Alexander Hamilton (49 page)

Having repudiated the convention, Yates and Lansing no longer felt bound by its gag rule and briefed Governor Clinton on what was being meditated in Philadelphia. “We must candidly confess that we should have been equally opposed to any system…which had in object the consolidation of the United States into one government.”
⁷⁶
Perceiving a threat to his power, Clinton stated publicly that the most likely effect of any new charter would be that “the country would be thrown into confusion by the measure,” Hamilton recalled. Irate at this violation of the convention’s confidentiality, Hamilton said that Clinton had not given the Philadelphia meeting a fair chance and had “clearly betrayed an intention to excite prejudices beforehand against whatever plan should be proposed by the Convention.”
⁷⁷

Hamilton was spoiling for a fight as New York resounded with rumors about the events in Philadelphia. When a story appeared that delegates were colluding to bring the duke of York, George III’s second son, from Britain to head an American monarchy, Hamilton traced this absurdity to a letter sent “to one James Reynolds of this city”—the first reference he ever made to the man whose wife would someday be his fatal enchantress.
⁷⁸
On July 21, Hamilton took dead aim at Governor Clinton in New York’s
Daily Advertiser.
In an unsigned article, he accused Clinton of poisoning the electorate’s mind against the ongoing work in Philadelphia, contending that “such conduct in a man high in office argues greater attachment to his
own power
than to the
public good
and furnishes strong reason to suspect a dangerous predetermination to oppose whatever may tend to diminish the
former,
however it may promote the
latter.
”
⁷⁹
As so often in his career, Hamilton’s assault on New York’s most powerful man—the opening salvo in his protracted campaign to win New York’s approval of the Constitution—seemed brave and foolhardy in equal measure.

In attacking Clinton, Hamilton went straight for the jugular. The Clintonians hit back hard, spreading smears about Hamilton. While Hamilton had chastised Clinton’s character to illustrate the abuses of self-serving governors, his adversaries vilified his personal reputation. They knew that Hamilton enjoyed Washington’s all-important patronage and tried to soil that association in the public’s mind. In a piece signed “Inspector,” one Clinton henchman wrote, “I have also known an upstart attorney palm himself upon a great and good man for a youth of extraordinary genius and under the shadow of such a patronage make himself at once known and respected…. [H]e was at length found to be a superficial, self-conceited coxcomb and was of course turned off and disregarded by his patron.”
⁸⁰

Hamilton was deeply offended. This man born without honor was exceedingly sensitive to any slights to his political honor. As an outsider on the American scene, he did not believe that he could allow such slander to go unanswered, so he appealed to Washington to correct the distortion: “This, I confess, hurts my feelings, and if it obtains credit will require a contradiction,” he told the general.
⁸¹
Friendly toward both Hamilton and Clinton, Washington was reluctant to take sides but confirmed to Hamilton that the charges against him were “entirely unfounded.” He had no reason, he said, to believe that Hamilton had taken a single step to finagle an appointment to his military family. As for the confrontation that led to Hamilton’s departure, “Your quitting [was] altogether the effect of your own choice.”
⁸²
Through the years, Hamilton was to exhaust himself in efforts to refute lies that grew up around him like choking vines. No matter how hard he tried to hack away at these myths, they continued to sprout deadly new shoots. These myths were perhaps the inevitable reaction to a man so brilliant, so outspoken, and so sure of himself.

Before returning to Philadelphia, Hamilton averted a duel between an English merchant friend, John Auldjo, and Major William Pierce, who happened to be a Georgia delegate to the Constitutional Convention. In a letter to Pierce’s second, Hamilton pleaded for forgiveness of Auldjo’s rude behavior in a business dispute and observed that “extremities ought then only to ensue when, after a fair experiment, accommodation has been found impracticable.”
⁸³
As was often the case, the prospect of a duel concentrated the minds of both parties, enabling them to reach a settlement without resort to bloodshed.

On August 6, the Philadelphia convention reconvened to begin the arduous task of refining the Constitution. Hamilton, back by August 13, dove into a debate that passionately engaged him: immigration. He opposed any attempt to restrict membership in Congress to native-born Americans or to stipulate a residency period before immigrants could qualify for it. He told the assembly that “the advantage of encouraging foreigners is obvious…. Persons in Europe of moderate fortunes will be fond of coming here, where they will be on a level with the first citizens. I move that the section be so altered as to require merely citizenship and inhabitancy.”
⁸⁴
This position again contradicts the image of Hamilton as indifferent to the plight of ordinary people. He was overruled: representatives would have a seven-year residency requirement, senators nine, the president fourteen. It has been speculated that Hamilton slipped a clause into the Constitution allowing him to become eligible for the presidency. The final document stated that the president had to be at least thirty-five and either native-born “or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution.” Since Hamilton was away from Philadelphia when a committee formulated this proposal, it seems unlikely that he had any influence upon it.

As Madison conceded, the specter of slavery haunted the convention, and he argued that “the states were divided into different interests not by their difference of size, but principally from their having or not having slaves…. [The conflict] did not lie between the large and small states. It lay between the northern and southern.”
⁸⁵
For many southerners, the slavery issue allowed no room for concessions, and they supported the Virginia Plan in exchange for protecting their peculiar institution. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina stated baldly, “South Carolina and Georgia cannot do without slaves.”
⁸⁶
The issue was so explosive that the word
slavery
did not appear in the Constitution, replaced by the euphemism of people “held to service or labor.”

Slaveholding states wondered how their human property would be counted for congressional-apportionment purposes. Northern states finally agreed that five slaves would be counted as equivalent to three free whites, the infamous “federal ratio” that survived for another eighty years. The formula richly rewarded the southern states, artificially inflating their House seats and electoral votes and helping to explain why four of the first five presidents hailed from Virginia. This gross inequity was to play no small part in the eventual triumph of Jeffersonian Republicans over Hamiltonian Federalists. In exchange, southern states agreed that the importation of slaves might cease after 1808, feeding an illusory hope that slavery might someday just fade away. Without the federal ratio, Hamilton glumly concluded, “no union could possibly have been formed.”
⁸⁷
Indeed, the whole superstructure erected in Philadelphia rested on that unstable, undemocratic foundation.

Hamilton’s upset over this tolerance of slavery may have been deeper than we know. There has always been some mystery as to his whereabouts after his August 13 statement on immigration. In fact, he had returned to New York for a meeting of the Manumission Society. Hamilton may have apprised members of the impending decision on slavery in Philadelphia, because they delivered a petition to the convention to “promote the attainment of the objects of this society.”
⁸⁸
After the slavery compromise in Philadelphia, Hamilton stepped up his involvement in the Manumission Society. The following year, even while pouring out fifty-one
Federalist
essays, serving in Congress, and campaigning to ratify the Constitution, he attended a meeting of the society that again protested the export of slaves from New York State and the “outrages committed in digging up and taking away the dead bodies of Negroes buried in the city.”
⁸⁹
Later in the year, Hamilton was appointed one of four counselors of the Manumission Society.

By September 6, Hamilton was back in Philadelphia, having made full peace with the new Constitution. Madison recorded Hamilton as telling delegates that “he had been restrained from entering into the discussion from his dislike of the scheme in general, but as he meant to support the plan…as better than nothing, he wished to offer a few remarks.”
⁹⁰
On September 8, Hamilton joined the Committee of Style and Arrangement, which would arrange the articles of the Constitution and polish its prose. The five-member committee, chaired by William Samuel Johnson, included Rufus King and James Madison but owed most of its success to Hamilton’s friend Gouverneur Morris. Thanks to a carriage accident, Morris, thirty-five, had a wooden leg and walked with a cane, accoutrements that only enhanced his whimsically flamboyant presence. Like Hamilton, the blue-blooded Morris dreaded mob rule and had favored a Senate made up solely of great property owners. He considered slavery a “nefarious institution” that would summon the “curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed.”
⁹¹
Although he represented Pennsylvania at the convention, he had grown up on Morrisania, the family estate in New York. Tall and urbane, he was a stout patriot with a biting wit and a cavalier twinkle in his eyes. He spoke a record 173 times at the convention, leading William Pierce to marvel at how “he charms, captivates, and leads away the senses of all who hear him.”
⁹²

The polyglot Morris was a bon vivant who admitted that he had “naturally a taste for pleasure.”
⁹³
At King’s College, he had composed essays on “Wit and Beauty” and on “Love.” Like many flirtatious men who oozed charm, the “Tall Boy” was thought superficial, even decadent, by more austere observers. John Adams said he was a “man of wit and made pretty verses, but of a character
très légère.
”
⁹⁴
In a similarly deprecatory vein, John Jay once wrote of the randy Morris, “Gouverneur’s leg has been a tax on my heart. I am almost tempted to wish he had lost
something else.
”
⁹⁵
Morris’s peg leg did not seem to detract from his sexual appeal and may even have enhanced it.

Hamilton and Morris felt a mutual affinity, flavored with some hearty cynicism. Morris admired Hamilton’s intellect even as he reproved him for being “indiscreet, vain, and opinionated.”
⁹⁶
Repaying the compliment, Hamilton called Morris “a man of great genius, liable however to be occasionally influenced by his fancy, which sometimes outruns his discretion.”
⁹⁷
On another occasion, Hamilton branded Morris “a native of this country, but by genius an exotic.”
⁹⁸

There is a splendid, if unsubstantiated, story about Hamilton and Morris at the convention that rings true and conveys Morris’s ironic, self-assured style. Hamilton and Morris were discussing how Washington signaled to people that they should maintain a respectful distance and not behave too familiarly with him. Hamilton wagered Morris that he would not dare to accost Washington with a friendly slap on the back. Taking up the challenge, Morris found Washington standing by the fire-place in a drawing room and genially cuffed him on the shoulder: “My dear general, how happy I am to see you look so well.” Washington fixed Morris with such a frigid gaze that Morris was sorry that he had ever taken up Hamilton’s dare.
⁹⁹

As a member of the style committee, Hamilton showed that, for all his misgivings about the Constitution, he could be cooperative and play a serviceable part. The convention showed good judgment in choosing him, given his literary gifts and rapid pen. It is hard to believe that the Committee of Style and Arrangement took only four days to burnish syllables that were to be painstakingly explicated by future generations. The objective was to make the document short and flexible, its language specific enough to constrain abuses but general enough to allow room for growth. As its chief draftsman, Morris shrank the original twenty-three articles to seven and wrote the great preamble with its ringing opening, “We the People of the United States.” Paying tribute to Morris’s craftsmanship, Madison wrote, “The
finish
given to the style and arrangement fairly belongs to the pen of Mr. Morris.”
¹⁰⁰

On September 17, 1787, after almost four months of hard-fought battles, the convention ended when thirty-nine delegates from twelve states signed the Constitution. By scrapping the Articles of Confederation and placing the states under a powerful central government, it represented a monumental achievement. Since Lansing and Yates remained stubborn holdouts, Hamilton ended up as the lone New York delegate to sign the charter. (The names of the states preceding the signatures appear in his handwriting.) It must have been with both relief and joy that Washington entered in his diary that night, “Met in Convention, when the Constitution received the unanimous assent of 11 States and Colo. Hamilton’s from New York.”
¹⁰¹
In the end, the headstrong Hamilton subordinated his ego to the common good. At the signing, he announced categorical support for the Constitution and appealed to the delegates for unanimous approval. Reported Madison: