Alexander Hamilton (44 page)

Shays’s Rebellion thrust to the fore economic issues—the very issues in which Hamilton specialized—as did an extremist movement in Rhode Island that beat the drum for abolishing debt and dividing wealth equally. The Massachusetts uprising shocked many who wondered just how far the rebels would go. “Good God!” Washington proclaimed of the rebellion, aghast that some protesters regarded America’s land “to be the
common property
of all.”
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James Madison confessed to similar trepidation about the rebels to his father: “They profess to aim only at a reform of the constitution and of certain abuses in the public administration, but an abolition of debts public and private and a new division of property are strongly suspected in contemplation.”
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Where Madison thought a weak republic would only invite disorder, Jefferson reacted to the turmoil with aplomb. “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” he told Madison loftily from Paris, “and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”
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To Colonel William Smith, Jefferson sent his famous reassurance: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
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While Hamilton feared that disorder would feed on itself, the more hopeful and complacent Jefferson thought that periodic excesses would correct themselves.

Ordinarily a veritable Niagara of opinion, Hamilton was initially mute about Shays’s Rebellion. He kept silent because he sympathized with the farmers’ grievances, however much he despised their methods. Hamilton wanted the federal government to take over state debts left from the war. Instead, Massachusetts, by trying to settle its own debt, had crushed the farmers with onerous taxes. “The insurrection was in a great degree the offspring of this pressure,” he later wrote.
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In
Federalist
number 6, he argued that “if Shays had not been a
desperate debtor,
it is much to be doubted whether Massachusetts would have been plunged into a civil war.”
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The rural uprising vindicated his sense that the federal government had to distribute the tax burden equitably across the states.

Many Americans wondered whether the fragile confederation could withstand the accumulating strains between rich and poor, creditors and debtors. In February 1787, Hamilton made a heroic stand in the New York Assembly to arrest the country’s deteriorating finances, supporting the 5 percent import tax proposed by Congress. Hamilton was not sanguine about defeating the Clintonians, with their popular catchphrases about states’ rights. Assemblyman Samuel Jones said of Hamilton’s campaign, “He told me during the session that the citizens expected it of him and he thought he ought not to disappoint them, otherwise he did not think he should bring the question again before the Assembly.”
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Hamilton delivered a marathon speech of one hour and twenty minutes that unfurled a grim panorama of America under the confederation. He lashed out at Congress’s reliance upon thirteen states for effectively voluntary payments and noted that some stingy states paid a fraction of their quotas or nothing at all. With the federal treasury empty, no surplus remained to service debt or establish American credit abroad. Domestic creditors might show patience, but foreign creditors would not. “They have power to enforce their demands,” Hamilton warned, “and sooner or later they may be expected to do it.”
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Hamilton thought the warnings of inordinate federal power misplaced: “If these states are not united under a federal government, they will infallibly have wars with each other and their divisions will subject them to all the mischiefs of foreign influence and intrigue.”
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Hamilton’s masterly exposition met with stony stares from the Clintonians, who responded in insulting fashion. They demanded a vote on the issue without bothering to rebut Hamilton’s speech. The federal tax was soundly defeated, as Hamilton had expected. His sustained eloquence left him bent over with exhaustion, though he was quickly buoyed by acclaim from supporters and recuperated sufficiently to attend the theater. “Hamilton went to the play after his famous speech in the House in favor of the impost,” Margaret Livingston told her son, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, “and when he came in he was called the great man. Some say he is talked of for G[overnor].”
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During his Assembly tenure that spring, Hamilton voted on two measures that suggested ambivalent feelings about his childhood. Oddly enough, he supported a bill making it impossible for people divorced due to adultery to remarry. Such a draconian statute in the Danish West Indies had prevented Hamilton’s parents from legitimizing his birth. If this vote suggests some latent hostility toward his mother, another vote betokens tenderness for her. The Assembly was debating a bill that aimed to deter mothers of illegitimate children from killing them at birth. One controversial clause stipulated that if the child died, the unwed mother had to produce a witness who could corroborate that the child had been stillborn or died from natural causes. It bothered Hamilton that the mother would have to admit openly that she had given birth to an illegitimate child. One newspaper account showed Hamilton’s empathy:

Mr. Hamilton observed that the clause was neither politic or just. He wished it obliterated from the bill. To show the propriety of this, he expatiated feelingly on the delicate situation it placed an unfortunate woman in....From the concealment of the loss of honor, her punishment might be mitigated and the misfortune end here. She might reform and be again admitted into virtuous society. The operation of this law compelled her to publish her shame to the world. It was to be expected therefore that she would prefer the danger of punishment from concealment to the avowal of her guilt.
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When Samuel Jones supported the measure, Hamilton refuted him “in terms of great cogency” and convinced the Assembly to side with him.
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That Hamilton argued so strenuously for this measure hints at surviving hobgoblins from the Caribbean that still hovered uneasily in his mind.

Soon after Hamilton was trounced on the impost measure, he introduced a motion in the Assembly to send five delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The general expectation was that the convention would simply tinker with the Articles of Confederation, not overhaul its basic machinery. Hamilton envisaged something far more audacious, hoping that a robust union would result. Two days later, the Clintonians boxed him into a corner by slashing the delegate count to three. Since Hamilton had been New York’s chief catalyst for the convention, the Clintonians couldn’t very well deny him a place; instead, they flanked him with two opponents of federal power who would smother his influence. Albany mayor John Lansing, Jr., was a prosperous landowner, and Robert Yates a pretentious judge on the New York Supreme Court. Both were vocal foes of efforts to endow Congress with independent taxing powers. They were a tightly knit pair for other reasons. The two men were related by marriage and the younger Lansing had clerked in Yates’s law office as a teenager. So instead of leading a united delegation, Hamilton was demoted to being a minority delegate from a dissenting state.

Hamilton arrived in Philadelphia on May 18, 1787, and joined other delegates at the Indian Queen Tavern on Fourth Street. Madison had arrived days earlier to brace for battle, confiding to Washington his fears that the team of Lansing and Yates would be a fatal “clog” on their friend Hamilton.
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Like other delegates, Madison had a sense of high drama, believing the document about to be drawn up would “decide forever the fate of republican government.”
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Lacking a quorum, the meeting did not convene officially for another week: against a patter of steady rain, Washington was then unanimously elected president of the convention. Hamilton had helped to coax the reluctant general from his Mount Vernon retreat and convince him to attend. At the end of the Revolution, Washington had been no less perturbed than Hamilton by the weak central government and worried that “local or state politics will interfere too much with that more liberal and extensive plan of government which wisdom and foresight...would dictate.”
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Though Washington was taciturn at the convention, his preference for a more effective central government was well known.

Washington appointed Hamilton, George Wythe, and Charles Pinckney to a small committee that drew up rules and procedures for the convention. To free himself from the domination of Lansing and Yates, Hamilton wanted the votes of individual members recorded. Instead, the convention chose to proceed on a onestate, one-vote basis, which meant that Hamilton’s vote would likely be nullified by his two fellow delegates. The committee prevailed in its general preference for secrecy. Preliminary votes were not recorded. To encourage candor, the committee also decided that “nothing spoken in the House be printed, or otherwise published, or communicated without leave.”
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Journalists and curious spectators were forbidden to attend, sentries were stationed at doors, and delegates, sworn to secrecy, remained tight-lipped to outsiders. The delegates even adjourned to the second floor of the State House to ensure confidentiality. During a sultry Philadelphia summer, in the face of thick swarms of tormenting flies, the blinds were often drawn and the windows shut to guarantee privacy. Even Madison’s copious notes of the convention were not published until decades later.

Why such undemocratic rules for a conclave crafting a new charter? Many delegates believed they were enlightened, independent citizens, concerned for the commonweal, not members of those detestable things called factions. “Had the deliberations been open while going on, the clamours of faction would have prevented any satisfactory result,” said Hamilton. “Had they been afterwards disclosed, much food would have been afforded to inflammatory declamation.”
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The closeddoor proceedings yielded inspired, uninhibited debate and brought forth one of the most luminous documents in history. At the same time, this secrecy made the convention’s inner workings the stuff of baleful legend, with unfortunate repercussions for Hamilton’s later career.

The venue for the convention was the gunmetal-gray East Room of the redbrick State House, where the Declaration of Independence had been signed. It had the proper dignity and simplicity for these right-minded republicans. Delegates sat in Windsor chairs, arranged in fan-shaped rows in front of Washington’s high-backed wooden chair, and jotted notes on tables covered with green baize. The tall windows were partly obscured by drooping green drapes. The room provided an intimate setting for these deliberations. Unlike orators in an amphitheater, the delegates met in a space cozy enough to enable speakers to make eye contact with every delegate and talk in a normal conversational voice.

Seated front-row center was James Madison, who staked out this pivotal spot to take minutes. “In this favorable position for hearing all that passed ...I was not absent a single day, nor more than a casual fraction of an hour in any day, so that I could not have lost a single speech, unless a very short one.”
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One observer said that the diminutive Virginian, bent over his notes, had “a calm expression, a penetrating blue eye, and looked like a thinking man.”
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Major William Pierce of Georgia filed the fullest portrait of Hamilton, finding him impressive, if a little too self-consciously the strutting young genius. “He is about 33 years old, of small stature, and lean,” Pierce observed. “His manners are tinctured with stiffness and sometimes with a degree of vanity that is highly disagreeable.” Hamilton’s voice lacked the resonance of a great orator’s, but he was eloquent and able and plumbed subjects to their roots: “When he comes forward, he comes highly charged with interesting matter. There is no skimming over the surface of a subject with him. He must sink to the bottom to see what foundation it rests on.” Pierce captured Hamilton’s mercurial personality, ponderous one moment, facetious the next. His “language is not always equal, sometimes didactic like Bolingbroke’s, at others light and tripping like [Laurence] Stern[e]’s.”
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Who were these solons rhapsodized by Benjamin Franklin as “the most august and respectable assembly he was ever in in his life”?
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The fifty-five delegates representing twelve states—the renegade Rhode Island boycotted the convention— scarcely constituted a cross section of America. They were white, educated males and mostly affluent property owners. A majority were lawyers and hence sensitive to precedent. Princeton graduates (nine) trumped Yale (four) and Harvard (three) by a goodly margin. They averaged forty-two years of age, meaning that Hamilton, thirty-two, and Madison, thirty-six, were relatively young. As a foreign-born delegate, Hamilton wasn’t alone, since nearly a dozen others had been born or educated abroad. Many delegates shared Hamilton’s preoccupation with public debt. The majority owned public securities, the values of which would be affected dramatically by decisions taken here. During the next few months, Hamilton’s attendance was spotty, but this wasn’t atypical. Many delegates shuttled back to their home states on business, and only about thirty of the fifty-five delegates were present much of the time.

The convention gave Hamilton a fleeting brush with the one founder otherwise absent from his story: eighty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin. The ancient Philadelphian, with his mostly bald head, lank strands of side hair, and double chin, was bedeviled by gout and excruciating kidney stones. He often discoursed to Hamilton and other delegates under the canopy of a mulberry tree in his courtyard, sometimes with his fond grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache looking on. Legend has it that when the enfeebled Franklin first came to the convention, he was borne aloft on a sedan chair, toted by four convicts conscripted from the Walnut Street jail. Nevertheless, with exemplary dedication, he showed up for every session of the four-month convention, sometimes asking others to deliver statements for him. Hamilton’s first act in Philadelphia paid homage to Franklin. The sage had opposed salaries for executive-branch officers, hoping such a measure would produce civicminded leaders, not government officials feeding at the public trough. Others thought this would exclude all but the idle rich from holding office. Hamilton seconded Franklin’s quixotic motion, likely from veneration for the man. Madison commented that the idea was “treated with great respect, but rather for the author of it than from any apparent conviction of its expediency or practicability.”
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