He finished with a note to his wife, which was to be delivered to her only in the case of his death. Up at the Grange, she had no idea of her husband’s plans. An orphaned boy was staying with him, and late that night, Hamilton found him reading a book in Hamilton’s study. Hamilton laid his hands on top of the boy’s and recited the Lord’s Prayer; then he settled back in a chair, and the child soon fell asleep in Hamilton’s arms. Roaming the house, he woke his son John, who was with him, to tell him he would be going later to the Grange so the boy wouldn’t worry to find him gone in the morning. Finally he returned to his own bed.
Hamilton rose before dawn and arrived first at the Manhattan docks. From there four oarsmen rowed him across the Hudson, with the loyal Pendleton, who would serve as his second, and Dr. Hosack, who had attended to his dying son, Philip. Hamilton had wanted him along; Burr professed not to see the point of having a doctor present.
Burr had passed the night at Richmond Hill, much of it writing a long, chatty letter to Theodosia, always his favorite correspondent, that said nothing of the duel. Instead, he informed her husband, asking him to keep up her academic studies if he didn’t survive. He waited out the days until the duel with increasing impatience. “From 7 to 12 is the least pleasant [time],” he told Van Ness, who was making the arrangements. “Anything so we but get on.” But when, on the fateful morning, Van Ness came to walk with Burr down the hill to the dock, he found Burr sound asleep on the couch in front of the fire.
The sun was just dawning when the men reached the bluff at Weehawken, and the seconds set about to clear away some brush that had gathered on the dueling ground. They were the ones to pace off the distance and to throw the lot to determine whose second would shout, “Present!,” the signal to fire. That fell to Hamilton’s man. With no other preliminaries, the two men took their positions across from each other. In the rosy light, at that distance, each could get a good look at the other, to check for a tightening of the eyes or a flickering of the cheek that might betray the obvious tension of the moment. By the code, calmness in the face of annihilation was essential, even as they stood across from each other, in a classic fencer’s pose, right foot forward, body sideways, right shoulder up high over the chin. The better, that way, to narrow the profile and protect the vitals from a one-ounce ball of lead that would strike like a tiny cannonball at this distance. Both men wore heavy topcoats to obscure the contours of their bodies. Standing so close, with an index finger curled around the trigger of his pistol, each could scrutinize the other’s face—one by now nearly as familiar as his own—for gratifying hints of distress.
It had to have been a singularly terrifying moment, but neither man is said to have betrayed any emotion as he stared the other one down. Finally, Hamilton’s second cried out, “Present!”
Each leveled his pistol at the other, and two blasts sounded, with puffs of smoke, in close succession.* Burr’s ball caught Hamilton on his right side. He gave out a cry of pain as the impact of the bullet twisted him onto the balls of his feet and then sent him sprawling back onto the ground. He lay there stunned, ashen faced, gasping. Burr took a step toward his fallen enemy, a flash of “regret” on his face, said his second, before he hurriedly left the field without a backward glance.
“I am a dead man,” Hamilton told his own second, Pendleton, and added to Dr. Hosack, who rushed to his aid, “This is a mortal wound.”
And so it was. The bullet had cracked through his ribs, shredded his lungs, and pierced his liver before lodging tight against his lower spine, leaving him paralyzed all down his legs as blood pooled in his gut. Pendleton and Hosack eased him down the steep slope and into the rowboat, which conveyed him back to Manhattan, every stroke of the oars excruciating.
The news from Weehawken went up as a bulletin at the Tontine coffeehouse, a gathering spot for the city’s business class. GENERAL HAMILTON WAS SHOT BY COLONEL BURR THIS MORNING IN A DUEL, THE GENERAL IS SAID TO BE MORTALLY WOUNDED. The electrifying news spread quickly in every direction, and an eerie quiet settled over much of the island. Much of the city’s business stopped, and on the street, people were desperate to find out what others had heard.
Despite his agony, as he lay on his deathbed at a friend’s house in Manhattan, Hamilton tried to comfort his delicate wife, who’d rushed to his side from the Grange, thunderstruck at the news. She’d dissolved into a fit of explosive weeping the moment she saw him. “Remember, my Eliza, you are a Christian,” Hamilton urged her. To soothe herself, she fanned him throughout the rest of the hot day. Her beguiling sister Angelica came and crumpled into tears, too.
Hamilton sought Communion, but neither minister he summoned would oblige a man dying from a duel. “I have no ill will against Colonel Burr,” he assured the second one, the Episcopal bishop Benjamin Moore. “I met him with a fixed resolution to do him no harm. I forgive all that happened.” With that, Bishop Moore gave Hamilton the sacrament after all. He labored through the night, and in the morning Betsey brought in his seven children and stood them at the foot of his bed, a sight that left Hamilton unable to speak. More friends came, twenty in all, a scene of desperate grief. Only Hamilton, it appeared, was able to keep his composure. His last words were political: “If they break this union, they will break my heart.” He died so easily, his wife weeping beside him, that people did not immediately realize he was gone.
Afterward, Betsey opened the letter that he’d written her in the event of his death. He concluded stirringly:
Fly to the bosom of your God and be comforted. With my last idea, I shall cherish the sweet hope of meeting you in a better world.
Adieu best of wives and best of women. Embrace all my darling children for me.
NEWSPAPERS OF EVERY political slant were filled with the story of the death, the ones favoring Hamilton’s Federalist Party framing their accounts with borders of funereal black. The city was consumed with grief. “The feelings of the whole community are agonized beyond description,” wrote one New Yorker, who added that there was a greater outpouring for Hamilton than there had been even for Washington upon his death five years before.
A state funeral was staged two days later. While massive guns boomed along the Battery, and church bells rang sorrowfully all about the city, the New York militia marched through the city in formation, their muzzles pointed downward in memory and respect, leading Hamilton’s mahogany casket east along Beekman, down Pearl, past Whitehall, and to Broadway, carving a line around what would be the financial center of the world that Hamilton had largely created. The casket was borne by eight pallbearers, with Hamilton’s wife and children trailing behind, and then Hamilton’s riderless horse, the boots reversed in the stirrups. At Trinity Church, the mourners packed the pews to hear a stirring eulogy by the stylish Gouverneur Morris, the longtime friend of Hamilton who’d also given the eulogy for Washington, and from there the mourning spread throughout the country, declaimed in pulpits and retailed in newspapers, until it seemed that everyone knew that Alexander Hamilton had been murdered by Aaron Burr.
Part Four
And Then There Was One
This cipher letter—sent by Burr to his coconspirator General James Wilkinson on July 29, 1806—contained Burr’s secret plan to establish himself as the emperor of the American West. It proved Burr’s undoing when Wilkinson passed the letter to President Jefferson, who had Burr arrested for the capital crime of treason.
FORTY-SIX
Have No Anxiety About the Issue of This Business
AFTER BURR CROSSED the water from Weehawken following the fateful interview, he climbed up to his retreat, Richmond Hill, in full confidence that everyone would recognize he had done nothing wrong. Hamilton had sullied Burr’s honor, and Burr had dispatched him according to the code.
As it happened, a cousin had come for a visit that very morning from Connecticut, arriving shortly after Burr. He was directed to the library, where he found Burr engaged in what an early
biographer called “his usual avocations.” Reading, presumably. Burr greeted him warmly, and the two chatted for a few minutes, until it was time for breakfast, which they enjoyed together, the young relative not thinking for a moment that there was anything amiss for his cousin. “Neither in his manner nor in his conversation was there any evidence of excitement or concern,” he noted. It wasn’t until the cousin bade Burr good day and took a stroll down Wall Street that he noticed an unusual stirring, and a friend rushed up from the crowd to ask if he’d heard the terrible news about Hamilton. “Colonel Burr has killed him in a duel just this morning!” he cried.
Nonsense, the cousin replied. He’d just come from seeing Burr, and he hadn’t said a thing about it.
But then, as he walked farther, the cousin heard more and more people saying the same thing. Colonel Burr had killed General Hamilton. And the cousin came to realize that Burr’s blithe insouciance was the queer proof that the gossip must be true.
Burr had planned to stay on in Manhattan, and why shouldn’t he? He’d gone into the duel confident that the people were with him, whatever happened. Unlike Hamilton, he’d tested his popularity. He’d stood for election, after all, and he’d held offices, increasingly higher ones—assemblyman, state attorney general, senator, and now vice president of the United States. Others might belittle the post, and he might himself, but it was still an impressive title. And what was Hamilton? With the ascendancy of Jefferson, he was yesterday’s man, and his many efforts of late to revive his reputation—including that ridiculous pamphlet about Maria Reynolds—only confirmed that impression.
Burr did summon Dr. Hosack—the doctor who had attended Hamilton—to Richmond Hill to give him an account of Hamilton’s condition. But that didn’t stem the wild stories of raucous celebrations at Richmond Hill, the claims that Burr wished he’d shot Hamilton in the heart, and the suggestions that he’d been practicing his marksmanship for weeks. Federalist stories, perhaps, but they spread. If Burr had hoped people would take his side, he was so grievously disappointed he thought it safer to stay inside.
Meanwhile, the Manhattan coroner was driven by the public outcry to investigate the case. More than forensics, such an investigation usually turned on atmospherics. If it looked like a crime, it was. And the coroner was not likely to let a possible murderer go free.
“I propose leaving town for a few days,” Burr airily wrote a friend a few days into the ordeal, “and meditate also a journey of some weeks, but whither is not resolved.” To his son-in-law, Alston, he was more candid, writing that the duel “has driven me into a sort of exile, and may terminate in an actual and permanent ostracism.” With rising anxiety, he hung on at Richmond Hill for a few more days, and then slunk away in the darkness, a house Negro carrying his bags, his loyal friend Sam Swartwout for company. There was a pier on the water at the foot of the gentle slope of the hill, and there a rowboat with a pair of oarsmen was waiting for him.
They rowed through the night and in the morning pulled in to Perth Amboy on the Jersey shore, where Burr figured he would be safe for a while, New Jersey being less likely to prosecute duelists. Besides, the state’s governor, Joseph Bloomfield, was a friend, or had been. In Perth Amboy, he’d come to see another friend, Commodore Thomas Truxtun, in hopes of securing horses to carry him on to Philadelphia. Truxtun greeted the vice president warily. He’d been friends with Hamilton, and it was hard for him to know what tone to take with his murderer. When Burr asked for “a dish of good coffee,” Truxtun brought everyone up to the house for a full breakfast. Burr asked about horses, but Truxtun said he was sorry, but he couldn’t possibly arrange a carriage and four until Monday, two days off.
It didn’t help that Truxtun let slip that he’d loved Hamilton “as a brother.” He quickly added that he had “an unfeigned and sincere regard” for Burr, too, but the damage was done. Burr was clearly troubled by what happened, Truxtun thought, not that he said anything. For his part, Burr had to wonder—was his old friend deliberately trying to hold him up?
Finally Monday came, Burr and his party boarded Truxtun’s carriage, and they hurried on to Bristol, and from there across the Delaware by ferry to Philadelphia. Truxtun, aware of the sensitivities, rushed to furnish his account of the visit to the newspapers, lest someone else do it for him, and he let the world know that, while he had done Burr a favor, he’d always been a Hamilton man.
Burr arrived in darkness in Philadelphia and made his way to a local tavern, instinctively pulling a cloak around him and drawing his brimmed hat low. But the tavern keeper recognized him and called out his name, sending a bolt of fear through Burr and his compatriots. That encounter proved harmless, but Burr never knew. Word of his crime—that was now the term—had spread from New York, and, courtesy of lurid newspaper accounts, shocked letters, and salacious gossip, it was moving through the surrounding states like an infectious agent. A vice president was normally fairly anonymous in those days, but not Burr. When he ventured out into Philadelphia one night, cloaked as usual, a correspondent for a Federalist paper spotted him and then marveled in print that a murderer had the “hardihood to show himself in the streets.” This was doubly troublesome, for he had received word of a plot by anonymous agents to assassinate him. In a letter to Theodosia, he assured her the claims were “mere fables,” bravely adding, “those who wish me dead prefer to keep at a very respectful distance.” He would carry on just as before, he assured her. “No such attempt has been made or will be.” But he later weakened, begging her not to be “dissatisfied with me . . . I can’t just now endure it.”
His associates were in worse trouble. At the end of July, warrants had been issued for them to testify or be clapped in jail, a fate that befell his close friends Matthew L. Davis and Colonel Marinus Willett. The crippled John Swartwout, who’d left Burr for New York, and the ever-loyal Van Ness had both gone into hiding. But after a few days Swartwout smuggled out a letter to Burr with the news that a grand jury had delivered a verdict of “willful murder by the hand of A.B,” with Van Ness and Hamilton’s Pendleton as “accessories before the fact.” Stunning news—a vice president accused of a capital crime. Swartwout was trying to keep the bulletin out of the papers, but it was not to be stopped. Shortly after came word that New York’s governor Lewis, who had trounced Burr in the last election, was set to enlist the governor of Pennsylvania to enforce the warrant for Burr’s arrest.
Burr remained defiant. “I shall remain here some days,” he told his son-in-law, Joseph Alston, “that I may better know the enemy.” He closed on a note of iron to fortify Alston—and possibly himself. “Have no anxiety about the issue of this business.”
Still, it must have been troubling to see a copy of the grand jury’s verdict, which declared that the vice president, “not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being moved and seduced by the Instigation of the devil . . . feloniously and willfully did kill and Murder [Alexander Hamilton] against the peace of the People of the State of New York and their dignity.”
Aaron Burr was now officially a wanted man.
FORTY-SEVEN
A Good Many Incidents to Amuse One
BURR HAD ALWAYS had a plan.
Late on the night of May 23, 1804, just days before Burr fired off his opening salvo in what would prove to be his fatal correspondence with Hamilton, the vice president received a visitor at his mansion on Richmond Hill, a man who had insisted on arriving in total darkness—“without observation,” as he put it in a letter to Burr setting up the interview—and on leaving that way too. It was Brigadier General James Wilkinson, a man of middling height, but bulky and heavy walking, with a confident manner and a rough voice that he kept low when Burr ushered his guest into the library and closed the door behind him. Wilkinson was the commander and highest-ranking officer of the American army, just a few thousand strong, but still the most powerful force in North America. His title had previously been held by Washington in 1798, when Adams h
ad raised an army to face down the rising French threat in the Quasi-War, and then by Hamilton. He in turn bestowed it on Wilkinson in 1800.
No one mistook Wilkinson for a canny general or a decent fellow. He was little more than a ruddy-faced braggart, but there was something solid within his bluster, even if it raised doubts about his fundamental character. Wilkinson was not a man to cross, and Hamilton had realized that, as dangerous as it might be to promote a man like Wilkinson, it was more dangerous not to. “He will apt to become disgusted if neglected,” Hamilton explained. “And through disgust may be rendered really what he is now only suspected to be.” He was being rendered really now, for Wilkinson had suffered a wrenching comedown, too, when Jefferson had unceremoniously trimmed Wilkinson’s army by a full third, making it, to Wilkinson, little more than a militia. And Jefferson also let it be known that he wasn’t so sure that Wilkinson needed a grand title like brigadier general. The moves “awakened me from a dream,” Wilkinson seethed. Burr, of course, had his own reasons to hate Jefferson.
Burr knew Wilkinson from their days in the Continental Army, when they had both served in Benedict Arnold’s ill-fated campaign to liberate Quebec from the British. And it may be that the specter of America’s preeminent traitor hung over them now as they huddled in Burr’s library, for the two were dreaming of sedition, which could be charted in the half dozen rolled-up maps that Wilkinson had brought with him. For they were all of the American West, which Jefferson had recently acquired from Napoléon, a faraway place at least two months’ ride from New York, assuming a safe passage across the Alleghenies. Burr unrolled the broad sheets over the library table and set about candles to light them. As he searched from one to the next, he could see these lands weren’t like any place he knew. There wasn’t anything there! It was like staring at the Pacific—endless, but empty. Burr wasn’t much of a traveler, but he was open to the possibilities of the West. Jefferson loved to spin tales of tribes of gigantic Indians, river bluffs carved into sculpture as fine as Michelangelo’s, endless prairies seeded with bumper crops, and whole mountains made of salt. (The Federalist editor Coleman scoffed that the president had left out the “lakes of molasses” and the “vales of hasty pudding.”) And the fancies had taken hold. It would be some time before they would be replaced by the harsh truth of a barren landscape, hostile Indians, and extreme weather.
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 39
