As tired as he must be, his enthusiasm was giving fresh energy to his voice. I listened, and I nodded, impressed with all the great plans he had for this new country of ours.
But I also thought of the more cautious gentlemen like James Madison, and wondered if Alexander would need to be more circumspect in order to gain allies. Sometimes with him, confidence could be like strong drink, and go directly to his head so thoroughly that he’d forget tact and reason.
“One step at a time, Alexander,” I cautioned. “Pray take only one step at a time, and don’t tread upon anyone else who wanders into your path.”
He grinned, bowed his head, and touched his fingers to his forehead in a wryly subservient gesture of acknowledgment. I smiled in return, for it was amusingly done, even as I knew he would not heed my advice. I wasn’t sure he could have done so, even if he’d wished it. He’d never grasped, or perhaps had chosen not to, that reserve was not the same as duplicity. He’d always valued honesty above all other virtues, but there were times where a little less of it might have stood him in better stead in the political arenas.
As the year ended and another began, it was clear that his concerns for the country were well-founded. Individual states levied taxes however they chose, and like niggling misers, refused to send their fair share (or, in some cases, any share) to the federal government for the good of the whole country. As a result, there was no money to address the enormous debt that remained from the war, and the loans granted by other countries went unpaid. To make matters worse, each state continued to print its own worthless paper currency, making debts impossible to settle and merchants unwilling and unable to extend further credit for goods.
I saw the evidence of this myself. A simple visit to a draper’s shop for a length of linen for a child’s shirt could become a mathematical adventure. Should I pay in dollars, or shillings and pence, French guineas or Prussian thalers? All of those coins and bills were common currency in our city, and I’d seen them come into our house, too, by way of my husband’s fees. But which would give more value as a housewife at market? Which would garner more respect from a shopkeeper, and offer the most advantageous rate of exchange?
Yet it wasn’t only the merchants who felt the pinch. Farmers and other small landowners were unable to pay the ever-increasing taxes, and being faced with foreclosure and ruin. Near the end of 1786, a large group of these impoverished farmers from western Massachusetts took matters into their own hands, and began shutting down courts and threatening officials.
Well-organized and armed under the leadership of a onetime militia captain named Daniel Shays, the men soon became emboldened to attack armories and raid private shops, and threatened worse. The mob of angry men grew as it surged east toward Boston, an open rebellion if not out-and-out civil war.
To me, this grim news was especially frightening. Most of the rebels had been soldiers during the war, men who had never been justly paid for their service, and they had much in common with the disgruntled soldiers who had threatened Congress (and my husband) in Philadelphia three years before.
As a veteran himself, Alexander sympathized with the rebels even as he railed on to me about how such martial demonstrations needed to be swiftly suppressed before they threatened the nation as a whole. One of his less popular beliefs was a need for a national standing army to address conflicts like this, and I believe that if it had been up to him, he would have sent a full national army to Massachusetts to put down the rebellion. In public, however, he was more measured, and pointed to the disturbances as more proof of the need for a stronger national financial system.
By the time Alexander returned to the state legislature in January, the Massachusetts rebellion had been quelled by local militia and the leaders captured, but the warning it had raised was still much in people’s minds. Or at least it was everywhere except in the small and narrow minds of Governor Clinton and his followers. Even the fact that this session of the legislature met in New York City, in the Old Royal Exchange, did not sway the governor from his insistence that the Confederation of states was perfectly adequate, and worse, that the suggested changes were to be despised, even feared.
While other states swiftly approved the proposal for a new Constitutional Convention and chose their delegates, Governor Clinton made sure that New York dragged its feet. Alexander fought heroically, in sessions and debates and with individual assemblymen, too, and each late night when he came home and our children were abed, I’d listen as he recounted every denial and scornful aside with me, and planned his next move.
One day he gave a speech defending a congressional proposal for an import tax that he knew would be defeated, and yet I heard from my father, in attendance as a state senator, that Alexander still spoke with passion and dedication for nearly ninety minutes, and nearly collapsed from exertion when he was done. The measure was promptly defeated, as he’d expected, but defiant and determined, he insisted that we go to the playhouse that same evening, if only to prove his resilience to the Clintonians.
To hear Alexander tell it (and I did, many times), Governor Clinton’s pettiness knew no bounds. When at last the New York delegates were chosen to attend the Constitutional Convention, Alexander was chosen—for not even the governor could overlook a gentleman who’d helped institute the Convention—but the two other gentlemen were firm followers of Governor Clinton, and guaranteed to vote together and against Alexander.
Still, when he left for Philadelphia on a warm, drizzling morning in the middle of May, his mood was buoyant and optimistic. His old mentor General Washington had agreed to serve as the Convention’s president. Under the general’s firm leadership, Alexander hoped the delegates would not be content with a few mends and darns to the old Confederation, but would instead, like master tailors, begin anew with a fresh bolt of cloth, cutting to measure to suit the needs of the country.