Alexander Hamilton (135 page)

“The scene I was present at when Mrs. Hamilton came to see her son on his deathbed…and when she met her husband and son in one room beggars all description!” said Robert Troup.
⁶¹

Alexander and Eliza clung to their groaning son through a dreadful night. Henry Dawson recorded this wrenching tableau: “On a bed without curtains lay poor Phil, pale and languid, his rolling, distorted eyeballs darting forth the flashes of delirium. On one side of him on the same bed lay his agonized father, on the other his distracted mother, around [him] his numerous relatives and friends weeping and fixed in sorrow.”
⁶²
After professing faith in Christ, Philip Hamilton died at five in the morning, some fourteen hours after receiving the mortal wound. He was buried on a rainy day, with an enormous throng of mourners in attendance. As he approached the grave, the faltering Hamilton had to be propped up by friends. By all accounts, he behaved bravely in the face of calamity. “His conduct was extraordinary during this trial,” Angelica Church wrote.
⁶³
For a long time, Eliza was inconsolable. Despite the feared miscarriage, her eighth and final child was born at the Grange on June 2, 1802, and christened Philip in memory of his deceased brother. (Often he was called “Little Phil.”) Philip Schuyler expressed the entire family’s hopes when he wrote to Eliza, “May the loss of one be compensated by another Philip.”
⁶⁴

The aftermath of the duel had eerie parallels to Hamilton’s later confrontation with Burr. Philip’s partisans told of his noble but ultimately suicidal resolution not to fire first, and they cursed the rival who had failed to respond in kind. Even the debate over whether Philip had discharged his weapon deliberately or in a spasm of pain was recapitulated later. Since Philip had been killed after withholding his fire for the sake of honor, Hamilton’s reaction to his son’s death tells us how he might have appraised his own fatal encounter. Many contemporaries believed that Hamilton collaborated with William Coleman on the
New-York Evening Post
articles about the duel, casting Eacker as the aggressor. These sanitized articles did not mention that Philip and Price had invaded Eacker’s box, and they claimed that the two young men had teased Eacker in a spirit of “levity.”
⁶⁵
The episode was depoliticized, with the
Post
making no mention that the crux of the dispute was Eacker’s Fourth of July oration about Hamilton. The paper further suggested that, if Eacker had been as conciliatory as Philip during the negotiations, the duel might never have occurred. The strongest blast directed at Eacker was that he had “murdered” Philip Hamilton by firing at someone who had no intention of firing back. This offended Eacker’s friends, who pointed out that Philip had agreed to the duel, had come armed, and had pointed his gun at Eacker.

When the
Post
editorialized on the need to outlaw dueling, it may have been Hamilton himself who wrote, “Reflections on this horrid custom must occur to every man of humanity, but the voice of an individual or of the press must be ineffectual without additional, strong, and pointed legislative interference.”
⁶⁶
George Eacker was never prosecuted for Philip Hamilton’s death. The young Jeffersonian lawyer died two years later of consumption.

One of the casualties of Philip’s death was the Hamiltons’ seventeen-year-old daughter Angelica, a lively, sensitive, musical girl who resembled her beautiful aunt. When Hamilton was treasury secretary, Martha Washington had taken Angelica to dancing school twice a week with her own children. Having been exceedingly close to her older brother, Angelica was so unhinged by his death that she suffered a mental breakdown. That fall, Hamilton did everything in his power to restore her health at the Grange and catered to her every wish. He asked Charles C. Pinckney to send her watermelons and three or four parakeets—“She is very fond of birds”—but all the loving attention did not work, and her mental problems worsened.
⁶⁷
James Kent tactfully described the teenage girl as having “a very uncommon simplicity and modesty of deportment.”
⁶⁸
She lived until age seventy-three and wound up under the care of a Dr. Macdonald in Flushing, Queens. Only intermittently lucid, consigned to an eternal childhood, she often did not recognize family members. For the rest of her life, she sang songs that she had played on the piano in duets with her father, and she always talked of her dead brother as if he were still alive. In her will, Eliza entreated her children to be “kind, affectionate, and attentive to my said unfortunate daughter Angelica.”
⁶⁹
In 1856, Angelica’s younger sister, Eliza, contemplating Angelica’s expected death, wrote, “Poor sister, what a happy release will be hers. Lost to herself a half century!!”
⁷⁰

After Philip’s death, Hamilton tumbled into a bottomless despair. Though no stranger to depression, he had never lapsed into the lethargy that usually accompanies it. No matter how grief stricken in the past, he still pumped out papers and letters with almost mechanical ease. Now the well-oiled machinery of his life ran down. He returned to political writing but was too disconsolate to discuss Philip’s death. “Never did I see a man so completely overwhelmed with grief as Hamilton has been,” Robert Troup wrote two weeks after the duel.
⁷¹
Having been abandoned by his own father, Hamilton must have regretted keenly his failure to protect his son. Four months passed before he could even acknowledge the many sympathy notes he had received. His replies reflect deep grief over his son’s loss, his own disenchantment with life, and an aching need for religious consolation. Replying to Benjamin Rush, he wrote that Philip’s death was “beyond comparison the most afflicting of my life…. He was truly a fine youth. But why should I repine? It was the will of heaven and he is now out of the reach of the seductions and calamities of a world full of folly, full of vice, full of danger, of least value in proportion as it is best known. I firmly trust also that he has safely reached the haven of eternal repose and felicity.”
⁷²

Hamilton was an altered man after Philip died. He even looked different. Troup said that his face was “strongly stamped with grief,” and this changed condition was captured on canvas by an Albany painter, Ezra Ames.
⁷³
A frequent guest at the Schuyler mansion, Ames produced a remarkable portrait of the bereaved Hamilton that illuminates his abrupt emotional decline. In earlier portraits, Hamilton had looked buoyantly into the distance, touched with youthful ardor, or had stared at the viewer with an urbane confidence. Ames captured Hamilton looking troubled and introspective, as if lost in thought and staring into an abyss. The ebullient wit had fled, and the eyes were fixed downward in a melancholy gaze. Some new, impenetrable darkness had engulfed his mind.

THIRTY-NINE

PAMPHLET WARS

T
he popularity of President Jefferson further darkened Hamilton’s pessimistic outlook. Fortified by Republican majorities in the House and Senate, Jefferson presided over a united government that his two predecessors would have envied, as he purged Federalist officeholders. Thanks to Washington and Hamilton, the American economy flourished; thanks to Adams, the Quasi-War with France had receded to a memory. Inheriting domestic prosperity and international peace, Jefferson benefited from exceptional good fortune as America settled down for the first time since the Revolution.

Jefferson soon adopted a relatively reclusive style as an administrator. He almost never made speeches and communicated with cabinet officers largely through memos. But he took daily horseback rides through Washington and perfected his populist image. “He has no levee days, observes no ceremony, often sees company in an undress, sometimes with his slippers on, always accessible to, and very familiar with, the sovereign people,” said Robert Troup.
¹
Jefferson cultivated rapport with the common people, while Hamilton stuck with his dated, paternalistic view of politics. The Federalists found themselves on the wrong side of a historical divide, associated with well-bred gentlemen, while Republicans appealed to a more democratic, rambunctious populace.

With Jefferson triumphant, Hamilton imagined that his own achievements would be scorned or soon forgotten. Republican journalist James Cheetham revived the hoary story that Hamilton had advocated a monarchy at the Constitutional Convention. Forced again to refute this propaganda, Hamilton sent a famously bleak letter to Gouverneur Morris in late February 1802:

Mine is an odd destiny. Perhaps no man in the U[nited] States has sacrificed or done more for the present Constitution than myself. And contrary to all my anticipations of its fate, as you know from the very beginning, I am still labouring to prop the frail and worthless fabric. Yet I have the murmur of its friends no less than the curses of its foes for my rewards. What can I do better than withdraw from the scene? Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me.
²

Written during the period of mourning after Philip’s death, the letter is tremendously revealing about Hamilton’s deep sense of estrangement from American politics. He hewed to a tragic view of life in which virtue was seldom rewarded or vice punished.

If given to dispirited musings, Hamilton could never completely withdraw from politics. His dismay over Jefferson’s success only added urgency to his desire to reverse the Republican tide. In “The Examination” essays, Hamilton undertook a broad-gauge assault on Jefferson’s program. The tone was captious and lacked the large-minded generosity that had distinguished his earlier work. Jefferson wanted to abolish the fourteen-year naturalization period for immigrants, and Hamilton insinuated that foreigners, not real Americans, had voted the Virginian into office; he predicted that “the influx of foreigners” would “change and corrupt the national spirit.”
³
Most amazing of all, this native West Indian published a diatribe against the Swiss-born treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin. “Who rules the councils of our own ill-fated, unhappy country?” Hamilton asked, then replied, “
A foreigner!
”
⁴
Throughout his career, Hamilton had been an unusually tolerant man with enlightened views on slavery, native Americans, and Jews. His whole vision of American manufacturing had been predicated on immigration. Now, embittered by his personal setbacks, he sometimes betrayed his own best nature.

After Philip’s death, Hamilton’s views seemed to emanate from some gloomy recess of his mind. He stood on more solid ground when he took Jefferson to task for favoring repeal of the whiskey tax and all other revenues except import duties. It galled him that Jefferson, who had accused him of wanting a perpetual debt, now canceled taxes that might have extinguished the federal debt more rapidly. In the end, Jefferson proved lucky: through a trade-induced boom in tariff revenues, he was able to cut taxes and produce a budget surplus.

As he pondered an amorphous comeback—he never spelled it out—Hamilton struggled with the conundrum that while Republicans might be “wretched impostors” with “honeyed lips and guileful hearts,” they had won the public’s affection.
⁵
How could this be? Hamilton thought that Republicans appealed to emotion, while Federalists relied too much on reason. “Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by their passion,” he told James Bayard, and his controversial solution was something called the Christian Constitutional Society.
⁶
The charge of atheism had been a leitmotif of Hamilton’s critiques of Jefferson and the French Revolution. Now he hoped that by publishing pamphlets, promoting charities, and establishing immigrant-aid societies and vocational schools, this new society would promote Christianity, the Constitution, and the Federalist party, though not necessarily in that order of preference. By signing up God against Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton hoped to make a more potent political appeal. The society was an execrable idea that would have grossly breached the separation of church and state and mixed political power and organized religion. Hamilton was not honoring religion but exploiting it for political ends. Fortunately, other Federalists didn’t cotton to the idea. As he drifted into more retrograde modes of thought, Hamilton seemed to rage alone in the wilderness, and few people listened.

It is striking how religion preoccupied Hamilton during his final years. When head of the new army, he had asked Congress to hire a chaplain for each brigade so that soldiers could worship. Although he had been devout as a young man, praying fiercely at King’s College, his religious faith had ebbed during the Revolution. Like other founders and thinkers of the Enlightenment, he was disturbed by religious fanaticism and tended to associate organized religion with superstition. While a member of Washington’s military family, he wrote that “there never was any mischief but had a priest or a woman at the bottom.”
⁷
As treasury secretary, he had said, “The world has been scourged with many fanatical sects in religion who, inflamed by a sincere but mistaken zeal, have perpetuated under the idea of serving God the most atrocious crimes.”
⁸

The atheism of the French Revolution and Jefferson’s ostensible embrace of it (Jefferson was a deist who doubted the divinity of Christ, but not an atheist) helped to restore Hamilton’s interest in religion. He said indignantly in his 1796 “Phocion” essays, “Mr. Jefferson has been heard to say since his return from France that the men of letters and philosophers he had met with in that country were generally
atheists.
”
⁹
He thought James Monroe had also been infected by godless philosophers in Paris and pictured the two Virginians dining together to “fraternize and philosophize against the
Christian religion
and the absurdity of
religious worship.
”
¹⁰
For Hamilton, religion formed the basis of all law and morality, and he thought the world would be a hellish place without it.