by John Ferling
Hamilton’s barge docked a few minutes before seven o’clock. He and Pendleton climbed the incline to the ledge. Upon arriving, they “exchanged salutations” with Burr and Van Ness. As the seconds stepped off ten paces, marking the spots where the duelists were to stand, the combatants manifested an air of unruffled calm. When lots were drawn to determine where the men would stand, Pendleton made the lucky draw. Oddly, he selected the northern position for Hamilton, though that meant he would be looking into the streaming morning sunlight. Burr and Hamilton walked to their positions. The seconds loaded and cocked the smooth-bore pistols selected by Hamilton, and handed them to their men. Each man then assumed the duelist’s stance: the right foot about two feet in front of the left, the face looking over the right shoulder, the stomach severely retracted in the mostly forlorn hope of shrinking the target by a few fractions of an inch.46 One of the seconds repeated the rules that had been agreed on days before.
Van Ness, in a subsequent statement, chronicled what occurred as the last of the preliminaries played out. Hamilton, bothered by the sun, “levelled his pistol in several directions, as if to try the light; then drew from his pockets & put on, a pair of spectacles, and again levelled his pistol in different directions,” including “once at Mr. Burr, who was all this time silent.” After several seconds, Hamilton announced: “this will do; now you may proceed.” The long wait was over.
One of the seconds asked whether each man was ready. Each uttered the agreed on affirmative reply: “Present.” Only a second or two elapsed before the first shot was fired.
The oarsmen had lingered at the water’s edge and Dr. Hosack remained out of sight in nearby woods, all hoping that in the event that New York pressed charges, they could truthfully testify to have seen nothing. The seconds were the only witnesses. Subsequently, they agreed on what happened prior to the shooting, but offered different versions of events thereafter.47 Pendleton initially attested only that the two pistols were “discharged successively.” Two days later, as friends and followers busily crafted an image of the former treasury secretary that they hoped would live on, Pendleton asserted that Hamilton “did not fire first—and that he did not fire at all at Col. Burr.” Instead, he insisted, Hamilton’s pistol discharged only because of an “involuntary exercise of the muscles” caused by having been wounded. He also made the uncorroborated claim that he found the bullet’s path in the cedar tree some twelve feet above ground level and about fourteen feet to one side of where Burr had stood. Van Ness saw things differently. He believed Hamilton fired first and missed. Burr took aim and fired.48 He did not miss. His bullet smashed through Hamilton’s rib cage on his right side before slicing through his liver and diaphragm and piercing his spine.
Hamilton fell immediately. Dr. Hosack, hearing the shots, rushed to the scene. In an instant, he knew that Hamilton had been mortally wounded. So, too, did Hamilton, who had learned in the Revolutionary War that there was no hope for one who had sustained the grievous damage of what soldiers called having been “gut shot.” He had begun the descent to a slow, agonizing, and thoroughly unnecessary death. Hamilton immediately said to his physician: “This is a mortal wound, Doctor.” Little time elapsed before he was unconscious. His breathing was undetectable and Hosack could not find a pulse. The doctor and Pendleton gathered up Hamilton’s seemingly lifeless body and rushed downhill to the waiting barge. During the long passage back to Manhattan, Hamilton regained consciousness and spoke. His vision was unclear, he said, and he had lost all feeling in his legs.
When they reached New York, Hamilton was taken to an upstairs bedroom in a house on Jane Street, near the waterfront. Hosack administered wine and water, and laudanum to minimize pain.49 Betsey and the children were summoned and arrived in the afternoon. Hamilton slept much of the time during the thirty-one hours that he lived after being shot, but while awake he asked to be given Holy Communion. Two pastors refused. An Episcopalian priest spurned Hamilton because he had not regularly attended his church. A Presbyterian minister rebuffed his entreaties because it violated the church’s practice to privately administer the sacrament. Finally, under pressure, the Episcopalian relented late on Wednesday. The next day, July 12, Hamilton’s life ebbed away in the presence of twenty or so doleful friends and family who crowded into his room, some standing, some on their knees praying.
At about one forty-five P.M. he lost consciousness for the last time. Fifteen minutes later Hamilton died quietly.
Exactly what occurred in the duel, and what raced through the combatants’ minds in the final breathless seconds before firing their pistols will never be known. Pendleton and Van Ness initially composed a joint account, though admitting that they did not fully agree on what had transpired. Subsequently, each second fleshed out his chronicle, though each provided an account in which accuracy likely gave way to a desire to defend the reputation of his man. However, if Van Ness was correct in contending that Hamilton donned glasses and sighted in on his target—an assertion that Pendleton never denied—Burr would have had to have believed that his adversary intended to kill him. Moreover, Hamilton’s behavior makes it extremely difficult to give credence to his last testament claim that he intended to throw away his first shot, or to Pendleton’s emended contention that he had done so.
One can only imagine the emotional intensity that must have engulfed the combatants as they stood a few paces apart, staring at an armed bitter rival. Their hearts must have raced. Adrenalin must have pumped. For a few seconds, reasoned thought must have been impossible.
No one can know what either duelist intended as he climbed the ledge in Weehawken. But once Hamilton drew down on his man and, in all likelihood, was the first to fire his weapon, Burr, a frenzy of nerves, gripped with unimaginable emotions and certain that Hamilton had just tried to kill him, must have shot to kill.
Reckoning
Jefferson learned of Hamilton’s death five days after the duel and simply mentioned it to Patsy and a correspondent as a “remarkable” occurrence.1 At the time, he was absorbed with grief over the death of his daughter Polly, who at age twenty-five had died two months earlier from complications of childbirth.2
As the years passed, Jefferson said little about Hamilton, and his few comments mostly concerned his old adversary’s political philosophy.3 Not even Adams could entice Jefferson to speak critically of his former rival. Reunited through the efforts of a mutual friend, Adams and Jefferson began to correspond in 1812, writing mostly about philosophy and theology, but sometimes about history, and occasionally about the American Revolution and the turbulent early days of the Republic. Adams told Jefferson that Washington and Hamilton had been “Jugglers behind the Scene” who manipulated his cabinet, and he portrayed Hamilton as a puppeteer pulling Washington’s strings.4 Refusing to take the bait, Jefferson merely remarked that he and Hamilton had “thought well” of each other.5 Late in his life, when he believed “the passion of the time” had cooled, Jefferson recalled Hamilton as “a singular character” of “acute understanding” who was “amiable in society,” valued “virtue in private life,” and was “disinterested, honest, and honorable in all private transactions.”6
Jefferson was forty months into his presidency when the Hamilton-Burr duel was fought. Nearly twenty years later, when he was seventy-six, Jefferson referred to his election as “the revolution of 1800.” In Common Sense, in 1776, Thomas Paine had said that by declaring independence, the American colonists would have it within their “power to begin the world anew.” That encapsulated Jefferson’s thinking, and when he became president, he envisaged a new “chapter in the history of man.” He once said that his presidency was about realizing “as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.” He took office expecting not the completion of the American Revolution but in some respects its beginning.7
To Jefferson, the American Revolution had never been solely about breaking away from Great Britain. It had been about enhancing the liberties
of free people, reducing social inequality, and making it possible for individuals to be more independent. Within days of entering the presidency, Jefferson wrote to friends who had played major roles in 1776, likening the American Revolution—by which he meant the period from Congress’s declaration of independence to his election—to a bark sailing in severe weather and rough seas that threatened its destruction. Federalist “Charlatans” had tried every trick, seized on every uncertainty and anxiety, he charged, to secure the “abandonment of the principles of our revolution.” They had failed. With his election, he wrote, the “storm is over, and we are in port.”8
Thomas Paine, who was about to sail for America after an absence of some fifteen years, was one acquaintance to whom he wrote, and Jefferson ebulliently told him that he would “find us returned generally to sentiments worthy of former times.” The election, as Jefferson understood it, had gone against those who favored consolidation and the creation of a mighty fiscal-military nation. The victors believed in a national commitment to the “just & solid republican” principles of the American Revolution and they also were driven by a sense of “duty” to “all mankind” to make republicanism work.9
Jefferson’s presidency ushered in change. The centralizing tendencies of recent years came to a halt. His administration cut back on federal expenditures, drastically slashed the number of officeholders (including 40 percent of the Treasury Department’s employees), made drastic cuts in the size of the navy, and reduced the army to 3,287 men, the same size it had been at the conclusion of Washington’s presidency. Jefferson left intact the Bank of the United States—that may have been the bargain he struck with Bayard—but the program of fiscal austerity that he pursued reduced the federal budget, slashed taxes (the excise on whiskey was eliminated), and reduced the national debt. By 1810 the debt was half of what it had been in 1801. These very real changes were accompanied by symbolic changes. Jefferson comported himself with a determined republican simplicity. He rode about the capital on horseback rather than in a carriage tended by liveried servants, jettisoned levees altogether, generally eschewed state dinners heavy with pomp and ceremony, dressed casually, and at times even answered the door at the President’s House.
Committed to the preservation of an agrarian way of life, Jefferson hoped that for generations, even centuries, most Americans would live outside cities and would farm the land they owned. As president, he did what he could to facilitate that life-long dream. He set in motion the practice of making it easier to purchase federal land, until in 1820 a farmer could buy 80 acres of western land for a bit more than one hundred dollars (down from a high of having to purchase 640 acres at two dollars per acre). Through the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson bloodlessly doubled America’s frontier, which thereafter stretched hundreds of miles west of the Mississippi River and abutted the Rocky Mountains. The percentage of the labor force in farming increased from 75 percent in 1800 to 80 percent in 1820.10
Jefferson had spoken of a revolution of 1800, and politically and socially, Jeffersonianism was truly revolutionary. After 1800, suffrage rights were broadened. Property qualifications were gradually phased out and universal manhood suffrage—the right of all adult, white males to vote—took hold. Changes in voting rights were accompanied by the nearly complete end to the requirement for meeting property qualifications in order to hold office. Furthermore, whereas the presidential electors had been chosen by state legislatures in three-fourths of the states in 1800, they were popularly elected in three-fourths of the states a quarter century later. A breathtaking egalitarianism burst forth as well. The deference patterns of colonial times—and of eons in Europe before American colonization commenced—were largely gone before the nineteenth century was very old. Men stopped bowing to their social betters and began shaking their hands, and badges of social distinction, such as silk stockings and silver-buckled shoes, faded from view. As a British traveler in America noted during Jefferson’s presidency: Americans “have a spirit of independence, and will brook no superiority. Every man is conscious of his own political importance, and will suffer none to treat him with disrespect.”11
The day when there had been a place for everyone, and everyone knew his place, was vanishing. Within a few short years of Jefferson’s inauguration, little was left of the eighteenth-century hierarchical society that had been in place when the Revolutionary War began, and that many Federalists had so fervently cherished. The new world that Paine and Jefferson longed for had come into being, and as it did, the pre-Revolutionary past into which Jefferson and Hamilton were born had indeed become an alien world not unlike that imagined by the British writer L. P. Hartley in his mid-twentieth century novel The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”12
Hamilton had not lived to witness the sweeping transformation in America’s political and social fabric, but he lived long enough to understand that crucial aspects of the world he had inhabited were disappearing, and he understood the cause of the sea change all about him. In his last letter, written on the day before he was rowed to Weehawken, Hamilton wrote that “our real Disease … is DEMOCRACY.” He called it a “poison” and presciently foresaw it as certain to grow only “more violent.”13
Had he lived to 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—he would have been seventy-one that year—Hamilton would have been aware of more than political and social change. Though Jeffersonian America was overwhelmingly agrarian, Hamilton would have seen evidence of the nation’s transformation into a modern capitalistic society. The number of towns with more than 2,500 inhabitants had more than doubled since 1800, banks had sprung up like toadstools (more than three hundred existed by 1800), and with investors at home and abroad seeding American enterprise, manufacturing was flourishing. There was hardly a cotton mill in America in 1800; within fifteen years there were nearly 250. Twenty years after Jefferson’s inauguration, one-fourth of the labor force in New England and the mid-Atlantic states worked in factories that churned out hats, shoes, textiles, and a great deal more. In rural townships such as Dudley and Oxford, Massachusetts, virtually every inhabitant had been a farmer in 1790; but fifty years after independence, residents were three times more likely to work in a factory than to own a farm. Factory towns seemed to materialize out of thin air, as did Slatersville, Rhode Island, which had not existed when Jefferson took office, but had a population of some 500 a dozen years later, and nearly all its residents worked in mills.14
Hamilton would have been dismayed by much that he beheld, though he might not have been appalled at discovering that Americans, in the words of one historian, had become a “people totally absorbed in the individual pursuit of money.” If Hamilton might have thought his countrymen were on the right track, Jefferson was unhappy both with America’s emerging business culture and the volcanic exuberance for evangelical Christianity that had gathered force during his presidency. Though he never acknowledged it, both were the products of the democracy nourished by the American Revolution, and both had been unfettered by his revolution of 1800.15
Jefferson had opposed much that he found in his world, and he knew that his successors would seek to change the world he had helped to make. “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their … ancestors,” he said late in life. While some things that were unsavory to him had taken root, as an old man he thought it “a good world on the whole.” He was especially buoyed by the conviction that “the flames” of the American Revolution “have spread over … much of the globe,” setting alight fires that threatened to consume tyranny. “[L]ight and liberty are on steady advance,” he proclaimed shortly before his death. In his final letter, Jefferson rejoiced that his countrymen still believed that the choice made in 1776 had been the proper one, and he remained confident that, in time, humankind everywhere, inspired by the ideals of the American Revolution, would “burst the chains”
of despotism and superstition, and secure the “rights of man.”16
In his last years, Jefferson’s optimism was tempered by a disquieting recognition that his younger countrymen did not understand their elders who had made the American Revolution. The old Revolutionaries, he said, were “left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not, and who knows not us.”17 He was aware that Franklin and Adams had penned autobiographies, but Jefferson declared in 1816 that to “become my own biographer is the last thing in the world I would undertake.” With some truth, he told Adams that he liked “the dreams of the future better than the history of the past,” while in 1817, with an abundance of dissimulation, he informed another friend that the skills for writing history were “not to be found among the ruins of a decayed memory.”18
Yet, Jefferson desperately wished to be remembered by posterity, and he wanted future generations to understand his side of the story of his life and times. He carefully preserved eighteen thousand letters he had written and another twenty-five thousand he had received, and he even indexed his correspondence. There can be no doubt that he hoped they would be published following his death.19 Beginning in 1818, Jefferson also gathered together his journal entries and a collection of memoranda dating from his time in Washington’s cabinet down to late in his own presidency. In a lengthy introduction, Jefferson acknowledged that he had made a “calm revisal” of these records, and even that he had “cut out” portions. He was candid about his intent. Though he did not publish the “Anas,” as he called the aggregation, Jefferson knew that subsequent generations would see these documents and compare them with the papers left by Hamilton and Washington. Cautioning readers that “we are not to suppose that every thing found” in the materials left by those individuals “is to be taken as gospel truth,” he said that the availability of his “Anas” would enable subsequent generations to come to a more accurate understanding of the early years of the American Republic.20