Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

  On August 2, 1804, the coroner’s jury delivered the verdict Burr had dreaded: that “Aaron Burr, Esquire, Vice-President of the United States, was guilty of the murder of Alexander Hamilton, and that William P. Van Ness and Nathaniel Pendleton were accessories.”37 Arrest warrants were issued, but the situation was not nearly as dire for Burr as it seemed, as New York governor Morgan Lewis protested Burr’s prosecution as “disgraceful, illiberal, and ungentlemanly.”38 Nonetheless, Burr feared that the governor might be coerced into ordering his extradition from Pennsylvania, and he made plans to flee farther south. He was convinced that, in the end, the charges would not stick, but he had to wait for the public hubbub to subside. Indeed, on August 14, a New York grand jury dropped the original murder indictment and replaced it with a lesser charge. Burr, Van Ness, and Pendleton were now accused of violating the law by sending a challenge to a duel.

  For his temporary hideaway, Burr chose a large slave plantation on St. Simons Island, off the Georgia coast, an estate owned by his foppish friend Pierce Butler, the son of a baronet and a former senator. Before sailing south, Burr dabbled in the sort of secessionist mischief that Hamilton had feared, though of an even more treacherous nature. He held a secret meeting with British ambassador Anthony Merry and assured him that he would cooperate in any British attempt “to effect a separation of the western part of the United States from that which lies between the Atlantic and the mountains in its whole extent.”39 Inasmuch as Burr was now a political outcast, rejected by both parties, and a reprobate into the bargain, Merry considered the situation promising.

  Burr passed several luxurious weeks on St. Simons with Peter and a young friend, twenty-one-year-old Samuel Swartwout. Outside of South Carolina, southerners tended to sympathize with someone who had slain Alexander Hamilton, and Burr was showered with presents by the islanders. In early September, he toured the Spanish-controlled Floridas, posing as a London merchant and surveying the territory for a possible secessionist plot. Then he started his journey northward under the pseudonym “R. King.” In many towns, his transparent disguise was quickly penetrated, and he was received royally, especially in the Jeffersonian stronghold of Virginia. He may have imagined that he was on the road to political rehabilitation, only to learn in late October that a grand jury in Bergen County, New Jersey, had indicted him for murder. The indictment was later tossed out because Hamilton had died in New York. Burr was taking no chances, however, and continued to steer clear of both New Jersey and New York. With irreverent humor, he wondered to Theodosia which state “shall have the honour of hanging the vice president.”40 The indebted Burr had another motive for boycotting New York: his creditors had seized his assets, auctioned his furniture, and sold Richmond Hill to John Jacob Astor, who was to subdivide it into four hundred small parcels and make a fortune. Now seven or eight thousand dollars in debt, Burr would face legal proceedings from local creditors if he crossed the state line. For the moment, the safest place in America for the vice president was the nation’s capital, where he could preside safely over the Senate.

  At the opening of Congress on November 4, 1804, it was more than a trifle startling for some legislators to see Aaron Burr settling into his chair on the Senate dais. Federalist William Plumer rubbed his eyes in disbelief: “The man whom the grand jury in the county of Bergen, New Jersey have recently indicted for the murder of the incomparable Hamilton appeared yesterday and today at the head of the Senate!... It certainly is the first time—and God grant it may be the last—that ever a man, so justly charged with such an infamous crime, presided in the American Senate.”41 An acute observer, Plumer noted that Burr had dropped his nonchalant veneer: “He appears to have lost those easy, graceful manners that beguiled the hours away [in] the last session. He is now uneasy, discontented, and hurried.”42

  Frozen out of Jefferson’s administration for four years, Burr found a new warmth and hospitality in the wake of the duel. The president invited him to dine at the White House several times, and both Secretary of State Madison and Treasury Secretary Gallatin received him with newfound camaraderie. This may have expressed tacit contempt for Hamilton, but it also reflected another factor: as president of the Senate, Burr was to preside over the impeachment trial of Samuel Chase, an arch-Federalist and associate justice of the Supreme Court who had derided the “mobocracy” of the Jefferson administration.43 Chase had been charged, among other things, with unbecoming conduct in the trial of James T. Callender under the Sedition Act. The trial was part of Jefferson’s continuing assault on the Federalist-dominated judiciary. And the president’s confidence was only bolstered when he and George Clinton trounced Charles C. Pinckney and Rufus King in a landslide victory in the 1804 election.

  In his final vendetta against Hamilton, Senator William Branch Giles of Virginia, who had harassed Hamilton with hostile resolutions as a congressman a decade earlier, organized a group of eleven Republican colleagues who appealed to New Jersey governor Joseph Bloomfield to terminate Burr’s prosecution. Notwithstanding his later denials, Burr instigated this lobbying effort. The senators argued that “most civilized nations” refused to treat dueling deaths as “common murders” and pointed to the absence of penalties in previous New Jersey duels.44 Senator Plumer was disgusted by what he saw as the Republicans’ two-faced embrace of Burr: “I never had any doubts of their joy for the death of Hamilton. My only doubts were whether they would manifest that joy by caressing his murderer.”45 Governor Bloomfield spurned the appeal, and three years passed before New Jersey dismissed the indictment.

  William Plumer wasn’t the only person who gagged at Burr’s incongruous presence in the Senate when the Chase impeachment trial started on February 4, 1805. One newspaper registered its shock thus: “What a page will that be in the history of the present democratic administration . . . that a man under an indictment for MURDER presided at the trial of one of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, accused of a petty misdemeanor!”46 Chase was acquitted of all charges, while Burr was universally praised for his evenhanded conduct of the trial. For the moment, things were looking brighter for Burr. Before he stepped down as vice president, one Republican senator defended his duel by citing David and Goliath and claiming that Burr was controversial “only because our David had slain the Goliath of Federalism.”47 On March 2, Burr delivered a celebrated farewell speech to the Senate in which he praised the institution as a “sanctuary and a citadel of law, of order, of liberty.”48 His words possessed such poignant eloquence—the speech was his farewell to public life—that they wrung tears from many colleagues.

  After leaving the vice presidency, Burr suffered instant political exile. He had outlived his brief usefulness for the Republicans and his courtship of the Federalists had ended with him gunning down the party’s erstwhile leader. He was now bankrupt and stateless, a wanted man, even if he flippantly dismissed the New Jersey indictment. “You treat with too much gravity the New Jersey affair,” he lectured Theodosia. “It should be considered a farce and you will yet see it terminated so as to leave only ridicule and contempt to its abettors.”49 Beneath his inveterate banter, Burr was worried: “In New York, I am to be disfranchised and in New Jersey hanged. Having substantial objections to both, I shall not, for the present, hazard either but shall seek another country.”50 As a result of Hamilton’s death, many reformers were denouncing dueling, though the archaic institution survived well into the nineteenth century, counting Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, John Randolph, Stephen Decatur, Sam Houston, Thomas Hart Benton, August Belmont, and Jefferson Davis among its practitioners.

  With the restless spirit that had long perturbed Hamilton, Burr roamed through the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys, where frontier settlers tended to tolerate duels and despise Federalists. He explored various cabals with England to seize portions of American soil, including Louisiana and other territories west of the Appalachians, in order to forge a new empire. This would-be conquistador also meditated an auxiliary plot to mar
ch into Mexico and liberate it from Spanish rule. His admirers hailed Burr as a visionary patriot, bent upon adding Spanish colonies to America, while detractors, including Jefferson, detected an evil plan to detach territory from the union. In 1807, Burr was arrested for treason and for trying to incite a war against Spain. He was acquitted by Chief Justice John Marshall, who applied a strict definition of treason. The acquittal only sharpened Jefferson’s contempt for “the original error of establishing a judiciary independent of the nation.”51

  For four years, the disgraced Burr traveled in Europe, resorting occasionally to the pseudonym H. E. Edwards to keep creditors at bay. Sometimes he lived in opulence with fancy friends and at other times languished in drab single rooms. This aging roué sampled opium and seduced willing noblewomen and chambermaids with a fine impartiality. All the while, he cultivated self-pity. “I find that among the great number of Americans here and there all are hostile to A.B.—All—What a lot of rascals they must be to make war on one whom they do not know, on one who never did harm or wished harm to a human being,” he recorded in his diary.52 He befriended the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham and spoke to him with remarkable candor. “He really meant to make himself emperor of Mexico,” Bentham recalled. “He told me I should be the legislator and he would send a ship of war for me. He gave me an account of his duel with Hamilton. He was sure of being able to kill him, so I thought it little better than murder.”53 Always capable of irreverent surprises, Burr gave Bentham a copy of The Federalist. The shade of Alexander Hamilton rose up to haunt Burr at unexpected moments. In Paris, he called upon Talleyrand, who instructed his secretary to deliver this message to the uninvited caller: “I shall be glad to see Colonel Burr, but please tell him that a portrait of Alexander Hamilton always hangs in my study where all may see it.”54 Burr got the message and left.

  By the time Burr sailed home in 1812 as “Mr. A. Arnot,” all charges had been dropped against him. To get back on his feet in New York, he borrowed a law library from Robert Troup and tried to revive his practice. A solitary figure who had relinquished interest in politics, he soon lost the last emotional props of his life. That summer, his adored grandson, Aaron Burr Alston, died at age ten. He still had his beloved Theodosia, however, whose portrait he had toted around Europe, cradling it in his lap during stagecoach trips. Though her husband was now governor of South Carolina, gossip claimed that he was abusing her. At the end of 1812, the morose Theodosia sailed for New York to join her father, but she never made it. She died at sea, age twenty-nine, the victim of either a storm or pirates. It was the heaviest blow that Burr ever weathered, so crushing that he described himself as “severed from the human race.”55 Four years later, his son-in-law, Joseph Alston, died at thirty-seven. This rash of calamities recapitulated the stunning sequence of deaths that Burr had suffered as a child. Already a ghost of times past, Burr became a famous recluse, occasionally pointed out on the New York streets. He seldom socialized beyond a small circle of people.

  As for the duel with Hamilton, Burr almost never showed any remorse. Soon after returning to America, he visited his aunt, Rhoda Edwards, who worried about his immortal soul and warned him, “You have committed a great many sins against God and you killed that great and good man, Colonel Hamilton. I beseech you to repent and fly to the blood and righteousness of the Redeemer for pardon.” Burr found this rather quaint: “Oh, aunt, don’t feel too badly,” he replied. “We shall both meet in heaven.”56

  One day, Burr was walking down Nassau Street in New York when Chancellor James Kent happened to see him. Kent lost all control, swooped down on Burr, and started flailing at him with his cane. “You are a scoundrel, sir!” Kent shouted. “A scoundrel!” His legendary aplomb intact, Burr tipped his hat and said, “The opinions of the learned Chancellor are always entitled to the highest consideration.”57 Then he bowed and walked away.

  Burr never lost his sense of humor about having killed Hamilton and made facetious references to “my friend Hamilton, whom I shot.”58 Once, in the Boston Athenaeum, Burr paused to admire a bust of Hamilton. “There was the poetry,” he said, tracing creases in Hamilton’s face with his finger.59 Another time, Burr paused at a tavern to refresh his horses and wandered over to a traveling waxworks exhibition. He suddenly came upon a tableau that represented him and Hamilton in the duel. Underneath ran this verse: “O Burr, O Burr, what has thou done? / Thou hast shooted dead great Hamilton. / You hid behind a bunch of thistle, / And shooted him dead with a great hoss pistol.”60 In relating the story, Burr roared with laughter. Only once did Burr betray any misgivings about killing Hamilton. While reading the scene in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in which the tenderhearted Uncle Toby picks up a fly and delicately places it outside a window instead of killing it, Burr is said to have remarked, “Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.”61

  Burr lingered on for twenty-four years after he returned to America. In 1833, age seventy-seven, he mustered enough strength or cynicism for one final romance and married a fabulously wealthy widow, fifty-eight-year-old Eliza Jumel, who occupied a mansion in Washington Heights. (Improbable legend claims that Hamilton once had a fling with her.) Née Betsey Bowen, she had started life as a courtesan and had borne an illegitimate son before marrying the rich wine merchant Stephen Jumel. Burr, as usual, behaved like a scamp and frittered away Madame Jumel’s money while being unfaithful. A year later, she filed for divorce and accused her incorrigible husband of adultery. Why had she expected Burr to reform at this late hour? On September 14, 1836, he died in a Staten Island hotel after two strokes and was buried in Princeton near his father and grandfather. The death mask of Aaron Burr is haunting and unforgettable, with the nose twisted to the left, the mouth crooked, and the expression grotesque, as if all the suppressed pain of his life were engraved in his face by the end. John Quincy Adams left this epitaph of the man: “Burr’s life, take it all together, was such as in any country of sound morals his friends would be desirous of burying in profound oblivion.”62

  EPILOGUE

  ELIZA

  For Eliza Hamilton, the collapse of her world was total, overwhelming, and remorseless. Within three years, she had had to cope with four close deaths: her eldest son, her sister Peggy, her mother, and her husband, not to mention the

  mental breakdown of her eldest daughter. Because the news of Hamilton’s death further weakened the already precarious health of Philip Schuyler, Eliza stayed in Albany to nurse him. As his gout flared up anew, he hobbled about in tremendous pain and became bedridden. “I trust that the Supreme Being will prolong my life that I may discharge the duties of a father to my dear child and her dear children,” Philip Schuyler told Angelica Church. Eliza “knows how tenderly I loved my dear Hamilton, how tenderly I love her and her children.”1 The Supreme Being, alas, had other plans for the ailing general. On November 18, 1804, four months after his son-in-law slumped to the ground in Weehawken, Philip Schuyler died and was buried in the Albany Rural Cemetery.

  How did Eliza soldier on after these dreadful events that came thick and fast upon her? A month after the duel, she answered a sympathy note from Colonel William S. Smith, who had written to inform her that the Society of the Cincinnati would erect a monument to Hamilton in Trinity Church. In her letter, Eliza alluded to the forces that would sustain her. Suffering from “the irreparable loss of a most amiable and affectionate husband,” she prayed for “the mercies of the divine being in whose dispensations” all Christians should acquiesce. Beyond religious solace, she drew strength from sympathetic friends and family members and the veneration paid to her husband. She wrote, “The wounded heart derives a degree of consolation from the tenderness with which its loss is bewailed by the virtuous, the wise, and humane” and “that high honor and respect with which the memory of the dear deceased has been commemorated.”2

  Eliza’s fierce, unending loyalty to Hamilton certifies that their marriage ha
d been deeply rewarding, albeit marred by Maria Reynolds and other misadventures. Blessed with a forgiving heart, Eliza made ample allowance for her husband’s flaws. Two months after the duel, she described Hamilton to Nathaniel Pendleton as “my beloved, sainted husband and my guardian angel.” She thought that God, in snatching Hamilton away, had balanced the ledgers of her life, inflicting exquisite pain equal to her matchless joy in marriage: “I have remarked to you that I have had a double share of blessings and I must now look forward to grief.... For such a husband, his spirit is in heaven and his form in the earth and I am nowhere any part of him is.”3 She pored so frequently over his letters to her that they began to crack and crumble into dust. Around her neck, she wore a tiny bag containing brittle yellow scraps of the love sonnet that Hamilton had given to her during their courtship in Morristown—the scraps were sewn together as the paper decomposed—and the intimate farewell letter he had prepared for her on the eve of the duel.