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

by Sedgwick, John

  With that, the two Virginians collected Muhlenberg to see Hamilton and discuss an “improper pecuniary connection” between Hamilton and Reynolds. The thought of two powerful members of the Republican Party coming to discuss a matter that had every possibility of bringing Hamilton’s career crashing down, and bringing down many of the structures he had built for the country—it must have filled Hamilton with dread. The three men laid out what they knew, and then, at Hamilton’s request, agreed to meet again in the privacy of Hamilton’s house that evening.

  There, Hamilton confessed to what he later termed “an indelicate amour” and to paying blackmail to keep it quiet. That was the full extent of his connection to James Reynolds. With that, Hamilton hoped to put the entire matter to rest. As gentlemen, the three politicians were inclined to take his word for it. Besides, they had the documents to back it up. Still, not everyone believed they should be so trusting, as the secrets were already leaking out. “Was I with you,” Hamilton’s war compatriot and Burr’s college friend “Light-Horse Harry” Lee wrote him, “I would talk an hour with doors bolted & windows shut, as my heart is much affected by rumor I have heard.” Two of the three “gentlemen” against him, after all, were his “sworn political opponents,” one of them, Monroe, a close ally of Jefferson; another conspirator was Hamilton’s aggrieved mistress; and the last two utter scoundrels.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Louis Capet Has Lost His Caput

  BY THEN, HAMILTON was being attacked headlong by House Republicans convinced that something was amiss in his handling of the large sums that the government had borrowed from Europe to pay back a loan to his new Bank of the United States. While Jeffersonians feared this money had been diverted from the nation’s rightful payments to France, other critics contended that Hamilton had used it to feed the speculative frenzy. Jefferson and Madison had more insidious accusations, stemming from the whispers they’d picked up about the Reynolds affair. To nail him, the incendiary Virginia congressman William Branch Giles had insisted that Hamilton address five resolutions, each one requiring a massive detailing of international accounts, and he assigned a two-month deadline, hoping that any failure or delay would indicate guilt. Hamilton delivered the information two weeks early and festooned it with countless tables and figures. That caused Giles to pause but not to stop. He went forward with nine censure motions against Hamilton, most of them drawn from a draft of Jefferson’s, but the Federalist-heavy House voted them down. Hamilton emerged victorious, but the battle had taken its toll, leaving him sleepless, skittish, irritable, barely able to distinguish between his enemies, his friends, and phantoms who might be either, and equally likely to lash out at any of the three.

  THE MESSAGES BETWEEN the Old World and the New were not sent by just the Americans. The French sent missives, too, and in August of 1792 they were dipped in blood, as the revolution that had seemed a glorious extension of the American one took a dark turn. Mobs stormed the royal palace in the Tuileries, captured Louis XVI, and threw him in prison. The new kings, the sadistic Robespierre and Marat, soon set up a guillotine nearby to slice off the heads of more than a thousand Parisians, two hundred of them priests. Hearing the news, the Jeffersonians at first endorsed the mass executions as a necessary cleansing. Then, on January 21, 1793, the king was himself guillotined, his head stuffed in a basket between his lifeless legs, while the revolutionaries howled with delight. With that, the revolutionaries were off on a murder spree throughout the country. Among thousands of others, the Marquis de Lafayette’s troops abandoned him, and he was hunted down and imprisoned. Although the revolutionaries had conferred honorary citizenship on the treasury secretary they mistakenly called “Jean Hamilton,” the recipient was horrified by the turn of events—“a state of things the most cruel, sanguinary, and violent that ever stained the annals of mankind.” At first, the chastened Jeffersonians simply refused to believe the newspaper accounts and persisted in regarding the revolution as “wonderful in its progress and . . . stupendous in its consequences,” as Madison put it. And some made light of it. “Louis Capet,” as the dethroned king was termed, “has lost his Caput,” joked Freneau’s Gazette. By 1794, the guillotine at Lyon was thought too deliberate a tool for slaughter, and hundreds were laid waste by cannon fire. At Nantes, two thousand people were loaded onto barges, tied together, taken to the middle of the Loire, and drowned. “Danton, Robespierre, Marat, and co[mpany] are furies,” Adams growled. “Dragon’s teeth have been sown in France and come up monsters.” Jefferson was blasé. “The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood?” But the playing out of the ideological dispute internationally both expanded it and contracted it, too. Like the light from a lantern show, the American tussle between its two nascent parties was projected out into the world, and colored the view, so that all of France became Jeffersonian, and all of England Hamiltonian, almost as if those two countries had been annexed. “There are in the U.S. some characters of opposite principles,” Jefferson put it, “all of them hostile to France and looking to England as the staff of their hope.” And vice versa, of course. But the projection went the other way across the Atlantic, too, so that every tremor from overseas reverberated through the American political landscape, either confirming or undermining the core prejudices of either party.

  The fervid revolutionary spirit paid a visit in April of 1793, when France delivered itself of a new French minister to the United States. Short but florid, he was Edmond-Charles Genet, but, in deference to the égalité of the French Revolution, he was known simply as Citizen Genet. Just thirty, he was stylish and erudite, a friend to the murdered king, and exquisitely educated. He spoke seven languages and had been fluent in ancient Greek since age six. He might have been exactly to Hamilton’s sophisticated tastes, except that Genet possessed a French snobbery that rose off of him like perfume. (He left his card when paying visits to workingmen.) He may have carried with it the musk of Hamilton’s bête noire, Jefferson. Beyond the stated mission of seeking a full payoff of the American war debt of 5.6 million dollars, Genet seemed bent on inflaming the differences between the emergent parties by offering an example of French democracy to counter the English aristocracy, and so drew to him a flock of Republican politicians, including Burr, who dined with him at Richmond Hill. More covertly, Genet had in his portfolio ambitions to upset Washington’s careful neutrality in France’s war with Britain by brazenly rounding up “privateers”—commercial fishing ships—and setting them loose to capture British merchant ships; to rouse the citizens of the adjoining foreign territories of Florida, Louisiana, and Canada to a revolution of their own; to recruit spies to infiltrate Britain; to rouse the throngs of adoring Francophiles; and to create domestic Republican versions of the rabid French political societies fueling the revolution, whose members passed around “liberty caps” and addressed each other as “Citizen.” Burr found the multipronged nature of the assault intriguing, and he was not put off by the light air of menace that hung about it. Genet would prove an inspiration, reinforcing the Frenchness that had been a feature of Burr’s character since he first encountered Rousseau: the multileveled approach to any endeavor, of which only the top was visible; and his lusty demagoguery, all of which explains why so many Burrites were early backers of the New York Democratic Society, which took off from the French revolutionary equivalent so gloriously evoked by Citizen Genet.

  The Genet invasion had its carnival aspects, but Hamilton saw it as agitprop that was invigorating Republicans who treated Genet like the Second Coming, spurring them to rapture. As one Federalist wrote, “very few body parts, if any, of the Citizen’s body, escaped a salute.” To the Federalists, Genet’s followers were a mob, and who knew what horrors they might unleash in the name of politics. Adams rued the “terrorism” Genet inspired, recalling how “ten thousand people in the streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his hou
se and affect a revolution in the government.”

  Eventually hubris caught up with him. Genet proclaimed that he’d follow the will of the people and, on his own authority, commandeer American ports to rig French ships for war with Britain. Hamilton was appalled at the lèse-majesté, and even Jefferson acknowledged that he had gone too far. Washington, already outraged at the incessant Republican claims that he was a secret monarchist, was in no mood to compromise his neutrality proclamation to aid France. By now, the political discord in his cabinet on the topic had reached a nearly comical extreme, with Washington listening serenely to Hamilton’s endless lectures about the Genet hazard, his little hands slicing the air, while the taciturn Jefferson fumed in his chair. In the last days of the National Gazette, Freneau chipped in a mock dirge for a guillotined Washington; that one left the president frothing at all the abuse he had suffered to serve his nation. “By God he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation,” Jefferson recalled his grousing. “He had rather be on his farm than to be made emperor of the world.” But that didn’t keep Jefferson from assailing Hamilton as a “monocrat” and “Angloman,” adding he was not just for a monarchy, but “for a monarchy bottomed on corruption.” To the Federalists, the Republicans were all radical Jacobins, the bloodthirsty rabble behind the Reign of Terror. A vicious hater, Hamilton eviscerated Jefferson more subtly, under the pseudonyms of Catullus and the Scourge, among others. “Cautious and shy,” Hamilton called Jefferson, “wrapped up in impenetrable silence and mystery, [Jefferson] reserves his abhorrence for the arcana of a certain snug sanctuary where seated on his pivot chair, and involved in all the obscurity of political mystery and deception . . . he circulates his poison thro’ the medium of the National Gazette.”

  The enmity didn’t end there. The two men attracted adherents like New Yorkers Rufus King and John Jay for Hamilton, and Virginians Madison and Monroe for Jefferson, and then emboldened them to spread the word to create a faction, or band of activists; they in turn accrued that broader army of believers that the Constitution preferred to overlook and Washington abhorred: parties. Two of them. Both so long evolving—a strain traced back to Rutgers v. Waddington—and then pushing forward through all the great political dilemmas until this one, of France versus England, which finally broke the country in two, making the next election, of 1796, the first to be settled by party, an act that split America as profoundly as the Mississippi River did the continent.

  In the end, Genet simply disappeared. He gave up his ministerial post and became an American citizen. By now, he had married Cornelia Clinton, the free-spirited daughter of the governor, a Genet patron, and the couple vanished into the countryside of upstate New York.

  With that, Jefferson declared that, worn out by his battles with Hamilton, he’d had enough of public life, at least for now, and wished to return to Monticello. As he wrote to Angelica Church, still a confidante: He wanted only “to be liberated from the hated occupations of politics, and to remain in the bosom of my family, my farm, and my books.” He delivered a letter of resignation to Washington, who accepted it with little regret. A year or two later, when he realized the depth of Jefferson’s involvement in the political intrigues bedeviling his administration, Washington restricted his correspondence to strained platitudes about the farming life until the letters stopped coming altogether three years before he died.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The Best Woman and Finest Lady I Have Ever Known

  AS HIS LAW practice had previously, Burr’s political career now kept him from Theodosia and the children for long stretches of time. Theodosia had never been well, but her health started to deteriorate sharply once he joined the Senate. Perhaps it was merely coincidence, but it might have been the natural pain of separation, compounded by Burr’s frustration with an invalid wife. “What can have exhausted or disturbed you so much?” he led off a tart letter on December 27, 1791. “You might surely have given some hint of the cause. If I had, before I left for New-York, sufficiently reflected on the subject, I would never have consented to this absurd and irrational mode of life.” Living apart from her, he means. “If you will come with Mr. Monroe, I will see you to New-York again; and if you have a particular aversion to the city of Philadelphia, you shall stay a day or two at Dr. Edwards’s, ten miles from town.” It was that night that Burr succumbed to a migraine, and sat with his feet in warm water, his head wrapped in cloths drenched with vinegar. Two months later, he made clear he could not return to her in New York anytime soon. “It will not do for me at present to leave this place,” he wrote. “I shall therefore expect you here.” That “therefore” must have stung, especially when followed by this: “But the tenor of your last induces me to think that you intend a very short visit.”

  Theodosia had visited him in Philadelphia only once, when, in the spring of 1793, her health, always a worry, went into a steep decline, and she never left New York after that. By then, Burr, always acquisitive for real estate, had finally bought his dream house, the fine Richmond Hill estate where he’d first met Washington and briefly served as his aide-de-camp before he made an inglorious exit that would damage the relationship between the two men forever. This marked Burr’s triumphant return, a trumpet fanfare with a note or two of spite in the bass register. After the war, the estate was owned by John Adams while he was the vice president. “Grand and sublime,” Abigail Adams had proclaimed it. With its fine views of the “noble Hudson,” she exulted, the estate afforded “a situation where the hand of nature has so lavishly displayed her beauties that she has left scarcely anything for her handmaiden, art, to perform.” This earthly paradise had become available when the capital moved to Philadelphia in 1790, taking the Adamses with it. Perfect as the Adamses had found the grounds, Burr immediately set to work improving them, stopping up a creek to produce an ornamental pool by the main gate, and adding gardens seemingly everywhere.

  Inside the house, the main entrance opened to two side rooms as well as the main hall; the upstairs dining room featured broad Venetian windows that looked out to that “noble Hudson” and the spreading New Jersey farmland beyond. He furnished the public rooms with two capriole sofas, a pair of inlaid card tables, an “Elegant Turkey Carpet” and a “carpet of Blue Bays,” several reading tables, a dozen mahogany chairs, and a “Dutch liquor case.” He filled the library with crates of his books and contracted for more from a London bookseller he trusted to select for him the finest offerings from English publishers. A place of such splendor would not have been complete without at least a few European dignitaries to stock it, and Burr had attracted the controversial diplomat Talleyrand and Jérôme Bonaparte, brother of the future emperor, as well as American nobility such as Jefferson and Madison on their New York sojourns and natives like Edward Livingston and Hamilton, who must have taken its measure for his own country estate, the Grange, which would have many of the same features. If the guests stayed over, they had the choice of the “White Room,” “Blue Room,” or “Little Bedroom West.”

  It all left Burr questing for more, but, without him, wife Theodosia must have longed for less. The sole parent of her own five, and the mother of her Burr namesake, Theodosia still had to oversee the mansion and farm, with more than a dozen slaves and paid employees, not to mention the various teachers providing young Theodosia’s extensive education. For all that, as Theodosia’s agonies worsened, it is doubtful she was able to rouse herself very often from the wide bed in the room Burr rarely shared with her, overlooking the front porch, to the pool. Distracted by her worsening health, his wife was no longer the intellectual helpmeet she had once been, although she still tried to pitch in with political advice, written, as requested, to him in code, and she must have noticed that, after he purchased this dream house, he didn’t move in, but largely remained with the government in Philadelphia. And however many letters she sent to him in Philadelphia, fewer came back.

  In early 1793, his letters took on a valedictory quality,
as he fondly recalled, “It was a knowledge of your mind which first inspired me with a respect for that of your sex.” Her service to him, he told her, was to elevate that status of women in his mind, thus inspiring him to undertake the campaign to educate the other Theodosia, who would soon supplant the original. “I confess, that the ideas you have often heard me express in favour of female intellectual powers are founded on what I have imagined, more than what I have seen, except in you.” With that he mused yet again about Mary Wollstonecraft, the philosophical wellspring for these ideas, threw in some words of enthusiasm for their daughter, and concluded that for the foreseeable future, his letters to his wife would have to be “mere notes.” Aside from some medical advice passed on from Dr. Rush at the very end of the year, that is the last letter to Theodosia saved by Davis for his collection that doesn’t pertain to her condition. There are dozens to young Theo, though, all of them cheerful, chatty, and long.

  Shortly after Burr had entered the Senate, he let his daughter know he’d placed her name, which he abbreviated to “T.B. Burr,” as if she were a dignitary, on a list of those whose letters were to be answered first, up with “some of the most eminent persons in the United States.” Shortly before Christmas in 1793, when her mother’s health was in danger, Burr wrote to his ten-year-old daughter like a seducer: “Every hour of your day is interesting to me. What would I not give to know even your most trifling actions and amusements?”

  Burr had sent the details of his wife’s condition to Dr. Benjamin Rush, the Republican physician who would soon run afoul of Hamilton after the outbreak of yellow fever. It amounted to a hellish barrage of symptoms. Yet Burr relates them with such dry medical specificity, he seems almost indifferent, and it is easy to forget the patient is his wife. Or is this Burr’s way, after all those deaths at age two, of distancing himself from the inevitable?