Alexander Hamilton (21 page)

The following year, James McHenry became an aide to Washington. Born and educated in Ireland, McHenry had studied medicine with Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia. He was able to minister to Hamilton’s various maladies, including a malarial infection that recurred every summer, probably a legacy of his tropical boyhood. To correct Hamilton’s constipation, McHenry instructed him to skip milk and go easy on the wine. “When you indulge in wine let [it] be sparingly—never go beyond three glasses—but by no means every day.”
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(That three glasses of wine was considered abstemious says much about the immoderate consumption of the day.) Warmhearted, with a touch of the poet, McHenry wrote heroic verse and often accompanied Hamilton in entertaining Washington’s family with songs. Hamilton referred to “those fine sounds with which he and I are accustomed to regale the ears of the fraternity.”
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From McHenry’s diary, we can see that many of Washington’s aides sneaked in romantic flings during inactive intervals that spring. In February, many wives of high-ranking officers—Mrs. Washington, Mrs. Knox, and Mrs. Greene, as well as Lady Stirling and her daughter, Lady Kitty—arrived and organized dainty little tea parties in the evening. One visitor, Martha Bland of Virginia, cast admiring eyes on the handsome young aides, finding them “all polite, sociable gentlemen who make the day pass with a great deal of satisfaction to the visitors.”
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One day, she joined a riding party headed by George and Martha Washington and was clearly taken with Hamilton, “a sensible genteel polite young fellow, a West Indian.”
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In this socially fluid situation, Hamilton could meet and court well-bred young women as social equals. Colonel Alexander Graydon recalled a self-possessed Hamilton surrounded by several adoring ladies at dinner, saying that he “acquitted himself with an ease, propriety and vivacity, which gave me the most favorable impression of his talents and accomplishments,” as he displayed “a brilliancy which might adorn the most polished circles of society.”
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One thing grew crystal clear at Morristown: Hamilton was girl crazy and brimming with libido. Throughout his career, at unlikely moments, he tended to grow flirtatious, almost giddy, with women. No sooner had he joined Washington’s staff than he began to woo his old friend Catherine Livingston, daughter of his former patron, William Livingston, now the first governor of an independent New Jersey. In an April 11 letter to Kitty, Hamilton struck the note of badinage favored by young rakes of the day:

After knowing exactly your taste and whether you are of a romantic or discreet temper as to love affairs, I will endeavour to regulate myself by it. If you would choose to be a goddess and to be worshipped as such, I will torture my imagination for the best arguments the nature of the case will admit to prove you so…. But if…you are content with being a mere mortal, and require no other license than is justly due to you, I will talk to you like one [in] his sober senses.

That Hamilton was being more than playful with Kitty Livingston is shown in his declaration in the letter that the end of the Revolution would “remove those obstacles which now lie in the way of that most delectable thing called matrimony.”
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When Hamilton received Livingston’s belated reply to his rather forward letter, he passed it around among the other aides. “Hamilton!” one confided. “When you write to this divine girl, it must be in the style of adoration. None but a goddess, I am sure, could have penned so fine a letter!” In his response to Livingston, Hamilton made clear that some family members thought he was excessively preoccupied by the opposite sex. “I exercise [my pen] at the [risk] of being anathematized by grave censors for dedicating so much of my time to so trifling and insignificant a toy as—woman.” Though Livingston, apparently, had spurned his advances—he chides her apathy—he concludes philosophically that “I shall probably be in a fine way” and tells her that “ALL FOR LOVE is my motto.”
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We can discern Hamilton’s ambivalence toward fashionable young women as he alternately flatters and belittles Kitty. As in his first boyish love poems in St. Croix, Hamilton could fancy young women as chaste goddesses or naughty little vixens. Which type he ultimately preferred, he still may not have known.

In the late spring of 1777, Hamilton began the most intimate friendship of his life, with an elegant, blue-eyed young officer named John Laurens, who formally joined Washington’s family in October. One portrait of Laurens shows a short, commanding figure in a pose of supreme assurance, with one arm akimbo and the other resting on the hilt of a long, curved sword. He was the son of one of South Carolina’s most influential planters, Henry Laurens, who succeeded John Hancock as president of the Continental Congress that November. Hamilton and Laurens, both French Huguenot on one side of their families and English on the other, seemed like kindred spirits, spiritual twins. Both were bookish and ambitious, bold and enterprising, and hungered for military honor. Both were imbued with a quixotic sense that it was noble to die in a worthy cause. Like Hamilton, Laurens was so sure of himself that he could seem brusquely overbearing to those who disagreed with him. More than any friend Hamilton ever had, Laurens was his peer, and the two were long paired in the fond memories of many who fought in the Revolution.

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, a few months before Hamilton was born in Nevis, Laurens had a privileged upbringing on one of the state’s biggest slave plantations. In 1771, while Hamilton toiled away as a clerk in St. Croix, Laurens’s father enrolled him in a cosmopolitan school in Geneva, Switzerland. He was a versatile, accomplished student, who excelled in the classics, fenced, drew, and rode. While breathing in the republican atmosphere of Geneva, he prepared to become a barrister. In 1774, he studied law at the Middle Temple in London. This was a time of antislavery ferment, spurred by Lord Mansfield’s legal decision that a slave became free by being brought to England. Laurens became a passionate convert to abolitionism, which was to create a strong ideological bond with Hamilton.

After Lexington and Concord, Laurens clamored to return home but was deterred by his fretful father, who worried about his son’s youthful lust for combat. Henry Laurens always had a strange foreboding that his impetuous son would die in battle. After reading Thomas Paine’s
Common Sense
in 1776, John Laurens grew ever more impatient to recross the Atlantic but remained trapped in England by an unexpected circumstance. He had impregnated a young woman, Martha Manning, whose wealthy father, William Manning, was a close friend of Henry Laurens. With his chivalric sense of honor, John Laurens married Manning in a clandestine ceremony in October 1776. Four months later, after Martha gave birth to a daughter, Laurens immediately boarded a ship back to Charleston. Not long after he returned, he signed on with the Continental Army and won the absolute trust of Washington, who invited him to join his family and gave him confidential missions “which neither time nor propriety would suffer me to commit to paper,” Washington wrote.
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Hamilton and Laurens took an instant liking to each other and became inseparable. Hamilton later lauded his friend’s “zeal, intelligence, enterprise.”
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As the war progressed, Hamilton wrote to Laurens with such unbridled affection that one Hamilton biographer, James T. Flexner, has detected homoerotic overtones in their relationship. Because the style of eighteenth-century letters could be quite florid, even between men, one must tread gingerly in approaching this matter, especially since Laurens’s letters to Hamilton were warm but proper. It is worth noting here, however, how frequently people used the word
feminine
to describe Hamilton—the more surprising given his military bearing and virile exploits. When John C. Hamilton was preparing his father’s authorized biography, he omitted a loose sheet that has survived in his papers and that describes the relationship between Hamilton and Laurens thus: “In the intercourse of these martial youths, who have been styled ‘the Knights of the Revolution,’ there was a deep fondness of friendship, which approached the tenderness of feminine attachment.”
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Hamilton had certainly been exposed to homosexuality as a boy, since many “sodomites” were transported to the Caribbean along with thieves, pickpockets, and others deemed undesirable. In all thirteen colonies, sodomy had been a capital offense, so if Hamilton and Laurens did become lovers—and it is impossible to say this with any certainty—they would have taken extraordinary precautions. At the very least, we can say that Hamilton developed something like an adolescent crush on his friend.

Hamilton and Laurens formed a colorful trio with a young French nobleman who was appointed an honorary major general in the Continental Army on July 31,1777. The marquis de Lafayette, nineteen, was a stylish, ebullient young aristocrat inflamed by republican ideals and eager to serve the revolutionary cause. “The gay trio to which Hamilton and Laurens belonged was made complete by Lafayette,” Hamilton’s grandson later wrote. “On the whole, there was something about them rather suggestive of the three famous heroes of Dumas.”
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Lafayette always spoke of his two American friends in the most affectionate terms. Of Laurens, he wrote that “his openness, integrity, patriotism, and splendid gallantry have made me his devoted friend.”
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In describing Hamilton, Lafayette was still more effusive, calling him “my beloved friend in whose brotherly affection I felt equally proud and happy.”
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Eliza Hamilton confirmed that “the marquis loved Mr. Hamilton as a brother; their love was mutual.”
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Portraits of Lafayette show a slender, handsome youth in a powdered wig with a long face, rosy lips, and delicately arched eyebrows. Like Hamilton’s, his life was shadowed by early sorrow: his father had died when he was two, his mother when he was thirteen, making him an orphan at the same age as Hamilton. At sixteen, he had married the fourteen-year-old Adrienne de Noailles, the daughter of one of France’s most august families, and he offered America invaluable contacts with the snobbish court of Louis XVI. His meteoric ascent in the Continental Army owed much to a letter that Benjamin Franklin wrote to George Washington from Paris, urging the political expediency of welcoming this well-connected young man. Lafayette agreed to serve without pay, brought a ship to America outfitted at his own expense, and spent lavishly from his own purse to clothe and arm the patriots.

Many people warmed to Lafayette, finding him full of poetry and fire and fine liberal sentiments. Franklin implored Washington to befriend “that amiable young nobleman” and expressed fear that people would take advantage of his goodness.
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Franklin need not have worried about Washington’s affections. When the young Frenchman was wounded in battle, Washington instructed the surgeon, “Treat him as though he were my son.” For Lafayette, Washington became a revered paternal presence, and he named his only son George Washington Lafayette. Lafayette always had his quota of critics, who regarded him as vain, suspicious, and self-seeking. Thomas Jefferson pinpointed one especially flagrant fault: “His foible is a canine appetite for popularity and fame.”
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For all his love of Lafayette, even Hamilton mocked the “thousand little whims” to which the marquis was prey.
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Whatever his flaws, however, Lafayette proved to be a valiant officer of surprisingly mature judgment and more than rewarded the faith of his admirers.

The bilingual Hamilton befriended Lafayette with the almost instantaneous speed of all his early friendships and was soon assigned to him as a liaison officer. As in the case of John Laurens, there was such unabashed ardor in Hamilton’s relationship with the marquis that James T. Flexner has wondered whether it progressed beyond mere friendship. Did Hamilton’s grandson mean much or little when he wrote, “There is a note of romance in their friendship, quite unusual even in those days, and Lafayette, especially during his early sojourn in this country, was on the closest terms with Hamilton”?
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Late in the war, Lafayette wrote to his wife, “Among the general’s aides-de-camp is a (young) man whom I love very much and about whom I have occasionally spoken to you. That man is Colonel Hamilton.”
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Where Hamilton was the more extravagant partner in corresponding with Laurens, Lafayette outshone Hamilton when it came to rapturous prose. “Before this campaign, I was your friend and very intimate friend agreeable to the ideas of the world,” Lafayette wrote to him in 1780. But since returning from France, “my sentiment has increased to such a point the world knows nothing about.”
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Was this just a specimen of flowery French writing, voguish at the time, or something more? As with John Laurens, we will never know. But the breathless tone of the letters that Hamilton exchanged with Laurens and Lafayette is unlike anything in his later letters. This may simply have been a by-product of youth and wartime camaraderie. The broader point is that Alexander Hamilton, the outsider from the West Indies, had a rare capacity for friendship and was already attracting a circle of devoted, well-placed people who were to help to propel him to the highest political plateau.

In early July 1777, Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York fell to the British, prompting King George III to clap his hands and exclaim, “I have beat them! Beat all the Americans.”
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It was a potential calamity for the patriots, since it opened a corridor for General John Burgoyne and his invading army from Canada to push south to New York City, slicing the rebel army in half and isolating New England—an overarching objective of British war policy. Livid at this defeat, Hamilton was unsparing in his censure of the commander held responsible, Philip Schuyler. “I have always been a very partial judge of General Schuyler’s conduct and vindicated it frequently from the charges brought against it,” he wrote to Robert R. Livingston, “but I am at last forced to suppose him inadequate.”
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Historians have proved more charitable toward Schuyler, who was weakened by desertions and the settled malice that his New England troops bore against him as a New York leader and a tough disciplinarian. The British had also pulled off a masterful plan by scaling the steep mountain that overlooked Ticonderoga, permitting its unlikely capture. After suffering many slurs, Schuyler was replaced as head of the army’s Northern Department by Horatio Gates, whom he jeered at as the “idol” of the New Englanders.
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Even though he was exonerated for the loss of Ticonderoga in a subsequent court-martial that he himself demanded, Schuyler never completely recuperated from the wounding debacle.