and in their conflicts over Hamilton’s financial measures they
organized, on the basis of varying tenets and ideals which
have never ceased to conflict in American politics, the two
great parties of Federalists and Democrats (or Democratic-Republicans).
On the 31st of January 1795 Hamilton resigned
his position as secretary of the treasury and returned to the
practice of law in New York, leaving it for public service only
in 1798–1800, when he was the active head, under Washington
(who insisted that Hamilton should be second only to himself),
of the army organized for war against France. But though in
private life he remained the continual and chief adviser of
Washington—notably in the serious crisis of the Jay Treaty,
of which Hamilton approved. Washington’s Farewell Address
(1796) was written for him by Hamilton.
After Washington’s death the Federalist leadership was divided (and disputed) between John Adams, who had the prestige of a varied and great career, and greater strength than any other Federalist with the people, and Hamilton, who controlled practically all the leaders of lesser rank, including much the greater part of the most distinguished men of the country, so that it has been very justly said that “the roll of his followers is enough of itself to establish his position in American history” (Lodge). But Hamilton was not essentially a popular leader. When his passions were not involved, or when they were repressed by a crisis, he was far-sighted, and his judgment of men was excellent.[1] But as Hamilton himself once said, his heart was ever the master of his judgment. He was, indeed, not above intrigue,[2] but he was unsuccessful in it. He was a fighter through and through, and his courage was superb; but he was indiscreet in utterance, impolitic in management, opinionated, self-confident, and uncompromising in nature and methods. His faults are nowhere better shown than in his quarrel with John Adams. Three times, in order to accomplish ends deemed by him, personally, to be desirable, Hamilton used the political fortunes of John Adams, in presidential elections, as a mere hazard in his manœuvres; moreover, after Adams became president, and so the official head of the party, Hamilton constantly advised the members of the president’s cabinet, and through them endeavoured to control Adams’s policy; and finally, on the eve of the crucial election of 1800, he wrote a bitter personal attack on the president (containing much confidential cabinet information), which was intended for private circulation, but which was secured and published by Aaron Burr, his legal and political rival.
The mention of Burr leads us to the fatal end of another great political antipathy of Hamilton’s life. He read Burr’s character correctly from the beginning; deemed it a patriotic duty to thwart him in his ambitions; defeated his hopes successively of a foreign mission, the presidency, and the governorship of New York; and in his conversations and letters repeatedly and unsparingly denounced him. If these denunciations were known to Burr they were ignored by him until his last defeat. After that he forced a quarrel on a trivial bit of hearsay (that Hamilton had said he had a “despicable” opinion of Burr); and Hamilton, believing as he explained in a letter he left before going to his death—that a compliance with the duelling prejudices of the time was inseparable from the ability to be in future useful in public affairs, accepted a challenge from him. The duel was fought at Weehawken on the Jersey shore of the Hudson opposite the City of New York. At the first fire Hamilton fell, mortally wounded, and he died on the following day, the 12th of July 1804. Hamilton himself did not intend to fire, but his pistol went off as he fell. The tragic close of his career appeased for the moment the fierce hatred of politics, and his death was very generally deplored as a national calamity.[3]
No emphasis, however strong, upon the mere consecutive personal successes of Hamilton’s life is sufficient to show the measure of his importance in American history. That importance lies, to a large extent, in the political ideas for which he stood. His mind was eminently “legal.” He was the unrivalled controversialist of the time. His writings, which are distinguished by clarity, vigour and rigid reasoning, rather than by any show of scholarship—in the extent of which, however solid in character Hamilton’s might have been, he was surpassed by several of his contemporaries—are in general strikingly empirical in basis. He drew his theories from his experiences of the Revolutionary period, and he modified them hardly at all through life. In his earliest pamphlets (1774–1775) he started out with the ordinary pre-Revolutionary Whig doctrines of natural rights and liberty; but the first experience of semi-anarchic states’-rights and individualism ended his fervour for ideas so essentially alien to his practical, logical mind, and they have no place in his later writings. The feeble inadequacy of conception, infirmity of power, factional jealousy, disintegrating particularism, and vicious finance of the Confederation were realized by many others; but none other saw so clearly the concrete nationalistic remedies for these concrete ills, or pursued remedial ends so constantly, so ably, and so consistently. An immigrant, Hamilton had no particularistic ties; he was by instinct a “continentalist” or federalist. He wanted a strong union and energetic government that should “rest as much as possible on the shoulders of the people and as little as possible on those of the state legislatures”; that should have the support of wealth and class; and that should curb the states to such an “entire subordination” as nowise to be hindered by those bodies. At these ends he aimed with extraordinary skill in all his financial measures. As early as 1776 he urged the direct collection of federal taxes by federal agents. From 1779 onward we trace the idea of supporting government by the interest of the propertied classes; from 1781 onward the idea that a not-excessive public debt would be a blessing[4] in giving cohesiveness to the union: hence his device by which the federal government, assuming the war debts of the states, secured greater resources, based itself on a high ideal of nationalism, strengthened its hold on the individual citizen, and gained the support of property. In his report on manufactures his chief avowed motive was to strengthen the union. To the same end he conceived the constitutional doctrines of liberal construction, “implied powers,” and the “general welfare,” which were later embodied in the decisions of John Marshall. The idea of nationalism pervaded and quickened all his life and works. With one great exception, the dictum of Guizot is hardly an exaggeration, that “there is not in the Constitution of the United States an element of order, of force, of duration, which he did not powerfully contribute to introduce into it and to cause to predominate.”
- ↑ e.g. his prediction in 1789 of the course of the French Revolution; his judgments of Burr from 1792 onward, and of Burr and Jefferson in 1800.
- ↑ After the Democrats won New York in 1799, Hamilton proposed to Governor John Jay to call together the out-going Federalist legislature, in order to choose Federalist presidential electors, a suggestion which Jay simply endorsed: “Proposing a measure for party purposes which it would not become me to adopt.”—Works, x. 371 (8: 549). Compare also with later developments of ward politics in New York City, Hamilton’s curious suggestions as to Federalist charities, &c., in connexion with the Christian Constitutional Society proposed by him in 1802 to combat irreligion and democracy (Works, x. 432 (8 : 596).
- ↑ Hamilton’s widow, who survived him for half a century, dying at the age of ninety-seven, was left with four sons and four daughters. He had been an affectionate husband and father, though his devotion to his wife had been consistent with occasional lapses from strict marital fidelity. One intrigue into which he drifted in 1791, with a Mrs Reynolds, led to the blackmailing of Hamilton by her husband; and when this rascal, shortly afterwards, got into trouble for fraud, his relations with Hamilton were unscrupulously misrepresented for political purposes by some of Hamilton’s opponents. But Hamilton faced the necessity of revealing the true state of things with conspicuous courage, and the scandal only reacted on his accusers. One of them was Monroe, whose reputation comes very badly out of this unsavoury affair.
- ↑ In later years he said no debt should be incurred without providing simultaneously for its payment.
