by Desmond Dilg
“With all his subverting theories Jefferson is not a real iconoclast. He hesitates and thinks too much. Thinking always kills action. Savants are seldom deed-doers and never soldiers. They are always in the rear of action. They build up their 'principles' and 'philosophies' to harmonize with accomplished facts.
“Even Jefferson’s sublime faith in the rule of numbers is wholly inherited and traditional. Majorities are nothing except they have arms in their hands. Indeed intelligent persistence is capable of making one man a majority. Jefferson ought to have been inducted into the Iron Cross. Then he would have known better.”
The horses in Hamilton's carriage trotted noiselessly over the snow. Suddenly the dead silence was broken by the sharp menacing crack of a pistol.
Immediately the carriage stopped and a pleasant, musical voice from a man-on-horseback came through the gathering gloom, saying:
“Hold the horses in, coachman. Ah! now step down, fasten the reins to the wheel. Very good. Stand there against the wall and hold up your hands. If you lower them during my interview with your master you will receive a bullet through your thick black skull. Hold up your hands! That's it.”
The coachman, being a negro and a slave, obeyed with alacrity.
Meantime, Hamilton, out of the pockets of his overcoat, drew a pair of beautiful mounted pistols that had seen much service in his hands. He guessed what was coming; and not being a dreamer or a mere philosopher, but a very practical man-of-action, he looked to the priming of his weapons and cocked them carefully. “Whoso maketh himself a dove is eaten by the hawk,” he thought grimly as his hands closed over the butts of the pistols.
Presently the door of the carriage was violently flung open.
“Come out!” said the musical voice of the highwayman, for such he was. (In those days suburban roads were infested by bold riders inclined to think it much more honorable to take money than to make it.) Hamilton did not move. “Come out!” said the melodious voice again, in a tone of impatience. The road-agent clicked the hammers of his pistols ominously.
Hamilton sat still, his fingers toying gently with the triggers and his mind made up.
“Ho! my defiant gentleman, I’ll have to bring you out.” spoke the road-agent angrily; riding up to the carriage door. Thrusting into the carriage the muzzle of a heavy horse pistol, he said to the silent Hamilton: “Come out immediately or I'll blow your brains out.”
Hamilton did not move. Being in the darkness he knew he could not be seen with certainty and therefore calculated the robber would not waste his shot by firing at random.
After waiting a little while Hamilton answered in a feigned, weak voice:
“I cannot come out; I am a crippled old man. What do you want?”
“I want,” replied the highwayman, somewhat mollified, “your money, or your life,” and he brought his pistol up on a level with that portion of the interior of the carriage where he imagined the voice of the supposed cripple came from, while tightening the reins of his horse in his left hand.
Now the entire body of the highwayman covered the carriage door. This was the opportunity Hamilton had been strategically waiting for.
“But I don’t propose to let you have either, sir,” replied Hamilton cooly, as he raised both his pistols and fired point blank through the open carriage door.
Both bullets took immediate effect. The bandit, taken completely off his guard, was slain almost before he knew where he was. One ball went in at his right eye and out through the crown of his head (taking some of the brain with it), and the other passed through his intestines, lodging in the spinal column.
Hamilton drew his sword and stepped out. The black coachman was bending over the prostrate body that lay in the snow.
The blood trickled from the wounds of the highwayman, while his horse trotted away with the reins hanging between its forelegs.
Hamilton leaned down and examined the unconscious, dying man. He looked into his face. It was the face of a youth, under twenty, with bold, clear cut features. His clothing was that of a gentleman. He appeared to be of good lineage.
“Ah,” thought Hamilton, “youth for daring, he is quite a boy. He had pluck however, and pluck covers a multitude of sins. It takes courage to be either a highwayman or a statesman. I have spoilt your career however, my lad. There was a serious flaw in your philosophy, Mr. Deadman. You failed, and to fail is crime—as you and I have so eloquently demonstrated unto each other. Perhaps if you had been more expert you might have had my purse.”
Then Hamilton quietly reloaded his pistols, returned to the carriage and resumed his journey.
“Ah,” he thought again, “the saintly Jefferson is wrong. His sublime confidence in the inherent goodness of all mankind is misguided. Men are the wolves of men. It has always been so. This simple incident is typical. It typifies the opposing interests of men, those who have and those who have not. If I had not defended my property, would I not have lost it? Certainly I would. My pistols and my own strength delivered me. So is it everywhere. Men of property must always stand ready to defend their possessions.
“There is more solid philosophy in that poor boy’s horse pistol than in all the dreary tomes that have ever been written from Jefferson to Jeremiah, from Plato to Paine and Rousseau.
“Theoretically, Jefferson is a bold and dashing destroyer of systems, but is as timid as a hare when it comes to doing anything. I foretell that (if he becomes president) he will alter naught.
“He has an instinctive constitutional horror of war; and is therefore not likely to build up an army; and indeed if he had an army he would not know how to use it. Therefore, he is a safe man, and will allay discontent. Is he not the leader and supposed 'Moses' of the discontented? All this country now wants is internal peace and quietness. Jefferson will give it that. Like a man afraid-of-his-horse, he will not attempt to go beyond a pleasant amble for fear he might get shook out of the saddle.
“Burr has been a soldier and is, therefore, an entirely different man. War burns up the mental cobwebs that are liable to gather in a man's mind from overmuch contemplation of ordered tranquility. War is the grim realist. It places a note of interrogation opposite every belief and every opinion, however hoary, however sanctified.
“War makes men iron; hence fit to be rulers. Luckily for us Jefferson is not a warrior.”
About a mile further on Hamilton was again disturbed in his cogitations by the crack of a rifle from behind a tree on the roadside.
“More robbers,” he thought, and again prepared his pistols for eventualities.
Presently the coach rolled over on its side into a deep gully, crossed by a narrow wooden bridge. One of the horses had been shot when crossing the bridge, and the other, frightened, plunged through the railing into the half frozen creek below, dragging the coach on top of himself. The fall broke the ice on the stream and the horse's head went through into the water. Unable to withdraw his head he drowned there.
Meanwhile, Hamilton, stunned and bleeding, pushed his head and shoulders through the uppermost panel of the coach door, grasping one of his pistols.
Immediately his head showed up, the black muzzle of a heavy military rifle was pushed coldly against his eye. He looked undauntedly along the bronze barrel, and at the other end thereof perceived in the intermittent moonlight, the head of a black-bearded man with a white handkerchief over his face, in which had been cut two holes for the eyes.
Hamilton felt instinctively he was in a dilemma this time. The blood trickled profusely from a wound in the temple, and one of his hands seemed numb or broken.
“Drop that pistol, hold up your hands and surrender instantly, or you are a dead man,” said the masked man behind the ugly rifle. “If you do not drop it, I will lift the top of your head off. I will shoot to kill.”
Hamilton saw no means of escape. He felt himself at the mercy of superior strategy. He understood in a flash that he had to deal this time, not with a boy highwayman, but with an old and experienced hand ('a
n inexorable one'). Therefore he smiled his most affable smile and said, in his most musical and insinuating tones:
“What do you want with me, sir? Do you know who I am, sir?”
“Yes, I know who you are. I know you too well, damn you. I want those papers in your breast pocket. Hand them over.”
Hamilton’s heart sank within him. “This is more than highway robbery,” he thought. “Burr is behind it. I am sure he is. This is his fine Roman hand. But I am trapped. The man behind the gun means business. I can read it in his eyes. I must submit or be shot.”
Hamilton turned over in his mind several plans of throwing the robber off his guard and then attacking him. The robber was also calculating on this, and considering how he should get the papers without committing murder.
“Come out of the carriage, Mr. Hamilton,” said the bandit, coaxingly, “then remove your overcoat and hand it to me.”
The highwayman never removed the rifle from before Hamilton’s eyes.
Hamilton, rapidly revolving a plan to suddenly push the rifle aside, and leap at the throat of his adversary, did as he was told.
As he drew off his overcoat, however, the robber jumped upon him and overthrew him. A short, sharp struggle on the snow ensued. Hamilton’s arms being entangled in the sleeves of the coat he was quickly overpowered and reduced to order.
“Be quiet or I'll kill you,” hissed the victor (who weighed about 200 pounds, while Hamilton weighed about 180), as he brought a short broad-bladed knife in front of Hamilton's right eye. At this the Major General lay quiet, now thoroughly vanquished. “Realism in excelsis,” he thought.
Hamilton, having submitted, his captor bound his two hands firmly together with one end of a rope and threw the other end of the rope over the top rail of the bridge and made it fast.
Thus Washington's famous secretary stood, his toes in the snow and his hands lashed firmly overhead to the broken bridge. In the creek lay the two dead horses, their blood splashed on the ice. The coachman was helplessly entangled in the harness, or pretended that he was, to escape coming in contact with a very possible bullet.
The masked man thereupon leisurely searched all Hamilton’s pockets. Then he searched the inside of the coach. He found more than he thought to find. He got not only all the papers shown to Jefferson but also another packet, of even greater importance, together with a Spanish sketch map, defining the location of a long forgotten safe-deposit vault in the City of Mexico, that had been covered up and hidden by the Priests before the Great Temple was burned by the Spaniards. This map had originally belonged to Burr, who got it from Holroyd, and thereby hangs another story that cannot now be related.
“Why don’t you take my money, my watch and other valuables instead of those papers?” said Hamilton, in a tone of appeal. “Of what value are mere legal papers to you? And I have a diamond ring on my finger worth $500. Why not take it, also my purse, and leave me those papers?”
The robber put the papers carefully away in the pocket of his overcoat and then replied in a gruff voice:
“Keep your infernal money. I am after higher game. The eagle does not stoop to catch flies.”
Then the burly robber in the white mask climbed up the bank of the creek where his horse was tied, mounted and rode away. Before doing so, however, he threw his captive's pistols far into the snowdrift, and as he rode off across the bridge he cut the rope that bound Hamilton, saying as he did so:
“You can now release your own hands at your leisure, and walk the remainder of the way. And I would advise you to say nothing of this little affair to anyone. You would not like to see those papers published, would you? Therefore, hold your tongue, I advise you.”
The highwayman, who was none other than John Swartwout (disguised), then rode off.
Now, Burr and Hamilton kept each his own private corps of detectives to watch the other's movements. Knowledge thus obtained was often used to win elections. Burr employed many women for this purpose as he found them very clever in worming out hidden secrets. Through the agency of one of these lady “friends” in Hamilton’s own household, the whereabouts of Burr’s “last papers” had been discovered. Also the facts relating to Hamilton’s proposed expedition on this particular night. The information first came to Swartwout, who immediately determined to attempt the recovery of the papers, with what results we have seen.
He had not only obtained one series of very important documents, but also, another set, that previously to this, Burr had known nothing about: and in addition had discovered Hamilton's intrigue (or rather proposed intrigue), with Jefferson.
John Swartwout was a wealthy New York merchant and general of militia, who had served in the Revolutionary war alongside of Burr. He was Burr's most intimate personal friend and trusted lieutenant. By disposition he was very loyal to his friends and possessed the valor and Pythian fidelity of ancient Greece and Rome.
He was both daring and resourceful, and would go through fire and water to serve Burr, whom he idolized. He also hated Hamilton for an injury which he believed Hamilton had once done him over a law case concerning confiscated property.
On this eventful night, however, all his risks and exertions proved utterly in vain, for as he rode on (about two miles further) he himself was set upon . and robbed by a band of seven masked footpads. They first shot his horse, then seized and bound him as he fell.
Then they took from him all his money, his watch, pistols, rifles, overcoat, and (greatest loss of all) the secret papers and cipher letters wherewith Hamilton had been negotiating Burr's ruin.
Being a man of resource, however, he made a treaty with them for the ransoming of the documents. He promised them a thousand dollars, which they duly received; but the papers were not all returned to him afterwards, although he thought they were.
Afterwards the seven robbers quarreled over the sharing of their booty and fought a pitched battle in the woods, when inflamed with liquor. Four were killed outright and wolves and ants ate the flesh from off their bones. The survivors “went West” to aid in the great work of territorial expansion. One of them joined Burr afterwards in an attempt to capture Texas too soon (thirty years too soon.) Strange how the wildest characters, the “criminals” of civilization, have ever taken the most pronounced and strenuous part in the heroic work of colonization.
If Burr had received those papers in time, Jefferson could never have been elected, but he did not receive them until two days after Jefferson had won, by the aid of the Federals. Bayard, of Delaware, and General Morris, of Vermont, voted for Jefferson and both of them were intimate personal friends of “Mr. Warwick Hamilton.”
Bayard, on the 8th of March, wrote to Hamilton as follows:
“The means existed of electing Burr, but this required his co-operation. By deceiving one man (a great blockhead) and tempting two (not incorruptible) he, Burr, might have secured a majority of the States and became President. He will never have another chance.”[*]
Judge Cooper, a delegate from New York (father of J. Fennimore Cooper), wrote to Thomas Morris, on the 12th of February, 1801:
“We are running Burr perseveringly. Had Burr done anything for himself he would long ere this have been President. If a majority vote of the individuals would answer he would have it on every vote.”
Burr thoroughly understood the why and wherefore of Jefferson's (the Southern man's) election. He knew he had been robbed of the Presidency, but said nothing. He was too proud to complain. He was too haughty and self contained to repine. But down deep in his heart he registered a vow of vengeance. (And Hamilton and Jefferson knew and feared.)
Defeat never broke his spirit. It made him more determined than ever to get even with his enemies, open and hidden.
He was wont to say, confidentially, to the grim and fiery John Swartwout:
“Swartwout, you know well I am President of the United States by the will of the people, although the honor I did not solicit. If Hamilton had kept his hands off, the Electoral College would
have given it to me. The 'Feds' in their hearts were for me to a man.
“Jefferson is unlawfully in possession of the Seat of Power. He is an usurper, equally as much so as Bonaparte or Cromwell. He is in control of the government by coup-d'-etat—the coup-d'-etat of Major General Hamilton. But what is the use of talking now. It is too late, too late. I am beaten, and when a battle is lost words are vain.
“If I had an army to back up my words with hard knocks it would be so different. Then they wouldn’t count me out. No! By my troth no. I'd fling the whole damned administration into the Potomac first.
“Am I not the rightful President?”
* * * * *
Swartwout, much chagrined and brooding angrily at his evil luck, walked on smartly towards the city lights that gleaned in the distance like a galaxy of stars. Presently he heard rapid footfalls on the crisp snow immediately behind him. He turned round and looked to see who or what it was.
It was Hamilton.
Now, Swartwout and Hamilton were personally well acquainted, so of course they were very courteous to each other. Soon they began to mutually relate their experiences of the night—with the wicked highway robbers. Hamilton had not the slightest conception that he was talking to the very man who had robbed him. John Swartwout had removed his disguise, had lost his overcoat, musket and horse; and was a widely known and highly respected member of New York's best society—whom no one could possibly suspect of turning highwayman.
And so they walked along side by side until they came to a little roadside inn known as “The Angel of Glory.”
There was a large heap of broken bottles outside and a number of large ale casks inside. Behind the bar were rows of black bottles on shelves.
On the walls hung antlers of deer, trophies of the chase, pictures of race horses and cock-fights and bull-fights and man-fights. In the place of honor hung a smoky painting of “Washington at Yorktown.” The principal room of the hostelry was odorous of tobacco smoke and whiskey fumes. Upon a wide stone hearth a bright log fire burned merrily, and over the mantel an old Queen Bess musket hung on a nail by a sling sewn of Indian scalps.