Jefferson and Hamilton

by Claude G. Bowers

In ‘A Farmer Refuted,’ the maturity of the thought, the severity of the reasoning, the vigor of the onslaught, the familiarity with history and governmental processes displayed, denoted the hand of one seasoned in controversy. The sprightliness, wit, humor, sarcasm, suggested more than talent. The evident joy in the combat, with the air of assurance, was that of the fighter unafraid. These are the qualities that were to run through all of Hamilton’s literary work. Nowhere in the literature of invective is there anything more vitriolic than the attack on a war speculator and profiteer, under the signature of ‘Publius.’[109] This tendency to bitter invective will appear, as we proceed, in Hamilton’s attacks on Jefferson and Adams.

But usually he appealed to reason, and then he was at his best. Thus, in ‘The Continentalist,’ urging a more perfect union and a more potent government, and in his letter to James Duer,[110] we are impressed with the writer’s intimate knowledge of conditions, his constructive instinct, his vision.[111] And thus, especially do these appear in ‘The Federalist’—one of the most brilliant contributions to the literature of political science in the world’s history. It will be impossible to comprehend the genius of Hamilton, his domination of his party, and his power, despite his unpopularity with the masses, without a foreknowledge of his force with the pen. It was his scepter and his sword.

IV

His power as an orator was unsurpassed in any assembly that called it forth, but with very few exceptions he did not appear before the multitude. He swayed the leaders and won them to his leadership. There was little of fancy in his speeches, scarcely any appeal to the emotions, but he spoke with enthusiasm and an intensity of conviction. Force, clearness, fire—‘logic on fire’—and a rapid fusillade of impressively directed facts—with these he usually swept all before him. The comparatively few speeches which have come down to us fail to explain his power. The stories of audiences moved to tears are scarcely in keeping with the absence of the slightest attempts at pathos or appeals to the emotions. Kent, who heard him in court, recalled, long after Hamilton was dead, ‘the clear, elegant and fluent style, and commanding manner.’[112] Physically, he was far from imposing, but it is easy to imagine the virility of his manner, the flash of his conqueror’s eye. In the New York Convention called to pass on the Constitution, it was the force and persuasiveness of his arguments that converted a hostile majority. Later Congress was to refuse him permission to present personally his reports on the ground that he might unduly sway its judgment; and Jefferson was to resent his interminable and passionate ‘harangues’ in the Cabinet room. But these exhibitions of his eloquence advanced his political career by impressing the leaders with the brilliancy of his intellect.

V

It is significant that, while he was not vain of his power as a writer and orator, he lived and died firmly convinced of his genius as a soldier. In the earliest of his letters we have his longing for a war. His son and biographer was impressed with the fact that, ‘while arms seemed to be his predominant passion, the world was at peace.’[113] He never faced the prospect of a war without seeing an opportunity for distinction. At a time when he abhorred the French Revolution, and all associated with it, he wrote of Napoleon as ‘that unequalled conqueror, from whom it is painful to detract.’[114]

Was he a military genius? We have nothing on which to base a judgment. In the Revolution we see him attracting the attention of Washington by his military alertness on the heights of Harlem. At Monmouth we see his horse shot under him as he dashes into the fray with a recklessness that looked to the commander like a courting of death. Throughout his services in the military household of Washington, where he became all but indispensable in a secretarial capacity and in diplomacy, he chafed under the conviction that his place was in a position of command. One of his friends declared that ‘the pen of our army was held by Hamilton; and for dignity of manner, pith of matter, and elegance of style, General Washington’s letters are unrivaled in military annals,’ but the youthful Hamilton felt that he should have been the army’s sword.[115] The vision of the renown of the military conqueror was ever before him. The war was an opportunity for glory, and he was missing it. ‘I explained to you candidly my feelings in respect to military reputation,’ he wrote Washington when seeking a separate command, ‘and how much it was my object to act a conspicuous part in some enterprise that might perhaps raise my character as a soldier above mediocrity.’[116] At Yorktown he took desperate chances in an effort for renown.[117] We shall find him leaving the Treasury to command soldiers sent to put down the western insurrection, with no possible occasion for it beyond his preference for the saddle and the sword. And when war with France loomed large, we shall find him resorting to importunity and intrigue to get the command over the protest of the President.

Was Hamilton a Napoleon? He thought himself of the race of military masters. He had the courage, the coolness under fire, and the audacity, but nothing that he did disclosed more genius than was shown by Aaron Burr. Had the chance come, he might have justified his own high pretensions as a military genius—but it did not come. He died with his boyhood ambition to command great armies unrealized—and undimmed.[118]

VI

His association of a strong military establishment with a strong and stable government was due in large measure to his temperament. He was essentially an aristocrat. From the moment of his arrival in America, he cultivated only the élite. His most partisan biographer has painted his portrait in a sentence—‘His sympathies were always aristocratic, and he was born with a reverence for tradition.’[119] There is nothing more contradictory in his career than the lowliness of his origin and his inherent passion for the lofty. This charity student moved in mansions as to the manor born. He had lived on terms of comparative intimacy with the aristocratic Washington of the camp, with Lafayette who brought something of the flavor of Old World aristocracy, and he married into one of the proudest of the manorial families, but his love of grandeur was inherent. He luxuriated in elegant society and fine houses, loved fine laces as an adornment, and, without having ever seen the interior of a gallery, at least affected a partiality for the fine arts, collecting such prints as his purse permitted, painting some himself, and advising Mrs. Washington in the purchase of paintings.[120]