Jefferson and Hamilton (65 page)

In closing, Jefferson expanded on how his presidency would carry out the ideals of the American Revolution. He was committed to “a jealous care of the right of election by the people”; the “absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority”; the conviction that “a well disciplined militia [is] our best reliance in peace”; the “supremacy of the civil over the military authority”;
the “honest payment of our debts”; “equal and exact justice to all men”; and the preservation of the rights and liberties of free men. “The wisdom of our sages, and blood of our heroes have been devoted” to attaining these ends. They should be the “creed of our political faith [and] … touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust.”
⁷

When Jefferson finished, Chief Justice John Marshall administered the oath of office. Thereafter, Jefferson returned to his boardinghouse, where he lived for two more weeks until all of the Adamses’ possessions had been removed from the President’s House. According to legend, it was mealtime at Conrad and McMunn’s when Jefferson returned to his residence, and he stood with his fellow boarders awaiting a chair so that he might have his dinner.
⁸

Alexander Hamilton was not in Washington for Jefferson’s inauguration. In fact, he never set foot near the District of Columbia, something he likely would have done had he ever visited Mount Vernon.

Reading Jefferson’s speech in the newspapers, Hamilton agreed with the more moderate Federalists who thought it “better than
we
expected.” He publicly remarked that the address provided “a ray of hope” that Jefferson would not pursue a “violent and absurd” course. He was especially happy that Jefferson had neither designated funding nor the Jay Treaty as “abuses.”
⁹

Not many cared any longer what Hamilton thought. During his first week in office, Jefferson smugly noted that Hamilton was “almost destitute of followers.” Hamilton was all too aware of that, and no less aware of the malevolence “which friends as well as foes are fond of giving to my conduct.” Calling himself a “disappointed politician,” Hamilton had to wonder whether he had the slightest hope of ever again being an important figure on the national stage.
¹⁰
At times, he seemed resigned to spending the remainder of his days in private pursuits. On occasion, he declared that the “passions” that had driven him to grasp power and win fame had waned because of the “triumphant reign of Decomocracy,” as he spelled it. At other times, however, he confessed that his dismal prospects spread “gloom” to “the bottom of my soul,” and he confided to close friends that he was waging a struggle “to abstract my self from” public affairs. If Burr was a capable judge, Hamilton’s inner turmoil was intense. In April, the vice president told Jefferson that Hamilton “seems to be literally Mad with spleen and envy and disappointment.”
¹¹

Hamilton often maintained that nothing any longer mattered to him but his wife and children, and that he could “find true pleasure” only through them.
¹²
“What can I do better than withdraw from the [public] Scene,” he said a year after Jefferson became president. Yet, he grew despondent observing the swirling social and political changes of Jefferson’s world all about
him, and he was suffused with melancholy when he lamented, “Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me.”
¹³

As if to show that family mattered most, Hamilton began construction of a country estate, an undertaking that had never especially interested him before. He visualized the dwelling as “a fine house,” and named it “The Grange” after his clan’s ancestral home in Scotland. At times, he implied that the house was to be a “refuge” for one with no future in public affairs.
¹⁴
He acquired thirty-five acres above Harlem Heights—between 140th and 147th Streets on today’s Upper West Side—for the stupendously expensive sum of fifty-five thousand dollars. Though a cottage, with barns and sheds, had been built on the property by a previous owner, Hamilton’s sylvan tract was still virgin woodlands in the bucolic northern reaches of Manhattan. It was nine miles from downtown, a ninety-minute carriage ride in his day, a problem for a lawyer who practiced in the city, though the distance also provided sanctuary from the recurrent yellow fever outbreaks that swept the urban center.

Hamilton hired a distinguished local architect and builder who completed the work with a speed that would have astonished Jefferson. By the summer of 1802 the Hamiltons were living in their new Federal-style clapboard house. The exterior was painted yellow and ivory, and included verandas and piazzas on two sides. A library, parlor, dining room, and two guest rooms made up the first floor. Six rooms with eight fireplaces were upstairs, including the family’s private living room, which opened onto a balcony with a breath taking view of the Hudson River, some two hundred feet below. Hamilton hung a Gilbert Stuart painting of Washington in the first-floor hallway, likely the first thing seen by visitors, and he furnished his home with Louis XVI sofas and chairs.
¹⁵

The house, and the acres of landscaping that Hamilton almost obsessively planned, cost about twenty-five thousand dollars. He had poured some eighty thousand dollars into his estate. His annual income was roughly twelve thousand dollars.
¹⁶
As with his adversary from Monticello, Hamilton’s suddenly lavish lifestyle had plunged him into debt. Like it or not, Hamilton gave the appearance of one who understood that his days in public office were behind him. Still relatively young, and with many years left to practice law, retiring his debts would not be difficult. But everything about his having embarked on this endeavor was uncharacteristic, from his wish for a mansion, to his captivation with gardening, to his sudden spendthrift habits. Perhaps he saw redemption in it, recompense to a wife and children who had been overshadowed by politics and betrayed in marriage. Perhaps he really believed the estate offered asylum from the cruel world he had failed to conquer. Or, perhaps,
this was his statement to the world that although defeated in politics, he was still a winner, a man who had risen from nothing to this crowning material success. It may not have been a coincidence that Hamilton launched his spending spree almost immediately after learning that President Adams had called him an immoral foreign bastard.

Hamilton’s all-consuming passion had been to hold great power and win glory, and from adolescence he had never thought it hopeless to dream that dream. Time and again, he had learned that adversity could be overcome. On repeated occasions, he had discovered how unpredictable the future could be. Only four or five years after finding himself stuck in a dead-end job in Christiansted, he had become the aide-de-camp to the most important soldier in North America. It was a post that filled his future with bright promise, and he had capitalized on the opportunities that came along. His political fortunes had plummeted in 1799 and 1800, but who could know what the future held. Hamilton turned forty-six in 1801, still a young age for one in public affairs. At that age, John Adams had been sixteen years away from becoming president. General Washington anguished at Valley Forge in his forty-sixth year, not yet an iconic figure and not even certain his position as commander of the Continental army was secure. Jefferson was a few months short of turning forty-six when he was offered the position of secretary of state, an opportunity that came a decade after his political career appeared to have ended disastrously in his wild flight from Colonel Tarleton’s soldiers. Hamilton knew the vagaries and vicissitudes of American politics, and he clung to the hope that in time the Federalists might regain the presidency or that the political parties might be reshuffled. Someday, somehow, he might again be on top.

In 1801, Hamilton joined with friends to found a Federalist newspaper, the
New-York Evening Post
, which published its first issue in November.
¹⁷
A month later, in his initial effort to claw his way back into political prominence, he placed the first of eighteen essays attacking Jefferson in his paper. In search of an issue that Federalists might ride back into power, Hamilton mostly blasted the Jeffersonian Republicans for removing a few Federalist officeholders and repealing the Judiciary Act of 1801, the Federalists’ last-ditch effort to pack the courts with their own judges before the opposition party took control. “The Examination,” as Hamilton’s acrid series was titled, attracted little attention. His pieces were turgid and painfully repetitive, his ideas shopworn, his style smacking of pettiness. (He chose to launch his enterprise with a shrill assault on a matter of little consequence: Jefferson’s decision to report on the state of the union in a written report rather than in a formal address to Congress.)
¹⁸
That the country was prospering hardly aided
Hamilton’s cause. “Go where you will,” observed his old friend Troup, and “you will behold nothing but the smiling face of improvements and prosperity.”
¹⁹
Above all, Hamilton’s essays aroused no controversy because his stature had sunk so low that even fellow Federalists were largely indifferent to his polemics. His striving for political rehabilitation had failed. A wiser course might have been to abandon public affairs entirely for a few years, hoping that someday his party would summon him back to the playing field as an elder statesman.

That he wrote these essays was peculiar, grotesque perhaps, for his eldest son, Philip, had been killed in a duel scant days before Hamilton composed the first piece in the series. The fatal duel had arisen from Philip’s outrage at an Independence Day speech delivered in lower Manhattan by George Eacker, a Republican lawyer who practiced in the city. Eacker had censured Federalist policies during the XYZ Affair, including the creation of the army under Inspector General Hamilton. Months after the speech, Philip confronted Eacker during a play at the Park Theater, causing an embarrassing disturbance and provoking Eacker to issue a challenge. There was never the slightest doubt that Philip would accept, and the duel was fought two days later, on November 22, at Paulus Hook, New Jersey. Eacker shot and killed young Hamilton.

General Hamilton, who had not been present at the duel, was so “completely overwhelmed with grief,” according to an observer, that he attended the funeral only through the support of others. Hamilton described his loss as “the most afflicting of my life.”
²⁰
That he persisted in writing essay after essay of “The Examination” at such a time may have been because he saw it as a therapeutic distraction during his bereavement. But it may have been that his obsession with his crumbling political forces was such that nothing, not even the tragic death of his son, could stay his hand. The latter seems all too likely, and in retrospect, Hamilton’s character, his long-nourished hatreds, and his gnawing ambition provided the impetus that long since had placed him on the course leading inexorably to his own tragic end.

Hamilton’s foundering fortunes were the legacy of his intemperate behavior in the political contest of 1800. Aaron Burr found himself in a similar situation. He, too, had done great harm to himself through his unwise choices when the House resolved the election. The misjudgments made by these two during the campaign put them on a fatal collision course.

Burr soon found himself without power or even patronage in Jefferson’s administration. As the 1804 presidential election approached, he called on the president to learn where he stood. When the conference ended, Burr knew he would not be part of the Republican ticket in the coming election.
²¹
On the outs nationally, he looked on the governor’s contest in New York as a restorative.

Early on, Hamilton sensed that the clash between Burr and Jefferson was “absolutely incurable,” thinking it “founded in the breasts of both in the rivalship of an insatiable and unprincipled ambition.”
²²
Hamilton saw the split as a double-edged sword. He welcomed it as likely to be ruinous to Burr’s political career, and he rejoiced at the prospect of ineradicable divisions among New York’s Republicans. Hamilton must have dared to hope for a Republican fracture that could pave the way for the Federalists to recapture the state in the presidential election of 1804.

His joy was tempered, however, by the fear that Burr, who had intrigued with Federalists during the deadlocked election, would be driven to do so again. When he learned that Burr had attended a Federalist banquet in the capital to commemorate Washington’s birthday in 1802, Hamilton was convinced that the vice president was exploring a switch to the Federalist Party. Should Burr change parties, and should that lead—as seemed certain—to the restructuring of New York’s Federalist Party, Hamilton’s influence in the party would decline even further. The possibility also existed that Burr might form a new party. That was not an idle concern. Burr had shot his bolt within the Republican Party, and like other astute politicos, he could readily see the dire plight of the Federalist Party in the face of America’s continuing democratization. After the congressional elections in 1802, for instance, Federalists held barely one-third of the seats in both the House and Senate. When Burr, in 1802, started his own newspaper in New York City, Hamilton was convinced that the vice president’s plan was to draw both Federalists and disgruntled Republicans into his camp.
²³

In 1804, Burr entered the governor’s race, running as a Republican. He was repeatedly slandered in the press, including by some Republicans who could not forgive his perfidy in the 1800 presidential election. Federalist penmen blasted away as well. Hamilton was active, slashing at his nemesis. Burr could not know who penned each tract, but some charges sounded strikingly similar to allegations that Hamilton had made earlier. For instance, someone averred that Burr was given to “abandoned profligacy,” a defamation that strayed across the line from criticism of political ideas and practices to matters of private character. It is not difficult to imagine Burr thinking that Hamilton, long his caustic rival, was responsible for the smear.
²⁴