Also by John Sedgwick
NIGHT VISION
RICH KIDS
THE PEACEABLE KINGDOM
THE DARK HOUSE
THE EDUCATION OF MRS. BEMIS
IN MY BLOOD
The case of dueling pistols owned by Hamilton’s good Federalist friend New York senator Rufus King. Similar to the Robert Wogdon flintlock pistols used in the fatal duel between Hamilton and Burr, these were made by H.W. Mortimer. They were never fired but demonstrate that such equipment was de rigueur for a gentleman of the political class and indicate the elaborate machinery involved in defending one’s honor.
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eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-19390-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sedgwick, John, 1954–
War of two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the duel that stunned the nation / John Sedgwick.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59240-852-8 (hardcover)
1. Burr-Hamilton Duel, Weehawken, N.J., 1804. 2. Hamilton, Alexander, 1757–1804. 3. Burr, Aaron, 1756–1836. 4. United States—Politics and government—1801–1809. I. Title.
E302.6.H2S27 2015
973.4'60922—dc23
2015014275
FIRST EDITION: October 2015
Cover photograph of Alexander Hamilton © DEA PICTURE LIBRARY / Getty Images.
Cover design by Stephen Brayda.
Photo credits: 1: Pair of Flintlock Dueling Pistols, c. 1780–1800, H.W. Mortimer & Sons. © Collection of the New-York Historical Society, USA / Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Gherardi Davis and Ellen King / Bridgeman Images. 2: A northwest prospect of Nassau Hall, with a front view of the president’s house, in New Jersey. Engraving by Henry Dawkins after William Tennent, 1764. Rare Book Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. 3: The Inauguration of George Washington, American School (19th century). © Collection of the New-York Historical Society, USA / Bridgeman Images. 4: View of New York from Weehawken, New Jersey, After William Henry Bartlett, c. 1840. Granger, NYC. 5: Cipher Letter from Aaron Burr to James Wilkinson, July 29, 1806. Courtesy, The Newberry Library, Chicago. Call # Graff 503. 6 and 7: Alexander Hamilton Letter to Theodore Sedgwick, 10 July 1804. Page 1 and 2. Original manuscript from the Theodore Sedgwick Papers. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Additional image credits can be found here.
The excerpt “Only we two are one” is a portion of line from “Re-statement of Romance,” a poem by Wallace Stevens, from Wallace Stevens Selected Poems, edited by John N. Serio, Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., 2009; reprinted from Ideas of Order by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1936 by Wallace Stevens, renewed 1964 by Holly Stevens.
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Version_1
FOR RANA
Only we two are one
—Wallace Stevens
The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now divided them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it was a thing of vital instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic.
—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON,
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
CONTENTS
Also by John Sedgwick
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Introduction: The Fatal Dinner
PART ONE: The Roots of the Hatred
1. In the Hands of an Angry God
2. Contentment
3. Platonic Love Is Arrant Nonsense
4. The Prodictious Glare of Almost Perpetual Lightning
5. Refinement
6. In the Roseate Bowers of Cupid
7. Six Slayloads of Bucks and Bells
8. Holy Ground
9. A Fever for War
10. Liberty or Death
11. When in the Course of Human Events
12. The Malcolms
13. A Lady with a Beautiful Waist
14. Beauty Is Woman’s Sceptre
15. The Schuylers
16. But a Single Word, Burr
17. A Little Sorceress
18. In Ill Humour with Every Thing but Thee
PART TWO: The Battle Is Joined
19. Commentaries on the Laws of England
20. Children of a Larger Growth
21. Come My Charmer and Relieve Me
22. You Will Become All That I Wish
23. Two Men of Politics
24. A Dreaded Dilemma
25. To a Mind Like His Nothing Comes Amiss
26. Another Long Nose
27. And We Had a Bank
28. Botanizing
29. Embryo-Caesar
30. Other Than Pecuniary Consolation
31. Sober Among the Drunks
32. I Have Been So Cruelly Treated
33. Louis Capet Has Lost His Caput
34. The Best Woman and Finest Lady I Have Ever Known
35. Root Out the Distempered and Noisome Weed
PART THREE: To the Death
36. To Fight the Whole Detestable Faction
37. The Bubble of Speculation Is Burst
38. An Absolute and Abominable Lie
39. Strut Is Good for Nothing
40. The Lady in the Well
41. The Fangs of Jefferson
42. The Gigg Is Therefore Up
43. A Damn’d Rascal
44. Tant Mieux
45. A Still More Despicable Opinion
PART FOUR: And Then There Was One
46. Have No Anxiety About the Issue of This Business
47. A Good Many Incidents to Amuse One
48. Motives of Profound Political Importance
49. A Terrible Whirlpool, Threatening Everything
50. A Slight Expression of Contempt
51. G.H. Edwards
52. In the End
Envoi
Images and Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Image Credits
Index
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ONE FALL AFTERNOON several years ago, I was in the reading room of the Massachusetts Historical Society, a splendid brick bastion in Boston’s leafy Fenway neighborhood. I was prowling through the society’s extensive collection of Sedgwick family papers for a book I was writing about my family’s history when the head librarian, Peter Drummey, came up and tapped me on the shoulder and said he had something to show me.
“We’ve got this one on display up front,” he whispered. “Come, you should see it.” He led me through a series of rooms to an exhibition space showing the society’s prized holdings in long glass cases. Peter stopped beside one of them and pointed toward a wrinkled letter, yellowed with age, its once-black ink long since faded to brown, that was propped up on glass. “There. Take a look.”
I bent over the case. “New York, July 10, 1804,” I read out.
My Dear Sir
I have received two letters from you since we last saw each other—that of the latest date being the 24 of May. I have had in hand for some time a long letter to you, explaining my view of the course and tendency of our Politics, and my intentions as to my own future conduct. But my plan embraced so large a range that owing to much avocation, some indifferent health, and a growing distaste for Politics, the letter is still considerably short of being finished—I write this now to satisfy you, that want of regard for you has not been the cause of my silence—
“Wait, this isn’t—?” I asked.
Peter nodded. “Yes—Alexander Hamilton’s last letter. Written the night before he was shot.” By the sitting vice president Aaron Burr, he need hardly have added, in the famous duel at Weehawken, New Jersey, in 1804, an event that Henry Adams called the most dramatic moment in the politics of the early Republic.
“And look, it’s to one of yours.” He beamed. “His good friend and legislative ally Theodore Sedgwick.” Of course—the name was scrawled hastily across the bottom.
I’d known about the letter, but I’d never seen it. Theodore was my great-great-great-grandfather. A career politician, he’d helped push Hamilton’s economic agenda through the House when he was a representative from Massachusetts, and ultimately rose to become Speaker of the House for the fateful election of 1800 that wrested control away from his Federalist Party and turned it over to Thomas Jefferson and the Republican “Jacobins,” as he thought of them, alluding to the bloodthirsty radicals of the French Revolution. Much to Hamilton’s distress, Theodore had tried fruitlessly to steer the election to Burr, a friend from the Berkshires. Still, Theodore had been one of the only politicians who’d remained a trusted friend of both men, which was why Hamilton was writing him then.
We will return to the letter later, in its time. Taken out of context, it may seem tangential and, unusually for Hamilton, wildly overblown. It is likely to defy expectations as to why Hamilton crossed the Hudson at daybreak and faced his doom. In a few choice sentences, Hamilton offered a better explanation about his part in the duel, and a better prediction of what would come from it, than he did anywhere else. Theodore Sedgwick never responded, since by then there was no one to respond to.
When earlier members of the family encountered the letter, they could see its value to history, for several added urgent notations on the back before they passed the letter down to the next generation. All conveyed the same message: This letter must be preserved.
INTRODUCTION
The Fatal Dinner
SEARCHING FOR THE true origins of the fatal hatred between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr is like trying to trace the wind to its source. It is easier to detail how the gusts are knocking tree limbs about. There was never any question that Burr shot Hamilton in anger. As for why, everyone turned to a remarkable series of letters, eleven in all, that Hamilton and Burr, or their surrogates, volleyed back and forth in the run-up to the slaughter and that filled the newspapers afterward. The letters have much of the quality of legal arguments, as befits the work of the two most prominent lawyers in the city, as each tried to pin the blame on the other, and they make up a duel of their own, a war of words.
While each man clearly disdained the moral character of the other, the issue at hand was far more limited, and more precise, as it turned, remarkably, on a single word, spoken in haste at a dinner party in Albany that February, in the midst of an abominable winter that, from November to May, was the coldest and snowiest on record. Only the steep roofs of the city’s Dutch houses were clear of the otherwise endless freezing white. The event was held at the State Street home of a powerful local judge named John Tayler, whose mouth seemed always down turned in displeasure. He ran nearly everything in town from the waterworks to the local New York State Bank, which he’d conveniently located directly across the street, and he was at work on plans for a new granite statehouse a few blocks away. The city had long been so Dutch that, it was said, even the dogs barked in Dutch. The Reformed Protestant Dutch Church still commanded one end of State Street—but a sturdy new Episcopal church had risen at the other, reflecting the developing political tensions of the city.
Tayler had invited in a few gentleman friends who were staying in the city for an ample repast before a roaring fire. The men duly arrived by sleigh on the snow-packed street. Their cheeks must have been raw as they came stamping into the front hall, their top hats and capes dusted with white. Federalists all, they dressed in the Federalist fashion; for clothing, too, was divided by party. Unlike Republicans, these good Federalist men all wore traditional knee-high silk stockings and buckled shoes, eschewing the blowsy shirts and crude trousers affected by the Republicans. Or worse. Even on formal occasions, President Jefferson was known to lounge about the President’s Mansion in a dressing gown and slippers.
The purpose tonight, however, was not mere conviviality. Since this was Albany in an election season, and one that featured the almost lubricious prospect of the disgraced vice president Aaron Burr’s attempt to seize the governor’s chair, the topic would be politics and, for a diversion, more politics. But for its designation as the state capital, after all, Albany would have remained what it once was: a nice piece of land along the Hudson, rich in strawberries. And these men possessed political opinions of value. Among them were the eminent James Kent, chief justice of the New York State Supreme Court, and the Dutch aristocrat Stephen Van Rensselaer, the eighth patroon, or lord of the manor, a onetime candidate for governor himself whose estate, Rensselaerswych, once encompassed all of Albany. But the prize guest of the evening was Alexander Hamilton.
In his younger days, Hamilton had cut a girlish figure, wasp-waisted, slim limbed, with none of the manly chest you’d associate with an orator who could dominate a hall for hours. He’d had a dancer’s grace, too, pirouetting and gesturing as he kept up an endless stream of talk. (No one had ever talked as much as Hamilton—the world might have drowned in his words.) Now it was only the talk anyone remembered. At forty-nine, he’d aged noticeably, thickened up, slowed. Even his electric, violet-blue eyes had dimmed, like a fire that had burned down to embers. And his hair, once a lustrous strawberry blond—a token of his Scottish heritage, it was said—had gone pale and brittle, but Hamilton still wore it straight back, clasped in his trademark club behind.
America was still a thinly populated country of only a few million free whites, most of them clumped in a few cities from Georgia to the Massachusetts coast that was not yet called Maine. If the elite weren’t related by blood or marriage, they’d served together in the war or gone to college together. So here, Hamilton knew Kent from his earliest days as a lawyer, and he knew Van Rensselaer because Van Rensselaer was married to Hamilton’s wife’s sister. But, of course, familiarity doesn’t always guarantee warmth. Among intimates, a slight can cause a cooling, and then chill into an ic
y fury, and so the political world of the young America was driven by the dual polarities of Anton Mesmer, the German physician who believed that everyone and everything is held together by a magnetic force. Those who loved, loved like newlyweds. Those who hated, hated like demons. Thinking he was among men he loved and who loved him, Hamilton ventured an opinion of a man he didn’t. When questioned about Burr’s candidacy for governor of New York, Hamilton was dismissive, but, being Hamilton, he expressed himself with memorable acuity. He said that he found Burr to be “dangerous.” He said other things too, but that was the only one that mattered.
Hamilton had said so many words, it was probably inevitable that he would say a wrong one. This was a wrong one, and no more words from him could make it right. For there was another man there that night, one whom Hamilton failed to take into account. It was Tayler’s young son-in-law Dr. Charles D. Cooper, who was staying over. He was so taken by Hamilton’s fevered denunciations of the vice president that he did something dangerous. He jotted down a summary for a political friend in Manhattan, and that man—unidentified—must have found the comments of larger interest, for he passed them along to the Evening Post’s editor, William Coleman, who was eager to run them, but with a disclaimer in case Burr take offense and make a challenge against him. The editor persuaded Hamilton’s father-in-law, the former New York senator General Philip Schuyler, to add a line expressing doubt that Alexander Hamilton would say anything so harsh about Burr after he’d pledged neutrality in Burr’s gubernatorial contest. That was a howler. Everyone knew that Hamilton had been anything but neutral in that election.
Up in Albany, Dr. Cooper read the Schuyler note in the Post, and he took offense at Schuyler’s insinuation that he’d gotten the story wrong or possibly had made it up entirely. Furious, he wrote a stiff letter to the Federalist Albany Register, to reiterate that Hamilton absolutely had called Burr “dangerous,” and that was not all. He added, tantalizingly, “I could detail for you a still more despicable opinion which Mr. Hamilton has expressed to Mr. Burr.”
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 1