And the Senate of the United States having taken the said nominations into consideration were pleased to advise and consent to the same.
CHAPTER II
HAMILTON: A PORTRAIT
I
THE genius for whom the Nation had been waiting, who walked briskly and with a martial air[92] into the Treasury, and sat down at the almost effeminate mahogany desk with the women’s faces carved upon the legs, to bring order out of chaos, looked the leader. Not that he was of commanding stature, for he was but five feet seven in height, with a figure of almost boyish slimness. It was rather in his soldierly erectness and the dignity of his bearing that he impressed. If his carriage suggested the camp, the meticulous care of his dress hinted of the court, for he was something of an elegant in his attire. We have one striking picture of him in a blue coat with bright buttons, the skirts unusually long, with a white waistcoat, black silk small-clothes, white silk stockings;[93] another in fine lace ruffles.[94] It is quite impossible to think of him as unfit for an instant summons to a court levee or a ladies’ drawing-room, albeit Wolcott, who saw him first in his office, thought him ‘a very amiable plain man.’[95] It was an age of frills and fancies among the men of the aristocracy and his very conservatism would have dissuaded him from the slightest departure from the conventions.
It was his head and features that denoted the commander. His well-shaped, massive, and symmetrical head, with its reddish fair hair turned back from his forehead, powdered and collected in a queue behind, was not so likely to attract attention as his pronounced features. These were unique in that rarest of all combinations of beauty and strength. He was handsome enough to be attractive to women, with his fair complexion and almost rosy cheeks, his well-moulded lips, and dark, almost violet, deep-set eyes that could smile as sweetly and seductively as any gallant’s.
And yet these lips could be firm and stern, and the soft, mirthful eyes could freeze and flash. If women were to observe the softer nature, the politicians were to note the man of relentless will disclosed in the firm, strong jaw. Graceful and debonair, elegant and courtly, seductive and ingratiating, playful or impassioned, he could have fitted into the picture at the Versailles of Louis XV, or at the dinner table at Holland House. No one born in the atmosphere of courts could have looked the part more perfectly.
And yet, such was his origin that the envious Adams could sneer at him as ‘the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar,’[96] and it was not without reason that Gouverneur Morris, meditating his funeral oration, and his ‘illegitimate birth,’ contrived a mode ‘to pass over this handsomely.’[97] Even the sympathetic researches of Mrs. Atherton have failed to lift the mystery of his origin and family. All we know is that he was born of an irregular relation, without the intervention of the clergy,[98] between an unprosperous Scotch merchant of the West Indies and a brilliant and beautiful daughter of the French Huguenots. Even his parentage by the man named Hamilton was doubted, on circumstantial evidence, by so ardent a friend as Pickering, who thought he had found the father in a physician.[99] Whoever the father—and the Pickering Papers are not convincing—there is no doubt that Hamilton inherited his genius from his brilliant, passionate, high-strung mother.