Alexander Hamilton (41 page)

But what has become of our dear father? It is an age since I have heard from him or of him, though I have written him several letters. Perhaps, alas! he is no more and I shall not have the pleasing opportunity of contributing to render the close of his life more happy than the progress of it. My heart bleeds at the recollection of his misfortunes and embarrassments. Sometimes I flatter myself his brothers have extended their support to him and that he now enjoys tranquillity and ease. At other times, I fear he is suffering in indigence. I entreat you, if you can, to relieve me from my doubts and let me know how or where he is, if alive; if dead, how and where he died. Should he be alive, inform him of my inquiries, beg him to write to me, and tell him how ready I shall be to devote myself and all I have to his accommodation and happiness.
¹⁷

This letter confirms that Hamilton lacked any clear grasp of his wayward father’s situation or even whether he was still alive. He did suspect, however, that his brother had maintained contact with him. The letter also makes manifest that he felt more tenderness and sorrow than anger toward his father.

There were only two figures from St. Croix with whom Hamilton remained in touch throughout his life. Hamilton’s cousin Ann Lytton Venton, who had helped to bankroll his education at King’s College, escaped a wretched marriage when her husband died in 1776. Four years later, she married a Scot, George Mitchell, who filed for bankruptcy the next year, forcing them to flee St. Croix. Three years after that, they moved to Burlington, New Jersey. It was a ghastly time for Ann Mitchell, who complained in 1796 that she and her daughter “have suffered and still suffer every hardship incident to poverty.”
¹⁸
Hamilton sometimes met Mitchell in Philadelphia and tried to prop her up with financial and legal help, but he was later bothered by a nagging conscience that he had not done more to alleviate her struggles.

The only truly happy relationship that Hamilton sustained from boyhood was with his best friend, Edward Stevens. In 1777, Stevens had completed his medical studies in Edinburgh, publishing a dissertation in Latin on stomach digestion, inspired by the peculiar case of a man who made a living by swallowing stones to amuse street crowds. The following year, at age twenty-four, Stevens became the first junior president of the Royal Medical Society. Like Hugh Knox, he was thrilled by Hamilton’s exploits under Washington, even slightly agog. “Who would have imagined, my friend,” he wrote to Hamilton in French in 1778, “that a man of your
size,
of your delicacy of constitution, and your tranquillity would have shone so much and in such a short time on the Field of Mars, as you have done.”
¹⁹
(The emphasis on Hamilton’s “size” may well have been a bawdy allusion.) In 1783, Stevens returned to St. Croix, married, and started a medical practice. Like Hamilton, he seemed to succeed readily at everything he tried. “The doctor has an extensive and lucrative practice and is much and deservedly esteemed in his profession,” Hugh Knox reported from the island. “He sometimes talks much of going to America and I believe would do exceedingly well there in one of the capitals, as he has a fine address and great merit and cleverness.”
²⁰
Hamilton and Stevens remained united by an indissoluble bond that seems conspicuously missing in Hamilton’s relationships with his father and brother.

The memories of his West Indian childhood left Hamilton with a settled antipathy to slavery. During the war, Hamilton had supported John Laurens’s futile effort to emancipate southern slaves who fought for independence. He had expressed an unwavering belief in the genetic equality of blacks and whites—unlike Jefferson, for instance, who regarded blacks as innately inferior—that was enlightened for his day. And he knew this from his personal boyhood experience.

Among many Americans, the Revolution had generated a backlash against slavery as a horrifying practice incompatible with republican ideals. In one abolitionist pamphlet, Samuel Hopkins had written, “Oh, the shocking, the intolerable inconsistence!...This gross, barefaced inconsistence.”
²¹
As early as 1775, Philadelphia Quakers had launched the world’s first antislavery society, followed by others in the north and south. Unfortunately, slavery itself had expanded in tandem with the rousing rhetoric of freedom that seemed to undercut its legitimacy.

Hamilton’s marriage into the Schuyler family may have created complications in his stand on slavery. At times Philip Schuyler had as many as twenty-seven slaves tending his Albany mansion and his fields and mills near Saratoga. They labored at every branch of household work: cooking, cultivating gardens, grooming horses, mending shoes, as well as doing carpentry and laundry, and fishing. Eliza had direct contact with these domestic slaves, to the extent that her grandson surmised that she was “probably her mother’s chief assistant in the management of the house and slaves.”
²²
The image is terribly jarring, for we know Eliza was a confirmed foe of slavery. There is no definite proof, but three oblique hints in Hamilton’s papers suggest that he and Eliza
may
have owned one or two household slaves as well. Five months after his wedding, Hamilton wrote to Governor George Clinton that “I expect by Col. Hay’s return to receive a sufficient sum to pay the value of the woman Mrs. H had of Mrs. Clinton.”
²³
Arguing that this transaction involved the hiring of a domestic servant, not the purchase of a slave, biographer Forrest McDonald has pointed out that the “sufficient sum” referred to back pay that Hamilton was slated to receive from Lieutenant Colonel Udny Hay, deputy quartermaster general—a sum that would have fallen far short of the money then requisite to buy a slave.
²⁴
In 1795, Philip Schuyler informed Hamilton that “the Negro boy & woman are engaged for you.” Apparently in payment, Hamilton debited his cashbook the next spring for $250 to his father-in-law “for 2 Negro servants purchased by him for me.”
²⁵
As we shall see, this purchase may have been made for John and Angelica Church and undertaken reluctantly by Hamilton. Ditto for the purchase of a Negro woman and child on May 29, 1797, which was explicitly charged to John B. Church. In 1804, Angelica noted regretfully that Eliza did not have slaves to assist with a large party that the Hamiltons were planning.

By no means confined to the south, slavery was well entrenched in much of the north. By 1784, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut had outlawed slavery or passed laws for its gradual extinction—at the very least, New England’s soil did not lend itself to large plantations— but New York and New Jersey retained significant slave populations. New York City, in particular, was identified with slavery: it still held slave auctions in the 1750s and was also linked through its sugar refineries to the West Indies. Even in the 1790s, one in five New York City households kept domestic slaves, a practice ubiquitous among well-to-do merchants who wanted cooks, maids, and butlers and regarded slaves as status symbols. (After the Revolution, few Americans cared to work as servile bonded servants in this new, more egalitarian society.) Slaves tilled the farms of many Hudson River estates along with tenant farmers, one English visitor noting that “many of the old Dutch farmers...have 20 to 30 slaves[, and] to their care and management everything is left.”
²⁶

The north never relied on slavery as much as the south, where it was inescapably embedded in the tobacco and cotton economies. When Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, slaves constituted 40 percent of the population of his home state, Virginia. Slaves in South Carolina outnumbered whites. The magnitude of southern slavery was to have far-reaching repercussions in Hamilton’s career. The most damning and hypocritical critiques of his allegedly aristocratic economic system emanated from the most aristocratic southern slaveholders, who deflected attention from their own nefarious deeds by posing as populist champions and assailing the northern financial and mercantile interests aligned with Hamilton. As will be seen, the national consensus that the slavery issue should be tabled to preserve the union meant that the southern plantation economy was effectively ruled off-limits to political discussion, while Hamilton’s system, by default, underwent the most searching scrutiny.

Few, if any, other founding fathers opposed slavery more consistently or toiled harder to eradicate it than Hamilton—a fact that belies the historical stereotype that he cared only for the rich and privileged. To be sure, John Adams never owned a slave and had a good record on slavery, which he denounced as a “foul contagion in the human character.”
²⁷
Yet he did not always translate his beliefs into practice. According to biographer John Ferling, “As a lawyer he occasionally defended slaves, but as a politician he made no effort to loosen the shackles of those in bondage.”
²⁸
Fearing southern dissension, Adams opposed plans to emancipate slaves joining the Continental Army, contested the use of black soldiers, and opposed a bill in the Massachusetts legislature to abolish slavery. “There is no evidence that he ever spoke out on the issue of slavery in any national forum or that he ever entered into a dialogue on the subject with any of his southern friends,” Ferling concluded.
²⁹

In his more radical later years, Benjamin Franklin was a courageous, outspoken president of Pennsylvania’s abolition society. As a young and middle-aged man, however, he brokered slave sales from his Philadelphia print shop, ran ads for slaves, and bought and sold them for himself and others. At many times, he kept one or two household slaves. Biographer Edmund Morgan has noted of Franklin’s involvement with slavery, “Not until late in life did it begin to trouble his conscience.”
³⁰

The Virginia founders came to see the problem as intractable, since their economic security was so interwoven with slavery. By the time of the Revolution, George Washington was a mostly benevolent master of more than one hundred slaves at Mount Vernon, though he could be a stickler for reclaiming runaway slaves. While he did not criticize slavery publicly, he had an uneasy conscience and belatedly acted on his views. In 1786, when he owned more than two hundred slaves, he refused to break up families and swore not to buy another slave. “There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition” of slavery, he told Robert Morris.
³¹
Washington emancipated his slaves in his will and even set aside money to assist the freed slaves and their children.

As owner of about two hundred slaves at Monticello and other properties, Thomas Jefferson was acutely conscious of the discrepancy between high-minded revolutionary words and the bloody reality of slavery. Early in the Revolution, he endorsed a plan to stop importing slaves and was dismayed when Congress expunged a passage from the Declaration of Independence in which he blamed George III for the slave trade. In
Notes on the State of Virginia,
written in the early 1780s, he laid out a gradual scheme for ending slavery, with emancipated blacks relocated to the continent’s interior. (As president, he preferred sending them to the West Indies.) In 1784, he proposed blocking slavery in the Northwest Territory, albeit with a sixteen-year grace period. Over time Jefferson yielded to a craven policy of postponing action on slavery indefinitely, constantly foisting the problem onto future generations, hoping vaguely that it would wither away. Unlike Washington, Jefferson freed only a handful of his slaves, including the brothers of his apparent mistress, Sally Hemings.

Madison’s views on slavery followed a pattern similar to Jefferson’s. He was a relatively humane master for the nearly 120 slaves that he inherited, once instructing an overseer to “treat the Negroes with all the humanity and kindness consistent with their necessary subordination and work.”
³²
In the mid-1780s, he supported a bill in the Virginia Assembly to abolish slavery slowly but then began to duck the issue as a severe political liability. Madison never tried to defend the morality of slavery—at the Constitutional Convention, he called it “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man”—but neither did he distinguish himself in trying to eliminate it.
³³
In the last analysis, biographer Jack Rakove has concluded, Madison “was no better prepared to live without slaves than [were] the other members of the great planter class to which his family belonged.”
³⁴
In his final years, he belonged to the American Colonization Society, which favored emancipation and resettlement of the former slaves in Africa. In the end, Madison’s political survival in Virginia and national politics required endless prevarication on the slavery issue.

The issue surged to the fore with the peace treaty that ended the Revolution. At the prompting of Henry Laurens, article 7 placed a ban on the British “carrying away any Negroes or other property” after the war. This nebulous phrase was construed by slaveholders to mean that the British should return runaway slaves who had defected to the British lines or else pay compensation. The British, in turn, claimed that the former slaves had been freed when they crossed behind British lines. Conceding that Britain may have violated article 7 on technical grounds, Hamilton nevertheless refused to stand up for the slaveholders and invoked a higher moral authority:

In the interpretation of treaties, things
odious
or
immoral
are not to be presumed. The abandonment of negroes, who had been induced to quit their masters on the faith of official proclamations, promising them liberty, to fall again under the yoke of their masters and into slavery is as
odious
and
immoral
a thing as can be conceived. It is odious not only as it imposes an act of perfidy on one of the contracting parties, but as it tends to bring back to servitude men once made free.
³⁵

This fierce defender of private property—this man for whom contracts were to be sacred covenants—expressly denied the sanctity of any agreement that stripped people of their freedom.