Race, Power, and Sociability in Alexander Hamilton's RECORDS OF THE TUESDAY CLUB

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Southern Literary Journal, volume xxxviii, number 1, fall 2005© 2005 by the Southern Literary Journal and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of English. All rights reserved.

21

Race, Power, and Sociability

in Alexander Hamilton’s

Records of the Tuesday Club

by Chris Beyers

Although David S. Shields laments that people who own a copy of Dr. Alexander Hamilton’s (1712 – 56) The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club (1756) constitute a “[v]ery select” group (xxiii), Hamilton’s writings are regularly culled by cultural historians looking for details about colonial life. The fact that Hamilton’s two major works —History, a rendition of the annals of his gentleman’s club, and Itinerarium (1744), a travel narrative of his journey from Maryland to what is now Maine — are the kind of texts that used to be ignored by students of “literature” attests to the strong historicist impulse in cul-tural studies. Hamilton’s major works circulated only in manuscript and were published long after their author died. Partly because he wrote just for himself and a specifi c coterie, his works are nowadays poorly under-stood — unfortunately so, because he has many more readers today than during his lifetime.

This essay seeks to put the interpretation of Hamilton on a better footing by focusing on two junctures in his writings where there seem to be glaring incongruities, where the opinions of the character, Alexan-der Hamilton (or his club pseudonym, Loquacious Scribble), are at odds with the same character’s more general views, as well as at odds with the apparent opinions of the historical Alexander Hamilton. I will not argue

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22 Southern Literary Journal

that Hamilton’s characters are merely fi ctional nor try to show how con-trary opinions do not confl ict; instead, I will seek to elucidate the logic governing these contradictions. The inconsistencies arise from the clash of antagonistic ideologies that Hamilton held simultaneously. How he negotiated the collisions has far-reaching implications for how we ought to understand Hamilton’s writings.

The fi rst apparent contradiction occurs in Itinerarium. Klaus H. Schmidt points out that, on the one hand, the narrator makes “repeated slurs on women and racial minorities”; on the other, “the self-same nar-rator defends women and members of ethnic groups against racism and sexism” (161). Schmidt focuses his analysis on women and ethnic groups such as the Dutch, arguing that the inconsistencies stem from Hamil-ton’s “self-fashioning as a cosmopolitan gentleman” (162). Yet he does not elaborate specifi cally how such self-fashioning might lead to irrecon-cilable attitudes toward people of African descent and slavery.

Hamilton owned a slave, Dromo, and his general attitude is as un-surprising as it is unpleasant. While traveling in New York, for example, Hamilton tells a tale of a doctor with a violent antipathy to green peas. When served them despite instructions to the contrary, the doctor runs away. It is rather amusing to read that, as a result of the strange doctor’s sudden departure, “we had a good dish of pease . . . which otherwise we should not have tasted.” However, it is not amusing to read that the blame is to be placed on a “stupid negroe wench” (85).

Typical of a slave owner, Hamilton is untouched by his slave’s exer-tions. For example, once when Dromo falls to the ground in the middle of a road, “horse and baggage and all,” Hamilton remarks that this sight made him think about his own “state of health” (193). A more compas-sionate person would have expressed concern for Dromo’s well-being. At another time, Dromo is enlisted to help free an anchor. Again, the de-scription bears little sympathy for his slave’s struggles, instead focusing on Dromo’s supposedly savage origin: “Dromo grinned like a pagod as he tugged att the cable or like one of his own country idols” (78).

Comparing Dromo to a heathen deity is telling, since Dromo was a Christian. While in Philadelphia on a Sunday, Hamilton says he “in-tended” to go to church, “but was diverted from my good purpose by some polite company.” Dromo, on the other hand, “very piously stept into the Lutheran church to be edifi ed with a sermon preached in High Dutch, which, I believe, when dressed up in the fashion of a discourse, he understood every bit as well as English” (24). The sneer here seems particularly unjust. Dromo could not have known that the sermon

Alexander Hamilton and the Tuesday Club 23

would be in High Dutch, because if there had been an indication that it would be, such as a sign outside of the church, he would not have been allowed even the rudimentary education to be able to notice that it was not in English. Instead, Hamilton seems at pains to suggest that his slave’s innate nature prevents him from being a Christian — Dromo can go to church all he wants, we are given to understand, but he will never truly be edifi ed.

Of course, Hamilton does not seem to believe that religion has much spiritual purpose anyway. When in Trenton, he speaks with Thomas Cadwallader, who complains of the “idle ceremonies that had been foisted into religious worship” (32). As Leo Lemay points out, Hamilton’s response reveals a “deistic theology” (227): “priests of all sorts and sects have made a kind of trade of religion, contriving how to make it turn out to their own gain and profi t,” Hamilton argues. “Men of sense of every perswasion whatsoever are sensible of the emptiness and nonsense of the mere ceremonial part of religion” but tolerate it “because the ignorant vulgar are to be dealt with in this point as we manage children by show-ing them toys in order to do that which all the good reasoning of the world never would” (32 – 33). No doubt, then, Hamilton’s sardonic com-ment about Dromo’s church-going is as much directed at the infl ated rhetoric he assumes the Lutheran minister will use as it is about Dromo’s congenital inability to reason. Robert Micklus, considering a similar an-ecdote in Itinerarium in which Hamilton mocks the speech of Dromo and that of a Dutch slave, argues that for Hamilton “race was not the issue,” because what Hamilton found off ensive was that lower-class peo-ple were “overstepping their bounds” (Comic 99). Something similar is at work in his description of Dromo at church, though Hamilton’s more general posture shows that race is at least part of the issue. At any rate, Hamilton’s anecdote suggests that intercourse in polite company in Phil-adelphia is more likely than religious rituals to educate his morals. Be-cause Dromo was denied the economic opportunity, education, and au-tonomy to enter polite society, he could not possess the wherewithal for the reasoning Hamilton thought necessary for truly religious feeling.

Hamilton would have dismissed this last point, surely, because he assumed people of African origin were unredeemably “vulgar,” with a few exceptions. While in New York, he dines with a company of gentle-man, and the discussion turns to “a certain free negroe in Jamaica who was a man of estate, good sense, and education” (48). Vincent Caretta points out that the man was Francis Williams, who was “arguably bet-ter known than [Olaudah] Equiano as a writer and personality” (213).


Williams fi gured prominently in abolitionist tracts because his example challenged the idea of “African inferiority” (218). For this reasons, sup-porters of slavery often depicted him as a “moral monster” (220).

While Caretta is alert to the ways that later writers tried to fi t Wil-liams into their notions of race, he does not consider Hamilton’s under-standing of him. It is useful to review the ways in which Hamilton gen-erally deals with opinions contrary to his own in Itinerarium. The fi rst way is by quoting the opposing view and then his own opinion, as I have shown in his discussion with Cadwallader. The second way is to con-demn the man and his opinions without quoting them. For example, while in Boston he meets a physician named William Douglas — I quote at length because I will return to this passage later in the essay — who he describes as

a man of good learning but mischievously given to criticism and the most compleat snarler ever I knew. He is loath to allow learn-ing, merit, or a character to any body. He is of the clinical class of physicians and laughs att all theory and practise founded upon it, looking upon empyricism or bare experience as the only fi rm basis upon which practice ought to be founded. He has got here about him a set of disciples who greedily draw in his doctrines and, being but half learned themselves, have not wit enough to discover the foibles and mistakes of their preceptor. This man I esteem a noto-rious physicall heretick, capable to corrupt and vitiate the practice of the place by spreading his erroneous doctrines among his shal-low brethren. (116 – 17)

Noticeably, personal character and faulty reasoning are shown to be hand-in-hand, and fl aws in both of these have pernicious social eff ect.

The third way is to describe the man in such a way as to render ev-erything he says ridiculous without actually disputing the opinion re-ported. Generally, Hamilton prefaces or concludes his account of the man’s opinions with an ironic phrase. Thus in New York he listens to “severall learned discourses” of Marcus Van Bummill, including this contention: “You pretend to know inward distempers and to cure them, but to no purpose; your art is vain. Find me out a doctor among the best of you that can mend a man’s body half so well as a joiner can help a crazy table or a stool” (53). Hamilton does not bother answering these arguments but had already undercut Van Brummil’s authority by de-scribing him a day earlier as drunken, speaking “bad English,” and a “bully and braggadocio” (51).


For Hamilton, an idea’s credibility depends upon the credibility of its speaker. The extent to which this is a social defi nition of truth becomes clearer when Hamilton meets a gentleman from Curaçao whom Hamil-ton fi nds rather ridiculous:

[He] told us that in a month’s time he had known either 30 or 40 souls buried, which, in his opinion, was a great number in the small neighborhood where he lived. I could scarce help laughing out at this speech and was just going to tell him that I did not think it was customary to bury souls anywhere but in Ireland, but I restrained my tongue, having no mind to pick a quarrell for the sake of a joke. (48)

Hamilton’s mirth presumably comes from the notion that bodies are buried and that souls are incorporeal; his attaching this turn of phrase to the Irish is especially signifi cant, since Hamilton’s more typical way of referring to a man from Ireland is by the slur, “Teague.”

The Curaçao gentleman reappears in the discussion of Williams, and it is important to consider the context of the comment:

We dined att Todd’s, with seven in company, upon veal, beaf steaks, green pease, and rasp berries for a desert. There, talking of a certain free negroe in Jamaica who was a man of estate, good sense, and education, the ’fore-mentioned gentleman who had entertained us in the morning about burying of souls, gravely asked if that ne-groe’s parents were not whites, for he was sure that nothing good could come of the whole generation of blacks. (48)

Clearly, readers are supposed to see the humor in Hamilton’s adverb, “gravely,” and to recognize that white parents could not engender a black child. By reminding the reader of the earlier anecdote, the gentleman’s opinions are rendered dubious. In short, he undercuts the gentleman’s testimony according to the third way I elucidated above: instead of di-rectly refuting what is said, he makes it seem ridiculous.

Oddly, the gentleman from Curaçao voices an opinion that, one would think, slave owners really ought to have. If some good can come out of that whole generation of Africans, then by extension slavery is wrong. Although it is hard to admire a man who own slaves, it can at least be said about the gentleman from Curaçao that he recognizes a contradiction to his own ideology. What, then, did Hamilton think about it? The information is reported as if there is an actual person who has the characteristics mentioned, though this is conditioned somewhat


by the fact that they were “talking” about Williams. Still, if Hamilton doubts the veracity of the report, he does not remark upon that — and this would be very unusual for Hamilton, who in other places has no trouble sizing up arguments and coming to a defi nite conclusion. He is “quite opinionated” (44), as Susan Imbarrato remarks, using an “author-itative voice” that “often reinforces his self-proclaimed position as arbi-trator of taste and behavior” (48). Here, it is the person who doubts that Williams can truly exist that is shown to be preposterous.

Given all of this, my contemporary readers can only be asking one question: What about Dromo? One wishes that Hamilton had retired to his bed that night, full of consternation; that in the morning, he called in his slave, and, apologizing in tears, set him free; that from that day forward, he resolved to spend his energies fi ghting the tyranny of slavery. Of course, Itinerarium is not a melodrama, and Hamilton did none of this. In his later work, History, his speculations on the origins of “Moors and Negroes” (I.41) demonstrate that the example of Williams had no profound infl uence on him. The speaker facetiously supposes that “Some of Noe’s [i.e., Noah’s] Jolly family, probably Ham, drank ’till he became black in the face, goggle eyed, fl at nosed, and blubber liped, and thus his posterity have remained ever since” (I.42). In fact, the his-torical Hamilton saw to it that Dromo was denied economic opportu-nity to the end. Lemay reports that in 1756 Hamilton ran an advertise-ment in the Maryland Gazette forbidding others from paying Dromo to do work for them, off ering a ten shilling reward to anybody willing to inform on somebody else doing business with Dromo (255).

Nevertheless, it cannot be argued that Hamilton never had any occa-sion to think of issues of race and slavery. Andy Doolen points out that Itinerarium records the lingering impact of the New York Conspiracy of 1741 — thirteen fi res in New York City in the spring and fall of 1741, thought to be “opening salvos in a massive slave insurrection” (Doolen 377); as a result, Hamilton reports, in New York there was “a law that no negroe shall be seen upon the streets with a lanthorn after dark” (88). Certainly, many of the areas he travels to did not accept slavery as a norm. In Norwalk, Connecticut, for example, he meets children who appar-ently had never seen a person of African extraction (see 168). Moreover, members of Hamilton’s gentleman’s club were not unanimous in their ideas about slavery. The Tuesday Club had both Quirpum Comic (John Beale Bordley) who argued against slavery, and Signior Lardini (Thomas Bacon), the author of Four Sermons, upon the Great and Indispensible Duty of All Christian Masters and Mistresses to Bring Up Their Negro Slaves in


the Knowledge and Fear of God (1750), who preached to congregations of slaves and ran an integrated charity school. Moreover, Maryland’s neigh-bor to the north, Pennsylvania, had a sizable population of Quakers, whose opposition to slavery was well known. Maryland itself had a sig-nifi cant Quaker minority, including Tuesday Club member, Coney Pimp Frontinbrass (Thomas Cumming); Hamilton’s History prints a letter from Frontinbrass to the club’s president signed in this way:

Your honors most devotedMost obsequious ServantSlave and confounded admirerConey Pimp Frontinbrass (III.215)

Hamilton expected his audience to see that this closing was comically inappropriate to the Quaker values of social leveling, plainness, and ab-olitionism.

In all, it seems clear that Hamilton was exposed to a wide range of views on race and slavery, and that while he might have considered slav-ery a necessary and desirable institution, he knew reasonable gentlemen who felt otherwise. It was not a position that he could have assumed ev-eryone held, and thus the notion that the example of Williams could prove the justifi cation for slavery a sham was not at all unthinkable. That is to say, we cannot rely on blind ideology to explain Hamilton’s si-lence on the matter.

Crucial to understanding Hamilton’s discussion of Williams is its so-cial context. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more sociable character than the way Hamilton portrays himself. He undertook his journey, he re-marks, “for health and recreation” (3), but from the evidence of Itiner-arium, he went to talk. Not only is he constantly conversing with nearly everyone he meets, but he views himself as a kind of connoisseur of con-versation. Meeting a woman in Boston, he remarks that, although she “cannot be deemed handsom,” he found her discourse “lively, entertain-ing, and solid, neither tainted with false or trifl ing wit nor ill natured sat-ire or refl exion” (141). On one evening in the Philosophical Club, Hamil-ton fi nds the topic turning to “fanaticks” and says that any discussion of them is just time thrown away, so “disgusted with such a stupid subject of discourse,” he leaves the club (152). He gives the conversation at Gov-ernor’s Club a mixed review: he fi nds most of the conversation “agreeable and instructing,” yet “some persons there showed a particular fondness for introducing gross, smutty expressions which I thought did not alto-gether become a company of philosophers and men of sense” (189 – 90).


This last clause is important for my discussion here, because Ham-ilton himself had a taste for the gross and smutty, so much so that the 1907 editor of Itinerarium very genteelly excised certain phrases and de-scriptions in his printed text (but supplied facsimiles of Hamilton’s au-tograph text so that scholars could see the removed phrases). Hamilton just did not think such expressions were proper for that company. More-over, his manner of evaluating social intercourse makes it clear that in some respects he considers his trip is a kind of New World Grand Tour. He expects to be edifi ed and is disgusted when he is not.

While in New York, Hamilton relates an anecdote that is especially indicative of the importance he places on social intercourse. He dines with a man whose conversation constantly revolves around the theme of how much better living in New York is to living in England. Hamil-ton comments that it appeared “he either would not, or did not, know much of that fi ne country England.” As ridiculous as the man’s conver-sation was, “he was a great person in the place, and therefor none in the company was imprudent enough to contradict him, tho some were there that knew better” (173 – 74). Hamilton goes on to draw a moral:

I have know in my time some of these great dons take upon them to talk in an extravagant and absurd manner: “What a fi ne tem-perate climate this is!” says a certain dictating fop, while every body that hears him is conscious that it is fi t for none but the devil to live in. “Don’t you think them fi ne oysters,” says another ex-alted prig, while every body knows that he is eating of eggs. This we cannot conceive proceeds from ignorance but from a certain odd pleasure they have in talking nonsense without being contra-dicted. This disposition may arise from the naturall perverseness of human nature, which is always most absurd and unreasonable when free from curb or restraint. (174)

The soul of productive social commerce, then, is disputation. As Wilson Somerville points out, Hamilton’s “model” was “Shaftesbury’s agenda for moral improvement through raillery and irony among small coteries of like-minded thinkers” (127). When men are allowed to express their opinions without check, they become absurd and dictatorial.

The ultimate moral of this anecdote is comparable to the moral of a tale told in Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759). Johnson and Hamilton are not often brought together, but they do share some traits — both were literary men, both were fond of quips, and both valued conversa-tion very highly. Chapters XL to XLVI of Rasselas relate the story of an


astronomer, who, after countless hours of lonely contemplation of the heavens, begins to believe that instead of merely recording the motions of the planets, he is in control of them. He “reasoned long against [his] own conviction,” but only with himself, and at last concluded that he had “the power of the seasons” (1058). Eventually, two gentlewomen visit him in an eff ort to dissuade him from his madness. Rather than directly disputing his delusions, they engage him in social intercourse and a va-riety of “sublunary pleasures” (1061)— not amorous adventures, but in-tellectual pursuits and the sort of delightful conversation that Hamilton had with the lady in Boston. By degrees, the astronomer relinquishes the notion that he is master of the universe “and began to trust less to an opinion which he could never prove to others” (1062). While it is easy to read this story as an example of the “dangerous prevalence of imagina-tion,” as the heading for chapter XLIV has it, it is also clear that truth and right reason can arise only in social context. Any intellect, no matter how brilliant or self-critical, goes awry into self-aggrandizement when removed from intercourse with society.

Thus, Hamilton’s “great person” is a real world example of Johnson’s fi ctional astronomer. The test of truth for both writers is not objective empiricism but social validation. Compare in this regard Hamilton’s cri-tique of Douglas, quoted above. Douglas is incapable of arriving at the truth because he will not listen to others; he relies solely on his own ob-servations and dismisses what learned men before him have said. “Em-piricism for empiricism’s sake,” Micklus comments, was believed by Hamilton to lead to “radical materialist positions” (Comic 22). For Ham-ilton, things are not so because you can prove them to yourself; they are true only if you can prove them to others in an open debate. When he hears reasonable men telling him that Williams did have good sense (and an unreasonable man disputing it), he is caught in the crosshairs of two confl icting ideologies: His repressive notions of race and class tell him that such an African cannot exist, yet the epistemological laws of sociability tell him that he must. And here, as always, Hamilton relies on his most profound convictions, and agrees, for that night, that Wil-liams was as he was presented. The next morning such an agreement is no longer particularly important since the social occasion for his agree-ment has passed.

The second apparent contradiction has already been noticed by Elaine G. Breslaw, who develops the notion that colonial gentlemen’s clubs in general and the Hamilton’s Tuesday Club in particular tended to use “wit and whimsy” to express “political concerns of the local, and more


than merely local, character” (“Wit” 296). Eighteenth-century Britain was re-evaluating relationships between king and parliament; in the politics of colonial Maryland, this division was embodied as a tug-of-war between “proprietary prerogative and legislative privilege, marked by contests between the court and popular, or country, parties” (“Wit” 300). Maryland was governed by a Lord Proprietor who legally had abso-lute, feudal power over all Marylanders. In practice, however, he needed the consent of the governed. Since both parties shared a common inter-est — making as much money as possible — they could at times agree on various issues. However, there were continuous disagreements over fees and taxes. The mandatory payments to the Anglican clergy were par-ticularly galling to those of other faiths, including the colony’s powerful Catholic minority. Time and again, the Maryland Assembly sought to reduce or eliminate taxes and fees, only to see them restored by the gov-ernor acting for the Proprietor.

In Hamilton’s History, these tensions are dramatized by constant disagreements between the faction that supported the club’s president, which constantly sought to protect the prerogatives and consolidate the power of the president, and a more Whiggish, country party group headed by Loquatious Scribble, who argued for “Clubical Liberty” (His-tory I.270). Breslaw points out, however, that Crinkum Crankum (Wil-liam Lux), who makes a passionate speech for complete and infl exible protection of all the president’s prerogatives, was, in his political life, an ardent member of the country party. Moreover, in his political life, Al-exander Hamilton was part of the “proprietary faction” (302). Breslaw concludes that members often used speeches in the club to satirize the rhetoric and underlying ideas of their opponents.

As sensible as this conclusion is, there are two reasons to view it with caution. The fi rst is that it is not at all unusual for people to argue for one political philosophy in one particular arena and another in a diff erent arena. Secondly, Breslaw assumes that Hamilton’s account is accurate, that Tuesday Club members said what Hamilton says they said. This as-sumption, however, is questionable. In the style of History, I will embark on a rather long digression (that is, perhaps, not really digressive) in order to address this issue before returning to my main argument.

Micklus points out that “four separate stages of composition went into the making” of History (History xxxv)—Hamilton’s actual minutes, his fair copy (now available in Breslaw’s edition, Records of the Tuesday Club of Annapolis), a draft of History, and the redraft that Micklus ed-ited. Micklus calls History a “comic novel,” Breslaw calls it a “mock epic”


(Records xvii), yet Somerville insists that the work is a “cultural perfor-mance” composed by many hands, and as such is an accurate albeit ex-aggerated and very rhetorical rendition of what was actually done and said at the club. As far as the Records, Lemay calls it “a straightforward account of the minutes” (250); Breslaw argues that Records constitutes “an unusual source of information on a variety of cultural and social themes” (Records ix). Breslaw and Somerville, as well as many others, use Records and History as a basis for historical data in their cultural studies of colonial Maryland. Somerville, for instance, says that we “must de-pend” on these texts for information about Charles Cole, since “few if any records survive” about him (22).

However, the fact that Charles Cole’s existence is chronicled only by Records and History in no way can be seen as support for the veracity of these two works. It is easy to see why Somerville and others want the texts to be trustworthy — once we ascertain the things that happened and what the people were like, we can begin to construct cultural histories. However, History makes many gestures toward its own fi ctive nature. The various pseudonyms are one such gesture. Another is in the work’s dedication, which claims to speak in a “plain easie and natural manner” and to avoid overpraising — this in the middle of a sentence so long it would make Henry James wince, in which the narrator praises (among other things) the dedicatee’s “gravity, Depth of Judgment, eloquence, Elocution, Erudition, probity and undaunted perseverance” (History I.12 – 13). He thus very obviously articulates one set of values while per-forming another. In this context, the work’s claim of historical accuracy, its “Strict regard to truth and Nature” (12), should be also viewed as ironic. For instance, his many assertions of the club’s antiquity are ob-viously farcical; the club lasted from 1745 to 1756, fairly long for a club, but hardly “ancient.” As Micklus notes, it was common for eighteenth-century novels to claim to be a true history; also like so many novels of the time, History features a “witty self-dramatizing narrator” comparable to that of Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews (History xxvii).

If History is fi ctional or at least partly fi ctional as is generally acknowl-edged, then the Records are tainted in some places because where the manuscript for the records is defi cient, Breslaw consulted History. More-over, I would adjudge that very few readers would agree with Lemay that the Records are a “straightforward account.” Certainly, the records begin that way — the most elaborate thing some of the earliest records do is record toasts, but slowly the records start to metamorphose into something quite diff erent. For one thing, the secretary (Hamilton) very


subtly begins to insert editorial comments. For example, he remarks that at sederunt (meeting) 26, “Mr. President Cole this night for the fi rst time mounted a magnifi cent chair provided for him at the expense of the Club” (21). The magnifi cence of the chair is an object of satire in History. Subsequent entries in Records and the narrator of History make it clear that Hamilton’s adjective means to mock both the notion that a chair could be magnifi cent and the president’s vanity in his desire for such a chair. The elaboration that the club paid for it hints at Hamil-ton’s irritation that he had to help fund the stupid thing.

Secondly, the secretary starts to include written letters, generally those from members asking pardon for missing a meeting. Very quickly these letters become more and more elaborate, more rhetorically infl ated in what Hamilton calls in the History the “Club Stile” (I.187)— in short, more satiric and simultaneously self-mocking, anything but straightfor-ward. Still, these letters would be part of a straightforward record if they were transcribed exactly as written. It is clear that sometimes they were not. The entries for sederunts 52 and 85 print letters from “Sir John Old-castle” (John Bullen) which, presumably, are accurate transcriptions of the letters — except that all the misspelled words are underlined. In an-other example of obvious tampering, part of the entry for sederunt 230 reads that a new member was confi rmed as “dictated by his honor the president, verbatim”; only the secretary added a “little Latin sentence . . . not only for the security of the Club, but for his honor’s entertainment” who liked such additions even though “he did not understand them” (Records 230). The satire here is more subtle than it might appear, since the Latin sentence inserted, “Salvis Societatis privilegiis et libertatibus” (Micklus translates this as “Without violating the privileges and liberties of the club” [History III.297] ) directly contravenes the absolute authority granted by the “verbatim” confi rmation formula.

In addition, it seems unlikely that even a secretary bent on mak-ing an honest, straightforward record would have been able to do so. Many times, for instance, the Records report various remarks made by members — some quite lengthy — that would have had to have been re-constructed. It also collects a number of speeches. Though some of the speeches may have been written down beforehand and submitted to the secretary, Somerville points out that many were “extemporaneous” (130). So how were they recorded? Under the best of circumstances, the re-cords of these speeches would have been only approximations of what was said, and the Tuesday Club was full of distractions. A main occupa-tion at the club was eating and drinking, and club members often made


comments (sometimes reported in Records) while speeches were going on. The Tuesday Club at its height was comprised of something like fi f-teen members, which, combined with guests, amounts to quite a lot of chatter and general hubbub. Add to this some of the more extraordi-nary events — such as the mock trials, which were full of extemporane-ous speech — and more and more of the Records, especially the sections of most interest to those in cultural studies, look like reconstructions by a secretary who was more interested in entertaining himself than in ac-curately representing. Given the character of Hamilton that is evident in Records and History, it seems likely that he would seek to exaggerate and otherwise improve any document he was supposed to copy — and, as I have shown, he was not above rewriting to make a passage mean pre-cisely the opposite of what its author intended.

If we read the Records straightforwardly, then, we are given many good reasons not to interpret them as a straightforward account. Somer-ville, seeking to make the case for the general veracity of Records and History, argues that “the entire club was involved in the manufacturing of the text” (22), pointing to a passage in sederunt 103 that mentions the minutes from the meeting being passed around. A closer look at that passage, however, leads to a much diff erent thesis:

The Club having observed this night that the book of records was too much handed and tossed about by certain over cautious and Inquisitive members, to the great hindrance of the Secretary in his offi ce of recording the proceedings, and entering the minutes of the Club, and to the Stirring up and encouraging needless dis-putes and objections concerning the laws, it was thus resolved, that at next meeting, the Club Shall take some method to prevent this abuse in the future, and the book Shall not be thus looked into upon all occasions, by every member at his own pleasure, while the Club is sitting, without leave given by the president and Club, and proper application made to the Secretary, who is the only per-son with whom the book of Records ought to be trusted. (113)

Given what we know about Hamilton’s methods, the fi nal two clauses (beginning “and proper application”) look suspiciously like the secre-tary’s surreptitious addition. More centrally, while this passage does show that members were looking at the minutes, it also shows that after this sederunt, it would be much more diffi cult to look at them. A per-son who desired to do so would have to petition the president, the club, and the secretary. Ironically, Somerville seeks to bolster his case that


the minutes (and thus Records and History) were communally composed with an anecdote which seems rather to mark the juncture at which Hamilton assumes sole authorship.

From the evidence I have just adduced, it is possible to construct a narrative: Hamilton begins as secretary just recording club laws and so forth, but pretty soon starts inserting here and there sly comments that could be construed as unintentionally ironic. Simultaneously, the inser-tion of letters opens up new fi elds of rhetoric that feeds his pleasure in Robert Burton-like prose. The early mock trials of William Thornton and John Bullen show him the possibility of incorporating narrative, and in sederunt 103 he seizes the opportunity for uninterrupted compo-sition. Subsequently, the Records become more and more novel-like; se-derunt 103 contains a rather long direct quotation of oral speech by John Bullen — the fi rst such instance in the Records — and subsequent entries use more and more quotations of informal discourse. It is in fact diffi cult to imagine Hamilton not improving as he composed. Somewhere along the line, it occurs to him to recompose the fi rst hundred or so sederunts in order to encompass the whole thing in a grand, ironic narrative. By doing so, he could further indulge in Robert Burtonism while improv-ing the things he had already improved upon. Thus we have the History.

Once Hamilton conceived of himself as the author of a narrative in which he is an important character, his subsequent actions became in an unusual way quixotic. History sometimes alludes to Don Quixote, and the motive for the activities of the Tuesday Club is reminiscent of mo-tives for action in the second part of Cervantes’ novel, in which the in-genious hidalgo continues his travels in the Spanish countryside, only this time he constantly meets gentlepeople who have read the fi rst part of the book. Already familiar with the outlandish character, they seek to increase their amusement by playing along, often creating elaborate scenarios so that they can observe their hero acting heroically. The self-consciously aesthetic cast to their actions means to provoke more text —for them Don Quixote is, in a literal sense, living literature. In the same way, the actions of the Tuesday Club, with its mock trials, insurrections, and general tumult, also become self-consciously dramatic productions.

All of this seriously compromises Records and History as historical documents full of “information” about colonial life. For one thing, the pervasive irony makes it diffi cult to discern not only the actual values the characters endorse but also the events as they actually happened and the words really said: is the inside joke of the Records and His-


tory the fact that members parodied the political ideas of their fellows, or is it that Hamilton ascribed speeches never uttered to people who never would have uttered them? Moreover, do outstanding events hap-pen because the members are responding to current events, or is it be-cause Hamilton thought his novel needed something? In short, I think it is very dangerous to try to discern, say, William Lux’s point of view from the History; it seems very likely that any speech, satirical or other-wise, he might have made was greatly embellished by Hamilton. Para-doxically, once Hamilton assumes sole authorship, everything we come across can safely be assumed to be “his”— and the more “accurate” text, then, would be History, but accurate only in registering one man’s ideol-ogy, and not the sorts of historical details (say, about Charles Cole) that we wish we could fi nd.

However, this does not remove the evident contradiction of Hamil-ton’s placing in the mouth of his club persona opinions that his “real-life” political persona would disavow. In fact, there are other contradic-tions that Breslaw does not acknowledge. There was a disputed result in the fi rst political offi ce Hamilton ran for, and in the midst of the tur-moil, Hamilton wrote to his brother, “I doubt I shall stand again . . . for tho I be a Lover of Liberty, and abhor force or oppression of any kind, and especially when they are exercised by an Insolent Government party, yet I like better to be a peace maker, than an Instrument of distur-bance in any Shape” (qtd. in History xvii). Perhaps it was the “insolence” that bothered Hamilton so much, but his rhetoric is that of the coun-try party. Further, Hamilton held a number of offi ces in his life, and, in his club at least, he was no peacemaker. So there are contradictions even in his “real” life. Even if we restrict ourselves just to History, if Lo-quatious Scribble’s country-party opinions are meant to be taken satiri-cally, what are we to do with the satirical presentation of the proprietary-party opinions? Identifying which ideas are Hamilton’s seems, from this perspective, simply picking and choosing which opinion is meant seri-ously and which satirically.

Again, I am not suggesting that there is no contradiction here, just that there is some logic to the contradiction. I agree with Breslaw and others that the work has a defi nite political purpose, but I think that purpose has been fundamentally misunderstood. Although there was indeed a country party and a proprietary party in colonial Maryland, History does not actually endorse either, because History ultimately re-jects the legitimacy of these factions, implying a much diff erent way of


analyzing politics, moving away from the convention of casting politi-cal diff erences as binary oppositions — country versus proprietary, liberal versus conservative, Scribble versus Crankum, and so forth.

It is perhaps appropriate that, in an essay about contradictions, I en-gage in a little self-contradiction myself. I have just said that it is very dangerous to take any part of the History “straight,” yet I am about to suggest that certain assertions in a book comprised of what Shields calls “playful ambiguities” (178) are meant a little more seriously than they appear. I off er two defenses for my inconsistency: fi rst, that the political values I am going to elucidate seem to be at work throughout the History and thus can be understood as the engine that drives the narrative; sec-ond, that these same values can be found in Itinerarium, a work where the irony is much more localized and easier to analyze.

In Book I of the History, the narrator inquires into the “merit and Dignity of Antiquity” of nations, clubs, and families (24). He concludes that all powerful civilizations were founded by “bold and valorous ac-tions of their Heroes and warlike Spirits, these illustrious Banditti, who used to range the face of the globe without controul, plundering, knock-ing on the head, burning, hewing to pieces and extirpating, the help-less and forlorn of their own Species” (24). These “Empires and states, in time, became very ancient, and therefore very honorable and venera-ble” (25). What about civilizations based on the “moral virtues”? They all found that “these supports” were too “weak,” and thus eventually found more eff ective supports in the

cutting of throats, burning, plundering, slaying, massacring and extirping whole Nations, proscribing their own Citizens, and kill-ing them up, like Sheep in a pen, by hundreds and thousands, whereby the Strongest was at last Sure of engrossing all power to themselves, amassing great treasure, and from this opulency sprung their permanency, Grandure, power, and honor. (25)

The assault on morality as a stable support for civilization is like that of Bernard Mandeville (mentioned in History at I.150 and III.18), but Ham-ilton does not seem to endorse The Fable of the Bees’ notion of “Private Vices, Public Benefi t.” Hamilton’s point here echoes that of the cultural critic David Lloyd, who has pointed out that all governmental power is, at least in its inception, illegitimate. That is to say, all nations have a point of origination where others are usurped, and, as the narrator here argues, become “honorable and venerable” simply as a result of having


been around for a long time. Even governments originally intended to be virtuous (Hamilton’s examples are Athens, Sparta, and the Roman Republic) fi nd they have to resort to the same techniques as did the “Ta-merlanes, Osman’s, Solyman’s” and other tyrants (24).

This inevitable progress is crucial to the work’s political stance. The narrator describes the Secretary as a “Sly, cunning, Insinuating, deceit-ful, mischief making member, the continual Author and promoter of Brawls, wrangles, Jealousies, Grumblings, heartburnings, hubbubs, and hurly burlys” (204). His one goal is, while claiming to act in the club’s best interest, “to make himself a person of weight and Importance, and in this indeed he resembled many other Secretaries and politicians, who, In Indiff erent matters can give very good advice, but whenever Self is to be served, that must of necessity be done, tho every body else go to the devil” (205). This seems to be a broad satire on politicians, and since Scribble generally justifi ed his ongoing battles with the president as a fi ght for clubical liberty, it appears to be an indictment of the country party. The narrator employs rhetoric of vice and virtue often used in the eighteenth century to characterize political debate. J. G. A. Pocock re-marks that, at the time, “the central question in Anglophone political theory” was “whether a regime founded on patronage, public debt, and professionalization of the armed forces did not corrupt both governors and governed; and corruption was a problem in virtue, not in right” (48). It was commonly asserted to be virtuous to selfl essly serve the state and thus work for the good of others.

However, this logic holds only insofar as the state is an agent of good and actually operates to serve a common interest. The narrator’s open-ing remarks tell us something much diff erent. Is it indeed virtuous to serve a state that maintains itself through “cutting of throats, burning, plundering, slaying, massacring”? The narrator says the state murders its own citizens for the benefi t of a very few. In such a state, there is no real common interest. And, the narrator tells us, this is true of every state that survives. He does not hold out the possibility for reform or that there are more benign states. It seems the actual satire is the rhetoric of vice and virtue and not the secretary’s self-serving antics. The man who pursues his own interest may not care if others go to hell, but the state is the devil himself. In such a world, wholly divided into nations built on murder and the jealous hoarding of power, what is a reasonable man to do? Serving the government only means helping the powerful at the ex-pense of the less so.


Compare, in this regard, Hamilton’s portrayal of Pennsylvania poli-tics in Itinerarium:

Their government is a kind of anarchy (or no government), there being perpetual jars betwixt the two parts of the legislature. But that is no strange thing, the ambition and avarice of a few men in both parties being the active springs in these dissentions and al-tercations, tho a specious story about the good and interest of the country is trumpt up by both; yet I would not be so severe as to say so of all in generall. (29)

Again, we see the distrust of the rhetoric of virtue, and government as a war between powerful men pursuing their personal interests. The fi nal clause helps defi ne the diff erence between Itinerarium and History, be-cause the latter is a satirical work that operates by exaggeration, so there are no such qualifi cations.

Interestingly, Hamilton goes on in Itinerarium to praise the gover-nor of Pennsylvania, George Thomas, saying that he is really an “upright man and has the interest of the Province really at heart.” As evidence, Hamilton mentions that Thomas has “done more for the good of that obstinate generation, the Quakers, than any of his predecessours have done” (29). Throughout Itinerarium, Hamilton expresses his low regard for Quakers and constantly inveighs against religious enthusiasm. Ham-ilton thinks it would be a better world if there were no Quakers, but still he contends that Thomas is a good governor because he has acted in their interest. Thus, the “interest of the Province” is really a balancing of interests. In this way, Hamilton’s political theory is essentially that of Ebenezer Cooke, the Maryland poet of an earlier generation, who also consistently used satire to imply that the only sort of government that can work is one that balances interests. For Cooke as well as Hamilton, the best government is based on no great principle — there is no partic-ular concern for “rights,” however they might be conceived, no admo-nitions for passive obedience to authority, and no indication that all of creation is conjoined by a great chain. From a twenty-fi rst century per-spective, the careful balancing of interests may seem to be ultimately ethical, but Hamilton thought it merely pragmatic, virtuous only in not relying on obviously false and self-serving rhetoric.

Thus the logic of Hamilton’s apparently contradictory attitudes to-ward proprietary power is that he will always pursue his own self-interest, knowing that as he does so, everyone else is engaged in the same pur-suit. I think his diffi culties in getting married provide an instructive an-


ecdote to help support this. Ellen Breslaw notes that Hamilton was a younger son of an educated Scottish family who was expected to make it on his own, so that he arrived in colonial Maryland intending, he wrote his brother, to fi nd a “moneyd wife” (qtd. in Breslaw “Marriage” 657). He had rank but few resources, relying on professional success and his own sociability to make himself attractive to eligible women with money. Breslaw points out that Hamilton had attempted to court “a young woman of the highest rank,” Elizabeth Tasker, but lost out to a wealthy merchant (“Marriage” 663). How did Hamilton understand this experience? It certainly must have occurred to him that as he was look-ing for a moneyed wife, the Taskers were on the lookout for a moneyed husband. But I doubt that he felt very comforted by this, because every-where in his writing (as I have shown) Hamilton values sociability most highly. It is hard to imagine Hamilton not saying to himself something like, “Well, she will have comfort, but at the price of a life of inane dis-course. With me, she could have been cultured and happy.” My point is, that in imagining ideal circumstances for social intercourse, Ham-ilton imagined a zone of complete liberty where men could distinguish themselves and rise above others with only the talents that he happened to have. I have shown that Hamilton is apt to criticize the powerful if their conversation is not up to his high standards; in his writings there is no passage in which he reports satisfying conversations with people very far below his own rank. In this way, Hamilton did not conceive of his zone as egalitarian, since pleasing conversation needs the kind of pol-ish available only to a person with the means to get a good education. Hamilton’s social zone (I hesitate to label this a Habermasian “sphere” for many reasons, most obviously because it is unclear if anybody other than Hamilton conceived of this zone) is one whose contours are set to benefi t someone of his own class and with his own abilities.

Thus in History Hamilton equates the socializing of his club with its politics. We are to understand that, men being what they are (and as-suming the inability of moral principles to provide order), the function of government is to provide certain men an opportunity to fi ght for their slice of the pie. The more successful citizens get a bigger slice, and by de-nying a man like Dromo a seat at the table, they make their slices that much bigger. Hamilton assigns everybody in the Tuesday Club an in-sulting nickname, and in doing so eff aces their actual standing and ren-ders them within his system. The effi cacy of the new system of providing Hamilton what he desired is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that he eventually did fi nd a moneyed wife from his contacts in the club.


this essay has striven to show how sociability acts in Hamilton’s writings as a way of making sense of the world and directing action. A secondary consideration all along has also been its connection to power relationships. I will conclude with two short comments on power and method.

The readers of History have duly noted that an overarching narra-tive is impressed upon the doings of the club, a moral tale of how luxury causes the club’s fall from grace. Like many of such moral-political tales, it turns out that the club’s fall begins almost immediately, when in the tenth sederunt Nasifer Jole’s introduction of rack punch was the fi rst of many “gradual Steps” whereby he used “madam Luxury” to ascend to power (I.150). He is fi nally elected the club’s president after setting an el-egant table and serving cake. The narrator laments that

this fatal Cake, Compleated the Catastrophe of the Clubs liberty, and, as Esau sold his birthright to Jacob, for fair words and a mess of porridge, so this unhappy Club, bartered their Liberty to Nasi-fer Jole Esqr, for an old Song, Rack punch, plumb pudding, four pounds of Candles, and an Iced Cake! (I.173).

The hyperbole of this lament — Shields calls it a “mock Jeremiad” (178) — is so great that it masks a more subtle irony. While the raison d’etre of the Tuesday Club is sociability and what we would call today network-ing, its sine qua non is eating and drinking, so much so that a protracted debate ensues over whether cheese ought to be considered “a dish of vit-tles” (II.150) and fi t to be served as a main course. Then as now, most so-cial intercourse comes after a great deal of lubrication. Is it so bad that the presidency of such a club goes to the man who serves the best vittles?

My point is that the deeper satire of History’s narrative is directed not at the individual foibles of this or that character (that is the source of the farce) but at the narrator’s politico-moral assumptions. Hamilton did not believe in the universal, inalienable rights that Thomas Jeff er-son would later assert, nor did he think that it was government’s duty to protect those rights. Further, political events in both Britain and co-lonial Maryland had shown that succession in government was not in-evitable but subject to political machinations, and common experience seemed to indicate that the king and his agents rarely, if ever, acted as if they were divine actors in a providential plan. If government is founded on no great, transcendent principle, what is left but its ability to pro-vide the best vittles? It is worthwhile to consider the elections in the United States, a country where schoolchildren are routinely informed


about their rights and the government’s role in protecting them. Is it not true that many if not most elections are won by the candidate who per-suades the voters that he can best help the economy, create jobs, produce tax cuts, improve roads, reform education — that is to say, who can best deliver the vittles?

Since I have spent some time in this paper criticizing the methods of others, it is appropriate that I conclude by refl ecting on my own. A good deal of my argument rests on instructive anecdotes, careful registering of irony, and close readings of key passages — in short, this analysis tends to focus on “literary” aspects of the texts even as it seeks to elucidate social and political conditions. I do this in full knowledge that the very same impulse that makes me put quotation marks around the word, “literary,” has made others dismiss the category altogether. But as we cast doubt on literariness as a classifi cation of value, we should not ignore its status as a historical reality. There is no doubt that sometimes in Itinerarium and always in History, Hamilton was self-consciously creating a written, artful text. Ignoring these elements, I have shown, can lead to missing or underestimating irony, reading farce as fact, and poorly appreciating the complexities and contradictions of a writer’s perspective. Most perni-cious, I think, is that too often cultural studies consider written texts as merely mimetic or reactive and thus overlook the degree to which they are creative, inventing worlds that never existed. I have suggested, for ex-ample, that the self-conscious actions of the characters in History often seem geared to creating dramatic situations suitable for “literature” with-out particular regard to local tensions or personal inclination.

Using the “information” from such texts can provide a stable basis for constructing cultural histories, but it does so at great cost. While mak-ing it less diffi cult to fi nd evidence for the notable ideas of theorists, it also shows an almost Augustan respect for established authority, doing more to reify existing theory than to analyze the texts the theories are supposed to help elucidate. And when we decide, fi nally, that our job is to prove other people right, we have diverged very far from what I con-sider to be the soul of academic pursuit — the scrupulous consideration (or reconsideration) of texts and evidence.

works cited

Breslaw, Elaine G. “Marriage, Money, and Sex: Dr. Hamilton Finds a Wife.” Journal of Social History 36.3 (2003): 657 – 873.

——, ed. Records of the Tuesday Club of Annapolis 1745 – 56. Urbana: U Illinois P, 1988.


——.“Wit, Whimsy, and Politics: The Uses of Satire by the Tuesday Club of Annapolis, 1744 to 1756.” The William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 32.2 (1975): 295 – 306.

Caretta, Vincent. “Who Was Francis Williams?” Early American Literature 38.3 (2003): 213 – 238.

Doolen, Andy. “Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741.” American Literary History 16.3 (2004): 377 – 406.

Hamilton, Alexander. Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton. Ed. Carl Bridenbaugh. Williamsburg: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1948.

——. The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club. (1756). Ed. Robert Micklus. 3 vols. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 1990.

Imbarrato, Susan Clair. Declarations of Independency in Eighteenth-Century American Autobiography. Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 1998.

Johnson, Samuel. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. (1759). Eighteenth-Century English Literature. Eds. Geoff rey Tillotson, Paul Fussell, and Marshall Waingrow. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969. 1020 – 1065.

Lemay, J. A. Leo. Men of Letters in Colonial Maryland. Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 1972.

Micklus, Robert. The Comic Genius of Dr. Alexander Hamilton. Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 1990.

Pocock, J. G. A. Virtue, Commerce, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Schmidt, Klaus H. “A Scotsman in British America; or, Up against Provincialism: The Construction of Individual and Collective Identities in Dr. Alexander Hamilton’s Itinerarium.” Early America Re-Explored: New Readings in Colonial, Early National and Antebellum Culture. Eds. Klaus H. Schmidt and Fritz Fleischmann. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 151 – 181.

Shields, David S. Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America. Williamsburg, VA: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1997.

Somerville, Wilson. The Tuesday Club of Annapolis as Cultural Performance. Athens: U Georgia P, 1996.

Race, Power, and Sociability in Alexander Hamilton's RECORDS OF THE TUESDAY CLUB

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