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

by Sedgwick, John

  2: CONTENTMENT

  For the Faucettes, the geography of Saint Croix, and the court case, see Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton and Flexner’s Young Hamilton. Atherton supplied the exquisite “mouth of a shark” in her fully researched but novelized account, The Conquerors. The sniffing Hamilton descendant is John Church Hamilton, Alexander’s third born. Chernow, in his Alexander Hamilton, made the observation about the multiple spellings of Levine, and countless other things that are tallied farther on. On Saint Croix, the Christiansted fort still stands, and Rachel’s low-ceilinged cell is open to visitors. Chernow is the best source on the Hamilton lineage, although I supplemented his account with Flexner. Robert White, of the Alexander Hamilton Society on Saint Croix, provided the observation about the limestone blocks, and several other things related to the island. The history, geology, economy, race relations, and natural history of Nevis are well evoked by Vincent K. Hubbard in his Swords, Ships and Sugar, right down to the metal-plated iguanas and the observations of the Reverend Robertson. The broader context of the sugar economy is laid out in the breathtaking Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire, an account of the global sugar trade by Andrea Stuart.

  For Hamilton’s far-seeing gaze, I am thinking primarily of Trumbull’s standing portrait from 1791, but it is true of nearly all of the renderings; even the famous bust by Giuseppe Ceracchi seems to be looking past the viewer. Jefferson purchased a copy and placed it opposite one of himself in the entrance hall at Monticello so the two of them, he joked, would be opposed in death as in life. Flexner noted that the Danish court found the children “obscene,” and that Lavien called them “whore children.”

  3: PLATONIC LOVE IS ARRANT NONSENSE

  For the early years of Burr, Lomask is the unrivaled source, and he is the source here for Burr’s early rebellious streak. Davis, as always, is the ur-source of the Burr quotes. For more on Elizabethtown, see As We Were: The Story of Old Elizabethtown, by Theodore Thayer. Parton shed the light on Burr’s early education and relationship with Reeve and Burr’s sister, Sally. Lomask recounted the tale, widely repeated, of Burr’s determination to escape from home and later to enter the College of New Jersey, and his life there. Davis makes much of Burr’s sexual history in his Memoirs. For more on the Cliosophic Society, see The Halls: A Brief History of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society of Princeton University, by Wallace J. Williamson III.

  4: THE PRODICTIOUS GLARE OF ALMOST PERPETUAL LIGHTNING

  Chernow charted Hamilton’s Jewish connection and his patched-together education on Nevis. John C. Hamilton recorded the remark “It’s a dog’s life.” Allan McClane Hamilton added Hamilton’s lament about his father. Chernow detailed the resemblance to Ned Stevens, and its implications, and looked into Hamilton’s work at Beekman and Cruger. The dailiness of the work is captured in the letters and documents from the period in PAH. His poem and life-changing essay are also there, as is Hamilton’s famous wish for a war in his letter to Ned Stevens. For more on Hamilton’s emergence from Saint Croix, see Richard Brookhiser’s Alexander Hamilton, American.

  5: REFINEMENT

  For a close-up view of life in New York when Hamilton arrived, I have turned to that marvelously compendious volume Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, which is a fund of statistical details, impressions, and insights, starting with the word “refinement” and proceeding from there. The steady march of the colonies toward war will come as no surprise to most readers; for the basics I have relied most heavily on A Leap in the Dark, by John Ferling, among countless other sources. For the details of Hamilton’s involvement with Rev. John Rodgers, I have relied on Chernow. For the suspicion that Rodgers alerted Hamilton to Burr’s existence, setting the two in competition, this is only my surmise, based on the facts that it seemed like a natural topic of conversation, and that Hamilton changed his behavior and his age shortly afterward.

  6: IN THE ROSEATE BOWERS OF CUPID

  For details of life in Elizabethtown, I have relied on Thayer’s history of the town. The frivolities of life at Liberty Hall are well recounted in the biography John Jay: Founding Father, by Walter Stahr, as Jay was an active participant. Chernow delved into the personalities of William Livingston and his brother-in-law Lord Stirling. As ever, see PAH for that scrap of Hamilton’s effulgent poesy. Among others, Chernow delineates how Hamilton’s politics guided his switch from the College of New Jersey to King’s.

  7: SIX SLAYLOADS OF BUCKS AND BELLS

  Lomask provides all the basics on Burr’s curricular and extracurricular pursuits at Princeton. For Theodore Sedgwick in Stockbridge, see Welch, Theodore Sedgwick, Federalist, and my own family memoir, In My Blood: Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family. The account of Burr’s frustrations with Rev. Bellamy is amply detailed in Burr’s many letters to Ogden, all of them collected in Davis; and Davis follows through with letters pertaining to the switch to his brother-in-law Tapping Reeve. Lomask has the best single account of the affair with the future Dolly Hancock, but I have also drawn on Unger’s biography of Hancock. Davis has collected Burr’s many dishy letters with Ogden relating his romantic exploits, along with Ogden’s tepid responses.

  8: HOLY GROUND

  For Hamilton’s years at King’s College, I’ve turned to Flexner as well as Chernow. Gotham is best at setting the general scene of that part of New York. John C. Hamilton recorded Troup’s observations of Hamilton in the college chapel, noting Troup’s ideas about Hamilton’s political beliefs at the time. For the earlier relationship between the colony of New York and the Crown, see The Memorial History of New-York, vol. 2, by James Grant Wilson. The Boston Tea Party is everywhere described; I took my details from Ferling. Flexner describes Hamilton’s early efforts to come to terms with the new politics, to take on Samuel Seabury, and to save Myles Cooper.

  9: A FEVER FOR WAR

  Burr’s response to the Battles of Lexington and Concord is well recorded in Davis’s collection of his letters. For the perilous assault on Quebec, the most reliable sources—beyond Burr’s own few letters—are two biographies of Benedict Arnold, James Kirby Martin’s and Willard Stern Randall’s. As for some indications of the psychological dimensions of the journey, I have turned to Fallen Founder, by Nancy Isenberg, who is especially good in highlighting the legendary aspects of Burr’s role in the tragedy in the poetical works of Spring and Brackenridge.

  10: LIBERTY OR DEATH

  Flexner tells the tale of Hamilton’s practicing to be a soldier, and John C. Hamilton recited the topics of his father’s paybook. Nathan Schachner described Hamilton’s efforts with his young charges in his Alexander Hamilton. Chernow laid out Hamilton’s ideological assault on British rule and then detailed Washington’s defense of New York, Hamilton’s rescue of Rivington, and his retrieval of the patriots’ sole cannons from the reach of the mighty Asia.

  Burr’s impatience is well documented in Davis; for his fateful meeting with Washington, I have relied on Lomask’s account.

  11: WHEN IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS

  The Hickey conspiracy is nicely described in Chernow’s Washington and in his Hamilton. In both, he relates the terrifying invasion of the vast royal armada, adding the charming bit about Hamilton missing his purse on the nation’s first Fourth of July. For the ensuing battles, it was not only the generals who were hidden behind a fog of war—historians have been, too. To penetrate it, for the first full year of war, I have found McCullough’s account in the oversize 1776—complete with maps, reproductions, and charming facsimiles of the correspondence of the principals—immensely helpful, especially in re-creating the Battle of Brooklyn. The precise movements of Burr and Hamilton can never be known for sure, only guessed at from fragments, but I have relied most heavily on the detective work of Lomask and Chernow and done my best to coordinate their somewhat divergent accounts. Their actual intersection at Bayard’s H
ill Redoubt is a matter of some conjecture, as neither referred to it in his letters, but in Davis’s compendium, Burr mentioned the story years later, adding that he knew the area because of his many visits to Mrs. Thomas Clarke, then Mary Stillwell, an aunt of Burr’s future wife, Theodosia Bartow Prevost. (In a quirk, the Clarkes’ daughter Charity married Benjamin Moore, the Episcopal bishop who gave Hamilton his last rites.) Chernow guided me through Hamilton’s involvement with the surprise attack at Trenton, then Princeton, emerging as Washington’s aide-de-camp at Morristown. Hamilton’s own letters from early March 1777, in PAH, revealed his early duties. The story of the dashing John Laurens is best told in his sole biography, John Laurens and the American Revolution, by Gregory D. Massey. I took Hamilton’s remarkable, confessional letter to Laurens from PAH, although it has now been picked up by gay rights activists and distributed widely about the Web. Theodore P. Savas and J. David Dameron’s Guide to the Battles of the American Revolution was indispensable in penetrating the fog of that war. That said, I found that Chernow provided a clear description of Hamilton’s daring skirmish with the British along the Brandywine—leaving Massey to detail Laurens’s fight at Chadd’s Ford—and the battle’s implications for the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

  12: THE MALCOLMS

  Davis records the letters regarding Burr’s appointment and his efforts to educate and lead the raw recruits of the Malcolms to guard the gap in the Ramapo Mountains, and Lomask provides a helpful overview. The events pertaining to Saratoga, with Hamilton’s negotiations with Gates, and the looming Conway Cabal—all this has been a staple of Hamilton lore since Henry Cabot Lodge brought it to general attention in 1884, but many political nuances and emotional subtleties have been added by Flexner and Chernow. The convergence of Burr and Hamilton at either end of Valley Forge is depicted by each man’s biographers, neither side, tellingly, taking notice of the other. Chernow provided the salient details of Laurens’s extraordinary duel with Charles Lee.

  13: A LADY WITH A BEAUTIFUL WAIST

  Again, Chernow sets the scene for Hamilton’s romantic life in camp, but it’s the extraordinary letter to Laurens that penetrates Hamilton’s tortured heart. That can, again, be found in PAH.

  14: BEAUTY IS WOMAN’S SCEPTRE

  Mary Wollstonecraft is indispensable to an understanding of Burr’s relations with women. For the Moncrieffe affair, I turned to Davis, who recorded the whole thing, rather uncomprehendingly. The brutal duty in Westchester County is well described by Lomask. For the detail about Burr’s escapade to New Jersey, I have relied on Lomask, who adds a ditty called “Aaron Burr’s Wooing” from Harper’s magazine of 1887:

  Eight miles to the river he gallops his steed,

  Lays him bound in the barge, bids his escort make speed,

  Loose their swords, sit athwart, through the fleet reach yon shore;

  Not a word! not a plash of the thick-muffled oar!

  Once across, once again in the seat, and away—

  Five leagues are soon over when love has the say;

  And “Old Put” and his rider a bridle-path know

  To the Hermitage Manor of Madame Prevost.

  15: THE SCHUYLERS

  Flexner gives a good account of Hamilton’s headlong plunge into matrimony, with Chernow adding important details about the family he was marrying into. But of course it is the letters of the bridal couple—plus the Memoir of Lieutenant Colonel Tench Tilghman and the biography of Catherine Schuyler by Mary Gay Humphreys—that fully evoke the scene. For the matrimonial tendencies of the Schuyler family, I found the biography of Catherine Schuyler particularly evocative. An earlier account of Hamilton and Burr, Arnold A. Rogow’s Fatal Friendship, was particularly good on the subject of Betsey’s older sister Angelica’s rash romance with John Barker Church.

  16: BUT A SINGLE WORD, BURR

  Isenberg was helpful at revealing the clandestine origins of Burr’s attachment to the woman who was then Mrs. Prevost. Parton is the most blunt of the biographers in appraising her, and the most credible. Davis has included much of the correspondence of the two lovers, pining for each other in their separation, with Burr in Albany and Mrs. Prevost in Paramus. And Davis, of course, tosses his own approving comments into the mix, obviously pleased that his friend was done, at least temporarily, with his philandering ways. The sad story of Major André is well told in James Kirby Martin’s biography of André’s coconspirator, Benedict Arnold. Lomask recounts the betrothal of Mr. and Mrs. Burr.

  17: A LITTLE SORCERESS

  The exchange between Hamilton and Schuyler is recorded in PAH, as are Hamilton’s letter to his new wife about being bewitched, the two to Laurens complaining about his service in the army and then denying his request for more troops, and Laurens’s letter of anguish back. Chernow gives the fullest description of the famous staircase altercation between Washington and his chief aide. For Hamilton’s participation in the siege of Yorktown, I turned to Savas and Dameron’s battle guide. For Hamilton’s comments to Betsey, see PAH.

  18: IN ILL HUMOUR WITH EVERY THING BUT THEE

  Davis records the letters to Theodosia, as well as the journal entries. Lomask and Chernow both place their men in Albany, although not at the same locale. Davis has the letters regarding Burr’s bid to alter the opinion of the New York State Supreme Court—interspersed with letters to Theodosia about what he’d prefer to think about. Lomask has the details of the wedding. See Brookhiser’s Madison for Hamilton’s encounter with him in Philadelphia. For Hamilton’s last letters to Laurens, see PAH.

  PART TWO:

  THE BATTLE IS JOINED

  19: COMMENTARIES ON THE LAWS OF ENGLAND

  The marvelous and indispensable Gotham set the scene of New York City after the war, and I relied on Herbert S. Parmet and Marie B. Hecht’s Aaron Burr: Portrait of an Ambitious Man to establish the movements of Burr in the city, while Chernow did the honors for Hamilton. The ecological details of early New York come from Eric W. Sanderson’s Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. For coffee shops as the center of city life, see William Ukers’s 1922 All About Coffee. Schachner best compared the legal styles of Burr and Hamilton. Isenberg detailed Burr’s legal practice. Parton had the item about Hamilton’s returning one fee as too much.

  I drew the complicated matter of Rutgers and Waddington from Davis, who likewise finds the source of American political parties in this seemingly obscure case. Brookhiser picked up the matter as a failure of the Articles of Confederation. The quote from Chancellor Robert Livingston can be found in Edwin Brockholst Livingston’s The Livingstons of Livingston Manor. A good look at the impregnable George Clinton can be had in George Clinton: Yeoman Politician of the New Republic, by John P. Kaminski. Davis also rounds out the story, with Clinton’s failed effort to take revenge on Mayor Duane.

  20: CHILDREN OF A LARGER GROWTH

  Lomask is the most sweeping in his account of Burr’s nascent legal career, including the details about his “nice, new, beautiful little chariot,” Burr’s insistence that his was Ver Plank’s house, and the growing debt that ensued, despite the activity of his law office. Davis provides the inner story that comes from the tender letters between Burr and Theodosia that were as clear in feeling as they were in expression. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman provides the basis of Burr’s understanding in the matters of gender that fascinated him, and Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman a point of ignorance. The extraordinary moment at Fort Johnson comes from Davis.

  21: COME MY CHARMER AND RELIEVE ME

  Chernow wonderfully details the domestic scene of the Hamiltons, with Allan McLane Hamilton adding a sprinkling of comments from his Intimate Life of Alexander Hamilton. The contrasting letters to Betsey and Angelica are in PAH. The Kent anecdote is from his memoirs, compiled by his son, William.

  22: YOU
WILL BECOME ALL THAT I WISH

  For an insightful account of the growth and development of young Theodosia Bartow Burr, I have relied on the biography by Côté, supplemented by letters in Davis.

  23: TWO MEN OF POLITICS

  Burr’s early political career is well told in Lomask; Chernow handles Hamilton’s, supplemented by the many insightful letters in PAH. Chernow and Kaminski present the early phase of the loathing between Hamilton and Clinton, from the opposing points of view. Two biographies of Madison—by Richard Brookhiser and Gary Wills—rounded out for me the oft-told tale of the Constitutional Convention. The biography of Gouverneur Morris shed light on that stylist and his contribution to the hallowed document. The Federalist Papers proved invaluable to understanding Hamilton’s thought. I turned to Broadus Mitchell for some of the details. As always, the quotations from Hamilton can be found in PAH. Chernow evoked the federal ship Hamilton.

  24: A DREADED DILEMMA

  To get a sense of Washington’s mind-set, I turned to Chernow’s Washington, well deserving of its Pulitzer Prize for evoking such a taciturn man in full. The letters of solicitation are in PAH, as are Hamilton’s tepid remarks about Adams. Kaminski reveals Clinton’s anxiety from the other side, and Adams’s fury is recorded in the Adams papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Kaminski is invaluable on Hamilton’s fight to remove Clinton from office; the Parton tripartite division is, justly, a staple of political commentary on the period. Chernow picks up the Yates campaign—and Lomask introduces Burr into the matter, which Kaminski helps sort out. For the larger economic environment, and Hamilton’s role in it, see, among the other predictable accounts, “The U.S. Panic of 1792: Financial Crisis Management and the Lender of Last Resort,” by David J. Cowen, Richard Sylla, and Robert E. Wright.

  25: TO A MIND LIKE HIS NOTHING COMES AMISS

  McCullough, in Adams, well depicts the scene of Washington’s inauguration at Federal Hall. Allan McLane Hamilton picks up the tale from his grandparents’ perspective, and Chernow runs through the humorous business of choosing a title for the new president. Brookhiser has an eye for the social subtleties of state dining. The Charles Rappleye biography of the brilliant, doomed financier Robert Morris offers a helpful perspective on Hamilton’s candidacy for Treasury. Chernow fills in the rest, about the politics of disappointing the Livingstons. In Robert F. Jones’s “The King of the Alley,” William Duer is a monarch all of his own, although ultimately a toppled one, and, like Morris, he provides a useful gloss on the early years of economic expansion under Hamilton. Mitchell retails Hamilton’s efforts to get the Treasury Department up and running, and the economy along with it. Fisher Ames’s comments, widely quoted, come from the second volume of the 1837 two-volume Life of George Washington, by John Marshall. Angelica’s letter to Hamilton regarding her husband, the exchange over the garter, and the Hamiltons’ sorrowful letters to the departed Angelica are all in PAH. Hamilton’s to-the-penny calculation of the debt is in his Report on the Public Credit, which is the source of the other quotations, as well. I used the handsome Library of America edition, although the text is also in PAH. The gossipy William Maclay recorded his observations of Hamilton’s “funding system” in his surprisingly tart Journal of William Maclay. Hamilton’s own version of the disagreement is in PAH.