Read Alexander Hamilton Online
Authors: Ron Chernow
On December 15, 1774, the
New-York Gazetteer
ran an advertisement for a newly published pamphlet entitled “A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress” that promised to answer “The Westchester Farmer.” The farmer’s sophistry would be “exposed, his cavils confuted, his artifices detected, and his wit ridiculed.”
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This thirty-five-page essay had been written in two or three weeks by Hamilton, as he entered the fray with all the grandiloquence and learning at his disposal. He showed himself proficient at elegant insults, an essential literary talent at the time, and possessing a precocious knowledge of history, philosophy, politics, economics, and law. In retrospect, it was clear that he had found his calling as a fearless, swashbuckling intellectual warrior who excelled in bare-knuckled controversy.
By the time of “A Full Vindication,” Hamilton had clearly assumed the coloring of his environment. Few immigrants have renounced their past more unequivocally or adopted their new country more wholeheartedly. “I am neither merchant, nor farmer,” he now wrote, just a year and a half after leaving St. Croix. “I address you because I wish well to my country”: New York.
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Hamilton reviewed the Boston Tea Party and the punitive measures that had ensued in Boston, including “license [of] the murder of its inhabitants” by British troops.
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Hamilton supported the Tea Party culprits and faulted the British for punishing the whole province instead of just the perpetrators. He voiced the increasingly popular complaints about taxation without representation and defended the trade embargo, insisting that England would suffer drastic harm. Sounding more like the later Jefferson than the later Hamilton, he evoked an England burdened by debt and taxes and corrupted by luxuries.
In many places, “A Full Vindication” was verbose and repetitive. What foreshadowed Hamilton’s mature style was the lawyerly fashion in which he grounded his argument in natural law, colonial charters, and the British constitution. He already showed little patience with halfway measures that prolonged problems instead of solving them crisply. “When the political salvation of any community is depending, it is incumbent upon those who are set up as its guardians to embrace such measures as have justice, vigor, and a probability of success to recommend them.”
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Most impressive was Hamilton’s shrewd insight into the psychology of power. Of the British prime minister, Lord North, he wrote with exceptional acuity:
The Premier has advanced too far to recede with safety: he is deeply interested to execute his purpose, if possible....In common life, to retract an error even in the beginning is no easy task. Perseverance confirms us in it and rivets the difficulty....To this we may add that disappointment and opposition inflame the minds of men and attach them still more to their mistakes.
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After Seabury rebutted “A Full Vindication,” Hamilton struck back with “The Farmer Refuted,” an eighty-page tour de force that Rivington brought out on February 23, 1775. More than twice the length of its predecessor, this second essay betrayed a surer grasp of politics and economics. Seabury had mocked Hamilton’s maiden performance and now suffered the consequences. “Such is my opinion of your abilities as a critic,” Hamilton addressed him directly, “that I very much prefer your disapprobation to your applause.”
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As if Seabury were the young upstart and not vice versa, Hamilton taunted his riposte as “puerile and fallacious” and stated that “I will venture to pronounce it one of the most ludicrous performances which has been exhibited to public view during all the present controversy.”
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This slashing style of attack would make Hamilton the most feared polemicist in America, but it won him enemies as well as admirers. Unlike Franklin or Jefferson, he never learned to subdue his opponents with a light touch or a sly, artful, understated turn of phrase.
Like most colonists, Hamilton still hoped for amity with England and complained that the colonists were being denied the full liberties of British subjects. In justifying American defiance of British taxation, he elaborated the fashionable argument that the colonies owed their allegiance to the British king, not to Parliament. The point was critical, for if the colonies were linked only to the king, they could, theoretically, wriggle free from parliamentary control while creating some form of commonwealth status in the British empire. Indeed, Hamilton cast himself as “a warm advocate for limited monarchy and an unfeigned well-wisher to the present royal family.”
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In what became his trademark style, he displayed exhaustive research, tracing royal charters for North America back to Queen Elizabeth and showing that no powers had been reserved to Parliament. In one glowing passage, Hamilton invoked the colonists’ natural rights: “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole
volume
of human nature by the hand of the divinity itself and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”
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These lines echo John Dickinson, who had written that the essential rights to happiness are bestowed by God, not man. “They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals.”
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Hamilton added beauty and rhythm to the expression.
Clearly, Hamilton was reading the skeptical Scottish philosopher David Hume, and he quoted his view that in framing a government “
every man
ought to be supposed a
knave
and to have no other end in all his actions but
private interests.
” The task of government was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good. In starting to outline the contours of his own vision of government, Hamilton was spurred by Hume’s dark vision of human nature, which corresponded to his own. At one point, while talking about the advantages that England derived from colonial trade, he said, “And let me tell you, in this selfish, rapacious world, a little discretion is, at worst, only a
venial
sin.”
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That chilling aside—a “selfish, rapacious world”—speaks volumes about the darkness of Hamilton’s upbringing.
With “The Farmer Refuted,” the West Indian student became an eloquent booster of his chosen country and asserted the need for unity to resist British oppression. “If the sword of oppression be permitted to lop off one limb without opposition, reiterated strokes will soon dismember the whole body.”
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He already took the long view of American destiny, seeing that the colonies would someday overtake the mother country in economic power. “If we look forward to a period not far distant, we shall perceive that the productions of our country will infinitely exceed the demands, which Great Britain and her connections can possibly have for them. And as we shall then be greatly advanced in population, our wants will be proportionably increased.”
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Here, in embryonic form, is his vision of the vast, diversified economy that was to emerge after independence.
“The Farmer Refuted” was a bravura performance, flashing with prophetic insights. While the British disputed that America could win a war of independence, Hamilton accurately predicted that France and Spain would aid the colonies. The twenty-year-old student anticipated the scrappy, opportunistic military strategy that would defeat the British:
Let it be remembered that there are no large plains for the two armies to meet in and decide the conquest.... The circumstances of our country put it in our power to evade a pitched battle. It will be better policy to harass and exhaust the soldiery by frequent skirmishes and incursions than to take the open field with them, by which means they would have the full benefit of their superior regularity and skills. Americans are better qualified for that kind of fighting which is most adapted to this country than regular troops.
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This was Washington’s strategy, compressed into a nutshell and articulated even before the fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord. This was more than just precocious knowledge: this was intuitive judgment of the highest order.
As rumors went around that Hamilton had authored the two “Farmer” essays, many New Yorkers, Myles Cooper included, dismissed the notion as preposterous. “I remember that in a conversation I once had with Dr. Cooper,” said Robert Troup, “he insisted that Mr. Jay must be the author[,]...it being absurd to imagine [that] so young a man” as Hamilton could have written it.
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Others attributed the pieces to much more established figures, such as William Livingston. Hamilton must have been flattered by the fuss and his literary club deeply amused. In a city with a dearth of republican pamphleteers, Hamilton represented an important recruit to the cause. He had demonstrated inimitable speed (the two “Farmer” essays totaled sixty thousand words), supreme confidence in his views, and an easy, sophisticated grasp of the issues. He was to be a true child of the Revolution, growing up along with his new country and gaining in strength and wisdom as the hostilities mounted.
FOUR
y the time Hamilton wrote “The Farmer Refuted,” the British Parliament had declared Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion and ratified the king’s unswerving determination to adopt all measures necessary to compel
obedience. On the night of April 18, 1775, eight hundred British troops marched out of Boston to capture Samuel Adams and John Hancock and seize a stockpile of patriot munitions in Concord. As they passed Lexington, they encountered a motley battalion of armed farmers known as Minutemen, and in the ensuing exchange of gunfire the British killed eight colonists and then two more in Concord. As the redcoats retreated helter-skelter to Boston, they were riddled by sniper fire that erupted from behind hedges, stone walls, and fences, leaving a bloody trail of 273 British casualties versus ninety-five dead or wounded for the patriots.
The news reached New York within four days, and a mood of insurrection promptly overtook the city. People gathered at taverns and on street corners to ponder events while Tories quaked. One of the latter, Judge Thomas Jones, watched exultant rebels storm by in the street “with drums beating and colours flying, attended by a mob of negroes, boys, sailors, and pickpockets, inviting all mankind to take up arms in defence of the ‘injured rights and liberties of America,’ ” he said.
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The newly emboldened Sons of Liberty streamed down to the East River docks, pilfered ships bound for British troops in Boston, then emptied the City Hall arsenal of its muskets, bayonets, and cartridge boxes, grabbing one thousand weapons in all.
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Armed with this cache, volunteer militia companies sprang up overnight, as they did throughout the colonies. However much the British might deride these ragtag citizen-soldiers, they conducted their business in earnest. Inflamed by the astonishing news from Massachusetts, Hamilton was that singular intellectual who picked up a musket as fast as a pen. Nicholas Fish recalled that “immediately after the Battle of Lexington, [Hamilton] attached himself to one of the uniform companies of militia then forming for the defence of the country by the patriotic young men of this city under the command of Captain Fleming, in which he devoted much time, attending regularly all the parades and performing tours of duty with promptitude and zeal.”
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Fish and Troup were among the diligent cadre of King’s College volunteers who drilled before classes each morning in the churchyard of nearby St. Paul’s Chapel. Their drillmaster was Edward Fleming, who had served in a British regiment and married into the prominent De Peyster family but was still warmly attached to the American side. As a sturdy disciplinarian, Fleming was a man after Hamilton’s own heart; Hamilton’s son said that the fledgling volunteer company was named the Hearts of Oak, although military rolls identify the group as the Corsicans. The young recruits marched briskly past tombstones with the motto “Liberty or Death” stitched across their round leather caps. On short, snug green jackets they also sported, for good measure, red tin hearts that announced “God and Our Right.”
Hamilton approached this daily routine with the same perfectionist ardor that he exhibited in his studies. Robert Troup stressed the “military spirit” infused into Hamilton and noted that he was “constant in his attendance and very ambitious of improvement.”
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Hamilton, never one to fumble an opportunity, embarked on a comprehensive military education. With his absorbent mind, he mastered infantry drills, pored over volumes on military tactics, and learned the rudiments of gunnery and pyrotechnics from a veteran bombardier. Despite the physical delicacy that Hugh Knox had observed, there was a peculiar doggedness about this young man, as if he were already in training for something far beyond humble infantry duty.
On April 24, a huge throng of patriots, some eight thousand strong, massed in front of City Hall. While radicals grew giddy with excitement, many terrified Tory merchants began to book passage for England. The next day, an anonymous handbill blamed Myles Cooper and four other “obnoxious gentlemen” for the patriotic deaths in Massachusetts and said the moment had passed for symbolic gestures, such as burning Tories in effigy. “The injury you have done to your country cannot admit of reparation,” these five Loyalists were warned. “Fly for your lives or anticipate your doom by becoming your own executioners.” This blatant death threat was signed, “Three Millions.”
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A defiant Myles Cooper stuck to his college post.
After a demonstration on the night of May 10, hundreds of protesters armed with clubs and heated by a heady brew of political rhetoric and strong drink descended on King’s College, ready to inflict rough justice on Myles Cooper. Hercules Mulligan recalled that Cooper “was a Tory and an obnoxious man and the mob went to the college with the intention of tarring and feathering him or riding him upon a rail.”
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Nicholas Ogden, a King’s alumnus, saw the angry mob swarming toward the college and raced ahead to Cooper’s room, urging the president to scramble out a back window. Because Hamilton and Troup shared a room near Cooper’s quarters, Ogden also alerted them to the approaching mob. “Whereupon Hamilton instantly resolved to take his stand on the stairs [i.e., the outer stoop] in front of the Doctor’s apartment and there to detain the mob as long as he could by a harangue in order to gain the Doctor the more time for his escape,” Troup later recorded.
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