When Hamilton rushed into the room, he took his son’s pulse, then, stricken, he turned to Hosack. “Doctor, I despair,” he told him, Hamilton’s face a river of tears.
“Never did I see a man so overwhelmed by grief as Hamilton,” his friend Troup recalled. Betsey came in, heavy with her tenth pregnancy, and stared down, disbelieving, at her son, who was white, scarcely able to breathe. Both parents lay down beside him and held their son all night long. A friend recorded the scene:
On a bed without curtains lay poor Phil, pale and languid, his rolling distorted eyeballs darting forth the flashes of delirium. On one side of him on the same bed lay his agonized father, on the other his distracted mother, around [him] his numerous relatives and friends weeping and fixed in sorrow.
Philip survived only until daybreak.
It was pouring the day of the burial, but a great throng turned out to pay their respects. His father was so weighed down by grief, he was speechless and unable to walk. He had to be supported by friends as he approached his son’s grave.
Hamilton had been afraid that Betsey would miscarry from the strain, but she carried the child to term and bore him safely in June. They christened him Philip, and the family sometimes called him “Little Phil.”
Philip’s sister Angelica, the third born, named for Betsey’s flamboyant sister, had always been devoted to her big brother, and she never recovered from his death. Sensitive and artistic, she may have been too delicate, and when her brother died, she lost touch with reality altogether. Hoping to bring her comfort, Hamilton had C.C. Pinckney, the onetime presidential candidate, send her some watermelons and parakeets, since she’d always been fond of birds, from South Carolina. But instead of being pulled out of her misery by such kindnesses, she retreated ever deeper into it. She remained a child even as she aged; she sang the songs she used to play on the pianoforte with her father when she was young; she referred to Philip in the present tense; she sometimes failed to recognize her parents; and she remained under a physician’s care for the rest of her life.
BURR READ THE account of Philip Hamilton’s death in the new Evening Post, interested that the violence had stemmed from a political conflict. Burr faced the same in Washington, and increasingly in New York, where the ancient factions that he had always played in his favor were now allied against him. In both places, he was being squeezed out. New York’s politics was a familiar triangle, but now with the Clintonians and the Livingstons in an uneasy alliance on one side, and the Burrites, having deposed Hamilton’s Schuyler faction, at an increasingly lonely apex on the other. As in Washington, power was measured in the ability to produce jobs for important constituents, and on that score, Burr was proving to be embarrassingly feeble. While DeWitt Clinton freely distributed appointments by the thousand, Burr made only the most modest request of DeWitt’s uncle, the governor, for eight positions, of which five were granted. Five slots for the vice president of the United States. Worse, he was outmaneuvered by the Clintons, who rammed through a change in the state constitution that drained away his little remaining chance to offer jobs through the Council on Appointments. And then his nemesis DeWitt Clinton was given a Senate seat to fill a sudden vacancy. The younger Clinton could scarcely have been more disdainful of his predecessor. “Little or no consequence is attached to him in the general estimation,” he declared.
Burr himself would not have disagreed with this assessment. “I dine with the president about once a fortnight, and now and then meet the ministers in the street,” Burr wrote Joseph Alston, dryly. “They are all very busy: quite men of business. The Senate and the vice president are content with each other, and move on with courtesy.” Avoiding him.
He did continue to occupy the chair of the Senate president, and his vote was needed to break a deadlock regarding the Republican-inspired repeal of the Federalists’ Judiciary Act from the Adams administration, which would have added a number of Federalist “midnight judges” to the court. Jefferson had swept into office determined to reverse the measure, and most vice presidents would have obliged him automatically. But Burr hinted that he respected the Federalist point of view and believed the Constitution forbade repeal, infuriating Jefferson but thrilling the Federalists, who thought he might be one of theirs after all. In a preliminary vote, however, Burr broke a tie by siding with Jefferson after all. Then, on a vote whether to send the measure back to a Senate committee for yet more agonizing consideration, he broke with Jefferson to vote yes. Burr insisted he did this on the merits, claiming he wished only “to ameliorate the provisions of the bill, that it might be rendered more acceptable to the Senate,” but Jefferson was not assuaged. He knew an enemy when he saw one. Ultimately, the Republicans rescued it from committee and forwarded it to a vote, which this time they carried, and did on the House side, too, by a substantial majority that did not require Burr’s vote. A man who could never miss, now could never hit.
With suspicions raised everywhere against him, his every move was subject to the darkest speculation. When it came time to celebrate the birthday of the revered Washington at the end of February 1802, a swarm of Federalists gathered at Stelle’s Hotel, for what a Republican newspaper derided as “Bacchanalian orgies” in memory of the country’s late founder. With all the guests loyal Federalists, they all enjoyed a boisterous dinner with ample quantities of wine when, by one account, some “gentle taps” were heard at the door. The crowd quieted and then turned completely silent as the door swung open to reveal the vice president of the United States. No one knew if he was representing Jefferson or signaling a switch in party. But they were galvanized by his presence either way.
Newly humble, Burr apologized for intruding on the merriment, but he reached for some wine and said he would like to propose a toast. Permission granted, he raised his glass and offered this: “An union of all honest men.”
If his remark was received with some bafflement in the hall, Jefferson knew exactly what it meant. His vice president was declaring war on him. If so, war he would have.
As if newspapers were not savage enough in the Federalist administrations, they became bloodthirsty under Jefferson, in large part because the two parties had drawn to rough parity among the electorate, so few issues or elections were so one-sided that they could not be tipped by a broadside attack. It was in this spirit that John Wood, a Scottish journalist of low repute, created a five-hundred-page pamphlet attacking the Adams administration, and then larded it with ancillary material, including a peripheral assault on Burr. “Thirty pages of high eulogium”—Burr put it in the teasing fashion he had come to affect in these brutal years. To avoid the stain, he offered to buy up the whole run of 1,250, and, suddenly worried the British edition would haunt him, dispatched the brig Recovery to fly to London to bag that one too. For good measure, Burr prepared to write a new edition of the pamphlet that was cleansed of the animadversions against him. For a fee, Wood delivered the offending edition to the home of Burr’s henchman, the lawyer and political operative William P. Van Ness, where it was promptly burned, so no new one was called for.
But then the infamous James Cheetham intervened. Burr himself had brought him over from the British Isles, seeing him as the sort of unscrupulous and conniving editor who could be of some use, and Burr chipped in half the purchase price of a Republican paper called The Argus for him. In 1801, Cheetham swapped that for a half share in the American Citizen, along with DeWitt Clinton’s wealthy cousin David Denniston. In switching papers, Cheetham shifted his political loyalty from Burr to the man emerging as his most dangerous enemy, the nefarious young Clinton. Worse for Burr, Cheetham decided it would help to stay on Jefferson’s good side by giving him a few morsels of malicious gossip about Burr to snack on. By now Cheetham had managed to secure an unburned copy of the Wood pamphlet, complete with its revelations about Burr, along with the juicier bit about Burr’s elaborate attempts to suppress it—attempts that now seemed rather comical. Jefferson was delig
hted to have it. He thanked Cheetham for sending news of his vice president that was so “pregnant with considerations.” Ever cautious about leaving behind evidence of his dirty dealing, Jefferson asked that Cheetham destroy the letter, which Cheetham was not the sort of man to do.
Cheetham then went at Burr hard, labeling his next pamphlet The Narrative of the Suppression of Colonel Burr of the History of the Administration of John Adams. This retailed the revelation of the original Wood pamphlet and Burr’s hilarious attempts to conceal it. It was succeeded by four more pamphlets attacking his former benefactor, all on the theme that Burr was an American Napoléon, an untrustworthy scoundrel who’d schemed to steal the presidential crown from its rightful owner and place it on his own head.
This action inspired an equal and opposite reaction, as John Wood, of all people, rose to Burr’s defense, as did a number of Federalist papers, including Hamilton’s Evening Post. But Burr’s reputation could not be unsullied. Whatever influence he might have had in Washington had evaporated. Even the loyal Burrite William P. Van Ness’s congressman brother, John, had to note that Burr’s “influence & weight with the administration is in my opinion not as much as I could wish.” Leaving Burr even further adrift, the Evening Post claimed that the New York Republicans were furious with Burr for—shades of the glorious 1800 campaign—advancing a slate of Burrites on the Republican side of the ledger in the coming election. This provoked Cheetham to disavow any such move by Burr. He was wanted by neither Republicans nor Federalists. Robert Troup hoped that the whole imbroglio would embarrass Jefferson, since everyone would assume he was behind it. Maybe so, but it left Burr in that middle place where few politicians want to be—scorned by both parties.
The anger didn’t just smolder, but flared into fire. As the editors of the leading two papers on the two sides of the partisan divide, Coleman and Cheetham started to go at it with new fury. Outraged by something Cheetham had written, Coleman challenged him to a duel. Not wishing to be killed over a few stray words, Cheetham avoided any lethal confrontation by promising not to repeat such charges. When the New York harbormaster claimed that it was Coleman who had backed off, Coleman called him out to the dueling ground—and shot him dead. Then the towering Burrite John Swartwout weighed in to declare that DeWitt Clinton was the one behind Cheetham’s denunciations of Burr. That accusation sent Clinton into a frenzy, calling Swartwout “a liar, a scoundrel, and a villain.” That earned them a trip to Weehawken, across the Hudson. There on the narrow rocky ledge that had become the prime dueling ground for antagonists from the city, Clinton waited for his second’s cry of “Present!” then leveled his pistol at Swartwout and blasted him in the leg, dropping him to the ground in obvious agony. When Swartwout finally hauled himself up, he insisted the matter was not settled, and he called for another round. The pistols were duly reloaded, the order to “Present!” repeated, and Clinton cracked Swartwout in the same leg again, and dropped him, howling, once more. When he managed to hoist himself onto his feet once more to stand unsteadily on a ruined leg, Swartwout bravely insisted the duel proceed. And it did, for five rounds altogether. None of the bullets found their mark, purposely, one imagines, on Clinton’s side. Finally, Clinton refused to continue, and, declaring that he “wished he had the principal here,” namely Burr, he quit the field.
But Burr did not enter that fray or any other. For someone who’d always been so scrappy, he had turned oddly defeatist, as if he was so overwhelmed with so many woes that he could only retreat into his shell. He did start another newspaper, installing the vivacious Peter Irving to edit it, with an eye to promoting Burr. He let the many verbal assaults go unanswered, and he instigated no duels against the many men who questioned his reputation. He did rouse himself to sue Cheetham for libel regarding his actions in the presidential election. For the case, he solicited depositions from James Bayard and Samuel Smith to acknowledge that Burr had done nothing wrong. But he placed these documents in a drawer, where they languished until 1830; he never pursued the case. The top of the world had become the bottom of the world, and there would be no inverting it.
INSTEAD, HE RETREATED from the world altogether, into a place where he found only comfort, the arms of women. After his initial stay in Georgetown, Burr moved into a handsome suite of rooms near the Capitol, where he dined frequently with his good friend Dr. William Eustis, who had come down from Boston as a representative. Still, for someone used to accomplishment, the lack of it must have been exasperating. “My life has no variety, and of course no incident,” he told his daughter, Theodosia, twenty days away in South Carolina. To fill the gap, he embarked on a series of affairs with women he wooed under various playful noms d’amour: “Celeste,” “La Planche,” “Madame G.” (also dubbed “La G.”), and “Inamorata.” Because Burr’s literary executor, Davis, destroyed most of his love letters, it is hard to say who these objects of his desire were, what he did with them and when, how much the affairs may have overlapped, and how they concluded. While he tended to be secretive about his amorous activities, he did confide in Eustis, his uncle Pierpont Edwards (only six years his senior, and a man very much after his own heart), and his daughter, Theodosia, whom he had raised in a manner that went beyond Mary Wollstonecraft, to think as coolly as a man.
Two of the women believed to be in his life as vice president were American exotics, Susan Binney and Madame Leonora Sansay. Binney may have been Celeste. She was just twenty-three when Burr was vice president, the daughter to an established Boston physician, and sister to a Philadelphia lawyer. Sansay seems to have been older. American-born, she spoke fluent French and styled herself as a European, freely carrying on affairs during her marriage. Whatever relationship Burr may have had with Binney, it was brief. He mentions her in a letter to William Eustis in June 1800, urging his friend to look in on a Miss Binney of Boston “if you have not forsworn all Virtuous women.” Burr had closed off relations by the time of the inauguration, telling Binney the “plain truth and quit honorably.” In his judgment, anyway. One letter to Binney survives, as it pertains to a book he’d sent her on the differences between the sexes, a favorite Burr subject. Burr himself had been unimpressed, finding the author had succeeded only in the “jumbling and confounding of sexes,” and was “as remote from the truth as the arrogant pretension of male superiority.” He thought he would write it better.
As for Sansay, Eustis may have been in on this one, too. Burr seems to have met her as early as 1797, well before Binney, getting serious sometime before her marriage in 1800 to a much older French merchant, Louis Sansay, from New York. Marriage seems not to have inhibited Leonora Sansay very much. In 1802, as she and her new husband prepared to move to Santo Domingo, she traveled to Washington to meet with Burr, ostensibly to request letters of introduction for her trip. Burr was thrilled by the encounter. As he told his uncle Pierpont Edwards: “you may speak very highly of her talents, her acquirements and her accomplishments—She speaks & writes French & has more sense & information than all the women to be found in St. Dom.” He had his protégé John Vanderlyn paint Madame Sansay in oil when she was next in New York. Once the Sansays were ensconced on their island home, Louis Sansay confided to Burr that he was afraid his beguiling young wife would run off with another man—although he never suggested that the man might be Burr himself. M. Sansay wanted Burr to offer her twelve thousand dollars upon his death if she stayed with him. So Burr played marriage counselor and lawyer—and rival. On that basis, the Sansays remained together. On Santo Domingo, she fashioned herself a connoisseur of love, writing for Burr the romantic adventures of a certain “Clara” on the island, much as Burr might have written of his for her. Eventually Leonora did leave her husband and return to America, where she settled in Philadelphia and ran an artificial flower shop and published racy novels. She may have been Burr’s mistress there. It is hard to know.
One last woman in Burr’s orbit in his vice presidential years was Susan Reynolds, just a teenager,
daughter of the infamous Maria Reynolds. Since Burr had handled Maria’s divorce from the abusive James, Maria was returning for another favor—to help her find a place for Susan to live. In December of 1800, Burr passed her request on to his friend Eustis to help. “I repeat & do assure you,” wrote Burr, “she is to my belief, pure and innocent as an angel.” By this he meant that she was a legitimate child, and not, as Eustis, knowing Burr, might suspect, Burr’s own daughter. It is remotely possible that Susan might have been Hamilton’s, since she was conceived after Reynolds came to know him. If so, it was surely a remarkable coincidence for such hot-blooded political adversaries. Burr addressed Eustis’s obvious first question head-on: “she has not the most remote affinity to me.” Instead of a familial connection, he had “a sacred obligation to protect her.” Burr placed Susan in a boarding school in Boston, but she had other ideas. In 1803, she eloped with Francis Wright, a rake, said Eustis, “educated to dissipation without acquiring any one decent trait.” He dumped Susan three weeks later, and she ended up in a house “frequented by young men”—a brothel. “I see nothing to be expected of our unfortunate charge,” Eustis wrote, “but a gradual declension from reputable life down to what lengths or depths God knows.” Thus ended the Reynolds affair.
While Burr betrayed European attitudes toward his gallantry, taking pleasure where he could and avoiding attachments where possible, his political enemies were not quite so sanguine. In May 1801, a handbill appeared all over New York City entitled AARON BURR! It called Burr a “Catiline,” a familiar charge that referred to the lustful conspirator of the Roman Republic, who had “confessed in all his villainy.” But this one added a NEW TRAIT—Burr’s “abandoned profligacy,” as demonstrated by all the “wretches” the vice president had supposedly seduced and betrayed, many now reduced to prostitution, others fallen to poverty, disease, and death. Like most of the images summoned up in the partisan wars, this handbill was satire, but it was not without foundation. For Burr had indeed left more than a few wretches in his wake. His friend Eustis was in on it; he wrote once from Boston to update the vice president of the doings of a Mrs. Werring and a “reported daughter of B——,” both of them Burr connections, presumably, one as a hired partner, the other as issue. A Mrs. Hayt in New Haven, however, could scarcely have been clearer. She wrote the vice president plaintively to remind him she was “in a state of pregnancy and In want . . . only think what a small sum you gave me, a gentleman of your connections. I don’t wish to crowd you tou hard Because I know your short of money by your small complyments to me. Neither do I wish to expose you. But I would thank you if you wuld Be so kind as to send me a little money.”
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 36
