Alexander Hamilton (24 page)

At this very day, there are complaints from the whole line of having been three or four days without provisions. Desertions have been immense and strong features of mutiny begin to show themselves. It is indeed to be wondered at that the soldiers have manifested so unparalleled a degree of patience as they have. If effectual measures are not speedily adopted, I know not how we shall keep the army together or make another campaign.
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Hamilton cast a critical eye on the whole revolutionary effort. However upset by profiteering, he knew that the central weakness of the continental cause was political in nature. In his letter to Clinton, he scoffed at the rank favoritism shown by Congress in showering promotions on “every petty rascal who comes armed with ostentatious pretensions of military merit and experience.”
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Unable to enforce its requests for money and troops, an impotent Congress was reduced to begging from the states, which selfishly hoarded soldiers for their own home guards. The only way the Continental Army could lure soldiers was through expensive cash bounties and promises of future land. The republican partiality for state militias in lieu of a strong central army threatened to undermine the entire Revolution.

The disillusioned Hamilton also struggled to fathom why a Congress that had once boasted such distinguished figures was now glutted with mediocrities. Where had the competent members gone? Hamilton concluded that the talent had been drained off by state governments. “However important it is to give form and efficiency to your interior [i.e., state] constitutions and police,” he told Clinton, “it is infinitely more important to have a wise general council…. You should not beggar the councils of the United States to enrich the administration of the several members.”
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Such statements presaged Hamilton’s later nationalism. Ironically, George Clinton became his bête noire, exemplifying the very parochial state power against which he inveighed.

Hamilton, just turned twenty-three, was already spouting civics lessons to state governors. His views were also solicited by his commander in chief. When Washington had to report to a congressional committee about a proposed army reorganization, he sought his aide’s advice, and Hamilton enumerated a long list of abuses to be curbed. He urged that officers who overstayed their furloughs by ten days be court-martialed, recommended surprise inspections to keep sentries alert, and even prescribed the manner in which they should sleep: “Every man must have his haversack under his head and, if the post is dangerous, his arms in his hand.” Hamilton also displayed an unbending sense of military discipline and seemed something of a martinet. Any dragoon who allowed another person to ride his horse without first notifying the inspector general should “receive one hundred lashes for such neglect.”
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That Hamilton already contemplated America’s political future was evident in March, when Washington assigned him to negotiate a prisoner exchange with the British. Having already questioned many British and Hessian deserters, Hamilton was a natural choice for the job and was joined by his former Elizabethtown mentor, Elias Boudinot, now the commissary general of prisoners. Some in Congress not only opposed negotiations but wanted them to fail so that Britain could be blamed. Shocked by this duplicity, Hamilton wrote to George Clinton, “It is thought to be bad policy to go into an exchange. But admitting this to be true, it is much worse policy to commit such frequent breaches of faith and ruin our national character.”
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Hamilton saw America’s essential nature being forged in the throes of battle, and that made honest action imperative.

Shortly after Hamilton penned his report on army reorganization, a Prussian soldier with a drooping face and ample double chin appeared at Valley Forge. He billed himself as a German baron and acted the part with almost comical pomposity. Although the baron and the honorific “von” were likely fictitious, Frederick William August von Steuben came from a military family and had served as an aide to Frederick the Great. He came to America at his own expense and waived all pay unless the patriots triumphed. Washington appointed him a provisional inspector general, with a mandate to instill discipline in the army. Since Steuben’s English was tentative at best, he relied on French as his lingua franca, bringing him into immediate contact with the bilingual Hamilton and John Laurens, who acted as interpreters. Though Steuben was forty-eight and Hamilton twenty-three, they became fast friends, united by French and their fondness for military lore and service.

Soon Steuben was strutting around Valley Forge, teaching the amateur troops to march in formation, load muskets, and fix bayonets and sprinkling his orders with colorful
goddamns
and plentiful polyglot expletives that endeared him to the troops. Wrote one young private: “Never before or since have I had such an impression of the ancient fabled god of war as when I looked on the baron. He seemed to me a perfect personification of Mars. The trappings of his horse, the enormous holsters of his pistols, his large size, and his strikingly martial aspect, all seemed to favor the idea.”
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Steuben overhauled the army’s drill manual or “Blue Book” and created a training guide for company commanders, with Hamilton often recruited as editor and translator. Hamilton eyed the drillmaster with wry affection. “The Baron is a gentleman for whom I have a particular esteem,” Hamilton said, though he chided his “fondness for power and importance.”
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He never doubted that Steuben had worked wonders for the élan of the Continental Army. “’Tis unquestionably [due] to his efforts [that] we are indebted for the introduction of discipline in the army,” he later told John Jay.
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On May 5, 1778, Steuben was recognized for his superlative efforts and awarded the rank of major general.

During the winter encampments, Hamilton constantly educated himself, as if equipping his mind for the larger tasks ahead. “Force of intellect and force of will were the sources of his success,” Henry Cabot Lodge later wrote.
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From his days as an artillery captain, Hamilton had kept a pay book with blank pages in the back; while on Washington’s staff, he filled up 112 pages with notes from his extracurricular reading. Hamilton fit the type of the self-improving autodidact, employing all his spare time to better himself. He aspired to the eighteenth-century aristocratic ideal of the versatile man conversant in every area of knowledge. Thanks to his pay book we know that he read a considerable amount of philosophy, including Bacon, Hobbes, Montaigne, and Cicero. He also perused histories of Greece, Prussia, and France. This was hardly light fare after a day of demanding correspondence for Washington, yet he retained the information and applied it to profitable use. While other Americans dreamed of a brand-new society that would expunge all traces of effete European civilization, Hamilton humbly studied those societies for clues to the formation of a new government. Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never saw the creation of America as a magical leap across a chasm to an entirely new landscape, and he always thought the New World had much to learn from the Old.

Probably the first book that Hamilton absorbed was Malachy Postlethwayt’s
Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce,
a learned almanac of politics, economics, and geography that was crammed with articles about taxes, public debt, money, and banking. The dictionary took the form of two ponderous, folio-sized volumes, and it is touching to think of young Hamilton lugging them through the chaos of war. Hamilton would praise Postlethwayt as one of “the ablest masters of political arithmetic.”
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A proponent of manufacturing, Postlethwayt gave the aide-decamp a glimpse of a mixed economy in which government would both steer business activity and free individual energies. In the pay book one can see the future treasury wizard mastering the rudiments of finance. “When you can get more of foreign coin, [the] coin for your native exchange is said to be high and the reverse low,” Hamilton noted.
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He also stocked his mind with basic information about the world: “The continent of Europe is 2600 miles long and 2800 miles broad”;
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“Prague is the principal city of Bohemia, the principal part of the commerce of which is carried on by the Jews.”
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He recorded tables from Postlethwayt showing infant-mortality rates, population growth, foreign-exchange rates, trade balances, and the total economic output of assorted nations. Hamilton’s notes from Postlethwayt showcase his exemplary discipline in undertaking private courses of study.

Like the other founding fathers, Hamilton rummaged through the wisdom of antiquity for political precedents. From the
First Philippic
of Demosthenes, he plucked a passage that summed up his conception of a leader as someone who would not pander to popular whims. “As a general marches at the head of his troops,” so should wise politicians “march at the head of affairs, insomuch that they ought not to wait the
event
to know what measures to take, but the measures which they have taken ought to produce the
event.
”
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Nearly fifty-one pages of the pay book contain extracts from a six-volume set of Plutarch’s
Lives.
Thereafter, Hamilton always interpreted politics as an epic tale from Plutarch of lust and greed and people plotting for power. Since his political theory was rooted in his study of human nature, he took special delight in Plutarch’s biographical sketches. And he carefully noted the creation of senates, priesthoods, and other elite bodies that governed the lives of the people. Hamilton was already interested in the checks and balances that enabled a government to tread a middle path between despotism and anarchy. From the life of Lycurgus, he noted:

Among the many alterations which Lycurgus made, the first and most important was the establishment of the senate, which having a power equal to the kings in matters of consequence did…foster and qualify the imperious and fiery genius of monarchy by constantly restraining it within the bounds of equity and moderation. For the state before had no firm basis to stand upon, leaning sometimes towards an absolute monarchy and sometimes towards a pure democracy. But this establishment of the senate was to the commonwealth what the ballast is to a ship and preserved the whole in a just equilibrium.
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Hamilton was especially attentive to the amorous stories and strange sexual customs reported by Plutarch. He registered in the pay book how in ancient Rome two naked young noblemen whipped young married women during the celebration of Lupercalia and “how the young married women were glad of this kind of whipping as they imagined it helped conception.”
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Hamilton was also intrigued that Lycurgus allowed a worthy man to ask permission of another husband to impregnate his wife, so that “by planting in a good soil he might raise a generous progeny to possess all the valuable qualifications of their parents.”
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This same Lycurgus tried to make the married women “more robust and capable of vigorous offspring” by allowing selected virgins and young men to “go naked and dance in their presence at certain festive occasions.”
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For anyone studying Hamilton’s pay book, it would come as no surprise that he would someday emerge as a first-rate constitutional scholar, an unsurpassed treasury secretary, and the protagonist of the first great sex scandal in American political history.

Restless at his desk, Hamilton longed to spring into combat, and he found a dramatic chance to do so in June 1778. The direction of the war had shifted in February when the French, heartened by the victory at Saratoga, decided to recognize American independence and signed military and commercial treaties with the fledgling nation. An ebullient John Adams spoke for many Americans when he exulted that Great Britain “is no longer mistress of the ocean.”
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As part of their response to French entry into the war, the British replaced General Howe with Sir Henry Clinton as commander of their forces. Hamilton had been unimpressed by Howe’s leadership. “All that the English need to have done was to blockade our ports with twenty-five frigates and ten ships of the line,” Hamilton told a French visitor. “But, thank God, they did nothing of the sort.”
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If anything, he was even less dazzled by General Clinton. One day, Henry Lee broached to Washington an ingenious plan for kidnapping Clinton, who was quartered in a house on Broadway in New York. He had a large garden out back, overlooking the Hudson River, where he napped in a small pavilion each afternoon. Lee wanted to sneak men across the Hudson at low tide and snatch Clinton as he dozed. Hamilton spiked the plan with a cogent objection, telling Washington that if Clinton was taken prisoner “it would be our misfortune, since the British government could not find another commander so incompetent to send in his place.”
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When General Clinton learned in mid-June that a French fleet had sailed for America, he feared that it might team up with the Continental Army and entrap his occupation force in Philadelphia. To avert this, he decided to evacuate the city and concentrate his troops in the more easily defensible New York. This meant that a huge British army of nine thousand men, laden with provisions filling fifteen hundred wagons—the baggage train stretched for twelve miles—would need to troop across New Jersey with perilous slowness. With supply lines stretched dangerously thin, these lumbering British forces would be exposed to the fire of the Continental Army. Washington saw an opportunity to score a telling blow against a vulnerable adversary and highlight the gains made by his men at Valley Forge under Steuben’s vigorous stewardship.