by Ron Chernow
On the eve of the duel, Nathaniel Pendleton stopped by Hamilton’s town house and made a last-ditch effort to dissuade him from his resolution to squander his first shot. Once again, Hamilton insisted he would fire in the air. When Pendleton protested, Hamilton indicated that his mind was made up. “My friend,” he told Pendleton, “it is the effect of a religious scruple and does not admit of reasoning. It is useless to say more on the subject as my purpose is definitely fixed.”12
Hamilton dedicated his last night to the activity that had earned him such lasting fame: framing words. Since one purpose of the duel was to prepare to head off a secessionist threat, he wrote a plea to Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, warning against any such movement among New England Federalists: “I will here express but one sentiment, which is that dismemberment of our empire will be a clear sacrifice of great positive advantages without any counterbalancing good.”13 The secession movement would provide no “relief to our real disease, which is democracy”—by which he meant unrestrained, disruptive popular rule.14
That evening, in surveying his life, Hamilton was evidently transported back to his West Indian boyhood and the near-miraculous escape that he had made from St. Croix more than three decades earlier. His mind turned to his cousin, Ann Mitchell, who had rescued him with money for his education. At ten o’clock, Hamilton took up his quill and wrote to Eliza, “Mrs. Mitchell is the person in the world to whom as a friend I am under the greatest obligations. I have [not] hitherto done my [duty] to her.”15 Ann Mitchell was struggling in impoverished circumstances, and Hamilton expressed a fervent wish that his estate might “render the evening of her days comfortable.” Should that prove impossible, he told Eliza, “I entreat you to ...treat her with the tenderness of a sister.”16 He also told Eliza that he could not bear to kill another human being and that the “scruples of a Christian” had convinced him to expose his life to Burr: “This must increase my hazards and redoubles my pangs for you. But you had rather I should die innocent than live guilty. Heaven can preserve me and [I humbly] hope will, but in the contrary event, I charge you to remember that you are a Christian.”17 In contemplating the duel, Hamilton may have miscalculated, may have been egregiously foolish, may have talked himself into the mad and elliptical logic of dueling, but he definitely was not in a suicidal state of mind.
Many thoughts swirled through Aaron Burr’s brain in his last days, and some of the most vexing pertained to money. The profligate Burr was more than short of cash: he was dead broke. The previous fall, he had contemplated selling his Richmond Hill estate to ward off demanding creditors. That he faced financial as well as political ruin may help to explain his almost palpable mood of desperation while seeking a duel with Hamilton. According to John Church Hamilton, in the period immediately preceding the duel (presumably before the challenge was issued) Burr was so harried by debt that he appealed even to Hamilton for help. Hamilton’s son related this incredible tale that Eliza told her children:
Hamilton was at his country seat and, soon after the early summer sun had arisen, was awakened by a violent ringing at the bell of his front door. He arose, descended, and found Burr at the door. With great agitation, he related circumstances which rendered immediate pecuniary assistance absolutely necessary to him. On returning to his bed, Hamilton relieved the anxiety of his wife caused by his early call. “Who do you think was at the door? Colonel Burr. He came to ask my assistance.”18
With astonishing generosity, Hamilton solicited money from John Church Barker, who had dueled with Burr, and other friends to raise ten thousand dollars in cash. Burr also scrambled to scrounge up another $1,750 for an unforgiving creditor who had demanded sudden repayment.
Burr had always doted on his daughter, Theodosia, playing a Pygmalion role as he molded her into his image of womanly perfection. In so doing, he converted her into one of America’s most literate young women. Burr wrote to his daughter in an intimate shorthand, chockful of clever jokes and gossipy references to his various amours. He gave her critical appraisals of the faces and figures of his many lovers. On June 23, the day after writing the defiant letter to Hamilton that guaranteed the duel, he celebrated his daughter’s birthday at Richmond Hill in her absence, telling her the next day how the guests “laughed an hour and danced an hour and drank her health.”19 (Theodosia was then in South Carolina.) He advised her to study history, botany, and chemistry and gave her tips on how to form a first-class library. In these letters, Burr kept hinting at some unspoken crisis but never mentioned the duel. While Hamilton’s last days were crammed with family and friends, Burr spent much of his time in solitude. On July 1, he told his daughter that he was sitting alone by the library fire at sundown, shivering from a sudden chill in the summer heat.
Burr had taken a personal interest in educating his slaves, though he never planned to free them. The night before the duel, he jotted down a sheet of instructions dictating their fates. It showed that the previous fall, this so-called abolitionist was still buying slaves, in this case a black boy named Peter, whom he hoped to groom as a valet for his grandson. Burr spoke kindly of a slave named Peggy and hoped Theodosia would retain her ownership, but the other servants were not nearly so lucky. “Dispose of Nancy as you please,” he told his daughter. “She is honest, robust, and good-tempered.”20 Having married into a large South Carolina slave-owning family, Theodosia scarcely required more servants, making Burr’s refusal to free his slaves the more inexcusable.
The final letters written by Hamilton and Burr provide an instructive comparison. As the two men contemplated eternity, Hamilton feared for America’s future and the salvation of the union, while Burr worried about incriminating letters he had written to his mistresses, urging Theodosia to “burn all such as...would injure any person. This is more particularly applicable to the letters of my female correspondents.”21 Long reviled as an archconspirator by the Jeffersonians, Hamilton had nothing whatsoever to conceal and did not ask that any personal papers be destroyed. Burr, by contrast, wanted to incinerate many worrisome documents, telling Theodosia to burn one small bundle of letters tied with red string and another wrapped in a white handkerchief. Since he made these last-minute arrangements, Burr must have imagined, at least in theory, that he could die in the duel. This confirms that he had no idea that Hamilton planned to withhold his fire at Weehawken.
The night before the duel, Burr lost no sleep and dozed off quickly on the couch in his library. His slumber was neither fitful nor agitated. “Mr. Van Ness told me that the morning of the duel when he went to Colonel Burr, he found him in a very sound sleep,” reported Charles Biddle. “He was obliged to hurry on his clothes to be ready at the time appointed for the meeting.”22 Burr donned a black silk coat that was to provide grist for interminable speculation. James Cheetham described its fabric as “impenetrable to a ball”—a sort of eighteenth-century equivalent of a bulletproof vest.23 Burr partisans portrayed their hero as simply garbed in a bombazine coat and cotton pants. Burr was escorted to a boat awaiting him at a Hudson River dock by the most trusted lieutenants of his recent campaign—John Swartwout, Matthew L. Davis, and others—as if they were sending him off to a rousing election rally.
After Hamilton completed his valedictory note to Eliza in his upstairs study at 54 Cedar Street, he went downstairs and entered a bedroom where a boy was reading a book. This must have been the orphaned boy who had attended the recent outdoor party at the Grange. In an unpublished fragment that may have embroidered the truth, John Church Hamilton reveals that his father entered the room, gazed pensively at the boy, and asked if he would share his bed that night. Hamilton “soon retired, and placing [the boy’s] little hands on his own, he repeated with him the Lord’s Prayer.”24 The child then fell asleep in his arms. This image of Hamilton sleeping with his arms wrapped around an orphaned youth during his last night on earth is inexpressibly poignant and makes one think that his own tormented boyhood weighed on his mind that night. At three o’clock in the morning, Ha
milton awoke one of his sons and asked the drowsy boy to light a candle. He made up a story that his four-year-old sister, Eliza, who had stayed at the Grange with her mother, had been taken ill and that he had to head up there with Dr. Hosack. In the dim candlelight, Hamilton composed a beautiful hymn to Eliza that was to become one of her sacred heirlooms.
By the time he finished, Nathaniel Pendleton and Dr. Hosack had arrived, ready to accompany him to Weehawken, and they all went off in a carriage. To avoid detection, Pendleton and Van Ness had worked out a precise timetable, with both parties scheduled to depart from separate Manhattan docks around 5:00 a.m. Each boat was to be rowed by four weaponless oarsmen whose identities would remain secret, sparing them any legal liability. The pistols were secreted in a leather case so that the boatmen could later swear under oath that they had never set eyes on any guns. Aside from the oarsmen, only the duelist, his second, and his surgeon were allowed on each boat.
Instead of the usual muggy July weather, the day dawned fine and cool on the water. Weehawken then stood far north of the city, so the seconds had allotted two hours for the journey upriver. (The dueling ground stood opposite today’s West Forty-second Street.) Hamilton’s boat departed from the vicinity of Greenwich Village. As the boat pushed north across a brightening river, Hamilton seemed relaxed and reiterated to Pendleton his vow “that he should not fire at Col. Burr as he had not the most distant wish to kill him.”25 At one point, Hamilton glanced back at the raucous, lively city that had given this outcast of the West Indies a home. During the past decade, New York’s population had doubled to eighty thousand, and the vacant downtown lots had disappeared. The sight of the growing city apparently touched something in Hamilton, for “he pointed out the beauties of the scenery and spoke of the future greatness of the city,” wrote his son.26
Because New York law dealt severely with dueling, local residents frequently resorted to New Jersey, where the practice was also banned but tended to be treated more leniently. At Weehawken, the Hudson Palisades form a steep cliff rising nearly two hundred feet from the water, and they were overgrown by thick woods and tangled brush. From afar, the cliff looked like a straight drop to the water, an impenetrable wall of rock clothed with dense vegetation. But at low tide, a little beach appeared down below. If the duelists pushed aside the bushes and tramped up a narrow path, they came upon a rocky ledge twenty feet above the Hudson that was well screened by trees. Idyllic and secluded, it faced an uninhabited stretch of Manhattan shoreline. Flanked by boulders and an old cedar tree, this level shelf was about twenty-two paces long and eleven paces wide—just large enough to accommodate a duel. The property was owned by Captain William Deas, who resided atop the cliff and was frustrated that his ledge was constantly used for duels. He heard the pistol reports, but could not see the duelists.
Vice President Burr arrived at 6:30 a.m. He and Van Ness stepped from their boat, ascended the dirt path, and began to sweep away underbrush and other debris from the dueling space. The rising sun began to shine down and they peeled off their jackets as they worked. Shortly before 7:00, the second barge arrived with Hamilton and Pendleton, who clambered up to the ledge and left Dr. Hosack down below. This was to protect the surgeon and boatmen from any legal consequences. The surgeon was expected to be close enough to the duel to heed cries for help but far enough away to profess ignorance, if necessary, of the whole transaction.
Thus, at 7:00 a.m. on July 11, 1804, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr stood face-to-face, ready to settle their furious quarrel. Both gentlemen followed strict etiquette and “exchanged salutations.”27 Twenty-three days had elapsed since the onset of their clandestine imbroglio. For two decades, they had met in New York courtrooms and salons, election meetings and legislatures, and had preserved an outward cordiality. Had it not been for their political rivalry, they might have been close friends. Both entered the duel from weak positions, hoping to reap some measure of political rehabilitation. To judge from a final painting of him by John Trumbull, Hamilton retained his keen, steady gaze, but melancholy clouded his face. And to judge from a John Vanderlyn painting done two years earlier, Burr had receding hair, graying at the edges, and a hint of anger darkened his expression. He was handsome and elegantly attired, however, and fearless on the field of honor.
In businesslike fashion, Pendleton and Van Ness marked out ten paces for the duel and drew lots to choose positions for their principals. When Pendleton won, he and Hamilton oddly decided that Hamilton would take the northern side. Because of the way the ledge was angled, this meant that Hamilton would face not just the river and the distant city but the morning sunlight. As Burr faced Hamilton, he would have the advantage of peering deep into a shaded area, with his opponent clearly visible under overhanging heights.
As the challenged party, Hamilton had picked the weapons and chosen flintlock pistols. Pendleton and Van Ness had drawn up guidelines specifying that the barrels could not extend more than eleven inches and had to be smoothbore. (Smoothbore pistols were unreliable; by contrast, if the pistol barrels were rifled, the inner grooves made possible greater accuracy.) Hamilton brought the brace of dueling pistols owned by John Barker Church, the same pistols used by Philip Hamilton and George Eacker in 1801. Hamilton might have wanted to use these pistols in homage to his dead son. More likely, he needed to confine knowledge of the duel to a tiny circle of confidants. John Barker Church was a trusted, intimate friend, possibly the only one with a pair of dueling pistols, though many fashionable gentlemen of the day owned such pistols. Though he often had recourse to affairs of honor, Hamilton himself possessed no such pistols, underscoring that he had used these affairs to silence critics, not to harm them. The Church pistols had been manufactured by a celebrated London gunsmith, Wogden, in the mid-1790s. They were long, slim, and elegant, with lacquered walnut handles, ornamental designs, and gold mountings along their brass barrels. While they looked light and easy to handle, they weighed several pounds apiece, and their large lead bullets weighed an ounce apiece. It took practice to handle these unwieldy guns with speed and finesse.
During an examination of the pistols for the 1976 bicentennial celebration, experts discovered an optional hair-trigger mechanism, which, when set, allowed a much lighter squeeze than if the regular trigger was used. Some commentators have found something suspect about Hamilton’s choice of these pistols, as if this hidden feature unmasked his true intention to fire at Burr. Yet historians have always known about the hair trigger. When Pendleton handed Hamilton his weapon on the dueling ground, he asked “if he would have the hair spring set” and Hamilton replied, “Not this time.”28 Thus, even if Hamilton had intended to conceal the hair trigger from Burr, he decided not to exploit it. Hamilton’s reply shows that he was still vacillating over whether to throw away his fire on the second shot as well.29
Pendleton and Van Ness again drew lots, and it fell to Pendleton to supervise the duel. The seconds loaded the pistols in each other’s presence, then handed them, already cocked, to Hamilton and Burr, who took up their assigned places. Pendleton recited the rules. He would ask them if they were ready. If they agreed, he would say “Present,” at which point they could fire. If one party fired and the other did not, the duelist who had fired had to wait for the opposing second to say, “One, two, three, fire,” giving his foe a chance to return fire. If the opponent refused to do so, then the sides would confer to see whether the dispute could be settled verbally or whether a second round was required.
Fanned by a light morning breeze, Hamilton and Burr now assumed sideways poses, presenting the slim silhouettes preferred by duelists. The sun was rising fast, and when Pendleton asked if they were ready, Hamilton, unnerved by light bouncing off the river, called out, “Stop. In certain states of the light one requires glasses.”30 He lifted his pistol and took several sightings, something that might have misled Burr about his intentions. Then he fished in his pocket for spectacles, put them on with one hand, and aimed the pistol in several directions. Bur
r and Van Ness later made much of the fact that Hamilton aimed the pistol once or twice at Burr. “This will do,” Hamilton finally said, apologizing for the delay. “Now you may proceed.”31 That Hamilton put on his glasses has been given a sinister meaning by some commentators, but he may have wanted to ensure that he didn’t hit Burr. We also know that he had not ruled out firing accurately on a second round.
Van Ness later confirmed that Burr had no idea of Hamilton’s vow to fire into the woods. Hamilton did not have the option of standing there with his arms slackly at his sides. To have done so would have been interpreted as a cowardly refusal to duel, detracting from the heroic aura that Hamilton wished to project and defeating the whole purpose of submitting to the duel. So as Burr glared at Hamilton, he saw a guilt-ridden malevolence that did not exist. “When he stood up to fire,” Burr later said of Hamilton, “he caught my eye and quailed under it. He looked like a convicted felon.”32 On another occasion, Burr said that Hamilton “looked as if oppressed with the horrors of conscious guilt.”33 Hamilton gave no evidence to anyone else of being bowed down by guilt.
Hamilton and Burr now braced for the event that Henry Adams later described as “the most dramatic moment in the early politics of the Union.”34 When Pendleton asked if they were ready, they both answered yes, and he then uttered the word Present. Hamilton lifted his pistol, as did Burr. Both guns were discharged with explosive flashes, separated by a split second or perhaps several seconds. Pendleton was adamant that Burr had fired first and that Hamilton’s shot was merely “the effect of an involuntary exertion of the muscles produced by a mortal wound,” a terrible blow in the abdominal area above his right hip, Pendleton wrote.35 Hamilton rose up on his toes, writhing violently and twisting slightly to the left before toppling headlong to the ground. Hamilton seemed to know that his wound was mortal and proclaimed instantly, “I am a dead man.”36 Pendleton called for Hosack, who came charging up the path. In Pendleton’s recollection, Burr started toward the fallen Hamilton in a manner “expressive of regret,” until Van Ness warned him that Hosack and the boatmen were approaching. From a legal standpoint, Van Ness feared this would place Burr at the crime scene in full view of witnesses, and the two men therefore withdrew as Van Ness tried to shield Burr’s face with an umbrella. Right before they stepped onto their boat, Burr said to Van Ness of Hamilton, “I must go and speak to him!”37 Van Ness counseled him that this was ill-advised. To placate Burr, Van Ness ran up the footpath himself and reported back on Hamilton’s condition before they pushed off from shore.