Alexander Hamilton (121 page)

Hamilton found increasing pleasure at home at 26 Broadway. One senses that he and Eliza clung to each other with a deep sense of mutual need. “I am well aware how much in my absence your affectionate and anxious heart needs the consolation of frequently hearing from me and there is no consolation which I am not very much disposed to administer to it,” he told Eliza in one letter. “It deserves everything from me. I am much more in debt to you than I can ever pay, but my future life will be more than ever devoted to your happiness.”
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The more despairing he became about politics and human nature—and his worldview was never very rosy to begin with—the more he appreciated his sincere, unpretentious wife. From Philadelphia, he wrote to her, “You are my good genius of that kind which the ancient philosophers called a
familiar
and you know very well that I am glad to be in every way as familiar as possible with you.” He concluded: “Adieu best of wives and best of mothers.”
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Even a rugged soldier’s life, once his sovereign remedy for all ills, no longer possessed its curative powers. “I discover more and more that I am spoiled for a military man,” he told Eliza. “My health and comfort require that I should be at home—at that home where I am always sure to find a sweet asylum from care and pain in your bosom.”
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Hamilton never stopped doting on Angelica Church. During one stay with his in-laws in Albany, he found himself seated at dinner opposite a John Trumbull portrait of her and her son Philip. Hamilton sent Angelica a witty letter, describing how he had dined in the mute presence of a special lady friend:

I was placed directly in front of her and was much occupied with her during the whole dinner. She did not appear to her usual advantage and yet she was very interesting. The eloquence of silence is not a common attribute of hers, but on this occasion she employed it
par force
and it was not considered as a fault. Though I am fond of hearing her speak, her silence was so well placed that I did not attempt to make her break it. You will conjecture that I must have been myself dumb with admiration.
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Hamilton was approaching his mid-forties and perhaps feeling his age. His high-pressure life was still packed with plenty of responsibilities. As inspector general, he bore single-handedly the weight of an entire army, while trying to retain his restive legal clients. “The law has nearly abandoned him or rather he has forsaken it,” Robert Troup told Rufus King. “The loss he sustains is immense!”
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Hamilton’s life began to lose some of its clockwork precision, and the darkness of depression again invaded his mind. While staying with Oliver Wolcott, Jr., in November 1798, Hamilton watched the emaciated Mrs. Wolcott wasting away from a terminal disease. He confessed to Eliza that he was haunted by despondent thoughts that he could not shake: “I am quite well, but I know not what impertinent gloom hangs over my mind, which I fear will not be entirely dissipated until I rejoin my family. A letter from you telling me that you and my dear children are well will be a consolation.”
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During one trip, he told Angelica Church of “a sadness which took possession” of his heart after leaving New York.
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These confessional remarks leap off the page because Hamilton seldom admitted to anxiety in this candid manner and tended to shield his innermost thoughts.

Now an invalid crippled by gout and abdominal troubles, Philip Schuyler worried about the punishing demands that his son-in-law made on himself. In early 1799, he again exhorted Hamilton to relax.

Mrs. Church writes me that you suffer from want of exercise, that this and unremitted attention to business injures your health. I believe it is difficult for an active mind to moderate an application to business but, my dear sir, you must make some sacrifice to that health which is so precious to all who are dear to you and to that country which rever[e]s and esteems you. Let me then entreat you to use more bodily exercise and less of that of the mind.
¹⁴

Schuyler discreetly exhorted Eliza to saddle Hamilton’s horse every day and get him to ride in the fresh air.

Hamilton did engage in some outdoor recreation. He had recently bought a rifle and liked to go out hunting with a retriever dog named Old Peggy. With his “fowling piece” in hand—a light gun with “A. Hamilton, N.Y.” carved into its stock—he sometimes roamed the Harlem forests, searching for birds to shoot. At other times, he prowled the Hudson, fishing for striped bass.
¹⁵
He was still a habitué of the theater, whether classical tragedies or lighter fare, and he attended the Philharmonic Society concerts at Snow’s Hotel on Broadway. Hamilton’s problem was never a shortage of interests so much as the time to cultivate them.

On occasion, Hamilton gave evidence of a prankish spirit at odds with the image of the sober public man. While on a visit to Newark, Hamilton’s aide Philip Church met a Polish poet, Julian Niemcewicz, a friend of General Tadeusz Kosciuszko. Niemcewicz insisted that Kosciuszko had entrusted him with a magic secret that permitted him to summon up spirits from the grave. Hamilton, intrigued, invited the Polish poet to a Friday-evening soiree. To give conclusive proof of his black art, Niemcewicz asked Hamilton to step into an adjoining room so that he could not see what was going on. Then one guest wrote down on a card the name of a dead warrior—the baron de Viomenil, who had seen action at Yorktown—and asked the Polish poet to conjure up his shade. Niemcewicz uttered a string of incantations, accompanied by a constantly clanging bell. When it was over, Hamilton strode into the room and “declared that the Baron [de Viomenil] had appeared to him exactly in the dress which he formerly wore and that a conversation had passed between them wh[ich] he was not at liberty to disclose,” related Peter Jay, the governor’s son.
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That Hamilton had communed with a fallen comrade attracted exceptional attention in New York society, so much so that he had to admit that it was all a hoax he had cooked up with Philip Church and Niemcewicz “to frighten the family for amusement and that it was never intended to be made public.”
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The yellow-fever epidemic of 1798 that had claimed the lives of Benjamin Franklin Bache and John Fenno had also given fresh urgency to the work of the Widows Society, as many women lost their family breadwinners. “None but eyewitnesses,” Isabella Graham wrote, “could have imagined the sufferings of so many respectable, industrious women who never thought to ask bread of any but of God.”
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This same scourge led the more profane Aaron Burr to create quite a different sort of institution in New York: the Manhattan Company.

To understand this pivotal moment between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, one must fathom the severity of the epidemic that had struck the city that autumn. In September, as many as forty-five victims perished per day, and Hamilton and his family even briefly took rooms several miles from town. Robert Troup described the terrifying paralysis that gripped New York: “Our courts are shut up, our trade totally stagnant, and we have little or no appearance of business…. I call in once a day at Hamilton’s and we endeavour to fortify each other with philosophy to bear the ills we cannot cure.”
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Wealthier residents escaped to rural outskirts, while the poor were exposed to a disease spread by mosquitoes that multiplied around the many swamps and stagnant ponds. Almost two thousand New Yorkers died, and a fresh potter’s field was consecrated in what is now Greenwich Village.

Aaron Burr’s brother-in-law, Dr. Joseph Browne, blamed contaminated water for the recurrent outbreaks of yellow fever—the city still depended on often polluted wells—and submitted a plan to the Common Council for drawing fresh water from the Bronx River. Browne’s plan contemplated the creation of a private water corporation chartered by the state legislature. The piped water was also hailed as a panacea for other civic needs, ranging from fighting fires to washing filthy streets. Although the Common Council applauded the basic concept of a water company, it countered with a proposal for a
public
company to conduct this business.

In reality, Browne’s plan was a ruse concocted by Burr, who had no interest whatever in pure water but considerable interest in setting up a Republican bank. Among the many putative advantages Hamilton and his Federalist associates enjoyed in New York politics was a virtual monopoly over local banking. At the start of 1799, both of the banks in New York City happened to be the brainchildren of Alexander Hamilton: the Bank of New York and the local branch of the Bank of the United States. Republican businessmen nursed a perennial grievance that these banks discriminated against them, one Republican journalist charging that “it became at length impossible for men engaged in trade to advocate republican sentiments without sustaining material injury…. As the rage and violence of party increased, directors became more rigorous in enforcing their system of
exclusion.
”
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It is not clear that Republicans were actually penalized, but the suspicion was certainly abroad. Hamilton opposed the vogue for state banks that proliferated in the 1790s, less from narrow political motives than from a fear that competition among banks would dilute credit standards and invite imprudent lending practices as bankers vied for clients.

Now a member of the New York Assembly, Burr knew that any politician who smashed the Federalist monopoly in local banking would attain heroic status among Republicans—at least those who did not regard banks as diabolical instruments. Easy access to a bank also appealed to an incorrigible spendthrift such as Burr, who had ongoing money problems. In early 1797, toward the end of his term in the U.S. Senate, his financial troubles had grown so acute that he had neglected his legislative duties. To establish a New York bank, he had to scale a very high hurdle. The state legislature conferred bank charters, and it was currently under Federalist sway; in those days, every New York corporation engaged in business needed a legislative charter. As the crafty Burr cast about for a stratagem that would let him sneak a bank charter past the opposition party, he hit upon the unlikely subterfuge of using the proposed water company as a blind.

In a cunning political sleight of hand, Burr lined up a bipartisan coalition of six luminaries—three Republicans and three Federalists—to approach the Common Council as sponsors of his proposal for a private water company. For his Federalist phalanx, he recruited Gulian Verplanck, president of the Bank of New York; John Murray, president of the Chamber of Commerce; and his greatest prize, Major General Alexander Hamilton. Why did Hamilton go along with Burr? Burr had recently flirted with the Federalists and had cooperated with Hamilton to fortify New York City against a French invasion. For the moment, the two men stood on a relatively good footing. Hamilton had survived yellow fever and would have favored a project to save the city from further epidemics. Hamilton may also have been investigating a business opportunity for John B. Church. Angelica had prodded her husband to give up his parliamentary career and return to America, but now Church seemed bored, if fabulously prosperous, in New York. Hamilton noted, “He has little to do [and] time hangs heavy on his hands.”
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Church emerged as a director of the Manhattan Company, which may have been a precondition for Hamilton’s participation. “Whatever Hamilton’s motives,” one Burr biographer has written, “no member of the committee of six worked harder [than Hamilton] to make possible Aaron Burr’s upcoming triumph in the New York legislature.”
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On February 22, 1799, Hamilton and Burr marched into the office of Mayor Richard Varick to plead the water company’s case. After conferring with an English canal engineer, Hamilton drew up an impressive memo that went far beyond waterworks to a systematic plan for draining city swamps and installing sewers. Persuaded by Hamilton, the Common Council ceded the final decision to the state legislature. Burr must have savored the situation: he was exploiting Alexander Hamilton and enlisting his foe’s mighty pen in a clandestine Republican cause. It was exactly the sort of joke that the drolly mysterious Burr treasured. He also got Hamilton to prepare a memo for the state legislature in support of a private water company. In late March, obliging state legislators approved the creation of the Manhattan Company, and on April 2 an unsuspecting Governor John Jay signed this act into law. Earlier promises about the company providing free water to combat fires and repair city streets damaged by laying pipes—standard features of water-company contracts in other states—had been quietly deleted by Burr from the final bill.

As usual, the devil lay in the details. At the final moment, with many legislators having departed for home and others too lazy to examine the fine print, Burr embedded a brief provision in the bill that widened immeasurably the scope of future company activities. This momentous language said “that it shall and may be lawful for the said company to employ all such surplus capital as may belong or accrue to the said company in the purchase of public or other stock or in any other monied transactions of operations.”
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The “surplus capital” loophole would allow Burr to use the Manhattan Company as a bank or any other kind of financial institution. The Federalists had dozed right through this deception because they knew of the Republican antipathy for banks and also because Burr had cleverly decorated the board with eminent Federalists.

Burr, it turned out, was too smart for his own good. If some Republicans admired his finesse, the general electorate did not. At the end of April, as he faced a reelection campaign for his Assembly seat, voters grasped the magnitude of his deception and shunned the ticket he headed. Once Hamilton realized that Burr had hoodwinked him, he was livid. He later complained of Burr, “I have been present when he has contended against banking systems with earnestness and with the same arguments that Jefferson would use…. Yet he has lately by a trick established a
bank,
a perfect monster in its principles, but a very convenient instrument of
profit and influence.
”
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Even some stalwart Republicans shuddered at Burr’s machinations. Of Burr’s discredited slate, Peter R. Livingston commented that “it would hardly be a wonder if they
did
lose the election, for they had such a
damn’d ticket
that no decent man could hold up his head to support it.”
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Burr’s editor, Mary-Jo Kline, has observed that the Manhattan Company scheme “was so baldly self-serving that it temporarily halted Burr’s political career and lost him the public office that had served him so well.”
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