. In a city with a dearth of republican pamphleteers, Hamilton represented an important recruit to the cause. He had demonstrated inimitable speed (the two “Farmer” essays totaled sixty thousand words), supreme confidence in his views, and an easy, sophisticated grasp of the issues. He was to be a true child of the Revolution, growing up along with his new country and gaining in strength and wisdom as the hostilities mounted.
FOUR
the other hand, critics had accused him of exploiting his government connections for personal gain.
THE PEN AND THE SWORD
By the time Hamilton wrote “The Farmer Refuted,” the British Parliament had declared Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion and ratified the king’s unswerving determination to adopt all measures necessary to compel
obedience. On the night of April 18, 1775, eight hundred British troops marched out of Boston to capture Samuel Adams and John Hancock and seize a stockpile of patriot munitions in Concord. As they passed Lexington, they encountered a motley battalion of armed farmers known as Minutemen, and in the ensuing exchange of gunfire the British killed eight colonists and then two more in Concord. As the redcoats retreated helter-skelter to Boston, they were riddled by sniper fire that erupted from behind hedges, stone walls, and fences, leaving a bloody trail of 273 British casualties versus ninety-five dead or wounded for the patriots.
