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

by Sedgwick, John

  No longer constrained by the codes of public life, Hamilton was finding freedom hazardous. His forehead healed, but his other wounds never quite did, never dissipated into that haze of the gladly forgotten. Instead, every fresh dispute awakened all the others. The frenzy of the Jay Treaty evoked Burr’s theft of Jay’s governorship, the abominations of France, the outrages of the Livingstons, the insolent questions about his service in Treasury, the viciousness of political clubs, the general Republican stupidity about matters of finance, the lies about his supposed monarchism, and so much more. Sensitive to challenges to his standing, he saw such challenges everywhere, and he stood ready to avenge any slight with a bullet.

  As he had with the Constitution, Hamilton defended the Jay Treaty with a series of tightly reasoned essays, a dozen this time under a variety of pseudonyms that made for a sandstorm of print. His efforts allowed Washington to sign the treaty in mid-August, but he continued to crank out more afterward. Jefferson couldn’t help but admire him. “Hamilton is really a colossus to the anti-republican party,” he admitted to Madison in some wonderment. “Without numbers, he is an host [meaning a multitude] within himself. . . . We have had only middling performances to oppose him. In truth, when he comes forward, there is nobody but yourself who can meet him.” But, of course, Madison could not “meet” Hamilton either, as Jefferson well knew.

  With the treaty, Washington’s work as president was complete. While there were almost universal pleas for him to stay on for yet a third term, he refused to listen. At sixty-five the great man was spent, his only thoughts of the warming fires and grand vistas of Mount Vernon. No monarch, he couldn’t wait to relinquish power. Relying on material that Madison had prepared four years before, Washington made an attempt at a farewell address, and then, unsatisfied, turned the job over to Hamilton, who whittled his draft down to a core statement of Washington’s belief in the importance of American neutrality in international affairs. Not only was this a clear endorsement of the Jay Treaty; it was also a not-so-subtle slap at France, which Hamilton continued to regard as a threat to American democracy. He retained much of Washington’s style and never acknowledged his contribution until well after Washington’s death. In keeping with Washington’s disdain for public appearances, the address was never delivered but was printed in Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser and then reprinted in papers across the land. One Republican called it “the loathings of a sick mind,” but its lessons would stand for generations.

  WITH WASHINGTON’S RETIREMENT, the country would have its first genuinely contested election, at a time when the electorate had erupted into a near civil war between the rival parties. While Hamilton was universally acknowledged as the Federalist head, he was far too controversial and ornery a figure to contend for the presidency. If he had ever harbored any ambitions, there was the fear that the Reynolds affair would be raised against him. Without Hamilton, Vice President Adams was the obvious choice to succeed Washington, but Hamilton was not alone in his reservations about his tendency toward theatrical overreactions.

  Since Jefferson was plainly the Republican candidate, Hamilton immediately set about trying to annihilate him in twenty-five essays that took on every aspect of his moral history, from his flight as Virginia governor in the face of British troops to his abandonment of his cabinet position, and then went hard at Jefferson for his ideas about race, especially such clinical assertions from Notes on the State of Virginia as the contemptuous idea that blacks “secrete less by the kidneys and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor.” (Meaning, presumably, that blacks urinate less and sweat more than whites.) This led Jefferson to regard Africans as lower primates—“below man and above the orangutan”—that might “stain the blood” of any offspring a white might have with them. In invoking this line of argument, Hamilton was making an oblique allusion to Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, which Angelica may have gossiped to him about. Jefferson was not the only one to collect embarrassing tidbits on his adversaries.

  But who for vice president? In the fall of 1795, Burr made the pilgrimage to Monticello, where Jefferson had been tending his estate for nearly two years. No record survives of the conversation, and neither man was inclined to keep one. Burr might have been a minor player, but he argued that, as a New Yorker uncommitted to either party, he could pry away one or two of the states that were now out of the Virginian’s reach. Whatever Jefferson replied, Burr took it to be approval, and in the summer of 1796 he was, it was said, “industrious in his canvas,” pressing his case from New Hampshire to South Carolina. He concentrated heavily on his home state but held out hopes for some southern electors all the same. He unleashed his Burrites to jawbone the electors and then to buzz among themselves to tabulate their progress.

  On the Federalist side, Hamilton preferred the stable, easygoing Thomas Pinckney, a revolutionary war hero who was governor of South Carolina. Hamilton imagined that, as a southerner, Pinckney might collect enough of the southern vote to edge out Adams. He tried to support Pinckney quietly, leaving no traces. But Burr had an extensive network of spies, and he sniffed out Hamilton’s plans.

  When Burr let Adams know of Hamilton’s duplicity, Abigail was not surprised—Hamilton had always been a “Cassius” to her, ready to slide the knife into her Caesar. But her husband was shocked by the perfidy. To Burr it was perfect: The revelation was sure to pluck Hamilton from Adams’s confidence and eject him from any Adams administration.

  In the final balloting that December of 1796, Pinckney’s bid fell short, but so did Burr’s. The South had betrayed him. North Carolina gave him only six to Jefferson’s eleven, and Virginia just one to Jefferson’s twenty. Hamilton’s maneuverings succeeded only in suppressing Adams’s total, and enraging him, without depriving him of victory. Adams edged out Jefferson by just three votes but missed gaining the political power that comes from a decisive win. In the bargain, he gained a vice president who would oppose his every move. As for Hamilton, Adams vowed to keep his distance from this “puppyhood,” but his anger got the better of him, and to anyone who would listen, he smeared his party chief—“as great a hypocrite as any in the U.S.”—and a “Creole bastard.” Except for Hamilton, Adams retained all of Washington’s cabinet, so no one felt much loyalty to him. Adams’s presidency was doomed before it began.

  HAMILTON’S FRONTAL ASSAULT on Jefferson in the run-up to the ’96 election had not gone unnoticed in Monticello. Jefferson was a famous repository of political tittle-tattle, much of it stored in a series of notebooks he called his Anas, an arcane term for a collection of material that characterizes an individual, and he was always collecting. It is likely that Monroe had more than a few things to tell him about his nemesis, Hamilton. For Jefferson soon turned to the slimy Republican newshound James Thomson Callender, a Scottish refugee, to consign Hamilton to oblivion. Callender’s ties to Jefferson picked up where Freneau’s left off; he was the sort of useful but unsavory character that Jefferson kept in the middle distance of his considerable entourage, close enough to be of service, but far enough away to be untraceable. Jefferson thought this was the right time to bid Hamilton good-bye.

  The first Hamilton heard of the move against him was in a notice for a forthcoming pamphlet with the unpromising title of Nos V & VI of the History of the United States for the Year 1796, claiming that the Reynolds letters proved that Hamilton had indulged in illicit financial speculation at Treasury. The more electrifying charge came toward the end, almost as an afterthought: “this great master of morality . . . had an illicit correspondence with another man’s wife.” As these things go, it wasn’t much. Far more salacious tidbits are routinely offered than just some “illicit correspondence.” When Hamilton insisted on reviewing the letters in question, he discovered they were indeed the ones under Monroe’s control.

  Whatever fire there was in Nos V & VI of the History, it might have died down on its own if Hamilton h
ad not tried to smother it with gunpowder. In his fury, he responded with a manic ninety-five-page broadside, elaborately titled “Observations” on “Certain Documents” in Callender’s History, in which “the Charge of Speculation” is “Fully Refuted.” “Written”—if anyone doubted—“by Himself.” Hamilton went at the claims as if his life depended on it, and it may have. He asserted the charges were driven by “the spirit of Jacobinism,” which posed a greater threat to humanity than “WAR, PESTILENCE and FAMINE” combined, as he declared in all caps, and stood ready to drag down “our most virtuous citizens.” He reprised his heroic efforts to pass the bill of assumption, only to be attacked by base Republicans like Mr. Giles of Virginia, and do much more for the nation. And now came the chiseler James Reynolds, and his claims of “improper pecuniary speculation.” Hamilton could barely bring himself to think of it. His revulsion at the vulgarity of such an “obscure, unimportant, and profligate man” came through on every page, as he averred that no one would ever use “so vile an instrument as Reynolds for such insignificant ends” as securing a few hundred dollars. Hamilton insisted the “reptile” cooked up the whole scheme to spring himself from prison, where he was languishing at the time.

  If Hamilton had just stopped there, his life would have gone very differently. But he was faced with a terrible choice, as Jefferson must have known. Now that he was accused of financial improprieties—the few hundred dollars he’d given Reynolds—that threatened his professional reputation, the only way to clear his name was to provide the real explanation, that the money was actually payment for sex with Reynolds’s wife. But he did so with such abandon that it constituted a nearly Calvinist desire to confess. He related everything that could decently be said about the affair with Mrs. Reynolds, as he always termed her, and then a good deal more.

  He began the tale as if it were a romantic novel: “Some time in the summer of the year 1791, a woman called at my house in the city of Philadelphia, and asked to speak to me in private.” He detailed her “seeming air of affliction,” and we are off. He published every letter he exchanged with both Reynoldses—presumably copying them out in his own hand—in the course of the long, wormy business of Hamilton’s buying sexual access to the wife from her husband, his letters crisply elegant, theirs a clutter of misspelled vulgarities; all of them, to and fro, defined his “amorous connection” with Mrs. Reynolds. He detailed that first tense meeting at his house on Fourth Street and his first visit to her grim abode, where he tendered her nonpecuniary “consolation” and carried it through to its discovery by the trio of Muhlenberg, Venable, and Monroe. In other words, he could either watch his professional reputation shatter or refute the financial charges by humiliating himself in the most embarrassing possible fashion. He chose the second option, but it didn’t work out as he had hoped. In confessing to the sexual embarrassment, he only added a second crime. Once a figure of probity, Hamilton became an adulterer and a cheat.

  When the pamphlet was published, a wildfire broke out, and it swept up and down the country. His Federalist allies were flabbergasted. His “Observations” had done what his enemies never could—and done infinitely worse to his long-suffering wife. “Humiliating in the extreme,” declared War Secretary Henry Knox. “His ill-judged pamphlet has done him inconceivable injury,” added Robert Troup. “It is afflicting to see so great a man dragged before the public in such a delicate situation and compelled to avow a domestic infidelity to an unfeeling world,” said William Loughton Smith. After the Reynolds affair, it seemed Hamilton was the butt of every joke and the target of every attack.

  If the Federalists were mortified, the Republicans were jubilant. Callender, the provocateur, giggled to Jefferson that Hamilton’s argument had come down to: “‘I am a rake and for that reason I cannot be a swindler.’” The Aurora put his line of reasoning: “I have been grossly . . . charged with . . . being a speculator, whereas I am only an adulterer.” Jefferson took chilly satisfaction at this much-hoped-for turn of events, claiming that Hamilton’s “willingness to plead guilty to adultery seems rather to have strengthened than weakened the suspicions that he was in truth guilty of the speculations.”

  At the White House, Abigail Adams went for a carriage ride with her friend Mrs. Pickering. She had picked up on Hamilton’s predilections in Philadelphia at the start of the decade, and now the whole drive was given over to chatter about Hamilton’s shameless “licentiousness” toward the ladies. A few months later, she turned philosophical, but no less damning. “Alas,” she cried out to her husband, “how weak is human nature.” Adams harrumphed that it wasn’t human nature. It was Hamilton’s. He’d made “audacious and unblushing attempts upon ladies of highest rank and purest virtue.”

  Hamilton was almost alone, but Washington did not abandon his old aide-de-camp. He sent Hamilton a wine cooler for four bottles “as a token of my sincere regard and friendship for you and as a remembrance of me.” Exquisitely, he made no mention of the scandal. The Hamiltons treasured the cooler.

  Unfortunately for Hamilton, the Reynolds affair did not end there, but moved on to an act two in which the three self-appointed investigators returned to the case in 1797, five years after he thought it was settled. Previously, the three congressional investigators had decided there were no fiscal improprieties. Now, to go by Callender’s History, they’d “left [Hamilton] under an impression our suspicions were removed.” Impression? When Hamilton asked Muhlenberg about it, he replied that he had been satisfied by Hamilton’s answers and still was. Venable said the same. Monroe, ominously, did not reply.

  Hamilton had already grown suspicious of Monroe. A Virginian, he naturally fell in with Jefferson. The two were nearly of the same height, but Monroe still had some of the broad-shouldered military bearing from his war days, where he’d somehow survived a musket ball to the chest. Monroe had wide-set blue eyes on an uneventful face. Like many of his contemporaries in government, Hamilton considered him maddeningly slow-witted.

  When Monroe failed to respond to Hamilton’s request for clarification, Hamilton inquired and discovered he was in New York visiting his in-laws just down Wall Street. Annoyed, Hamilton fired off a note demanding an interview “at any hour tomorrow forenoon that may be convenient.” Knowing the conversation might grow testy, he brought Church as a witness; Monroe brought a lawyer named David Gelston, who provided a detailed report of the meeting afterward. To Gelston, Hamilton appeared “very much agitated” from the moment he came in the door, and launched into a detailed history of the Reynolds correspondence. When Monroe asked him to come to the point, Hamilton angrily delivered it: Had Monroe accepted Hamilton’s explanation of the Reynolds affair back in 1792, or had he not? Hamilton took over from there, until Monroe told him to “be temperate or quiet for a moment,” and he fished out of his pocket a response to Hamilton’s inquiry signed by all three men, accepting Hamilton’s account.

  Gratifying—but what about the original Reynolds papers the three men had been given for safekeeping? Had they leaked them to Callender? Monroe said they remained “sealed with a friend in Virginia,” and he, Monroe, had no intention of publishing them. To Hamilton, that was absurd—someone had given them to Callender. “That is totally false,” he shouted.

  At that, Hamilton and Monroe both leapt out of their chairs.

  “If you say I am representing falsely,” snarled Monroe, “you are a scoundrel.”

  Hamilton: “I will meet you like a gentleman.”

  Monroe: “I am ready to get my pistols!”

  The issue would probably have required a bullet if Gelston and Church hadn’t pushed between them. Hamilton remained hot, but Monroe cooled. Gelston proposed the men put aside their differences until Monroe could meet with his two confederates in Philadelphia on Friday to discuss what had happened. This was a Tuesday. Promising to forget about their “warmth” for now, Hamilton and Church left the house.

  By the time Monroe reached Philadelphia,
Venable had left for Virginia, leaving Monroe and Muhlenberg to reiterate in writing the joint declaration that they all three believed Hamilton’s account five years before. Unsatisfied, Hamilton insisted that Monroe denounce Clingman’s central claim of misconduct at Treasury—and admit that he, Monroe, had given the Reynolds papers to Callender from “motives towards me [that are] malignant and dishonorable.” A large request, and no one went along. Monroe admitted only that he’d recorded Clingman’s statement. Furious, Hamilton resolved to publish a full account of the matter.

  On August 6, Monroe passed to Aaron Burr a copy of his Hamilton correspondence, thinking that Burr might find a way to avert a duel. Why Monroe thought that is anybody’s guess. He must have known of Hamilton’s hatred for Burr. Possibly, as one of the few politicians who avoided party affiliation, Burr could be thought impartial. And he did ease tensions between the two men. “I have no desire to persecute [Hamilton],” Monroe confided to Burr, “though he justly merits it.” When Burr told Hamilton that Monroe had no interest in a duel, Hamilton relented. With that, Burr asked Monroe to burn his Hamilton correspondence out of “magniminity.”

  When Hamilton’s pamphlet came out, Monroe saw in its details a fresh assault on his honor. Still, it took him months to organize a duel, with Burr as his second. Around the same time, Hamilton wrote a letter saying that he was prepared to fight, but he never sent it and Monroe let the whole matter drop. Burr’s opinion of Monroe fell with it. “Naturally dull and stupid; extremely illiterate; indecisive to a degree that would be incredible to one who did not know him.” If Burr had been dishonored as Monroe had, Hamilton would be dead.