THIRTY-EIGHT
Once Jefferson became president, Hamilton, forty-six, began to fade from public view, an abrupt fall for a man whose rise had been so spectacular, so incandescent. If stripped of his former political standing, however, he remained at the pinnacle of the legal profession, exerting influence over a wide range of New York institutions. He drew up a will for a wealthy retired seaman, Robert Richard Randall, who wanted to set up a sanctuary for retired American merchant sailors. The resulting home on Staten Island was called Sailors’ Snug Harbor. Hamilton also tendered legal advice to the Church of St. Mark’s in the Bowery as it sought independent status within the Trinity Church parish.
But no legal fame or fortune could offset the painful decline of his political stature. From the time of his first newspaper essays at King’s College, Hamilton had shown a steady knack for being near the center of power. He had gravitated to Washington’s wartime staff, the Confederation Congress, the Constitutional Convention, and the first government. Now he was exiled from the main political action, a great general with no army marching behind him.
In his more despairing moments, Hamilton had long toyed with the fantasy of retiring to a tranquil rural life, especially as Philip Schuyler continued to badger him about his cerebral, sedentary labors. But something had held him back. Part of the problem was that Hamilton was a quintessentially urban man, who preferred to commune with books, not running brooks. The other founders—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams—had plantations or substantial farms from which they had drawn financial and spiritual sustenance, while Hamilton had remained a city dweller, harnessed to his work.
This began to change in the late 1790s as Hamilton found increasing solace in his family. Away on a business trip, he chided Eliza mildly for not having written about their sick infant, Eliza: “It is absolutely necessary to me when absent to hear frequently of you and my dear children. While all other passions decline in me, those of love and friendship gain new strength. It will be more and more my endeavor to abstract myself from all pursuits which interfere with those of affection. ’Tis here only I can find true pleasure.”1
To fulfill his pledge of spending more time with his family, Hamilton formed a “sweet project” to build a country house nine miles north of lower Manhattan.2 He told a friend laughingly, “A disappointed politician is very apt to take refuge in a garden.”3 During the fall of 1799, he and Eliza rented a country house along with the Churches in the vicinity of Harlem Heights. This decision probably owed something to the yellow-fever epidemics that visited the city each autumn. Hamilton knew the area well. On fishing expeditions up the Hudson, he sometimes moored his boat to a dock owned by pharmacist Jacob Schieffelin, who had a lovely summer house on a nearby hilltop. Hamilton was so enraptured by the exquisite vista from this house that he tried to buy it. Instead, in August 1800 Schieffelin sold him an adjoining fifteen-acre parcel with a two-hundred-foot elevation with views of the Hudson River on one side and the Harlem River and East River on the other. From physician Samuel Bradhurst, Hamilton bought an additional twenty acres. The combined property was picturesquely wooded and watered by two streams that converged in a duck pond. It had outlying buildings, including stables, barns, sheds, gardens, orchards, fences, and a chicken house. The property was bisected by Bloomingdale Road (today Hamilton Place), which provided a fast, direct connection by stagecoach or carriage to Manhattan or Albany.
Hamilton called his retreat the Grange, a name that paid homage to both the ancestral Hamilton manse in Scotland and the plantation of uncle James Lytton in St. Croix. It was to be the only surviving residence linked to Hamilton’s memory and the only one we know for certain that he owned. Its name suggested both pride in his Scottish ancestry and a more relaxed attitude toward his Caribbean origins. One day, Hamilton was riding up to Albany to visit Eliza’s ailing sister Peggy and had to choose between bringing her a pie or a basket of crabs. Upon reflection, he told Eliza, he had opted for crabs: “Perhaps as a Creole, I had some sympathy with them.”4 Twenty years before, Hamilton would never have hazarded such a flippant remark about his boyhood.
The Hamiltons used the existing farmhouse as a temporary residence until they completed a new structure. For this home, Hamilton drafted a man whom he had once hired at Treasury to design lighthouses: John McComb, Jr., then the most prominent New York architect and soon to be in charge of constructing the new City Hall. The main contractor was Ezra Weeks, brother of Levi, whom Hamilton had defended in the Manhattan Well Tragedy case. From his sawmills at Saratoga, Philip Schuyler shipped planks and boards down the Hudson along with hand-carved timber, still rough with bark, to decorate the children’s attic. He also sent enormous bushels of potatoes and wheels of cheese. Hamilton brimmed with so much nervous energy that he could not remain aloof from any project for long and collaborated with McComb on everything from the design of the tall chimneys to the Italian-marble fireplaces. Like all new homeowners, he had scouted other residences for ideas. On one journey to Connecticut, he told Eliza, “I remark as I go along everything that can be adopted for the embellishment of our little retreat, where I hope for a pure and unalloyed happiness with my excellent wife and sweet children.”5
The two-story Federal house that McComb and Weeks completed by the summer of 1802 occupied a spot near the corner of present-day West 143rd Street and Convent Avenue. (It was later moved south for preservation purposes.) The neat, handsome structure had a yellow-and-ivory frame exterior, topped by classical balusters. With six rooms upstairs and eight fireplaces to warm the family in winter, it was clearly designed with Hamilton’s brood of seven children in mind. As elegantly meticulous as Hamilton himself, the house was small for a man of his fame, though marked with mementos of his past power. Visitors entering the doorway under a delicate fanlight glimpsed a Gilbert Stuart painting of George Washington, a gift from Washington himself. Ironically, the Anglophile Hamilton furnished the parlor with a Louis XVI sofa and chairs. The centerpiece of the house was two octagonal rooms that stood side by side, one serving as parlor, the other as dining room. When the doors were thrown open, they created a single, continuous space in which to entertain guests. The mirrored doors that covered three sides of the parlor reflected the leafy landscape seen through the high French windows. Further blending the living room with the sylvan setting, the windows opened onto a balcony with panoramic river views. Incapable of total relaxation—Hamilton had probably never experienced an indolent day in his life—he commandeered for his study a tiny room to the right of the entryway and fitted it out with a beautiful roll-top desk that he called “my secretary at home.”6 This compulsive bibliophile packed the Grange with up to one thousand volumes.
Perhaps the aspect of this hideaway that most captivated Hamilton was landscaping it and growing fruit and vegetable gardens. As a newcomer to the bucolic life, he humbly sought assistance from friends and country neighbors. “In this new situation, for which I am as little fitted as Jefferson [is] to guide the helm of the U[nited] States, I come to you as an adept in rural science for instruction,” he wrote to Richard Peters, an agricultural expert.7 He also drew on the expertise of his friend and physician, David Hosack, who also served as a renowned botany professor at Columbia College. Hosack had just established a botanical garden with greenhouses and tropical plants where Rockefeller Center stands today. En route to or from the Grange, Hamilton surveyed Hosack’s flowers and frequently rode off with cuttings, bulbs, and seeds. He even communicated a political message through his gardening. Among the many shade trees that he dispersed around the grounds, he planted to the right of the front door a row of thirteen sweet gum trees meant to symbolize the union of the original thirteen states.
We know about Hamilton’s supervision of the grounds because he was often away on business and left detailed instructions for Eliza, who oversaw much of the day-to-day development. Hamilton was enchanted by an ornamental bed of tulips, lilies, and hyacinths that Hosack had devised, and he sent a drawing of it to Eliza. With his usual exactitude, he told her, “The space should be a circle of which the diameter is eighteen feet and there should be nine of each sort of flowers…. They may be arranged thus: wild roses around the outside of the flower garden with laurel at foot…. A few dogwood trees, not large, scattered along the margin of the grove would be very pleasant.”8 Hamilton also planted strawberries, cabbages, and asparagus and constructed an icehouse covered with cedar shingles.
Eliza kept close tabs on outlays for the Grange, which proved an extravagance for a couple with seven children. Always a tightwad compared to Jefferson, Hamilton began to spend with an open hand and lavished about twenty-five thousand dollars, or twice his annual income, on the house and grounds. Since the property itself cost fifty-five thousand, the cumulative expense dragged Hamilton into debt. He was aware that his liberal spending was outstripping his wealth but anticipated that his growing legal practice would defray future bills. In the past, Hamilton had been somewhat cavalier about collecting legal fees, but he now demanded payment from clients in arrears. When he asked one client to pay for a will drawn up many years earlier, he explained, “As I am building, I am endeavouring to collect my outstanding claims.”9
For Alexander and Eliza Hamilton, the country house ushered in a new stage of their lives with a mellow, autumnal tone. The Grange did double duty as both rustic refuge and posh venue for dinner parties. The Hamiltons functioned as a complete, stable family as they seldom had before. Both Alexander and Eliza had been upset that his career had so often separated them and caused the children to be split up between them. Her life’s greatest sacrifice, Eliza once said, was “that of being one half the week absent from him [Hamilton] to take care of the younger while he took care of the elder children.”10 For someone with Hamilton’s early family history, these separations must have carried an extra burden of anxiety and frustration.
Hamilton made more and more time for his children. On one occasion, when Eliza went to Albany, he wrote to her from the Grange, “I am here, my beloved Betsey, with my two little boys, John and William, who will be my bedfellows tonight…. The remainder of the children were well yesterday. Eliza pouts and plays and displays more and more her ample stock of caprice.”11 He liked to sing with the family and gather them in the gardens on Sunday mornings to read the Bible aloud. Hamilton’s children tended to remember their father at the Grange, partly because they were older then and partly because it was there that they had the full attention of a man whose life had been hectic and distracted by controversy.
The new squire was no passive spectator of the national scene and followed avidly the fortunes of Aaron Burr. Once Jefferson entered the White House, Burr was no longer just expendable to the president: he was an outright hindrance. After betraying Jefferson’s trust during the electoral tie, Burr knew he would probably be dropped as vice president when Jefferson sought reelection, and in the meantime he was pointedly excluded from the president’s counsels. “We are told and we believe that Jefferson and [Burr] hate each other and Hamilton thinks that Jefferson is too cunning to be outwitted by him,” Robert Troup reported to Rufus King.12 As Burr became a pariah in Washington, he realized that he had to shore up his political base at home.
By coincidence, an acrimonious race for New York governor followed the electoral stalemate in Washington. That old Republican warhorse George Clinton decided to seek yet another term as governor. When John Jay declined to run for reelection, the Federalists turned to thirty-six-year-old Stephen Van Rensselaer, the incumbent lieutenant governor and Hamilton’s brother-in-law. That Hamilton would get involved was further assured when Burr began to meddle on behalf of Clinton. For Hamilton, this exposed the shameless deceit behind Burr’s flirtation with the Federalists during the tie election. He said in sarcastic tones to Eliza, “Mr. Burr, as a proof of his conversion to Federalism, has within a fortnight taken a very active and officious part against [Van] Rensselaer in favour of Clinton.”13
Hamilton had a compelling personal motive for entering the fray. Eliza’s younger sister Peggy was married to Stephen Van Rensselaer (Hamilton crowned her with the comic nickname “Mrs. Patroon”) and had been gravely ill for two years. For a time, doctors plied her with oxygen that helped to revive her. Then, in early March 1801, while Hamilton was waylaid in Albany on legal business, Peggy’s health deteriorated. Hamilton visited her bedside often and kept Eliza posted on developments. When Hamilton finished his court work, Peggy asked him to stay for a few days, and he complied with her wishes. In mid-March, Hamilton had to send Eliza a somber note: “On Saturday, my dear Eliza, your sister took leave of her sufferings and friends, I trust, to find repose and happiness in a better country…. I long to come to console and comfort you, my darling Betsey. Adieu my sweet angel. Remember the duty of Christian resignation.”14 Peggy’s funeral at the Patroon’s manor house was attended by all of his many tenants, marching in mourning.
So aside from wanting to thwart Burr and Clinton, Hamilton must have felt compelled to assist young Stephen Van Rensselaer, who had been widowed at the advent of his gubernatorial race. In a blizzard of articles and speeches, Hamilton credited the Federalists with producing peace and prosperity. He also tried to convert the election into a referendum on the Republican infatuation with France, evoking the “hideous despotism” of Napoleon that was “defended by the bayonets of more than five hundred thousand men in disciplined array.”15 After Jefferson’s victory, the New York Federalists were desperate to resuscitate their party. As he campaigned with verve, Hamilton felt the full fury of vengeful Republicans, who were giddy with their recent triumph. “At one of the polls, General Hamilton, with impunity by the populace, was repeatedly called a thief and at another poll, with the same impunity, he was called a rascal, villain, and everything else that is infamous in society!” Robert Troup reported. “What a commentary is this on republican virtue?”16
To restore some civility, Hamilton suggested at one Federalist rally that both candidates appoint supporters to conduct a calm, reasoned debate on the issues. Republican papers turned on him harshly and accused him of “haranguing the citizens of New York in different wards in his usual style of imprecation and abuse against the character of the venerable Clinton.” The same paper suggested that Hamilton should be “obscure and inactive,” since he had been “detected in his illicit amours with his lovely Maria, on whose supposed chastity rested the happiness of her husband and family.”17 Burr watched amusedly as Hamilton squirmed. “Hamilton works day and night with the most intemperate and outrageous zeal,” he told his son-in-law, “but I think wholly without effect.”18 Indeed, in an especially ominous sign for Hamilton, Clinton regained the governorship by a landslide.
But Clinton’s return augured poorly for Burr as well. As Hamilton had predicted, President Jefferson gloried in the exercise of power and now moved to sweep Federalist officeholders from New York posts. The president blatantly snubbed Burr and showered most New York appointments on the Livingstons and Clintons. In trying to prop up his base in New York, Burr saw that he would indeed have to cobble together a new coalition of disaffected Republicans and free-floating Federalists. Such a strategy also threatened any comeback meditated by Hamilton and promised sharp future clashes between the two men.
Jefferson had not captured the presidency by a wide margin over Adams, but he was an agile politician with a sure sense of populist symbolism.19 A handsome man of sometimes unkempt appearance, Jefferson eliminated the regal trappings of the Washington and Adams administrations and brilliantly crafted an image of himself as a plain, unadorned American. The various Jeffersons served up by Hamilton in his essays—the epicurean Jefferson, the spendthrift Jefferson, the patrician Jefferson, the indebted Jefferson, the slave-owning, lovemaking Jefferson—were blotted out by one of history’s most impressive image makers. For two weeks after his inauguration, Jefferson stayed at his boardinghouse near the Capitol and supped at the common table. Once in the White House, the folksy president (who had been a fashion plate in Paris) galloped through Washington on horseback, dispensed with wigs and powdered hair, shuffled around in slippers, fed his pet mockingbird, and answered the doorbell himself. (When William Plumer first visited the executive mansion, he mistook the president for a servant.) Only Jefferson could have turned frumpy clothing into a resonant political statement.
Jefferson endowed his election with cosmic significance, later saying that “the revolution of 1800 was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form,” and the Republican press cheered his victory as a liberation from British tyranny.20 In fact, Jefferson proved a more moderate president than either he or Hamilton cared to admit. The Virginian no longer had the luxury of being in opposition and could not denounce every assertion of executive power as a rank betrayal of the Revolution. A group of purists calling themselves Old Republicans protested that the turncoat Jefferson had violated his former principles by refusing to dismantle Hamilton’s system, including the national bank. Jefferson intended to cut taxes and public debt, contract the navy, and shrink the central government—a swollen bureaucracy of 130 employees!—to “a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants,” but many changes were less than revolutionary.21 He made the mistake of scuttling much of the navy, which was to leave the country appallingly vulnerable during the War of 1812. In the end, however, Jefferson often devised variants of Hamilton programs, stressing household manufactures over factories for instance. On the other hand, he overturned some bad Federalist policies and allowed the Alien and Sedition Acts to lapse.
Jefferson’s more extreme impulses were restrained by his treasury secretary, the balding, Geneva-born Albert Gallatin, who broke the shocking news to him that it was too soon to abolish all internal taxes. He educated Jefferson that the national bank and Customs Service did help reduce the national debt. “It mortifies me to be strengthening principles which I deem radically vicious,” the president replied, but he agreed that Gallatin was probably right “that we can never completely get rid of [Hamilton’s] financial system.” Indeed, Hamilton had deliberately shaped his policies so as to make it difficult to extirpate them.
The new president relished the chance to rifle through Treasury files and corroborate his suspicions of Hamilton. He asked Gallatin to browse through the archives and uncover “the blunders and frauds of Hamilton.” Having tangled with Hamilton over the years, Gallatin undertook the task “with a very good appetite,” he admitted, but he failed to excavate the findings Jefferson wanted. Years later, he related the president’s crestfallen reaction: “‘Well Gallatin, what have you found?’ [Jefferson asked]. I answered: ‘I have found the most perfect system ever formed. Any change that should be made in it would injure it. Hamilton made no blunders, committed no frauds. He did nothing wrong.’ I think Mr. Jefferson was disappointed.”22 Gallatin complimented Hamilton by saying that he had done such an outstanding job as the first treasury secretary that he had turned the post into a sinecure for all future occupants. As for the First Bank of the United States, once denounced by Jeffersonians as a diabolical lair, Gallatin proclaimed that it had “been wisely and skillfully managed.”23 Republicans still found it hard to accept the need for the central bank. As president, James Madison allowed the bank’s charter to expire, and American finances suffered as a result during the War of 1812. When a chastened Madison then sponsored the Second Bank of the United States, critics inveighed that he “out-Hamiltons Alexander Hamilton.”24
Hamilton still feared that Jefferson would weaken presidential power, since he had long contended that a strong executive branch would revert to monarchical methods. “A preponderance of the executive over the legislative branch cannot be maintained but by immense patronage, by multiplying offices, making them very lucrative, by armies, navies, which may enlist on the side of the patron all those whom he can interest and all their families and connections,” Jefferson had written.25 Hamilton should have trusted his election prediction that Jefferson in office would discover the joys of presidential power. Jefferson resolved his ideological dilemma by showing outward deference to Congress while subtly steering congressional leaders at private dinners that he held three times per week at the presidential residence.
One area where Hamilton perceived a legitimate threat to the Federalist legacy was the judiciary, the last redoubt of party power. 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. The high court’s justices had spent more time negotiating muddy roads than deciding cases in Philadelphia. At the end of his term, President Adams rushed through appointments for these judges, offending Republicans who thought he should have allowed the new president to choose. Worse, Adams made baldly partisan selections for a judiciary already packed with Federalists. His appointment of the so-called midnight judges rubbed old Republican wounds. “The Federalists have retired into the judiciary as a stronghold and from that battery all the works of republicanism are to be beaten down and erased,” Jefferson declared.26 William Branch Giles agreed with Jefferson that “the revolution is incomplete so long as the judiciary” was possessed by the enemy.27 Thus the battle was joined between triumphant Republicans and defeated Federalists over Republican efforts to repeal the Judiciary Act. Hamilton and other High Federalists feared that Republicans would thereby destroy judicial independence.
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. Marshall, forty-five, was a tall, genial man with penetrating eyes and a shock of unruly hair. He now rivaled, perhaps even superseded, Hamilton as the leading Federalist and had contempt for his distant cousin, Jefferson, whom he mocked as “the great lama of the mountain.”28 Historian Henry Adams said of Marshall, “This excellent and amiable man clung to one rooted prejudice: he detested Thomas Jefferson.”29 Jefferson reciprocated the animosity, especially since the new chief justice revered Hamilton, having once observed that next to the former treasury secretary he felt like a mere candle “beside the sun at noonday.”30 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
During thirty-four years on the court, John Marshall, more than anyone else, perpetuated Hamilton’s vision of both vibrant markets and affirmative government. When he became chief justice, the Supreme Court met in the Capitol basement in a less-than-magisterial setting. Hamilton had always regarded the judiciary as the final fortress of liberty and the most vulnerable branch of government. John Marshall remedied that deficiency, and many of the great Supreme Court decisions he handed down were based on concepts articulated by Hamilton. In writing the decision in Marbury v. Madison (1803), Marshall established the principle of judicial review—the court’s authority to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional—drawing liberally on Hamilton’s Federalistnumber 78. His decision in the landmark case of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) owed a great deal to the doctrine of implied powers spelled out by Hamilton in his 1791 opinion on the legality of a central bank.
The scalding debate over repeal of the Judiciary Act prompted Hamilton to lambast Jefferson in a series of eighteen essays entitled “The Examination.” Reviving themes from The Federalist Papers, he explained why the judiciary was destined to be the weakest branch of government. It could “ordain nothing. Its functions are not active but deliberative…. Its chief strength is in the veneration which it is able to inspire by the wisdom and rectitude of its judgments.”33 For Hamilton, Jefferson’s desire to overturn the Judiciary Act was an insidious first step toward destroying the Constitution: “Who is so blind as not to see that the right of the legislature to abolish the judges at pleasure destroys the independence of the judicial department and swallows it up in the impetuous vortex of legislative influence?”34 Without an independent judiciary, the Constitution was a worthless document. “Probably before these remarks shall be read,” he concluded, the “Constitution will be no more! It will be numbered among the numerous victims of democratic frenzy.”35 Despite the ink that Hamilton copiously expended and his warning before the New York bar that the law’s cancellation would trigger civil war, the Republicans managed to repeal the Judiciary Act in March 1802 without incident.
The repeal and other Jeffersonian innovations had spurred Hamilton and his friends to found a new Federalist paper, the New-York Evening Post, now the oldest continuously active paper in America. Robert Troup complained at the time, “We have not a paper in the city on the federal side that is worth reading.”36 Newspaper editor Noah Webster had turned against Hamilton after the Adams pamphlet, depriving him of an outlet for his views. Marginalized but far from eliminated as a force in national affairs, Hamilton hoped the Post would chart a path for other Federalist newspapers and breathe life into a nearly moribund party. Of the ten thousand dollars of start-up capital, Hamilton likely contributed one thousand. Tradition has it that the decision to launch the Post was made in the mansion of merchant Archibald Gracie.
For chief editor, Hamilton plucked one of his most colorful disciples, thirty-five-year-old William Coleman, an engaging man with a broad, florid face and a nimble wit. Born to an impecunious Boston family, Coleman had been serving in the Massachusetts House of Representatives when Hamilton toured New England in 1796 and Coleman fell promptly under his spell. He considered Hamilton “the greatest statesman beyond comparison of the age” and later dated his professional success from the time of their meeting.37 After moving to New York, Coleman practiced law with Aaron Burr, a decision he regretted and quickly reversed. Attracted to writers, he joined a literary society called the Friendly Club, where he mingled with Hamilton’s Federalist associates. Coleman was wrestling with financial problems when Hamilton got him the coveted clerkship of the circuit court, where he employed his shorthand skills to produce the comprehensive transcript of the Manhattan Well Tragedy case.
William Coleman was such an unreconstructed Federalist that one Republican journalist crowned him “The Field Marshall of Federal Editors.”38 After Jefferson’s election, Coleman sent the new president a bombastic epistle, accusing him of pulling down the old temple of morality and religion and erecting in its place “a foul and filthy temple consecrated to atheism and lewdness.”39 He threw himself so wholly into Stephen Van Rensselaer’s gubernatorial campaign that a Republican paper predicted that this “seller of two-pence halfpenny pamphlets, this sycophantic messenger of Gen. Hamilton[,]…will at one time or another receive a due reward.”40 Coleman was a casualty of the back-to-back victories of Thomas Jefferson and George Clinton. After the governor’s nephew De Witt Clinton emerged as the reigning figure of the all-powerful Council of Appointments, he purged Federalist officeholders and ejected Coleman from his clerkship.
Hamilton and his partners set up Coleman in a brick house on Pine Street. When the newspaper’s first issue appeared on November 16, 1801, it sounded a patrician note, promising “to diffuse among the people correct information on all interesting subjects, to inculcate just principles in religion, morals, and politics, and to cultivate a taste for sound literature.”41 It made no bones about soliciting the backing of local merchants, announcing it would write about whatever relates to “that large and respectable class of our fellow-citizens.”42 While openly admitting its Federalist pedigree, it also noted that “we disapprove of that spirit of dogmatism which lays exclusive claim to infallibility and…believe that honest and virtuous men are to be found in each party.”43 The paper soon won plaudits for its legible print, high-quality paper, and lucid, trenchant writing. None other than James T. Callender bestowed kind words upon Hamilton’s publication: “This newspaper is, beyond all comparison, the most elegant piece of workmanship that we have seen either in Europe or America.”44
The Post immediately became Hamilton’s newspaper of choice for assailing Jefferson, and all eighteen installments of “The Examination” appeared there under the name Lucius Crassus. Hamilton was no hands-off investor, and Coleman candidly described his pervasive influence on the paper: “Whenever anything occurs on which I feel the want of information, I state matters to him, sometimes in a note. He appoints a time when I may see him, usually a late hour in the evening. He always keeps himself minutely informed on all political matters. As soon as I see him, he begins in a deliberate manner to dictate and I to note down in shorthand. When he stops, my article is completed.”45 Coleman’s vignette confirms that Hamilton had a lawyer’s ability to organize long speeches in his head and often dictated his essays. Otherwise, the sheer abundance of his writing is hard to comprehend.
In a macabre coincidence, the New-York Evening Post had its first major story on its hands just one week after its maiden issue: a duel involving Hamilton’s eldest son. With his high forehead, luminous eyes, and Roman nose, Philip Hamilton, nearly twenty, was exceedingly handsome. Smart and with a winning manner, he had followed a career path that replicated his father’s: he had graduated the year before from Columbia College with high honors, was a fine orator, and studied to be a lawyer. “Philip inherits his father’s talents,” Angelica Church told Eliza. “What flattering prospects for a mother! You are, my dear sister, very happy with such a husband and such promise in a son.”46 One of Eliza’s friends asked whimsically if she could notify the “renowned Philip” that she had heard he had “outstripped all his competitors in the race of knowledge” and daily gained “new victories by surpassing himself.”47
Hamilton regarded Philip as the family’s “eldest and brightest hope” and was grooming him for major accomplishments.48 In Robert Troup’s opinion, Hamilton held “high expectations of his future greatness” and likely expected him to perpetuate his own work.49Like Hamilton, Philip was partial to ornate rhetoric and once complained to his father that the Columbia president had made him strike this purple patch from a speech: “Americans, you have fought the battles of mankind, you have enkindled that sacred fire of freedom.”50 Like his father when he was younger, Philip had a wayward streak—Troup called him a “sad rake”—and drifted into escapades that required gentle paternal reprimands.51 Strict but loving, Hamilton had recently prepared a daily schedule for Philip that included reading, writing, church attendance, and recreation, governing all his waking moments from 6:00 A.M. to 10:00 P.M. Nevertheless, Hamilton showed some amused tolerance for his son’s antics, ending one letter to Eliza in October 1801 with the words, “I am anxious to hear from Philip. Naughty young man.”52
Philip’s duel originated in a speech given by a committed young Republican lawyer, George I. Eacker, during a Fourth of July celebration that year. As principal draftsman of the Declaration of Independence, President Jefferson had a personal stake in whipping up patriotic fever on the holiday, and New York’s festivities were especially exuberant. Bells chimed, cannon belched thunder and smoke, and militia marched up Broadway to the Brick Church, where the Declaration was read aloud. Then Captain Eacker, in his late twenties, addressed the crowd with partisan gusto. Instead of blaming the XYZ Affair or French privateering for the Quasi-War with France, he blamed Britain and suggested that Hamilton’s army had been designed to cow Republicans. “To suppress all opposition by fear, a military establishment was expressly created under pretended apprehension of a foreign invasion,” he told the crowd.53 He credited Jefferson with chasing a Federalist aristocracy from the government and saving the Constitution. When the speech was published, Philip Hamilton pored indignantly over the references to his father.
Probably by chance, Philip spotted Eacker at the Park Theater in Manhattan on Friday evening, November 20, 1801. The two young men scarcely knew each other. The theater was presenting a comedy entitled The West-Indian when the son of America’s most celebrated West Indian, along with a friend named Price, barged into a box where Eacker was enjoying the show with a male companion and two young ladies. The two interlopers began taunting Eacker about his Fourth of July oration. At first he tried to ignore them, but the growing commotion drew stares from the audience. Eacker asked the two men to step into the lobby. As they did so, Eacker muttered, “It is too abominable to be publicly insulted by a set of rascals.” Philip Hamilton and Price retorted, “Who do you call damn’d rascals?”54Rascal was a loaded word and often the prelude to a duel. When Eacker grabbed Philip by the collar, the antagonists nearly came to blows. They retired to a tavern, where Eacker reiterated that he considered them both rascals. As he left to return to the play, Eacker said, “I expect to hear from you.” Philip and Price blurted out in chorus, “You shall.”55 Events then moved swiftly. By the time Eacker left the theater, he had a letter from Price challenging him to a duel, and he accepted the offer.
That same night, Philip Hamilton consulted his friend David S. Jones, a young lawyer and former private secretary to Governor Jay. Jones decided to take no further steps until he had conferred with John Barker Church, the Schuyler family authority on dueling. Church advised the young men that Eacker’s insulting behavior demanded a response. On the other hand, he noted that Philip, having given first offense, should try to resolve his differences amicably with Eacker. That Sunday afternoon, Eacker and Price fought a hastily arranged duel in New Jersey. They exchanged four shots without injury and declared the matter closed. Afterward, John Church and David Jones tried to negotiate a truce for Philip Hamilton with Eacker’s second. Among other things, they feared the political ramifications of a bloody encounter between Alexander Hamilton’s son and a young Jeffersonian. Since Eacker blamed Philip Hamilton more than Price for the theater incident, he would not retract the word rascal even if Philip apologized for his rudeness. The negotiations foundered, and the two sides agreed to duel at 3:00 P.M. the following afternoon at Paulus Hook, New Jersey (today Jersey City). The dueling ground was located on a sandbar that was attached to the mainland only at low tide, affording privacy to the antagonists.
Where was Alexander Hamilton in all this? The New-York Evening Post coverage shielded his involvement and conveyed the impression that Philip arranged the duel before his unsuspecting father knew what was afoot. In fact, Hamilton knew all about it but hovered in the background while applauding his brother-in-law’s efforts to stave off bloodshed. Hamilton was trapped in a dilemma that later plagued him with Burr. He believed in rebuking insults to one’s integrity and abiding by the gentlemanly code of honor, but he grew increasingly critical of dueling as he returned to the religious fervor of his youth. During the mustering of his army, he had even issued a circular to his men to curb the practice. Hamilton’s feelings were further complicated by the knowledge that his son was blameworthy and wished to make amends.
Grappling with these contradictory feelings, Hamilton devised a compromise response that previewed his own duel with Burr. He thought that Philip should throw away his shot on the field of honor, a maneuver that French duelists styled a delope. The idea was that the duelist refused to fire first or wasted his shot by firing in the air. If his opponent then shot to kill him, honorable men would regard it as murder. One of Philip’s former classmates, Henry Dawson, confirmed this: “On Monday before the time appointed for the meeting…General Hamilton heard of it and commanded his son when on the ground to reserve his fire till after Mr E[acker] had shot and then to discharge his pistol in the air.”56 Of course, there was no guarantee that one’s opponent would not shoot to kill.
At the duel, Philip Hamilton heeded his father’s advice and did not raise his pistol at the command to fire. Eacker followed suit, and for a minute the two young men stared dumbly at each other. Finally, Eacker lifted his pistol, and Philip did likewise. Eacker then shot Philip above the right hip, the bullet slashing through his body and lodging in his left arm. In what might have been a spasmodic, involuntary discharge, Philip fired his pistol before he slumped to the ground. Both sides agreed that Philip’s dignity and poise had been exemplary. “His manner on the ground was calm and composed beyond expression,” the Post reported. “The idea of his own danger seemed to be lost in anticipation of the satisfaction which he might receive from the final triumph of his generous moderation.”57 The wounded young man was rushed back across the river to Manhattan. Henry Dawson wrote that he was “rowed with the greatest rapidity to this shore where he was landed near the state prison. All the physicians in town were called for and the news spread like a conflagration.”58
Once Alexander Hamilton learned that negotiations had foundered, he raced to the home of Dr. David Hosack to inform him that his professional services might be needed. Hosack later recalled that Hamilton “was so much overcome by his anxiety that he fainted and remained some time in my family before he was sufficiently recovered to proceed.”59 In fact, Hosack already knew about the duel and had hurried to the home of John and Angelica Church, where Philip had been brought. When Hamilton afterward arrived, he gazed at his son’s ashen face and tested his pulse. Then, Hosack related, “he instantly turned from the bed and, taking me by the hand, which he grasped with all the agony of grief, he exclaimed in a tone and manner that can never be effaced from my memory, ‘Doctor, I despair.’”60 Then came the horror-struck Eliza, three months pregnant with their eighth child. A month earlier, when she had gotten sick, Hamilton had feared another miscarriage.
“The scene I was present at when Mrs. Hamilton came to see her son on his deathbed…and when she met her husband and son in one room beggars all description!” said Robert Troup.61
Alexander and Eliza clung to their groaning son through a dreadful night. Henry Dawson recorded this wrenching tableau: “On a bed without curtains lay poor Phil, pale and languid, his rolling, distorted eyeballs darting forth the flashes of delirium. On one side of him on the same bed lay his agonized father, on the other his distracted mother, around [him] his numerous relatives and friends weeping and fixed in sorrow.”62 After professing faith in Christ, Philip Hamilton died at five in the morning, some fourteen hours after receiving the mortal wound. He was buried on a rainy day, with an enormous throng of mourners in attendance. As he approached the grave, the faltering Hamilton had to be propped up by friends. By all accounts, he behaved bravely in the face of calamity. “His conduct was extraordinary during this trial,” Angelica Church wrote.63 For a long time, Eliza was inconsolable. Despite the feared miscarriage, her eighth and final child was born at the Grange on June 2, 1802, and christened Philip in memory of his deceased brother. (Often he was called “Little Phil.”) Philip Schuyler expressed the entire family’s hopes when he wrote to Eliza, “May the loss of one be compensated by another Philip.”64
The aftermath of the duel had eerie parallels to Hamilton’s later confrontation with Burr. Philip’s partisans told of his noble but ultimately suicidal resolution not to fire first, and they cursed the rival who had failed to respond in kind. Even the debate over whether Philip had discharged his weapon deliberately or in a spasm of pain was recapitulated later. Since Philip had been killed after withholding his fire for the sake of honor, Hamilton’s reaction to his son’s death tells us how he might have appraised his own fatal encounter. Many contemporaries believed that Hamilton collaborated with William Coleman on the New-York Evening Post articles about the duel, casting Eacker as the aggressor. These sanitized articles did not mention that Philip and Price had invaded Eacker’s box, and they claimed that the two young men had teased Eacker in a spirit of “levity.”65 The episode was depoliticized, with the Post making no mention that the crux of the dispute was Eacker’s Fourth of July oration about Hamilton. The paper further suggested that, if Eacker had been as conciliatory as Philip during the negotiations, the duel might never have occurred. The strongest blast directed at Eacker was that he had “murdered” Philip Hamilton by firing at someone who had no intention of firing back. This offended Eacker’s friends, who pointed out that Philip had agreed to the duel, had come armed, and had pointed his gun at Eacker.
When the Post editorialized on the need to outlaw dueling, it may have been Hamilton himself who wrote, “Reflections on this horrid custom must occur to every man of humanity, but the voice of an individual or of the press must be ineffectual without additional, strong, and pointed legislative interference.”66 George Eacker was never prosecuted for Philip Hamilton’s death. The young Jeffersonian lawyer died two years later of consumption.
One of the casualties of Philip’s death was the Hamiltons’ seventeen-year-old daughter Angelica, a lively, sensitive, musical girl who resembled her beautiful aunt. When Hamilton was treasury secretary, Martha Washington had taken Angelica to dancing school twice a week with her own children. Having been exceedingly close to her older brother, Angelica was so unhinged by his death that she suffered a mental breakdown. That fall, Hamilton did everything in his power to restore her health at the Grange and catered to her every wish. He asked Charles C. Pinckney to send her watermelons and three or four parakeets—“She is very fond of birds”—but all the loving attention did not work, and her mental problems worsened.67 James Kent tactfully described the teenage girl as having “a very uncommon simplicity and modesty of deportment.”68 She lived until age seventy-three and wound up under the care of a Dr. Macdonald in Flushing, Queens. Only intermittently lucid, consigned to an eternal childhood, she often did not recognize family members. For the rest of her life, she sang songs that she had played on the piano in duets with her father, and she always talked of her dead brother as if he were still alive. In her will, Eliza entreated her children to be “kind, affectionate, and attentive to my said unfortunate daughter Angelica.”69 In 1856, Angelica’s younger sister, Eliza, contemplating Angelica’s expected death, wrote, “Poor sister, what a happy release will be hers. Lost to herself a half century!!”70
After Philip’s death, Hamilton tumbled into a bottomless despair. Though no stranger to depression, he had never lapsed into the lethargy that usually accompanies it. No matter how grief stricken in the past, he still pumped out papers and letters with almost mechanical ease. Now the well-oiled machinery of his life ran down. He returned to political writing but was too disconsolate to discuss Philip’s death. “Never did I see a man so completely overwhelmed with grief as Hamilton has been,” Robert Troup wrote two weeks after the duel.71 Having been abandoned by his own father, Hamilton must have regretted keenly his failure to protect his son. Four months passed before he could even acknowledge the many sympathy notes he had received. His replies reflect deep grief over his son’s loss, his own disenchantment with life, and an aching need for religious consolation. Replying to Benjamin Rush, he wrote that Philip’s death was “beyond comparison the most afflicting of my life…. He was truly a fine youth. But why should I repine? It was the will of heaven and he is now out of the reach of the seductions and calamities of a world full of folly, full of vice, full of danger, of least value in proportion as it is best known. I firmly trust also that he has safely reached the haven of eternal repose and felicity.”72
Hamilton was an altered man after Philip died. He even looked different. Troup said that his face was “strongly stamped with grief,” and this changed condition was captured on canvas by an Albany painter, Ezra Ames.73 A frequent guest at the Schuyler mansion, Ames produced a remarkable portrait of the bereaved Hamilton that illuminates his abrupt emotional decline. In earlier portraits, Hamilton had looked buoyantly into the distance, touched with youthful ardor, or had stared at the viewer with an urbane confidence. Ames captured Hamilton looking troubled and introspective, as if lost in thought and staring into an abyss. The ebullient wit had fled, and the eyes were fixed downward in a melancholy gaze. Some new, impenetrable darkness had engulfed his mind.