by Ron Chernow
Aside from Pendleton, Hamilton confided his plan to waste his shot to Rufus King, the former minister to Great Britain and “a very moderate and judicious friend,” who tried several times to talk him out of it.45 King found dueling abhorrent but told Hamilton that “he owed [it] to his family and the rights of self-defence to fire at his antagonist.”46 King sneaked out of town the morning of the encounter, leading to criticism that he had acted cravenly when he could have headed off the catastrophe. King said that even though Hamilton had the “most capacious and discriminating” mind he had ever known, he rigidly followed the rules known as the “code duello.”47 Pendleton was likewise horrified at Hamilton’s decision to throw away his shot and exhorted him not to “decide lightly, but take time to deliberate fully.”48 Hamilton would not listen. As so often in his career—the Reynolds and Adams pamphlets spring to mind—he became possessed by a notion and would not let it go. In this frame of mind and in spite of his son’s experience, he was impervious to reason.
Hamilton’s decision has given rise to speculation that he was severely depressed and that the duel was suicidal. Henry Adams phrased it, “Instead of killing Burr, [Hamilton] invited Burr to kill him.”49 Historian Douglas Adair has evoked a guiltridden Hamilton who planned to atone for his sins by exposing himself to Burr’s murderous gunfire. In 1978, four psychobiographers studied the duel and also concluded that it was a disguised suicide.
It is indisputable that in Hamilton’s final years he was seriously depressed by personal and political setbacks, and his judgment was often spectacularly faulty. Long beguiled by visions of a glorious death in battle, he had also never lost a certain youthful ardor for martyrdom. Yet in the duel with Burr, he obeyed the antique logic of affairs of honor. Because he followed a script lost to later generations, his actions seem lunatic rather than merely rash and wrongheaded. “He did not think of this course of action as suicidal,” Joseph Ellis has written, “but as another gallant gamble of the sort he was accustomed to winning.”50 While the duel shocked many contemporaries, Hamilton and Burr partisans understood its logic, even if they did not endorse it. Attorney David B. Ogden said that his friend Hamilton knew that if he did not duel, “it would in a great measure deprive him of the power of being hereafter useful to his country.”51 Likewise, William P. Van Ness said that Burr had to defend his honor, for if he “tamely sat down in silence and dropped the affair, what must have been the feelings of his friends?”52
Hamilton gambled that Burr would not shoot to kill. He knew that Burr had nothing to gain by murdering him. Burr would be denounced from every pulpit as an assassin, and it would destroy the remnants of his career. Since he had provoked the duel to rehabilitate his career, it did not make sense for him to kill Hamilton. Hamilton calculated (correctly, it turned out) that Burr could not kill him without committing political suicide at the same time. This did not rule out the possibility, of course, that Burr might kill him accidentally or that he might submit to a murderous rage that overrode his political interests. If Burr did kill him, Hamilton knew, he would at least have the posthumous satisfaction of destroying Burr’s alliance with the Federalists. On the other hand, Hamilton never wavered in his belief that if he did not face Burr’s fire, he would lose standing in the political circles that mattered to him. With an exalted sense of his place in history, he viewed himself as a potential savior of the republic. He once told a friend, “Perhaps my sensibility is the effect of an exaggerated estimate of my services to the U[nited] States, but on such a subject every man will judge for himself.”53
The antagonists approached their rendezvous in starkly different personal situations. Hamilton had a large family of dependents: Eliza and seven children ranging in age from two to nearly twenty. Some observers criticized Hamilton for having recklessly jeopardized his family to salvage his reputation. Burr, by contrast, was a widower with a daughter, Theodosia, who had married into the wealthy Alston family of South Carolina; he did not need to worry about the financial aftermath of his death.
Deeply conflicted about the duel, Hamilton displayed a fatalistic passivity. When King told Hamilton that Burr undoubtedly meant to murder him and that Hamilton should prepare as best he could, Hamilton replied that he could not bear the thought of taking another human life, to which King retorted, “Then, sir, you will go like a lamb to be slaughtered.”54 The day before the duel, Pendleton begged Hamilton to study the pistols and handed him one. “He quickly raised it to a line,” said Robert Troup, “but, dropping his arms as quickly, he returned the pistol to Pendleton and this constituted the whole of his preparation to fight an antagonist very adroit in firing with pistols. I verily believe that Hamilton had not fired a pistol since the termination of the revolutionary war.”55
Quite different was the diligent preparation of Aaron Burr, a superb marksman who had killed several enemy soldiers during the Revolution. After the duel with Hamilton, the press was awash with rumors that Burr had engaged in intensive target practice. One Federalist paper quoted a Burr friend as admitting “that for three months past, he had been in the constant habit of practicing with pistols.”56 The Reverend John M. Mason insisted that “Burr went out determined to kill” Hamilton and for a long time had been “qualifying himself to become a ‘dead shot.’”57 John Barker Church later said that he had reason to believe that Burr “had been for some time practising with his pistols for this purpose.”58 Burr’s friend Charles Biddle disputed this, saying that Burr “had no occasion to practice, for perhaps there was hardly ever a man could fire so true and no man possessed more coolness or courage.”59 So commonplace was the accusation that Burr had taken repeated target practice that it is probably more than mere Federalist mythology. George W. Strong, Eliza’s lawyer in later years, visited Burr’s home right before the duel. “He went out once to Burr’s place at Richmond Hill on business,” recalled his son, John Strong, “and there he saw the board set up and perforated with pistol balls, where the infernal, cold-blooded scoundrel had been practicing.”60
At least outwardly, Hamilton and Burr continued to mingle in New York society, pretending that nothing was amiss. Charles Biddle told of an acquaintance who “dined in company with Hamilton and Burr the week before the duel. He has since told me he had not the most distant idea of there being any difference between them.”61 Their final encounter before the duel occurred on the Fourth of July. Since Washington’s death, Hamilton had been president general of the Society of the Cincinnati, the order of retired Revolutionay War officers that had aroused suspicions of hereditary rule. Hamilton could not skip the group’s festivities without drawing notice, and he and Burr shared a banquet table at Fraunces Tavern. The year before, Burr had joined the society when courting the Federalist vote.
Burr sat morose and taciturn among the other members, averting his eyes from Hamilton. As John Trumbull recalled, “The singularity of their manner was observed by all, but few had any suspicions of the cause. Burr, contrary to his wont, was silent, gloomy, sour, while Hamilton entered with glee into the gaiety of a convivial party.”62 At first, Hamilton could not be induced to sing, then submitted. “Well, you shall have it,” he said, doubtless to cheers from the veterans.63 Some have said his valedictory song was a haunting old military ballad called “How Stands the Glass Around,” a song reputedly sung by General Wolfe on the eve of his battlefield death outside Quebec in 1759. Others said that it was a soldiers’ drinking song called “The Drum.” Both tunes expressed a common sentiment: a soldier’s proud resignation in the face of war and death. One version of the evening has Hamilton standing on a table, lustily belting out his ballad. As he delivered this rendition, Burr is said to have raised his eyes and watched his foe with fixed attention.
During this strange period of concealment, Hamilton continued to perform his fatherly duties. His son James, now a student at Columbia College, asked him to review a speech he had written. James was mystified by his father’s response and only later understood its import. “My dear Jam
es,” Hamilton began, “I have prepared for you a thesis on discretion. You may need it. God Bless you. Your affectionate father. A.H.”64 In retrospect, this homily sounds like the confessions of a man who had never learned to be discreet himself. Hamilton told his son: “A prudent silence will frequently be taken for wisdom and a sentence or two cautiously thrown in will sometimes gain the palm of knowledge, while a man well informed but indiscreet and unreserved will not uncommonly talk himself out of all consideration and weight.” Someone without discretion, Hamilton added, was apt to have “numerous enemies and is occasionally involved by it in the most [difficul]ties and dangers.”65 Did Hamilton here give vent to tacit regret for the loose language he had employed toward Burr?
By the spring of 1804, Alexander and Eliza had completed their retreat, the Grange, and begun entertaining on a grander scale. In May, they had hosted a dinner for Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoleon’s youngest brother, who had just married Elizabeth Patterson of Baltimore. Then, in the week preceding the duel, Hamilton invited seventy people to the Grange for a lavish ball that included John Trumbull, Robert Troup, Nicholas Fish, and William Short, Jefferson’s onetime secretary in Paris. Hamilton was fascinated by the French fête champêtre, the elegant alfresco parties held in wooded surroundings, favored by the French aristocracy. In the woods, Hamilton had planted a small cluster of unseen musicians, so that guests caught faint strains of a horn and clarinet as they strolled. John Church Hamilton left a sketch of his father at this dinner that conveys his social magnetism:
Never was the fascination of his manner more remarked, gay and grave as was the chanced topic....Never did he exhibit more the safe softness with the man of society. Eloquent feelings, sportive genius, graceful narrative—all spoke the charm of a generous, rich, and highly cultivated nature. Even at this time, amid the brilliant circle, he brought forward the son of a deceased friend, commended him to the attention of an influential friend, then took him aside and conferred with him as to his plans for the future. This was one of the last sunny days of Hamilton’s short life.66
Hamilton devoted considerable time to arranging his affairs and drawing up farewell letters. The solemnity with which he performed these duties seems to bespeak some premonition that he might die. On July 1, he drew up a statement of assets and liabilities that showed him with a comfortable net worth. Yet he acknowledged that, if death prompted a forced sale of his property, the proceeds might not suffice for his fifty-five thousand dollars in debt. Most of the money had been spent on the Grange, so he needed to defend this splurge: “To men who have been so much harassed in the busy world as myself, it is natural to look forward to a comfortable retirement in the sequel of life as a principal desideratum. This desire I have felt in the strongest manner and to prepare for it has latterly been a favourite object.”67 Hamilton had expected to retire his debts with his twelve thousand dollars in annual income. Now he had to reckon on the chance that Eliza might be deprived of this money. Trying to console himself, he computed that Eliza stood to inherit some money from her recently deceased mother, and “her father is understood to possess a large estate.”68 He further noted that the Grange, “by the progressive rise of property on this island and the felicity of its situation,” would “become more and more valuable.”69 Unfortunately, Hamilton’s estimates were to prove grossly optimistic, so that the man who had so ably managed the nation’s finances left his own family oppressed with debts.
Aware of the duel’s political dimensions, Hamilton labored over a statement that would justify his conduct to the public. He admitted that he might have injured Burr, even though he had spoken only the truth. As a result, he wrote, he planned “to reserve and throw away my first fire and I have thoughts even of reserving my second fire and thus giving a double opportunity to Col Burr to pause and to reflect.”70 The wording here is significant. Hamilton assumed that Burr would have two such opportunities. Thus, Hamilton would have to signal to Burr his intention to waste his shot. He could either, as Philip had, fail to lift his pistol, or fire first and very wide of the mark.
In the statement, Hamilton acknowledged the grievous pain he might cause his family and even the harm he would do to his creditors. Writing for public consumption, Hamilton sounded more statesmanlike toward Burr than he probably felt. It is hard to take at face value his contention that he bore “no ill-will to Col Burr distinct from political opposition.”71 He saw that while he had much to lose by refraining from the duel, he had precious little to gain by facing it: “I shall hazard much and can possibly gain nothing by the issue of the interview.”72 Why then did he fight? To maintain his sense of honor and capacity for leadership, he argued, he had to bow to the public’s belief in dueling: “The ability to be in future useful, whether in resisting mischief or effecting good, in those crises of our public affairs which seem likely to happen would probably be inseparable from a conformity with public prejudice in this particular.”73 In other words, he had to safeguard his career to safeguard the country. His self-interest and America’s were indistinguishable. For Burr, Hamilton’s letter reeked of sanctimony. When he later read it, he reacted with coldhearted contempt: “It reads like the confessions of a penitent monk.”74
FORTY-TWO
FATAL ERRAND
In his last days, Hamilton seemed wistful but not distraught. He seems to have made peace with his decision to duel and elected to savor his remaining hours with his family. On Sunday morning, July 8, he, Eliza, and the children wandered the shady grounds of the Grange in the morning coolness. Back at the house, encircled by his family, he “read the morning service of the Episcopal church,” recalled John Church Hamilton.1 Then, later in the day, “gathering around him his children under a near tree, he laid with them upon the grass until the stars shone down from the heavens.”2
On Monday morning, July 9, Hamilton left Eliza at the Grange and rode down to lower Manhattan, where he drafted a will at his last Manhattan town house at 54 Cedar Street. He named John B. Church, Nicholas Fish, and Nathaniel Pendleton as executors. In this document, he again stated, with more hope than true conviction, that his assets would extinguish his debts: “I pray God that something may remain for the maintenance and education of my dear wife and children.”3 As a man devoted to property rights and the sanctity of contracts, he also fretted about the fates of his creditors: “I entreat my dear children, if they or any of them shall ever be able, to make up the deficiency.”4 And again he expressed the tentative hope that the Schuyler fortune would save Eliza: “Probably her own patrimonial resources will preserve her from indigence.”5 That the methodical Hamilton left dangling the critical question of Eliza’s future solvency seems shockingly out of character.
More than Hamilton, Burr found waiting for the duel unbearable, telling William Van Ness that he preferred an afternoon duel and did not care to “pass over” another day of delay. “From 7 to 12 is the least pleasant [time], but anything so we but get on,” he moaned.6 A surgeon usually attended duels, and Hamilton proposed his friend Dr. David Hosack. Burr seemed inclined to skip medical attention, appending this curious postscript to Van Ness: “H[osack] is enough and even that unnecessary.”7 Does this signify that Burr planned to kill Hamilton, making a surgeon superfluous? Did he hope that, if wounded, Hamilton would simply bleed to death? Or did he think that nobody would be injured? We’ll never know. On the afternoon of July 9, Van Ness and Pendleton finalized plans for the duel, which would take place at dawn on Wednesday, July 11, across the river in Weehawken, New Jersey.
Right up until the end, Hamilton comported himself with stoic gallantry, giving no hint of what was to come. He spent the afternoon and evening of July 9 with his old Treasury protégé, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., who found Hamilton “uncommonly cheerful and gay.”8 On his last workday, July 10, Hamilton ran into a family friend and client on Broadway, Dirck Ten Broeck, who reminded him that he had forgotten to deliver a promised legal opinion. Afterward, Ten Broeck reflected with astonishment on Hamilton’s reaction: “
He was really ashamed of his neglect, but [said] that I must call on him the next day, Wednesday—(the awful fatal day)—at 10 o’clock, when he would sit down with me, lock the door, and then we would finish the business.”9 This represents, again, extraordinary proof of Hamilton’s sense of responsibility. Far from being suicidal, Hamilton planned to go straight from the early-morning duel to his office to catch up on work—hardly the behavior of a depressed man meditating suicide. Nobody who saw Hamilton right before the duel reported any special symptoms of gloom.
During Hamilton’s final day at his Garden Street (today Exchange Place) law office, his clerk, Judah Hammond, observed nothing untoward in his demeanor: “General Hamilton came to my desk in the tranquil manner usual with him and gave me a business paper with his instructions concerning it. I saw no change in his appearance. These were his last moments in his place of business.”10 Hamilton drafted an elaborate opinion in a legal matter. Late in the afternoon, he made a last stop on his itinerary, one that must have carried sentimental meaning. For weeks, his King’s College chum Robert Troup had lain bedridden with a grave illness that Hamilton feared might prove mortal. When he dropped by to visit Troup, Hamilton did not mention the duel and overflowed with medical suggestions. “The General’s visit lasted more than half an hour,” said Troup, “and after making particular inquiries respecting the state of my complaint, he favored me with his advice as to the course which he thought would best conduce to the reestablishment of my health. But the whole tenor of the General’s deportment during the visit manifested such composure and cheerfulness of mind as to leave me without any suspicion of the rencontre that was depending.”11