Jefferson by Albert Jay Nock

Author:Albert Jay Nock [Jay Nock, Albert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781610160360
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc
Published: 2011-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

II

Alexander Hamilton came to the colonies at the age of sixteen, from his home in the West Indies, dissatisfied with the prospect of spending his days in “the grovelling condition of a clerk or the like, . . . and would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station. . . . I mean to prepare the way for futurity.” This was in 1772. He found the country ripe for him. There was something stirring all the time, something that an enterprising young man might get into with every chance to make himself felt. At eighteen he came forward in a public meeting with a harangue on the Boston Port Bill, and he presently wrote a couple of anonymous pamphlets on public questions, one of which was attributed by an undiscriminating public to John Jay, who, as Mr. Jefferson said, wielded “the finest pen in America,” and therefore resented the imputation of authorship with a lively chagrin. He showed his bravery conspicuously on two occasions in resisting the action of mobs; once to rescue the Tory president of King’s College, now Columbia, and once to rescue another Tory named Thurman. He saw that war was almost certainly coming on, bearing a great chance of preferment to the few in the colonies who had learned the trade of arms; so he studied the science of war, and the outbreak of hostilities found him established as an artillery officer. He had an unerring instinct for hitching his fortunes to the right cart-tail. Perceiving that Washington would be the man of the moment, he moved upon him straightway, gained his confidence, and remained by him, becoming his military secretary and aid-de-camp.

But the war would not last forever, and Hamilton had no notion of leading the life of a soldier in time of peace. Arms were a springboard for him, not a profession. He served until the end of the campaign of 1781, when he retired with some of the attributes of a national figure, and with the same persistent instinct for alliance with power. He always gave a good and honorable quid pro quo for his demands; he had great ability and untiring energy, and he threw both most prodigally into whatever cause he took up. Money never interested him. Although he inaugurated the financial system which enriched so many, he remained all his life quite poor, and was often a good deal straitened. Even in his career as a practicing lawyer, conducting important cases for wealthy clients, he charged absurdly small fees. His marriage in 1780 with one of the vivacious Schuyler girls of Albany, made him a fixture in “the circle of principal citizens” of New York; it was a ceremony of valid adoption. He was elected to Congress in 1782; he served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787; and now he was in the Cabinet, as the recognized head of the centralizing movement.

The four great general powers conferred by the Constitution upon the

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