Indeed, the governor and his politically ambitious nephew DeWitt Clinton soon moved in on Burr’s patronage role, DeWitt becoming Burr’s prime rival in New York. Eventually, the position Burr sought for Davis went to DeWitt’s father-in-law, the same Samuel Osgood who had warned Jefferson that Davis was a Burr loyalist.
Burr in the meantime was not going to be a willing tool for Jefferson. As president of the Senate, he declined to rubber-stamp the president’s efforts to repeal Adams’s Judiciary Act of 1801. The law had created additional federal courts and a host of new federal judges, and Adams, just before leaving office, had made many midnight appointments of Federalists. Jefferson was determined to break the rival party’s hold on its one remaining federal branch by replacing these judges with fellow Republicans, in contradiction of his famous inaugural conciliatory declaration: “We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists.”
On one tie vote, Burr did cast the deciding ballot with the administration to keep the prospect of appeal alive. But on a subsequent ballot, he voted to recommit the bill to tone down the partisan sting he perceived in it. This even-handed treatment did not please Jefferson and was not overlooked by some Federalists who were beginning to cast a favorable eye on Burr, now increasingly a man without a party.6
Jefferson’s vice president demonstrated his apostasy in other ways as well. At a Federalist dinner celebrating Washington’s birthday in the new capital city in 1802, Burr showed up unannounced and offered a simple toast, to a “union of all honest men!”7 The remark was taken by Jeffersonians as a brazen slap at the president and by many Federalists as a statement of independence and availability. Burr, referring to his icy relationship with Jefferson, sarcastically informed his son-in-law John Alston, “I dine with the president about once a fortnight, and now and then meet the ministers in the street. They are all very busy: quite men of business. The Senate and the vice-president are content with each other, and move on with courtesy.”8
James Cheetham, the editor of the New York American Citizen and a conspicuous Burr hater, told Jefferson of Burr’s frequent criticism. “The end is obvious,” he wrote. “It is to bring the present administration to disrepute, and thereby to place Mr. Burr in the Presidential Chair.”9 At this same time, a handbill was circulated calling the vice president a “Cataline” (traitor) and a man of “abandoned profligacy” in his affairs with women, reinforcing a reputation that clung to him as a widower now perceived as a possible presidential heir.10
Later in 1802, when Burr supporters decided to start a newspaper, the Morning Chronicle, Cheetham attacked its editor, Dr. Peter Irving, as a “young man of handsome talents,” implying a sexual relationship with Burr. He said of the vice president, “There is a softness, an insinuating deceitfulness about him admirably calculated to fascinate youth.” He referred to Irving as a “beau,” as “Miss Irving,” and “Her Ladyship.” Burr declared Cheetham’s slurs and innuendoes “false and groundless” and initiated libel charges against him.11
Burr, as clear evidence that he realized he would not be offered a second term in the second office, launched a quest for the governorship of New York. In it, he was challenged by a moderate, Morgan Lewis, and supporters of Governor Clinton, who continued to have presidential ambitions, saw the opportunity to end Burr’s similar aspirations. In the summer of 1802, Senator John Armstrong wrote to DeWitt Clinton, “Can we look to any circumstances more auspicious to ourselves than the present? I think not. The cards are with us.… An unbroken vote from this State does not merely disappoint Mr. B—it prostrates him and his ambition forever, and will be a useful admonition to future schismatics.”12
A Burr loyalist, John Swartwout, accused Clinton of trying to destroy Burr’s reputation for his own political ends, and Clinton replied by calling him “a liar, a scoundrel and a villain.” At this, Swartwout challenged Clinton to a duel, in which Swartwout suffered two leg wounds but recovered. Clinton offered to shake hands with his foe but added he would rather have had a shot at Burr himself.13
Burr’s reputation, however, was of little concern to Jefferson at this point. A development in Europe was unfolding that eventually would bring him into further conflict with his dissident vice president. Upon the signing of the third Treaty of San Ildefonso, in 1800, Spain had granted France the rights to the Louisiana Territory, but France did not take immediate possession. In late 1802, the Spanish administrator of the port of New Orleans disclosed that the new French owners intended to restrict the port’s access.
Concerned, Jefferson wrote his minister in Paris, Robert Livingston, that access to the port was imperative because three-eighths of the territory’s produce passed through that market. He warned, “The day France takes possession of New Orleans” the United States would be compelled to “marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation” to deal with the commercial threat that would occur.14 Jefferson alerted Congress to “the danger to which our peace would be perpetually exposed whilst so important a key to the commerce of the Western country remained under foreign power.”15
Jefferson therefore obtained an appropriation of two million dollars from Congress to initiate negotiations with Napoleon to buy a small portion of the Louisiana Territory that would include New Orleans and the territories of west and east Florida only. He instructed Livingston to make the offer and dispatched Monroe to Paris in April 1803. Livingston meanwhile was astounded when Talleyrand inquired whether the United States would be interested in buying the entire Louisiana Territory! The deal was negotiated at the bargain price of fifteen million dollars, along with a promise, as the French required, to extend American citizenship and religious freedom to all Catholics living in that vast expanse. Talleyrand, in the understatement of the young century, told the two American negotiators, “You have made a noble bargain for yourselves, and I suppose you will make the most of it.”16 Jefferson submitted the deal to the Senate, which easily ratified it.
The Louisiana Purchase provided a rationale for Jefferson to change his mind about seeking a second term in 1804, after he had said it was his “decided purpose” not to do so but to return to Monticello instead. The only question was the identity of his running mate, since Burr’s conduct before and since becoming vice president had made him unacceptable to the president and other Republican stalwarts. In January of the presidential year, Burr met with Jefferson and indicated his willingness to remove himself from the picture if Jefferson would extend some gesture to advance his ambition to become governor of New York, but Jefferson offered none.
The one positive development that had come from that fiasco was congressional approval but not yet Senate ratification of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, which soon would require the separate election of president and vice president, discarding the double-balloting fiasco. With the party system and the Jeffersonian Party barely out of the cradle, the Republican caucus in Congress in conversations with state party leaders met to choose the national ticket for 1804. They unanimously endorsed Jefferson for a second term and then cast ballots for his running mate. The Philadelphia Aurora reported afterward, “It is worthy of notice that the name of Mr. Burr was not introduced in the meeting or in a single vote.”17
Governor Clinton, who had now decided he would not seek another term in Albany, was named on sixty-seven ballots, more than the majority required. The choice of Clinton sat well with Jefferson, inasmuch as the New Yorker’s advanced age indicated he would not seek the presidency in 1808, when the path would be clear in Republican ranks for Madison to succeed Jefferson. As for Burr, he looked to New York to salvage his political career. Hamilton immediately warned that Burr’s election as governor would fuel a scheme by New England Federalists to bring about the breakup of the Union, achieved at such great cost in the Revolution, with a defecting Burr in command.
Concerned about the possibility of additional agrarian states being carved out of the Louisiana Purchase, Federalists in Massachusetts formed the Essex Junto. Timothy Pickering, secretary o
f state under Washington and Adams, wrote in late 1803, “Although the end of all our Revolutionary labors and expectations is disappointed, I rather anticipate a new confederacy exempt from the corrupt and corrupting influences and oppression of the aristocratic Democrats of the South.” He predicted, “There will be a separation [and] the British provinces, even with the assent of Britain, will become members of the Northern Confederacy.”18
The Essex Junto first approached Hamilton with a scheme of electing him rather than Burr to the New York governorship, then having New York and New Jersey secede from the Union and join Nova Scotia and other Canadian provinces in the prophesied northern confederacy. But Hamilton, for all his hostility toward Jefferson, wanted no part of breaking up the Union. So the Essex Junto turned to the discontented Burr as a prospective co-conspirator, military leader, and even president of the new continental power.
The very notion of breaking up the Union met strong editorial opposition. Mirror of the Times of Wilmington, Delaware, reported of one Fourth of July toast in Philadelphia: “The advocates of Burrism and third party principles—May they be speedily shipped on Board a British prison ship, and exported to the congenial regions of Nova Scotia.”19 Jefferson, learning of the conspiracy, wrote a friend, “It will be found in this, as in all similar cases, that crooked schemes will end by overwhelming their authors and coadjutors in disgrace.”20
When approached with the scheme, Burr wanted no part of it either. While he said he agreed with the northern Federalists’ concern that the “Northern states must be governed by Virginia or govern Virginia, and that there was no middle course,” he said he felt he “must go on democratically” to achieve a better power arrangement with the southern states within the Union.21
So Burr pressed on in his pursuit of the New York governorship. By running an effective reformer’s campaign against the political machine of DeWitt Clinton in New York City, he hoped to restore his own political reputation in the state and nationally. But Jefferson’s pointed unwillingness even to say a favorable word about him did Burr no good, and Hamilton’s earlier assaults on Burr in their 1800 fight over control of the state were picked up and greatly embroidered by Cheetham. He resumed his earlier allegations against Burr as an inveterate womanizer who consorted not only with white and black prostitutes but also homosexuals and preyed on young boys.
At the same time, Cheetham, the major political provocateur, taunted Hamilton by writing in the American Citizen: “I dare assert that you attributed to Aaron Burr one of the most atrocious and unprincipled of crimes. He has not called upon you.… Either he is guilty or he is the most mean and despicable bastard in the universe.” And he asked Burr in print whether he was “so degraded as to permit even General Hamilton to slander him with impunity?”22 In behaving like a boxing promoter trying to build a big gate for a fight between two prominent heavyweights, Cheetham was playing with fire.
Through all this, Burr sought to brush off the whole barrage, at one point telling his daughter, Theodosia, he might send her “some new and amusing libels against the vice president.”23 But on Election Day the various attacks took their toll, and he lost to Lewis. Hamilton’s role in the defeat of Burr in New York soon was repaid in measure far beyond its significance.
In March 1804, a New Yorker, Dr. Charles Cooper, in a letter to a friend that found its way into print, said he had heard Hamilton at a dinner party in Albany harshly criticize Burr “as a dangerous man and one who ought not to be trusted with the reins of government.” When Hamilton’s father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, wrote in protest to the New-York Post, the irate Cooper’s reply to him was printed in the Albany Register: “I could detail to you a still more despicable opinion which General Hamilton has expressed of Mr. Burr.”24
Two months later, Burr wrote Hamilton calling on him to explain or retract the use of the word despicable. Hamilton sloughed Burr off, saying the word despicable was too ambiguous for him to confirm or deny its use. He parsed words to squirm out of the bind. “ ’Tis evident,” he shamelessly argued, “that the phrase ‘still more despicable’ admits to infinite shades, from very light to very dark.” Then he asked, “How am I to judge of the degree intended? Or how shall I annex any precise idea to language so indefinite?” Remarkably, Hamilton concluded by seeming to minimize the whole matter: “I trust, on more reflection, you will see the matter in the same light as me. If not, I can only regret the circumstance, and abide the consequence.”25 But Burr would not let the matter go. He wrote back about the evasion, “I regret to find in it nothing of that sincerity and delicacy which you profess to Value,” lecturing Hamilton that “political opposition can never absolve Gentlemen from the necessity of a rigid adherence to the laws of honor and the rules of decorum.”26
But now Burr had enough of Hamilton’s word games and dodges. He pressed for Hamilton’s apology. Still, Burr was not mollified with an apology. Apparently determined to humiliate Hamilton further, he demanded a flat retraction, to which Hamilton replied he could not be held responsible for any “rumours which may be afloat” over their long acquaintanceship. Going on the offensive, he now accused Burr of “premeditated hostility.” Burr finally ended the verbal duel by challenging Hamilton to a real one, with weapons of Hamilton’s choice.27
Another two weeks went by before they physically faced off. In that time, surprisingly, Hamilton and Burr both attended a Society of the Cincinnati dinner, at which Hamilton mounted a table and sang a lusty military ditty while Burr sat by morosely, listening. In the week before the duel, Hamilton showed no sign of concern, even hosting seventy guests at a lavish ball in a wooded site in which unseen musicians were hidden to serenade strolling couples.28
In anticipation of the worst, however, he wrote an “apologia” for later publication in which he again engaged in slippery semantic games, saying basically he hadn’t said anything against Burr that many others had not often said. Although he was strongly opposed to dueling, Hamilton said he felt obliged to accept the challenge to maintain his “ability to be in the future useful,” ostensibly to preserve his own honor but practically to save his political life. Of his intentions regarding the challenge, he wrote, “My religious and moral principles are strongly opposed to the practice of duelling.… As well because it is possible I have injured Col. Burr … as from my general principles and temper.… I have resolved to … reserve and throw away my first fire, and I have thoughts even of reserving my second fire—and thus give a double opportunity to Col. Burr to pause and reflect.”29
Burr in advance of the duel wrote no similar rationale or indication of intent, instead penning letters to daughter, Theodosia, and son-in-law, Joseph Alston, on the prospective settling of his financial and property affairs, which were in disorder.
According to the extant code of honor, Hamilton selected a pair of old family pistols for the duel and gave Burr his choice of the two. On the morning of July 11, on a cliff overlooking the Hudson River at Weehawken, New Jersey, the two heroes of the American Revolution paced off the required distance and on the signal fired the pistols. Hamilton’s shot went into the air, splitting an overhead branch; Burr’s shot hit Hamilton’s right hip and lodged in his spleen. He was taken by boat back across the Hudson to New York, where he died of his wounds the next day.30
The precise words of Doctor Cooper’s that had precipitated the duel were never reported, but Hamilton over the years had repeatedly slandered Burr without inciting a deadly confrontation. At the site of the duel, as Hamilton fell, Burr’s second (i.e., his assistant and witness) hustled him away, leaving in the wake of the sensational event a torrent of attacks on the sitting vice president as both a coward and an assassin. Hamilton received the equivalent of a state funeral three days after the duel, while Burr remained in his Richmond Hill mansion.
After eleven days, as a coroner’s inquest was held in New Jersey, bearing the threat of a murder charge against Burr, he fled, taking refuge in the Philadelphia home of his friend Charles Biddle. Subsequ
ently he was indicted in New York for violating the law against dueling and by a New Jersey grand jury for murder. Again he joked of his dilemma with his daughter, writing her that the neighboring states were fighting over “which of them shall have the honor of hanging the vice-president!”31 In Philadelphia he met a favorite mistress, Celeste, about whom he whimsically confided to daughter Theodosia: “If a male friend of yours should be dying of ennui, recommend him to engage in a duel and a courtship at the same time.”32
Meanwhile, little had been said about removing Burr from being a heartbeat away from the presidency. He soon moved south to Georgia and Florida. Eventually he headed north, avoiding both New Jersey and New York, where indictments hung over him. The man who shot Alexander Hamilton to death was, however, still the vice president of the United States, and so, incredibly, he took refuge in Washington, where there was no law against dueling. After his arrival, Burr dined with a suddenly cordial Jefferson and was warmly welcomed by Madison and Gallatin. And when Congress convened on November 4, he took his chair as president of the Senate. Federalist senator William Plumber observed of the scene, “It certainly is the first time—and God grant that it may be the last—that ever a man so justly charged with such an infamous crime, presided in the American Senate. We are, indeed, fallen on evil times.”33
In his final task as president of the Senate, Burr chaired a sensational trial of impeachment against the Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase, accused by Jefferson through congressional allies of making “a seditious and official attack on the principles of our Constitution and on the proceedings of [the] State.”34 Burr, still under indictment himself, imposed strict rules of decorum in the chamber as he presided even-handedly and was widely commended for his role. Chase was acquitted on all eight articles, and Burr, in his final official appearance as vice president, delivered a farewell speech to the Senate that was so unexpected and emotionally overwhelming that many of the listening senators were reduced to tears.
The American Vice Presidency Page 6