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441b431
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For five weeks in November and December 1798, he conferred in Philadelphia with Washington, who made his first resplendent return to the capital in twenty months, appearing in uniform on horseback. Charles C. Pinckney and Secretary of War McHenry joined the planning sessions.
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Ron Chernow |
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0d0253d
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Regarding the uprising as a direct threat to constitutional order, Washington asked Supreme Court Justice James Wilson to declare a state of anarchy around Pittsburgh.
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Ron Chernow |
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651948f
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Washington contrived a statesmanlike compromise between Hamilton's truculence and Randolph's civility. He issued a proclamation telling the insurgents to desist by September 1, or the government would send in a militia. At the same time, he announced that a three-man commission would confer with citizens
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Ron Chernow |
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2341f35
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There is no road to despotism more sure or more to be dreaded than that which begins at anarchy.
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Ron Chernow |
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0b37a43
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September 9, Washington had had enough. "If the laws are to be trampled upon with impunity," he said, "and a minority is to dictate to the majority, there is an end put at one stroke to republican government."
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Ron Chernow |
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41f32ed
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Hamilton now believed that his great opportunities lay behind him. On December 1, 1794, the day he returned to Philadelphia, he told Washington that he would surrender his Treasury post in late January.
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Ron Chernow |
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5850828
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After Hamilton and his family left Philadelphia in mid-February 1795, they rented lodgings in New York City for several days before proceeding to the Schuyler residence in Albany for a long-overdue rest.
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Ron Chernow |
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fed9f19
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Hamilton refused to drop his involvement in the Manumission Society even as his renown grew and his commitments vastly multiplied. He kept up his connection as a legal adviser until his death. Was this perhaps his personal way of acknowledging the past by rectifying the injustice that had surrounded his early years?
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Ron Chernow |
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4220ba6
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On November 26, 1799, she gave birth to her seventh child, Eliza, but she continued to shelter strays and waifs, a practice that she and Alexander had started in adopting Fanny Antill.
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Ron Chernow |
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a6bde79
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On December 12, 1799, Washington sent Hamilton a letter applauding his outline for an American military academy: "The establishment of an institution of this kind . . . has ever been considered by me as an object of primary importance to this country."44 It was the last letter George Washington ever wrote. After riding in a snowstorm, he developed a throat infection and died two days later. Washington did not live to see the government tran..
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Ron Chernow |
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3627199
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Time ran out on Hamilton's military ambitions. By February 1800, Congress halted enlistments for the new army that he was assembling and that had monopolized his valuable time. That same month, Americans learned that Napoleon Bonaparte had eliminated the Directory in November and pronounced himself first consul, in precisely the turn to despotism that Hamilton had long prophesied for France. The fulfillment of his prediction, however, left ..
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Ron Chernow |
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2a14585
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On October 15, Adams yielded grudgingly to the appointment of Hamilton as inspector general. Knox refused to serve under him, but Charles Cotesworth Pinckney agreed and praised Hamilton. "I knew that his talents in war were great," he told McHenry, "that he had a genius capable of forming an extensive military plan, and a spirit courageous and enterprizing, equal to the execution of it."
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Ron Chernow |
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dfb50ba
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Around this time, Hamilton chatted with Burr about an appointment. Aware of bad blood between him and Washington, Hamilton asked Burr whether he could serve faithfully under the general. Burr unhesitatingly replied that "he despised Washington as a man of no talents and one who could not spell a sentence of common English."
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Ron Chernow |
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bc76390
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In retirement, Adams mused that if Burr had become a brigadier general in 1798, it might have tethered him to the Federalists and assured his own reelection in 1800. Indeed, Adams was right in one respect: Washington blundered by recruiting only Federalists to top military positions, while Adams had wished to include two Republicans--Burr and Frederick Muhlenberg--as brigadiers. Had the army taken on a more bipartisan complexion, it might w..
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Ron Chernow |
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e54e4ce
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Hamilton sketched out this phantom force in microscopic detail, producing comprehensive charts for regiments, battalions, and companies. In a typical passage, Hamilton was to write, "A company is subdivided equally into two platoons, a platoon into two sections and a section into two squads, a squad consisting of four files of three or six files of two."89 He assigned ranks to officers, set up recruiting stations, stocked arsenals with ammu..
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Ron Chernow |
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33363d8
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By the time he left the Treasury in 1795, slavery had begun to recede in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. Rhode Island, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut had decided to abolish it.
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Ron Chernow |
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148546b
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yellow-fever epidemic of 1798 that had claimed the lives of Benjamin Franklin Bache and John Fenno had also given fresh urgency to the work of the Widows Society, as many women lost their family breadwinners.
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Ron Chernow |
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39fc50f
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Republican ire about the Federalist dominance of the judiciary became especially strident after Adams nominated John Marshall as chief justice of the Supreme Court in late January 1801.
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Ron Chernow |
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fd298f6
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By the time he left the Treasury in 1795, slavery had begun to recede in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. Rhode Island, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut had decided to abolish it. Conspicuously missing were New York and New Jersey. So in January 1798, Hamilton resumed his association with the New York Manumission Society, his personal affiliation having lapsed during his Philadelphia years. Electe..
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Ron Chernow |
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baa25a8
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All on this side [of] the Mississippi must be ours, including both Floridas," he had already argued to McHenry in early 1798."
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Ron Chernow |
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64d4a69
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Like the Reynolds pamphlet, these clandestine messages signal a further deterioration in Hamilton's judgment once he no longer worked under Washington's wise auspices and was left purely to his own devices.
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Ron Chernow |
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21ce38c
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Hamilton believed that the United States should preemptively seize Spanish Florida and Louisiana, lest they fall into hostile French hands. To accomplish this, he directed General James Wilkinson to assemble an armada of seventy-five riverboats.
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Ron Chernow |
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9fe1b48
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Hamilton never carried out his plans for Louisiana or Florida, much less for Spanish America. As the original rationale for his army--defense against a French invasion--was increasingly undercut by peace negotiations, such plans seemed increasingly pointless, preposterous, and irrelevant. Still, the episode went down as one of the most flagrant instances of poor judgment in Hamilton's career.
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Ron Chernow |
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fa2140f
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The low point of his presidency came in June and July 1798. While Adams wrestled with Hamilton over the ranking of Washington's major generals, Congress enacted four infamous laws designed to muzzle dissent and browbeat the Republicans into submission. They were known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Naturalization Act, passed on June 18, lengthened from five to fourteen years the period necessary to become a naturalized citizen with ful..
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Ron Chernow |
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4a41b7d
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The Alien Act of June 25 gave the president the power to deport, without a hearing or even a reasonable explanation, any foreign-born residents deemed dangerous to the peace. The Alien Enemies Act of July 6 granted the president the power to label as enemy aliens any residents who were citizens of a country at war with America, prompting an outflow of French emigres. Then came the capstone of these horrendous measures: the Sedition Act of J..
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Ron Chernow |
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8e8d420
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The Federalist-controlled Congress was maneuvering for partisan advantage and betraying an unbecoming nativist streak. Federalists wanted to curb an influx of Irish immigrants, who were usually pro-French and thus natural adherents to the Republican cause.
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Ron Chernow |
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1c037ed
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Hamilton and others had argued that the Constitution transcended state governments and directly expressed the will of the American people. Hence, the Constitution began "We the People of the United States" and was ratified by special conventions, not state legislatures."
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Ron Chernow |
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135d706
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Now Jefferson and Madison lent their imprimatur to an outmoded theory in which the Constitution became a compact of the states, not of their citizens. By this logic, states could refrain from complying with federal legislation they considered unconstitutional.
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Ron Chernow |
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b6996ec
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The influence of the doctrine of states' rights, especially in the version promulgated by Jefferson, reverberated right up to the Civil War and beyond. At the close of that war, James Garfield of Ohio, the future president, wrote that the Kentucky Resolutions "contained the germ of nullification and secession, and we are today reaping the fruits."
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Ron Chernow |
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3be4d72
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The people had registered their dismay with a long litany of unpopular Federalist actions: the Jay Treaty, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the truculent policy toward France, the vast army being formed under Hamilton and the taxes levied to support it. The 1800 elections revealed, for the first time, the powerful centrist pull of American politics--the electorate's tendency to rein in anything perceived as extreme.
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Ron Chernow |
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99e9863
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Alexander Hamilton triumphed as a doer and thinker, not as a leader of the average voter. He was simply too unashamedly brainy to appeal to the masses.
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Ron Chernow |
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4c86f98
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Both Hamilton and Jefferson believed in democracy, but Hamilton tended to be more suspicious of the governed and Jefferson of the governors. A strange blend of dreamy idealist and manipulative politician, Jefferson was a virtuoso of the sunny phrases and hopeful themes that became staples of American politics.
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Ron Chernow |
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ef16347
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The three terms of Federalist rule had been full of dazzling accomplishments that Republicans, with their extreme apprehension of federal power, could never have achieved. Under the tutelage of Washington, Adams, and Hamilton, the Federalists had bequeathed to American history a sound federal government with a central bank, a funded debt, a high credit rating, a tax system, a customs service, a coast guard, a navy, and many other institutio..
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Ron Chernow |
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d2d13f5
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The 1800 triumph of Republicanism also meant the ascendancy of the slaveholding south. Three Virginia slaveholders--Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe--were to control the White House for the next twenty-four years. These aristocratic exponents of "democracy" not only owned hundreds of human beings but profited from the Constitution's least democratic features: the legality of slavery and the ability of southern states to count three-fifths of ..
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Ron Chernow |
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ed54f55
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Right before Adams left office, Congress had enacted the Judiciary Act, which created new courts and twenty-three new federal judgeships so as to spare Supreme Court justices the onerous task of riding the circuit.
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Ron Chernow |
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f07c21b
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After reading through George Washington's papers, Marshall pronounced Hamilton "the greatest man (or one of the greatest men) that had ever appeared in the United States."31 Marshall considered Hamilton and Washington the two indispensable founders, and it therefore came as no surprise that Jefferson looked askance at the chief justice as "the Federalist serpent in the democratic Eden of our administration."32"
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Ron Chernow |
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c309199
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At the start of 1799, both of the banks in New York City happened to be the brainchildren of Alexander Hamilton: the Bank of New York and the local branch of the Bank of the United States.
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Ron Chernow |
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2030500
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Not only had Burr's plan failed to provide pure water but it had thwarted other sound plans afoot, including those for a municipal water company.
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Ron Chernow |
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746a942
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With John Adams certain to run strongly in New England and Thomas Jefferson equally so in the south, the election would hinge on pivotal votes in the mid-Atlantic states, particularly New York, which had twelve electoral votes.
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Ron Chernow |
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f8c440a
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This was Alexander Hamilton's recurring nightmare: an electoral deal struck between Virginia and New York Republicans.
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Ron Chernow |
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3c81939
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By midnight on May 1, 1800, the local political world learned the result of this fierce election, one that portended a fundamental realignment in American politics: the Republican slate had swept New York City, converting Hamilton's own home turf from a Federalist to a Republican stronghold. This meant that Jefferson could now count on twelve electoral votes where he had received none in 1796.
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Ron Chernow |
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563d7ae
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How had Hamilton justified this disgraceful action to himself? He believed that Jefferson's support for the Constitution had always been lukewarm and that, once in office, he would dismantle the federal government and return America to the chaos of the Articles of Confederation. This was not entirely paranoid thinking on Hamilton's part, for Jefferson made statements that sounded as if he wanted an annulment or radical recasting of the Cons..
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Ron Chernow |
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74f4227
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In writing an intemperate indictment of John Adams, Hamilton committed a form of political suicide that blighted the rest of his career. As shown with "The Reynolds Pamphlet," he had a genius for the self-inflicted wound and was capable of marching blindly off a cliff--traits most pronounced in the late 1790s. Gouverneur Morris once commented that one of Hamilton's chief characteristics was "the pertinacious adherence to opinions he had onc..
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Ron Chernow |
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1f8a30e
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In "The Reynolds Pamphlet," Hamilton had exposed only his own folly. In the Adams pamphlet, he displayed both his own errant judgment and Adams's instability."
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Ron Chernow |