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

by Sedgwick, John

  A bravura performance, from one seemingly determined to deliver his own revenge on a world that had been so hard on him. In this scenario, Hamilton may have been a worm, only too aware of his pathetic limitations as a tiny clerk in a counting house, abused by fate. But, because of his knowledge, he was not a vile one—or a humble one, for that matter. He envied the hurricane’s wrath, its ability to waste the vile worms he detested. That was the inner message in his letter, wound tightly inside the outer one.

  On an island not known for its literature, the composition was bound to command some attention, but the very elements that made him feel so frustrated and ashamed—his youth, his clerkship—made it a sensation, and it quickly won the attention of a Falstaffian minister, Hugh Knox, who’d drunk away his youth in New York City and then fallen under the sway of Rev. Aaron Burr Sr., of all people. The elder Burr reformed him by offering personal instruction in the Presbyterian faith, and then handed him off to the synod, who dispatched him to a small circle of hell—the hollow caldera of the remote volcanic island of Saba in the Leeward Islands. Only a few miles from Saint Croix, it had infrequent contact with any of the other islands, making it only a little more hospitable than the moon. Knox did his penance there for seventeen years, attending to the spiritual needs of the few villagers. Finally released from this purgatory, he returned to Saint Croix in time to read Hamilton’s gale-force prose and see a boy in desperate need of an education—at the Princeton of the now-deceased Burr Sr., Knox imagined, since its new president, Witherspoon, had put out the word that the college was seeking worthy students from just such far-flung places as Saint Croix. Knox got up a fund from the West Indies governor Ernst Frederick Walterstorff and various Lytton relations, and it was done. Within a week, Hamilton was aboard a packet bound for America, never to return.*

  FIVE

  Refinement

  WHILE BURR DAWDLED at Princeton, Hamilton sailed into New York Harbor in the fragrant city heat of early summer 1773. No place in the world was so frenzied, so bustling. From the fortified Battery by the Hudson along the East River, the shoreline piano-keyed with wharves—Albany Pier, Murray’s Wharf, Beekman Slip, and a dozen more all the way around to the clattering shipyards well to the east—the sea air alive with squawking gulls, the rattle of cartwheels, the rude shouts of dockhands, the operatic cries of passengers searching for their ship, the yells of the newsboys, the patter of visitors in every conceivable language. It was a meeting of the Old World and the New, but it was a scene like no other along the coast, or in the world, for people came to New York to make an entrance into a new life in a city that called itself new, because it was new and always would be. Since 1760, the city population had swelled by almost a quarter to just under twenty-five thousand, beginning a stampede of immigrants that would soon push New York past Philadelphia as the most populous city in America.

  It was made for Hamilton. The city would define him, and he would define it. Although he shifted his residence with the seat of government, from the moment he set foot on the dock, he never thought of anywhere else as home. Others might gape at the turbulence of such a rambunctious city; Hamilton was keen to throw himself into it and ride its waves. Even at sixteen, he was not one to be cowed. A handsome lad with those electric eyes and an erect bearing, he had grown used to staring down big-chested sea captains over shoddy merchandise and poor performance, and he was not likely to be put off by noisy New Yorkers. The proper John Adams of Massachusetts was appalled by New Yorkers and their unmannerly ways. “With all the opulence and splendor of this city, there is very little good breeding to be found,” he sniffed. “We have been treated with an assiduous respect but I have not seen one real gentleman, one well-bred man, since I came to town. At their entertainments there is no conversation that is agreeable; there is no modesty, no attention to one another. They talk very loud, very fast and altogether. If they ask you a question, before you can utter three words of your answer they will break out upon you again and talk away.” But that’s Adams at his fussiest. Hamilton would talk away. He was home.

  EVEN AS ITS population grew, New York had fewer people than Saint Croix, and only half the land. But most residents were crammed onto the southern tip of the island by the harbor, where oddly angled streets ran past shops stuffed with fine goods; coffeehouses loud with political talk; taverns full of noisy, cussing patrons; and churches of every denomination, their spires dominating the sky. But the pews were emptying, as the awakenings receded. In Manhattan, God was passing out of style.

  Inflated by the sugar trade, Saint Croix’s port did more business than New York’s, but New York’s economy, boosted by the first stirrings of industrialization, generated a much broader range of goods to send to the sugar islands, receiving their sugar, rum, and slaves in return. The activity created a rivalry with the mother country that was starting to grate on both sides—and would lead to a conflict that would define the age. To regain Britain’s edge, King George had pushed through the Stamp Act of 1765, imposing stiff duties on English paper goods, and would soon squeeze the colonists further with the fabled Tea Act, which stoked outrage throughout the colonies, and no less in New York, which drew so much wealth from British trade.

  For all of its new immigrants and rising patriotic sentiment, New York was still, at heart, an English city, and as Hamilton wandered about a fashionable neighborhood like the one along Queen Street, he might have imagined himself in London’s Mayfair. Shops offered fine glassware, European furniture, leather-bound books, and other luxury goods of an energized economy. Wealthy merchant families like the Beekmans and Crugers built palatial homes. The ladies attired themselves in the latest London fashions—cloaks, hooped petticoats, and bonnets of India damask or Venetian poplin—while the men were decked out in “gallant” wigs, cravats, silk handkerchiefs, walking sticks, toothpick cases, and the occasional sword. The best families in Manhattan, exactly sixty-nine in total, owned elegant carriages, chaises, and phaetons, all of them relatively new presences to the city streets, to whisk their passengers to the Governor’s Ball, the charmingly informal “turtle feasts,” a card table for a private game of whist, some Haydn at the New York Harmonic Society, or the New Theater on Nassau Street to see Richard III, or, for a thrill, The Intriguing Chambermaid.

  The growing economic disparity between rich and poor had given rise to a new word to clarify the social distinction: “refinement.” Just the word was refined, as only the rich used it, and employed troops of professionals to create it. Elocutionists instructed their charges to lengthen their vowels with more breath and to eliminate crude expressions like “Split me, madam” from their conversation. To instill social grace, dancing masters were enlisted to give their clumsy, gawky students a smoothness of motion. Smoothness was key. In a herky-jerky world, the aristocrat needed to be smooth. Class was certainly not new to New York, but it was new on this scale, and it had never before been a choice. For Hamilton, the choice was easy.

  Whatever else Hamilton brought with him to America, he possessed only one article of value—a list of Rev. Hugh Knox’s connections among the Presbyterian elite. Given the city’s social stratification, for a young man from the West Indies—a place so foreign that many people expected him to be a Negro—it would be impossible to get anywhere without such entrée, and he could never have created it on his own. Foremost among the Presbyterians was the Reverend John Rodgers, a pompous figure who carried a gold-headed cane as he completed his rounds making loving gestures to the poor. At that point, Hamilton was bent on attending Princeton as Knox had intended. When they met, Rodgers must have mentioned that his son had recently attended the college. In fact, he had roomed there with a young man with a notable pedigree. Aaron Burr Jr., son of the former president—perhaps Hamilton had heard of him? Rodgers might have added that Burr was a remarkable boy who’d entered Princeton at thirteen and finished his studies just two years later, which was nearly a record. That, in turn, might have provoked Rodger
s to ask Hamilton how old he was. Either then, or shortly afterward, Hamilton subtracted two years from his age—a curious development for a boy who had previously felt too young. Now he was no longer a year older than this Burr, but a year younger.

  It was Hamilton’s first awareness of Burr, and it shaped him almost ineradicably, as Burr may have come to embody that elusive gentility Hamilton saw everywhere about him but could not think how to obtain. Rodgers must have advised Hamilton that, no matter how eager he was, he could not go directly to Princeton without formal schooling. This delay made the age adjustment all the more imperative. Hamilton agreed to attend Elizabethtown Academy, just as Burr had. Or, perhaps, because Burr had.

  A mere coincidence at first, and the substance is a matter of some speculation, this virtual meeting of Burr and Hamilton through Rodgers. It might have been the work of that spider of Jonathan Edwards. But this spider is not at God’s mercy; men are at the mercy of it. In the world of Burr and Hamilton, after all, God is not the prime mover, leaving the spider to cast its silky, invisible web as it will. And sometime in 1773 the first wisp wound about these two proud, unsuspecting young creatures, joining them, and then the spider began the slow work of binding them, loop by loop, ever tighter in an unnatural embrace.

  SIX

  In the Roseate Bowers of Cupid

  HAVING LIVED IN Elizabethtown since he was four, Aaron Burr had long since ceased to notice it. To a boy from the tropics like Hamilton, though, the chill in the air that fall, the turning leaves, and the first skim of ice on the Elizabeth River, all of it would have been astonishing, to say nothing of the grand brick houses in the center of town, the proper estates farther out, apple and pear orchards that extended to the rolling hills, the geese tottering about with long sticks tied sideways to their necks to keep them from escaping through the fence, or the town’s academy, a fine two-story building topped by a gleaming cupola, the first schoolhouse Hamilton ever entered.

  Late that summer, Burr came home from Princeton, on one of his regular forays to visit one beauty or another, and he may have overlapped with Hamilton there when he was settling in. More likely, they didn’t cross paths, reflecting the radically different stations they occupied in those days, with Burr a longtime resident at the center of this elegant town and Hamilton a visitor on the outskirts.

  Through Knox, Hamilton had won an introduction to the cerebral William Livingston, tall and lean enough to be dubbed the “whipping post”—a troubling image, surely. He was a member of the powerful and moneyed Hudson River clan. Livingston would go on to become the first governor of the state of New Jersey, but he also wrote romantic poetry and was not averse to stoking a political controversy on occasion. Outraged that the Crown was bent on setting King’s College above the harbor, interrupting some of the finest views in the city, he raged against the school as a “contracted receptacle of bigotry.” When this had no effect, he created the New York Society Library as a counterweight to this royal imposition and made plans to sell his finely wrought town house in Manhattan and move to Elizabethtown, where he’d build a fifteen-room extravaganza for himself with the evocative name of Liberty Hall on a sumptuous 120-acre estate. Hamilton stayed with him in the city, and when the estate was complete that spring, Hamilton visited regularly, his first immersion in extravagance. It must have been alluring: the vast, rolling expanse, the Georgian architecture, the orchards, classical statuary, English gardens. There was almost too much to take in.

  Fitting its name, Liberty Hall was a place of some abandon, and Hamilton watched another visitor, the smart young New Yorker John Jay—the future Federalist whose political life would be interwoven with his own—in open pursuit of Livingston’s delightful young daughter Sarah, just sixteen, whom a cousin described as an “opening rose.” The witty Gouverneur Morris, himself a ladies’ man, watched the suitors moon about, “one bending forwards rolling up his eyes and sighing most piteously. Another at a distance sitting side long upon his chair with a melancholic and despondent phiz [sic].” Jay prevailed, marrying Sarah the following spring and snatching the political influence that was her patrimony.

  Hamilton fell hard for Sarah’s older sister, Catharine, known as Kitty, a spritely version of her more demure younger sister. Kitty was in her early twenties, making her several years older than Hamilton, but, ever since those Saint Croix poems, he’d never lacked confidence in romance either. He wanted Kitty to know that his mind brimmed with other things besides cleverness.

  He slipped her a provocative note:

  I challenge you to meet me in whatever path you dare. And, if you have no objection, for variety and amusement, we will even make excursions in the flowery walks and roseate bowers of Cupid. You know I am renowned for gallantry and shall always be able to entertain you with a choice collection of the prettiest things imaginable.

  It’s quite pushy for a sixteen-year-old, let alone one who is pretending to be fourteen, and not just for its teasing sexuality. Somewhere between a tickle and a nudge, it shows off his powers of persuasion, as it appeals to Kitty’s sense of adventure, literary imagination, femininity, sensuality, material desires, and hunger for sex. While most of Hamilton’s writing seems very written, even from a young age, with balanced phrases and choice metaphors, this one has all the directness of actual speech, and you can hear him whisper this devilishly in her ear in the drawing room. And, as speech, it penetrated. Kitty did not ask him to stop. Most likely, Kitty Livingston was his first conquest in America. He’d entered her circle.

  Another character who drifted through Liberty Hall was William Livingston’s uproarious brother-in-law, William Alexander, who called himself Lord Stirling on the strength of a highly dubious Scottish earldom. Like all the Livingstons, Lord Stirling would reappear in the war, ultimately dying of diseases brought on by drink. He went William many times better with a thousand-acre estate in nearby Basking Ridge, complete with stables, gardens, and a deer park in the manner of an English country estate, where he bred horses and made wine, among other aristocratic pursuits.* But Hamilton’s interest in anyone of rank was compounded by his fascination with Lord Stirling’s daughter, also a Catharine, although she was dubbed “Lady Kitty,” to distinguish her from her cousin. Just as Burr might have done, Hamilton dallied with both Kittys shamelessly.

  And finally, in this teeming Elizabethtown milieu, Hamilton was drawn to another local power, Elias Boudinot, an innkeeper’s son who, in his piety, created the American Bible Society and would rise to become the president of the Continental Congress after John Hancock. Boudinot also appreciated the finer things, arranging for readings of biographies and histories, while his wife, Annie, wrote verse that later won the compliments of George Washington. Hamilton was virtually adopted by the Boudinots, so much so that when the Boudinots’ infant daughter, Anna Maria, was stricken with a fatal illness, Hamilton sat by her bedside until the end came, and, afterward, wrote an affecting elegy.

  For the sweet babe, my doting heart

  Did all a mother’s fondness feel;

  Careful to act each tender part

  And guard from every threatening ill

  But what, alas, availed my care?

  The unrelenting hand of death,

  Regardless of a parent’s pray’r

  Has stopped my lovely infant’s breath.

  It is striking that it is written from the mother’s perspective. Possibly, he was thinking of his own mother, Rachel, who abandoned her young son, Peter, when she fled her brutal husband, and then removed herself from her two other sons when she died. It’s a tale of loss from both sides, for he feels for the dying child too.

  The emotional range of his writing—by turns empathic, aspirational, mimetic, hortatory, and seductive—is impressive for a teenager, and all the more so because the sensitive Hamilton is so rarely in evidence outside the page. Hamilton—or Ham, as he was then called—was primarily a man of action, driven to achieve;
his strongest feelings stemmed from ambition, and indignation when his aspirations were not met. To judge by his letters, he did not usually bother with introspection. One imagines that if the later Hamilton were to stumble across this elegy, unaware of who had written it, he might have been puzzled that anyone would trouble himself to express such feelings.

  Hamilton attended the academy for only six months before he decided he was ready for college. That was intended to mean Princeton. But Hamilton was now a boy in a hurry. Like Burr before him, Hamilton had an interview with President Witherspoon. By now Witherspoon had started to emerge as a fierce patriot, one who would later sign the Constitution and take pride in the fact that the Constitutional Convention held more graduates from Princeton than from any other college. At that point, however, Hamilton wasn’t a patriot and didn’t think he’d ever become one. Having grown up on Nevis, he was an English subject, and that meant more to him than it did to his fellow colonists in America. He called himself an Anglican and had no objection to the aristocracy, in England or anywhere else. Coming from poverty, he sought to join the aristocracy, which is why he’d been so at ease at Liberty Hall. If a war of independence required hating England, Hamilton would never take up arms. No, he had, he said, “strong prejudices” in favor of the British point of view. So Hamilton told Witherspoon no, he wouldn’t enter Princeton. Instead, he would follow Ned Stevens to King’s College. Lord Stirling, the brother-in-law of William Livingston, may have helped his admission, since he was on the governing board (of the college Livingston detested, no less). It was the first decision that Hamilton made on his own, without any outside influence, and he acted not on exigency, but on desire. He wished to be a King’s College man, with everything that that entailed—set in Manhattan, not New Jersey, of Anglican belief, aristocratic in outlook, and with fealty to the Crown. Of these, the most enduring attachment would be to Manhattan, the great, throbbing beast that would always inspire him. As the seat of commerce, it was the perfect training ground for a future secretary of the treasury, and it wouldn’t hurt him to enter that endless gladiatorial contest that was life in the city—and take on all comers.