War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901)

by Sedgwick, John

  Her husband took up her father’s line as he bellowed from the Newark pulpit that the Duquesne massacre only portended worse calamities to come, all of them richly deserved. “Our men slaughtered! Our wives and daughters delivered to the lusts and fury of a lawless soldiery! Our helpless babes dashed against the stones!” It was too much for Esther. “’Tis very probable that you and I may live to see persecution,” she soberly told Sally Prince, “and may be called to give up everything for the cause of God and a good conscience—even to burn at the stake.”

  In 1754, Esther had given birth to her first child, Sarah, whom neither parent admired, Burr predicting she’d be a “numbhead,” and Esther insisting, rather tepidly, she’d be “above middling on all accounts.” In the snows of early February, two years later, the Reverend Burr was off attending to his pastoral duties—leaving Esther, almost nine months into her second pregnancy, feeling that the “Sun does not give as much light as it did when my best Self was at home.” Heavy with child, she lumbered through the snowdrifts to a friend’s that chilly Wednesday evening, February 5, to keep her spirits up. The next morning she was feeling “very poorly unable to write.” That afternoon, her husband still away, she delivered Aaron Burr Jr.

  Aaron proved a weakly baby, prone to flu and other illnesses. His health gradually improved, but Esther was not drawn to him. “A little dirty Noisy Boy,” she called him, fairly hissing. “Very sly and mischievous.” It was with some reluctance that she admitted he was more energetic than Sally, “and some say handsomer, but not so good tempered.” He must have cried, fussed, refused to be calmed, for she concluded: “He requires a good governor to bring him to terms.”

  After Aaron turned one, Esther bundled him up for the long journey by sled to Stockbridge to show him to her parents. A frightening passage anyway, it was made all the worse by the terrible news from August 10 that the British Fort Oswego in upstate New York had fallen to the French and Indians. Worse still was the duplicity: As terms of the surrender, the French general Montcalm had assured the English soldiers that they would be unharmed once his troops entered the fort. The French observed the agreement, but once the soldiers were inside, the Indians sprang on the defenseless English, scalped dozens of them, butchered others, and made off with the rest.*

  To Esther, it was all too awful. In her imagining, Indians were everywhere. The Mohawks were keen to take revenge on the turncoat Stockbridge Indians and their English keepers. Esther imagined she could see savages flitting in the shadows of the thick, leafy woods all around, their faces streaked with war paint, bows drawn to pierce her and her baby Aaron with arrows, or butcher them both with tomahawks, all amid fearful screams of battle, knives at the ready to scalp her and who knew what else.

  At the family house on Main Street, the Reverend Edwards tried to reassure her that God never punished without good reason. If the English had suffered, it was because they deserved it. From the pulpit, he insisted to his anxious parishioners that it would be far worse to lose God than to lose their lives. Esther found that some comfort, but still, she decided to return home directly with young Aaron; it was too frightening to stay. Before she left, her father instructed her to remain close to God and all would be well. “What a mercy that I have such a Father!” she declared after she left. “What a guide!”

  When she returned, the new college in Princeton was almost complete, a staggering accomplishment, a new Jerusalem. The main building, Nassau Hall, rose three stories and was 176 feet long and a third as wide. Esther was sure it was the biggest “on the continent.” A handsome president’s house stood beside. The students responded with such enthusiasm that it seemed the college was experiencing an “awakening” all of its own, Aaron Burr Sr. noted proudly. “Religious concern has been universal. Not one student excepted.”

  The next summer, 1757, Burr Sr. rode to Stockbridge to tell his father-in-law the thrilling news in person. By now, though, the town was virtually under siege. The French and Indian forces had taken the British fort at Lake George, less than a hundred miles away—close enough, Burr wrote Esther, that they could “hear the firing at the fort” in Stockbridge. Rev. Burr decided not to tarry, but hurried home again, arriving at their impressive new Princeton quarters as the leaves fell in October. He’d hardly gotten there before he had to set out again to Elizabethtown, ten miles distant, to see what he could do about exempting a student from military duty.

  When he returned this time, he was crushed to discover that New Jersey’s governor Belcher, loyal supporter of the college, had just died at seventy-five. “Such a loss,” he lamented to Esther.* Already exhausted from his travels, he felt obliged to labor over the funeral sermon, but the strain brought on a burning fever that left him delirious. “The whole night after he was irrational,” Esther reported. Weak, blurry, Burr was determined to deliver the oration in Newark all the same. When he came back, he was ghostly pale. Drenched with fever, wheezing, white, he collapsed into bed and never rose again. He died three weeks later. He was forty-two.

  Esther was devastated. As awful as it was to lose her bedmate, she was frightened she would not set a proper Christian example for her children, as her father had made clear was essential to warding off such calamities. “I am afraid I shall conduct myself so as to bring dishonor on my God, and the religion which I profess!” she wrote her mother. “No, rather let me die this moment than be left to bring dishonor on God’s holy name.” Pathetically, she begged her not to “forget their greatly-afflicted daughter (now a lonely widow), nor her fatherless children.” She tried to see by her suffering that God was close by. And he sometimes truly seemed to be. After burying her husband, Esther told her mother, “God has seemed sensibly near”—and shown her the way to deliverance. “God has given me such a sense of the vanity of the world, and uncertainty of all sublunary enjoyments as I never had before,” she announced. “The world vanishes out of my sight! Heavenly and eternal things appear much more real and important, than ever before.”

  In the midst of these trials, Aaron Jr. came down with a raging fever of his own that left him churning on the bed, his hair drenched with sweat. Esther took that as a sign of God’s love too. He wished to claim her boy. It was all too beautiful, to be immersed in so much divine love. “I was enabled to resign the child,” she wrote her father. “God showed me that the child was not my own, but his.” Her husband dead, the boy’s life ebbing—the very gloom was thrilling. “He enabled me to say, Although thou slay me, yet will I trust in thee.” “One evening, in talking of the glorious state my dear departed must be in,” she confided to her father, “my soul was carried out in such long desires after this glorious state, that I was forced to retire from the family to conceal my joy.” It was beyond happiness. “When alone, I was so transported and my soul carried out in such eager desires after perfection, and the full enjoyment of God, and to serve him uninterruptedly, that I think my nature would not have borne much more.” She ended: “I think I had a foretaste of Heaven.”

  It was the full flower of her father’s preaching. Hell may be below, but God was above, and one need only reach for him. The Reverend Edwards himself came to Princeton to take over the presidency vacated by his son-in-law and to occupy the house in which he’d died. He had been in Princeton only a few months, when, to protect himself from an epidemic of smallpox that was sweeping through the colonies, he had himself inoculated by a Philadelphia physician, Dr. William Shippen, the founder of the medical college there, and a good friend of the family. Edwards had been a naturalist before he was a theologian, and he wished to demonstrate the value of medical science to the academic community. The inoculation was a fairly simply matter of slicing open a small wound, inserting a few pustules of the disease, and letting the body develop immunity as it healed. By a quirk, the technique had been brought from Africa by a “Negro-man” owned by the prominent Puritan minister Cotton Mather, and it may have taken on a tinge of divine providence. In this case, however
, the inoculation did not confer immunity. It gave him the full-blown disease.

  Smallpox is hideous and excruciating, as the pox bubble up, lifting off bloody sheets of crusty skin, torturing the sufferer in his bed, every movement a dagger slice of pain. Worse for Edwards, the pox encrusted the roof of his mouth and throat so thickly he couldn’t speak above a whisper, and eating or drinking was impossible. But Edwards bore it all stoically, unmoving, his eyes on the ceiling, his afflictions a sign of God’s tender, embracing love. He rasped to his daughter Lucy, who had rushed down from Stockbridge: “It seems to me to be the will of God that I must shortly leave you.” He told her to thank their mother for producing “a most uncommon union” with him, and he directed his children, after his death, “to seek a Father, who will never fail you.” The end came on March 22. Dr. Shippen attended him; he said he had never seen anyone go with such “continued, universal, calm, cheerful resignation.”

  Esther was inoculated successfully, but she soon came down with a fever that produced such hellish sweats and violent headaches that her mind floated free of reality altogether. Unmindful of her two children, she babbled incoherently for two weeks until she died, too, on April 7. She was twenty-seven. At the news, her friend Sally Prince fell into a pit of mourning for her beloved “Burrissa,” who “held the empire of my breast.” But she resolved to love the Lord all the more.

  TWO

  Contentment

  IN 1745, ON the West Indian island of Saint Croix, three weeks’ sail from New York, a cheerful, rather flirty sixteen-year-old redhead named Rachel Faucette lived with her mother, Mary, on a small plantation called the Grange. It was owned by Rachel’s sister Ann and her prosperous husband, James Lytton. It was perhaps an hour’s climb by horse up from the main port of Christiansted, with a fine view of the Caribbean and a steady breeze to counter the dusty island’s baking heat. Mary had come there with Rachel to escape her husband, John Faucette. A French Huguenot, he’d come to the nearby island of Nevis to escape the brutal French persecution after the religiously tolerant Edict of Nantes had been summarily revoked at the end of the previous century. John Faucette had learned doctoring, enough to pass himself off as a healer, and probably as a veterinarian, too. The couple had seven children, but despite John’s medical skills, five of them died from one or another of the many contagions—malaria, dysentery, yellow fever—that burned through the island. That was hard enough for both parents to bear, but when some land investments soured, dropping the family into poverty, John Faucette turned bitter, then outright cruel, and Mary decided to take Rachel and leave him. The abuse from him must have been extreme, for she obtained from the island’s chancellor the right, rarely granted, to “live apart for the rest of their lives,” and also won a writ of “supplicavit,” enjoining her husband not to injure her physically or to “vex, sue, implead” her legally.

  But the agreement also required Mary to renounce all rights to her aging husband’s property after his death; her share would go to Rachel instead. While she did receive a scant annuity, it would be hardly enough to keep the two from starvation. A marriageable daughter was about the only asset Mary possessed.

  A Dane lived on the next estate, lower down the hill. Thirty years old, Johann Michael Lavien was tall, pale, and handsomely dressed in laced vests and dress coats, and, while he was neither vigorous nor charming, he expressed a romantic interest in Rachel that was welcomed by her mother, Mary, if not by her. To Mary, Lavien seemed like the perfect man to restore her fortunes: a well-to-do planter who’d been highborn in Danish society and retained his standing in the Danish court. To Rachel, there was something drooling about Lavien that made her uneasy. As was said later, he seemed to have the “mouth of a shark.”

  Nonetheless, Rachel married Lavien at the Grange, with her sister and brother-in-law attending, and they settled next door on the broad estate he called Contentment. As soon as the couple was wed, the name proved bitterly ironic. For far from being highborn and prosperous, Lavien came to the marriage possessing little more than the fine clothes he’d worn to win Rachel, and his property was mortgaged to the hilt. Like so many other islanders, he’d come to Saint Croix to make a fortune in the sugar trade, only to lose whatever money he had. By marrying him, Rachel had taken a similar gamble, with a similar result.

  No longer was he the genteel, courtly man he’d seemed to be while wooing. “A coarse man of repulsive personality,” sniffed a Hamilton descendant. In the records at Saint Croix, he spelled his last name half a dozen ways—Lovien, Lawine, and so on—probably to disguise his origins as a Sephardic Jew, not that such a background would have been a liability on an island like Saint Croix with a significant Jewish population. Still, his reversal of fortune did for him what a similar turn had done for Rachel’s father. It made him angry, and then mean, and then Lavien took it out on his wife. Rachel bore it for five miserable years, and then, in her desperation, left him, and even abandoned their son, Peter, not much more than a toddler. In his fury, Lavien brought the Danish court down on her, charging her not only with marital abandonment, but also with the worse crime of adultery, as he insisted that she had committed “errors” while they lived together, not just afterward. The fact that Rachel did not dispute the charge suggests it must have been true. That left the Danish authorities with no choice but to clap her in prison—a grim, dark, low-ceilinged hell in the Christiansted fort by the boisterous harbor. There, kept alive on cornmeal mush and an occasional scrap of cod, she sprawled on a dank stone floor, staring out a window slit through some sharply tipped iron bars at a slender patch of sky.

  When she was released months later, she fled the island and made for nearby Saint Kitts to start afresh. Despite her tortured history, Rachel was still pert and enticing at twenty-one, and men noticed, one of them a Scotsman named James Hamilton, who, like Lavien, had come to the islands to make a fortune in the sugar trade and largely failed. Unlike Lavien, however, his lineage was genuine: the son of the fourteenth laird of the so-called Cambuskeith line of Hamiltons, who traced their lineage back to a twelfth-century castle ironically also called the Grange. James Hamilton was raised in Kerelaw Castle, an ivy-draped pile by the Firth of Clyde with a view of a rolling green landscape, where the Hamiltons owned half the arable land in the parish.

  Since James was one of eleven children, including nine sons, and nowhere near the oldest, he had no chance of becoming the fifteenth laird, and he utterly lacked the qualities of industry and imagination to make up the deficit. “Bred to trade,” his grandson John Church Hamilton admitted.* He was hired out by an older brother to work in an inkle factory producing linen tapes, but James didn’t catch on, and, all his options exhausted, he went to sea.

  Sugar was so profitable that competence was not essential to success, but it did help. James was undercapitalized and unlucky, but most of all he was inept. His brother John sent enough money to keep him from starving—but not enough to allow him to leave. The islands became his prison, just as they were for Rachel. Hamilton was working a menial job in the harbor at Saint Kitts when he met Rachel sometime in the early 1750s. Both were in social free fall—Rachel by her jail stay and Hamilton because of his financial failings. But Rachel had a flair, nicely symbolized by her flaming red hair, and obvious gumption to have risked everything to flee a husband she loathed. And James Hamilton’s aristocratic pretensions might have given her soul a lift. Relationships outside of marriage weren’t approved on Saint Croix, but they were common enough, and the two felt no obligation to withdraw from each other for lack of a marriage certificate. To start over, Rachel and Hamilton crossed to Nevis, the island from which her mother had fled, and where she’d inherited from her father, recently deceased, a small, two-story stone cottage by the sea in the port town of Charlestown. The thick limestone blocks of the house were a product of the slave economy. (With free slave power, heavy blocks were no more expensive than light ones, and held a tighter seal.) Cramped and ill lit, the house
was not pleasant on the bottom floor, which they reserved for themselves, but this was the tropics, and, for all but sleeping and the most private acts, life was lived in the open air. And it was here, on January 11, 1755, that Rachel squatted over the earthen floor, a midwife hovering over her, straining to give birth to a son whose name would reflect James Hamilton’s frustrations and his aspirations both. He would be Alexander Hamilton, named for James’s father, the fourteenth laird, and heir to the Grange. Alexander was the couple’s second son after James, who’d been named for his father and was two years older. Alexander would be the couple’s last child.

  ON A MAP, the island of Nevis was nearly a perfect oval, just seven miles across. Viewed from the sea, however, it seemed to go almost straight up, a steep, greened-over, jagged-topped volcano that rose more than three thousand feet to disappear into the swirling clouds. If Saint Croix and Saint Kitts and the other Leeward Islands were flat and peaceable, Nevis was bulked up, an angry god that cast a dark shadow across the sea.

  In 1755, Nevis was home to about a thousand European settlers, most of them planters like Johann Lavien and James Hamilton who’d come to make or restore their fortunes. But they were vastly outnumbered by the ten thousand “nigro” slaves, a churning mass of African muscle imported by slave ships that unloaded their wares in the harbor not far from the Hamiltons’ stone house, their cargo to be paraded into the town square, where they would be displayed in cages, often naked, for bulk purchase. The slaves worked the sugar fields that made Nevis some of the richest land in the world.

  In 1755, Nevis and the five other sugar-producing Leewards exported goods of greater value than all thirteen American colonies combined, and when the English were trying to decide whether to give France all of Canada or the single sugar-producing island of Barbados, it was a very close decision. Once reserved for sweetening the tea and coffee of European nobles, sugar had become more pervasive, and the trade infinitely more lucrative, as the sweetener found its way into cakes, candy, jam, pastry, and innumerable other sweets for which the middle class had developed a craving. Just in England, the importation of sugar jumped from 10,000 tons a year in 1700 to 150,000 tons a century later. Sugar was white gold.