In some desperation, Seabury did his best to rebut “A Full Vindication.” Hamilton rebutted that with “The Farmer Refuted,” this time, in his fresh confidence, deploying a sharp wit to go with his icy intelligence, and the farmer quit the field for good.
In Boston, the British resolved to crush the foment by the colonists, dispatching eight hundred redcoats to round up the revolutionary leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock and then seize a cache of munitions in Concord and Lexington. When, along the way, the British troops encountered a clutch of armed farmers known as minutemen, they let loose a few blasts of grapeshot, and in moments, eight colonists lay dead. The war was on.
The stunning news raced down the coast. In New York, protesters swarmed the streets and, late one night, their outrage amplified by drink, surged toward King’s College, by now a symbol of Tory contempt. There, with torches blazing and drums pounding, they surrounded the college’s one building, bent on rousting President Cooper—his scholarly self-assurance having long since elided into rank arrogance—out of bed so they could tar and feather him. A sympathetic alumnus had raced ahead to warn Cooper to flee, and the man had awoken Hamilton and Troup too, since their room was close by. When Cooper froze in terror, Hamilton hurried down the stairs to hold off the insurgents. He arrived on the front steps just as the assailants were advancing on the school building, ready to seize their prize and hustle him away to be stripped and tarred. Despite Hamilton’s growing reputation, the mob took him to be little more than a schoolboy. But when he started to reason with them, to point out that nothing would be accomplished by abusing Cooper, they quieted, and then Hamilton went on from there. Only a few words have survived, but they catch the burden of it, as Hamilton asserted that taking Cooper would only bring “disgrace and injure the glorious cause of liberty.” As if to demonstrate just how out of touch Cooper was, he then poked his head out his third-story window and, not realizing that Hamilton was trying to save him, demanded that nobody listen to the boy because he was “crazy.”
The mob never did get its hands on Cooper, who fled the college in his nightgown and finally found his way to a ship back to England, never to return. For all of Hamilton’s decisiveness, the scene reveals his ambivalence too, as he defends a questionable Tory from a drunken mob of patriots. Which side was he on? The patriot side is the short answer. The longer one—his own. For every word, every gesture, says what his placement atop that stoop does: I am with you, but I am above you. And I say so not because of my birth, but because of my genius.
NINE
A Fever for War
WHILE HAMILTON SAW the war approaching from hundreds of miles away, Burr seemed largely unaware of the coming conflict until the winter of 1775, a few months before the Battles of Lexington and Concord, when he found out that a mob of several hundred people had torn down the house of a suspected loyalist in Great Barrington, just over the Massachusetts border from Litchfield. With axes and saws, the rioters had chopped the house down like a pine tree. The ringleaders were from Burr’s Litchfield, and, after they returned to town, they’d been captured there by the sheriff, “without resistance,” Burr marveled to his friend Matt Ogden, indicating they probably did not have his sympathy. But then the mob regathered and galloped into town on horseback bearing white clubs, the emblems of their cause, to free the leaders—only to discover they’d been locked in jail. With that, Burr broke off the story and turned whimsical, as if this event were of no consequence. “I shall leave here a blank, to give you (perhaps in heroics) a few sketches of my unexampled valour, should they proceed to hostilities; and, should they not, I can then tell you what I would have done.”
It’s a bit of a tease, this lurch into hypotheticals, leaving it to Ogden to fill in the facts. The truth is, like Hamilton, Burr was unsure where he stood regarding the monumental issue of his day. By 1774, the students of Princeton had burned in effigy the Massachusetts royal governor and formed their own militia, but Burr’s elitism may have outdone his rebellious nature. When Hamilton faced a similar dilemma, his gut instincts kicked in with those speeches that marked him forever as a patriot leader, even though he’d shielded Myles Cooper from the intruders. When Burr heard the story of his endangered loyalist, he felt no need to intervene. It was just a story.
Then, in April, came Lexington and Concord, and this time Burr did not hesitate. Electrified by the news, Burr wrote Ogden to fly with him on horseback to Cambridge to join the war. When Ogden replied that he couldn’t just yet, Burr waited while he read up on military history and tactics to prepare himself to be an officer in the conflict. Then, two months later, came word of the American triumph at Bunker Hill, and, terrified he might miss out on the war, he rushed to Elizabethtown and demanded that Ogden come with him at once, and the two galloped to Cambridge, where the Continental Army was massing on the common.
It was not an inspiring sight. Almost seventeen thousand strong, the troops were little more than a mass of farmers stretched out across a vast, mud-soaked township of sagging tents, dripping wash, foul latrines, and fleshy whores. As Burr moved among this ragtag assemblage, he could see that smallpox, dysentery, and countless other diseases had spread like slow wildfire through the ranks, leaving hundreds of the men lounging bare chested on sweat-soaked blankets. Harsh words born of pique or boredom led to fistfights that sometimes burst into small riots. Even the ones who weren’t sick or hungry were unmanageable, all were ill equipped, and it defied the ability of the officers to bring order. “A scene of idleness, confusion, and dissipation,” Matthew Davis called it.
George Washington had assumed command only a few days before Burr arrived. A tall, deep-voiced, oddly serene Virginian who’d distinguished himself as a soldier in the French and Indian War, he’d been a planter for the last decade or more and had never led any troops into battle. With scarcely any staff, he was overwhelmed by the task of organizing so many farmers into a fighting army.
Burr wandered the camp in a kind of daze, astounded at the squalor. When he approached Washington’s senior staff, he repeatedly emphasized that he was a gentleman volunteer, a man of lineage, of education, and he produced letters to that effect from prominent citizens including Hamilton’s mentor Elias Boudinot from Elizabethtown, now a member of the Congress. He identified Burr as “the only son of our old worthy Friend President Burr,” not needing to explain what he was president of. He added grandly that young Burr was bent on “improving his youth to the advantage of the country.”
It might not have been wise to emphasize what Burr sought to gain from his service. But even he could see there was no use for such a letter, and he made no effort to put it in Washington’s hands. With that realization, something broke within him. Burr was ever a tower that was not always fully supported by its base, and at the thought that the war might not be the answer to his dreams, and that the grandeur that he imagined was his due might elude him, the whole thing came crashing down. Burr tumbled onto his cot, pulled his sheets about him, and lay there like a dying man.
Davis called it a “fever,” and there were plenty of infections passing through the camp. And Burr had always been sickly, ever since he was very young, prone to periods of exhaustion after intervals of tremendous effort. But there had been no particular effort this time, only the shock of what he’d seen at the camp and his sudden hopelessness about his prospects. Like Hamilton, he could be oversensitive, taking to heart what others might shrug off. He brooded, letting dark thoughts congeal until they became a great weight within him. But it quite likely manifested itself for him as something physical that went beyond lethargy, a migraine, perhaps, that began with a pounding headache, like the thudding of an ax, timed to his heartbeat, then spread to a swelling of his eyeballs as if being pushed from within, wheezing nausea, a burning fever, a fatigue accompanied by a fretful tossing about. The military career that was supposed to crown him with glory was drowning him in muck.
He lay on his cot for some time�
�until one day he heard Ogden talking to some soldiers outside the tent about an “expedition” of some kind. Roused, Burr was curious to know more. He shouted for Ogden, who came in to explain that some troops were to embark on an expedition to take Quebec from the British. Almost impossibly audacious, it would mean pushing through hundreds of miles of the Maine wilderness to mount a surprise wintertime assault on a fortress atop a towering cliff that was thought to be impregnable. If this mission succeeded, it could lead to the liberation of British Canada. But anyone could see it was far more likely to fail, and fail miserably. That was Burr’s kind of plan.
General Washington had already approved the mission, and an American contingent of several hundred men headed by Brigadier General Richard Montgomery was already headed up the Hudson to take Montreal. Montgomery was a large, affable Irishman, much appreciated by the troops for his easy authority, who’d been in the British army before coming over to the American side. The other contingent would be headed by Colonel Benedict Arnold. Slick and muscular, given to dares and stunts, Arnold projected an exciting sense of dash that had not been dimmed by the recent death of his darling young wife, and he was fresh from seizing Fort Ticonderoga from the British, the greatest victory of the young war. Now he was seeking men for the march on Quebec. Both contingents would ultimately defer to the Northern Department of General Philip Schuyler, the blustery aristocrat from Albany.
His blood up, Burr volunteered and then plucked some of the hardiest and most enterprising soldiers he could find from the sprawling mass of volunteers to form a “mess,” or small company, to join him. Not to be left out, Ogden signed up, too, and gathered some men of his own, and both companies marched with the rest of Arnold’s men forty miles north to the embarkation point at Newburyport. There, Burr assured his sister in Litchfield that he “was equal to the undertaking”—and happily noted that the villagers gave a special welcome to “gentleman volunteers” like himself. When she passed on word to their guardian, Edwards, about her brother’s military plans, Edwards was staggered at his ward’s folly and insisted he quit this nonsense at once. When that didn’t work, Edwards had a number of Burr’s friends plead with him to be sensible. “You will die,” wrote one. “I know you will die in the undertaking; it is impossible for you to endure the fatigue.” But this only urged Burr on. Danger was the whole point. Finally, in desperation, Edwards tried to bribe Burr, with gold, no less. Burr’s answer: No.
Before their departure by sail, Burr joined some other officers for a service led by the Princeton clergyman Samuel Spring at the First Presbyterian Church, the only time Burr had ever been known to attend church since the death of his parents. Afterward, they all descended into the crypt, where lay George Whitefield, the flamboyant open-air preacher who had spread the fervor of Jonathan Edwards’s Great Awakening of 1740. The men pried open the coffin lid to gaze upon the hallowed remains, touching them “with great solemnity.” The body was little more than dust, but much of the clothing was still intact, and the officers cut it to pieces to carry with them as “a precious relic,” blessed by the Almighty, to protect them. For Burr, it was an unlikely joining of his religious lineage and his own quest for valor, but one that reflects the solemnity with which he viewed this potentially fatal undertaking. When the group emerged, they were greeted by an adoring throng that lined the street to cheer the mission on.
As plotted out on the map of a keen-eyed British military engineer named John Montresor, who’d nearly starved to draw it one freezing winter, down to shoe leather for nutrition, the mission seemed preposterous. More than a thousand raw recruits would journey six hundred miles into the frigid wilderness. They’d sail by packet up the Atlantic Coast into the Maine interior, then board two hundred flat-bottomed, squared-off bateaux, each one more than twenty feet long, to push a hundred miles up against the current of the twisting ice-cold Kennebec. They’d then ride down the ominously named Dead River, along the way hauling the heavily laden boats up from the riverbanks, through the woods, and down into the water again to avoid dangerous rapids or thundering waterfalls, and make one last exhausting portage hacked out of the woods to Lake Mégantic and then to Chaudière Lake beyond. Finally, they would cross the wide Saint Lawrence to the meeting point of the two armies by the cliffs of Quebec. The place names indicated the vagueness—Great Carrying Place, Seven Mile Stream. Little of this route had ever been traveled by white men aside from Montresor, and almost none of it had been settled except by Indians. Everything depended on the accuracy of the map and Arnold’s ability to follow it. He’d allowed provisions for twenty days to cover a 150-mile trek to Quebec City. If it took much longer, the men would likely die of starvation and exposure in the deepening winter.
From his days on the Elizabeth, Burr was comfortable on a river, but none of his fellow soldiers figured he was anyone to count on. So Burr outfitted himself in rugged clothing—heavy boots, woolen trousers, a double-breasted jacket, a short, fringed coat—and then added a foxtail hat, plumed with a jaunty black feather. All of it intended, he admitted, to “help my Deficiency in Point of Size.” For arms, he carried a “Tommahawk” and a musket with a fixed bayonet. Ogden and his men joined Burr in one boat, along with Rev. Spring, among three or four others.*
A last-minute scramble delayed the departure until October 2, perilously close to the onset of winter. But Burr set off aboard the sloop Sally—“the very name I hope prosperous,” he wrote his sister—and before the first day was out he’d made it up the Kennebec to Gardinerston for the shift to bateaux. Rowed by a pair of oarsmen, and a couple of others who worked poles to protect the boat from rocks, they weren’t particularly maneuverable and proved too small for their men and the material they needed to carry, bringing the water up perilously close to the gunnels. Because of his experience, Burr took charge of one boat as captain.
At first, life on the river must have seemed luscious in the golden paradise of a fall forest, but before long the river revealed what the maps didn’t—that the water ran dangerously shallow in some places, was clogged with boulders and downed trees in others, and sometimes came up unexpectedly on ripping rapids, uncharted turns, or monstrous falls that swamped boats and required dozens of brutal portages deep into the tangled forests. Only gradually did Arnold realize that John Montresor’s map was unreliable in more critical ways, having been deliberately distorted by the British military to deceive the Americans.
Worse still, the boats were leaking. Built in haste, they had been made of green pine, which shrank as it seasoned, opening up wide cracks in the floor that admitted ice water that rose up the men’s shins, and then brought more water surging over the gunnels. “You would have taken the men for amphibious animals,” Arnold reported, “as they were a great part of the time under water.” When the temperatures dipped below freezing as fall deepened, a Captain Thayer added that his clothes were “frozen a pane of glass thick.” All the sloshing water made the boats nearly impossible to steer, and it ruined what was left of their provisions, primarily peas and salted beef. The men tried to scoop up fish and shoot game, and when their efforts failed, their hunger was so fierce they shot the dogs they’d brought and roasted them over a fire.
And then the rains came. Torrential, freezing rains that raised the river as much as eight feet, the water surging over the banks and tumbling madly over the boulders on the riverbed, halting the progress of Arnold’s flotilla and leaving everyone soaked to the skin and white with cold. But as winter came on, the temperature continued only to drop, and the snow fell, turning the whole world white. Exhausted, frozen, starving, some men were reduced to drinking a sickening broth of boiled shoe leather; others tried a “water gruel” of melted candles. Still, up against the frigid waters of the fierce Kennebec they struggled, poling against the current only to find hundred-foot waterfalls sending up spray in their faces, or some riotous rapid shooting at them. Many of the men died of slow starvation, exposure, or illness, and many more vanished in
to the woods to save themselves. On it went, the snows getting heavier, the rations lighter, the progress slower.
It was Burr’s first chance to demonstrate his hardiness, and “Little Burr,” as he was still called, was used to going without food from his college days. Eager for a test, and for recognition, he welcomed the hazards, the fiercer the better, almost as if the outcome didn’t matter, and he soon won the trust of men who’d seen an overeducated stripling with a boastful feather in his cap and misjudged him. At one point, once he’d finally reached the Dead River and was pulled along by the swift current, he didn’t see the men on the banks signaling for him to stop—there was a waterfall ahead. He blithely kept on until it was too late, and over the falls he went in his bateau, tumbling straight down twenty feet into the foam below. One boatmate was killed on impact, everyone was battered, but Burr was not seriously harmed, and he slogged to shore and then kept on, without complaint. If anything, he seemed to welcome this ordeal of manhood and the chance to abandon his dignity, and so establish it.
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 8
