Jefferson and Hamilton

by Claude G. Bowers

If he was not a friend of the people, nor the electorate of him, he was the courtier and friend of the powerful, and thus his was one of the first careers created by the social lobby. If he did not cultivate the voters, he selected his friends with fine discrimination with the view of his own advancement. At Yale he cultivated Noah Webster and Uriah Tracy, a potent writer and a powerful politician; he early profited by the popularity and prestige of his father, and through his father’s and his family’s influential friends; and socially, he made himself the ‘bonny boy’ of the Hamiltonian circle, and smiled and joked himself into the affections of the Bingham set. A beautiful and brilliant sister brought him the championship of the clever Chauncey Goodrich and his associates. A charming wife threw wide all the doors of the capital. While he was earning the grateful appreciation of Hamilton and the Essex Junto, this attractive wife was winning and deserving the tender affection of Mrs. Washington, with whom she was on terms of intimacy, and she was corresponding regularly with Nellie Custis.[1283] When Washington left public life, his wife gave the wife of Wolcott a lock of the General’s hair and one of her own. The social lobby looked after its own—and Wolcott was its very own.

For this cultivation of the social lobby, he was well adapted, for he had a genius for society, with his cheerful disposition, his playful manner, his conversation, which, while sometimes sober, was usually gay. The ‘small talk’ that Adams lacked, Wolcott had in full measure running over. A master of the art of banter, no one with entrée to Mrs. Bingham’s could tell a joke better or more noisily enjoy one. His laugh was hearty, frequent, and infectious. Living in a world of statistics, he at least affected a love of literature, was fond of quoting poetry, and interested in the personalities of distinguished writers. His conversation after office hours could be light and graceful. Gracious, smiling, ingratiating, this bureaucrat—one of the first—created and sustained by the social lobby as one of its first exhibits. He differed from Pickering as day from night, but like his sphinx-like colleague of Salem, he owed everything to Hamilton, nothing to Adams; and as he sat, suave and smiling, at the Cabinet table, it was to Hamilton, not to Adams, that he looked as chief.

VIII

If Pickering was a conspirator against Adams and did not care who knew it, and Wolcott a conspirator trying to conceal it, James McHenry, the Secretary of War, was a conspirator and scarcely knew it. The simplicity of this Irish immigrant is most disarming. Left alone, he would have been harmless. His was only another instance of loving, not wisely, and too well. Born in comfortable circumstances in Ireland, the impairment of his health through intensive application to his studies in an academy in Dublin brought him to America on a recuperative voyage. So favorably was he impressed that his family soon followed and his father opened a general store in Baltimore. A year later, we find him in an academy in Newark, Delaware, and then in Philadelphia studying medicine under the celebrated Dr. Rush. But he took as little to his profession as to the prosaic duties of the counting-room, and, thanks to inherited property, lived through the greater portion of his life as a gentleman of leisure. In nothing that he ever undertook did he attain distinction. The practice of his profession was limited to a brief period as surgeon in the army; his career in commerce was almost as much curtailed; and he employed his leisure as a dilettante in politics and literature.

Had McHenry remained in Ireland, it is easy to imagine him as a young blade about Dublin, affecting the fashions, a bit dandified in dress, over-fond of society, given to verse. A searcher of souls might have discovered in him an ambition—to write poetry. Even in his academy days at Newark he was an inveterate verse-maker, and he thought enough of his effusions to send them to the papers. It was a weakness he never overcame, and at his death they found a great portfolio full of rhymes. It is possible—and it is this pathetic touch that makes one almost love him—that he hoped for a posthumous volume as a memorial and monument.[1284] Some of these lyrics are clever, light and graceful, reminders of the sort that even Curran liked to make for the amusement of his friends—thoroughly Irish. He could never have become a poet, but there is evidence in his letters that had he turned his attention to the humorous essay, he might have produced things worth while. These epistles are charming in their playfulness, sprightly, witty, glowing with humor. No one among the public men of the period could have made posterity so much their debtor with letters on men, women, and events—not even Morris, Ames, or Goodrich. He was really made for an observer, rather than participant, in the harsh conflicts of life—more of a Horace than a Robert Walpole, more of a Boswell than a Johnson. Dinners, dances, routs, these, and the writing of light verses, were enough to make him happy.

And yet he was not effeminate. If he did not play his part in the affairs of men with brilliancy or even efficiency, he did with courage and to the best of his ability. We have few references to his services as surgeon in the army. It was when he became one of Washington’s secretaries that he fell completely under the fascination of Hamilton. Even before his resignation from the army, he had entered politics as a member of the State Senate in Maryland, a rather important body consisting then of but fifteen members. Here he was the representative of the commercial class. In the Constitutional Convention he was obscure, and strangely enough his views were the very opposite of Hamilton’s. Speaking seldom, his voice was raised in warning against too much centralization.[1285] He was even favorable to a mere amendment to the Articles of Confederation,[1286] and his chief interest was in the provisions for the regulation of commerce.[1287] When the work was over, he signed with avowed reluctance, and solely on the ground—which was characteristic—that he distrusted his own judgment, that amendments might be made, and he was willing to take a chance.[1288] In the bitter fight over ratification in the Maryland Convention, he took but little part.

Even so, the confidence and friendship of Washington and Hamilton were not weakened. To him they looked from the beginning for advice on Maryland patronage, and Washington found it convenient to use him as an agent in matters of this sort.[1289] Hamilton thus employed him frequently.[1290] Taking seriously his rôle as the Federalist boss and distributer of the loaves and fishes, he resented the disregarding of one of his recommendations, and even the long explanatory letter of Hamilton failed to smooth his ruffled feathers.[1291] More than two years were to elapse before his woman-like affection for his idol gained the ascendancy over his resentment. ‘I have not ceased to love you nor for a moment felt an abatement of my friendship,’ he wrote impulsively after the long silence.[1292]

Like Pickering and Wolcott, McHenry was persistent in his hints for place. Six years before the Constitution went into effect, we find him soliciting the influence of Washington to get him a diplomatic post in Europe, and the great man tried and failed.[1293] Among the first letters Hamilton received on entering the Cabinet was one from McHenry. ‘I am not wholly lost to ambition,’ he wrote, ‘and would have no objection to a situation where I might indulge and improve at the same time my literary propensities, with, perhaps, some advantage to the public. Would you, therefore, be good enough to feel ... whether the President has thought of me, or would, in such a case, nominate me. I wish you would do this for me as a thing springing entirely from yourself.’[1294] Nothing came of it, and the faithful party hack continued to run the errands of the Administration in Maryland. Three years later, he took his courage in both hands and wrote directly to Washington asking to be sent to Paris and Vienna to attempt to secure the release of Lafayette. He wanted a change of air. It would be no use, the President replied.[1295] It was not until near the close of Washington’s eight years in office—and only then because many others had declined—that he was finally summoned to Philadelphia to become Secretary of War. Would he have felt so much elated had he read Hamilton’s comment on his capacity? ‘McHenry, you know,’ wrote the leader. ‘He would give no strength to the Administration but he would not disgrace the office. His views are good.’[1296] But happily he did not know, and jubilantly he gave up all private enterprises as incompatible with public office—for in such matters he was meticulously proper—and, mounting his horse, he rode to Philadelphia. He carried the conviction with him that he owed his honor to the earnest persistency of his idol. To the extent indicated, this was true. The great genius of Federalism, now planning to continue his domination of the Government from his law office in New York, had reasons to believe that whoever might be President, McHenry would be his own faithful servitor. When Hamilton had married Betty Schuyler, his friend had journeyed to Albany with some verses for the event. Was it with an indulgent smile that the bridegroom acknowledged the poem? ‘You know I often told you you wrote prose well, but had no genius for poetry. I retract.’[1297] Six years before the first inauguration of Washington, this ardent friend had written Hamilton: ‘Were you ten years older and twenty thousand pounds richer, there is no doubt but that you might obtain the suffrages of Congress for the highest office in their gift.’[1298] Verily it was not without an eye to the future that Hamilton found a place for such an idolater and political valet in the Cabinet.

There is something a bit wistful and pathetic about McHenry that persuades forgiveness for even his treachery to Adams. His were the sins of a lover, and love covers a multitude of sins. Nature intended him for a snug harbor, and fate pushed him out upon tempestuous seas. His own best epitaph has been written by himself: ‘I have built houses. I have cultivated fields. I have planned gardens. I have planted trees. I have written little essays. I have made poetry once a year to please my wife; at times got children, and at all times thought myself happy.’[1299] Like Pickering and Wolcott, he owed everything to Hamilton—nothing to Adams; and as he faced Adams in the Cabinet room, it was to Hamilton—not to Adams—that he looked as chief.