Not everyone agreed. Republican Senator Robert Wright of Maryland compared Burr’s duel with Hamilton to David’s combat with Goliath, arguing that Federalists had condemned the duel only “because our David had slain their Goliath of Federalism.”5
Twenty-eight years earlier Colonel Alexander Hamilton and Colonel Aaron Burr Jr. had been comrades in arms at Valley Forge and Monmouth, then worked as colleagues in New York’s courts of law—sometimes together, sometimes against each other. Even as personal ambitions for higher office and political power pitted them against each other in opposite political parties, Federalist Hamilton and Republican Burr remained friends on a personal if not a political level.
Their relationship first began to sour after Burr unseated Hamilton’s father-in-law from the US Senate in the 1791 elections and rose to the top ranks of the Republican Party. Just as Burr’s political star was ascending, Hamilton’s began to fall, as hints of his marital scandal forced the Treasury secretary to resign from the federal government.
The Hamilton-Burr ties frayed further when Burr showed up at Hamilton’s door as a second for Virginia’s former Senator James Monroe. Hamilton had challenged Monroe to a duel for exposing Hamilton’s adulterous relationship with Mrs. James Reynolds and all but destroying the Treasury Secretary’s political career. All three men—Burr, Monroe, and Hamilton—had fought alongside each other in battle, however, and Burr succeeded in convincing Hamilton to withdraw his challenge.
Hamilton’s suspicions festered nonetheless, and by the time Burr challenged Jefferson for the presidency, Hamilton’s alienation had metamorphosed into outright paranoia. Intent on destroying Burr’s political career as he imagined Burr had destroyed his, Hamilton engineered Jefferson’s 1801 presidential victory in the House with a barrage of hate-filled letters to Federalist congressmen that concluded by calling Burr a man “without principles.”6
Burr’s challenge to Jefferson in the 1800 presidential election earned him Jefferson’s lasting enmity as well and cost him a second term as vice president. Although his career in the federal government appeared at an end, Burr sought to retain political power at the state level when his friend New York’s George Clinton vacated the New York governorship to run with Jefferson in the 1804 election.
After Burr announced for governor, however, Hamilton warned voters that Burr espoused “Jacobin principles,” had no ethics “either in morals or in politics,” and was “unfit to govern.”7 After Burr lost the election 30,829 to 22,139,8 Burr allies complained, “If General Hamilton had not opposed Colonel Burr, I have very little doubt but he would have been elected governor of New York.”9
With only ten months remaining as vice president, forty-eight-year-old Aaron Burr faced as precipitous an end to his political career as Hamilton had suffered after the Reynolds scandal. Burr, however, had done nothing to deserve his fate. He had challenged Jefferson for the presidency in a legitimate election in 1800, then campaigned for the New York governorship in another legitimate election in 1804—only to have Hamilton frustrate his ambitions in both, for no evident reason.
Burr’s fury had festered as much as Hamilton’s. A war of words followed, with Hamilton calling Burr “despicable” and Burr demanding an explanation. Instead of responding directly, Hamilton, who was the same age as Burr, seemed to enjoy goading his adversary:
“’Tis evident that the phrase . . . admits of infinite shades from very light to very dark.” Hamilton taunted Burr, telling him to “see the matter in the same light with me. If not, I can only regret the circumstance and must abide by the consequence.”10
Burr did not see the matter in the same light, and five days later, on June 27, the war of words turned into a war of weapons. Distraught by the undeserved attacks of both Hamilton and Jefferson, Burr refused to tolerate further assaults. He had, after all, served his country valiantly in the military arena, had continued his service to the nation in the political arena, and had received nothing but constant attacks on his character. To put a stop to them, he challenged Hamilton to a duel.
On July 11, 1804, both men crossed the Hudson River at sunrise in small boats that took them from the lower end of Manhattan Island (near present day Greenwich Village) to Weehauken, New Jersey (opposite present-day 42nd Street). After climbing a steep path up the sheer rock cliff, they reached a plateau, where, just after 7 a.m., the two heroic Men of Monmouth, once comrades in arms, stood thirty feet apart, prepared to kill each other for reasons neither man could fully explain.
Indeed, as their seconds were working out details of the duel during the previous two weeks, the two men had socialized at several dinner parties. Only a week earlier they had celebrated July Fourth together at a banquet at Fraunces Tavern, where Hamilton sang a popular drinking song solo before the Society of the Cincinnati, a fraternal organization of Revolutionary War officers.
Under accepted rules of dueling Hamilton had the option to fire first but said he bore no ill will toward Colonel Burr—“as distinct from political opposition.” He therefore intended to “throw away my first fire and I have thoughts even of reserving my second fire and thus giving a double opportunity to Colonel Burr to pause and to reflect.” Hamilton conceded that “I shall hazard much and can possibly gain nothing from the interview.”11
In one of the most pointless confrontations in American history, Revolutionary War heroes Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Jr. stand ready to kill each other for reasons neither man could fully explain. Once comrades in arms, the two had celebrated July 4 together at Fraunces Tavern a week earlier. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
Hamilton fired, his bullet lodging in a tree limb above Burr’s head. Burr then fired, intending only to wound Hamilton, he said, but the bullet penetrated Hamilton’s right rib cage, tore through his liver and diaphragm, and lodged in his spine by his second lumbar vertebra.
Hamilton’s seconds carried the wounded man down the cliff side to the boat, rowed him across the Hudson, and carried him to his home, where he died the following day. He left a grief-stricken widow and seven hysterical children, who had had no hint of the impending duel until Hamilton’s seconds brought his nearly lifeless body home. He spent most of his last hours pleading with churchmen to give him holy communion. Absent membership in any church and given his violation of both church and civil law by participating in a duel, they refused—until he pleaded his need to die a Christian for the sake of his wife and children. A Protestant bishop relented and gave him holy communion.
In the largest such procession New York had seen since the death of George Washington, Hamilton loyalists staged a military funeral with full honors. A military detail led his coffin, followed by his horse, its boots reversed in the stirrups, stomping uneasily down Broadway to Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street, where he lies today. Ironically, Hamilton’s idolaters buried him on July 14, the anniversary of the destruction of the Bastille Prison in Paris and the beginning of the French Revolution, whose excesses Hamilton despised as a mockery of the American Revolution.
As Hamilton had lain dying, Burr inquired about his fallen rival’s condition and wanted to visit him but found himself more than ever the target of attacks by Hamilton supporters, who now labeled Burr an assassin. Some accused him of having hunted down his victim and shooting him without warning.
Encouraged by Jefferson, New York Citizen editor James Cheetham launched a furious editorial attack on the vice president. “Wrapt up in himself to appease his resentment and to gratify his ambition,” Cheetham wrote, “he is capable of wading through the blood of his fellow citizens and laughing at the lamentations of widows and orphans.”12
The fury of the attacks shocked Burr. “Thousands of absurd falsehoods are circulated with industry,” he railed. “All our intemperate and unprincipled Jacobins who have been for years reviling Hamilton are the most vehement in his praise . . . and malice to me.”13
Although they had no jurisdiction over crimes committed in New Jersey, Jefferson’s Republican prosecutors i
n New York City called a coroner’s jury and badgered it into indicting Burr for violating New York’s law against dueling. Although dueling was legal in New Jersey, that state’s Republican prosecutors fabricated a charge of murder, and Burr fled south to the seclusion of a friend’s estate on St. Simon’s Island off the Georgia coast. A few weeks later he traveled incognito to the Capitol in Washington, where he had enough supporters to prevent state authorities from trying to arrest him.
Not everyone mourned Hamilton.
“Although I have long since forgotten this arch enemy,” John Adams growled, “vice, folly, and villainy are not to be forgotten because the guilty wretch repented in his dying moments.”
Nor am I obliged by any principles of morality or religion to suffer my character to lie under infamous calumnies, because the author of them, with a pistol bullet through his spinal marrow, died a penitent. . . . Born on a speck more obscure than Corsica . . . with infinitely less courage and capacity than Bonaparte, he would, in my opinion, if I had not controlled the fury of his vanity . . . he would have involved it in all the bloodshed and distractions of foreign and civil war.14
Jefferson was even more pleased than Adams with the outcome of the duel, which removed two of the political opponents he despised most from the political scene. With an obsequious Republican majority in Congress, the President faced no evident political opposition—except John Marshall and the Supreme Court.
A lawyer himself, Jefferson knew Marshall could—and probably would—use the Marbury v. Madison decision to limit the President’s assertions of power over American government. Jefferson, therefore, decided to destroy Marshall and the Court. He began his assault with an attack on the Court’s most vulnerable member: Samuel Chase.
As the Chase trial began, Burr seemed oblivious to the response of spectators to his presence. Although Federalists shunned him, Republicans—including President Jefferson, of all people—flocked about him, flattered him, and curried his attention. Jefferson invited the vice president to dine at the presidential mansion, then filled three important posts in Louisiana’s new territorial government with Burr’s stepson, brother-in-law, and closest personal friend. Although he had rejected Burr as his vice presidential running mate, Jefferson had staked much of his political future on the outcome of the Chase trial and hoped Burr would steer it in a favorable direction.
Burr, however, proved a superb presiding officer, guiding the course of witness testimony and attorney questioning with dispassion.
Before the trial began he ordered the Senate chamber “fitted up in a style beyond anything which has ever appeared in the country,” according to Connecticut Senator Uriah Tracy.15 Burr ordered a raised chair for himself placed on center stage, between two squared-off areas, surrounded by waist-high fence-like partitions—one for House managers, or prosecutors, the other for Chase and his defense attorneys.
The President’s chair overlooked two rows of thirty-four desks covered in crimson cloth for the senators, while members of the House sat behind them on three tiered rows of benches covered with green cloth. Burr ordered a special area built for the President’s cabinet and a temporary gallery for women. In the main spectator’s gallery sat some of Washington’s most important dignitaries, including Chief Justice John Marshall and the other members of the Supreme Court.
The House had served Chase with eight articles of impeachment. Four dealt with his procedures in various trials, one with his decision in the Fries trial, two with the Callender trial, and the last with his “intemperate,” “inflammatory,” and “indecent” charge to the Baltimore grand jury.
The trial lasted just over three weeks, from February 4 to March 1, 1805, with one day’s interruption for the counting of Electoral College votes for the presidential election. To Aaron Burr fell the galling task of announcing the results and proclaiming Thomas Jefferson and George Clinton “duly elected to the respective offices of President and Vice President of the United States for four years commencing on 4th March next.”16
As the trial of Samuel Chase continued, many senators grew uneasy.
“This prosecution,” Senator John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts concluded after ten days, “is not very consistent with my ideas of impartial justice.”17 Adams complained that the articles “contained in themselves a virtual impeachment not only of Mr. Chase, but of all the judges of the Supreme Court from the first establishment of the national judiciary.”18
Philadelphia attorney Joseph Hopkinson opened the formal Chase defense with an emotional appeal: “We appear for an ancient and infirm man, whose better days have been worn in the service of that country which now degrades him.”
Hopkinson argued that none of the articles of impeachment had charged Chase with treason, bribery, or corruption, and “it is well understood and defined in law that . . . a misdemeanor or a crime . . . is an act committed or omitted in violation of a public law.”19 The Constitution, he insisted, defined high crimes and misdemeanors as indictable offenses.
A second defense counsel reinforced Hopkinson’s argument. Although he admitted that Chase had used “unusual, rude and contemptuous expressions” in the Callender trial, he argued that such language represented only “a violation of the principle of politeness [rather] than the principles of law . . . the want of decorum [rather] than a high crime and misdemeanor.”20
Chase admitted having used the word “damn,” but, as his counsel said with a smile, the word had multiple meanings, “supplying frequently the place of the word ‘very’ . . . connected with subjects most pleasing; thus we say indiscriminately ‘a very good’ or ‘a damned good bottle of wine,’ ‘a damned good dinner,’ or ‘a damned clever fellow.’”21
As for his “indecent” language to the Baltimore grand jury, Chase protested that no law existed forbidding a judge to express his opinions to a grand jury and that, absent a law, he had committed no crime, let alone a high crime or misdemeanor. He had simply exercised his right as an American citizen to express his political views. Citing instance after instance, he demonstrated the longstanding “practice in this country” of judges expressing themselves from the bench.22
“Is it not lawful for an aged patriot of the Revolution to warn his fellow citizens of dangers by which he supposes their liberties and happiness to be threatened?” a Chase defense attorney asked the Senate jury. “What law forbids [judges] to exercise these rights? . . . We contend that this is a criminal prosecution for offenses committed in the discharge of high official duties.”23
Both prosecution and defense made short work of the four articles dealing with breach of procedures, with Chase admitting that he probably made procedural errors but that they had been “honest errors” with no malice intended and certainly not impeachable “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Court procedures, his attorneys pointed out, varied widely from state to state, depending on whether they had been derived from common law, state laws, or British laws. The nation was still too young to have established uniform courtroom procedures.
Prosecutors charged that in fining and jailing Callender for violating the Sedition Law, Chase had violated the editor-publisher’s First Amendment rights to freedom of the press. When the defense called the Chief Justice to testify, Marshall pointed out that the object of a criminal trial is to determine the guilt of the defendant, not the constitutionality of the law.
“The counsel [for Callender] persisted in arguing the constitutionality of the sedition law,” Marshall testified, “in which they were constantly repressed by Judge Chase.” Asked whether Judge Chase’s conduct was “tyrannical, overbearing, and oppressive,” as the prosecution had charged, Marshall replied, “When the counsel attempted to show the unconstitutionality of the Sedition Law, Judge Chase observed that it was a point which should not go before the jury, and he would not permit a discussion upon it.”24
Marshall’s testimony added weight to the defense attorney’s argument that Chase had simply enforced the law against “one of the most danger
ous libels ever published.” If the courts do not protect the public against “base calumniators,” defense counsel warned, the public “will become their own avengers. And to the bludgeon, the sword, or the pistol they will resort for that purpose.”25
The prosecution turned to Chase’s having sentenced Pennsylvania auctioneer John Fries to death for what President Jefferson—vice president at the time—had called legitimate tax protests. The Chase defense cited Fries’s own words, however, as proof that he had led a rebellion and committed treason. In any case President Adams had pardoned Fries and his codefendants and made the case moot.
The lead prosecutor, Virginia Representative John Randolph, thought he was striking a fatal blow at the defense by arguing that many types of offenses by public officials fall outside the category of criminal offenses but within the sphere of impeachable offenses. His argument undermined his own case, however. “The wildest opinions have been advanced,” he charged, “that to be impeachable, it must be indictable.”
It is possible that . . . a president of the United States may endeavor to influence Congress by holding out threats or inducements to them. . . . The hope of an office may be held out to a Senator; and I think it cannot be doubted that for this the President would be liable to impeachment, although there is no positive law forbidding it.26
Chase allies in the galleries and on the Senate floor hooted Randolph down, reminding everyone within earshot of Judge John Pickering’s impeachment trial. After Pickering’s removal from the bench, President Jefferson appointed one of the witnesses against Pickering to fill Pickering’s seat, another to be clerk of the court, and a third to be district attorney in the same district.
After Burr gaveled the proceedings to order, the trial heard the last of the fifty-one witnesses, and opposing counsels summed up their arguments. John Randolph’s histrionics destroyed the prosecution’s chances of success with what Senator John Quincy Adams described as
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