by Dan Gutman
“Shhhh!” Julia suddenly interrupted them. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?” asked Isabel.
“I heard a sound!” Julia whispered. “Somebody’s coming!”
CHAPTER 15
DESPICABLE
“OKAY, NOBODY SAY A WORD,” LUKE WHISPERED. “We can’t let ’em know we’re here.”
“Shhhh!” said Julia. “Will you stop talking?”
The Flashback Four could hear the footsteps on the dirt leading up to the ledge. There was rustling in the bushes. Luke carefully slipped on the Hot Head and raised his eyes just over the top of the tree trunk so he could see and film what was about to happen.
At that moment, there was a buzz in Isabel’s pocket. She grabbed for the TTT. There was a message from NOYB . . .
ARE YOU IN WEEHAWKEN YET?
Isabel hurriedly punched her reply into the keypad . . .
WILL YOU PLEASE LEAVE US ALONE? WE’RE VERY BUSY.
The footsteps were getting louder—and closer.
“Remember to hold your head steady,” David advised Luke. “I hate watching shaky video.”
“I know what to do,” Luke replied testily. “I don’t need you to tell me—”
“Shhhhh!” said Julia. “Will you two shut up?”
A man appeared on the other side of the dueling ground. Then another one. It was hard to make out their faces from that distance.
“Is that them?” asked David. “Is that Hamilton and Burr?”
“It’s definitely not Hamilton,” Isabel whispered. “I remember what he looks like from pictures. It must be Burr and some other guy.”
“You owe me a dollar, dude,” whispered David.
“Okay, okay,” said Luke. “Who’s the other guy?”
“Shhhhh!” whispered Julia. “Your talking is going to be on the video!”
“Your shushing is louder than our whispering!” said David.
The “other guy” was William Van Ness, who had come to Aaron Burr’s house in the middle of the night to wake him up and escort him to Weehawken. In a duel, it was customary for each man to bring along a “second”—a trusted friend who would assist the duelist and make sure that the agreed-upon rules were being followed.
Burr looked pretty much the way he looked in his painted portraits. He was elegantly dressed in a long black coat, with black boots that came up so high that only a few inches of his white pants were showing. He wore a white shirt underneath, with ruffled edges at the wrists and neck. It looked like he was dressed up to go to the theater, or maybe a funeral.
Aaron Burr didn’t wear a powdered wig, as some of the other Founding Fathers did. He was a thin, handsome man with dark hair that was starting to turn gray at the edges. His piercing dark eyes looked like they could burn a hole in whatever he was looking at.
The sun was rising now, and it was getting warmer. William Van Ness peeled off his jacket and started to tidy up the dueling ground. He picked up some loose branches from the area and tossed them into the woods so they wouldn’t be in the way. The kids hoped and prayed that Van Ness wouldn’t come over near the tree trunk they were hiding behind. While Van Ness cleaned up, Burr stood around looking impatient and fidgety.
“Hamilton is late,” he muttered.
“Perhaps the general has had a change of heart,” Van Ness replied.
“I always figured him to be a coward.”
“He will be here,” Van Ness assured his friend. “I personally delivered your last letter and put it in his hand.”
A few seconds later, more sounds came from the footpath leading up to the ledge. It was Hamilton with his second, Nathaniel Pendleton. Pendleton was still holding the brown leather case he had brought with him to Hamilton’s house. Both Pendleton and Van Ness, by the way, were wearing top hats.
Dr. Hosack, who had accompanied Pendleton across the Hudson River, did not climb up to the dueling ground. He stayed down below near the boat, for a reason. If one of the duelists should die and there was a murder trial, Dr. Hosack would be able to claim honestly in court that he had not witnessed the shooting.
“That guy on the left is definitely Hamilton,” whispered Isabel.
Alexander Hamilton was more recognizable than Aaron Burr. He had a distinctive face, and of course the kids had seen it on countless ten-dollar bills.
Hamilton was also dressed quite elegantly, with a gray vest under a black buttoned coat that was oddly short in the front but went down below his knees in the back. He wore a white ascot around his neck, and his hair was neatly trimmed. Hamilton, it was said, went to the barber for a haircut every day.
He strode purposefully over to Burr. The two men were face-to-face, a couple of feet apart.
“Oh shoot,” whispered David. “I think they’re gonna start fighting each other right now.”
They didn’t. Instead, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr shook hands.
“Colonel,” said Hamilton, a serious look on his face.
“General,” said Burr cordially.
For two guys who shared so much hatred that they were willing to kill each other, Hamilton and Burr did not show signs of anger. They looked like they had come for a business meeting.
In fact, both Hamilton and Burr had attended the same formal dinner party just seven days earlier, on the Fourth of July. At the time, neither of them had spoken a word about their upcoming duel.
And no other words were spoken as they stood facing each other on the cliffs of Weehawken. Everything had been said in advance. Further discussion was unnecessary. They knew how they felt about each other. It was time to settle their differences. At this point, their guns would do the talking.
So reader, you’re probably asking the obvious question: Why did Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr hate each other so much? Well, there were a number of reasons.
I know some of you don’t care about this kind of stuff, and that’s okay. Long, drawn-out explanations can get a little dry. You want to read about the big gunfight, right?
But if you really want to understand what brought these two men to point guns at each other, you should read this section. People don’t usually decide to risk their lives in this way unless they have a pretty good reason. But if you prefer to “cut to the chase,” as they say, it’s okay to skip ahead a few pages.
Hey, it’s a free country, thanks to patriots like Hamilton and Burr.
The feud started back in 1791, thirteen years earlier. Aaron Burr was running for senator of New York. His opponent was Philip Schuyler, who happened to be Alexander Hamilton’s father-in-law. Burr won the election. Hamilton wasn’t happy.
It went downhill from there. The United States was still a very young country, and political parties were starting to form. Hamilton was a leader of the Federalist Party, which believed in a strong national government. Burr belonged to the Democratic-Republican Party (not to be confused with today’s Democrats or Republicans), which feared that a strong national government could lead to a monarchy like England’s. And the US had just fought a war because it didn’t like the way England treated its colonies.
But really, Aaron Burr didn’t have any strong political beliefs at all. And that might have been the big reason Hamilton didn’t like him. Burr didn’t seem to stand for anything. He just wanted to be rich, famous, and powerful. In Hamilton’s view, he had no principles.
When Burr ran for president in 1800, Hamilton did everything he could to prevent him from winning. He even published a pamphlet saying, “You are the most unfit and dangerous man in the community.” Burr came in second to Thomas Jefferson in that election, and because of the odd laws of the day, the candidate with the second highest number of votes became vice president. So Burr was “a heartbeat away” from being president of the United States.
For more than ten years, Hamilton and Burr had been throwing insults and accusations at each other, sometimes in public. Tensions built up. They came to a boil in early 1804.
Burr, knowing that his term as vice p
resident was coming to an end, decided to run for governor of New York. Hamilton didn’t disguise the fact that Burr was unfit for the job. He wrote letters calling Burr “a dangerous man and one who ought not to be trusted.”
Word got around, and sometimes ended up in newspapers. Burr lost the election. Later, according to Van Ness, Burr said, “General Hamilton had at different times and upon various occasions used language and expressed opinions highly injurious to my reputation.”
There was more sniping back and forth between the two of them. Then, at a dinner party in early 1804, Hamilton said some unkind words about Burr. He supposedly called him “despicable,” which was just about the worst curse word you could say about another person in those days.
A doctor named Charles D. Cooper happened to be at that dinner party. He overheard what Hamilton said and wrote about it in a letter to a friend. Somehow, in April, that letter found its way into the Albany Register newspaper. Burr didn’t see it at first, but a friend of his showed it to him.
Burr was furious. So he did what offended people did in those days. He wrote a letter demanding to know if Hamilton had indeed used those words. Hamilton wrote back, basically saying he didn’t know what Burr was talking about.
During May and June, the two men traded a number of politely worded but increasingly angry letters. Burr sent one to Hamilton demanding that he explain the “despicable” comment and demanding that he apologize for all his insults throughout their long rivalry.
Hamilton could have apologized, and that would have been the end of it. But he didn’t. Hamilton considered himself to be an expert at negotiations, and he was also a very self-assured, combative man. He was incapable of apologizing for his insults, because he had said exactly what he meant.
“I trust, on more reflection,” he wrote to Burr, “you will see the matter in the same light with me. If not, I can only regret the circumstance and must abide by the consequences.”
In other words, bring it on. That was it. After Burr read that letter, he’d had enough. Hamilton hadn’t been particularly nice to him, but he hadn’t said anything worth killing somebody over either, right? Burr thought differently. He challenged Hamilton to a duel.
So you could argue that Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton over one word—despicable. But there was another reason why Hamilton and Burr ended up in Weehawken on July 11, 1804. And there’s one more thing these two men had in common. They were both at a low point in their lives.
Hamilton had been a superstar during the Revolutionary War and afterward. He had been famous, wealthy, respected, and with his wife had a large and loving family. But his political career was in decline. The Federalists were out of power, and it didn’t look like they would reclaim the presidency any time soon. Hamilton was a has-been. His hero and mentor George Washington had died in 1799.
Personally, he was depressed. After being abandoned by his own father, he’d felt responsible when his first-born son, Philip, was killed in a duel in 1802. After that, his teenage daughter Angelica had a mental breakdown. For the rest of her life, she didn’t recognize her family but acted as though her brother was still alive. Hamilton’s wife, Eliza, had a miscarriage. His mother-in-law had a sudden stroke and died. He was almost fifty—old for those times—and he had stomach and bowel problems.
And it didn’t help that his worst enemy—Aaron Burr—was the vice president of the United States.
Burr was also in a state of personal depression. He wanted to be rich and famous. He wanted to be president. But it wasn’t going to happen. He had run for president in 1796 and lost. He’d run again four years later and tied Thomas Jefferson, ending up as Jefferson’s vice president. But Jefferson despised him and dropped him as vice president for his second term. Burr lost his bid to become the governor of New York. He would still be vice president for a few months. But the former war hero was now powerless and humiliated.
Personally, he was also in bad shape. He had spent a fortune and run out of money. He had no woman in his life, and his daughter had grown up and moved to South Carolina to be with her husband. Aaron Burr’s future was bleak, and he blamed Hamilton, rightly or wrongly, for all his problems and disappointments.
So both men were at a low point in their lives, and both made the foolish decision that fighting a duel might improve their situation. Now, one of them was going to die.
I know who’s going to die. You know who’s going to die. The Flashback Four know who’s going to die. But Hamilton and Burr didn’t know who was going to die.
The four men—Hamilton, Burr, Pendleton, and Van Ness—gathered together in the middle of the dueling ground.
“General,” William Van Ness said to Hamilton, “let me allow you one more opportunity to apologize and explain the words you have spoken of Colonel Burr.”
“I beg of you, sirs,” Pendleton said to both duelists, “you can retain your dignity and walk away from this place as two honorable men.”
Hamilton and Burr stared into each other’s eyes for a moment as if they were trying to look into each other’s souls.
“I cannot apologize for spoken words I believe to be the truth,” said Hamilton.
“Then let us begin the interview,” said Burr.
CHAPTER 16
RULES FOR DUELS
BEFORE WE CONTINUE WITH THE STORY, READER, a word of warning. This chapter is about dueling. Now, if you think reading about the ins and outs of dueling could possibly be boring, feel free to skip this chapter entirely. But if you think reading about dueling might be boring, you’re nuts because dueling is very interesting. So stick around and read this chapter.
Unless, of course, your house is on fire right now or some other emergency is going on in your life. But if that’s the case, what are you doing reading this book to begin with? You should be running to get a fire extinguisher or something.
First of all, you may think that America’s Founding Fathers were one big, happy family. But in fact, they were constantly insulting one another, and many of them hated each other.
The Federalists hated the Republicans, and vice versa. Alexander Hamilton hated Thomas Jefferson, and John Quincy Adams called Jefferson “a slur upon the moral government of the world.” His dad, John Adams, hated Benjamin Franklin. He said, “His whole life has been one continued insult to good manners and to decency.”
John Adams, in fact, hated just about everybody. He made fun of Alexander Hamilton for being short and skinny. He called George Washington “illiterate, unlearned, unread.” He had a long-running feud with Thomas Jefferson, who called Adams “a blind, bald, crippled, toothless man.” And they had worked on the Declaration of Independence together!
(By the way, Adams and Jefferson died on the same day—July 4, 1826. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the United States. On his deathbed, ninety-year-old John Adams complained, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” Actually, he was wrong. Jefferson had died five hours earlier.)
Even George Washington’s wife, Martha, got in on the act. She said Jefferson was “one of the most detestable of mankind.”
Sometimes, these angry words turned into violence. In 1798, on the floor of the House of Representatives, Roger Griswold from Connecticut called Matthew Lyon from Vermont a “scoundrel,” which was considered a curse word in its day. Lyon spit in Griswold’s face. So Griswold attacked Lyon with a hickory walking stick, beating him over the head with it repeatedly. This actually happened! Then Lyon ran to the fireplace and fought back with a pair of iron tongs. The other representatives finally separated the two men, but a few minutes later they attacked each other again. It was like professional wrestling!
And sometimes, the angry words turned into gunplay. The idea of two grown men pointing pistols at each other because they had a little argument sounds crazy to us today. But then, so does slavery. So does prohibiting women from voting. So do any number of weird things that supposedly intelligent people did hundreds of years ago.
But lots of men (and as far as I
know, they were all men) participated in duels in early America. It was common, especially among upper-class gentlemen and military men like Hamilton and Burr, who had seen violence with their own eyes on the battlefield.
In fact, both of these men had been involved in duels before their famous one. In 1799, Aaron Burr dueled against Hamilton’s brother-in-law John Church using the same pistol he would use against Hamilton. Church shot a button off Burr’s coat. And even though Alexander Hamilton didn’t like dueling, he had participated in nine duels as a second or assistant. He was not a man to compromise, turn the other cheek, or apologize.
Most of the men who engaged in duels were not lunatics, fiends, or martyrs. So what would make two sensible, intelligent men stand twenty feet apart and point loaded guns at each other?
Sometimes it was because of an election. The loser or one of his friends would provoke a duel with the winner or one of his friends. But often, a duel would result when one guy simply insulted another guy. In those days, if you called a man a “rascal,” a “scoundrel,” a “liar,” a “coward,” or even a “puppy,” you were asking for trouble. You might very well be challenged to a duel.
Two hundred years ago, if you were insulted by someone and challenged him to a duel, you were showing your courage and leadership. If you avoided the duel, you were considered to be a coward. Nobody wanted to get shot and killed, of course. But they might have been even more afraid of being humiliated and losing their honor. After losing the presidential election twice and then the election for New York governor, maybe Aaron Burr thought a duel with Hamilton would redeem his honor.
The other reason why men would do such a crazy thing as dueling was because they probably were not going to die. Most duels were not fatal. Often, shots weren’t even fired. One of the duelists would apologize to the other. Or if bullets were fired, they would miss. The old flintlock pistols were not very accurate.