It was a rare duel, one that left both men dead.
* For all his rampant Anglophilia, Lord Stirling would soon serve loyally as a brigadier general for the revolutionary side, although not well if Aaron Burr—who surfaced in his military retinue—is to be believed. Burr claims Stirling was chiefly devoted to tippling, his tankard endlessly refilled by his obsequious aide-de-camp, James Monroe.
* Burr was not only the first graduate but also the most prominent one, although the list also includes Senator John C. Calhoun, the educator Horace Mann, and Supreme Court Justice Levi Woodbury.
* To the frustration of posterity, many of the names have been redacted from the surviving letters in Matthew L. Davis’s edition of Burr’s Memoirs.
* It thus follows a habit that dates back to Burr’s first secretive letters to his sister and would be the mode hereafter for Burr’s sensitive correspondence. While it is true that letters were notoriously open to public perusal, it is unusual for someone so young to be so clandestine. Hamilton hardly ever wrote any personal letters in code, and Washington never. At this point, the cipher’s schoolboy simplicity is rather charming, as the code was a simple “acrostic,” as Burr terms it, by which every letter of the alphabet is translated to another one, following a key that both parties possess. As Burr’s duplicities multiplied, and he had ever more secrets to keep from more people, he would strengthen the encryption significantly. William Paterson once teased Burr that his feminine “hand” was too “sleek & ladylike,” and later made clear the implication as he referred to his own writing: “When the itch of scribbling seizes me, I hardly know when to stop. The fit, indeed, seldom comes upon me; but when it does, though I sit down with a design to be short, yet my letter insensibly slides into length, and swells perhaps into an enormous size. I know not how it happens, but on such occasions I have a knack of throwing myself out on paper that I cannot readily get the better of.”
* By one account, Burr was accompanied by a beautiful Abenaki princess named Jacatacqua. Part Indian and part French, she was supposedly helpful to Burr because she knew the backcountry, and she was keen to provide the help because she was in love with him. Despite Burr’s alarming reputation for gallantry, she joined him in his bateau, along with her hound. Sadly, this seems too good to be true, since she appears in none of the near-contemporary accounts, and, distrustful of Indians, Washington was opposed to using them on such an expedition.
* Despite the tip toward rebellion, the New York delegation would not be empowered to vote for independence and abstained, leaving it the only colony not to sign the Declaration of Independence.
* Hamilton was joking, but there was something extreme in Laurens’s recklessness, as if he was seeking something in death he could not find in life. He’d seen two siblings die, a third had perished in his care, and his mother had died when he was still young. Then, in September 1780, Laurens’s father, Henry, the former president of the Continental Congress, had been captured by the British at sea and removed to the Tower of London. But his obvious and impossible love for Hamilton may have encouraged this abandon, as he sought, in effect, to throw himself onto the pyre of his devotion. Even Hamilton’s son John, usually obtuse where his father’s emotions were concerned, observed that Laurens’s quest for “higher excellence” was appropriate “in the warm conceptions of a mind deeply tinged with romance.” And, in revealing his engagement to Laurens, Hamilton assured him that, while in marriage, he “had a part for the public, and another for you.” Betsey was one thing, in other words, Laurens another.
* Unlike most surviving letters of Hamilton’s, this one is a draft, and its tatter of cross outs and reworkings reveals what is normally concealed, namely, the fidgety, unsure Hamilton.
* It was Carleton who directed the defense of Quebec to begin Burr’s war; he now ended Hamilton’s.
* And this ultimately became a bedrock principle of the US Constitution, as its Supremacy Clause declares that national laws are paramount.
* He also served as lawyer for his former guardian, Timothy Edwards, regarding some land purchases from the Stockbridge Indians—once the flock of his father—where they had been driven off to in the “Ten Townships” grant of New York’s Broome and Tioga Counties. Edwards’s and his brother Jonathan’s portion had been disputed by their partners, and the whole matter thrown to the New York legislature.
* Having made a lover of Laurens, Hamilton seems here to be making a child of Kent. However puzzling this might seem to later generations, it seems not to have been puzzling at the time, as neither Laurens nor Kent took exception to Hamilton’s overtures, taking them for gestures of loving concern only, and none of his political adversaries, so eager to pounce on any perversion, found them noteworthy either. Even so, such tenderness was unusual; it is hard to imagine Washington writing such things. It may be that the emotions of Hamilton’s that were so unbounded in other arenas were no less unbounded in this: He was a man of grand passions who simply couldn’t easily be confined to the tidy psycho-erotic categories of today.
* That service evolved into the US Coast Guard.
* And enduring, as the principle of “implied powers” is a foundation of constitutional authority today.
* Its denizens made up a little society that published its own newspaper and established its own court, of which Duer served as a judge. Duer had two rooms, one of them given over to two clerks who attended to his various petitions. He remained there for five years, released only briefly in 1797 to avoid the yellow fever epidemic. Returned, he pleaded with Hamilton for intercession, and Hamilton may have persuaded his friend Troup to sign a forty-five-thousand-dollar bond, springing Duer to live in the city. By then, Duer was painfully sick; it was a special torture to urinate. He died that May of 1799 of “putrid Fever,” according to a relative.
* If by nephritic, he means renal, referring to some kidney failure, he is probably mistaken, as the best modern guess is that Theodosia suffered from stomach cancer, which can deliver severe abdominal pain, weight loss, and a bloody stool. It was out of the reach of eighteenth-century medicine.
* His collection would form the basis of the National Gallery in London.
* The portrait was done on a trip to London to negotiate the status of Indian lands with the Crown at the start of hostilities in 1775. Any number of English dignitaries came to gawk, but they were gawked at, too. The biographer James Boswell recalled that Brant “was struck with the appearance of the English in General, but he said he chiefly admired the ladies and the horses.” Taken by the Mohawk, Boswell had a cameo done of him, as a memento.
* Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier invented the globe aérostatique, or hot-air balloon, in 1783, when they stitched together an orb of tightly buttoned sackcloth seventy-five feet high and fifty feet across, and colorfully decorated with signs of the zodiac and the royal monogram of Louis XVI. Standing in a basket below, Jacques-Étienne was the first to be lifted off the face of the earth, leaving the outskirts of Paris’s Bois de Boulogne, rising three thousand feet, floating five miles outside of Paris, and landing safely beside a windmill half an hour later.
* Gallatin also imagined that Jefferson might be seeking a way to weaken Burr to the point that he could drop him for his second term, clearing the way for the loyal Virginian James Madison to take over.
* For some time, there has been the competing theory that Burr was outraged not by anything Hamilton said about his political behavior, but because he had accused Burr of having an incestuous relationship with his daughter, Theodosia. A tempting idea, since it would certainly explain the duel, but there is no evidence that Burr had done anything so abominable, or that Hamilton had said he had. Such a remark would have been so inflammatory, and so consequential, that someone would have passed it along to history, but no one has. As it is, only Gore Vidal has asserted it in print, and he did so in his Burr, a sat
iric novel. Fiction, of course, is not fact.
* The shots were not almost simultaneous, as one might expect, but according to the two eyewitnesses were about four or five seconds apart. It is an unusual gap. It takes considerable sangfroid to hold back one’s fire and hope the other man’s ball flies past harmlessly. Aside from separating the calm from the impatient, the delay suggests a divergence in strategy that says something about the otherwise mysterious mind-sets of the two men at this climactic moment in their lives. Who shot first? That has never been clear, and competing narratives have sprung up to support either position. Was it Burr, the more soldierly one, firing immediately to deliver a mortal wound that was, in fact, just an inch from a near miss? Or was it Hamilton, immediately “throwing away” his fire, as he had claimed he would—and then leaving it to Burr to shoot him at his leisure if he chose? Both sides labored mightily to persuade the world that the other man fired first. The Hamilton forces insisted that Burr did and that Hamilton’s gun had gone off only by a spastic reflex after he was shot and his bullet went up into the trees. Pendleton returned to the dueling ground the next day and claimed to find a cherry tree branch “at about twelve and a half feet” up from where Hamilton stood that had supposedly been drilled through by his bullet. “General Hamilton did not fire first, and he did not fire at all at Col. Burr,” Pendleton argued. The Burr camp insisted that Hamilton did and that Burr had no way of knowing that Hamilton hadn’t shot to kill. “The falsehood ‘that H. fired only when falling & without aim’ has given to very improper suggestions—the fact does appear to me to be important—‘You never before doubted’—is it possible you can now doubt?” Burr later wrote Van Ness in an unusually clipped style that revealed his anxiety about the matter. When Hamilton’s ball missed, it left Burr time to wait for the smoke to clear, take precise aim, and fire. What’s more, to show that Hamilton fully intended to shoot at Burr, the Burr camp contributed the detail that Hamilton stopped the proceedings after the distance had been paced off, and the two men faced each other down, to say that the sunlight was glinting off his glasses, obscuring his vision. He needed to adjust them. John McLane Hamilton, however, insisted his grandfather didn’t wear glasses.
Burr was determined to show that he had followed the prescriptions of the code duello and upheld his honor; the Hamilton people insisted that Burr had killed a defenseless man in cold blood. If the evidence favors the former, it has been the latter position that has won the day. In this, the dead Hamilton outdid the living Burr.
* Burr’s encryption had evolved into an elaborate process involving an ever-changing key drawn from an unrelated text, like a passage from the Bible, to encode messages letter by letter, translating, for example, an e into a g, and a j into an l, and then decoding them back. Encoded, the message looks like a crossword puzzle created by a lunatic, with no proper words, and a highly perplexing proposition for anyone who found it. By modern standards, however, such encryption is so light a teenager with a cell phone could penetrate it.
* When Butler had been a representative at the Constitutional Convention, he was the one to advance the insidious constitutional rule that, for purposes of apportioning House seats, a black slave, even though nonvoting, counted as three-fifths of a white citizen, substantially inflating the political power of the South. Without that provision, the historian Garry Wills has argued, Jefferson and Burr would most likely not have been elected in 1800.
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War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 55
