A new book reveals how Thomas Jefferson (left) and Alexander Hamilton (right) hated each other from the get-go — and their feud formed the basis of our political parties. The damp spring and hot summer of 1793 brought clouds of mosquitoes infected with yellow fever to close-packed Philadelphia. Twenty thousand residents fled for the safety of the countryside. Nearly 5,000 lives, a tenth of the city’s population, were lost.
As the death toll rose, workaholic Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton remained at his post. Priding himself as President George Washington’s most essential aide, he privately referred to the government as “my administration.” No one else could carry on the nation’s business, he was sure.
Until he and his wife fell ill.
A feverish Eliza Hamilton waved from an upper window to catch what might be her final glimpse of her five small children — baby John, the youngest, had marked his first birthday just two weeks before — as the kids were hustled to the safety of her father’s home in Albany. Edward Stevens, a distinguished physician and close friend of Hamilton’s, rushed to his bedside. Washington sent a get-well note and half a case of vintage wine as he evacuated the city.
Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton prided himself on being President Washington’s most essential aide. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton prided himself on being President Washington’s most essential aide. Ullstein Bild via Getty Images But Hamilton’s colleague, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, simply scoffed.
“His family think him in danger and he puts himself so by his excessive alarm,” Jefferson sneered in a letter to his protégé James Madison.
“A man as timid as he is on the water, as timid on horseback, as timid in sickness, would be a phenomenon if [his] courage … were genuine.”
Washington was six months into his second presidential term, and officially the two-party system we know today did not exist. But outright contempt between his two top aides, Jefferson and Hamilton, was already poisoning what is now called the most viciously partisan decade in American history.
“They just hated one another from almost, it seems, the moment they met,” said Dennis Rasmussen, author of “Fears of a Setting Sun” (Princeton University Press), out now. “The personal animosity between the two helped the first parties to coalesce.”
From the start, Washington was wary about the formation of political parties, convinced that partisans would shred the young nation’s fragile unity.
But the first president had accidentally planted the seeds of the two- party system by placing Hamilton and Jefferson, the nation’s most ferocious partisans, in his cabinet.
Thomas Jefferson (above) was a longtime ally to Washington who tapped him for the first presidential administration in 1789. Thomas Jefferson (above) was a longtime ally to Washington who tapped him for the first presidential administration in 1789. Getty Images “So seditious, so prostitute a character,” Hamilton said of Jefferson.
“A man whose history … is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country,” Jefferson wrote of his rival in a 1792 letter to their mutual boss.
When Stevens’ unorthodox yellow-fever treatment of quinine and cold baths restored the Hamiltons’ health, the treasury secretary celebrated his recovery with an open letter that rebuked the old- school bloodletting methods practiced by Jefferson’s ally Benjamin Rush.
Stevens’ cure was adopted by Hamilton’s Federalist followers; Rush’s became the prescription for Jefferson’s Republicans (proving our 2020 battles over hydroxychloroquine and “warp-speed” vaccines were far from unique).
The Hamilton-Jefferson rancor “was personal, for sure,” Rasmussen said. “Jefferson looked down on Hamilton as an immigrant upstart trying to exalt himself above his proper station.”
The boundlessly ambitious treasury secretary was forever expanding the power of his department, by far the new government’s largest, aggravating Jefferson.
Meanwhile, the self-made Hamilton, born out of wedlock and into poverty in the Caribbean, saw Jefferson as a hypocrite. “Jefferson poses as the embodiment of the common man and the yeoman farmer, but he’s pretty much an aristocrat, a major slave holder born to wealth,” Rasmussen explained. “So there was personal distaste.”
The two men’s shared interest in women heightened the tension. Both Founding Fathers maintained long-running flirtations with Eliza Hamilton’s sister, Angelica Schuyler Church, who dallied with Jefferson in Paris when he served as America’s ambassador to France. Jefferson presented her with one of a pair of miniatures of himself; Angelica gave Jefferson the first-edition copy of “The Federalist” that Hamilton and his wife had gifted to her.
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