Complete Works. Hamilton Alexander
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for a while will break out when there is a favorable opportunity.
Besides this, men coming from a neighbouring province to chastise the notorious friends of the ministry here, will hold up an idea to our enemies not very advantageous to our affairs. They will imagine that the New Yorkers are totally, or a majority of them disaffected to the American cause which makes the interposal of their neighbours necessary: or that such violences will breed differences and effect that which they have been so eagerly wishing, a division and quarreling among ourselves. Everything of such an aspect must encourage their hopes.
Upon the whole the measure is condemned, by all the cautious and prudent among the whigs, and will evidently be productive of secret jealousy and ill blood if a stop is not put to things of this kind for the future.
All the good purposes that could be expected from such a step will be answered; and many ill consequences will be prevented if your body gently interposes a check for the future. Rivington will be intimidated & the tories will be convinced that the other colonies will not tamely see the general cause betrayed by the Yorkers.—A favourable idea will be impressed of your justice & impartiality in discouraging the encroachments of any one province on another; and the apprehensions of prudent men respecting the ill-effects of an ungoverned spirit in the people of New England will be quieted—Believe me Sir it is a matter of consequence and deserves serious attention.
The tories it is objected by some are growing insolent and clamorous: It is necessary to repress and overawe them.—There is truth in this; but the present remedy is a bad one. Let your body station in different parts of the province most tainted, with the ministerial infection, a few regiments of troops, raised in Philadelphia the Jerseys or any other province except New England. These will suffice to strengthen and support the Whigs who are still I flatter myself a large majority and to suppress the efforts of the tories. The pretense for this would be plausible. There is no knowing how soon the Ministry may make an attempt upon New York: There is reason to believe they will not be long before they turn their attention to it—In this there will be some order & regularity, and no grounds of alarm to our friends.—
I am Sir with very great Esteem
Your most hum Servant
A. Hamilton.
Jay subsequently wrote to Nathaniel Woodhull, President of the Provincial Congress of New York, communicating Hamilton's views:
The New England exploit is much talked of and conjectures are numerous as to the part the Convention will take relative to it. Some consider it as an ill compliment to the Government of the Province, and prophesy that you have too much Christian meekness to take any notice of it. For my own part I do not approve of the feat, & think it neither argues much wisdom nor much bravery; at any rate, if it was to have been done, I wish our own people, and not strangers, had taken the liberty of doing it. I confess I am not a little jealous of the honour of the Province, and am persuaded that its reputation cannot be maintained without some little spirit being mingled with its prudence.
Hamilton appears, even when the chance for a systematic education was denied him, to have gone on with his studies, and to have worked constantly to the end of his life, acquiring a vast amount of learning of all kinds, which is manifest in everything he wrote, especially in his briefs, which always contained copious Latin and Greek quotations and every evidence of profound cultivation.
Chapter II
Personal Characteristics
Much misapprehension exists as to the appearance of Hamilton, some of which is due to the idea that because his birthplace was the West Indies, he presented the physical characteristics of those born under a tropical sun.
He is referred to by various authors as a "Creole," or a "swarthy young West Indian," and most of his biographers picture him as being dark in color, and "having black hair and piercing black eyes." One enthusiastic negro preacher, extolling his virtues as champion of that race during the Revolutionary War, when he favored the enlistment of black soldiers, recently went so far as to suggest, at a public meeting in the city of New York, that Hamilton's veins surely contained African blood. In reality he was fair and had reddish-brown hair, and a specimen before me proves this to have been the case. It has a certain glint which was probably more marked at an earlier period; but even now there is no difficulty in finding that it belonged to a person of the semi-blonde type. His eyes were a deep blue—almost violet—and he undoubtedly presented the physical appearance of his Scotch father rather than his French mother:
His eyes were deep set, his nose long, and of the Roman type, and he had a good chin, the jaw being strong; the mouth firm and moderately large. He is variously referred to by his biographers as "The Little Lion," and "The Little Giant/' but although short of stature, he was not notably so, being about five feet seven inches in height.
Sullivan described him as "under middle size, thin in person, but remarkably erect and dignified in his deportment. His hair was turned back from his forehead, powdered and collected in a club behind. His complexion was exceedingly fair, and varying from this only by the almost feminine rosiness of his cheeks. His might be considered, as to figure and color, an uncommonly handsome face. When at rest it had rather a severe, thoughtful expression, but when engaged in conversation it easily assumed an attractive smile. When he entered a room it was apparent, from the respectful attention of the company, that he was a distinguished person."
From the available portraits, which are numerous but are not artistically remarkable, and most of them evidently unreliable, very little impression is to be gained of his figure or how he actually looked, in repose or when animated. Even such a fruitful painter as Trumbull rarely produced the same results in his different pictures; although his portraits are all powerful, yet they have a dramatic quality which is somewhat artificial. One of the most notable gives Hamilton bow-legs, while another in the Governor's Room in the New York City Hall portrays him as a well-shaped and graceful man, of more than medium height. This artist seemed to have had special facility for studying his subject for he was always an intimate and devoted friend and after his death left a large number of personal relics of Hamilton, among them a fowling-piece and other belongings of his early friend, which he had evidently carefully treasured until the end of his life.
At the end of the eighteenth century, itinerant portraits being in vogue, we find all kinds of daubs, and all grades of depicted ugliness in the canvases that have been preserved. Those of Peale are often decidedly unflattering, for he does not seem to have known how to paint the eyes of his subjects, and he has made sad work with Hamilton. There are numerous other portraits, but many of them are said to be those of other persons.
The history of the Hamilton pictures is interesting, but it is often difficult to trace their wanderings. That of Trumbull was painted at the request of Gulian Verplanck and others, who, in the year 1791 requested that it should "typify some act of his public career," but Hamilton deprecated any such advertising in the following words: "I shall cheerfully obey their wish as far as respects the taking of my portrait, but I ask that they will permit it to appear unconnected with any incident of my political life. The simple representation of their fellow-citizen and friend will best accord with my feelings." This is the picture that hangs in the New York Chamber of Commerce, and of which there are several replicas. The best likenesses, however, were evidently those of Sharpless, an English artist who came to Philadelphia about 1796, and made various pictures of prominent people, after the Revolution, many of which are to-day in existence. Most of his portraits were small, but all were very carefully finished, and one of them is the frontispiece of this book. The most notable is the so-called Talleyrand miniature, by reason of the fact that this devoted friend and wily old diplomat was supposed to have purloined the picture while visiting in Philadelphia and taken it to France, later returning a copy in 1805. The picture he took was really a pastel by Sharpless, and upon the 6th of December, 1805, Mrs. Hamilton wrote, asking that it be returned to her, to which she received a reply from Theophile Cazenove, who for many years had been president of the Holland Company and a friend of Talleyrand, with this