Starting in on the law ahead of Hamilton, Burr did a favor for his future rival by persuading the five-man New York State Supreme Court to exempt returning soldiers from the requirement of three full years of legal study before applying to the bar, and permitting them to complete only six months instead. “Surely,” he declared, “no rule should be intended to . . . injure one whose only misfortune is having sacrificed his time, his constitution and his fortune to his country.” The truth was, any length of study was too long. He told Theodosia he much preferred to dive into “Rousseau’s 4th volume,” with its interesting ideas about jealousy. Theodosia believed it a natural human emotion, but Rousseau declared it fit only for “brutes and sensualists,” and Burr let her know rather sharply (he could be stinging in his chastisements) he heartily agreed.
By then, he’d received a far greater, almost wondrous, deliverance. In December of 1781, a friend directed Theodosia to a small item in The York Gazette: Lieutenant Colonel James Mark Prevost had died of yellow fever in Jamaica. When Burr learned the news he was still in Albany, frantically training for the law. He started keeping a journal of his love for Theodosia as a means of closing the gap of separation between them. The following spring, Burr finally won his license as an attorney and set up an office in Albany, and, the last impediment cleared away, the two were set to be married in Albany, not far from Hamilton’s wedding place at the Pastures.
Given the relative extravagance, one would be forgiven for thinking that Hamilton was the aristocrat and Burr the immigrant. To save money, Burr and Theodosia wedded in a joint ceremony with Theodosia’s half sister Catherine de Visme, who was marrying a British physician who’d joined the American cause. Burr wore an “old coat,” and Theodosia’s gown “of suitable gauze; ribbons, gloves, etc.,” as she put it, was borrowed from her sister. It cost them “nothing,” Theodosia was delighted to report. “The attention of my Burr,” as she always called him, “is not to be equaled,” and “the air of Albany is healthy, beer in perfection.” This was a marriage that was plainly not about money.
William Livingston, Hamilton’s host at Liberty Hall, and an admirer of Theodosia’s, sent word that he hoped the marriage would silence “the tongue of malice” that had been so noisy against the couple. They could only hope.
WHEN HE ARRIVED in Albany, Hamilton relied on the Burr exemption, and he was confident that six months of legal study would be more than ample. He decided not to follow the custom of seeking instruction from a practicing lawyer. He’d teach himself the law, relying only on occasional pointers from his old friend Robert Troup, whom he lived with in the Schuyler mansion, and he busied himself preparing a manual to teach others the essential points of the profession. Practical Proceedings in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, he titled it. He also penned some essays about how to reorganize the national economy, a subject he’d been pondering while the army was plagued by the funding efforts of the Continental Congress.
Neither man mentioned meeting the other in Albany. But Albany society was so tight, their interests so similar, their friends so overlapping, and their ages and marital circumstances so nearly identical, it is inconceivable that the two should have missed each other. If they had met, it would have been a remarkable moment, like the moment when twins meet in Shakespeare, only these twins were fraternal, not identical, with intriguing differences to complement their obvious similarities. Both men were still short enough that they’d never been able to shake the sobriquet “little” that had attached to both their names, and each was deceptively slight. Hamilton’s chest was so slender it needed a medal to enhance it. Burr, always dreamier, counted less on his body to convey his character, and more on his dark, deep-set eyes.
THEIR TIME TOGETHER in Albany was brief, barely a year, and punctuated on Hamilton’s part by duties that arose from those essays deploring the confederate system of governance. He was asked to serve on the Confederation Congress, intended to reconsider the thorny matter of the dysfunctional Articles of Confederation, and in November of 1782, he trotted on horseback from Albany clear to Philadelphia, now much restored after its months of British subjugation. It was now a pleasing little London that combined sea-scented wharves with parasol-twirling ladies on tree-shaded streets. The work of creating a new nation held Hamilton’s attention for only two months before he was begging Betsey, “Come my charmer and relieve me. Bring my darling boy to my bosom.”
The meetings meandered interminably, and it got worse with the signing of a provisional peace treaty with Great Britain at the end of November 1782, further undercutting any need for national unity. The whole thing might have been a total loss for Hamilton but for his discovery of a wizened, monkish figure whose brilliance possibly surpassed Hamilton’s own. It was James Madison, a thirty-one-year-old who might have been twice that. Fresh from a virtuosic display at the Virginia House of Delegates, he’d been the youngest delegate in Congress when he arrived two years before, an honor that now passed to Hamilton at twenty-eight. Unlike most of their confederates, Madison shared Hamilton’s conviction that the government needed to be reorganized along federal lines with a powerful central government in place of the current squabbling duchies. The national government needed its own source of revenue if it was to maintain an army, and the states would wither if they didn’t create a national market. The frustrations came to a head that June when the entire four-hundred-man officer corps of the Continental Army threatened to resign if its demands weren’t met. Hamilton appealed to Washington to intervene, and when Congress still did not act, the officers poured into Philadelphia to seize military arsenals and then stormed into the statehouse to take some congressmen hostage, including a seething Hamilton. When he was finally released, he wrote an angry broadside asserting that the government had been “grossly insulted.” He demanded the state militia offer protection from these belligerent army officers, but when that was not forthcoming, the Congress decamped to cramped and inelegant quarters in Princeton.
Hamilton was so disgusted with the state of Congress that it compelled him to think anew about a more powerful national legislature. The outgoing governor of Virginia, the tall, airy, bandy-legged Thomas Jefferson, thought that Congress should remain weak and simply meet less. Hamilton would certainly not let Jefferson have the last word on that.
HAMILTON PASSED HIS exams and was set to embark on a legal career in Albany until politics again intervened. His thoughts on taxation led to his being appointed as the receiver of continental taxes for New York, a post that placed him at the center of the debate about the future of the government and won him membership on a five-man committee in Philadelphia to reexamine the Articles of Confederation.
By then, Hamilton had long since put the war behind him. But John Laurens had not, still committed to the idea of raising a black army against the British. “Quit your sword my friend, put on the toga, come to Congress,” Hamilton begged him. “We have fought side by side to make America free. Let us hand in hand struggle to make her happy.”
Laurens never received this message. Trying to brush back the British from South Carolina that August, Laurens flouted orders to be cautious—not for the first time—and tried to ambush a small expeditionary force he’d spotted near the Combahee River. But the enemy was waiting for him in the tall grass, muskets at the ready. As soon as Laurens and his men drew near, the British sprang on them, firing. Laurens was cut down instantly.
When he heard the news in Albany, Hamilton was crushed to have lost a friend in a “trifling skirmish,” as he told Lafayette. “You know how much I love him and will judge how much I regret him.” That was an ending for Hamilton, not just for his friendship with Laurens, but also for that flow of deep and honest emotion that Laurens always seemed to inspire in him. When Laurens died, it was as if the true Hamilton died too.
Part Two
The Battle Is Joined
In his suit of American broadcloth, President George Washington de
livered his first inaugural address on the balcony of Federal Hall. He was said to be so nervous that he thrust his free hand into his pocket to conceal the trembling. Not yet in the government as treasury secretary, Hamilton watched from an upstairs window of his house down the street.
NINETEEN
Commentaries on the Laws of England
ALTHOUGH CORNWALLIS’S BRITISH troops had marched smartly out of Yorktown to fife and drum, the last soldiers occupying New York City under General Guy Carleton drained away like the tide.* A jeering crowd turned out to watch the detested redcoats get ferried out to transport ships in the harbor for the long, desultory passage home. Before the last of them was gone, the rotund General Henry Knox led thousands of tattered soldiers into the liberated city. “Our troops,” recalled one witness. “My heart and eyes were full, and I admired and gloried in them the more because they were weather-beaten and forlorn.” Many of the onlookers sported “union cockades” of black and white ribbons as they roamed the streets ripping down tavern signs that expressed loyalty to the Crown. Royal street names fell too: Crown Street became Liberty, King became Pine. When the last of the British were gone from the city’s shores, to a roar from the crowd, Knox raised the American flag to flap in the chilly air over a free Manhattan.
General Washington had ridden down from Tarrytown for the occasion, and General McDougall and other former Sons of Liberty escorted him past a jam of ecstatic New Yorkers to the Bowery to see the British ships finally raise anchor and leave the harbor. Then he toured the new New York to a raucous welcome, receiving thirteen toasts at the fabled Fraunces Tavern alone. At New York governor George Clinton’s dinner for the French ambassador at Cape’s Tavern, 120 guests downed 135 bottles of fine Madeira and 50 bottles of beer—and then, joy-struck, tossed sixty wineglasses and eight decanters into the fire in an alcohol delirium. The night was capped with a burst of fireworks: A “Balloon of Serpents and a Yew Tree of brilliant fire” shot up into the heavens, followed by an “Illuminated Pyramid, with Archemedian Screws, a Globe and vertical sun,” and then, the grand, thundering finale: “Fame, descending,” accompanied by a hundred blazing rockets. The celebrations turned solemn a week later when Washington paid a return visit to Fraunces Tavern to deliver a farewell to his officers. No orator, he said little, but silently embraced each man in turn.
HAMILTON WAS NOT among them. Just a few days before, he’d come down the Hudson by sloop from Albany with Betsey and baby Philip to Manhattan, to establish a legal practice there now that all the Tory lawyers had been officially turned out. They’d found rooms at 57 Wall Street, not far from the Fraunces Tavern on Pearl, so inconvenience was no excuse. Nor was Hamilton likely to have gone uninvited, as Washington never held grudges where his family was concerned. More likely, Hamilton was still smarting from the incident on the staircase. His pride was sizable, but it was also tender, and Washington had wounded it.
Another young lawyer, a newly confident Aaron Burr, moved down from Albany virtually the same day, and he’d settled with Theodosia and three of her children, with Theodosia, fille, to come the next year, into a house on Wall Street, a short walk from the Hamiltons, not that Burr was likely to pass that way. He referred to it as “next door but one to City Hall.” The rent was to start the day the troops left the city. He and Hamilton were certainly not the only ambitious young lawyers bursting into Manhattan. Hamilton’s roommate Robert Troup came, as did Morgan Lewis, another rising political star; James Kent, who would become one of Hamilton’s friends; and Henry Brockholst Livingston of that overspreading political family. Perhaps fifty altogether, making up a blindingly talented cadre of New York lawyers who proceeded to define the city’s law, and its politics too.
WHEN NEW YORK emerged from the war, it was still only inhabited for about a mile up from the Battery on the island’s southern tip. Beyond that it was a scramble of wooded hills, opening into an occasional lonely farm. Many of the trees fringing inhabited Manhattan had been hacked away for firewood, leaving just skeletons behind. Further north, the landscape was teeming with wolves and black bears, and every imaginable species of birds flew overhead—enough wildlife to make New York’s forest one of the most abundant in America. And the island was bounded on either side by the pristine waters of the Hudson and East Rivers, which were a paradise of trout and lobster.
Hamilton and Burr both lived near the ruins of the once-spectacular Trinity Church, now a ghost of itself, a grim reminder of the city’s devastation. All the finer buildings that were still intact, churches mostly, had been put to crude military use by the British as prisons and storage dumps, and they’d turned much of the rest of the city into an armed camp, digging up the streets for trenches and erecting forts on nearly every rise, in preparation for an American assault that never came. The Great Fire of 1776, which the British had let rage, had claimed seventeen hundred buildings, many of them those grand mansions around the former Queen Street that had given the city whatever gentility it might have possessed. They lay now hollowed out, the walls crumbled, the beams blackened embers, the furniture ashes. “The Burnt District,” the papers called it. In the hollows where proper buildings once stood, desperate New Yorkers had thrown up a village of shanties and rude huts that was called “Canvas Town.” Rude as they were, many of them had been stripped bare like the trees: scavengers peeled off every stick they could reach to feed the fires against the icy winter.
At first, the peace only made things worse, for the city largely depended on the wealth and talents of the Tories, who had now evacuated en masse, either by decree or in fear of what the victors might do to them. Ten thousand altogether, many of them fled to Nova Scotia, where fugitive slaves went to tend them. Hamilton was one of the few citizens who saw the exodus as the city’s loss, as he knew the Tories would be essential to the rebuilding effort, not to mention the restoration of the prewar refinement that had made New York society so appealing. Lamenting the mindless hostility of the patriot mobs, he wrote one of the highborn Livingstons: “Our state will feel for twenty years at least the effect of the popular frenzy.”
New York craved renewal. The exuberant fashions, the shameless celebration of wealth, the jaunty, cosmopolitan worldview—all the distinctive New Yorkness that had started to emerge before the war, as the city became a thriving commercial hub, abuzz with immigrants, had been pounded by cannon fire, torched, and ground to dust by heavy-booted soldiers. But it had not been extinguished. That essential vitality had merely gone underground, like tree squirrels in a forest fire.
The city’s inherent electricity first returned in the boisterous coffee shops that sprouted by the dozens around the city—Tontine’s, most famously, which would soon evolve into the city’s first stock exchange—as well as the hundreds of loud taverns that were sprinkled about, one to every city block, and often, it seemed, on every side of every city block. All of these were places for garrulous New Yorkers to jaw over politics, gossip, news, and business, creating the outlines of the new city.
Besides its energetic immigrants, taste for the new, and commercial impulse, New York still possessed a unique asset—a confluence of the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean that made it the center of the New World, and the cocky attitude that came with it. Hamilton was one of the first to see that, free of Britain, New York could remake itself as an international city, if it could replace the English system of government with a sound American one. Not yet truly a nation, America was a confederacy of jostling sovereignties, each one a jumble of statutes that had no force past its borders. Still, for a young lawyer, these were attractive circumstances: a wide-open job market with the established Tory lawyers all banished; an endless supply of cases in the postwar chaos; and plenty of work in interpreting the new laws coming out of Albany.
In the scramble, two men quickly emerged as the two finest lawyers in the city—Hamilton and Burr, and each was so impressive no one knew which to rate first. General Erastus Root, a fellow New York lawy
er who often saw them in action, went so far as to call them “the two greatest men in the state, perhaps the nation.” But, as in so many other aspects of their lives, their appeal was a matter of taste. The styles of the two men could scarcely have been more different. Hamilton, Root declared, was “flowing and rapturous,” and Burr “terse and convincing.” To be sure, Hamilton might have been overflowing in Root’s opinion, as it might take him four hours to say what took Burr thirty minutes. In a legal battle, though, each man could land a memorable blow. Hamilton’s good friend Troup was on the opposite side of one case and fretted to a friend: “I shall deem myself fortunate [if] we all get out of this cause [without] fighting. With my moderation of temper I hope to escape [Hamilton’s] pistols as well as his sword.” Burr’s wrath came out more subtly, as his early biographer Parton noted a “vein of quiet sarcasm in some of his speeches,” although, he hastened to add, Burr otherwise exhibited nothing but “courtliness” and “perfect breeding.”
Hamilton cut the more airy figure, pirouetting about the courtroom with that dancer’s body, beautifully clothed, gesturing gracefully, ever eloquent, and seemingly inexhaustible. His rhetorical elevation wasn’t just to convey superiority (although it did have that effect) but to take the long view. To Hamilton, a case was about the principle of the case.
To Burr, a case was about the case. In the courtroom, he rarely moved, scarcely gestured. His silky hair up in a shell comb, his head lightly powdered, his face was a mask, free of smiles, frowns, grimaces, or any other threepenny theatricality. Let Hamilton deliver his arias of impassioned argument. Burr kept his voice a level monotone, and he let those deep, penetrating eyes of his convey any emotion the jury might seek. “Perfectly round, not large, deep hazel in color, [each] had had an expression which no one who saw it could ever forget,” intoned a correspondent for the New York Leader. “No man could stand in the presence of Col. Burr with his eyes fixed on him and not feel that they pierced his innermost thoughts.” To Burr, the law was whatever he could claim it was—“Whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.” Instead of eloquence, Burr went for a conversational style, but always, wrote Parton, “the conversation of a well-bred, thoroughly-informed man of the world.”
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 16
