Still more despicable.
That did it.
As Burr told a friend later, with the lightly veiled anger that was the purest expression of his breeding: “[Hamilton] had a peculiar talent of saying things improper and offensive in such a manner as could not well be taken hold of.” Dr. Cooper’s letter in the Register didn’t come to Burr’s attention for a full two months, in the middle of June, by which time Hamilton had succeeded in snatching the governorship from him in humiliating fashion: Burr lost by the greatest margin of any gubernatorial candidate in the state. Burr was not inclined to be forgiving. He intended to extract from Hamilton the full meaning of Cooper’s words, if he had to use pincers to do it.
On June 18, 1804, he dispatched a note to Hamilton at his law office in New York.
Sir:— I send for your perusal a letter signed Charles D. Cooper, which, though apparently published some time ago has but very recently come to my knowledge. Mr. Van Ness, who does me the favor to deliver this, will point out to you that clause of the letter to which I particularly request your attention.
You must perceive, sir, the necessity of a prompt and unqualified acknowledgement or denial of the use of any expression which would warrant the assertions of Dr. Cooper.
I have the honor to be,
Your obedient servant,
Burr.
With that, the game was on. Those eleven letters passed between them, but when the third, from Burr, declared that he had been dishonored, it became clear that the men would be headed across the Hudson to the dueling ground in Weehawken to resolve the matter at dawn with pistols.
BUT IT IS the rare lethal dispute that stems from a single word, or even several words. And, while “dangerous” was insulting, and “despicable” more so, the words merely evoked a string of calumnies that Hamilton had leveled against Burr at every presidential election up through the last one, the epic contest of 1800, when Jefferson and Burr tied in the Electoral College, throwing the matter to the House of Representatives. While Hamilton had always disdained Jefferson, he loathed Burr so utterly that he fought to counter every attempt by the Federalists to cut a deal with him that would award him the presidency, not Jefferson. It is a mark of Hamilton’s aversion to Burr that he embraced the anti-Christ instead.
As to Burr, there is nothing in his favour. His private character is not defended by his most partial friends. He is bankrupt beyond redemption, except by the plunder of his country. His public principles have no other spring or aim than his own aggrandizement. . . . If he can, he will certainly disturb our institutions to secure to himself permanent power and with it wealth. He is truly the Catiline of America.
As every classicist knew, the dissolute Catiline was one of the greatest traitors of the classical age, leading troops against the Roman Republic in a monstrous conspiracy that was foiled by Cicero, the canny orator in whom Hamilton may have seen a little of himself.
But Hamilton’s political antipathy dated back to the presidential contest of 1792, when Burr rather audaciously put himself forward as a vice presidential candidate for the nascent Republican Party against the Federalist incumbents, Washington and Adams. At that point, Burr had been elected New York assemblyman, then appointed attorney general by the governor, who later persuaded the Assembly to make him senator from New York just the year before his vice presidential bid. He was hardly a political threat to the Federalists, and certainly not in a campaign against Washington. Yet Hamilton savaged him:
I fear [Burr] is unprincipled both as a public and private man. . . . I take it he is for or against nothing but as it suits his interest or ambition. . . . I am mistaken if it be not his object to play the game of confusion and I feel it a religious duty to oppose his career.
A religious duty, no less. Divinely inspired, and permanent. And this for a man who went on to garner just one electoral vote, from South Carolina.
While Hamilton did not hesitate to say such things, and more, against Burr, Burr never responded in kind, preferring to answer Hamilton’s contempt with silence, which may have been all the more infuriating. Hamilton’s vituperation was unanswerable in any case, as it stemmed from something far deeper than any transient political disagreement but may have been embedded in his psyche. But in seeing evil in Burr, he brought some out in himself. The duel did not derive from circumstances, but from the essence of who these men were and aspired to be.
Who you are can depend on where you are, just as what you seek can depend on where you’ve come from. The past is always pertinent. Hamilton came to America alone at sixteen, a penniless immigrant, from the West Indian island of Saint Croix, the only one of the original Founding Fathers not born on the continent; Burr was raised comfortably in New Jersey, the son of the second president of the college that became Princeton University, and the grandson of the greatest theologian of the age. “I have never known, in any country,” John Adams once declared, “the prejudice of birth, parentage and descent more conspicuous than that in the instance of Colonel Burr.” As for the illegitimate Hamilton, Adams derided him as “the bastard brat of a Scotch peddler.”
The differences followed from there. Eager for acclaim, Hamilton was resplendent in dress and fair in coloring, with those violet eyes; reserved, Burr dressed most customarily in black, his eyes were black too, bottomless, and he wore his fine dark hair straight back, to reveal a luminous white forehead. In argument, Hamilton could take four hours to say what Burr could say in thirty minutes. Burr was the one with the common touch, whereas Hamilton could sound superior. All the same, Burr was the furtive one, writing many of his letters in code and keeping no notes. Hamilton was a straight party man; Burr was impossible to categorize politically. Hamilton believed in an almost neoclassical sense of order, balance, and regularity; Burr was a dreamy and impetuous romantic. While both devoted themselves to the ladies, Hamilton strayed only once in his marriage, catastrophically. Burr remained faithful in his but was an epic lothario outside of it.
There were plenty of similarities, of course, but they may have only encouraged the antagonism. They had nearly identical builds, both short and slender—Hamilton about five-seven and Burr an inch less—and may both have felt they had something to prove. They were just a year apart in age, with Hamilton the elder, which may have encouraged a kind of sibling rivalry. Both were extraordinarily intelligent—quick, insightful, articulate, educated. But in the small public arena of a young country, their rare talents may have only pulled them into tighter conflict as they ascended into an ever narrower circle of influence. Personally magnetic and immensely capable, they were born leaders, a fact demonstrated both in war and in peace, but in politics they had sharply contrasting styles and skills, as Hamilton was brilliant at backroom politicking while Burr was the first political candidate to campaign openly for his office, rather than leave the electioneering to surrogates. Each envied, and feared, the abilities of the other.
Their rivalry became a study in contrasts by which each man came to define the other, and be defined by the other, as light defines shadow, or up defines down. Each was what the other was not, Hamilton the man who would never be Burr, Burr the man who would never be Hamilton. The differences, however, were oddly complementary, like the competing images of an optical illusion: Both couldn’t be taken in simultaneously, but neither could be removed, either, without destroying the picture.
So, no, the duel did not start on the morning of July 11, 1804, with a stray word from Hamilton earlier that year. Conflicts do not begin at the end. It had begun like a cancer, imperceptibly, and only gradually turned lethal. A mild irritation had evolved into disdain, then into dislike, then into a hatred, and finally into a war that transcended all reason and eclipsed everything else. When the two men faced each other down at sunrise at Weehawken, each did it to save himself. If one was to live, the other had to die.
Part One
The Roots of the Hatred
Nassau
Hall, the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, in 1764, five years before Burr was admitted at the age of thirteen. To the right stands the president’s house, where Burr’s father and grandfather died before Aaron Burr was two. When Hamilton realized he would be older than Burr had been when he’d graduated from the college, he attended King’s College, later Columbia University, instead.
ONE
In the Hands of an Angry God
IN EARLY JUNE of 1752, a wizened figure, cloaked in black, made his slow way north from Newark, New Jersey, to Stockbridge, a farming village arrayed on either side of a broad, rutted street on the edge of civilization in the chilly Berkshires of western Massachusetts. It was a treacherous three-hundred-mile journey that could take a week—by sail up the Hudson to Albany, then east by wagon through pine forests that were said to be thick with Mohawks.
The traveler was the thirty-eight-year-old Reverend Aaron Burr Sr., president of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, which had been founded recently in Elizabethtown. A kindly character with a penetrating gaze, he was unusually forceful for someone so slight. He possessed a vast storehouse of classical knowledge, some humor, and, according to a contemporary, a “lofty style,” the italics suggesting this was not entirely a compliment. He was coming to Stockbridge in search of a wife, and he had every reason to think he would find one.
Pastor of the First Church of Newark, the most prominent church in New Jersey, since he was twenty-two, he’d taken over the presidency of the college after the death of its founder, four years into the school’s existence. He moved it from Elizabethtown to Newark, and, without compensation, taught eight students the Hebrew Bible, Greek and Latin, rhetoric, natural and moral philosophy, history, divinity, and politics. After boosting the enrollment to nearly fifty, he’d undertaken to move the college to the village of Princeton. He’d been raising the funds for a proper campus by running lotteries in local towns, soliciting potentates like New Jersey’s royal governor, Jonathan Belcher, and importuning a variety of English aristocrats eager to educate the colonists.
He’d come to Stockbridge because he had set his eye on Esther Edwards, a cheerful, moon-faced beauty of twenty. He’d met her only once, six years before, when she was barely a teenager, but he’d never forgotten her spirited ways. To some at the college, the prospect of their esteemed president betrothed to a flirtatious twenty-year-old was unnerving, but Burr himself had no reservations. He’d allotted three days to the task of securing Esther’s assent at the snug Edwards house on Main Street, and that is precisely how long it took. Esther was quite candid when she told a friend why she’d agreed: to gain “a bedfellow.” Then she added with a silent cackle, “Tis better to Marry than to—!” The nuptials were set for Newark a fortnight later.
The whole operation was conducted so briskly that Burr had plenty of time left over to devote to Esther’s father, Rev. Jonathan Edwards. A Calvinist theologian of vast renown throughout the colonies, he was also a prominent member of the New England elite, the so-called River Gods who governed every aspect of life—political, judicial, military, and much more—in the wide plain of the Connecticut River valley that pushed up into western Massachusetts. Serene looking despite his wiry intensity, Edwards had a high forehead that conveyed an almost eerie intelligence, all-seeing eyes, and a slender mouth that rarely curved into a smile.
Back in 1734, Edwards had unleashed a bone-shaking religious fervor, known as a Great Awakening, that ripped like a wind out from his pulpit in Northampton, down through the valley’s broad reach, as far east as New Haven, and southwest into New York and New Jersey. It had begun with an impassioned funeral sermon he had delivered at the service for a young man who had died in agony of pleurisy, every breath labored, as if his chest was being crushed by a force he couldn’t see. To Edwards, that was God’s punishment for his wasting his precious youth, as so many did, in a life of “levity and vain mirth,” rather than in devotion to the Lord. Let his death be a lesson to young people everywhere, Edwards thundered. That made an impression, but when a young wife died shortly after, his sermon struck the parish like lightning. For this woman had devoted herself to God—and everyone noticed that she had died without a flicker of distress. Proof, Edwards said, “of God’s saving mercy.” With that, Edwards’s evangelism swept up the young, who inspired their parents to rededicate themselves to the church. In short order, the ways of God became the only topic in Northampton. “Other discourse,” Edwards noted approvingly, “would scarcely be tolerated in any company.” As his message of God spread parish by parish, throughout the northern colonies, Edwards became something close to a divinity himself.
In 1736, when he was a recent Yale graduate, Aaron Burr Sr. had been inclined toward a scholar’s life, but with the Great Awakening, “God saw fit to open my eyes” to religion. Or Rev. Edwards had. Burr might have been one of the wayward youths Edwards had fulminated against, a young man “polluted,” as Burr himself put it, “by nature and practice.” Newly penitent, Burr declared himself the recipient of “the Divine wrath I deserved.” To restore himself, he accepted the call.
It was on a visit to the Reverend Edwards in Northampton that Burr had first met Esther. By the time Burr came courting his daughter, Edwards had fallen victim to some of the very passions he had unleashed. In 1750, the congregation had tired of his frightful severity and cast him out of the church he had once ruled. It was in exile that Edwards came to Stockbridge, amid the wilderness of the chilly, low-slung Berkshires. Here he presided over the town’s Congregational church and served as a missionary to the Stockbridge Indians who had settled there among a clutch of hut-wigwams to receive religious instruction and social guidance from the English in that “praying town.” Rather than seek to stir another awakening, Edwards devoted himself to towering religious works like The Freedom of the Will and The Nature of True Virtue, which pushed theology deep into psychology and onto the verge of metaphysics.
Edwards’s driving interest was in man’s relationship with God, but he never entirely acknowledged that that was never mutual. While God could plumb the soul of the believer, the believer could never discern the mind of God. He must take God’s love on faith, no matter how many cruelties he visited on the faithful. All human suffering was deserved, Edwards argued, punishment for sins that God alone could detect.
In his most memorable sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Edwards depicts the errant soul as a helpless spider dangled by the Almighty over the fires of hell. Terrifying as the prospect of being cast forever into this burning pit might be, it is far worse, Edwards insists, to contemplate God’s disgust at what makes that act so necessary.
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.
The ferocious imagery of damnation aside, the sermon captures the terrors of daily life in Stockbridge, and throughout the colonies, where the Christian settlers were supposed to count themselves lucky whatever happened, even if they were scalped by marauding Indians, slaughtered by the militant French, or assaulted by one of the many contagions that swept through the colonies. To Edwards, it was meant to be reassuring that, despite such perils, God alone decides the settler’s fate. To him, the true hazard is not sickness or war, but sin.
The clucking in the college over the difference in age between the Burrs did not quickly dissipate. While one student found Esther “amiable in her person, of great affability and agreeableness in conversation,” that was a minority view, and local wags found much to dislike in a dainty young thing with her “Calimaco gown” and “Corded Dimity.” Her husband had to warn her to “expect to hear, & Bar
e a great deal of ill nature.”
Esther resolved to take all of it, and more, to be the wife of such a wonderful husband. As she wrote her bosom Boston friend Sally Prince: “Do you think I would exchange my good Mr. Burr for any person or thing on Erth! No sire! Nor for a Million Such worlds as this yt had no Mr. B——r in it.” Whenever they were apart, she counted the minutes until his return. “O my dear it seems as if Mr. Burr had been gon a little Age! & it is yet but one Fortnight!” she wrote Prince when Burr had gone to visit Prince’s father and her own. “I imagine now this Eve Mr. Burr is at your house, Father is there & some others, you all set in the Middleroom, Father has the talk, & Mr. Burr has the laugh, Mr. Prince get room to stick in a word once in a while.” Life wasn’t a complete delight for Esther in the president’s tight, hip-roofed house under the buttonwood trees between his Presbyterian church and the town jail. As the wife of the president cum parson, Esther was obliged to bake “Mince-pyes & Cocoa-nut-Tarts” for thirty at a moment’s notice. And there were existential worries. In the sweaty heat of summer on July 9, 1755, an entire English regiment headed by General Edward Braddock was annihilated when it staged an attack on the French stronghold of Fort Duquesne, outside Pittsburgh. If their British protectors could be destroyed there, they certainly could be slaughtered in Newark—and then what? “O the dreadful, awful news!” Esther fairly shrieked to Sally Prince. “General Braddock is killed and his army defeated. Oh my dear, what will, what must become of us!” She tried to think of it as God’s justice. “O our sins, our sins—they are grown up to the very heavens, and call aloud for vengeance, the vengeance that the Lord has sent—’Tis just, ’tis right.” But her heart wasn’t in it.
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 2