Alexander Hamilton (67 page)

Complicating the debate was the expectation that there would first be a temporary capital, likely New York or Philadelphia, which would function as the makeshift seat of government while a permanent capital was readied. Notwithstanding his nationalist bent, Hamilton wanted New York to remain at least the temporary capital. In August 1788, he contacted his old mentor, Governor William Livingston of New Jersey, and expressed shock at reports that Livingston had capitulated to “the snares of Pennsylvania” and was leaning toward Philadelphia as temporary capital for the first Congress.
⁶⁷
The northeastern states feared the enhanced power that would accrue to Pennsylvania if it housed the temporary capital, which might then prove permanent. Before Livingston, Hamilton dangled a tantalizing deal: if he supported New York City as temporary capital, Hamilton would endorse Trenton, New Jersey, as the long-term capital.

Hamilton’s desire to have the capital in New York intensified as Washington’s inauguration neared. In February 1789, he made a spirited campaign speech for his friend John Laurance, then running for Congress from New York City, and urged “that as the residence of Congress would doubtless be esteemed a matter of some import to the city of New York…
our representative
should be a man well qualified in oratory to prove that this city is the best station for that honorable body.”
⁶⁸
By January 17, 1790, with the uproar mounting over Hamilton’s funding scheme, William Maclay believed that Hamilton, emboldened by his burgeoning power, was determined to retain New York as the capital: “I have attended in the minutest manner to the motions of Hamilton and the [New] Yorkers. Sincerity is not with them. They will never consent to part with Congress.”
⁶⁹

In this tussle, New York was a controversial choice. It was becoming so associated with Hamilton that his enemies branded it “Hamiltonopolis.” For many southerners, Jefferson in particular, New York City was an Anglophile bastion dominated by bankers and merchants who would contaminate the republican experiment. These critics equated New York with the evils of London. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia booster, told Madison, “I am satisfied that the influence of our city will be against the [Treasury] Secretary’s system of injustice & corruption…. Philadelphia will be better ground to combat the system on than New York.”
⁷⁰

The question of the capital served as a proxy for the question of whether America should assume an urban or agrarian character. Many southerners believed that a northern capital would favor the mercantile, monied urban interests and discriminate against agrarian life. Jefferson’s pastoral dream of a nation of small, independent farms had a powerful appeal to the American psyche, however much it differed from the slaveholding reality of the south. Jefferson, Madison, and Washington wanted a permanent capital on the Potomac, not far from Mount Vernon. For Jefferson, this would plant the nation’s capital in a bucolic setting, safe from abolitionist forces and the temptations “of any overgrown commercial city.”
⁷¹
Madison and Henry Lee speculated in land on the Potomac, hoping to earn a windfall profit if the area was chosen for the capital.

There were other political questions to consider. Should the capital be near the population or the geographic center of America? New York was scarcely equidistant from the northern and southern tips of the country—sixteen of the twenty-four original senators came from south of the city—and this would present hardships for southern delegates who had to travel long distances. The choice of the capital was also seen as a referendum on America’s future growth. For those who believed that the country would expand westward—a view especially prevalent in the southern states, whose western borders functioned as gateways to the frontier—a northeast capital would poorly serve America’s future political landscape. All these simmering issues came to the surface during the ensuing debate.

During the spring of 1790, quarrels over assumption and the national capital grew so vitriolic that it didn’t seem far-fetched that the union might break up over the issues. The south increasingly fired at Hamilton the same vituperative rhetoric once directed at the British. In writing to Madison, Henry Lee stated that the battle to stop assumption brought back memories of the Revolution: “It seems to me that we southern people must be slaves in effect or cut the Gordian knot at once.”
⁷²
Jefferson long remembered the sour mood that hung like a miasma over New York that spring: “Congress met and adjourned from day to day without doing anything, the parties being too much out of temper to do business together.”
⁷³

Of the two policies that Hamilton wished to promote—the federal assumption of state debt and the selection of New York as the capital—assumption was incomparably more important to him. It was the most effective and irrevocable way to yoke the states together into a permanent union. So when he saw that Madison possessed the votes to block assumption, Hamilton considered bargaining away New York as the capital in exchange for southern support for assumption. As early as May 16, glimmers of a deal emerged in a letter from Philip Schuyler to Stephen Van Rensselaer: “No motion has yet been brought forward to remove the seat [of] government, but we apprehend that, if the assumption is not carried, that the South Carolinians may (in order to obtain an object which is so important to them) negotiate with those who wish the removal.”
⁷⁴
Nine days later, William Maclay reported frantic negotiations: “The [New] Yorkers are now busy in the scheme of bargaining with the Virginians, offering the permanent seat on the Potomac for the temporary one in New York.”
⁷⁵

On June 2, 1790, the House enacted Hamilton’s funding bill without the assumption component. Hamilton knew he had to strike a deal quickly. Reluctant to surrender his reputation for uncompromising stands, he relied on deputies to make the conciliatory overtures. In the early republic, it was difficult for politicians to engage in legislative maneuvering that later became standard practice, so Hamilton dispatched emissaries to sound out Robert Morris, the Pennsylvania senator and a leading proponent of Philadelphia as the capital. “I did not choose to trust them,” Morris said, “but wrote a note to Colonel Hamilton that I would be walking early in the morning on the Battery and if Colonel Hamilton had anything to propose to him he might meet him there.”
⁷⁶
To Morris’s surprise, Hamilton was already at the rendezvous spot when he arrived. Hamilton’s deal was simple: if Morris rounded up one vote in the Senate and five in the House for assumption, he would back Germantown or Trenton—both hard by Philadelphia—as the permanent capital. Hamilton had now tipped his hand as the master strategist behind the bargaining over the capital. Pennsylvania congressman Peter Muhlenberg told Benjamin Rush, “It is now established
beyond a doubt
that the Secretary of the Treasury guides the movements of the eastern phalanx.”
⁷⁷

What likely scuttled Hamilton’s deal was that the Pennsylvania and Virginia delegations had already reached an understanding: Philadelphia would become the temporary capital and the Potomac site the permanent capital. This was the very solution Hamilton had worked to avoid because it rejected a role for New York and placed the long-term capital in the south. The Pennsylvania legislators probably consented from a wishful hunch that the capital, once placed temporarily in Philadelphia, would be difficult to dislodge. By June 18, having surrendered hope of a permanent capital on the Delaware, Hamilton was slowly coming around to the Potomac site. That day, William Maclay reported that Hamilton “affects to tell Mr. Morris that the New England men will bargain to fix the permanent seat at the Potomac or at Baltimore.”
⁷⁸

It was against this backdrop of an emerging consensus that one must evaluate the famous anecdote told by Jefferson about the dinner bargain that fixed the capital on the Potomac. According to Jefferson, the northern states were threatening “secession and dissolution” when he ran into a ragged Hamilton outside Washington’s residence. Usually, Hamilton was dapper and polished; now, to Jefferson’s amazement, he was despondent and unkempt: “His look was somber, haggard, and dejected…. Even his dress uncouth and neglected.”
⁷⁹
Hamilton seemed in despair.

He walked me backwards and forwards before the President’s door for half an hour. He painted pathetically the temper into which the legislature had been wrought; the disgust of those who were called creditor states; the danger of the
secession
of their members and the separation of the states. He observed that the members of the administration ought to act in concert; that though this question was not of my department, yet a common duty should make it a common concern…that the question having been lost by a small majority only, it was probable that an appeal from me to the judgment and discretion of some of my friends might effect a change in the vote.
⁸⁰

If assumption faltered, Hamilton hinted, he might have to resign. Jefferson blandly informed Hamilton that he “was really a stranger to the whole subject” of assumption—Jefferson was very adroit at presenting himself as a political naïf—when he had, in fact, followed the debate intently and had just written George Mason urging a compromise on the matter.
⁸¹
Doubtless with this in mind, he invited the treasury secretary to dine at his home the next day.

If we are to credit Jefferson’s story, the dinner held at his lodgings on Maiden Lane on June 20, 1790, fixed the future site of the capital. It is perhaps the most celebrated meal in American history, the guests including Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and perhaps one or two others. For more than a month, Jefferson had been bedeviled by a migraine headache, yet he presided with commendable civility. Despite his dislike of assumption, he knew that the stalemate over the funding scheme could shatter the union, and, as secretary of state, he also feared the repercussions for American credit abroad.

Madison restated his familiar argument that assumption punished Virginia and other states that had duly settled their debts. But he agreed to support assumption—or at least not oppose it—if something was granted in exchange. Jefferson recalled, “It was observed…that as the pill would be a bitter one to the southern states, something should be done to soothe them.”
⁸²
The sedative measure was that Philadelphia would be the temporary capital for ten years, followed by a permanent move to a Potomac site. In a lucrative concession for his home state, Madison also seems to have extracted favorable treatment for Virginia in a final debt settlement with the central government. In return, Hamilton agreed to exert his utmost efforts to get the Pennsylvania congressional delegation to accept Philadelphia as the provisional capital and a Potomac site as its permanent successor.

The dinner consecrated a deal that was probably already close to achievement. The sad irony was that Hamilton, the quintessential New Yorker, bargained away the city’s chance to be another London or Paris, the political as well as financial and cultural capital of the country. His difficult compromise testified to the transcendent value he placed on assumption. The decision did not sit well with many New Yorkers. Senator Rufus King was enraged when Hamilton told him that he “had made up his mind” to jettison the capital to save his funding system. For King, Hamilton’s move had been high-handed and secretive, and he ranted privately that “great and good schemes ought to succeed not by intrigue or the establishment of bad measures.”
⁸³

True to his dinner pledge, Hamilton applied his persuasive powers to the Pennsylvania delegation. Maclay’s journal is again invaluable in tracking these closed-door deliberations. When he discovered that Hamilton had linked the “abominations” of his funding scheme with the Potomac capital, he berated Washington as a tool of Hamilton and “the dishclout of every dirty speculation.”
⁸⁴
In the Senate on June 23, Maclay noticed that Robert Morris was summoned from the chamber. “He at last came in and whispered [to] me: ‘The business is settled at last. Hamilton gives up the temporary residence’” for New York.
⁸⁵
The next day, the Pennsylvania congressional delegation bowed to the compromise that was to make Philadelphia the temporary capital for ten years.

To clinch the deal, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Secretary of War Knox dined with the Pennsylvanians on June 28. Maclay’s recollections of that dinner are instructive. He found Jefferson stiff and formal, possessed of a “lofty gravity.” He warmed more to the fat, easygoing Knox, who may have drunk to excess—Maclay calls him “Bacchanalian”—yet managed to project an aura of dignity. The description of Hamilton is suggestive: “Hamilton has a very boyish, giddy manner and Scotch-Irish people could well call him a ‘skite.’”
⁸⁶
The
Oxford English Dictionary
defines the Scottish word
skite
as meaning a vain, frivolous, or wanton girl. The choice of words hints at something feminine about Hamilton beneath the military bearing, an androgynous quality noted by others. The description also suggests that Hamilton had gone from abject despair to inexpressible elation as he won final backing for his funding scheme.

On July 10, 1790, the House approved the Residence Act, designating Philadelphia as the temporary capital and a ten-mile-square site on the Potomac as the permanent site. A disenchanted Maclay concluded that Hamilton was now all-powerful: “His gladiators…have wasted us months in this place…. Everything, even to the naming of a committee, is prearranged by Hamilton and his group of speculators.”
⁸⁷
On July 26, the House narrowly passed the assumption bill. The famous dinner deal had worked its political magic. Madison voted against Hamilton’s measure but arranged for four congressmen from Virginia and Maryland to change their votes in favor of assumption.