Hamilton, Washington and the Man
Who Might ”Ride the Storm and Direct the Whirlwind.”
© John A. Hodgson
As Rep. Adam Schiff opened the first impeachment trial of President Donald Trump in January 2020, he began with a quotation from Alexander Hamilton:
“When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.” ” (Papers of Alexander Hamilton, XII.252)
This one long sentence, from a lengthy memorandum about governmental administration that Hamilton wrote to George Washington in 1792, has been central to America’s presidential impeachment debates since that time.
Did you notice the quotation marks setting off the last seven words of Hamilton’s sentence? Apparently no one ever does. But Hamilton was careful to insert them. Why?
The answer is exactly what you might expect: Hamilton was pointedly indicating to Washington that he was quoting another author. But whom, and to what purpose? We no longer know. We the people need to remember again.
* * *
The literary allusion that Hamilton was deliberately broaching to Washington is one that both men, and indeed most of the Founders, knew very well. It comes from a long poem, “The Campaign,” by the English author Joseph Addison, who had been commissioned to celebrate the Duke of Marlborough’s victory at the Battle of Blenheim (1704) in the War of the Spanish Succession. At the climax of the poem, Addison presents a succinct picture of Marlborough’s masterful generalship at Blenheim: unflustered by the chaos of battle, unblinded by the fog of war, he calmly plots his moves and countermoves, rallies his troops, and makes his victory inevitable. Addison conveys all this in eight taut lines:
‘Twas then great Marlbrô’s mighty soul was prov’d,
That, in the shock of charging hosts unmov’d,
Amidst confusion, horror, and despair,
Examin’d all the dreadful scenes of war:
In peaceful thought the field of death survey’d,
To fainting squadrons sent the timely aid,
Inspir’d repuls’d battalions to engage,
And taught the doubtful battle where to rage.
And then, to drive home the importance of this climactic moment, Addison introduces a remarkable epic simile, likening the storm of battle to a storm indeed – but with cosmic implications:
So when an angel by divine command
With rising tempests shakes a guilty land,
Such as of late o’er pale Britannia past,
Calm and serene he drives the furious blast;
And, pleas’d th’ Almighty’s orders to perform,
Rides in the whirl-wind, and directs the storm. (My emphasis.)
Hamilton either misremembers Addison’s last line here or deliberately varies it. The latter seems far more likely, as he had quoted the line accurately in a letter to his and Washington’s mutual friend Edward Carrington of Virginia only a few months earlier (PAH, XI.444). (Why might he have wanted to vary it to Washington now? More on that in a moment.)
“The Campaign” was a great success when it appeared, and the six-line passage I have highlighted was immediately singled out for special praise and became quite famous as “Addison’s celebrated simile,” a designation that remained widespread for a century. (Its fame gained additional cachet when Alexander Pope did it the great honor of incorporating its last couplet – with the last line unchanged – in both versions of his mock-heroic Dunciad [1728, 1743], where the “angel” in question is now a prominent London theatre manager in the service of the Goddess Dulness, working to extend her realm by dumbing down the works appearing on the London stage.) Hamilton, writing to Washington, had particular reason to allude to it in 1792. Addison had used his simile to characterize Marlborough’s cool and inspiring generalship that brought about an unanticipated victory at Blenheim, reversing the momentum of the war. When Hamilton cites it in his memorandum it acquires an additional, more personal undertone as well: the compliment Addison had bestowed on Marlborough is equally apt for the Washington whose generalship brought about the unanticipated victories at Trenton and Princeton, putting the American revolutionary cause firmly on the path to independence.
Hamilton is also paying Washington the further compliment of assuming that Washington would recognize the allusion, as he surely did. It is very likely that Hamilton himself had shared it with Washington long before this. He knew that Washington was extremely fond of a later, highly popular work by Addison, the blank-verse tragedy Cato (1713), which was widely cherished by American Revolutionaries of all stripes as a celebration of selfless devotion to the cause of Republican liberty. Cato was Washington’s favorite play; he knew many of its lines by heart and often used them in his conversations and war councils. He even had the play staged for his troops at Valley Forge in early May 1778, towards the end of the Continental Army’s long winter encampment there. Hamilton, only 23 at the time (Washington was 46), had reunited with Washington at Valley Forge that January and quickly became Washington’s most important aide; for the next several years the two men were continually together, and became close friends despite their temperamental differences. They inevitably would have discussed Cato that spring and thereafter, and probably Addison’s writings more generally, too.
The next two short paragraphs of Hamilton’s memorandum then drive his Addisonian point home:
It has been aptly observed that Cato was the Tory, Caesar the whig, of his day. The former frequently resisted—the latter always flattered the follies of the people. Yet the former perished with the republic, the latter destroyed it.
No popular government was ever without its Catalines & its Caesars. These are its true enemies.
Hamilton, ever the realist, well understood that principled leaders—“men of real integrity and patriotism,” as he called them in another contemporaneous essay on the same theme (PAH, XI.463)—have no monopoly on leadership. An unprincipled man careless of “the principles of liberty,” someone with talents as a rabble-rouser and chaos agent (Aaron Burr was in the back of his mind here), could aspire to seize control of events as readily as a principled man like Washington could. (This is why Hamilton doesn’t mention an angel in his allusion: the angel image wouldn’t fly for an unprincipled scoundrel, a Burr.) The integrity or morality—fundamentally, the character—of the leader is crucially important. This general belief, shared widely by the Founders, had been particularly driven home to American audiences by Cato.
As Jeffrey Rosen recently wrote in The Atlantic, “the Founders believed that personal self-government was necessary for political self-government” (“The Founders’ Guide to Happiness,” 2/8/2024). Governments thus are likely to thrive or fail in accordance with the moral qualities of their leaders. That is the point Hamilton is using Addison to make in his memorandum. And once we recognize Hamilton’s allusion to Addison’s “The Campaign” and consider the implications of his immediate continuation to Cato, we can also begin to appreciate more fully that the standard of comparison Hamilton is implying here—a man of true integrity and patriotism, careful of the principles of liberty—is someone like George Washington himself
* * *
In 1792, Hamilton could comfortably assume that Washington and Carrington and others would appreciate his allusions to “Addison’s celebrated simile” and to Cato because a familiarity with Addison characterized a gentleman’s education and a well-read citizen’s personal experience. Jefferson, son of a prosperous rural farmer with a personal library, grew up on Addison even before he left his isolated home for an education at William and Mary College; Franklin, a printer with only two years of formal elementary schooling ending at age ten, intensively studied Addison on his own and committed much of Cato to memory.
But times and fashions change, and school curricula change with them. Once-familiar poems and songs and phrases come to seem passé, then old-fashioned, and ultimately archaic, the concern of scholars and specialists only. And today we can look back and see that our own cultural memory of Addison and his celebrated simile was already winking out by the turn of this century.
In 1997 historian Benson Bobrick published a well-received book, Angel in the Whirlwind: The Triumph of the American Revolution. He took his title from a letter that John Page of Virginia sent to his close friend and William and Mary College classmate Thomas Jefferson in 1776 soon after the Declaration of Independence was published. “I am highly pleased with your Declaration,” Page wrote. “God preserve the united States. We know the Race is not to the swift nor the Battle to the strong. Do you not think an Angel rides in the Whirlwind and directs this Storm?” President George W. Bush then quoted these last two sentences from Page verbatim in his January 2001 inaugural address and returned to them for his closing lines:
This work continues. This story goes on. And an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm.
God bless you all, and God bless America.
It is Addison again. Page in 1776, like Hamilton sixteen years later, was reading American history through the lens of Addison’s poem and drama, although Page was seizing upon the positive notion that God’s angel was on America’s side while Hamilton instead worried that the man seeking to direct the course of events might be no angel but an unprincipled self-server. But when President Bush stressed Page’s interpretation, neither he nor his speechwriters had any awareness of its allusive context. Only a single American reader, it would appear, had even a clue: a syndicated reporter for the Hartford Current (Rob Kyff, “The Word Guy”) noted four days later that “Page, in fact, was quoting Alexander Pope, who in turn lifted the line from Joseph Addison.” But no one knew why.
* * *
So here are two reasons why recognizing Hamilton’s quotation and appreciating its resonances matters to us today. First, when we retrieve this knowledge from “deeply archaic” status and bring it again to light we are improving our ability to understand him, nuances and all. The Founders, steeped in the literature and drama of their own era, could think and speak in iambic pentameters (“the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor”), could imagine their musings as soliloquies, could recognize themselves as performing roles in a living drama. To understand them well, we need to appreciate the poetry and dramas of their very lives. An allusion they shared easily among themselves that we do not catch is a thought we neither understand nor realize that we do not understand. Once we do catch it, we can understand them better.
Second, a contemporaneous, “originalist” reading of Hamilton’s warning not only affirms but strongly reinforces Rep. Schiff’s interpretation of it. Schiff was right to deem Hamilton’s description of the despotic “man unprincipled in private life” highly relevant to the impeachment trial. This was simply Hamilton’s latest contribution to a conversation that had been engaging the Founders for years, since The Federalist Papers and before. A man who cannot or will not govern himself is not fit to govern others. Such a man—a man just such as Hamilton described in his 1792 memorandum, apart from “having the advantage of military habits”—was on trial in the Senate that day. A George Washington he was not.