Sold – Hamilton Promotes the Establishment West Point

I left with General Pinckney a project of a military school

Hamilton was one of the primary proponents of the U.S. Constitution, and his “Federalist Papers” were instrumental in its acceptance by the public and passage. George Washington made him the first Treasury Secretary, and in that post he quickly developed and maneuvered into law an economic program of extraordinary vision and scope. Its main components included funding of the federal deficit at par and assumption of state debts, establishment of the national credit, the founding of a national bank, and provision of assistance and encouragement to manufacturing and invention. The success of Hamilton’s program won the business community to the government's support and played a key role in the nation’s economic development.

In the turbulent years following the French Revolution, the U.S. was subjected to costly and humiliating seizures at sea by France and Britain. By 1798 the situation was intolerable, and in July war against France was looming and an army needed to be recruited, trained and led. The aging George Washington was commander in chief of U.S. forces, but he declined active command. Instead he wanted Hamilton to be appointed Inspector General, which would make him second in command of the U.S. Army and its actual leader.

President Adams opposed the selection, preferring someone less political, but with his Secretary of War James McHenry and Washington both insisting on Hamilton, he nominated Hamilton and sent his name to the Senate, which approved on July 19, 1798.

Hamilton was a visionary, and by the time he took office as Inspector General, he was looking not merely to manage the current situation, but to create long-term solutions. He determined that the only way to prevent the evils through which the nation was suffering was to strengthen the national defense. So from the first, he advocated creation of a professional military (even in peacetime), and establishment of a military academy to train officers. Both of these ideas met with strong opposition, as many Americans felt that a professional military would enable tyrants to destroy the liberties of the people. He and George Washington communicated extensively on this topic. It represented a shared vision forged in the trials of battle during the Revolution.

In office, Hamilton found the U.S. military utterly inadequate to the task at hand, and he set about trying to return Revolutionary War officers to active duty, and to generating enlistments to build an army for a war that was potentially imminent. However, he found opponents pushing back, and he felt, obstructing his work in a way dangerous to the nation. Soon he received complaints that the appointments of some officers who were willing to serve were being subjected to delays, or they never received their commissions. And while handling the emergency needs of the military, Hamilton persisted in his long-term projects as well. In late 1798 he traveled up the Hudson River to West Point to visit a potential site for an American military school.

Autograph Letter Signed as Inspector General of the Army, marked “Private”, New York, December 26, 1798, to Secretary of War James McHenry, bemoaning the state of the national defense and promoting his military academy project.?McHenry, like Hamilton, had served as an aide to George Washington during the Revolution. Later he represented Maryland at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 and signed the U.S. Constitution. “As it may not have possibly come to you through any other channel, I think it well to inform you that General [Ebenezer] Huntington has been displeased at not at not having received official notice of his appointment with his commission. This, if not already so, ought to be remedied. I hear nothing of nominations. What malignant influence hangs upon our military affairs?” He adds as P.S. “I left with General Pinckney a project of a military school, which he was to have sent me. Has he quitted Philadelphia? If so, have you heard anything of this paper? I want it.”

The Quasi-War with France would remain undeclared and end in 1800, and the war with Britain would not commence until 1812, well after Hamilton’s death. But both points of his far-sighted 1798 military program would come into being. In 1802, President Jefferson established the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and it opened that year. Graduates became part of a permanent military, one that replaced weakness with strength in the nation’s defense. This was the greatest legacy of Hamilton's time as Inspector General of the Army, yet we have never seen a Hamilton letter about it.