CHAPTER XII
THE MARCHING MOBS
I
DURING the remainder of the short session of Congress, feeling ran high. The Jeffersonians made a second foolish attempt to trace some act of official turpitude to Hamilton, and signally failed. The latter was now ready to go. His great work had been achieved with the establishment of public credit. His official honor had been vindicated. Never had he stood so high in the esteem of the commercial interests, the only class whose good opinion he coveted. He was the leader of the leaders of his party. With the rank and file he had never been popular, though always admired, but he sought no popularity with the multitude for whom he had a certain contempt. After years in the public service, he found himself in poverty, confronted with obligations to an increasing family. Early in December he wrote of his plans to Angelica Church: ‘You say I am a politician, and good for nothing. What will you say when you learn that after January next I shall cease to be a politician at all? Such is the fact. I have formally and definitely announced my intention to resign and have ordered a house to be taken for me in New York.’[992] A little earlier he had hoped to take a vacation in Europe. He was ‘heartily tired’ of office. Only the opportunity to quit ‘with honor and without decisive prejudice to public affairs’ held him at all. Now political conditions seemed favorable for an early retirement for the elections promised ‘to prove favorable to the good cause.’[993]
When Jefferson retired, Fenno announced the event in two lines, but he heralded the resignation of Hamilton in a glowing eulogy, double-spaced, of the man who had made ‘two blades of grass to grow where none grew before.’[994] This was too much for Bache. ‘America will long regret that his work lives after him,’ he wrote. And why the fawning rhapsody? Had Washington done nothing?—nor Congress?—nor the natural advantages of the country?—nor the Constitution? ‘No, the Secretary was the life, the soul, the mind of our political body; the spirit has flown—then we are a lifeless mass, dust, ashes, clay.’[995]
But the sneer of Bache and the contemptuous fling of Madison, because it was ‘pompously announced in the newspapers that poverty drives him back to the Bar for a livelihood,’[996] could not rob the daring innovator of his triumphs. The Lancaster Troop of Horse, dining, toasted him,—‘May his domestic felicity be equal to his public services.’[997] The day the story of this toast was printed, a hundred and fifty of the leading merchants, capitalists, and social leaders of Philadelphia sat down to a farewell dinner in his honor. Judges of the Supreme Court and governmental functionaries were in attendance. When the project was suggested, merchants ‘crowded to the subscription paper,’ and many were excluded for lack of space. Toasts were mingled with convivial songs, and wine, we may be sure, flowed like water. After Hamilton had toasted the Philadelphia merchants, he withdrew, and he himself was toasted. ‘May he enjoy in private life that happiness to which his public services have so justly entitled him’—and the rafters rang.[998] Two nights later, the fashionable Dancing Assembly, celebrating Washington’s birthday with a dance and dinner, took note of Hamilton’s departure with a toast.[999] When he reached New York, he found another dinner awaiting him, when more than two hundred people in his honor sat down at Tontine’s Coffee-House ‘at the expense of the merchants of the city.’ There among the guests were the Chancellor, the Judges, the Speaker of the Assembly, the Recorder of the City, the President of Columbia. More convivial songs and stories, more wine and cheers and laughter, and again Hamilton toasted the merchants—of New York. And again he retired to permit the toastmaster to propose ‘Alexander Hamilton’ with nine cheers. Reporting the affair honestly enough, the ‘New York Journal’ could not omit the observation that ‘few of our best citizens and genuine Republicans were present.’ The editor had never questioned Hamilton’s ‘financial abilities,’ but he doubted ‘the propriety of his political principles.’ However, ‘in the language of the play bills it was a great dinner, Mr. Hodgkinson,[1000] one of the managers of the farce being present.’[1001]
Having been thus wined and dined, toasted and roasted, Hamilton retired with his family to the Schuyler mansion in Albany for relaxation and rest. Perhaps he could not afford the coveted trip to Europe—it did not materialize. In April, Justice Iredell wrote his wife that Hamilton had ‘already received more than a year’s salary in retainer fees’ and that a ‘number of mechanics here [New York] have declared that they will build him a house at their own expense’—a promise unredeemed.[1002] Hamilton had hoped to open his New York office in May, but autumn found his family lingering under the hospitable roof of the Schuylers.[1003]
Such, however, was his insatiable craving for power that he was unable to forget, even for a month, the familiar field of battle. Enraged by a triumph of his political foes on a measure in the House, he wrote furiously to King that ‘to see the character of the country and the Government sported with ... puts my heart to the torture.’[1004] Events were not moving with the felicity of old under the successor of his own choosing, and he turned spitefully upon some of his most faithful followers. ‘So,’ he wrote King, ‘it seems that under the present administration of the department, Hillhouse and Goodhue are to be ministers in the House ... and Ellsworth and Strong in the Senate. Fine work we shall have. But I swear the nation shall not be dishonored with impunity.’[1005] Clearly he had determined to keep his hand on the driving wheel from afar. The Cabinet was composed largely of his followers, only Randolph remaining to plague him, and his days were short and full of trouble. The Federalists in Congress could be directed by correspondence—and should be; Washington not only could, but would be kept constantly advised. Hamilton retired from office in January, 1795, but he was not to retire from power until Adams, repeatedly betrayed, should drive the Hamiltonian stool-pigeons from his Cabinet some years later. Meanwhile, a party crisis was approaching that would require all Hamilton’s genius to save his party from destruction.
II
We speak of the ‘Jay Treaty’; the Jeffersonians called it the ‘Grenville Treaty’; as a matter of fact it was more nearly the Hamilton treaty, and it was certainly a Federalist Party treaty.[1006] Jay had arrived in London, to be so graciously received and so lavishly entertained that he had cautiously refrained from mentioning this unusual cordiality in official reports. Thomas Pinckney, the regular Minister, who had stoutly fought for American rights, was shunted aside. ‘If I should say that I had no unpleasant feelings on the occasion I should be insincere,’ he wrote his brother.[1007] But he accepted the situation with good grace.
In time, after receiving attentions from the King not previously accorded America’s diplomats at the court, Jay sat down with Lord Grenville to the negotiation of a treaty. The latter, a favorite of Pitt’s, comparatively young, but rising rapidly because of an abnormal capacity for hard work rather than brilliancy, was in no sense the intellectual superior of Jay. In the first days of the negotiations, the prospects were bright enough for the Federalist emissary. England had previously faced and accepted the necessity for the abandonment of the western posts, and she was not, at the moment, in position vigorously and persistently to protest the other outstanding American claims. The conditions on the Continent were far from satisfactory, with the coalition apparently verging toward disruption. England was not seeking another open enemy, and she could not afford the loss of the American trade. But there was another danger threatening that was causing Grenville no little distress—and this is where Jay held the high card in the gamble.