ANOTHER COFFEE BREAK: OUR FOREFATHERS’ COVENANTS, Part 29

OUR FOREFATHERS’ COVENANTS

Part 29

June 26, 2020

Today we begin our discussion with a brief history of the life of Alexander Hamilton. The details of his life and his involvement in the formation of our early government are so voluminous that it would take many Coffee Breaks to recount, so I offer you the following. We’ve already mentioned him and talked about some of his influence with our nation’s founding, but let’s get a little more specific today.

For a man who had such a short life with such questionable beginnings, Alexander Hamilton used his life to literally change the world of his day and influence the world economy even to the present.

Born on the island of Nevis in the British West Indies on January 11, 1755 of a union between James Hamilton (a Scottish merchant) and Rachael Fawcette Levine (of French Huguenot descent), the Law saw his birth as illegitimate. Rachael had been married to a Danish businessman at a very early age; and for reasons unknown, the court ordered her divorce from him. Under Danish Law, Rachael was forbidden to remarry; and her union with James Hamilton could never be legalized.

Hamilton's birthplace on the island of Nevis had a large Jewish community, constituting one quarter of Charlestown's white population by the 1720s. He came into contact with Jews on a regular basis; as a small boy, he was tutored by a Jewish schoolmistress, and had learned to recite the Ten Commandments in the original Hebrew.

Hamilton exhibited a degree of respect for Jews that was described by Chernow as "a life-long reverence." He believed that Jewish achievement was a result of divine providence.

Before Alexander turned 13 years of age, his mother died. His father had gone bankrupt, and Alexander was compelled to go to work as a clerk and apprentice at the counting house of Nicholas Cruger and David Beekman. It may have been tragic circumstances that compelled him to go to work at such a young age, but it was a Godsend in disguise. When Alexander was age 15, Cruger found it necessary to leave on other business and left him in charge.

It had only been a year since Alexander Hamilton (now age 14) had written a note to a friend by the name of Edward Stevens, in which he said, "my ambition is prevalent, so that I contemn the groveling condition of a clerk or the like … and would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station."

Without having to do either, he found the opportunity thrust upon him. Growing up in near-poverty, educational opportunities had been scarce, but his mother's French upbringing made it possible for him to learn the language; and indeed he learned it well. The devastating hurricane of August 30, 1772 that struck the islands and all but wiped out the city of Christiansted provided an opportunity for Alexander that changed his life forever.

Despite his youth, he had become very articulate in expressing himself. Following the hurricane event, he wrote a complete description of the devastation for the Royal Danish-American Gazette. Family friends were extremely impressed with his writing and decided to fund the opportunity for him to be educated at a grammar school in Elizabethtown, New Jersey where he enrolled in the fall of 1772. He graduated one year later and immediately entered King's College in New York City. Again, he graduated college after only one year with his Bachelor of Arts degree.

The War of Independence was just beginning and Alexander Hamilton felt a very keen loyalty to the colonists. It was on the morning of July 6, 1774 at a mass meeting in the fields of New York City that he made an absolutely sensational speech attacking British policies. At the same time he began writing a series of letters for John Holt's New York Journal.

While at King's College, he had joined a patriot volunteer band known as "the Corsicans." Every morning before classes began, they would drill. These exercises fueled Alexander's military ambitions and desires. Thus, one August morning in 1775, the "Corsicans" participated in a raid to seize the cannon from the local Battery. On March 14, 1776, less than 90 days before the Declaration of Independence was set forth, he was commissioned captain of a company of artillery set up by the New York Providential Congress.

In August of that year, his company participated in the Battle of Long Island; and in October his battery guarded Chatterton's Hill while protecting the withdrawal of General William Smallwood's militia. His military feats continued eventually bringing him to the attention of General Nathaniel Greene; and subsequently to George Washington. Just prior to his 22nd birthday, in March of 1777, he joined Washington's personal staff and was commissioned with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

I quote the following from Wikipedia.

While on Washington's staff, Hamilton long sought command and a return to active combat. As the war drew nearer to an end, he knew that opportunities for military glory were diminishing. On February 15, 1781, Hamilton was reprimanded by Washington after a minor misunderstanding. Although Washington quickly tried to mend their relationship, Hamilton insisted on leaving his staff. He officially left in March and settled with Eliza close to Washington's headquarters. He repeatedly asked Washington and others for a field command. Washington demurred, citing the need to appoint men of higher rank. This continued until early July 1781, when Hamilton submitted a letter to Washington with his commission enclosed, "thus tacitly threatening to resign if he didn't get his desired command."

On July 31, Washington relented and assigned Hamilton as commander of a battalion of light infantry companies of the 1st and 2nd New York Regiments and two provisional companies from Connecticut. In the planning for the assault on Yorktown, Hamilton was given command of three battalions, which were to fight in conjunction with the allied French troops in taking Redoubts No. 9 and No. 10 of the British fortifications at Yorktown. Hamilton and his battalions fought bravely and took Redoubt No. 10 with bayonets in a nighttime action, as planned. The French also fought bravely, suffered heavy casualties, and took Redoubt No. 9. These actions forced the British surrender of an entire army at Yorktown, Virginia, marking the de facto end of the war, although small battles continued for two more years until the signing of the Treaty of Paris and the departure of the last British troops.

While on Washington's staff, Hamilton had become frustrated with the decentralized nature of the wartime Continental Congress, particularly its dependence upon the states for voluntary financial support. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress had no power to collect taxes or to demand money from the states. This lack of a stable source of funding had made it difficult for the Continental Army both to obtain its necessary provisions and to pay its soldiers. During the war, and for some time after, Congress obtained what funds it could from subsidies from the King of France, from aid requested from the several states (which were often unable or unwilling to contribute), and from European loans.

An amendment to the Articles had been proposed by Thomas Burke, in February 1781, to give Congress the power to collect a 5% impost, or duty on all imports, but this required ratification by all states; securing its passage as law proved impossible after it was rejected by Rhode Island in November 1782. James Madison joined Hamilton in influencing Congress to send a delegation to persuade Rhode Island to change its mind. Their report recommending the delegation argued the national government needed not just some level of financial autonomy, but also the ability to make laws that superseded those of the individual states. Hamilton transmitted a letter arguing that Congress already had the power to tax, since it had the power to fix the sums due from the several states; but Virginia's rescission of its own ratification ended the Rhode Island negotiations.

After the Battle of Yorktown, Hamilton resigned his commission. He was appointed in July 1782 to the Congress of the Confederation as a New York representative for the term beginning in November 1782. Before his appointment to Congress in 1782, Hamilton was already sharing his criticisms of Congress. He expressed these criticisms in his letter to James Duane dated September 3, 1780. In this letter he wrote, "The fundamental defect is a want of power in Congress...the confederation itself is defective and requires to be altered; it is neither fit for war, nor peace."

While Hamilton was in Congress, discontented soldiers began to pose a danger to the young United States. Most of the army was then posted at Newburgh, New York. Those in the army were funding much of their own supplies, and they had not been paid in eight months. Furthermore, after Valley Forge, the Continental officers had been promised in May 1778 a pension of half their pay when they were discharged.By the early 1780s, due to the structure of the government under the Articles of Confederation, it had no power to tax to either raise revenue or pay its soldiers. In 1782 after several months without pay, a group of officers organized to send a delegation to lobby Congress, led by Capt. Alexander McDougall. The officers had three demands: the Army's pay, their own pensions, and commutation of those pensions into a lump-sum payment if Congress were unable to afford the half-salary pensions for life. Congress rejected the proposal.

Several Congressmen, including Hamilton, Robert Morris and Gouverneur Morris (no relation), attempted to use this Newburgh Conspiracy as leverage to secure support from the states and in Congress for funding of the national government. They encouraged MacDougall to continue his aggressive approach, threatening unknown consequences if their demands were not met, and defeated proposals that would have resolved the crisis without establishing general federal taxation: that the states assume the debt to the army, or that an impost be established dedicated to the sole purpose of paying that debt.

Hamilton suggested using the Army's claims to prevail upon the states for the proposed national funding system. The Morrises and Hamilton contacted Knox to suggest he and the officers defy civil authority, at least by not disbanding if the army were not satisfied. Hamilton wrote Washington to suggest that Hamilton covertly "take direction" of the officers' efforts to secure redress, to secure continental funding but keep the army within the limits of moderation. Washington wrote Hamilton back, declining to introduce the army. After the crisis had ended, Washington warned of the dangers of using the army as leverage to gain support for the national funding plan.

On March 15, Washington defused the Newburgh situation by addressing the officers personally. Congress ordered the Army officially disbanded in April 1783. In the same month, Congress passed a new measure for a twenty-five-year impost—which Hamilton voted against—that again required the consent of all the states; it also approved a commutation of the officers' pensions to five years of full pay. Rhode Island again opposed these provisions, and Hamilton's robust assertions of national prerogatives in his previous letter were widely held to be excessive.

In June 1783, a different group of disgruntled soldiers from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, sent Congress a petition demanding their back pay. When they began to march toward Philadelphia, Congress charged Hamilton and two others with intercepting the mob.^[74] Hamilton requested militia from Pennsylvania's Supreme Executive Council, but was turned down. Hamilton instructed Assistant Secretary of War William Jackson to intercept the men. Jackson was unsuccessful. The mob arrived in Philadelphia, and the soldiers proceeded to harangue Congress for their pay. The President of the Continental Congress, John Dickinson, feared that the Pennsylvania state militia was unreliable, and refused its help. Hamilton argued that Congress ought to adjourn to Princeton, New Jersey. Congress agreed, and relocated there.^[80] Frustrated with the weakness of the central government, Hamilton while in Princeton drafted a call to revise the Articles of Confederation. This resolution contained many features of the future U.S. Constitution, including a strong federal government with the ability to collect taxes and raise an army. It also included the separation of powers into the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches.

As a youth in the West Indies, Hamilton was an orthodox and conventional Presbyterian of the "New Light" evangelical type (as opposed to the "Old Light" Calvinists); he was taught there by a student of John Witherspoon, a moderate of the New School. He wrote two or three hymns, which were published in the local newspaper.Robert Troup, his college roommate, noted that Hamilton was "in the habit of praying on his knees night and morning."

According to Gordon Wood, Hamilton dropped his youthful religiosity during the Revolution and became "a conventional liberal with theistic inclinations who was an irregular churchgoer at best"; however, he returned to religion in his last years.Chernow wrote that Hamilton was nominally an Episcopalian, but, he was not clearly affiliated with the denomination and did not seem to attend church regularly or take communion. Like Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson, Hamilton has been accused by modern theologians of deism, which sought to substitute reason for revelation and dropped the notion of an active God who intervened in human affairs. At the same time, he never doubted God's existence, embracing Christianity as a system of morality and cosmic justice.

Stories were circulated that Hamilton had made two quips about God at the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. During the French Revolution, he displayed a utilitarian approach to using religion for political ends, such as by maligning Jefferson as "the atheist," and insisting that Christianity and Jeffersonian democracy were incompatible. After 1801, Hamilton further asserted the truth of Christianity; he proposed a Christian Constitutional Society in 1802, to take hold of "some strong feeling of the mind" to elect "fit men" to office, and he wrote of "Christian welfare societies" for the poor. After being shot, Hamilton spoke of his belief in God's mercy.

On his deathbed, following the duel between him and Aaron Burr, Hamilton asked the Episcopal Bishop of New York, Benjamin Moore, to give him holy communion. Moore initially declined to do so, on two grounds: that to participate in a duel was a mortal sin, and that Hamilton, although undoubtedly sincere in his faith, was not a member of the Episcopalian denomination. After leaving, Moore was persuaded to return that afternoon by the urgent pleas of Hamilton's friends, and upon receiving Hamilton's solemn assurance that he repented for his part in the duel, Moore gave him communion. Bishop Moore returned the next morning, stayed with Hamilton for several hours until his death, and conducted the funeral service at Trinity Church.

In case you are missing out on real fellowship in an environment of Ekklesia, our Sunday worship gatherings are available by conference call – usually at about 10:30AM Pacific. That conference number is (712) 770-4160, and the access code is 308640#. We are now making these gatherings available on video usingZOOM. If you wish to participate by video on ZOOM, our login ID is 835-926-513. If you miss the live voice-onlycall, you can dial (712) 770-4169, enter the same access code and listen in later. The video call, of course, is not recorded – not yet, anyway.

Blessings on you!

Regner

Regner A. Capener
CAPENER MINISTRIES

RIVER WORSHIP CENTER
Temple, Texas 76502

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