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

by Sedgwick, John

  Delivered presto like this, this jumble of requirements may sound comic, but the pushy monosyllable must, much repeated, is the giveaway, since it is the most characteristic expression in the Hamilton lexicon. Such demands, after all, are characteristic of a man accustomed to dashing off a hundred sets of instructions a day.

  Without sisters, with a mother who died young, with a history of all-male environments culminating in the military, Hamilton had little intimate knowledge of the female of the species, and the idea that women were to be appraised from the outside in was standard for proper young gentlemen. Lord Chesterfield, the English self-styled philosophe whose famous letters to his illegitimate son were the last word on the subject of proper behavior, declared that women were more “binding” than “book,” and men the reverse.

  Still, for all his flirtatiousness, Hamilton’s fundamental interest was financial security. At bottom, a woman’s worth was her worth to him, and the tone of the letter turns serious when he discusses her material qualifications. Any wife of his had to be seriously rich. “As to fortune, the larger stock of that the better,” he wrote Laurens, all humor draining away. “You know my temper and circumstances and will therefore pay special attention to this article in the treaty. Though I run the risk of going to purgatory for avarice, yet as money is an essential ingredient to happiness in this world—as I have not much of my own and as I am very little calculated to get more either by my address or industry—it must needs be that my wife, if I get one, bring in at least a sufficiency to administer her own extravagances.”

  It was a rare confessional: A love that floated free of the material world didn’t appeal to him largely because he couldn’t afford it. That realization must have clouded over him, because he quickly tries to make a joke of it. If Laurens doesn’t find him such a belle, his bosom friend should advertise for one in the “public papers.” There, to improve his chances, Laurens should be sure to include Hamilton’s own “qualifications”—“his size, make, quality of mind and body, achievements, expectations, fortune, &c.” The winking italics are all Hamilton’s. “In drawing my picture, you will no doubt be civil to your friend; mind you do justice to the length of my nose and don’t forget, that I—” Here the paper breaks off again.

  In closing, he throws the whole business up into the air as a “Jeu de folie.” As he says: “Do I want a wife? No—I have plagues enough without desiring to add to the number that greatest of all.” He assures Laurens he went into the silliness about wives only to extend the letter to him—“lengthening out the only kind of intercourse now in my power with my friend.” The sexual implications of that sentence were surely not lost on either of them.

  Speaking of matrimony, Hamilton concluded by saying he included a couple of letters from Laurens’s wife, Martha, whom he’d abandoned after she’d given birth in England. “I anticipate by sympathy the pleasure you must feel from the sweet converse of your dearer self in the enclosed letters,” Hamilton added, in a line that requires an ironic reading. He was doing to Laurens what Laurens was doing to him, namely, undercutting any interest in matrimony by invoking the thrill of their own “dearer selves.” Then, as if it might be news, “She speaks of a daughter of yours.” The rest is illegible, as the page has been torn, possibly by the recipient.

  The letter raised so many questions about Hamilton’s fundamental desires that it left his descendants in a quandary about how to handle it. Alexander’s son John, the family keeper of his memory, was so distressed by the mercantile calculations in his choice of spouse—John’s mother, after all—he wrote himself a note, “I must not publish the whole of this,” and left the financial portion out of his account. Hamilton’s grandson, the New York City alienist Allan McLane Hamilton, omitted the letter altogether.

  FOURTEEN

  Beauty Is Woman’s Sceptre

  WHEN IT CAME to love, Aaron Burr would never have been as calculating as Hamilton, even if he was feeling a little pinched. From his days on the prowl in Elizabethtown through his dangerous dalliance with Dolly Quincy, now Mrs. John Hancock, and into unknown philandering in the war, Burr had a deep well of romantic experience to draw on. Even if his aristocratic background had faded into the past, he still was confident that any woman would be thrilled to have him, and he had only to take his pick. His desires were never theoretical but made up a permanent state of hunger.

  Unlike Hamilton, he was not so utilitarian, or so crass, as to write out his particular qualifications for the ideal wife. Nonetheless, he had plenty of ideas about womanhood, most of them anticipating Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Mary Shelley, who wrote the first and most persuasive feminist tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. “Women are every where in [a] deplorable state,” she would write; “for, in order to preserve their innocence, as ignorance is courteously termed, truth is hidden from them, and they are made to assume an artificial character before their faculties have acquired any strength. Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”

  Burr never thought of women as mere beauties in service to men’s desires, even as he played with them. Instead, Burr held to the heretical belief, shared only by John Adams in the circle of Founding Fathers, that women were fully the equals of men, just as capable in intellect, just as sensible, and just as deep in feeling. While they may have been intended for male pleasure, they were not just pretty baubles, but fully realized individuals. Not bindings, they were books.

  While the editor of Burr’s posthumous memoirs, Matthew Davis, is committed to the idea that Burr is a cad, one of the few romances he describes from the war years gives another impression. Burr was a lieutenant colonel on General Putnam’s staff when he met a charming young English girl, Margaret Moncrieffe, who was the daughter of a British brigade major posted on Staten Island. As a foreign national, Margaret was being detained in Burr’s hometown of Elizabethtown near Putnam’s headquarters.

  Davis doesn’t specify what happened between Burr and Moncrieffe, but he presents this story as an example of Burr at his worst. And the encounter has the earmarks of the outrageous: Moncrieffe was fourteen. But Moncrieffe did not consider herself victimized, either then or years later when she recalled the incident for her memoirs. When Burr appears in her pages, it is as if the sun bursts through the clouds. Every word makes clear that she loved him then and loves him still. “May these pages one day meet the eye of him who subdued my virgin heart. . . . To him I plighted my virgin vow. . . . With this conqueror of my soul, how happy should I now have been!” It’s unclear if a fourteen-year-old was simply consumed with fantasies for a handsome American officer, or whether something actually happened between them, but Burr’s own account suggested the former. “Eccentric and volatile,” he called her, but also “endowed with talents, natural as well as acquired.” Initially charmed by her, he wrote over the signature of General Putnam an invitation for her to stay in his field headquarters. But then he had second thoughts. He found Moncrieffe to be unusually sophisticated and not a little sneaky. Once she was at military headquarters, Burr realized that she would be privy to military secrets. She could overhear conversations, pocket correspondence, study battle plans. At fourteen, she would be a very effective spy. Who would ever suspect? Perhaps it took someone inclined toward intrigues like Burr. He had her detained and then removed by barge to her father at British headquarters, presumably on Staten Island. “Bidding an eternal farewell to my dear American friends,” she writes, “[I] turned my back on liberty.” But Burr doubted that. While a seducer is interested in only one thing, Burr was able to focus on another.

  IN THE FALL of 1778, Burr was detached from the Malcolms and received a brutal assignment to manage largely on his own. He was to preside over the Neutral Ground, a no-man’s-land that was not controlled by either side, north of New York City near present-day Westchester County, whose residents were
getting it from both sides—raids by heartless British “cowboys” and by brutal “skinners,” or American brigands. The villages were being plundered of everything of value—food, livestock, household goods—driving the villagers to penury and starvation.

  Washington assigned Burr to put a stop to it, eliminating the brigands and returning any stolen property to its rightful owners. Why Burr? Washington knew perfectly well that Burr had sided with Charles Lee and the Conway Cabal against him, and he may have seen this thankless assignment as fit punishment for Burr’s disloyalty, but it might also be that Washington was giving him a lesson in sorting friend from foe. For the war was not entirely military; it was also political, stemming from a profound hatred between loyalists and patriots, a murky scrum that would continue long after the war was over. But unlike the military war, the political one had no clear battle lines, as each side had enemies in its midst. In Westchester County, it would be up to Burr to rout them out.

  Arriving in a howling snowstorm, he immediately issued orders that every stolen article was to be returned to its owner, whether patriot or Tory, and the thieves chased down. Determined to bring order to the Neutral Ground, Burr threw himself into the dismal work, scarcely eating, not sleeping more than an hour at a time, through the night making the rounds of his commanders, a circuit of about twenty miles, never failing even in the worst winter weather, and it thoroughly exhausted him. As with the Malcolms, Burr was able to rouse a listless, inept crew of soldiers into a fairly solid fighting force. But it wasn’t just the physical effort; it was also the emotional stress of bringing home to the thieves on both sides the blunt fact that their criminality would not be tolerated—and he conveyed this in the most persuasive way he could, through a savage ministry of unbearable pain: fifty lashes on their bare backs. Burr himself bore witness as the whip plucked out hunks of skin, spattering blood everywhere, while the half-naked thief hauled on his restraints and screamed with pain. In one case, Burr commanded that the plunderers—a pair of soldiers in the local militia—be whipped at the house they’d plundered and be imprisoned there “till they make satisfaction.” Always, Burr was there when the suffering was dispensed.

  Burr had never been a man of solid constitution. He would push himself until he’d used up all his reserves and then fall into torpor. Even short of a complete collapse, it seemed there was always a wasting of some kind waiting for him, whether it be the flu, the fevers known as agues, distempers, migraines, “eye trouble,” or some mysterious ache or other. And those were just the physical ones; he was also prone to violent mood swings that sent him skyward with enthusiasm over some daring adventure and then plunged him into long fits of gloom. All of it, together, made close friends like Robert Troup worry that this time he was ready to take his “final farewell of this wrangling world.” For he succumbed to a cluster of nervous complaints that left him scarcely able to rise from bed for well over a month. He tendered his final resignation from the army to Washington in April of 1779, and this time it was accepted, probably without regret. Hamilton may have handled that correspondence too.

  With Burr, however, retirement was not quite so simple. With his Westchester County assignment, he was to keep to his miserable post every day, and, according to his order book, he did—every day except for two nights toward the end of his tour, when he stole away on a horse he named Ol’ Put to gallop to the Hudson. Because of its strategic value, the British patrolled the river closely. Nonetheless, Burr took a boat across to New Jersey, where he rode on to Paramus, a journey of more than thirty miles. To see a woman, of course.

  FIFTEEN

  The Schuylers

  WHILE HAMILTON WAITED for the perfect woman, he enjoyed his waltzes with the nameless ones. And then, in early February 1780, a woman appeared before him who so closely matched his dream lover that he would be forgiven to think of her first as an apparition. It was Elizabeth Schuyler, one of the Schuylers, and no one ever had to say more than that. She was the daughter of General Philip Schuyler, the former commander of the Northern Forces who’d overseen Aaron Burr’s ill-fated Quebec campaign. Hamilton had first laid eyes on him when he paraded into New York with Washington, a paunchy figure with an endless nose. Hamilton had never been impressed with Schuyler’s skills as a military man; neither had Washington. But Schuyler was rich. He was a descendant of one of the four immensely wealthy Dutch families that had settled in New York well over a century before and ruled upstate New York in Hamilton’s time. The Schuylers lived outside Albany in a fine brick mansion they called the Pastures. And, through Schuyler’s wife, the former Catherine Van Rensselaer, of that other great Dutch family, which possessed nearly a million acres of upstate New York, Schuyler had acquired a 120,000-acre estate in Claverack, up the Hudson, in Columbia County. He created a primitive industrial village on the edge of the Saratoga wilderness that would come to be called Schuylerville. All of this made Philip Schuyler one of the richest men in the colonies.

  When Elizabeth made her entrance at Washington’s headquarters, she was accompanied by a uniformed military escort and she bore letters of introduction from her father to Washington and to General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, the colorful Prussian field officer who was imposing military discipline on the ill-trained soldiers.

  Hamilton had to be wondering if this timid little beauty had somehow been conjured from his letter to Laurens. With her hair done up in what she later joked was her “Marie Antoinette coiffure,” with jeweled earrings, Betsey must have dazzled in the candlelight: slight and trim, scarcely more than five feet, with dark flashing eyes that “threw a beam of good temper and benevolence over her whole countenance,” a friend of Hamilton’s wrote. “She is most unmercifully handsome,” Hamilton wrote Betsey’s sister Angelica that February, and then praised her “good nature, affability and vivacity. In short she is so strange a creature that she possesses all the beauties, virtues and graces of her sex without any . . . amiable defects.” Not the way Betsey would have had him put it, but in keeping with the image that he created for himself as a connoisseur of fine wives. And Hamilton? “He exhibited a natural, yet unassuming superiority,” wrote Betsey’s younger sister Catherine. She recalled his “high, expansive forehead, a note of the Grecian mold, a dark bright eye, and the line of a mouth expressing decision and courage.” It was, she concluded, “a face never to be forgotten.” Betsey was staying with her aunt Gertrude, wife of Dr. John Cochran, an innovative physician who was attempting to develop a more reliable system of inoculations against the smallpox that was slaughtering American soldiers at an appalling rate.

  Afterward, Hamilton could scarcely get her out of his mind, and the romantic intrigue undid him so much that he uncharacteristically forgot the pass code for reentry into the fortifications. He threw himself into courtship, at one point penning a sonnet entitled “Answer to the Inquiry Why I Sighed” that included the bloodless couplet “Before no mortal ever knew / A love like mine so tender, true.” If the sentiment seems somewhat forced, it may be because the feeling was, at least at first. As his attachment deepened, he had a dream of finding her in Albany asleep on the grass—with another suitor stroking her hand. Somewhat archly, Hamilton “reproached him for his presumption and asserted my claim.” Thereupon in the dream, Betsey awoke with a start, threw herself in Hamilton’s arms, and covered his face with kisses, although he does not move to kiss her back. To Laurens, he called Betsey “a good-hearted girl” who is “not a genius,” merely “agreeable.” And concluded: “Though not a beauty, she has fine black eyes, is rather handsome, and has every other requisite of the exterior to make a lover happy.”

  Betsey was far more charitable in appraising him, and more insightful, too. While Hamilton’s poetry did not move her, the attempt did. Years later, when she cataloged the qualities of Hamilton that won her heart, she mentioned ones that Hamilton himself would probably not recognize or appreciate. “Elasticity of his mind. Variety of his knowledge. Playfulness of his wit. Ex
cellence of his heart. His immense forebearance [and] virtues.” These were indeed his virtues, but they were not the ones he would have mentioned. Such insights are a mark of her love for a man who would repeatedly challenge it.

  Rather than woo her, Hamilton set about to improve her. “I entreat you, my charmer, not to neglect the charges I gave you, particularly that of taking care of yourself and that of employing all your leisure in reading,” he counseled. “Nature has been very kind to you. Do not neglect to cultivate her gifts and to enable yourself to make the distinguished figure in all respect to which you are entitled to aspire.”

  It was one thing to win Betsey and another to win her father. General Schuyler styled himself a democrat, but every utterance suggested otherwise. He once advised his son John, “Be indulgent, my child, to your inferiors.” Schuyler was quite aware that Hamilton was not one of his kind. For a man of Schuyler’s standing, it was a serious risk to let his daughter marry outside the clan. But the fact was, it had happened before, repeatedly. Three of Betsey’s sisters had eloped, one slithering out her bedroom window to flee to Massachusetts with her lover, and all entered marriages without their father’s consent. Betsey’s beguiling older sister, Angelica, had fallen for an Englishman, born John Barker Carter, later John Barker Church, a short man with plum-like lips who’d been swanning about London as a man of means. From this side of the Atlantic, it was difficult to size him up, but General Schuyler had heard some alarming stories, like the one about Church’s having fled to America because he’d killed someone in a duel. Everyone said it was much more likely that Church had fled bankruptcy, but he had a handsome pair of dueling pistols to show for it, ones that were made by the London firm of Wogdon and put to tragic use later.