Alexander Hamilton (102 page)

This was first seen in Hamilton’s crusade for the Jay Treaty. Despite Senate passage, Washington had not yet affixed his signature to it. The battle over the treaty became more than a routine political clash for Hamilton. He fought as if it were a political Armageddon that would decide America’s fate. That summer he saw himself as in the midst of a quasi-revolutionary atmosphere in New York. The French tricolor even flapped above the Tontine Coffee House, gathering place of the merchant elite. In his more fearful moments, Hamilton envisaged Jeffersonian tumbrels carting him and other Federalists off to homegrown guillotines. “We have some cause to suspect, though not enough to believe, that our Jacobins meditate serious mischief to certain individuals,” Hamilton wrote confidentially to Oliver Wolcott, Jr. “It happens that the militia of this city, from the complexion of its officers in general, cannot be depended on…. In this situation, our eyes turn as a resource in as udden emergency upon the military now in the forts.”
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It was increasingly difficult for Hamilton to trust the sincerity of his opponents, whom he viewed as a malignant force set to destroy him. Early in the spring, Commodore James Nicholson—the father-in-law of Albert Gallatin, a friend of Aaron Burr, and the former president of New York’s Democratic club—had leveled vicious accusations against him. Nicholson claimed that Hamilton, as treasury secretary, had stashed away one hundred thousand pounds sterling in a London bank—the clear insinuation being that Hamilton had both profited from public office and connived with the British. One of Hamilton’s friends, taking umbrage at this slander, demanded proof. The unruffled Nicholson replied that he would disclose his source only if Hamilton called upon him. “No call has, however, been made from that time to this,” John Beckley informed Madison, as if this constituted proof of Hamilton’s guilt. “Nicholson informed me of these particulars himself and added that, if Hamilton’s name is at any time brought up as a candidate for any public office, he will instantly publish the circumstance.”
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That Republicans could swallow such nonsense as gospel truth suggests that Hamilton did not entirely dream up the conspiracies ranged against him.

The altercation with Nicholson formed the backdrop to some extraordinary events that unfolded in mid-July 1795. For several days, New York City was saturated with handbills urging citizens to gather at City Hall (Federal Hall) at noon on July 18 “to deliberate upon the proper mode of communicating to the President their disapprobation of the English treaty.”
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Boston citizens had issued a blanket condemnation of the Jay Treaty, and Hamilton feared a bandwagon effect. Already leaders of the Democratic clubs were delivering heated antitreaty speeches on Manhattan street corners. To devise ways to blunt the gathering, the business community summoned a meeting at the Tontine Coffee House on the night of the seventeenth at which Hamilton and Rufus King endorsed the Jay Treaty. They appealed to supporters to show up at City Hall the next day and stage a counter-demonstration.

As the clock tolled twelve the next day, Hamilton took up a position on the stoop of an old Dutch building on the west side of Broad Street, right across from City Hall. More than five thousand people had squeezed into the intersection where George Washington had taken the oath as president in 1789. But the scene of concord six years earlier now witnessed one of the uglier clashes in the early republic. From his stoop, Hamilton shouted out and demanded to know who had convened the meeting. The irate crowd shouted back in response, “Let us have a chairman.”
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Colonel William S. Smith, John Adams’s son-in-law, was chosen and presided from the balcony of City Hall. Peter R. Livingston began to speak against the Jay Treaty, but he was brusquely interrupted by Hamilton, who questioned his right to speak first. When a vote was taken, the vast majority of those present favored Livingston, who resumed his oration. But there was so much heckling, such a tremendous din of voices, that Livingston could not be heard, and he suggested to treaty opponents that they move down Wall Street toward Trinity Church.

Not all treaty critics drifted away, however, and about five hundred listened in a surly mood as Hamilton began his ringing defense. According to one newspaper, Hamilton stressed “the necessity of a
full discussion
before the citizens could form their opinions. Very few sentences, however, could be heard on account of hissings, coughings, and hootings, which entirely prevented his proceeding.”
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This was a remarkable spectacle: the former treasury secretary had descended from Mount Olympus to expose himself to street hecklers. John Church Hamilton contends that when his father asked the demonstrators to show respect, he was greeted “by a volley of stones, one of which struck his forehead. When bowing, he remarked, ‘If you use such knock-down arguments, I must retire.’”
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Federalist Seth Johnson confirmed the tale: “Stones were thrown at Mr. Hamilton, one of which grazed his head,” while another indignant Federalist said that the “Jacobins were prudent to endeavour to knock out Hamilton’s brains to reduce him to an equality with themselves.”
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Before long, treaty opponents stormed down to the Battery, formed a circle, and ceremonially burned a copy of the Jay Treaty. When Jefferson heard about Hamilton being stoned in the street, he didn’t react with horror or sadness; rather, he was elated, telling Madison that “the Livingstonians appealed to stones and clubs and beat him and his party off the ground.”
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Evidently, Jefferson thought this would delight the author of the Bill of Rights.

For a man of his stature, Hamilton had suffered the ultimate indignity. The opposition had turned into the faceless rabble he had feared. On the other hand, his own behavior had been provocative and unbecoming. When he told “friends of order” to follow him down the block, only a small number complied. It was at this moment that Hamilton and his entourage came upon a shouting match in the street between a Federalist lawyer, Josiah Ogden Hoffman, and the same Commodore James Nicholson who had smeared Hamilton months earlier. When Hamilton intervened to stop the quarrel, he was insulted anew by Nicholson, who called him an “abettor of Tories” and told him he had no right to interrupt them. Hamilton tried to herd the feuding men indoors. Nicholson then said that he didn’t need to listen to Hamilton and accused him of having once evaded a duel. These were incendiary words for any gentleman. “No man could affirm that with truth,” Hamilton retorted, and he “pledged himself to convince Mr. Nicholson of his mistake” by calling him to a duel at a more suitable time and place.
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Hamilton wasn’t through with his swaggering performance. After leaving Nicholson, he and his followers stopped by the front door of Edward Livingston—the youngest brother of Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, a later mayor of New York, and a man Hamilton called “rash, foolish, intemperate, and obstinate”—where Hoffman and Peter Livingston were locked in a nasty verbal scuffle over the Jay Treaty.
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The discussion grew more heated until Edward Livingston and Rufus King begged the men to settle their quarrel elsewhere. “Hamilton then stepped forward,” Edward Livingston later said, “declaring that if the parties were to contend in a personal way, he was ready, that he would fight the whole party one by one. I was just beginning to speak to him on the subject [of] this imprudent declaration when he turned from me, threw up his arm and declared that he was ready to fight the whole ‘
detestable faction
’ one by one.”
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Livingston thought Hamilton must have been “mortified at his loss of influence before he would descend [to] language that would have become a street bully.”
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This was truly amazing behavior: Hamilton was prepared to descend into outright fisticuffs in the streets with his opponents, as if he were a common ruffian. Maturin Livingston, Peter’s brother, coolly told Hamilton that he was ready to take up his offer and duel him “in half an hour where he pleased.”
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Hamilton confessed that he already had another duel on his hands but would get around to Livingston once he had disposed of Nicholson. Evidently, Hamilton had no concerns about issuing two deadly challenges in quick succession. Vigilant as ever about his reputation, he knew how to exploit such affairs of honor to face down his enemies.

The Republican newspaper,
The Argus,
called for another large protest rally against the Jay Treaty two days later. This huge meeting passed a resolution against the treaty, an action duplicated by protest rallies in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston. It was a horrendously busy week for Hamilton, who was supposed to defend before the Supreme Court the legality of a tax on carriages that he had instituted as treasury secretary. (In the end, the case wasn’t argued until February.) Two days after their encounter, Hamilton stung Commodore Nicholson with a letter proposing a duel a week later: “The unprovoked rudeness and insult which I experienced from you on Saturday leaves me no option but that of a meeting with you, the object of which you will readily understand.”
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Hamilton didn’t leave room for an apology and proceeded straight to a challenge. His old friend Nicholas Fish, drafted as his second, delivered the letter to Nicholson. Within minutes, the impulsive Nicholson scratched out a reply, accepting the duel and asking that it take place the next morning. He claimed that his family would be upset by any delay and that word might leak out. In a series of faintly mocking replies—“I should hope that it will be easy for you to quiet the alarm in your family”—Hamilton insisted that he was too busy to duel before the following Monday.
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He adopted the brisk tone of an important man irritated by having to negotiate with an inferior. From the tone of this exchange, one can tell that Hamilton felt fully in charge and free to needle Nicholson at will.

For several days, their seconds scurried back and forth, trying to work out a settlement. In all likelihood, Hamilton thought Nicholson was bluffing and would back down. But Hamilton took the prospect of a duel seriously enough that he named Troup executor of his estate and wrote him a letter that would serve as a revised will. Hamilton was especially concerned about a sheaf of personal papers that he had stowed in a leather trunk and marked “JR.
To be forwarded to Oliver Wolcott Junr. Esq.
”
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Presumably, the “JR” referred to James Reynolds, with Wolcott charged if need be with the safekeeping of the correspondence related to the Reynolds affair.

The 1795 will sheds light on other mysteries, including Hamilton’s relationship with his father, who had moved to St. Vincent five years earlier. They had never entirely lost touch and now exchanged stilted, intermittent letters through couriers. James Hamilton ended one letter to his famous son with his “respectful compliments to Mrs. Hamilton and your children,” whom he had still never met.
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James Hamilton had borrowed seven hundred dollars from his son. Hamilton now worried that, if he died in a duel, his creditors might seek to recover money from his aging father. Hamilton told Troup that he had considered giving his father special protection from creditors, then decided against it:

I hesitated whether I would not also secure a preference to the drafts of my father. But these, as far as I am concerned, being a merely voluntary engagement, I doubted the justice of the measure and I have done nothing. I regret it lest they should return upon him and increase his distress. Though, as I am informed, a man of respectable connections in Scotland, he became bankrupt as a merchant at an early day in the West Indies and is now in indigence. I have pressed him to come to me, but his great age and infirmity have deterred him from the change of climate.
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Hamilton seemed to repress some unspoken hostility here—there is pity but no warmth in the description—as he leaves his father to the tender mercies of his creditors. Though now free of Treasury duties, Hamilton never expressed a wish to visit his aging father in St. Vincent.

The will again belies Jeffersonian fantasies that Hamilton had reaped a fortune from government service and had salted away embezzled funds in a British bank. Hamilton told Troup that he owed five thousand pounds to his brother-in-law, John Barker Church, and that he feared he was insolvent: “For after a life of labor, I leave my family to the benevolence of others, if my course shall happen to be terminated here.”
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In the event that he died in debt, Hamilton said that he trusted to the “friendship and generosity” of John Barker Church.
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In the end, Hamilton tinkered with the apology that he wanted Nicholson to make, and Nicholas Fish got him to sign it pretty much verbatim. As for the second duel that Hamilton broached on July 18, he got Maturin Livingston to deny that he had ever cast aspersions on his manhood or accused him of cowardice. Hamilton had prevailed in the two affairs of honor arising from the Jay Treaty protests, but at what price? He had shown a grievous lack of judgment in allowing free rein to his combative instincts. Without Washington’s guidance or public responsibility, he had again revealed a blazing, ungovernable temper that was unworthy of him and rendered him less effective. He also revealed anew that the man who had helped to forge a new structure of law and justice for American society remained mired in the old-fashioned world of blood feuds. When it came to intensely personal conflicts, New York’s most famous lawyer still turned instinctively not to the courtroom, but to the dueling ground.