Alexander Hamilton (2 page)
Read Alexander Hamilton Online
Authors: Ron Chernow
Tags: #Statesmen - United States, #History, #Presidents & Heads of State, #Political, #General, #United States, #Personal Memoirs, #Hamilton, #Historical, #United States - Politics and Government - 1783-1809, #Biography & Autobiography, #Statesmen, #Biography, #Alexander
RON CHERNOW
ALEXANDER HAMILTON
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,
Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Books (NZ) cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany,
Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2004
Published in Penguin Books 2005
Copyright © Ron Chernow, 2004
All rights reserved
Illustration credits appear on pages 789–90.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Chernow, Ron.
Alexander Hamilton / Ron Chernow.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-1-1012-0085-8
1. Hamilton, Alexander, 1757–1804. 2. Statesmen—United States—Biography.
3. United States—Politics and government—1783–1809. I. Title.
E3002.6.H2C48 2004 973.4'092—dc22[B]
2003065641
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
C
ontents
PROLOGUE: The Oldest Revolutionary War Widow
TEN: A Grave, Silent, Strange Sort of Animal
TWELVE: August and Respectable Assembly
FOURTEEN: Putting the Machine in Motion
SEVENTEEN: The First Town in America
EIGHTEEN: Of Avarice and Enterprise
TWENTY-TWO: Stabbed in the Dark
TWENTY-FOUR: A Disagreeable Trade
TWENTY-SIX: The Wicked Insurgents of the West
TWENTY-SEVEN: Sugar Plums and Toys
TWENTY-NINE: The Man in the Glass Bubble
THIRTY: Flying Too Near the Sun
THIRTY-ONE: An Instrument of Hell
THIRTY-THREE: Works Godly and Ungodly
THIRTY-SIX: In a Very Belligerent Humor
THIRTY-EIGHT: A World Full of Folly
FORTY-ONE: A Despicable Opinion
FORTY-THREE: The Melting Scene
Selected Books, Pamphlets, and Dissertations
TO VALERIE,
best of wives and best of women
O
BSERVATIONS BY
A
LEXANDER
H
AMILTON
I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be.
—
LETTER OF AUGUST
13, 1782
The passions of a revolution are apt to hurry even good men into excesses.
—
ESSAY OF AUGUST
12, 1795
Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by the impulse of passion.
—
LETTER OF APRIL
16, 1802
Opinion, whether well or ill founded, is the governing principle of human affairs.
—
LETTER OF JUNE
18, 1778
PROLOGUE
THE OLDEST REVOLUTIONARY WAR WIDOW
I
n the early 1850s, few pedestrians strolling past the house on H Street in Washington, near the White House, realized that the ancient widow seated by the window, knitting and arranging flowers, was the last surviving link to the glory days of the early republic. Fifty years earlier, on a rocky, secluded ledge overlooking the Hudson River in Weehawken, New Jersey, Aaron Burr, the vice president of the United States, had fired a mortal shot at her husband, Alexander Hamilton, in a misbegotten effort to remove the man Burr regarded as the main impediment to the advancement of his career. Hamilton was then forty-nine years old. Was it a benign or a cruel destiny that had compelled the widow to outlive her husband by half a century, struggling to raise seven children and surviving almost until the eve of the Civil War?
Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton—purblind and deaf but gallant to the end—was a stoic woman who never yielded to self-pity. With her gentle manner, Dutch tenacity, and quiet humor, she clung to the deeply rooted religious beliefs that had abetted her reconciliation to the extraordinary misfortunes she had endured. Even in her early nineties, she still dropped to her knees for family prayers. Wrapped in shawls and garbed in the black bombazine dresses that were de rigueur for widows, she wore a starched white ruff and frilly white cap that bespoke a simpler era in American life. The dark eyes that gleamed behind large metal-rimmed glasses—those same dark eyes that had once enchanted a young officer on General George Washington’s staff—betokened a sharp intelligence, a fiercely indomitable spirit, and a memory that refused to surrender the past.
In the front parlor of the house she now shared with her daughter, Eliza Hamilton had crammed the faded memorabilia of her now distant marriage. When visitors called, the tiny, erect, white-haired lady would grab her cane, rise gamely from a black sofa embroidered with a floral pattern of her own design, and escort them to a Gilbert Stuart painting of George Washington. She motioned with pride to a silver wine cooler, tucked discreetly beneath the center table, that had been given to the Hamiltons by Washington himself. This treasured gift retained a secret meaning for Eliza, for it had been a tacit gesture of solidarity from Washington when her husband was ensnared in the first major sex scandal in American history. The tour’s highlight stood enshrined in the corner: a marble bust of her dead hero, carved by an Italian sculptor, Giuseppe Ceracchi, during Hamilton’s heyday as the first treasury secretary. Portrayed in the classical style of a noble Roman senator, a toga draped across one shoulder, Hamilton exuded a brisk energy and a massive intelligence in his wide brow, his face illumined by the half smile that often played about his features. This was how Eliza wished to recall him: ardent, hopeful, and eternally young. “That bust I can never forget,” one young visitor remembered, “for the old lady always paused before it in her tour of the rooms and, leaning on her cane, gazed and gazed, as if she could never be satisfied.”
For the select few, Eliza unearthed documents written by Hamilton that qualified as her sacred scripture: an early hymn he had composed or a letter he had drafted during his impoverished boyhood on St. Croix. She frequently grew melancholy and longed for a reunion with “her Hamilton,” as she invariably referred to him. “One night, I remember, she seemed sad and absent-minded and could not go to the parlor where there were visitors, but sat near the fire and played backgammon for a while,” said one caller. “When the game was done, she leaned back in her chair a long time with closed eyes, as if lost to all around her. There was a long silence, broken by the murmured words, ‘I am so tired. It is so long. I want to see Hamilton.’”
1
Eliza Hamilton was committed to one holy quest above all others: to rescue her husband’s historical reputation from the gross slanders that had tarnished it. For many years after the duel, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and other political enemies had taken full advantage of their eloquence and longevity to spread defamatory anecdotes about Hamilton, who had been condemned to everlasting silence. Determined to preserve her husband’s legacy, Eliza enlisted as many as thirty assistants to sift through his tall stacks of papers. Unfortunately, she was so self-effacing and so reverential toward her husband that, though she salvaged every scrap of his writing, she apparently destroyed her own letters. The capstone of her monumental labor, her life’s “dearest object,” was the publication of a mammoth authorized biography that would secure Hamilton’s niche in the pantheon of the early republic. It was a long, exasperating wait as one biographer after another discarded the project or expired before its completion. Almost by default, the giant enterprise fell to her fourth son, John Church Hamilton, who belatedly disgorged a seven-volume history of his father’s exploits. Before this hagiographic tribute was completed, however, Eliza Hamilton died at ninety-seven on November 9, 1854.
Distraught that their mother had waited vainly for decades to see her husband’s life immortalized, Eliza Hamilton Holly scolded her brother for his overdue biography. “Lately in my hours of sadness, recurring to such interests as most deeply affected our blessed Mother…I could recall none more frequent or more absorbent than her devotion to our Father. When blessed memory shows her gentle countenance and her untiring spirit before me, in this one great and beautiful aspiration after duty, I feel the same spark ignite and bid me…to seek the fulfillment of her words: ‘Justice shall be done to the memory of my Hamilton.’”
2
It was, Eliza Hamilton Holly noted pointedly, the imperative duty that Eliza had bequeathed to all her children:
Justice shall be done to the memory of my Hamilton.