Jefferson and Hamilton (36 page)

The traditional elite was no longer guaranteed political dominion, and some were unhappy about it. After losing a gubernatorial race to George Clinton, Philip Schuyler grumbled that the victor’s “family and connections do not entitle him to so distinguished a predominance.” Nor were all thrilled when their social inferiors were no longer deferential. The “spirit of independency was converted into equality” so that each country peasant now “conceives himself, in every respect, my equal,” fumed a Virginia aristocrat.
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What Hamilton wrote for public consumption focused on the weaknesses of the national government, but in private he, too, raged at the growth of democracy. Democratic politics, he said with alarm in 1785, had brought men and factions to power who were not “disinterested.” These “new men” promoted local and selfish concerns, especially the authorization of paper money and assorted forms of debtor-relief, including stay laws. The state assembly, he said, was now open to increasing numbers of “the levelling kind,” so that the “despotism and iniquity of the Legislature” jeopardized “the
security of property
.”
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Aside from Governor Clinton, no political activist bothered Hamilton more than Abraham Yates, a man whose rise had been facilitated by the American Revolution.

Yates’s background resembled that of other Founders. Like John Adams, Yates was raised on a small farm. Like Washington, he lacked formal education and became a self-educated surveyor. Like Hamilton, he took up the law after limited study. But there were substantive differences as well. Yates had never acquired the gentlemanly sheen that many realized through a liberal education. Before the war, Yates had risen to be a sheriff, but the American Revolution transformed him. In 1776, he was elected to New York’s provincial congress, where he helped write the state’s first constitution. He pushed for democracy and openly vowed to break the political stranglehold of the elite, or the “high-flyers,” as he called New York’s wealthiest and most powerful.
Yates fought for more elective offices, annual elections, the secret ballot, graduated land taxes that fell most heavily on the wealthy, and the confiscation—and redistribution—of Loyalist estates. After the war, while a member of the state legislature, Yates resisted the augmentation of national powers, advocated inflationary monetary policies and other debtor-relief measures, and voted against the proposed impost that Congress sent to the states in 1782.

New York’s conservative old guard hated Yates and other upstarts who sought to change the state politically and socially. They labeled these new men “antifederal peasants,” “little folks,” and “demagogues,” charging that they manipulated an unsophisticated citizenry already given to believe that men of “Abilities were … dangerous, and learning … a crime.” Both Hamilton and Philip Schuyler spoke of Yates’s supposed “ignorance and perverseness,” portraying him as a charlatan who played on class biases to gain more power.
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Undergirding Hamilton’s assertions was a belief, common among the Founders, that their rule was disinterested. Their reasoning went like this: As they were wealthy, leisured gentlemen who were dependent on no one and no thing, they were worthy and virtuous, beholden to no sordid, local faction, and capable of governing for the greater public good. It was a noble conceit, but it was hooey. From the very first, America’s congressmen had shown their stripes as representatives of disparate sections, defending the interests of the colonies and states they represented in disputes over trade embargoes, the appointment of diplomats and the army’s general officers, whether or not to declare independence, what to seek from Great Britain at the peace table, and what, if anything, to accept of Spain’s offer regarding trade and the Mississippi River.

Hamilton was more disinterested than most. He was neither a creditor nor a speculator in land or public securities, and though he was a shareholder in a bank, he owned exactly one share of stock. But others who railed against the likes of Yates, and who wrung their hands about democratic excesses that promoted narrow, local interests over what they presumed to be the national well-being, were hardly objective. Not a few sought to protect their wealth and investments, and to preserve the traditional social order and customary social distinctions. More and more of the most conservative Americans came to believe that the “vile State governments [were] sources of pollution,” as Henry Knox put it, or grew steadily more agitated about what a Massachusetts merchant called “plebian despotism” and the “fangs” of the citizenry. Hamilton shared their concerns. “All men of respectability” and “genius,” he said, “must for their own defence, unite to overset” radical, egalitarian
democrats. They must ensure “that the power of government is intrusted to proper hands.”
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The sense was growing that the way to achieve this was through consolidation—the creation of a powerful national government safely under the sway of America’s traditional leaders, a government capable of addressing and resolving the new nation’s sundry problems, and simultaneously of foiling democratic excesses in the states.

Within eighteen months of the end of the war, a consensus was building that Congress must have more power. Early on, New York and Massachusetts formally urged that the national government be strengthened, and in 1786 Virginia’s assembly proposed a “Continental Convention” to meet in Annapolis to consider “such regulations of trade as may be judged necessary.” In private, James Madison, who was every bit as much a consolidationist, or Nationalist, as Hamilton, made clear that he foresaw the Annapolis Convention as only a “first instance” toward fixing the “other defects” in the Articles of Confederation. If all went well, he said, “the present paroxysm of our affairs” would in due time be resolved by “bracing the federal system.” Other Nationalists thought it unwise to limit the Annapolis meeting to trade problems. A better strategy, they thought, would be to call a convention and put everything on the table. William Grayson, a Virginia congressman, thought it would be “fatal” to attempt only “a partial reformation.” He presciently advised that it would be preferable to consider all “grievances … at the same time,” as agreement on “one object will facilitate the passage of another, & by a general compromise perhaps a good government may be procured.”
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Soon after Virginia urged the Annapolis Convention, Congress debated calling a national constitutional convention, though in the end it chose to appoint a committee to propose amendments to the Articles. In August, the committee reported seven amendments. Among other things, they would have given Congress authority to regulate trade, impose federally enforced penalties on states that did not meet national requisitions, and, as a last resort, empower the national government to collect taxes from recalcitrant states. But Congress tabled the proposed amendments. In all likelihood, the most conservative congressmen blocked their consideration. While the amendments would have given the national government the necessary authority to solve the nation’s economic problems, they would not have addressed the conservatives’ concerns about democracy. Furthermore, the conservatives despaired of Congress’s ever tackling that matter. Only a national convention, and only a convention composed of the proper sort of delegates, could truly cope with the democratic threats unleashed by the American Revolution.
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By the spring, Hamilton would have known about Virginia’s call for an interstate convention. During the previous year he had rebuffed those who urged him to seek a seat in the New York assembly, but in April 1786 he eagerly sought election, subsequently remarking that he was drawn back into politics by the “derangement of our public affairs.”
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He hoped to have New York’s legislature endorse the convention in Annapolis, and he wished to attend it. Hamilton succeeded on both counts. In September, he was in Annapolis, where, like Madison, he was prepared to take a first step in changing the government of the United States.

The Annapolis venture failed, but it was a failure with positive consequences. Only a dozen delegates from five states attended. All stayed at the City Tavern, and with plenty of time on their hands during the week or so that most were in town, they conversed and made future plans. It is a good bet that Hamilton and Madison, reunited for the first time in more than three years, dominated the discussions, and equally likely that Hamilton, always a clever strategist, took the lead in plotting the next steps. The outcome was that the Annapolis Convention urged that another convention meet in May in Philadelphia, but that it have “enlarged powers” to take up “other” matters “as the situation of public affairs, may be found to require” in order “to render the constitution of the Foederal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.” In addition, Hamilton and Madison knew that it was crucial to have Washington on hand, both for the respectability that his presence would bring to the meeting and to impress the public with the gravity of the nation’s problems. When Madison left Annapolis for home, he swung by Mount Vernon, where he spent three days laying the groundwork for Washington to attend the Philadelphia meeting, if it in fact was to take place.
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What was especially needed to give the Philadelphia Convention a better chance of success was some dramatic occurrence that lent an air of immediate crisis. Like manna from heaven, Shays’ Rebellion erupted just as the Annapolis Convention came to its abortive end.

The uprising aroused a sense of urgency among Nationalists, and may have contributed to their willingness to compromise once they got together in Philadelphia. The insurgency may also have convinced Washington to attend. Previously, he had tenaciously resisted all entreaties. He neither desired to risk his towering reputation in a cause that many Americans, possibly most, opposed, nor did he wish to renege on his pledge to never again hold office. Then came Shays’ Rebellion, after which Washington pronounced the Philadelphia Convention “very desirous.”
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Before Shays’ Rebellion, the consolidationists had primarily focused on the dangers of national weakness, but the unrest in Massachusetts brought
economic considerations, and especially indebtedness—personal, state, and national—front and center. This was Hamilton’s bailiwick, and he responded with a ninety-minute speech in the New York assembly in February. It was occasioned by yet another attempt to secure a national impost, though in some ways his address was his opening salvo on behalf of the constitution that was soon to be drafted. Yet again, the national will had been frustrated by a narrow provincial interest. Unless a remedy was found, powerful local oligarchs would always have the power to thwart the national well-being. In a contest between local and national authority, he said, “the body of the people will always be on the side of the state governments,” for local interests and issues comprise “familiar personal concerns.” During the war, localism had played out in the form of a “universal delinquency” by the states to meet their national responsibilities. In the five years since Yorktown, five states “have paid nothing” to the federal treasury, while payments from the other eight “have declined rapidly each year.” This was entirely predictable. The end game was similarly foreseeable: The national government “will never be able to exercise power enough to manage the general affairs of the union.” Such a state of affairs renders “the confederacy … in continual danger of dissolution.” Unless remedied, the union will be sundered, subjecting the states to the wiles of Europe’s great powers. He concluded with an appeal: Do not let the United States perish from fears over the “imaginary dangers from the spectre of power in Congress.”
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Hamilton lost the battle over the impost, but he successfully moved to have the assembly send representatives to the convention in Philadelphia. The Clinton faction could not avoid naming Hamilton to its delegation, but by appointing John Lansing, the mayor of Albany, and Judge Robert Yates—two of its own—the Clintonians assured that Hamilton would be checked.

Hamilton was accustomed to dominating every room, and within days of entering Congress in 1782 he had emerged as a leader. But Hamilton was not a commanding figure at the Constitutional Convention. Though he was far younger than most—thirty-two, which was ten years below the average age of the delegates—it was not his age that was a factor. Hamilton’s influence was limited largely because his views were too radical even for this conservative gathering. Desperate for the convention to produce something that was superior to the Articles of Confederation, Hamilton for the most part remained on the sidelines, watching and listening, but rarely speaking.
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George Mason aptly described the delegates as the “first characters” in the land, and not solely because nearly all belonged to society’s top rung. Nearly 80 percent had sat in Congress, eight had been delegates to state constitutional
conventions, seven had been governors, and one-third had served in the Continental army. These men were experienced, but they were not disinterested. More than half were slave owners, a third were actively involved in foreign or interstate commerce, the lion’s share were land speculators, and a majority owned certificates of public debt. Economic considerations were part and parcel of the deliberations. The Philadelphia Convention was also defined by who was not present. The “new men,” like Abraham Yates, were conspicuously absent. Nor were vocal decentralists with democratic leanings, such as Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, present in the East Room of the Pennsylvania State House, the same chamber in which independence had been proclaimed eleven years earlier.

While virtually every delegate came prepared to increase the powers of the national government at the expense of the states, none was willing to jeopardize the vital interests of his own state. Moreover, the larger states sought more power than they had under the Articles, while the smaller states steadfastly resisted losing their clout. These things made for problems, though it did not mean that the convention was doomed. All knew that this would almost certainly be the only opportunity in their lifetimes—and possibly the only chance ever—to fashion a truly strong national government that could cope with what they saw as deep-seated problems. These delegates were experienced politicians, skilled in the arts of bluff, bluster, and deception, but also practiced in negotiating deals. Most had come prepared to bargain, hopeful, as Grayson had predicted fifteen months earlier, that through compromise a good government could be created.