Theodosia did not take the developments nearly so well. She was “stupefied” to learn her father had been expelled from England and aghast at the prospect of his vagabond life in Europe. “You appear to me so superior, so elevated above all other men; I contemplate you with such a strange mixture of humility, admiration, reverence, love and pride, that every little superstition would be necessary to make me worship you as a superior being.” She concluded: “I had rather not live than not be the daughter of such a man.” Even as Burr religiously detailed his every expense, he rarely expressed much concern for his financial state, which was growing more perilous by the day. Theodosia could scarcely sleep for worry about him. Once when he sent her a letter in cipher, he failed to provide her with the key, sending his daughter into a paroxysm of distress. “I have worked and wept, and torn the paper and thrown myself down in despair, and rose full of some new thought, and tried again to fail again, till my heart is worn out.” She had tried to scrounge up a loan for him from one of the few moneyed friends who was not tapped out. The fact that she evidently hadn’t turned to Alston for the money shows how tired her husband must have grown of his father-in-law’s follies. That, in turn, may account for a daughter’s panegyrics for a father who hardly seems worthy of them. What she means is, I still love you, even if no one else does. And every line of his journal says, back, I love you more than anyone. In Theodosia’s desperation, she’d gone so far as to ask Burr’s old flame Dolley Madison, once she became first lady, if there was anything her husband could do to help. She received no response.
In Germany, he settled for a time outside Hamburg, then under French control, in a community thick with Americans who did not take to the former vice president. “What a lot of rascals,” he complained, “to make war on whom they do not know; on one who never did harm or wished harm to a human being.” That, of course, was an exaggeration. He pushed on through other German principalities and then took it as a summons to Paris when Napoléon called for the liberation of Spain’s American colonies. His application to the police for a passport to Paris was wry, declaring that he was acting “from motives of curiosity and amusement only.” Permission denied, Burr was left in limbo for months, in which he suffered dental agonies that led to the extraction of one tooth, which only passed the pain to the “neighbors of the departed.” He spent the next few days with his head wrapped in bandages, boiled figs pressed against his inflamed gums. Burr would eventually be left with hardly any teeth in his head. For three more months, he was not allowed to enter the French capital, probably done in by the American minister, General John Armstrong of the DeWitt Clinton faction. A month later, that judgment was mysteriously overturned, and Burr found himself en route to Paris, “my head so full of X matters.”
In Paris, he stayed at the Hotel de Lyon at 7, Rue Grenelle in the Saint-Honoré district, and he got to work collecting maps of Mexico and lining up friends in Paris such as the Compte de Volney and the painter Vanderlyn. The diplomat Talleyrand refused to see him. Having considered Hamilton the greatest man of the age, he could not possibly welcome his murderer. Burr prepared for the emperor a lengthy, four-part memorandum of his plans and had it translated into courtly French. It finally detailed what he had always intended—an attack on Spanish Pensacola, on the Gulf, a brisk sweep across to New Orleans, gathering recruits as he went, and then the sailing down the coast for the long-awaited assault on Mexico, which would pull away the American West. As if that were not enough, Burr also planned to liberate Canada from the British, snatch its island of Jamaica, and return Louisiana to French control. These were all acts of liberation, not conquest, he emphasized, although that difference was not made clear. To call this bold was an understatement, but it wasn’t necessarily lunacy to pitch such a sweeping campaign to an emperor who had conquered much of Europe. Still, there were obvious objections: The British navy would likely close down any naval transport into the Gulf or out to Veracruz; the United States was not likely to be any more receptive to Burr’s plot this time, especially if it was under the aegis of Napoléon; Burr had never displayed any talent for military leadership, only for audacity, and he had no soldiers, supporters, or funds. Finally, he lacked what he always lacked—a wider rationale for his efforts beyond the prospect of his own aggrandizement. While this might be done in the name of liberation, it was not in the cause of liberty, freedom, self-determination, or any of the other ideals that cause people to risk their lives. It was to give Burr a reason to live.
Napoléon must have considered Burr’s plan preposterous, if it came to his attention at all, for he never responded to it. Burr did see him once, or thought he did. He was attending a concert in the Tuileries, and the emperor was said to be above him in the balcony, “but that not being lighted, we could not distinguish him.” Burr waited for months in increasing desperation for an answer and finally decided there was nothing for it but to give up on plan X and return to the United States. Once again, however, no passport was forthcoming. Now his funds had just about run out. “I am a prisoner of the state, and nearly penniless,” he wrote in French in July of 1810. He walked fourteen miles a day to make his supplications to various bureaucrats “and all for nothing.” He thought he’d found some luck when the chief of police, the Duc d’Orante, seemed sympathetic enough to his military plan to request details, but Napoléon discovered that Orante had opened back-channel communication with the British. Orante fled for his life, but not before an aide had revealed his private correspondence with Burr. “This, Madame, is rather grave,” Burr wrote Theodosia, revealing the first signs of anxiety. “Winter approaches, no prospect of leave to quit the empire, and still less of any means of living in it. So must economize most rigidly.” He realized he faced “starving in Paris.” He moved out of the hotel to a room of a family named Pelough, lived on a cup of tea, some bread, and a single egg for dinner. Even so he purchased seven francs’ worth of a certain mademoiselle named Flora, whom he deemed “pretty good, voluptuous.” Winter was on. Only by turning his oversize fireplace into a jury-rigged Franklin stove was he able to heat his room to 41 degrees—but even so, he had to lie flat on the floor when icy winds blew down the chimney. He placed a candle on either side of him and read a book, the only diversion he allowed himself. He slept hardly at all, suffered from chronic diarrhea, walked with a limp on a painfully swollen foot, and gradually became unmoored. After dragging himself into the city one bitter afternoon, he lost track of everything. “I then stood some minutes to discover where I was. In what country I was. What business I had there. For what I came abroad. And where I intended to go.” Terrified for him, Theodosia could send him nothing. Any money he borrowed, he spent on lavish presents for her—and then, to live, had to sell the presents for a fraction of the sum he paid for them. He made a stab at learning Spanish. He tried to pick up with the Holland Company, whose bidding he had done as an assemblyman, to some effect. He made a little money translating English books into French. One of them was a political diatribe containing “a quantity of abuse and libels on A. Burr.” Nonetheless, he translated them faithfully.
He was cursed. In April 1811, Burr discovered that the French had relented and issued a passport, but it was lost in the bureaucratic maze and would take months to replace. On his own, he located a sailing ship, the Vigilant, captained by a New Englander, to take him across the Atlantic, except it was out of commission for legal reasons. When those restrictions eased a month later, he still had no passport. Finally, toward the end of July, the Duc de Bassanno—a friend he’d met over oysters at the home of the French museum director—became minister of foreign affairs, and he knew a lady who possessed unusual influence over the American minister, Mr. Russell, who’d placed a hold on Burr’s passport. Moments after she paid a call on Russell, Burr’s passport materialized. By then the Vigilant had been released from purgatory, and Burr paid all but his last few Louis to book passage. He wrote Theodosia: “I feel as if I were already on the way to you, and my heart be
ats with joy.”
But no. The British seized the ship as a potential prize of war and docked it in England. Burr was waylaid there with the three hundred books he’d purchased in Europe and thirteen steamer trunks of his belongings for seven months. Finally, in February 1812, the Vigilant was released—but this time bound for New Orleans, not Boston. And New Orleans was not likely to be receptive to Burr. “A bad, bad day,” he wrote. Finally, in March, he found another ship, the Aurora, to carry him across, but, unable to retrieve the original fare, he was twenty pounds short for passage. By the time he was able to scrape it up, the Aurora had set sail. Burr scrambled into a wherry to row after it, but, without a coat, he found the icy winds so fierce, he had to stop to pitch some straw on the bottom of the boat for insulation.
Finally, he reached the Aurora, and it made an uneventful passage. On May 5, Burr arrived safely in Boston under the “incog” of Mr. Adolphus Arnot. Fearing the “implacable wrath” of Bostonians, he concealed himself in a wig and heavy whiskers when he limped about the city’s streets, but no one noticed him. Three weeks later he returned to New York. By then he’d written to tell Theodosia of his safe return. A month later, he received a letter back: “A few miserable days past my dear father & your late letters would have gladdened my soul, & even now I rejoice at their contents as much as it is possible for me to rejoice at anything—but there is no more joy for me, the world is a blank, I have lost my boy, my child is gone forever—he expired on 30th June.”
His grandson, Aaron Burr Alston, who once was to inherit his Gampy’s throne as emperor, had died of fever at age ten. To her husband’s dismay, Theodosia decided to sail north to see her father, in hopes that their reunion would lighten both their hearts. To be safe, Burr sent a friend to accompany her. The two left from South Carolina aboard the Patriot on New Year’s Eve 1812. The ship never it made it to Boston, and although there have been rumors of the ship having been seized by pirates, it was most likely lost at sea. None of the passengers or crew were heard from again.
For Burr, it was the cruelest blow. He wrote Alston that he felt “severed from the human race.”
BURR WAS FIFTY-SEVEN. He lived more than twenty more years, most of them uneventful, none of them successful. The light had gone out of him, and he shrank in size. William Seward, the future secretary of state, worked a case against him in Albany and discovered Burr in one of the “fourth-rate houses” there. Seward was shocked to find Burr “shriveled into the dimensions almost of a dwarf.” Like many, he debated whether to shake the hand that “laid low Alexander Hamilton.”
While Burr rarely spoke of the duel, it was clear it was never very far from his mind. Some years before he died, a friend persuaded him to revisit Weehawken, where he had never been since that July morning in 1804. It was a bright summer day, but Burr seemed unusually quiet, lost in thought, as they rowed over to the Jersey shore. After they clambered up the cliff, he had his friend stand where Hamilton had squinted into the sun. As the memories tumbled forth, Burr’s voice rose, according to his first biographer, James Parton. He recounted how much he’d had to put up with from that popinjay, until he could bear it no longer. Either he would have to “slink out of sight, a wretch degraded and despised,” or make a stand against this slanderer, who would keep at it until he was cornered. “When he stood up to fire, he caught my eye, and quailed under it; he looked like a convicted felon.” Burr had heard the claims that he had fired first, but they weren’t true. Hamilton had. He heard the bullet whistle past, and as for Hamilton’s own assertions to his wife about the duel from the night before? “It reads like the confessions of a penitent monk.” The friend couldn’t help noting that, as he spoke, Burr didn’t seem little anymore. “His very form seemed to rise and expand.”
While the Burrites who confined themselves to politics were unharmed by the association, several of his coconspirators suffered unduly. The Blennerhassetts were driven to dirt farming to survive, and Senator John Smith was nearly expelled from the Senate before he withdrew of his own volition. Wilkinson survived three investigations and died in Mexico in 1825.
Burr himself sailed on. He set up house with a couple of his late wife’s Bartow relatives, plus two of his own children, Aaron Columbus Burr and Charles Burdett, by other women. On July 1, 1833, when he was seventy-seven, he married again, to Eliza Jumel, a former prostitute, it was said, who had been the wife of a wealthy wine merchant, Stephen Jumel. But Burr continued to see a young beauty named Jane McManus, among others, and, incensed, Eliza divorced him for adultery and plundering her assets. He accused her of adultery back. Her charges proved more credible in court, as a witness had spotted Burr and McManus sitting together on a settee “as close as they could set.” Peering through a window blind, he could see “Colonel Burr had his hand under her clothes . . . his trousers all down.”
Back in 1830, Burr had suffered a stroke that disabled his right side, and four years later, shortly after the divorce, he had another stroke that proved completely debilitating. Friends moved him to the Jay Mansion, named for his Federalist nemesis, now a dilapidated boardinghouse on the Battery. When that was condemned, Burr was moved to the Hotel Saint James near Port Richmond on Staten Island. He was placed by the window on the second floor, where he could watch the boats at harbor. It was here that he died alone at age eighty on September 14, 1836.
If Hamilton’s death had triggered a nationwide outpouring of grief and a massive funeral parade that wound through New York, Burr’s death occasioned only a tepid oration by the president of Princeton. He was buried at the college beside the monuments to his father and grandfather, in an unmarked grave.
FIFTY-TWO
In the End
EMPIRES RISE AND fall, and so do the men who build them. Hamilton came from so little to make so much, winning a war, creating a constitution, establishing a financial system, before he fell to scandal and despair. Burr’s ascent is not so marked, in part because he began at such a height: He gave good service in the revolution, proved an able lawyer, initiated a democratic style of campaigning, and nearly won the presidency. Their lives, Burr’s and Hamilton’s, stand now on the distant horizon like a pair of mountains of different heights but similar shapes. The one behind is higher and mightier, but it is obscured by the lower mountain in front. And their ridgelines cross, the one in front appearing to rise where the other descends.
Front and back, up and down—relative standing was everything to these two men—fatal for Hamilton, and hardly less ruinous for Burr. Hamilton was well into his decline while Burr was climbing to the presidency. Just when Hamilton was diminished by his failures, Burr was enlarged by his success, exacerbating all the latent tensions between the two—until Burr missed the presidency and he started his own plunge. His bitterness shaded into wrath, and he took his revenge on a fallen man.
THE FORTUNES OF both men turned at Weehawken. Today, it is a town of a little over ten thousand. Just north of Hoboken, it is best known as the western terminus of the Lincoln Tunnel. Up on a bluff above a ferry landing, there is a small park off Hamilton Avenue purporting to mark the spot of the fatal duel. It is actually well below it, as the original dueling ground rested on a rocky ledge that stood above, until it collapsed sometime in the nineteenth century. The memorial park’s chief feature is a sizable boulder that Hamilton supposedly rested on after he was shot, and a plaque that describes the basics of the duel. Adjoining is a park devoted to Hamilton alone, clearly the favored combatant, that offers a proud bust of him on a high pedestal.
But of course, the real monument to Hamilton does not lie on the Jersey shore, but on the shore across, where the financial towers of Wall Street that he inspired have turned an island wilderness into a built paradise that is the envy of the world, one that has extended from New York to Pittsburgh to Kansas City to Des Moines to San Francisco and to hundreds of cities more, in the steady advance of prosperity across the land. Great men do great things. As he made h
imself out of nothing, he created a country out of nothing.
There is no bust of Burr. If a visitor were to look out from Weehawken, scanning the horizon in search of Burr’s lasting contribution to the country, let alone to the world, he might detect a certain glow of roguery that, at this distance of time, can seem charmingly American. But that’s vaporous. If our visitor were to seek something more solid, he could look everywhere in this vast country, from the east to the west, and be very hard-pressed to find anything at all.
ENVOI
AND THAT LETTER from Hamilton to Theodore Sedgwick from July 10, 1804, the night before the duel?
New York July 10. 1804
My Dear Sir
I have received two letters from you since we last saw each other—that of the latest date being the 24 of May. I have had in hand for some time a long letter to you, explaining my view of the course and tendency of our Politics, and my intentions as to my own future conduct. But my plan embraced so large a range that owing to much avocation, some indifferent health, and a growing distaste for Politics, the letter is still considerably short of being finished—I write this now to satisfy you, that want of regard for you has not been the cause of my silence—
I will here express but one sentiment, which is, that Dismembrement of our Empire will be a clear sacrifice of great positive advantages, without any counterballancing good; administering no relief to our real Disease; which is Democracy, the poison of which by a subdivision will only be the more concentrated in each part, and consequently the more virulent.
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 45
