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

by Sedgwick, John

  “In five or six months past,” he wrote, “she has been afflicted with an almost constant choke [choking]; which is supposed to be Nephritic, & which indeed assumes all the appearances of a nephritic complaint—at Intervals of three or four weeks she has returns of Nausea and Vomiting, which have sometimes lasted six & eight Days & with such Violence as to threaten life—when these abate, the Cholic, from which she is never wholly free, returns with greater severity.”* The various medical prescriptions she’d received had only brought on waves of nausea, and the dietary changes had been no help at all. “She eats with impunity whatever appetite or whim suggests—fruits, Vegetable, fresh or Salted Meats,” he revealed. “Her pulse holds at about 100, although she suffers frequent chills and flushes of heat.” What would the doctor, with his “inventive Mind,” recommend?

  A month or two later Rush arrived one evening at Burr’s rooms to offer an unexpected suggestion: a small amount of hemlock. “A dose of one tenth of a grain,” he recommended. “Increase as you may find you can bear it,” Burr told his wife, “that it has the narcotic powers of opium, superadded to other qualities.” Indeed, hemlock—a foul-smelling juice emitted from the lacy leaves of poison hemlock, a flowering plant native to the Mediterranean—can be a sedative and antispasmodic, rather like nicotine, and it was thought possibly to be helpful in tiny doses for a patient in constant pain like Theodosia. Those benefits were known to the Greeks. But the Greeks also knew, just as the Burrs must have known, that hemlock in a larger dose could be a lethal poison, one that had most famously been used to execute Socrates. Plato detailed how, after taking the poison, Socrates calmly felt a paralyzing “chill” rise from his feet to his legs and ever so slowly into his torso, where it stopped his lungs. The question was, how much hemlock was too much?

  At the end of 1793, Burr considered resigning to go home to his wife, but Theodosia wouldn’t hear of it. As their young daughter, Theodosia, reported in January: “Ma begs you will omit the thoughts of leaving Congress.” A heavy message, but Burr replied by correcting his daughter’s diction. “‘Omit’ is improperly used here,” he lectured her. “You mean ‘abandon, relinquish, renounce, or abjure the thoughts/ etc.’ Your mamma, Mr. Leslie, or your dictionary (Johnson’s folio) will teach you the force of this observation. The last of these words would have been too strong for the occasion.”

  Burr inched closer to a mortal dose that winter, for the hemlock did not yield any improvement through December and into January; Rush recommended more, and Burr went along. No letters from this period survive, so it is difficult to determine the exact medical consequences, but hemlock was no remedy. In desperation, Burr tried molasses and milk, milk punch, straight milk, port wine, sweet oil, chocolate, and “bark,” or quinine. Also, another highly dubious substance: mercury, which can kill by shutting down the central nervous system, or wreak a constellation of impairments—clouded thinking, impaired memory, poor balance, and queer tingling sensations throughout the body. It is no cure for anything. It was not widely known that mercury was poisonous, but there were suspicions, and Burr had picked up on them. He counseled “the most vigilant caution,” but he did not veto it.

  Nor did he go home to oversee the treatment. Rather, determined to salvage his political career after his embarrassment in 1792, he focused his efforts on becoming Washington’s new minister to France after the departure of Gouverneur Morris, although that was certainly not a position designed for a man with an ailing wife. A committee headed by Jefferson and Madison promoted him to the president, but Washington demurred, declaring with a directness that smacked of Hamilton that he could never appoint “any person . . . in whose integrity he had not confidence.” Instead, Washington picked James Monroe, even though he was a leader of the opposition.

  The rejection of Burr left his ambitious friend Theodore Sedgwick mystified. “Wherefore was it that they preferred Monroe to him?” he wondered to their mutual friend Jonathan Dayton, referring to Washington and his advisers, Hamilton foremost among them. “Had they more confidence in Monroe’s talent? They are not so stupid. In his integrity? no.” Then Sedgwick landed on it. “They doubtless respect Burr’s talents, but they dread his independence of them. They know, in short, he is not one of them, and of course they will never support but always effect to support him.” Then again, Burr might do the same toward them.

  Burr remained in Philadelphia as his wife’s life ebbed. He drew the young Theodosia into the adult world, complex and freighted as it was, to take his wife’s place. He tutored her in the mysterious potions he’d assigned her mother. “Dr. Rush thinks that bark would not be amiss,” he wrote her, “but may be beneficial if the stomach does not rebuke it, which must be constantly the first object of attention. . . . Be able, upon my arrival, to tell the difference between an infusion and decoction; and the history, the virtues, and the botanical or medical name of the bark.” He’d already quizzed her on the properties of mercury and praised her “disquisition” on that delicate subject as “ingenious and prettily told.” She seems to have been unaware that lethality was one of its properties.

  On Monday, May 19, 1794, Burr was relieved to get a letter from his daughter letting him know that her mother was “easier” and more comfortable than she had been in weeks. Then, an hour later, he received an overnight “express” from an exhausted post rider who had borne it from New York: His wife had died the day before. Burr’s immediate reaction is not recorded. Toward the end of his life, he said, “her death dealt me more pain than all sorrows combined.” As always with Burr, it is hard to know. He sent a letter to his uncle Pierpont Edwards a few days later, assuring him there was no need to grieve. “So sudden & unexpected was her death that no immediate Danger was apprehended until the Morning that she was relieved from all earthly cares.” An oddly unaffecting way to put it. “She . . . sank calmly and without pain into her last sleep.” He may have ascribed his true feelings to the young Theodosia. “My little daughter though much afflicted and distressed,” he wrote a friend, “bears the stroke with more reason and firmness than could have been expected for her years.” With her father in Philadelphia, it fell to Theodosia to oversee the preparation of her mother’s body for burial. Theodosia Burr was laid to rest in one of Trinity Church’s burial grounds, but it is not known just where—or whether her husband attended the ceremony. Shortly before he died many years later, he called her “the best woman and finest lady I have ever known.”

  But by then she’d had many competitors. If he hadn’t taken other women by the time of his wife’s death, he had certainly toyed with them, flirtations that became more serious and more numerous once she passed from the scene. To his detractors, the flirtations summed him up as a fickle man who could never commit. But Burr himself believed he was just expressing a natural hunger. It was with delight that he used to tell the story of being caught out by an unnamed lady who’d snuck up on him in his library at Richmond Hill after Theodosia’s death. He was buried in a book as usual, probably with his feet up before the fire. The interloper gave him a playful slap on his cheek and asked: “Come, tell me, what little French girl, pray, have you had here?” The woman had smelled a distinctive French scent. Burr didn’t furnish the name, but, in Parton’s telling, he “admitted the fact,” whereupon the lady “burst into loud laughter”—and Burr took no less pleasure in being discovered.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Root Out the Distempered and Noisome Weed

  EXHAUSTED BY POLITICS and intrigue, much of it of his own making, Hamilton told President Washington in December of 1794 that he planned to leave the government by the end of January. For someone so reserved, Washington’s response overflowed with fatherly appreciation and pride. “In every relationship which you have borne to me, I have found that my confidence in your talents, exertions and integrity has been well placed.” And more than anyone, he spoke from experience. “I the more freely render this testimony of my approbation, because I speak from opportu
nities of information wch cannot deceive me, and which furnish satisfactory proof of your title to public regard.” He concluded with the wish that “your happiness will attend you in your retirement,” and, unusually for him, closed by offering his “sincere esteem, regard and friendship.”

  It had been a remarkable run. Just forty, Hamilton had taken an insolvent confederacy and turned it into a dynamic union that would dominate the world. But it was time for him to go. When he’d accompanied Washington to put down the Whiskey Rebellion—a mob of five hundred, infuriated by taxes Hamilton had imposed on hard liquor—Hamilton himself had become the target of the rebels’ wrath as much as his tax. It didn’t help that the protests had been stoked by the Genet-inspired political societies that were a cauldron of Hamilton-hating Republicanism. Betsey had miscarried during the fighting, reminding him of the stresses of his activities on her and of the call of home. In January, he would lay out a final refinement on his epic Report on the Public Credit that would forever extinguish the national debt in thirty years. Although the Giles investigation was behind him, he knew the Republicans would continue to impugn his service. And he doubted the explosive Reynolds secrets would hold.

  His final report offering a refinement to the bill of assumption was like everything else of his. It was designed not just to seize the objective, but to overwhelm it. It won congressional approval swiftly, delayed only by an objection from an unexpected quarter, as Aaron Burr roused himself to offer an amendment challenging one small aspect of the finance package. His motion didn’t pass, but it irritated Hamilton to have Burr, of all people, crowd into view. Hamilton was the one true hero, not Burr. As he wrote to his ally Rufus King:

  To see the character of the Government and the country so sported with, exposed to so indelible a blot puts my heart to the Torture. Am I then more of an American than those who drew their first breath on American Ground? Or What is it that thus torments me at a circumstance so calmly viewed by almost every body else? Am I a fool—a Romantic quixot—Or is there a constitutional defect in the American Mind? Were it not for yourself and a few others, I . . . would say . . . there is something in our climate which belittles every Animal human or brute.

  I conjure you, my friend, Make a vigorous stand for the honor of your Country. Rouse all the energies of your mind, and measure swords in the Senate with the great Slayer of public faith—the hacknied Veteran in the violation of public engagements. Prevent him if possible from triumphing a second time over the prostrate credit and injured interests of his country. Unmask his false and horrid hypotheses. Witness the 40 for 1 scheme a most unskilful measure, to say the best of it. Display the immense difference between an able statesman and the Man of subtilties. Root out the distempered and noisome weed which is attempted to be planted in our political garden—to choak and wither in its infancy the fair plant of public credit.

  I disclose to you without reserve the state of my mind. It is discontented and gloomy in the extreme.

  Yes, indeed his mind is, and one could think of more adjectives, too. The letter reveals a man in such pain he will lash out at anyone. In his discontent, Hamilton seems to have made a rare but revealing mistake, conflating Burr with Connecticut senator Oliver Ellsworth, another politician-aristocrat; Ellsworth, not Burr, had been behind the “40 for 1 scheme”—the exchange rate for the conversion of inflated Continental currency. The letter’s anger is striking, even for Hamilton, given that Burr is offering only a minor amendment to his bill, not threatening to reject it. But Hamilton’s identification with his assumption bill was so extreme, and his frustrations with politics so vast, that a dart at his bill was an arrow at him. Nonetheless, Hamilton had plenty of fight left, and to the death he would defend America from its (and his) most dire enemy.

  Part Three

  To the Death

  The view from Weehawken by the British landscape artist William Henry Bartlett in 1840. By then, it had become just another pastoral scene, albeit one with a ghoulish cast. A fourteen-foot marble monument to Hamilton had been erected here in 1806 but was soon entirely chipped away by souvenir hunters, to be replaced by a pair of rough stones engraved with the names of the two duelists and placed where each stood and fired—and one fell.

  THIRTY-SIX

  To Fight the Whole Detestable Faction

  WHEN HAMILTON RETURNED to New York that January, he was the hero of the city. The chamber of commerce put on a vast dinner for two hundred to honor him, and the evening culminated in nine rousing cheers for Hamilton—compared to just three for Washington and Adams. Later, Mayor Richard Varick awarded him the “freedom of the city,” the highest honor he could bestow.

  Hamilton settled his family in temporary lodgings before venturing north to the splendid Schuyler manse overlooking the Hudson through June. Then, after his years on a tight thirty-five-hundred-dollar salary as treasury secretary, Hamilton had to get to work. “I am not worth exceeding five hundred dollars in the world,” he declared. Indeed, he had been relying on friends like Troup for small loans to stay afloat. As the former treasury secretary, he had no shortage of offers for his legal services, but he knew to be cautious. He declined Troup’s offer to get in on some vast tracts of land in the newly opened Northwest Territory, since the deal originated with the vivacious, English-born Charles Williamson at a time when foreigners were still forbidden to purchase real estate under New York’s Alien Act. He was more receptive to the London merchant banking house Bird, Savage, and Bird, which wrote to “beg leave to offer you our best services in whatever future walk of life you may fix on.” He did help his brother-in-law Church with some of his land speculations in Pennsylvania and with more complicated transactions later. Walter Livingston, the son of the chancellor Robert, wanted him to wage lawsuits against the prominent speculator Alexander Macomb; against his own second cousin, Jonathan Livingston; and against the bankrupt William Duer, now languishing in the New Gaol debtors’ prison. Hamilton agreed to handle only the matters involving Macomb and the cousin, steering clear of his old Treasury colleague Duer. He didn’t ignore politics. His skeletal friend John Jay, now the Supreme Court chief justice, had been laboring over a treaty to avoid war with Britain, which had been “impressing” American sailors—snatching them off their ships to toil in the royal fleet—and in the spring of 1795, he sent back from London the final agreement, then waited for calmer seas for his own return passage. When the treaty arrived, it was derided as a shameful capitulation, as it did nothing to end the impressment, but granted the British most-favored-nation status in American markets, among other gifts. The Republicans saw it as yet more evil from the Anglomen. When Jay finally sailed into New York Harbor in June, he said he could find his way home by the light of all the burning effigies of himself.

  It fell to Hamilton to defend the treaty. At Washington’s request, Hamilton delivered a lengthy endorsement, trumpeting the treaty’s core virtue that it did indeed avoid a war the United States couldn’t possibly win now, but might later. Unimpressed by that argument, masses of treaty opponents marched on City Hall, formerly Federal Hall. Anticipating them, the slender Hamilton climbed onto a stoop across the street and, when Peter R. Livingston spoke up against the treaty from the balcony where Washington had taken the oath of office, Hamilton shouted up at him, interrupting his speech, much to the irritation of the crowd. The protesters then voted down the treaty and marched in noisy triumph down Wall Street toward Trinity Church, torched a copy of the treaty at the Battery, and surged through the city.

  A few hundred opponents stayed behind, and still perched on his stoop, Hamilton let loose with a fusillade of oratory in favor of the treaty; his listeners responded only with taunts. Furious, Hamilton demanded they show him proper respect, but they replied by flinging stones at him, one of which struck him square in the forehead. The blow stunned him, but he stayed on his feet, finally crying out: “If you use such knock-down arguments, I have to retire.” Then, his forehead streaming blood
, he staggered down the street.

  The rest of the night, Hamilton wandered through scenes out of Hieronymus Bosch, as tempers flared like hellfire, everyone lost in a delirium of hate. His head bandaged, he charged back down Wall Street, spoiling for battle, until he spotted the perfidious Commodore James Nicholson, the father-in-law of Albert Gallatin, the Swiss-born Pennsylvania senator who’d been ousted as an alien, despite Burr’s efforts. Nicholson had charged that Hamilton, as treasury secretary, had hidden one hundred thousand pounds sterling in a London bank. (He said he had proof, but Hamilton would have to ask him for it in person.) Now Nicholson was jawing with a Federalist backer of the treaty. Hamilton tried to calm the two men, but, seeing it was Hamilton, Nicholson wheeled around to attack him as an “abettor of Tories.” When Hamilton let that pass, Nicholson accused him of base cowardice. That stood Hamilton up, and he curtly declared he would settle that charge with pistols. Too busy to make the arrangements now, Hamilton moved on to the house of Edward Livingston, brother of the chancellor, where he found his friend Judge Ogden Hoffman going at it with the treaty-hating Peter Livingston. This time, it was Rufus King who was trying to keep the peace, but Hamilton’s nerves were shot, and he shouted that if the Republican argument was to be this personal, he’d “fight the whole detestable faction one by one.” Livingston’s brother Maturin coolly announced that, if so, Hamilton could start with him in a half hour, at a place of his choosing. Hamilton retorted that Maturin Livingston would have to wait. He had another duel to settle first.

  The next day, when he considered his dueling obligations, Hamilton dutifully wrote out his will, with Troup to be his executor. But then he came to his senses and crafted an apology for Nicholson to sign that would spare them both. The language was strong enough to give Hamilton satisfaction without inflicting undue humiliation on the commodore. Nicholson furnished his signature, and that was it. As for Maturin Livingston, Hamilton persuaded him to withdraw any aspersions he might have cast on Hamilton’s courage, and that one was finished, too.