The greatest American, Alexander Hamilton; an historical analysis of his life and works together with a symposium of opinions by distinguished Americans

Front matter

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Foreword

I PRESENT this study to the American people in the profound hope that, by virtue of its novelty if not its merits, it may challenge some new measure of popular attention to the history of the United States. The greater our common familiarity with the sacrifices, the hardships, the heroisms, the martyrdoms, the aspirations, the evolutions, the visions, the victories that have made America, the greater will be our common respect for the consequent institutions that are our fortunate inheritance. By the same token, lack of one breeds lack of the other; and we are suffering today an unhappy poverty in both.

We modernists too frequently are prone to scorn history as a useless record of dead things — a mere lamp astern. We are complacent, epochal egotists, pretending that our own transient age has leaped beyond the reach of any utility the yesterdays might recommend. Because it is the easiest way, we are apt to ape the ignorance which,

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for want of willingness to learn, has no alternative but to boast a blithe indifference to history, and style its lessons useless.

Yet the Bible is no more to religion than history is to the United States. Within it are wrapped the mighty inspirations that have made us what we are. To worship this past, with eyes rolled always backward, would be vain idolatry. But to ignore it is purblind folly. Even granting Lamartine's cynicism that "historians, as a rule, show us more of art than veracity in their productions," still Montaigne is right in calling history "the very anatomy of philosophy" with its "patterns to imitate" — quoting Jimius — and its "examples to deter."

We shall never graduate into greater sublimity of character than has chaptered the whole past story of our land; and from no more wholesome source than this can we borrow strength and precept for the crises yet to come. If the trend of the times portends a drift away from the foundations that have borne the temple of popular government for nearly 1 50 years, we must not expect a resumption of these vitally essential fidelities except as we create a mass understanding of what these foundations were when the Fathers set them in

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the ages. If the trend of the times confesses lightly valued citizenship, the cure is to renew a mass appreciation of what this citizenship has cost. If we need purified standards of unselfish devotion in our seats of the mighty, there are no models that excel those with which American history is jeweled. If the familiar cry — "Back To The Constitution" — is an apostrophe to sanity and wisdom, the story of the Constitution is the starting point for the crusades. In a word, no one thing would go farther or do more toward Americanizing America than to make American History fashionable. A discerning California millionaire is planning to endow a movement to popularize the study of science. The millionaire who endows an "American History Foundation" — dedicated to a wider mass acquaintance with the stupendous story of the United States — will turn his excess funds to rare account.

This life-story of the nation is best written and reflected in the lives of its great men. The achievements of peoples and periods are lived in the careers of their dominant leaders. Thomas Carlyle has said: "Universal history is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here. . . . The soul of the whole world's his-

ix tory, it may justly be considered, were the history of these. . . . Could we see them well, we should get some glimpses into the very marrow of the world's history." Every great event in the evolution of a nation is the lengthened shadow of some man or set of men for whom the event is the expression of character and the reflex of aspiration. The event is cold and second-hand as compared with the warm, pulsating, human flesh and blood that gave it genesis. The event is a distant, abstract thing which soon becomes a mere item in chronology and is accepted with perfimctory grace as a thing that "happened" without particular travail and in the due unfolding of an automatic destiny. But the human genius and courage and wisdom and will that ordered the event are living, throbbing, dynamic emotions which awaken responsive sensations in human hearts all down the calendars of posterity and register an intimate and lasting appreciation of what the birth and re-birth of a nation costs. The best and most useful laboratory for historical research and reaction, then, is in the biographies of the men who made, rather than in the observations of those who write, history. If, by a confessedly startling challenge to habitual American public opinion in m}^ nomination jforetoorb

of "The Greatest American," I shall succeed in sending my countrymen to the biographies of their own favorite figures in American history, seeking renewed and refreshed knowledge with which to rebut my conclusions, this volume will not have failed its monitorial ambitions.

But this challenge has another and scarcely secondary purpose. The twentieth century, in America, and the eighteenth century are farther apart, more remote one from the other, than any other tw^o connated cycles in history. As a result, the busy modem generations of today yield scant acknowledgments to the superlative men of those distant, inchoative days which put down the rock foimdations upon which all institutional America has been erected, and upon which our society leans, confidently but all too thoughtlessly, today. Among these men, none holds us in more completely unrequited debt than Alexander Hamilton. America's persistent failure to pay his memory an historical obligation beyond adequate measurement in words is the most glaring of all the Republic's ingratitudes.

In his great book upon the origin and growth of the Constitution, Hannis Taylor bemoans the fact that posterity has never given Pelatiah Webster

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proper credits for his pioneering part in charting our Constitutional experiment. "In all this," observes Taylor, "there is nothing out of the usual course. The achievements of contemplative men, especially when they are far-reaching, have often had to wait for a long time for full recognition. Not until after the lapse of 200 years was it admitted that Velasquez was one of the mightiest painters the world had ever known; it was quite as long perhaps before Shakespeare, as a world poet, was permitted to enter into the full possession of his kingdom." If this philosophy fits Pelatiah Webster, how much more does it fit Alexander Hamilton! If I shall succeed in turning an even casual illumination upon this man and this national debt, even though few among you agree with the extremes of my conclusions, there will have been ample justification for this undertaking.

This is the question that I ask. What man, all things considered, in the whole history of our country down to date, is best entitled to be called "The Greatest American?" To answer is not an easy task. There are varying elements of greatness. Sometimes there is a well-nigh irreconcilable conflict between the coimter-claims of favored

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eligibles. The relative importance of eras and periods must be resolved. Perfectly natural and normal himian sympathies and prejudices bring their astigmatic influences to bear. Some say that there is no such thing as exclusive and paramount pre-eminence for any one, great man ; that defensible answer to such a hypothetical question is impossible. Some even say the pursuit is absurd. But I respectfully insist, for the ample reasons given, that there is a real utility to be served ; and that, upon the basis of exhibits subsequent hereto, it is possible to catch and reflect the sub-conscious verdict of our people. It may not be possible to sustain an argument at every point of test. Nearly all of us have predilections; and nearly all of us have built a shrine within our hearts and souls to some one favorite above all others. But it is good for us to submit our convictions, in these respects, to comparative scrutiny. It is worth-while for us to catechize our historical opinions. Who is "The Greatest American": and why?

The first section of this book is a symposium in which representative men of today, each with some peculiar authority of opinion, report their answers to my question. I am eternally grateful to all of them for the fine spirit in which they have

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joined in this academic chase. I have been both honored and encouraged by their interest and their helpfulness. The compilation of their views is a valuable contribution to the shelves of history, if no further credit may ever be assessed to this undertaking.

The second section is a study of the life of Hamilton, presented, I make bold to believe, in a new fashion, and in justification of my own profound faith that, all things considered, he, above all others, has earned the right to pre-eminent American historical distinction. Those who cannot yield consent to my verdict will, I trust, at least yield a new measure of acknowledgment to the memory of this brilliant statesman-soldierpublicist who flamed like a meteor across colonial skies, and, changing metaphors, taught our swaddling Republic first to creep and then to walk.

I have made free draft upon all available Hamiltonian authorities, with scrupulous footnote efforts to grant specific credits wherever due. But I cannot leave to mere footnotes an adequate expression of my obligation to certain outstanding works of superior utility. First, I would say that when Gertrude Atherton wrote The Conqueror, the life of Hamilton in fiction form, she

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wrote what is, to date, the great American novel. Never did any writer more brilliantly prove my contention that biography can make history palatable to the most fickle appetite. "In all the fairy tales," Hamilton Wright Mabie once wrote in his introduction to a book entitled Men Who Have Risen, "there is nothing more wonderful than the contrast between Franklin, the printer's apprentice, and Franklin, the chief figure in the most brilliant city in the world; between Lincoln, floating down the Ohio on a flat-boat, and Lincoln, liberating with a stroke of the pen 4,000,000 slaves." Nor is there anything more wonderful than the contrast between Hamilton, a friendless immigrant upon the docks of Boston at the tender age of fifteen, and Hamilton, by sheer force of himian intellect, whip -lashing a snarling New York Convention majority into unwilling submission to the Constitution, at the age of thirty-one. This is the theme that The Conqueror has developed in a masterly, fascinating way that wholly justifies its title.

Then, I am indebted to the fine understanding of Hamilton that has been evidenced by United States Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in his Life of Hamilton and in "bhe edition of The Works of Alex-

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ander Hamilton which he ably edited. Again, the most sympathetic and discerning study of Hamilton's influence upon his time and upon posterity is the remarkable Essay on American Union from the pen of Frederick Scott Oliver, a Briton, writing in 1906 at Checkendon Court, Oxfordshire. The History of The Republic of The United States of America as Traced in the Writings of Alexander Hamilton and His Co-Temporaries, by John C. Hamilton, his son, in 1857, and the son's biography of his distinguished sire, written in 1834, have been extremely valuable. These and many other references have made their liberal contribution to this compendiimi.

Who is "The Greatest American"? If it be Alexander Hamilton, it is a type that exalteth a nation. If it be some other among the super-men whom destiny seems to have raised for each succeeding crisis, no greater compliment may be his than to assert that he exceeds Hamilton in his deserts. To the tolerant and thoughtful contemplation of my fellow-countrymen, these pages are committed.

Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg.

Grand Rapids, Michigan, February 4, 1921.

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Foreword .

Contents!

PACE

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PART ONE Lincoln

Washington

Others ......

PART TWO— HAMILTON Introduction

From Birth to Death The Master Builder of American Union The Federalist .....

The Founder of the Public Credit . First in Literature and Law .

The Great Soldier ....

Prophetic Paragraphs

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143 173 206 240 260

PART THREE Conclusion Index

301 349 xvu

Mnitvationi

PAGE

Alexander Hamilton . . Frontispiece

President Harding's Letter . . . . vii

The Hamilton Coat-of-Arms .... 67

The House where Hamilton was Born, St. Croix, Nevis Island ..... 74

From Life of Alexander Hamilton, by Allen McLane. Permission of Charles Scribner's Sons.

The Hamilton Monument at Weehawken, New Jersey ........ 106

The Hamilton "Float" in Parade, 1788, Celebrating the Ratification of the Constitution 130

The First Meeting between George Washington AND Hamilton ...... 242

Prom the picture by Chappell.

The Hamilton Statue on Hamilton College Campus at Clinton, New York . . . 280

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PAGE

Mrs. Alexander Hamilton . . . . 292

From the picture by Inman.

Hamilton's Tomb in Trinity Churchyard, New York City ....... 296

Model of the Hamilton Statue to be Placed ON the Treasury Plaza, Washington . . 341

XK

PART ONE JLimoln

'The kindly, earnest, brave, fore-seeing man,

Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame. New birth from our new soil, the first American."

Herbert Putnam, for twenty years the Librarian of Congress in Washington, nominates Abraham Lincoln as the man who, all things considered, encompassing the entire story of the Republic down to date, is entitled to pre-eminence as "The Greatest American." Mr. Putnam goes back to that famous Harvard hour on July 21, 1865, when James Russell Lowell delivered his inimitable "Commemoration Ode" wherein the poet sang his inspired apostrophe to the martyred President who three months before had given his blessed life to his cotmtry. To "hang my wreath on his world-honored urn " was Lowell's dedication.

' ' Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face."

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Mr. Putnam contents himself, in answering the question which is at the root of this symposium, with quoting Lowell's beautifully truthful lines noted at the head of this chapter. That they nominate "the first American," without the necessity even of calling him by name, to the satisfaction of a majority of the people of modem America is amply testified by the fruits of my inspection. Even those of us, myself among the niimber, who finally give paramount consideration to some other among the Titans who have gloriously served the Republic in hour of crisis, have no quarrel with the majority verdict which thus is rendered. It can be defended in any forum and justified in any court. Too great honor cannot be accorded this Mortal Saviour who deserved every word of epitomized eulogy with which Secretary Gideon Welles annoimced his death to the American Navy : "To him our gratitude was justly due, for to him, under God, more than to any other person, are we indebted for the successful vindication of the integrity of the Union and the maintenance of the power of the Republic.'"

That a nation-wide referendiim woiild return its popular majority in Lincoln's favor, if this

^General Order No. 51, April 15, 1865.

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academic quest coiild be answered in the voting places of the nation, is indicated by the trend of answers that have come to me as I have asked leaders in the contemporary thought of the United States to assist me in putting down this record.

"I think our greatest American was Abraham Lincoln," says William Allen White, the brilliant Kansas Journalist. "He is the greatest because he comes nearest to the American ideal. If I were speaking of the most typical American, it would be Theodore Roosevelt. But he is not our greatest American, nor does he approach the American ideal so nearly as Lincoln. Lincoln is the greatest man this modern age has seen. He is great because he was simple; simple because he was kind."

"Comparisons are odious," observes President William Goodell Frost of Berea College, Berea, Kentucky. "They are often misleading. But Lincoln seems to me the man whom we should name as the greatest American because he was so distinctly American, because he represented the north, south, east and west more perfectly than any other, because he surmounted the greatest difficulties, met the greatest emergencies, and left the deepest impress in the institutions and ideals of our country."

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"America has produced a number of great men, a nimiber of men who in their fields outshone all others," declares Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor for nearly four decades. "But it has always been my conviction that the greatest of all was Lincoln. No other reached to such heights in so many ways. Lincoln's character and his work must be, for all time, inspiring to Americans as the highest example our coimtry has produced."

Though Mr. Gompers and Governor Henry J. Allen of Kansas differ violently in other things — with an eye particularly to the spirited controversy between them over the principles involved in the Kansas Industrial Judicature Act — in this present matter their minds meet. "Both because of what he was and of what he did," says Governor Allen, "I regard Abraham Lincoln as the greatest American. The world is full of great intellectual accomplishments. American life has afforded a proud share of these. Our history has been enriched by great genius in science, by great worth in literature, by great courage in its military history; but there is about Lincoln a quality which sets him apart. In my judgment he is the first typical American, the first who ever contained within himself all the strength and all the gentleness of the Republic. It takes so many things to make greatness. Many Americans have been greater in some things than was Lincoln, but in all the qualities which roimd him out and make him fit for the high place you are creating for an American, the simi total of Lincoln's qualities casts the majority. We have been blessed by many great Americans. I would like to vote for Roosevelt for many reasons. For many reasons I would like to vote for Washington. For some reasons I would like to vote for Alexander Hamilton. Some other times I'd like to be for Edison. In other moods I'd like to be for Longfellow and sometimes I think of Wendell Phillips; and sometimes the greatness of the courage of a limatic by the name of John Brown overwhelms me. But in the natural evolution of events we were bound to have a man like Washington. We were boimd to have great scientists, great writers, great orators, great soldiers ; but I think that only divine providence could have given us for a great hour of need a man who took possession of the hour and lived up to all of its demands in a perfectly human fashion as did Abraham Lincoln. Certainly the period through which we have just passed produced no such result."

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Governor Allen speaks of Thomas A. Edison, whose rich genius has contributed so prodigally to the progress and convenience of the modem era. Edison himself, asked to nominate the greatest American, promptly and imequi vocally replies with the name of Lincoln.

With similar expressive and unqualified finality, Lincoln's eminence comes back to me in one single magic word from President John Grier Hibben of Princeton University ; from ex-United States Senator Lawrence Y. Sherman of Illinois; from Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis of Brooklyn's Plymouth Church; from President F. W. Gimsaulus of the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago; from the learned and honored Charles W. Eliot, for forty years the President of Harvard University; from Dr. Marion L. Burton, now President of the Univeristy of Michigan ; from Dr. Henry Churchill King, President of Oberlin College in Ohio; from Dr. John Huston Finley, formerly New York State Commissioner of Education and President of the University of the State of New York, and more recently associated with the New York Times; from ex-United States Senator William Alden Smith of Michigan ; from Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior in the Cabinet of President

Wilson; from United States Senator Philander C. Knox of Pennsylvania; from Dr. H. M. Bell, President Emeritus of Drake University in Iowa; from Major General Enoch H. Crowder, honored veteran of American participation in the great world war; from ex-President Harry B. Hutchins of the University of Michigan; from United States Senator Knute Nelson of Minnesota; from Henry L. Stoddard, Editor of the New York Mail; from United States Senator Arthur Capper of Kansas; and from John Hays Hammond, the world famous engineer.

This is an imposing jury. Such a diversity of high advocates does supreme honor to the memory of any man. It has come to pass quite as prophesied in Senator Simmer's resolution from the unofficial special committee (Lincoln's death occurred during a congressional recess) appointed from the thirty -ninth Congress on April 17, 1865, "that in the life of Abraham Lincoln, who by the benignant favor of republican institutions rose from humble beginnings to the heights of power and fame" there is to be recognized "an example of purity, simplicity, and virtue which should be a lesson to mankind," while in his death there is to be recognized "a martyr whose memory will become more precious as men learn to prize those principles of constitutional order and those rights — civil, political, and human — for which he was made a sacrifice."

Winston Churchill, the great American novelist whose writings disclose an intimate understanding of his country's history, puts his opinion in this fashion: "Abraham Lincoln; to my mind, in addition to great gifts of statesmanship, he had the quality of selflessness which is real greatness, and the knowledge of men that comes from love."

Proclaiming the difficulty of considering "all things" in measuring the relative eminence of leaders, United States Senator Gilbert M. Hitchcock of Nebraska says: "Giving due weight to his enormous responsibility, to the difficulties of his position, to the immense importance of the outcome, and to his combination of moral force, remarkable tact, and intellectual strength, I nominate Abraham Lincoln as the greatest American of history."

The late Bishop Charles Sumner Burch of New York declared his belief in Lincoln's super-eminence "not because of his wonderful accomplishment in the face of the most trying difficulties, to free the slaves and save the Union, but because of his influence over the entire English-speaking t!Df)c (^reatesit ^mtvitan

world. He was a man of vision and a man who had the capacity for putting his vision into accompHshment. Next to Abraham Lincoln, I regard Theodore Roosevelt as the greatest American."

Not the least striking thing disclosed in the catalogue of Lincoln nominators is the fashion in which extremes meet and find a common ground in their addresses to his memory. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., promptly answers "Lincoln" upon this roll-call. No less promptly does Upton Sinclair, the antithesis of Rockefeller, respond that "the greatest American in wise kindness was probably Abraham Lincoln, that is, he was the one who managed to make these qualities most effective in the world." Sinclair adds: "He was killed, and there has been very little of either wisdom or kindness that has been effective in America since his death."

Again, there is adulatory eloquence in paralleling the verdicts of John Spargo, one of the greatest Socialists America has ever produced, and Thomas W. Lamont, one of the greatest of America's modem capitalists.

"It is very difficult to answer such a question with any degree of authority or finality," writes Spargo. "Not only have there been many men

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remarkable for their great gifts of statesmanship, but the question involves greater difficulties than mere selection between individuals. For example, if we grant the greatness of Lincoln and his wisdom in meeting the critical problems of his time, can there be any positive assurance that he would have met with equal success the greater problems of the world war recently ended? All in all, if I were obliged to make such a selection, I should, I th'nk, decide for Lincoln. His fine fidelity to the basic ideals of America, would, alone, place him upon the pinnacle of my affectionate and reverent regard. To that great quality must be added a statesmanlike wisdom in dealing with the practical problems of his day, amounting to real genius."

"Most Americans," writes Lamont, "called upon to answer your question by naming their country's greatest man must, I believe, hesitate between its founder and its preserver. Washington was a great soldier whose military triumphs, joined to a patient and wise leadership, founded the nation. Lincoln was a great statesman who directed military power and moral force to the preservation of the state and the destruction of human slavery within it. Varied in personality, temperament and method, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were shown by heroic tests to share the same basic gifts and virtues — vision, faith, courage, fortitude, patience and human sjnnpathy. Both hold our reverent admiration. But Lincoln, through the tragedy of life among a divided people and of death by assassination, touches our hearts more nearly. Therefore, if between these two sublime personalities we must make decision, sympathy is likely to lead us to declare Lincoln the greatest American."

United States Senator Hiram W. Johnson of California confronts this same dual appeal in analyzing his judgment. "Had you asked me to place two Americans on the highest eminence of greatness, I would have had little difficulty," says Johnson. "Washington and Lincoln typify American greatness. They represent, however, such different types that it is almost impossible to place one before the other. If you insist upon the choice, my temperament would place Lincoln first, although my judgment would rebel at making a choice between the two."

Professor Andrew G. McLaughlin, head of the history department of the University of Chicago and editor of many historical publications, is content to observe, "I suppose Lincoln is the greatest

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American, but I don't know." He adds that both Washington and Jefferson deserve close study ere the die is cast.

President C. A. Richmond of Union College, Schenectady, says: "I have no hesitation in saying that no one in our history embodies so much that is highest and most distinctive in our American life as Abraham Lincoln."

President Ernest M. Hopkins of Dartmouth College, the traditional collegiate shrine of Daniel Webster, protests that it is practically impossible to give any designation for the title of ' ' the greatest American" without implying large injustice to many others than the man named. However, President Hopkins expresses the personal conviction that Abraham Lincoln nearest justifies such exaltation.

Chancellor James R. Day of Syracuse University, disliking to select any one of the great men of America as the greatest, says: "However, I have cherished the thought for some time that Lincoln was the great composite character of Americans, and I would be forced to say that it is my conviction that he is the greatest American."

Rev. Henry N. Couden, blind Chaplain of the House of Representatives in Washington, a patriot

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who last saw his country's flag upon the field of battle, and a scholar who has had unusual opportunities to study public service in its processes of rendition, unhesitatingly pronounces Lincoln's name in answer to my question. "I am quite familiar," says he, "with the leading Americans and I place Lincoln at the top of the men who have done things that live. All things considered, he is the greatest of them all and the service he rendered his country is unparalleled. God bless his name and may he be ever an example to the American youth."

Ex-Governor Chase S. Osborn of Michigan, brilliant in a diversity of talents, replies with typical vigor. "I pronounce Abraham Lincoln the greatest American. Not one other has been in his sphere. He alone was anointed of God with crystal superiority at a time when the God forces of America needed leading as never before or since. Lincoln sprang from the lowly. He guided the nation through the greatest peril that ever threatened the destruction of a grouped people. But words are as nothing. Washington was not an American. He was a colonial British aristocrat who was fortified from Heaven diiring the agonizing and prolonged birth throes of a nation.

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He welded with blood and courage and love three million people. On what could easily have been the death bed of America, Lincoln saved the cohesive lives of thirty millions."

Ex-Governor Frank O. Lowden, from the great commonwealth of Illinois which boasts Lincoln as an adopted son, imhesitatingly joins the symphony of Lincoln praise. For Governor Lowden, Lincoln was and is the greatest American. Speaking before the Middlesex Club in Boston upon an anniversary' of Lincoln's birth he referred back to Lowell's "Commemoration Ode" and upon it built a tribute endorsing all that Lowell had simg. A year before, upon similar occasion, he had said: "The cause of democracy is the cause of humanity. It concerns itself with the welfare of the average man. Lincoln was its finest product. In life, he was its noblest champion. In death, he became its saint. His tomb is now its shrine. His country's cause, for which he lived and died, has now become the cause of all the world. It is more than half a century since his countrymen, with reverent heads, bore him to his grave. And still his pitiless logic for the right, his serene faith in God and man, are the surest weapons with which democracy, hu-

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manity and righteousness now fight their ancient foe. . . . Lincoln's spirit still walks the earth. His life remains the greatest resource to the forces fighting for freedom and righteousness throughout the world."