Alexander Hamilton (44 page)

By no means confined to the south, slavery was well entrenched in much of the north. By 1784, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut had outlawed slavery or passed laws for its gradual extinction—at the very least, New England’s soil did not lend itself to large plantations—but New York and New Jersey retained significant slave populations. New York City, in particular, was identified with slavery: it still held slave auctions in the 1750s and was also linked through its sugar refineries to the West Indies. Even in the 1790s, one in five New York City households kept domestic slaves, a practice ubiquitous among well-to-do merchants who wanted cooks, maids, and butlers and regarded slaves as status symbols. (After the Revolution, few Americans cared to work as servile bonded servants in this new, more egalitarian society.) Slaves tilled the farms of many Hudson River estates along with tenant farmers, one English visitor noting that “many of the old Dutch farmers…have 20 to 30 slaves[, and] to their care and management everything is left.”
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The north never relied on slavery as much as the south, where it was inescapably embedded in the tobacco and cotton economies. When Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, slaves constituted 40 percent of the population of his home state, Virginia. Slaves in South Carolina outnumbered whites. The magnitude of southern slavery was to have far-reaching repercussions in Hamilton’s career. The most damning and hypocritical critiques of his allegedly aristocratic economic system emanated from the most aristocratic southern slaveholders, who deflected attention from their own nefarious deeds by posing as populist champions and assailing the northern financial and mercantile interests aligned with Hamilton. As will be seen, the national consensus that the slavery issue should be tabled to preserve the union meant that the southern plantation economy was effectively ruled off-limits to political discussion, while Hamilton’s system, by default, underwent the most searching scrutiny.

Few, if any, other founding fathers opposed slavery more consistently or toiled harder to eradicate it than Hamilton—a fact that belies the historical stereotype that he cared only for the rich and privileged. To be sure, John Adams never owned a slave and had a good record on slavery, which he denounced as a “foul contagion in the human character.”
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Yet he did not always translate his beliefs into practice. According to biographer John Ferling, “As a lawyer he occasionally defended slaves, but as a politician he made no effort to loosen the shackles of those in bondage.”
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Fearing southern dissension, Adams opposed plans to emancipate slaves joining the Continental Army, contested the use of black soldiers, and opposed a bill in the Massachusetts legislature to abolish slavery. “There is no evidence that he ever spoke out on the issue of slavery in any national forum or that he ever entered into a dialogue on the subject with any of his southern friends,” Ferling concluded.
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In his more radical later years, Benjamin Franklin was a courageous, outspoken president of Pennsylvania’s abolition society. As a young and middle-aged man, however, he brokered slave sales from his Philadelphia print shop, ran ads for slaves, and bought and sold them for himself and others. At many times, he kept one or two household slaves. Biographer Edmund Morgan has noted of Franklin’s involvement with slavery, “Not until late in life did it begin to trouble his conscience.”
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The Virginia founders came to see the problem as intractable, since their economic security was so interwoven with slavery. By the time of the Revolution, George Washington was a mostly benevolent master of more than one hundred slaves at Mount Vernon, though he could be a stickler for reclaiming runaway slaves. While he did not criticize slavery publicly, he had an uneasy conscience and belatedly acted on his views. In 1786, when he owned more than two hundred slaves, he refused to break up families and swore not to buy another slave. “There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition” of slavery, he told Robert Morris.
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Washington emancipated his slaves in his will and even set aside money to assist the freed slaves and their children.

As owner of about two hundred slaves at Monticello and other properties, Thomas Jefferson was acutely conscious of the discrepancy between high-minded revolutionary words and the bloody reality of slavery. Early in the Revolution, he endorsed a plan to stop importing slaves and was dismayed when Congress expunged a passage from the Declaration of Independence in which he blamed George III for the slave trade. In
Notes on the State of Virginia,
written in the early 1780s, he laid out a gradual scheme for ending slavery, with emancipated blacks relocated to the continent’s interior. (As president, he preferred sending them to the West Indies.) In 1784, he proposed blocking slavery in the Northwest Territory, albeit with a sixteen-year grace period. Over time Jefferson yielded to a craven policy of postponing action on slavery indefinitely, constantly foisting the problem onto future generations, hoping vaguely that it would wither away. Unlike Washington, Jefferson freed only a handful of his slaves, including the brothers of his apparent mistress, Sally Hemings.

Madison’s views on slavery followed a pattern similar to Jefferson’s. He was a relatively humane master for the nearly 120 slaves that he inherited, once instructing an overseer to “treat the Negroes with all the humanity and kindness consistent with their necessary subordination and work.”
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In the mid-1780s, he supported a bill in the Virginia Assembly to abolish slavery slowly but then began to duck the issue as a severe political liability. Madison never tried to defend the morality of slavery—at the Constitutional Convention, he called it “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man”—but neither did he distinguish himself in trying to eliminate it.
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In the last analysis, biographer Jack Rakove has concluded, Madison “was no better prepared to live without slaves than [were] the other members of the great planter class to which his family belonged.”
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In his final years, he belonged to the American Colonization Society, which favored emancipation and resettlement of the former slaves in Africa. In the end, Madison’s political survival in Virginia and national politics required endless prevarication on the slavery issue.

The issue surged to the fore with the peace treaty that ended the Revolution. At the prompting of Henry Laurens, article 7 placed a ban on the British “carrying away any Negroes or other property” after the war. This nebulous phrase was construed by slaveholders to mean that the British should return runaway slaves who had defected to the British lines or else pay compensation. The British, in turn, claimed that the former slaves had been freed when they crossed behind British lines. Conceding that Britain may have violated article 7 on technical grounds, Hamilton nevertheless refused to stand up for the slaveholders and invoked a higher moral authority:

In the interpretation of treaties, things
odious
or
immoral
are not to be presumed. The abandonment of negroes, who had been induced to quit their masters on the faith of official proclamations, promising them liberty, to fall again under the yoke of their masters and into slavery is as
odious
and
immoral
a thing as can be conceived. It is odious not only as it imposes an act of perfidy on one of the contracting parties, but as it tends to bring back to servitude men once made free.
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This fierce defender of private property—this man for whom contracts were to be sacred covenants—expressly denied the sanctity of any agreement that stripped people of their freedom.

In New York, the dispute over article 7 had immediate practical repercussions. After the war, slave owners from other states prowled New York’s streets, hoping to spot and steal off with their fugitive slaves. Therefore, on January 25, 1785, nineteen people gathered at the home of innkeeper John Simmons to form a society that would safeguard blacks who had already secured their freedom and try to win freedom for those still held in bondage. The group was called the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves. Its members were especially roiled by the rampant kidnapping of free blacks on New York streets, who were then sold into slavery. Robert Troup and Melancton Smith, a Poughkeepsie merchant and land speculator, were appointed to draw up the society’s rules. Ten days later, an expanded group met at the Merchant’s Coffee House, this time joined by Hamilton and Alexander McDougall. Though he owned five slaves, John Jay was voted chairman. Unless America adopted gradual abolition, Jay believed, “her prayers to heaven for liberty will be impious.”
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Robert Troup, who owned two slaves, read aloud a statement embellished with echoes of the Declaration of Independence:

The benevolent creator and father of men, having given to them all an equal right to life, liberty, and property, no sovereign power on earth can justly deprive them of either. The violent attempts lately made to seize and export for sale several free Negroes, who were peaceably following their respective occupations in this city, must excite the indignation of every friend to humanity and ought to receive exemplary punishment.
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The New York Manumission Society, as it was known for short, conducted a wide-ranging campaign against slavery, sponsoring lectures, printing essays, and establishing a registry to prevent free blacks from being dragged back into slavery. It set up the African Free School to teach the basics to black students, drill discipline into them, and, paternalistically, keep them from “running into practices of immorality or sinking into habits of idleness.”
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The older boys were instructed in carpentry and navigation, the older girls in dressmaking and embroidery. At an early meeting, the society decided to petition the New York legislature for a gradual end to slavery; Aaron Burr, a member of the Assembly, agreed to help them. A pending bill proposed that all blacks born after a certain future date would automatically be considered free. To toughen the measure, Burr introduced language that would terminate all slavery after a certain date. When this radical amendment was defeated, Burr backed the diluted version. In the end, the legislature enacted a toothless, purely voluntary measure that permitted slaveholders to free slaves between twenty-one and fifty years of age.

Burr was no angel when it came to slavery: he always kept an entourage of four or five household slaves. Although he wrote about them with wry affection, his letters reflect no interest in freeing them. As he drifted into the Jeffersonian camp, Burr found it politically expedient to drop any pretense of being an abolitionist. As late as 1831 he tried to discourage William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of
The Liberator,
from persisting in his antislavery crusade. Garrison recalled of Burr, “His manner was patronizing…. As he revealed himself to my moral sense, I saw he was destitute of any fixed principles.”
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Burr was not the only abolition advocate in the mid-1780s who held slaves. In fact, the New York Manumission Society had to deal with the awkward fact that this contradiction was commonplace and that more than half of its own members owned slaves. As members of the society, these people wanted to cleanse themselves of this moral corruption, but how to do so and at what pace? At the February 4 meeting, Hamilton, Troup, and White Matlack were recruited as a ways-and-means committee to produce answers. The society minutes make clear that Hamilton was more than just a celebrity lending his prestige to a worthy cause. An activist by nature, he scorned timid measures and wanted to make a bold, unequivocal statement.

On November 10, 1785, Hamilton’s committee presented its proposals on what members should do with their slaves. For many members, these suggestions were frighteningly abrupt and specific in their timetable. The plan proposed that slaves under twenty-eight should gain their freedom on their thirty-fifth birthday; those between twenty-eight and thirty-eight should be freed seven years hence; and those above forty-five should be freed immediately. It is hard to imagine that Hamilton would have advocated this uncompromising plan had he not contemplated releasing any house slaves he and Eliza might have owned. The members were also urged to emancipate their slaves, not to sell them, lest they be transported to harsher climes than New York.

Hamilton’s committee threw down a gauntlet to the society, cleverly balancing immediate and future emancipation. Melancton Smith—who later emerged as a major proponent of states’ rights and Hamilton’s antagonist in the battle over the U.S. Constitution in New York—balked at such a precise timetable for freeing slaves. Instead, he scrapped Hamilton’s plan by pushing a motion to defer the matter until the next quarterly meeting. Hamilton, Troup, and Matlack had produced a document too strong to be swallowed by their peers, and their committee was summarily disbanded. The successor committee faulted the earlier plan as likely to cause members to “withdraw their services and gradually fall off from the Society.”
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They recommended instead that members should remain free to emancipate their slaves as they saw fit, without any bothersome prompting from the society.

Despite this setback, Hamilton did not stride off in a huff. Three months later, in February 1786, he was added to the society’s standing committee when it lobbied the state legislature to halt the export of slaves from New York. The committee deluged state and federal legislators with a pamphlet entitled “A Dialogue on the Slavery of the Africans etc.” That March, Hamilton’s name appeared on a petition that called upon the state legislature to end the New York slave trade and that deplored the plight of blacks exported “like cattle and other articles of commerce to the West Indies and the southern states.” The petition demanded the termination of a practice “so repugnant to humanity and so inconsistent with the liberality and justice which should distinguish a free and enlightened people.”
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