Burr had come to this.
FORTY-FOUR
Tant Mieux
DESPITE THE FEDERALIST fears that Jefferson would spell the end of the Republic, he had governed far more from the center than from the edge, presiding over a nearly noiseless administration that retained much of the Hamilton financial system even as he reduced the federal debt on which it was based. To top it off, although he had vowed to observe every particle of the Constitution and to reduce spending, on his own authority he’d spent 15 million dollars from the US Treasury on the Louisiana Purchase, a stack of prairie in the middle of the continent that would double the size of the country. Like most successful presidents, he succeeded more by what he was not than by what he was. He was not the overheated Adams, and he let the despised Alien and Sedition Acts expire, unmourned.
Since 1802, there had been alarming rumors about a continuing sexual liaison between Jefferson and one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, but the spreading of those charges seemed more a mark of the Federalist desperation than of any lapse in Jefferson’s character. By the close of 1803, Jefferson was confident enough about the 1804 election that he could contemplate a move that might, under other circumstances, seem drastic: shedding the perfidious Aaron Burr as vice president. He decided to replace him with the old warhorse George Clinton, once Clinton assured Jefferson he wouldn’t seek the presidency himself, since Jefferson wished to reserve that for his current secretary of state and fellow Virginian, James Madison. Clinton obliged, terming the vice presidency a “respectable retirement.” When the plan was put to the Republicans’ nominating caucus, it was passed without a single dissenting vote. No one spoke up for Burr.
It was as a dying man that Burr sought an interview with Jefferson on January 26, one that Jefferson recorded in his Anas in unusual detail, to plead with him to be kept on, and, failing that, for him to offer the slightest endorsement of the man who had secured him the presidency. Burr could scarcely have been more unctuous in his professions of loyalty to the president, as he recalled that he had accepted being named as vice president only “from a desire to be with me,” Jefferson wrote, “whose company & conversation had always been fascinating to him.” His pen must have dripped acid in inscribing that sentence. If, before, Jefferson had offered Burr a cabinet position to withdraw from the vice presidency, Burr asked now only for “some mark of favor” from the president, whose eminence was nearing Washington’s. On such matters, Jefferson had to remind him that it was his policy to remain “merely passive”—always the most comfortable position for him anyway. Hoping to come away with something, Burr complained about the pamphlet wars in New York, which were shredding his reputation in his home state and the base of any political power he retained. Surely, Jefferson could restrain the Republican newspapers, at least. But no. Jefferson admitted that, while he had noticed the attacks on Burr, they were “as the passing wind.” And, regrettably, he had “never thot it proper to interfere for myself, & consequently not in the case of the Vicepresident.”
It was all over. A few days later, snow had blanketed the Northeast, and, exchanging his coach’s wheels for runners, Burr sleighed up the coast to New York to throw himself into the election for the governorship that Clinton was abandoning. This time, he would run neither as Federalist nor as Republican, but as an independent, a rare category in that bifurcated age. The Republican machine was in the hands of the hateful DeWitt Clinton, who’d given up his Senate seat to take over the mayor’s office and run the Clinton faction from there, where it could be amplified by the heavy patronage in the city. That Clinton put forward the perennial Morgan Lewis, a Livingston by marriage, united two sides of the political triangle.
As ever, Hamilton ran the embattled Federalist Party, but it wasn’t until February 16 that he was able to organize a grand Federalist banquet at Lewis’s City Tavern in Albany to choose a candidate. Since the Federalists had been so battered the last time around, no one of substance wished to get involved. After the fiasco of the 1800 election, and the Reynolds scandal before it, Hamilton’s political standing was almost as low as Burr’s. Like his rival, he saw the election as his best chance to recoup. But he would never consider Burr a Federalist, not after 1800, and would never support him for anything. Instead, he threw his weight behind the current New York chancellor, former chief justice John Lansing, unaware that Lansing had chosen not to run. As Burr summarized it in a dispatch to his daughter, Hamilton was “for any candidate who can have a chance of success against A.B.” This time, however, Hamilton’s usual attacks on Burr went for naught. The Federalists declared Burr their candidate anyway. And so did the Republicans who gathered at Tontine’s in Albany. As did a political group that gathered at Mechanics Hall in New York City. And so it went almost county by county. Hamilton looked like yesterday’s man. It seemed as though the state would elect Burr by acclimation.
While New York seemed to be coalescing around Burr’s candidacy, there was another movement afoot, a clandestine one, as befit Burr’s style, pulling Burr, and the state, in a drastically different direction. It appeared that Burr was appealing simultaneously to sharply different constituencies for radically different ends: Even as he was campaigning for governor, he was also listening to the entreaties of a group of northeastern Federalists who were in such despair over Jefferson that they were starting a movement to secede from the Union. The bedrock Federalist states of New England would join with New York to create an independent nation, provisionally called the Northern Alliance. Because of its size and economic strength, New York was key to the venture. And the backers imagined that Burr was key to New York. Massachusetts’s senator Pickering, thought to be the ringleader of the scheme, dined with Burr half a dozen times, accompanied by one or another of the other New Englanders in on the plot. Burr never committed himself to such a treasonable project, but he did listen and let the conspirators imagine he was with them. But as they later went back over his statements, they couldn’t find a syllable that indicated he actually was. As a mystified Senator William Plumer put it: “No man’s language was ever more apparently explicit, & at the same time so covert and indefinite.”
In the conversations, Burr freely bashed the “Virginia faction” that had treated him so abominably, making no distinction for the president, but that didn’t necessarily mean that he was willing to break the Union apart to be free of it. “He has the spirit of ambition and revenge to gratify,” said the conspirator Senator Roger Griswold, the one previously famous for his cane, “and can do little with his ‘little band’ alone.” The more Griswold pressed, however, the more Burr retreated. It was the election of 1800 all over again. If Burr was to be king, he had to seize the crown, but this he would not do. And who could blame him? The scheme called for him to win the governorship first and then inform the voters they’d actually elected him president of a whole new country—and face the consequences from Jefferson.
Burr professed to his daughter that he could scarcely be less interested in the outcome of an election that would, in fact, determine his political future. “They are very busy here about an election between Morgan Lewis and A. Burr,” he wrote in a teasing fashion that revealed an effort to put some distance between himself and events. “The former supported by the Livingstons and Clintons, the latter per se.” By himself alone. The remark was meant to be humorous, but there was considerable truth, and pathos, to it. The campaign was vicious, unhampered by any serious discussion of the issues. Indeed, the casual observer might think the election wasn’t between Burr and Lewis, but between Burr and Hamilton, with the scurrilous editor James Cheetham bent on playing up every point of dispute between them. Burr went so far as to file a lawsuit for libel against Cheetham, but the editor replied that any criticism had come from Hamilton, drawing the two men even more tightly into conflict. A Burr newspaper revived the hoary charge that Hamilton sought to install the son of George III as an American king, claiming that Governor Clinton, of all people, retained a
letter of Hamilton’s to that effect. Surprisingly enough, Clinton could produce no letter, only a recollection of it. Hamilton struck back by accusing Burr of plotting to destroy the Union with his scheme of a northern confederacy, which Hamilton had gotten wind of. Undaunted by any threat of a libel suit, Cheetham’s American Citizen went after Burr for a sexual licentiousness that was monstrous, by its account. The newspaper assembled a list of “upwards of twenty women of ill fame” who had supposedly dallied with Burr, and another of respectable married women whom Burr had betrayed. Thousands of handbills posted all around the city took up the theme. Many of them penned by Cheetham, they told bitter stories of the deflowered who were now descending on New York to seek their revenge, or of business associates who had been cheated out of their money. But by far the most scandalous claim was Cheetham’s that Burr had seduced a bosomy black woman at a “nigger ball” hosted by a black servant at his Richmond Hill. It was all shockingly personal, a public shaming that relied, not on truth, but on the credibility of any appalling story about the vice president.
Burr responded by dispatching his Burrites throughout the state to push the cause and seek endorsements of the influential. One new convert was Martin Van Buren, just twenty-two, who proved so adept that the other side sought to disparage him as Burr’s illegitimate son, an imputation that lingered. Burr professed to be unaffected by the “new and amusing libels” that were daily published against him, and did not respond in kind. In his own literature, he styled himself a “plain and unostentatious citizen” and made sure his own attacks on Lewis stayed well within the bounds of political decorum. He hoped that voters would reward him for his high-minded restraint.
The tumult finally came to a close when the voting began. Despite the acclaim he’d received at the start of the campaign, Burr was not sanguine about its end, telling his daughter that he’d never gone into an election with “so little judgment about the outcome.” Hamilton was likewise darkly pessimistic, declaring himself “disgusted” by politics.
This time, there proved no reason for him to be. The election was a disaster for Burr. He lost to Morgan Lewis by almost nine thousand votes, sixty percent to forty percent, making it the worst defeat in the history of New York gubernatorial elections. “The storm in New York is thoroughly allayed,” observed John Randolph of Virginia, referring to the Burr forces, “never to rise again from the same quarters, or rather from the same men.”
If this was his political demise, Burr did not acknowledge it. A long, chatty letter to Theodosia written shortly after the election was filled mostly with tales from his romantic life, describing how he had not been received by the mistress he called Celeste, but had been by the “good-natured” but lamentably “flat-chested” “La G.” (Given the tenor of the campaign, it is surprising that any woman would entertain his advances.) It wasn’t until the end of the letter that he added as a postscript, “Election is lost by a great majority: tant mieux.” So much the better.
But that was merely Burr’s surface aristocratic disdain. Down deeper, he was not nearly so accepting. He had lost everything worth having in the public life to which he had committed himself for the last fifteen years, and one that might have brought him to the presidency. The defeat had been so sweeping, it could not be blamed on any one factor. Burr’s behavior in 1800, the ferocious newspaper attacks, and the rumors about the northern conspiracy—all these were immensely destructive. But the Burrites instinctively attributed the loss to one man: Hamilton. “If General Hamilton had not opposed Colonel Burr,” groused Burr’s ally Charles Biddle, “I have very little doubt but he would have been elected governor of New York.” Burr himself believed that, even if Hamilton had not cost him the election, he was behind the vicious newspaper attacks that ruined his reputation. This was an immensely public defeat, and every aspect of Burr’s life, public and private, had come under assault. The result would burn. First the presidency, then the vice presidency, and now this. He who once had everything within his reach if not in his grasp now held nothing at all.
Rage was never a Burr characteristic. He was far too controlled and far too fond of his pose of heroic detachment. Coolly methodical, he was far more likely to seek revenge. For him, it was a form of communication: His enemy would get to know his pain by feeling it as his.
HAMILTON KNEW RAGE very well. He flew into it often, although he usually expressed it in such artful language that it lost much of its communicative force. By 1804, however, his rages were starting to subside, the passion spent in too many tirades against too many malefactors, real and imagined. Burr had scarcely known defeat before 1804, but it had been a commonplace for Hamilton ever since he left the Treasury in 1795. None of his Federalist candidates had won. This fact didn’t stop him, but it surely diminished the fury he might have felt if the fates were against him less regularly. By 1804, Hamilton was largely finished as a party manager. And his joy was gone, too, after the death of his favored son, murdered for defending his father’s name. If his daughter Angelica never recovered from the shock, the same could be said of her father. A darkness descended over him. He was not angry.
FORTY-FIVE
A Still More Despicable Opinion
HIGHLY PUBLICIZED DUELS enjoyed something of a revival in New York City at the turn of the nineteenth century, owing largely to the combustible mix of politics and the press—and a cadre of gentlemen willing to kill or die for their reputations. The whole notion of a duel—from duellum, a contraction of duo bellum, or war of two—descended from the medieval contests of rivalrous knights that developed in Europe in the early sixth century. Frustrated by the inability of courts to dispense justice, combatants started whacking at each other with heavy truncheons to resolve criminal disputes between them, the loser to be hung. Over the centuries, the disagreements branched out into romantic rivalries, and, in an oddly festive, tournament setting, a pair of especially eager suitors would fight to the death with swords or daggers, if they didn’t joust on horseback, to win a lady’s hand—not that the lady always rejoiced at the outcome. But by the time the duel had migrated to America in 1800, the traditional weapons of chivalry had been exchanged for dueling pistols, often quite handsome ones—engraved, hand finished, and long barreled for greater accuracy—that were frequently kept as a pair in a velvet-lined mahogany case. And the animating sentiment had fluffed out into a grander sort of masculine pride that wasn’t intended to impress the courts, women, or the Crown, but to awe a small circle of gentlemen who shared their particular notion of personal honor, one that ran so deep that they, almost alone, would be willing to face down a loaded pistol—coolly, without the slightest trace of fear—at ten paces to defend it.
An “affair of honor,” as this tiny war was termed, was as tightly regulated as the president’s ball and advanced according to precise steps. The precipitating event could be almost anything: The code of honor was no statute book, and any offense was subjective. It may be as seemingly minor as calling someone a “rascal,” as Eacker did to Philip Hamilton; or as fierce as accusing someone of engaging in bribery, as John Barker Church did Burr. Whatever, the offender is rarely surprised to receive notice. Every gentleman had a feel for the limits of acceptable behavior. The transgressor was officially made aware of his transgression when the aggrieved party called him out by issuing a “challenge.” While there was some wiggle room, the recipient was generally obliged to accept. Both parties appointed seconds to handle the details of place and time and to serve as the principals’ surrogates as needed. For the final “interview,” the two antagonists met in some out-of-the-way spot, usually in New Jersey, where duels were no less illegal than in New York, but the laws were less likely to be enforced. There, the seconds marked out ten paces, loaded the pistols, and set them out for the participants. The two men then took up their positions, standing sideways to the line of fire to diminish their profile. They awaited the cry “Present!”—their cue to fire when ready; it was possibly the last wo
rd one of them ever heard.
For a gentleman of a certain sort, his honor was everything he most prized about himself—his prestige, valor, cultivation, masculinity, self-regard. The very notion might seem ridiculous in an uproarious period when the vilest insults filled the streets, newspapers, coffee shops, taverns, and halls of Congress. But this very chaos may have fostered it, as honor alone separated a gentleman from all this rampant vulgarity. As abstract as honor might seem to those who scoffed at it, to a gentleman his honor was like his manhood. It could never be surrendered without a fight. Because of their comfort with arms, military officers were probably the first to call an assailant out to the dueling ground over a slight, but politicians were soon close behind. The political rivalries of the day were so fierce as to provoke genuine outrage, and more than in other fields, a politician’s career rested largely on his reputation.
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 37
