E liza Hamilton made us tea while I sat in Hamilton’s study. He remained impassive while he listened to us. Only a tapping foot gave away his agitation. I explained to him what I had concluded, and why I had concluded it. He understood. He insisted I wait, however. The night was too dark to ride out now, the roads too covered in snow. I would leave, I said, an hour before dawn, and ride by the lights of the city until the sun rose. Hamilton then began to write out another letter, this one for Duer.
“I am explaining all to him,” he said. “I hope to appeal to his better nature. You must do the same. You must augment this letter as best you can, but you must convince him to reverse course. He will have to sell what he can, clear out what debt he can. He will have to sacrifice his dreams of conquest in exchange for an opportunity to avoid complete ruin and ignominy.”
“I cannot imagine Duer accepting such a trade,” I said.
He nodded, his quill still making its methodical way across his heavy sheet of paper. “Neither can I. Nevertheless, it is the choice he will have to make. He must understand the consequences of ruin. He cannot be allowed to be exposed as a bankrupt. He cannot allow the public to know of his debts. If that happens, if he is exposed, he is ruined, and that will produce a chain of events so devastating I cannot endure to think of it. England survived its South Sea Bubble because it was an old and large and entrenched economy, but France, where modern finance was new, never recovered from its simultaneous Mississippi Bubble. If Duer is exposed, we will be lucky to-like France-see no more than our economy ruined and our people pauperized. Banks will fail, so merchants will fail, and then farms. And then starvation. And that is the best we can hope for. I dare not think of how much worse it could become, but the resulting turmoil could put an end to our system of governance.”
He paused in his writing.
I had been staring at the fire, thinking of all those with whom I now knew Leonidas to be involved, but most of all Joan Maycott. I knew she hated Hamilton and had some grievance with Duer, but could this be what she wished? Could that lady and her whiskey-smelling associates truly wish to see the destruction of American republicanism in its infancy?
“You will have to offer him something if he is to agree,” I said. “Duer never acts, not even to save himself, if he cannot see something shining and glittering at the end of it. You may have to promise him some kind of quiet bribe, money with which to live when all is settled.”
Hamilton hastily scratched a few words onto the page and then began to blot. “No. I cannot have it be said, when all is finished, that I paid this man a reward for his work of nearly destroying the nation. Even if Duer understands what he has done to himself, and even if he understands that a quiet reversal is his only hope, he will later feel resentment. He will tell himself he was tricked and bullied into giving up his scheme, and so he will complain of it to all who will listen. I cannot have Jefferson’s republican faction learning that, in essence, I’ve bribed a scoundrel for nearly ruining the nation.” He now looked at Lavien. “You will have to make certain he agrees to everything. You understand me.”
Lavien nodded. “He will agree.”
I understood their meaning. “You don’t think the Jeffersonians will use it against you if you start breaking Duer’s fingers?”
“They will use it against me if I have boiled beef for my dinner,” Hamilton said. “What matters is the force of their argument. The populace will forgive a politician who uses rough means to accomplish a good end. They will never forgive a man who makes secret payments to a villain.”
When the letter was dry, he folded it, placed it in an envelope, and handed it to me along with a letter of credit from the government of the United States. He said I was to do what I must-trade horses, buy horses, it did not matter. Spend any amount to get to New York with all due haste.
“But keep your receipts,” he added, “so the ledgers will balance.”
Even in the midst of crisis, he could not help being himself.
Joan Maycott
March 1792
Things began to happen not precisely quickly, for events were spread out over several weeks, but certainly with a kind of consistency that, looked at later with the eye of history, would certainly give the impression of rapidity. Duer attempted to proceed with his plan to control six percent securities, but his failure with the Million Bank was a public setback. News spread that Duer’s schemes had failed him, and so finally there was tarnish upon his name.
Soon thereafter the Bank of the United States began to restrict credit, calling in loans, including a number belonging to Duer that were difficult, if not impossible for him to meet. Then the last blow was struck. The Treasury Department itself had conducted an inquiry into Duer’s actions on the old Treasury Board-the ones I had myself discovered-and found the $236,000 he had illegally appropriated. Duer objected and wrote to Hamilton, begging forbearance, but these were only delaying tactics, and now it was but a matter of waiting for the inevitable.
The great speculator no longer made appearances at the Merchants’ Coffeehouse. He could ask none of his agents to do his bidding. All either faced their own ruin or would not be touched by Duer’s new ignominy. Instead, he barricaded himself in his house in Greenwich Village and, I could only imagine, attempted to convince himself that even the most severe of storms would, in the end, pass. A man who had endured as much as he would endure this.
He did venture out now and again for private business, and one such time, near the end, he came to see me. I received him in my parlor. Unlike Pearson on the day of the Million Bank launch, Mr. Duer appeared neatly dressed and well groomed and, were someone not to know his circumstances, he would never suspect him to be in any danger. I could only see him as the buzzard circling the dying form of a corruptible nation.
He sipped a glass of sherry and smiled at me, inquired how I had been keeping myself and what news I had to report. I made small talk, of course, but in the end I was forced to return the subject to his own concerns.
“I do not like to repeat the unpleasant news I hear in the papers,” I ventured, “but you and I have ever been too friendly for me to pretend there are no such reports abroad.”
“You need not concern yourself with me,” he said. “I shall weather this. There are always moments of crisis in a speculator’s life. This is but a distraction.”
I sipped my sherry but never once took my eyes off him. “I should like to know how you will extract yourself from these difficulties.”
He looked at me, seeing something new in me, perhaps. He might have, for I was growing weary of disguise. Indeed, I could hardly imagine a reason to remain in disguise. “Your tone, madam, suggests you do not think you will see me recover.”
“You owe more than half a million dollars by my estimate, and that assumes you will liquidate your items of real value, including your house. Creditors such as the Bank of the United States are not easily put off, and I don’t think the coopers and bakers of the city from whom you’ve borrowed will be any more forgiving. Indeed, you may have more to fear from them than you do the law.”
He said nothing for a long moment, as if waiting for the words that would erase what I had already said, the words that would turn everything into a great joke. “I-I cannot understand why you would speak to me so.”
“I only tell you the truth. You do not hate the truth, do you?” I set down my drink, folded my hands in my lap, and looked at him until he looked away.
“Is it the money?” he asked. “Is that what this comes to? You fear I shall soon be worthless, and so you scorn me?”
“Even in your moments of distress, you are nothing but a creature of greed. You think there is nothing in the world but money, sir? You think we care for nothing but wealth? It means nothing to me. Have I ever asked you for so much as a penny? No, never. I have never wanted anything from you, and yet you did not notice it.”