With sweetness the lure, Nevis became a global trading center, as if it weren’t on the edge of the world, but at the very center of it. African monkeys and mahogany trees, Indian mangoes, Tahitian breadfruit, Spanish oranges—everything on the island seemed to come from somewhere else. Only the monstrous iguanas were native-born. They were five feet long, with green-and-gold scales that were metal hard; it could take three bullets at point-blank range to kill them. And, of course, the slaves came to enrich the planters, receiving nothing but misery in return. They worked under a broiling sun from dawn to dusk, felling the trees, clearing the fields, planting the sugarcane, then hacking off the cane from a plant that grew head high, and hauling it off to windmills that powered rollers to squeeze out the sweet juice—and sometimes caught a hand or an arm in the process. The juice was boiled down to precious granulated sugar, which was then exported by ship. Primitive and unabashed, many of the Africans worked naked, giving their masters all the more flesh to sting with their whips. One especially sadistic planter, Edward Huggins, established the island record for cruelty when he gave a male slave 365 lashes and brought his whip down on a female for 292 more. Brought into court for malicious conduct, Huggins was exonerated: His slaves were his property to do with as he liked. Worn out by their misery, two of every five imported slaves died within five years of their arrival on the islands.
In the face of such horrors, the slaves were not placid, which is why half the cannons at that Christiansted fort where Rachel Faucette was imprisoned were trained inland. An Anglican minister named Robert Robertson in 1727 saw that whites and blacks were both enslaved, the blacks by their chains and the whites by their fear. The more fiercely the planters subjugated the slaves, the more determined the slaves were to seize their freedom, which brought on harsher measures still. Rev. Robertson noticed that as soon as the slaves stepped off the fetid slave ships that had brought them from Western Africa they sought to rebel—making them an early model of the revolution on the mainland to come. According to Robertson, they immediately schemed to “find ways of working off their Irons, and rise upon the Seamen, and snatching Billets of Wood, or whatever offers, knock them down, toss them over-board, turn their own weapons upon them, and mischieve them all they can; and these Insurrections are not sometimes to be quell’d without much Effusion of Blood, the Sailors being forced in their own Defence to fire upon and slaughter the slaves.” In reprisal, the island laws were savage: If a slave raised a hand in resistance, that hand was chopped off. Any runaway who was caught would lose a foot. If he ran again, he’d lose the other. And any slave who attacked a white would be decapitated, but not before he’d been castrated, and ravaged by red-hot pokers.
Riding the volcano that was Nevis, everyone, black and white, faced the same tenuous existence of life amid the sea. Like most islands, Nevis was prone to fierce storms that seemed to whip up out of nowhere: Suddenly, the skies would darken, birds start shrieking, fish scatter to deeper water, and then the winds would come, ferocious ones that ripped through the island, turning life sideways, uprooting trees, smashing boats at harbor, and blowing down the houses in their path. Slaves working the fields knew to throw themselves to the ground and dig their hands into the earth to keep from being blown away.
And then there were the earthquakes. One started with a “strange, hollow noise,” according to an eyewitness, and then the ground opened up great chasms that could drop a man to the center of the earth, hissing geysers shot boiling water twenty feet into the air, and a massive tidal wave rose on the horizon, surged toward the shore, and crashed so hard up the beach that its waters drove a third of a mile up the mountain, destroying everything in their path. When the waters finally drained away, the capital city of Jamestown was no more.
IT WAS AGAINST this background that Alexander Hamilton was raised—a harsh world of angry weather, divided between those who whipped and those who were whipped, with struggling, impoverished families like the Hamiltons caught in between. The aristocratic Burr, even after that spate of deaths, would have identified with the planters, in their fine houses well up the mountainside, enjoying the sea breeze. Although Hamilton maintained the optimism of the talented, his life was hard, and it always would be hard, a matter of constant, grinding toil, with little gladness in it. He would forever live under the baking heat of the flatland, down with the slaves.
A proud man whose eyes in portraits never engage with the viewer, but look askance, trained on some distant object only he can see, Hamilton seems always to be trying to set himself apart, and often, as in the celebrated John Trumbull portrait, to place himself above. From birth, he’d strained to raise himself—to rise above his standing as a bastard. A harsh word, “bastard,” but one that he heard often from journalistic gadflies and political enemies like John Adams, whose snub of him as “the bastard brat of a Scotch peddler” quickly entered the annals of vituperation. Thinking of his father’s claims to the Grange, Hamilton once declared, “I have better pretensions than most of those who in this Country plume themselves of Ancestry,” but then added a heartbreaking line, that his birth was “not free from blemish.” For, of course, his parents could not have been married at the time of his birth; his mother had been unable to extract herself from the odious Lavien. It would not be for another four years that Lavien agreed to a divorce so he could marry again—to a local laundress, demonstrating the depth to which he had sunk. Even then, Rachel was legally prohibited from remarrying. So Alexander and James Hamilton were bastards, and would remain bastards, and penniless ones at that. To the Danish court, they were termed “obscene.” Or in Lavien’s still more vicious term, they were “whore-children.”
It was a stain that Hamilton could never wash off, as desperately as he tried, and so did his descendants as they laid on encomiums to Alexander’s parents, as if adjectives could undo the ignominy. One hailed Rachel as a “woman of superior intellect [and] elevated sentiment,” and another praised James Hamilton as a “dreamer,” whose fancies at least had some elevation to them.
THREE
Platonic Love Is Arrant Nonsense
YOUNG AARON HAD recovered from his own fever by the time his mother died. Now orphans, he and his sister, Sally, two and five, were entrusted to the care of Dr. Shippen, the inoculant, who brought them to his home at the corner of Fourth and Locust Streets in Philadelphia, joining his own children there. Their grandmother Sarah Edwards was to collect them eventually, but, in mourning for her double loss, she was not able to come down from Stockbridge until six months later, in September of 1758. No sooner had she arrived than she contracted dysentery, a raging inflammation of the bowels that killed her.
It was a frightful string of calamities, and one made all the more troubling for its being visited on the family of the greatest theologian of the age. What sin was being punished? Did other believers have anything to fear? Or was suffering proof of election? Sally Prince spoke for many as she extolled Esther as “a mortified humble self-denied lively Christian.” While she was unnerved at the idea that “God points his arrows at me,” she decided she would “gladly . . . follow my dear beloved into the valley of DEATH.” She set aside all doubts. “I want to lay low at the foot of God and resign to him.”
It is impossible to know what the children thought. At nearly five, Sally would certainly have sensed the sweeping loss—not only of parents and grandparents, but also of her life in the grand president’s house at Princeton and in the more humble Edwards quarters in Stockbridge. At two and a half, Aaron would have just started to emerge into consciousness and to store lasting memories. His first understanding of the world would have been of a dreadful vacancy. In his case, a double vacancy, as he was not only missing his parents, but missing the grandparents whose memories would have brought them back to life. It wasn’t until long after, when Burr was in his sixties, that he found some letters of his mother’s in her final derangement, when it appeared that Aaron’s fever would take him from her,
too. She made clear that she was content with that, for little Aaron did not belong to her at all, but to God, who was willing to “comfort” her by “enabling [her] to offer up the child by faith.” By then, Burr had been exiled from the country and had nearly starved in Europe. So he knew suffering intimately, and he knew how hardship can be distorted into a perverse form of pleasure.
The children stayed on with Dr. Shippen for two years, until they moved in with their uncle Timothy Edwards. The oldest of Jonathan Edwards’s three sons, he was, as a twenty-one-year-old bachelor, an unlikely choice. But now that his parents were dead, he’d already taken in several of his younger brothers and sisters. An aspiring merchant, he lived in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, on the shore of the Elizabeth River that opened onto Newark Bay. From there, a ferry made the twenty-seven-mile passage to New York City. Edwards soon took a wife, Rhoda Ogden, a respectable name in Elizabethtown, and they eventually added fifteen children of their own, making the house a small village of twenty-one children altogether.
Burr was not overly fond of his guardian, who must have been tremendously put upon, and he played the rebel, as if the deaths cut any bonds to the strict Calvinism of his ancestry. At four, annoyed by something Timothy Edwards had said, he ran away and hid for “three or four days.” At eight, irked by the “prim behavior and severe morality” of a female visitor, he climbed up into the boughs of a cherry tree and pelted her with cherries. At ten, he decided to bolt. He made it to the New York docks, where he prepared to go to sea as a cabin boy. When Edwards chased him down and spotted him on board one of the sailing ships, Aaron shinnied up the topgallant mast and refused to come down until, as he wrote later, “all the preliminaries of a treaty for peace were agreed on.” Meaning that his irate guardian would not thrash him for his misbehavior.
Burr stayed put after that, spending much of his time on the Elizabeth River, close to home. There he’d swim, fish, or paddle about in his skiff with Matthias Ogden, an easygoing sandy-haired boy, technically his uncle as the brother of his aunt Rhoda, who would be a lifelong friend and the first of his political allies.
In the early years both Aaron and Sally were tutored by Tapping Reeve, a brilliant, wide-eyed scholar with womanly, shoulder-length hair who’d graduated from Princeton a few years before. In the one surviving portrait, he looks startled, but then, he was the kind of person whose eyes were more closely trained on his books than on life around him. A legacy from their father sent Sally to a girls’ school in Boston, and Aaron to Elizabethtown Academy, a strict school of thirty boys where Aaron, small for his age, held his own with the other boys, being more argumentative. One of its founders was Reeve, who later pursued his interest in the Burrs by wooing Sally, an idea that Aaron found astonishing, since he always considered her a bore. Nonetheless, Reeve eventually married her and took her back with him to Litchfield, Connecticut, where he would establish himself as one of the great legal talents of the day, creating the nation’s first law school.
At the ripe age of eleven, after two years of the academy, Aaron decided it was time to enter the college where his father and grandfather had been presidents. He appeared before the college’s authorities to make his case. Burr never would be tall, but he must have seemed minuscule to those black-robed elders, especially with his elfin ears clapped on either side of an unimpressive little face with a narrow nose and dark eyes that were set so deep in bony sockets that they must have seemed like two tiny caves. The group took little more than one look at the lad and sent him home. To Burr, that was infuriating, and, to show them their error, he set himself to learn the entire first two years of the Princeton curriculum—Latin, the Hebrew Bible, and the Greek New Testament, as well as rhetoric, logic, mechanics, and on and on—in a single year, even though it would require an endless series of grueling eighteen-hour days, rising before daybreak and studying deep into the night by candlelight. With two years of the curriculum under his belt, he would enter as a junior, two years in. That would be his revenge, and that was the plan. But when he returned to Princeton in the fall of 1769 at thirteen to plead his case once more, the college had a new president, a rigorous Scot named John Witherspoon whose academic brilliance manifested itself in physical eccentricity—as he possessed a balding head that, to the younger students, looked like a top, narrow at the tip and fat in the middle. Unfortunately for Burr, Witherspoon brought new requirements for admission. Regardless of what Burr might have studied, as a candidate for the junior class he would have to pass a stringent set of exams of Witherspoon’s own devising or go up against three classmates in an oral exam to determine if Burr was at their level. Burr chose the first, and he was granted admission—but only as a sophomore, not as a junior.
Burr was outraged, but he had little choice except to accept entrance as a sophomore, and to redouble the effort he’d put in at Elizabethtown. He would do the work of sophomore year, and of junior year, and of senior year, too. At that rate, he’d enter his senior year at fourteen, the youngest student ever to have that standing, and have all the work needed to graduate already done.
Still solidly Presbyterian from his father’s time, Princeton, with its massive granite Nassau Hall, had a monastic, interior quality. There was a tavern in town, the Hudibras, that was located in a “commodious Inn,” and a general store, but few other diversions. After the students were awoken by a servant’s bang on the door at five thirty, the day began with a round of earnest prayers, and, from then on, prayers alternated with study and meals until the candles were snuffed out at nine. That is when, determined to make up that extra year, Burr bent over his books all the more—the Hebrew Bible, Tacitus, rudimentary mathematics, the pages a dull yellow in candlelight—until midnight or later. And if, in his exhaustion, his mind balked at the prospect of another page, he’d cut back on his meals to starve himself, in the belief that digestion was wearying him.
He did not complete the three years in one year as he’d hoped, but he did in two, passing the requirements for a Princeton degree at fifteen. He might have finished with Princeton then, but he remained. Rather than continue his studies, he chose to engage instead in what his close political ally and the editor of his posthumous memoir, Matthew L. Davis, primly termed “idleness, negligence and . . . dissipation.” This at a time when the college was caught up in another of the religious convulsions called awakenings; Burr could not have been less interested. It was the first example of the erratic streak that became a Burr characteristic, as if his compass might point north one week and south the next. So it was here: Burr could not have worked harder to win the acclaim of the college, to say nothing of his late father and grandfather. Now he sought to antagonize all of them.
There was another activity in Davis’s list of fripperies that may explain all the rest and would prove defining: “gallantry”—a courtly, and therefore deceptive, term for a casual involvement with the opposite sex. While Burr’s friends made light of his numerous sexual conquests, they won the scorn of Davis, who could be quite prim on the subject.* Burr was an unabashed sexual enthusiast from puberty, and he enjoyed the close companionship of dozens if not hundreds of women, all of them willing if not enthusiastic. But to Davis he was a predator, whose victims were powerless to resist. “In his intercourse with females,” Davis wrote, “[Burr] was an unprincipled flatterer, ever prepared to take advantage of their weakness, their credulity, or their confidence. She that confided in him was lost. No terms of condemnation would be too strong to apply to Colonel Burr.” Why, Davis asked, did a man like Burr waste his time on such frivolities? “It is truly surprising how any individual could have become so eminent as a soldier, as a statesman, and as a professional man, who devoted so much time to the other sex as was devoted by Colonel Burr.”
But Burr himself didn’t regard these affairs as pointless at all. They were the point. “For more than half a century of his life they seemed to absorb his whole thoughts,” Davis admitted. “His intrigues were without number.
His conduct most licentious.”
Intrigues. In retrospect, the word fits the shadowy Burr psyche. But sex is always a matter of discretion, a romp to be enjoyed behind closed doors, and sex outside of marriage especially so. It can’t not be an intrigue. But if it is unmonitored, it is a matter for the couple alone to decide, an arrangement that puts the woman in a vulnerable position, as she can be far more compromised than the man. If it is hidden, it will also go unrecorded, which might have served Burr’s interests.
Was Burr dastardly—or loving? We’ll never know. While the romances of most men of his station were primarily for their satisfaction, Burr thought of love more as a fair exchange, and a physical one at that. This may have been a rebellion against the astringent Calvinism of his father and grandfather, who, however joyfully lascivious they might have been in marriage, looked on sex outside of wedlock as an abomination. For all of his scattershot affairs, Burr wasn’t just a deflowerer of women, someone who enjoyed the quest and lost interest when he had secured the prize—although plenty of women must have thought so. He genuinely loved women, and loved them so much that he wanted more of them. He delighted in idling with them, enjoying the free play of sex for hours. What would a man rather do than love? And, having loved, what man wouldn’t want to remember? Burr not only dedicated himself to these romances, but kept records so he could savor them all again later, like a botanist thrilled with every detail of some rare woodland flower he’d spotted years ago and pressed into a book. His whole life, he carefully saved all his diary entries, his mementos, his love letters, his couplets, and stored them all in a kind of romantic treasure chest where he hoped they would be safe forever, his most prized possessions. Davis burned all of it, every scrap.
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 4
