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

by Sedgwick, John

  On April 2, 1798, the Alien Law was no more, and the state attorney general was three thousand dollars richer. Senator Thomas Morris received one thousand dollars in “legal fees,” as did another legislator recorded only as “L,” and doubtless there were many other recipients, too. Burr himself received a handsome loan from the Holland Company he never paid back, he was freed from the nonpayment penalty for the hundred thousand acres, and the twenty-thousand-dollar bond was returned to him.

  When questioned about these transactions, Burr replied in a lengthy, detailed, and highly unpersuasive letter that concluded on a note of testiness:

  By those who know me, it will never be credited that any man on earth would have the hardiness even to propose to me dishonourable compensations. This, sir, is the first time in my life that I have condescended (pardon the expression) to refute a calumny. I leave to my actions to speak for themselves, and to my character to confound the fictions of slander. And on this very subject I have not up to this hour given one word of explanation to any human being. All the explanation that can be given amounts to no more than this—That the thing is an absolute and abominable lie.

  While the terms of Burr’s service to the Holland Company were widely known, the only man willing to use the word “bribery” to describe them was Hamilton’s hefty brother-in-law, John Barker Church. He probably heard the details from Hamilton. Apparently, Church was discussing the matter a little too loudly at a “private table in town,” according to a newspaper account. As soon as Burr heard it, he demanded a duel, and Church, ever a “man of business” in Hamilton’s appraisal, was not one to refuse him. Burr may have seen it as a way to burnish his Republican credentials in the run-up to 1800, for he chose the South Carolina rapscallion and noted Hamilton hater Aedanus Burke to be his second, while Church picked the former treasurer of Hamilton’s Society for Useful Manufactures. The dueling ground was in Hoboken, New Jersey, and the two of them, plus their seconds, rowed across the Hudson at sunset one evening in the same boat. It was Burr’s first duel, but not Church’s. They both owned dueling pistols, his from a fine London gunsmith, but Burr’s were used. They came with bullets that were slightly too small for the chambers, requiring a wrap of chamois to produce a snug fit in the barrels. Burr’s man, Burke, had trouble ramming Burr’s bullet into place, but Burr assured his second that it was no matter. If he missed his mark on the first shot, he would hit him with the second. The ten yards were duly measured, and the two men faced off, aimed, and fired. Burr’s bullet missed entirely, but Church’s clanged off a metal button on Burr’s jacket, leaving its target startled but unharmed. As the seconds prepared the pistols for a second shot, Church had had enough. He stepped forward to apologize to Burr for his “indiscreet” remarks. Burr accepted the apology, the two men shook hands, and that was it. The dispute was “satisfactorily adjusted,” in the words of Davis, and the party returned to New York most convivially.

  That was the end of Burr’s dealings with the Holland Company, but it was the beginning of another, more lasting piece of business, the creation of the Manhattan Company, which likewise combined high purpose with low skullduggery, a Burr trademark. By now, Burr watchers learned not to be distracted by the surface ripples, but to attend to the more powerful currents working below.

  Ostensibly the Manhattan Company was a water company intended to deliver freshwater to a city that thirsted for it. For years, the vast majority of the citizens had had to rely on shallow well water so foul that horses shied away from it; the city’s only reservoir, the so-called Fresh Water Pond, teemed with putrid filth; and its Tea Water Pump had become dangerously contaminated in 1785. Long dire, the water situation became frightening in 1798, when the yellow fever that had decimated Philadelphia in 1793 struck Manhattan, leaving many of its citizens to believe the foul water was to blame.

  Burr smelled opportunity. He would provide what everyone clamored for—fresh drinking water, drawn from the still pristine Bronx River—and that surely would do much to cleanse a name that may have gotten muddied by the Holland Company business. Moreover, the proposition was likely to be highly lucrative, both for obvious reasons and for reasons that were not obvious at all. Burr left it to his brother-in-law, the physician Joseph Browne, to formally propose the notion to the Common Council, the city’s governing body; the council was grateful for the suggestion but was reluctant to turn a public necessity over to a private concern. It preferred the water to be delivered by a municipal water-supply system, not by the private company Browne (and Burr) had in mind.

  When he heard of the Common Council’s verdict, Burr immediately secured ten days’ leave from the Assembly in Albany and galloped to New York. There he collected five of the city’s most celebrated men to persuade the members of the Common Council of their error, and if they failed to see their error, to overrule them. To show this appeal was above politics, Burr made sure that the six (including him) were evenly divided between three Republicans and three Federalists. For this purpose, he was one Republican; the two others were a president of a large insurance company and the head of the Mechanics Society; the Federalists were the presidents of the chamber of commerce and the Bank of New York—and Alexander Hamilton.

  Why did Hamilton join in? Having barely survived the outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia, he knew the risks of the disease. And he must have seen that a great city needed a reliable water supply no less than fresh capital. But there was another factor, one that blurs the differences between Hamilton and Burr. Church may have enticed Hamilton into such a potentially lucrative venture, with good money for Hamilton as his lawyer and agent in the deal. When the council refused to reconsider, the august committee met with New York’s mayor Richard Varick, who asked the six members to put their thoughts in writing. Only Hamilton did, and apparently his argument was enough to persuade Varick to recommend to the Assembly that the city’s water rights be assigned exclusively to the Manhattan Company.

  In Albany, the session was scheduled to conclude on March 28, 1799. Burr had named himself head of the committee that would present the measure. He waited until the end of that last day to introduce his bill—and at the last moment of that last day, he introduced a slight but extremely significant change to his water bill. He added the bank clause.

  And be it further enacted, That it shall and may be lawful for the said company to employ all such surplus capital as may belong or accrue to the said company in the purchase of public or other stock, or in any other moneyed transactions or operations, not inconsistent with the constitution and laws of this State or of the United States, for the sole benefit of the said company.

  The water company could also be a bank—a Republican bank, in point of fact, to counter the only other bank in New York City, Hamilton’s Bank of New York, which was staunchly Federalist. If anyone in the legislature noticed this addition, there is no record of it. Many of them had left for home. The bill passed on a voice vote.

  For passage, however, the bill needed to clear the Council of Revision, an impressive group that included Governor John Jay; Robert Livingston, the state chancellor; and all five justices of the supreme court. Of the group, only Chief Justice John Lansing said a word against the bill, protesting the bank clause. Chancellor Livingston was somewhat compromised, since Burr had already given him an option for two thousand shares of Manhattan Company stock. On April 2, 1799, Governor Jay did the math and signed the bill into law.

  As a water service, the Manhattan Company was never much more than a creaky assemblage of leaky wooden pipes and overstrained pumps delivering water from a smattering of wells, the most famous of them in Lispenard’s Meadow well north of the city. As a bank, it was something else again, as it finally provided for the Republicans what the Federalists had long possessed. No less than newspapers, fashions of dress, medical approaches, and European loyalties, banks were divided by party, and the Republicans had long suffered for the lack of one. The bank’s polit
ical value, Edward Livingston told Jefferson, was supreme. “A very important change has been effected,” he wrote, “by the instrumentality as Mr. Hamilton would call it of the New Bank.” After praising the “zealous” and “active” Burr, he added, “Every thing promises a favorable issue to our labors.” The Republican propagandist James Cheetham was gleeful, as he later put it: “Federalism retained its dominion until the establishment of the Manhattan Company; after that event its empire became dissolved.”

  Burr never intended anything less, for he stocked the board with Republicans—who were inclined to advance the prospects of fellow Republicans frozen out of credit by the Bank of New York. One of the few exceptions was his duelist John B. Church, which may be another reason why Hamilton was uncharacteristically reserved in his appraisal of Burr’s deceit. The bank was a “perfect monster in its principles,” he declared, but also “a very convenient instrument of profit and influence.” It was for Burr, anyway. By 1802, he’d taken out almost sixty-five thousand dollars in loans from the bank.

  The political benefits did not materialize, as the Federalists campaigned against the underhanded manner in which it was created. None suffered more than Burr himself, who was voted out of office in the next election by a wide margin. The presidential contest was a year away, and Burr had just been ejected from about the lowest office in the land.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Strut Is Good for Nothing

  IN THE WINTER of 1798, on the floor of the House of Representatives, the stern Federalist from Connecticut Roger Griswold strode up to the hot-blooded Republican from Vermont Matthew Lyon and started caning Lyon furiously with his hickory walking stick. “He was laying on blows with all his might,” wrote a fellow Federalist. Lyon tried to fend off the blows raining down on his head and shoulders and then dashed to the fireplace, grabbed the tongs, and charged at Griswold, wrote the Federalist, and “gave him one or two blows in the face” before other congressmen jumped into the fray and hauled the two men apart.

  The fracas had started when Lyon accused the entire Connecticut delegation of lining their pockets with public funds; noting Lyon’s dishonorable discharge from the army, Griswold taunted Lyon about his “wooden sword”; Lyon spat a cheekful of tobacco juice into Griswold’s face.

  The parties had been at each other’s throats for some time, each side casting the other as the redcoats in a refought War of Independence. Now that the radical Jacobins had fallen to the right-wing Directory that ruled France (and to which Burr had sought to appeal), the new government had unleashed a furious assault on the upstart Americans, seizing American vessels in French ports, refusing to honor bills from American merchants, letting colonial authorities make off with American property, and, as the British had, dispatching hundreds of picaroons, or privateers, to the West Indies to seize American vessels and impress their seamen. Then the Directory expelled the new American minister, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who had succeeded Monroe, broke off diplomatic relations with the United States, and started to extend its naval reach up the Atlantic to Long Island Sound, making it risky for any American ship to sail the northern Atlantic without a convoy. Trade with Britain was endangered, and the Bank of England had suspended cash payments to American merchants. Most menacing of all, perhaps, the sage young general Napoléon Bonaparte was said to be gathering an army to attack the English coast.

  All this had a political cast, as usual. Since Genet, France had been the frightening symbol of mobocracy, with French-inspired democratic clubs and societies that had brought, to Federalists, a rough element to politics, which had always been left to their betters in the educated classes. Thus, Griswold was the son of the Connecticut governor, bearing degrees from Harvard and Yale, and Lyon was a loud, scrappy Irish immigrant who operated a mill in Vermont.

  The squabble with France was not yet a hot war, but a Quasi-War—a matter of posturing that only portended cannon fire—and Hamilton was in the thick of it. His reputation shattered by the Reynolds affair, he hoped a war might rescue him. Hamilton advocated girding the nation for war by creating a full-scale navy and a twenty-five-thousand-man army, the rival of any on the continent. Negotiate, he told his Treasury successor, Oliver Wolcott Jr., but “prepare vigorously for the worst. “Real firmness is good for everything. Strut is good for nothing.”

  Alarmed by the military threat, Adams was sensitive to the politics. Even as cities along the Eastern Seaboard frantically erected fortifications to hold off a French invasion, he couldn’t afford to antagonize pro-French Republicans or the anti-French Federalists, but had to somehow find the crack between them. Adams pointedly did not seek Hamilton’s counsel, but enough other secretaries did that Hamilton shaped the administration’s response. As of old, Jefferson worked to undermine the president’s initiatives through back-channel communications. By now, Napoléon had wheeled south to crush the Austrians in Italy, and Talleyrand demanded that Adams retract his harsh criticisms of France and, outrageously, pay France for the damage French privateers had done to American ships—although Talleyrand quietly indicated that some handsome bribes might make matters right between the two nations.

  When commissioner John Marshall’s account of these negotiations finally reached Adams in March of 1798, the president was outraged. Hamilton urged “calm defiance,” and for once Adams agreed, requesting a congressional appropriation for the military Hamilton had been recommending. Unaware of Talleyrand’s maneuvering, the Republicans charged Adams with going off half-cocked. But when Adams revealed the Marshall report—dubbed the “XYZ papers” for the coded names of three of the more irritating French diplomats in on the extortion scheme—the country flew into an uproar. The Republican leadership scrambled to justify its French allegiance; Jefferson claimed the XYZ papers had to have been faked by the Federalists. True to form, Hamilton rushed into print with a seven-part series, the Stand, slashing at the treasonous Republicans and demanding a military response.

  A standing army was not a welcome idea in a country that associated such a thing with the reviled British, but, in response to the threat, Hamilton now proposed one of fifty thousand men all the same. Adams scoffed that “Mr. Hamilton knew no more of the sentiments and feelings of the people of America than he did of the inhabitants of one of the planets.” He added: “Hamilton’s hobby was the army.” The Congress compromised on a “Provisional Army” of ten thousand men.

  Eager for military rank, Hamilton longed to become the leader of his new army—except that another well-regarded general was ahead of him in line. Creaky at age sixty-six, George Washington had signaled he was willing to be lured out of retirement to protect the young nation. He’d resolved to enlist Hamilton as his number two under the title of inspector general. Adams needed only make the appointment. But Adams could be remarkably maladroit, and he could scarcely have been more clumsy in handling America’s greatest hero. He appointed Washington commander without actually speaking to him first, which struck the ex-president as preemptory. Washington made clear he would be appeased only if Adams appointed Hamilton too. Adams would rather have eaten shoe leather, but he had no choice. To save his dignity, he tried to drop Hamilton below Adams’s two other appointees—Henry Knox and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney—in the official announcement. “If I should consent to the appointment of Hamilton as a second in rank, I should consider it as the most [ir]responsible action of my whole life and the most difficult to justify,” he wrote. He derided Hamilton as “not a native of the United States,” observed that his wartime rank had been “comparatively very low,” and wound up, “Hamilton has not popular character in any part of America.”

  In a rare case of restraint, Adams decided not to send this diatribe, but the sentiments were plenty evident, and Washington was not pleased to hear of Adams’s disdain for his former aide. After Adams had worried about Hamilton’s ambition, Washington called it “of that laudable kind which prompts a man to excel in whatever he takes in hand.” Having irr
itated all the principals in this drama, Adams finally restored Hamilton to second place. However it came about, Hamilton was delighted with his lofty rank, and he immediately commissioned a bright uniform, studded with epaulets, and drew up audacious, if not grandiose, plans not just to defend America from the French, but to roust the French out of Spanish Florida and Louisiana, and, while he was at it, to remove the Spanish from land east of the Mississippi, and possibly to go marauding down the South American coast, expelling European colonists, as well. To round out his roster of brigadier generals, Adams selected a Republican: Burr. Washington was shocked about the selection of such an “intriguer.” Burr? Adams was thunderstruck—he’d show Washington an intriguer. “How shall I describe to you my sensations and reflections at that moment? He had compelled me to promote over the heads of Lincoln, Gates, Blinton, Knox, and others, and even over Pinckney, one of . . . the most restless, impatient, artful, indefatigable, and unprincipled intriguers in the United States, if not in the world.” It was too much, but the die was cast. “I was not to nominate Burr,” Adams admitted. Secure in his own position, Hamilton was surprisingly accepting of the choice of his archrival. He could use an ally in New York City, as that would be a natural strike point for a French assault. Troup couldn’t personally believe that Hamilton was coming around to Burr but acknowledged that “some conjecture that he is changing his ground.” Later, he told a friend that he had seen the impossible: Hamilton and Burr actually being polite to each other. As for Burr, he lashed out only at Washington, telling Adams that he “despised Washington as a Man of No Talents, and one who could not spell a sentence of common English.” That got back to Washington, and, if Burr had any chance for a commission, that spelled the end of it.