by Ron Chernow
Everything in Alexander Hamilton’s life pointed to the fact that he would not dodge a duel or negotiate a compromise. He was incapable of turning the other cheek. With his checkered West Indian background, he had predicated his career on fiercely defending his honor. No impulse was more deeply rooted in his nature. This outspoken man was always armed for battle and vigilant in deflecting attacks on his integrity. On six occasions, Hamilton had been involved in the duel preliminaries that formed part of affairs of honor, and three times he had been attached to duels as a second or an adviser. Yet he had never actually been the principal in a duel. His editor, Harold C. Syrett, has observed that, until the summer of 1804, Hamilton “was obsessed with dueling in the abstract, but not with duels in fact.”12
The dueling cult was still widespread, though far from universal. Jefferson and Adams opposed dueling, and Franklin had deplored it as a “murderous practice.”13 Dueling was especially prevalent among military officers, who prided themselves on their romantic sense of honor and found this ritualized violence the perfect way to express it. Both Hamilton and Burr had been schooled in this patrician culture. Military men always feared that if they ducked a duel they might be branded cowards, drastically impairing their future ability to command troops. Since he envisioned a host of bloody possibilities in America’s immediate future—a civil war, anarchy, a secessionist revolt—and thought he might lead an army to deal with them, Hamilton dwelled on the implications for his courage in accepting or declining Burr’s challenge. Courage was inseparable from his conception of leadership. Said one contemporary of Hamilton: “He was a soldier and could not bear the imputation of wanting spirit. Least of all could he bear the supercilious vaunting of Aaron Burr that he had been called by him to account and shrunk from the call.”14
Dueling was de rigueur among those, like Burr and Hamilton, who identified with America’s social elite—Burr by birth, Hamilton by marriage and accomplishment. If a social inferior insulted you, you thrashed him with your cane. If you traded insults with a social equal, you selected pistols and repaired to the dueling ground. In theory, Burr could have sued Hamilton for libel, but it was thought infra dig for a gentleman to do so. Hamilton said loftily that he had largely refrained from libel suits because he preferred “repaying hatred with contempt.”15
Politicians were among the most ardent duelists. Many duels arose from partisan disputes and, as Joanne Freeman has shown in Affairs of Honor, they often followed contested elections, as losers sought to recoup their standing. Political parties were still fluid organizations based on personality cults, and no politician could afford to have his honor impugned. Though fought in secrecy and seclusion, duels always turned into highly public events that were covered afterward with rapt attention by the press. They were designed to sway public opinion and shape the images of the adversaries.
Duels were also elaborate forms of conflict resolution, which is why duelists did not automatically try to kill their opponents. The mere threat of gunplay concentrated the minds of antagonists, forcing them and their seconds into extensive negotiations that often ended with apologies instead of bullets. Experience had taught Hamilton that if he was tough and agile in negotiations he could settle disputes without resort to weapons. In the unlikely event that a duel occurred, the antagonists frequently tried only to wound each other, clipping an arm or a leg. If both parties survived the first round of a duel, they still had a chance to pause and settle their dispute before a second round. The point was not to exhibit deadly marksmanship; it was to demonstrate courage by submitting to the duel. Further militating against a mortal ending was that many states had levied harsh penalties for dueling. Although these laws were seldom applied, especially when social luminaries were involved, the possibility of prosecution always existed. Even if no legal action was taken, the culprit might still be ostracized as a bloodthirsty scoundrel, defeating his purpose in having dueled.
Hamilton could thus have assumed that he would likely emerge alive, though not unscathed, from his affair of honor with Burr. At the same time, he faced a situation in many ways unlike anything he had ever experienced. In previous affairs, Hamilton had been on the offensive, taking opponents by surprise and briskly demanding apologies and retractions. He was a past master at using this technique to muzzle specific people who had slandered him. Now he found himself on the receiving end, deprived of the righteous wrath and moral authority of being the wronged party. He could not take an aggressive, high-minded tone, since it was he who stood accused of slander.
Ordinarily, Hamilton might have assumed that the worldly Burr would see that he had nothing to gain and everything to lose by murdering him. They had been colleagues for twenty years and had enjoyed each other’s company. That spring, Hamilton had told a mutual friend that political disputes were more civilized in New York than in Philadelphia and that they “never carried party matters so far as to let it interfere with their social parties.” He even mentioned that he and Colonel Burr “always behaved with courtesy to each other.”16 Yet Hamilton knew that Burr’s career had been damaged, even ruined, and he feared that he was in a homicidal mood. Hamilton told his friend the Reverend John M. Mason that “for several months past he had been convinced that nothing would satisfy the malice of Burr but the sacrifice of his life.”17 At every step, Hamilton proceeded with a sense of gravity that suggested his awareness of the possibility of his impending death.
Throughout his affair with Burr, Hamilton evinced ambivalence about dueling. In light of his extensive history of affairs of honor, it may seem disingenuous for Hamilton to have stated that he did not believe in duels. But with his son Philip’s death and his own growing attention to religion, Hamilton had developed a principled aversion to the practice. By a spooky coincidence, in the last great speech of his career Hamilton eloquently denounced dueling. During the Harry Croswell case, he argued that it was forbidden “on the principle of natural justice that no man shall be the avenger of his own wrongs, especially by a deed alike interdicted by the laws of God and man.”18 In agreeing to duel with Burr, Hamilton claimed to be acting contrary to his own wishes in order to appease public opinion. As his second, Nathaniel Pendleton, later wrote, dueling might be barbarous, but it was “a custom which has nevertheless received the sanction of public opinion in the refined age and nation in which we live, by which it is made the test of honor or disgrace.”19 In 1804, Alexander Hamilton did not think he could afford to flunk that test, though many friends would fault him for bowing to this popular prejudice.
It is hard to escape the impression that in the early stages of negotiations it was the headstrong Hamilton, not Burr, who was the intransigent party. The letter that William P. Van Ness carried to Hamilton’s law office on June 18 demanded a “prompt and unqualified acknowledgment or denial” of any expression that might have justified Charles Cooper’s use of the term despicable.20 Hamilton could have mollified Burr by saying that he had no personal quarrel with him and offering a bland statement of apology or regret. Instead, he adopted the slightly irritated tone of a busy man being unjustly harassed. In niggling, hairsplitting style, Hamilton objected that Burr’s charge against him was too general and that “if Mr. Burr would refer to any particular expressions, he would recognize or disavow them.”21 Technically, Hamilton was correct. In affairs of honor, the aggressor was supposed to pinpoint his accusations and do so as soon after the event as possible. In his own experiences, Hamilton had cited chapter and verse about the charges. Now Burr was dragging up dinner-party chatter from three months ago and resting everything on an adjective. For a man with Hamilton’s full schedule, it was difficult, if not impossible, to recollect old table talk, and he had legitimate grounds to protest. Yet he must have suspected that Burr was trying to coax him into a duel to satisfy political purposes as well as rage. If so, he played into Burr’s hands by behaving in a haughty, inflexible manner.
When Van Ness said that he found his response inadequate, Hamilton promised that he wo
uld review the Albany Register—he had never even seen the Cooper quote—as well as Burr’s letter and get back to him later in the day. At 1:30 p.m., Hamilton stopped by Van Ness’s home and pleaded a “variety of engagements,” while assuring him of a response by Wednesday. He told Van Ness that “he was sorry Mr Burr had adopted the present course, that it was a subject that required some deliberation, and that he wished to proceed with justifiable caution and circumspection.”22
On Wednesday evening, June 20, Hamilton dropped off his response at Van Ness’s home. Instead of applying balm to Burr’s wounds, Hamilton struck a didactic tone and quibbled over the word despicable. “ ’Tis evident that the phrase ‘still more despicable’ admits of infinite shades from very light to very dark. How am I to judge of the degree intended?”23 A defensive tone crept into his prose: “I deem it inadmissible on principle to consent to be interrogated as to the justness of the inferences which may be drawn by others from whatever I may have said of a political opponent in the course of a fifteen years competition.”24 He stood ready to avow or disavow specific charges, but he would not give Burr a blanket retraction. Then he curtly added lines that committed him to a duel: “I trust, on more reflection, you will see the matter in the same light with me. If not, I can only regret the circumstance and must abide the consequences.”25
In his acerbic reply the next day, Burr only hardened his position. He thought Hamilton had patronized him with a pedantic discourse. “The question is not whether [Cooper] has understood the meaning of the word or has used it according to syntax and with grammatical accuracy,” Burr wrote, “but whether you have authorised this application either directly or by uttering expressions or opinions derogatory to my honor.” Far from being appeased, Burr resolved to proceed with his challenge: “Your letter has furnished me with new reasons for requiring a definite reply.”26
At noon on Friday, June 22, Van Ness delivered Burr’s message to Hamilton, who read it in his presence. Hamilton seemed perplexed and said that Burr’s letter “contained several offensive expressions and seemed to close the door to all further reply.... [H]e had hoped the answer he had returned to Col. Burr’s first letter would have given a different direction to the controversy.”27 As if this were a legal debate or a tutorial in logic, Hamilton could not see why Burr would expect him to make a specific disavowal to a general statement. He did not appreciate the need for personal delicacy. Eager to defuse the controversy, Van Ness fairly dictated language to Hamilton that would have ended the matter. He said that if Hamilton replied to Burr that “he could recollect the use of no terms that would justify the construction made by Dr Cooper it would...have opened a door for accommodation.”28 But Hamilton, turning a deaf ear, repeated his original objection to a broad disavowal. Since Hamilton had refused to reply, Van Ness returned to Richmond Hill and informed Burr that he “must pursue such [a] course as he should deem most proper.”29 In a shockingly brief span, the two men had moved to the brink of a duel and were ready to lay down their lives over an adjective.
After talking with Hamilton, Van Ness consulted with Nathaniel Pendleton. At first, Pendleton could not understand why Hamilton refused to repudiate any statement he might have made. “Mr. Pendleton replied that he believed General Hamilton would have no objections to make such [a] declaration and left me for the purpose of consulting him,” Van Ness recalled.30 Pendleton was chastened by his visit with Hamilton, who called Burr’s letter “rude and offensive” and unanswerable.31 Later in the day, Pendleton told Van Ness that he had not appreciated “the whole force and extent” of Hamilton’s feelings and his profound difficulty in complying with Burr’s request.32 In a new letter, Hamilton gave Burr a good tonguelashing, describing his expressions as “indecorous and improper” and making compromise ever more elusive.33 He tried to turn the tables on Burr, seize the moral high ground, and cast himself as the victim. It clearly bothered him that he was being asked to make amends to Burr, whom he regarded as his intellectual, political, and ethical inferior.
Judge Nathaniel Pendleton was a confidant of Hamilton who had fought in the Revolution before becoming a U.S. district-court judge in Georgia. Even though he suspected Pendleton of Republican leanings, Hamilton had developed such high respect for him that he had recommended him to President Washington as a candidate for secretary of state: “Judge Pendleton writes well, is of respectable abilities, and [is] a gentlemanlike, smooth man.”34 In 1796, Pendleton moved to New York to escape the Georgia climate, which was harming his health, and he quickly established himself as a distinguished jurist.
The courteous, dignified Pendleton was dismayed by Hamilton’s rigidity. “The truth is that General Hamilton had made up his mind to meet Mr. Burr before he called upon me, provided he should be required to do what his first letter declined,” Pendleton later told a relative. “And it was owing to my solicitude and my efforts to prevent extremities that the correspondence was kept open from 23 June to the 27th.”35 Burr, it must be said, proved no less obdurate. George Clinton later told one senator that “Burr’s intention to challenge was known to a certain club...long before it was known to Hamilton.... [T]his circumstance induced many to consider it more like an assassination than a duel.”36 Between Hamilton’s combative psychology and Burr’s need to solve his political quandary, there was little room for the seconds to hammer out a deal.
In replying to Hamilton’s unyielding second letter, Burr obeyed the inexorable logic of an affair of honor. He wrote to Hamilton and regretted that he lacked “the frankness of a soldier and the candor of a gentleman” and quoted Hamilton’s ominous phrase that he was ready to meet the consequences. “This I deemed a sort of defiance,” said Burr. “Thus, sir, you have invited the course I am about to pursue and now by your silence impose it upon me.”37 Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton had moved from frosty words to a mutual and irreversible commitment to a duel.
Hamilton spent that weekend at the Grange and did not set eyes on Burr’s letter until June 26. Over the weekend, Pendleton met several times with Van Ness, trying to arbitrate a solution. If Hamilton had been the more recalcitrant one at first, it was now Burr’s turn to throw up insurmountable obstacles. Pendleton thought he saw a way out of the impasse. If Burr asked Hamilton to specify whether there had been “any impeachment of his private character” (italics added) during the Albany dinner, Hamilton could disclaim such a statement.38 But Burr had drawn up truculent instructions for Van Ness that precluded any such harmonious resolution. For a long time, he said, he had endured Hamilton’s insults “till it approached to humiliation,” and he concluded that Hamilton had “a settled and implacable malevolence” toward him.39 By this point, Burr was clearly spoiling for a fight. On Monday, Pendleton asked Hamilton to recount what had been said at the Albany dinner. Hamilton’s recollections were fuzzy, and he remembered only that he had spoken of “the political principles and views of Col. Burr ...without reference to any particular instance of past conduct or to private character.”40
By this point, Burr had gone far beyond the Cooper slur and upped the stakes dramatically. Van Ness told Pendleton that Burr now wanted Hamilton to make a general disavowal of any previous statements that might have conveyed “impressions derogatory to the honor of Mr. Burr,” and he made clear that “more will now be required than would have been asked at first.”41 Burr was deliberately making impossible demands, asking Hamilton to deny that he had ever maligned Burr, at any time or place, in his public or private character. Hamilton could not sign such a document, which would have been untrue and which Burr might have brandished in future elections as an endorsement. Hamilton must have feared that such a concession would strip him of standing in Federalist eyes and make military leadership difficult. Burr’s provocation only adds to the suspicion that the “despicable” statement was just a transparent pretext to pounce on Hamilton. After discussing the latest demands with Hamilton, Pendleton reported back to Van Ness that Hamilton now perceived “predetermined hostility” on Burr’s pa
rt.42
At this point, a confrontation was unavoidable. On Wednesday, June 27, Van Ness delivered to Pendleton a formal duel request. Henceforth, Burr would entertain no further letters from Hamilton, and all communication would take place between the seconds. Duels tended to occur posthaste to prevent the secret from leaking out. But this duel was scheduled at a relatively distant date, July 11, for reasons that speak well of Hamilton. The New York Supreme Court was holding its final session in Manhattan on Friday, July 6, and Hamilton felt duty bound to satisfy clients who had lawsuits pending. His sense of professional responsibility was impeccable. He told Pendleton, “I should not think it right in the midst of a circuit court to withdraw my services from those who may have confided important interests to me and expose them to the embarrassment of seeking other counsel who may not have time to be sufficiently instructed.”43 He also needed time to put his personal affairs in order. For the next two weeks, Hamilton hid the situation from Eliza and the children, as Burr did from his daughter, Theodosia. Only a handful of politically well-connected people in New York knew of the unfolding drama.
Once a duel was agreed upon, Hamilton had to reconcile the two glaringly incompatible elements of the situation: his need to fight to preserve his political prestige and his equally powerful need to remain true to his avowed opposition to dueling. He opted for a solution chosen by honorable duelists before him: he would throw away his fire—that is, purposely miss his opponent. This was the strategy Hamilton’s son Philip had disastrously followed in his duel. It was likely Hamilton himself, writing in the New-York Evening Post, who gave this description of Philip’s approach: “[A]verse in principle to the shedding of blood in private combat, anxious to repair his original fault, as far as he was able without dishonor, and to stand acquitted to his own mind, [he] came to the determination to reserve his fire, receive that of his antagonist, and then discharge his pistol in the air.”44 Only after Philip threw his fire away was his second supposed to announce his reason for doing so and try to resolve the dispute.