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

by Sedgwick, John

  The more deeply Hamilton entered into his new family, the more he chafed at his old one with Washington. He had resented the strictures of his position for much of the war—confined to headquarters when other officers, like Burr, could make a name for themselves in battle—and Washington had steadfastly refused to set him free. It was maddening: In October of 1780, Lafayette had wanted Hamilton to take charge of a company to drive the British from Staten Island, but Washington refused, even after Hamilton enlisted a pair of generals to plead his case. In some ways, Hamilton had become a victim of his own success. He’d become the indispensable man. But that didn’t make the situation any easier to bear. If anything, the unfairness of it all made it infuriating.

  By January, Washington had established his winter headquarters in a tight little farmhouse in New Windsor, New York, just off the Hudson, where icy winds swept across to rattle the farmhouse walls and send snow arcing up under the windows. For Hamilton, newly married, eager for his wife’s company, it was a place of utter misery. “I hate congress—I hate the army—I hate the world—I hate myself,” Hamilton moaned. “The whole is a mass of fools and knaves.” For Washington, it had been a miserable year. The army had blundered into loss after loss, renewing calls for his removal. In late spring, Hamilton had been distressed to discover that Laurens had been captured by the British in a siege of Charleston, not far from the grand house where he’d grown up. Laurens had begged Washington for reinforcements, but he had none to send, and it had fallen to Hamilton to give him the bad news. He began the letter “Adieu my Dear,” and closed it with a plea for him to be careful “for the sake of Yr. affectionate A. Hamilton.” Laurens was so outraged that Hamilton had to beg him to “play the philosopher” and not turn to “the dagger, nor the poisoned bowl, nor to the rope.”*

  Now, with another harsh winter upon them, mutinies had erupted among the ranks as soldiers refused to go any longer without shoes or proper clothing. With Hamilton’s concurrence this time, Washington responded savagely, ordering the “most incendiary” leaders hanged. As ever, Martha Washington tried to boost everyone’s spirits, and Betsey had come down from Albany to tend to Hamilton’s, but it was no use.

  One night after Betsey had returned home, Hamilton and Washington stayed up late preparing dispatches for some French officers, until they finally dragged themselves to bed, exhausted. Early the next morning, the offices once again humming with activity, Hamilton was descending the narrow stairs when Washington was coming up in search of him. Hamilton merely nodded to the general, said he’d be with him in a moment, and continued downstairs to speak to Lafayette. He returned to find Washington standing at the top of the stairs, glaring down at him. As Hamilton wrote his father-in-law, the exchange went:

  “Col Hamilton (said he), you have kept me waiting at the head of the stairs these ten minutes. I must tell you Sir you treat me with disrespect.” I replied without petulancy, but with decision “I am not conscious of it Sir, but since you have thought it necessary to tell me so we part” “Very well Sir (said he) if it be your choice” or something to this effect and we separated.*

  And that was it for the greatest collaboration of the war. Hamilton stayed on for a month more, until Washington could find a suitable replacement, but the two never again spoke of the impasse. Washington was mortified by the break, Hamilton somewhat relieved. “For three years past, I have felt no friendship for him and have professed none,” he bluntly declared, because their “dispositions are the opposites of each other.” Hamilton felt no inclination to “court” him. But he did feel guilty all the same. To Schuyler, Hamilton did everything but tally the seconds to show that Washington had been in the wrong, and he invoked Lafayette—who surely did not want to get in the middle of this—as his star witness in the case. “He can testify how impatient I was to get back, and that I left him in a manner which but for our intimacy would have been more than abrupt. I sincerely believe my absence which gave so much umbrage did not last two minutes.”

  But then he returned to the core issue. “You are too good a judge of human nature,” he told his father-in-law, flattering him in his eagerness to keep him on his side, “not to be sensible how this conduct in me must have operated on a man to whom all the world is offering incense. With this key you will easily unlock the present mystery.” It is typical of all family quarrels for one member to assail another for his own traits, so it was probably wise that Hamilton struck a reference to Washington’s “self-love” from the draft, and he might have dropped the incense, too. Hamilton could be quite the preening rooster, and this was a reckless display of vanity.

  Still determined to win military honor, Hamilton continued to pester Washington for a field command, and after several months of entreaties, Washington finally set aside his pique and dispatched him to New York City.

  But by the end of the month, his ambition had gotten the better of him again when Washington finally awarded him four light infantry companies. He was desperate to obtain glory in the field and wrote Betsey that he simply must go. So much for the seductive whispers; now it was time for a lecture. “I am obliged to sacrifice my inclination to my public character. Even though my presence should not be essential here, yet my love I could not with decency or honor leave the army during the campaign. . . . I must not now evince to the army, that the moment my circumstances have changed, my maxims have changed also. This would be an inconsistency, and my Betsey would not have me guilty of an inconsistency. Besides this my Betsey, The General is peculiarly averse to the practice in question.” Any love for her is soft and temporary; his need for success is hard and fixed. For Betsey, it was one thing to be wooed, and another to be won.

  He left the Schuylers in Albany, and shortly before Betsey’s worst fears were realized: A terrifying mob of Tories and Indians swarmed the Pastures and then burst inside, seemingly bent on slaughtering everyone, including Betsey, now several months pregnant with the Hamiltons’ first child. “Where is your master?” one of the men demanded of Betsey’s sister Peggy, menacing her with his musket. Schuyler was hiding upstairs, but Peggy told the men he’d galloped into town to fetch troops. The credulous marauders fled at the prospect, leaving all the Schuylers unharmed.

  By then, Hamilton was preparing to join Washington in his effort to retake Manhattan and avenge the rout that started the war, when word came in from Lafayette—who’d been shadowing the British forces as the rambunctious young commander of seven thousand French—that General Charles Cornwallis had gathered the bulk of the British army, about seven thousand men, in the port city of Yorktown, Virginia, along the York River. There they were protected from any naval assault by a wall of British ships.

  Washington saw his chance: If the ships could somehow be driven off, Cornwallis’s strength would be turned to his weakness, as he and his great mass of men would be pressed up against the sea, facing annihilation from both sides. Washington immediately got word to the mammoth French fleet commanded by Admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse and harbored down in the Antilles to fly north to scare off the flotilla of British ships. Meanwhile, Washington snuck two thousand of his own men plus five thousand French out of Manhattan, past innumerable spies who never understood what they saw, and rushed them to Virginia.

  Hamilton, now, like Burr, a lieutenant colonel, had been assigned a light infantry company, and he trudged down the coast with them to join the fray. Keyed up as he was to be part of the war, his eagerness sat uneasily with his desire to be with his pregnant wife. “I must go without seeing you,” he told Betsey a few days before he left Manhattan. “I must go without embracing you. Alas I must go.” An unusual gloom stole over him as he marched, and his apprehension grew. “Every day confirms me in the intention of renouncing public life and devoting myself wholly to you,” he declared. “Let others waste their time and their tranquility in a vain pursuit of power and glory. Be it my object to be happy in a quiet retreat with my better angel.”

&nb
sp; In Williamsburg, the staging area for the Yorktown fight, Washington joined with Lafayette to assemble a vast American force, the largest agglomeration of the war, of more than fifteen thousand men, enough for a small city, for the last great push to rid America of redcoats. Laurens was there too. Freed in exchange for a British officer of equivalent rank, he’d been serving in Paris in an ambassadorial post to secure some crucial arms for the American side. He’d been sprung from the negotiations in time to take part in this last great showdown of the war. Hamilton was thrilled to be reunited at last with his exuberant friend.

  From Williamsburg, Hamilton’s brigade led the fifteen-mile march to Yorktown, up on a bluff overlooking a narrowing in the York River. The river opened into the Chesapeake Bay, which reached up through Maryland. By then, the great twenty-nine-ship fleet of the French under de Grasse had dispersed the British fleet that had defended Cornwallis’s position. As soon as they were gone, Washington directed his men to enclose Cornwallis in semicircles of soldiers and trenches. They were digging his grave. Without his ships, Cornwallis knew the peril, and he desperately put his men to protecting his position with stout fortifications that rose so high they hid everything but the very tops of a few church steeples. He’d hoped these defensive walls would hold off the Americans until his navy could return to rescue him, but they created his own prison instead.

  It was a classic siege, an ever-tightening knot, designed to cut the British off from supply lines, all the while pummeling them with cannon and artillery fire to press their faces to the ground in submission. But to get the guns in range for maximum effect, the Americans had to gradually tighten the range of the trenches. Washington had Cornwallis in his grip, but he still had to squeeze. At first, the men set up camp safely out of reach of the British guns, so Hamilton and his men could sleep out under the stars, if fitfully.

  Then Hamilton’s men helped dig a closer trench to the south. By custom, when a trench was complete, one of the officers in the company of trench diggers would lead a small celebration, waving a flag or offering a spirited tune, to show the company’s mettle. Hamilton led this one, and he ordered all his men out of the trench to perform some brisk parade drills on level ground, in full view of the enemy. It was supposed to be a taunt, but it had a death wish in it, and his men were not pleased to be part of such a nervy display. Later, Hamilton told his men that if the British charged at them, to fire only once at a soldier as he tried to storm the trench, and then run him through with a bayonet, which would require veins full of ice water. Sure enough, when he sent out pickets for some predawn reconnaissance, they came tumbling into the trench, terrified to have spotted some British soldiers. Furious, Hamilton ordered them back out of the trench, and to return to their task.

  In yet another blunder, Cornwallis had placed two sections of his fortifications well in front of the rest, leaving them dangerously exposed to attack. To take advantage, Washington planned to take a page from General Howe’s book at Chadd’s Ford, feint north, to distract Cornwallis, and then charge hard at the two redoubts from the south.

  But who would have the chance for glory? Determined to be the man, Hamilton pestered Washington about it, relentlessly cajoling, demanding, until the general had little choice but to award the plum to his renegade former aide. Ecstatic at the news, Hamilton burst into his tent. “We have it!” he exclaimed. “We have it!”

  Past midnight on October 14, the American artillery units let loose with a thunder of cannon fire well to the north, to make the British think the attack was coming from there. Meanwhile, Hamilton readied his men to the south. Since silence was essential to the surprise, Hamilton had ordered all guns unloaded and bayonets affixed. Then he gathered his men five deep in the long trench and waited for the signal—a burst of five French shells high into the night sky. When it came, Hamilton leapt out of the trench to lead his men forward, dashing two hundred yards across the rough field to the distant redoubts, which loomed up larger with every pounding step. Hamilton was the first to reach the far walls, and, scrambling up the back of one of his soldiers, he was the first to vault over the top and into the parapet inside. Behind him, his men snapped off the tips of the wooden pikes intended to impale invaders and used them as steps to climb over the top. At Hamilton’s direction, the men raised bloodcurdling screams, making one terrified Hessian soldier inside think he was being overrun by a “whole wild hunt.” Inside the fortifications, bayonets dripped red in the night light as the men did their bloody work, Hamilton’s no less than the rest, and a few plaintive gunshots rang out from the British side. Then Hamilton’s men overwhelmed the enemy with their sheer numbers, and the British and Hessians were soon begging to surrender to save themselves. Hot with battle, many of the Americans wanted to press the attack, but Hamilton insisted they avoid such “barbarity.” Hamilton instead accepted the proffered sword of his British counterpart, Major Campbell, and Hamilton’s last battle was over.

  Once the Americans seized the fortifications, their guns could strike anywhere in Yorktown. Frantic, Cornwallis dispatched some men under Lieutenant Colonel Robert Abercrombie to break the center of the American line, but they were easily repulsed. Hunkered down, Cornwallis even tried to infect some black slaves with smallpox and send them out to wander among the American troops, to no effect. The patriots continued to pound Yorktown. Two more days passed, in which the British supplies ran down and diseases spread, and finally on October 17, a single red-coated drummer boy appeared on the parapet, followed by an officer waving a white handkerchief.

  “Tomorrow Cornwallis and his army are ours,” Hamilton crowed to Betsey. And it was so. Cornwallis had tried to hold out for better terms, but it was hopeless: In the end he had to surrender his entire army of nearly ten thousand men to the Americans. Hamilton was there to watch the spectacle of the British withdrawal from Yorktown. Once proud, strutting, invincible, the redcoats were now beaten men for whom Hamilton had no pity. “I observed every sign of mortification with pleasure,” he said. Officially the war would drag on until 1783, as the remnants of the British army retreated to New York City, which had always been their stronghold, and as Benjamin Franklin, in Paris, negotiated the peace that would mark the departure of the British from American shores.

  Hamilton watched the surrender on horseback, and when the ceremony was complete, he galloped off to see Betsey in Albany, wearing out two horses in his eagerness. When he arrived at the grand Schuyler mansion, he dropped into bed and scarcely rose from it for two months. The Pastures was a vast house, broad enough for seven windows across and, within, a sixty-foot hall that set off a sitting room, drawing room, nursery, and vast dining room, with a grand, curving staircase leading up to the ballroom above, and it was beginning to feel like his home. A friend extolled the house in Byronic verse as a lover’s bower:

  All these attendants Ham are thine,

  Be’t yours to treat them as divine.

  By January of 1782, Hamilton had roused himself enough for Betsey to present him with a son, Philip, named for her father, not his, but giving Alexander Hamilton a true family at last.

  EIGHTEEN

  In Ill Humour with Every Thing but Thee

  A SMALL CITY OF sober Dutch homes, Albany was the first place where Burr had to confront the fact that his income was no match for his expenses. He’d come to secure for himself a moneymaking profession, expecting he might soon have a family to support. While Burr had taken his time to settle on his career, Hamilton knew immediately that his was to be the law. It suited every talent of his, from his mastery of detail to his brilliance at argument. Like Burr, he’d learn it in the state capital, since Manhattan was still under British control. For both men, the law was attractive for its income. Both of them were reckless with money in all ways—spending it freely on luxuries and overly generous to friends in need.

  Although Hamilton was supposed to be the poor one, it was Burr who was in the financial bind, and not for the last t
ime. While he didn’t dwell on his finances, they defined him, if only by their precariousness, and when they appear in his journal it’s clear they made him miserable, as they explained why he was in this remote city, so far from Theodosia, doing work he plainly detested, in merely “tolerable” quarters. One entry doubles as a letter to Theodosia. “A day completely lost,” he grumped of a futile search for rooms, “and I, of course, in ill humour with every thing but thee.” The next morning, he was down with a migraine that he attributed to a “hearty supper of Dutch sausages.” He took “the true Indian cure,” sweating out the malignancy in front of the fire and living on hot tea. But he admitted the best cure would be Theodosia herself. He finally found rooms, but they were too dreary for studying. “Were my life at stake, [the law] could not command my attention.” And then deliverance: A Schuyler relative, Philip Van Rensselaer, came to call, sniffed about Burr’s digs, and pronounced them inadequate for a man of his qualities; he soon found Burr far better lodging with a pair of his wealthy spinster aunts. Delighted with the new place, Burr professed to find the aunts “obliging and (incredible!!) good-natured,” each of them “the paragon of neatness. Not an article of furniture, even to a teakettle, that would soil a muslin handkerchief.”

  It was likely that General Alexander McDougall—the rebel patriot from Hamilton’s college days whom Burr had served under in Westchester County—had put the Schuylers up to enlisting Van Rensselaer, since McDougall was close to General Philip Schuyler. That had prompted Burr to pay a call on the Schuylers while Hamilton was at Yorktown and Betsey was still flush with her pregnancy. Shaking his hand in greeting, and then gazing into the moonglow of Aaron Burr’s face, Betsey could not possibly have imagined she was staring at the man who would be her husband’s killer. Nonetheless, she must have dispatched her uncle Philip to look after Burr—something she could obviously not, as a lady, do herself.