War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901)

by Sedgwick, John

  SEVEN

  Six Slayloads of Bucks and Bells

  AFTER GRADUATING FROM Princeton at sixteen, Burr was in no hurry to get on with his life. Instead, floated by that modest legacy from his father, he lolled about Nassau Hall for a full year more, idling over the classical texts, much to the distress of his guardian, Timothy Edwards, who didn’t approve of too much leisure. When his books bored him, he drifted back to Elizabethtown to return to that summertime life with his strapping friend Matthias Ogden, the uncle he loved like a brother. In the warm weather, the two would laze in the Elizabeth River as they had done in his youth, swimming in its gentle currents or paddling about.

  Or he’d chase women, of course. Elizabethtown seemed to have no shortage of flirtatious young ladies eager to dally with someone like Burr, who was now beginning to develop that air of dark mystery that countless women would find alluring. By now, Burr was free to take advantage of it, since his uncle Timothy had taken Aunt Rhoda and the remaining young children off to Stockbridge. She’d turned tubercular, and he was hoping the Berkshires’ cool, inland air might be better for her tender lungs. In Stockbridge, Edwards bought a dry goods store on Main Street across from the property of one of the last Stockbridge Indians, the others having been dispossessed of their lands by the English who’d pledged to provide for them, and made a slow, sad migration west out of town. He later oversaw the sale of the Indian’s house lot to a broad-chested lawyer and rising politician named Theodore Sedgwick, who built on it a fine Federal-style house, the largest in town, for a growing family that would eventually include seven children. The confidence of the house matched his own. It was in Stockbridge that Sedgwick would meet Aaron Burr, and, seeing a rising political star, befriend him.

  This was the summer that Hamilton dallied with William Livingston at Liberty Hall. Burr surely knew Livingston, since he’d delivered the funeral oration for Burr’s father. If Burr didn’t come around to Liberty Hall, it was because Burr didn’t need to cultivate someone like Livingston; he already had. He preferred to focus on bosom friends like Ogden—and, of course, on any ladies he might find.

  Now, what to do with his life? Just to ask the question was a luxury, and Burr spent some time pondering. For him, the choices boiled down to three: the law, medicine, or the ministry. To Burr, none seemed attractive. Most of his Princeton classmates picked the ministry, as it was stable and prestigious, and his ancestry cried out for him to follow their example. His background gave off “an almost suffocating odor of sanctity,” as one friend put it. Burr himself could scarcely have been less interested, but he had to acknowledge the expediency. So he found his way to Rev. Joseph Bellamy, a disciple of his grandfather’s, no less, who ran a small divinity school out of his home in Bethlehem, Connecticut.

  Immense and imposing, with a booming voice that seemed to ring down from heaven, Bellamy had a history of intimidating would-be ministers and sending them packing before the first day was out. Slight as he was, Burr was not frail, and he didn’t back down. He learned his texts, firing back a smart answer to every one of the sly Socratic questions posed by the overbearing reverend, and soon bragged to Matt Ogden that he had Bellamy “completely under [his] thumb.”

  Typically for him, now that success was in hand, Burr started to feel bored by the whole religious enterprise and was eager for some fun. Idling at a local tavern one snowy winter afternoon, he noticed “six Slayloads of Bucks and Bells,” a cheery group from nearby Woodbury who’d come by horse-drawn sleigh, furled in blankets, their faces bright with the wintry air. Burr gave them his full attention. “And,” he rejoiced, “a happier Company I believe there never was; it really did me good to look at them. They were drinking Cherry-Rum . . . and I perceived both Males and Females had enough to keep them in Spirits—the Females especially looked too immensely good-natured to say NO to anything.” Burr could always tell the noes from the yeses, or thought he could. “And I doubt not the Effects of this Frolic will be very visible a few months hence.” Nine months, to be more exact.

  That was January of 1774. A month later, Burr told his guardian he was tired of the ministry and he was going to try the law instead. He’d decided to learn it either from Timothy Edwards’s brother Pierpont Edwards or Sally’s husband, Tapping Reeve, Aaron’s former tutor. Both were impressive lawyers, but Reeve more so, and he was now starting his law school, a one-room affair in Litchfield.* Edwards, growing frustrated with the whims of his ward, declared himself “indifferent” to Aaron’s choice. So it was done: He’d study with Reeve.

  Burr moved in with Reeve and his own sister, Sally, to their white, pillar-fronted house in Litchfield on a street lined with sycamores, and he became Reeve’s very first law student, making use of his extensive law library and receiving his instruction. Burr proved to be an able student, but he did not devote himself exclusively to his studies. “I have now and then an affair of petty gallantry,” he confided to Ogden, who would not have been surprised by the news.

  One such affair was hardly petty. It took place in Fairfield, forty miles away, at the home of his cousin Thaddeus Burr. Ostensibly, Aaron rode over for a few familial visits, but the purpose was actually to woo the stylish socialite Dorothy “Dolly” Quincy, who was visiting there. This required some daring, for Miss Quincy was already spoken for—by John Hancock, no less, the rich and formidable Boston merchant who would soon serve as president of the Continental Congress. Not a man to trifle with, obviously. For Hancock, the attachment to Dolly was not casual. “Be fully convinc’d,” Hancock declared to his intended, “that no Distance of Time or place can ever Erase the Impression made & the determination I have formed being forever yours.” The stentorian tone suggests why Dolly wasn’t so sure of that attachment, and Burr saw a chance to ruffle her skirts, steal a few kisses, and possibly more. Dolly was utterly infatuated. She complained that she scarcely had “a moment alone” with this “handsome young man” who kept riding over from Litchfield to see her. The affair had elements of Restoration comedy—the charming young rake seeking to cuckold a rich and stuffy elder—but it caused his cousin Thaddeus “the most bitter anguish,” as he was terrified that Hancock might be furious to find out about the affair being carried out under Thaddeus’s roof.

  It came to nothing, as Burr soon shifted his attention to a wealthy “young Miss ——,”* provoking him to confer with Ogden about the wisdom of marrying for money. Matt conceded it was “alluring” but told him not to “let fortune buy you peace, or sell your happiness.” So Burr turned his attention to yet another “Miss ——,” this one a “fountain of melody” who had written a musical composition he told Ogden he was desperate to find. It was, Burr said, “the work of her own hands.” The notion is suggestive, and it becomes all the more so for being written to Ogden in code, as if the real intimacy was not between Burr and the miss, but between him and Ogden.*

  Burr was on to yet another new love just weeks later: “What would you say if I should tell you that —— had absolutely professed love for me,” Burr asked his good friend. “Now I can see you with both hands up—eyes and mouth wide open. Trust me, I tell you the whole truth.” By then, it’s doubtful Ogden could be surprised by anything in this department. The better question is how Burr could be so successful with women and yet so indifferent to them. And why, knowing Burr’s reputation, would any woman seek to add her name to his list? The identifier “——” seems apt, for all Burr’s women in these accounts end up a blank. His only lasting relationship is with Ogden, with whom he seems to join arms as he declares, “The world is before us.”

  EIGHT

  Holy Ground

  IN THOSE DAYS, King’s College, later Columbia University, consisted of a single, handsome three-story building that, much to William Livingston’s distress, commanded a hill on the southern limits of the city, offering splendid views of the water. To its stolid president, Myles Cooper, the former chaplain of Queen’s College, Oxford, the elevation was proof o
f its “commanding eminence,” for you could see down to the harbor, across the Hudson River to the farmland of New Jersey, and out past Staten Island to the open sea. For all the expansiveness, the college was still in the grip of the city—and its many earthly temptations. Just outside the front gate past Saint Paul’s Chapel stood the “Holy Ground” where hundreds of perfumed “ladies of pleasure” abounded for undergraduates who dared to vault a high wall to enjoy them. Hamilton was undoubtedly one; his sexual desires were fully the equal of Burr’s. As John Adams hatefully rasped later, Hamilton possessed “a superabundance of secretions which he could not find whores enough to draw off.”

  The one three-story building contained the entire college: President Cooper’s quarters, rooms for twenty-four students, a chapel, library, kitchen, dining hall, and classrooms. Student rooms were often shared, and Hamilton was thrown in with Robert Troup, a tubby orphan from Elizabethtown who would become a lifelong ally. A friend of Aaron Burr’s too (“That great fat fellow,” Burr called him), the amiable Troup was one of the few men besides the Berkshireman Theodore Sedgwick who would be able to stay close to both. In the tight quarters of King’s, the two students shared the same bed, too. At first, Hamilton studied medicine, starting with Professor Clossey’s lectures on anatomy—or “physic,” as it was known—possibly at the recommendation of Hugh Knox, who had a fascination for such things. Never a doctor, of course, Hamilton did retain a deep understanding of the essential functions and structure of the body, one that may have provided a helpful model for the nation’s economy, with its bloodlike money flows and skeletal financial institutions. But then he shifted to mathematics, whose Professor Harpur may have introduced him to the political philosophy of the formidable Scot David Hume, which proved critical to his understanding of government. Hamilton continued scratching out poems and attended the college’s Anglican services. Troup used to see Hamilton drop down on his knees in the little chapel to pray aloud “both night and morning,” leaving his friend “moved by the fervor and eloquence of his prayers.” If Burr had the literary-minded Cliosophic Society, Hamilton had a weekly debating club he started with Troup and Ned Stevens, where Hamilton made his first forays into oratory. Troup said that Hamilton “made extraordinary displays of richness of genius and energy of mind.”

  Whenever the colonists’ struggles with the Crown came up in conversation, Hamilton always took the British side. He “admired” the English constitution, said Troup, who considered his friend “originally a monarchist.” Such attitudes would haunt him.

  BUT THAT WAS before the revolution broke into bloody conflict. In New York, the colonial Assembly had asserted much earlier in the century that the colonists’ rights to their own property were not to be surrendered to any distant king. The question remained: Who owned America? Was it the king’s to administer, and tax, as he pleased? Or was it the colonists’ to manage on their own, without interference from the Crown? The issue split into a hundred pieces of contention, from the obligations to serve in the British army to the freedom to assemble to the place of the Anglican Church. And the slights had been building, first into indignation, then to open hostility, and finally to a fury that could never be contained.

  The rage burst forth in December 1773, just as Hamilton started college. In Boston, New York’s rival city well up the coast, a hardy band of rebels, many of them liquored up, and all clothed crudely as Mohawks with buckskins and face paint, rowed out into Boston Harbor in the dead of night to sneak aboard three British ships lying at anchor. There with tomahawks they burst open more than three hundred chests of tea and dumped the contents overboard, making a statement about taxes and tyranny that would reverberate throughout the colonies.

  Troup contended that Hamilton, astounded that such a large furor could stem from such a small tax, rode to Boston to investigate the matter and came away impressed with the “superior force” of the “American claim.” The sequence may be off, and the conversion oversimple, but there is no question that Hamilton started to reconsider his loyalist views. Exactly how thoroughly he converted, then or ever, is an issue that Hamilton would spend a lifetime addressing. The fact was, Boston was not New York. Boston was free to defy its imperial warlord, but New York was not so eager to abandon its English ties. After the Tea Party, Hamilton continued to attend a Tory college, observe Tory religious beliefs, admire Tory culture, and sympathize with Tory politics, much as before. But just the word was telling, for Tories were defined by what they weren’t. They weren’t the daring patriots devoted to the new cause of American independence, but loyalists to the old cause of the Crown, which, as the war approached, was proving to be an increasingly rare and risky devotion.

  Furious at the Tea Party antics, the Crown imposed on the colonists a set of draconian regulations that became known as the Intolerable Acts. They shut down the Boston port, choking off all trade, until the colonists paid for the spilled tea; forbade public assemblies and jury trials; suspended other rights of a free people; and unleashed a regiment of stiff British troops under the bovine General Gage to patrol Boston’s streets to enforce these new regulations.

  If this was intended to contain the outbreak of liberty, it did the opposite, as Bostonians turned their calamity into a cause and sent out riders to enlist the support of other colonies through “committees of correspondence,” which led to the convening of the First Continental Congress in a craft guild’s brick Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia in September.

  The news of the British assault on Boston swept through Manhattan like an island hurricane, leaving the city “as full of uproar as if it was besieged by a foreign force.” Hamilton had returned to his books, but he could not remain oblivious to the political winds whipping past the college. It seemed the city was engulfed in handbills and rallies and frenzied talk of rebellion.

  At first, Hamilton was unsure where he stood. While New York’s rebel leaders promoted a boycott of British goods in sympathy, the more moderate worried this would only bring the British down on New York too, and Hamilton was not yet ready to sever his Tory ties.

  To promote the boycott, a band of militants called the Sons of Liberty called for a mass meeting on July 6, 1774, on the common by King’s College. The war had come to Hamilton. It was time to pick a side.

  Ahead of the meeting, Hamilton spent some time strolling under the shade trees by the college quietly talking to himself, trying to think the question through. Despite his Tory disposition, he could not help being affected by the emotional power of the patriot cause, with its quest for liberty. He had already dashed off an article or two for the Boston newspapers in favor of the Tea Party, trying out the stance. As he told Troup, “I [had been] prejudiced against the measure.” But now was the time to commit, and as he went through the arguments under the trees, his mutterings were loud enough to draw attention to what passersby called “the young West Indian.” He was rousing himself to speak.

  The meeting had been called by a former merchant privateer named Alexander McDougall, now the streetwise founder of the Sons of Liberty. He had been imprisoned for assailing the New York Assembly as a gang of traitors to the patriot cause—and then proved so popular in jail he had to schedule appointments for his visitors. “I rejoice that I am the first sufferer for liberty since the commencement of our glorious struggles,” he declared when he was freed. McDougall became the symbol of liberty, and his appearance that afternoon by the Liberty Pole at the Fields was electrifying. But that was just symbolism. As Hamilton listened to the speakers bellowing into the wind, he found the arguments against the British to be surprisingly feeble, and, unable to wait his turn, he started to speak up, unbidden, from the middle of the crowd, first timidly, unsure, and then loudly, firmly; and finally he could not stop, bringing forth a great tumbling river of argument that washed over the crowd. At nineteen, Hamilton was not the most prepossessing speaker, or the most fully voiced, but he was the most persuasive—forceful, compelling, assured�
�and somehow all the more so for being so boyishly slender and obviously young. When he finished, people in the crowd looked about, searching for someone who knew the lad, and finally the cry went up, “It’s a collegian! A collegian!”

  And a patriot. By backing the rebels on the Fields that hot July afternoon, and doing it so firmly, he set himself on a course for life. Indeed, McDougall and the others were so taken by their collegian, they didn’t ask Hamilton just to join, but to join the leadership.

  But he was still in college, so he aided the cause with arguments that he scribbled out in the third-floor room he continued to share with Troup, the heat rising with the warm weather. When an Anglican rector named Samuel Seabury, writing as “A Westchester Farmer,” claimed that the patriots were starting a trade war with England, the pamphlet inspired such wide disgust that scraps of it were tarred and feathered and stuck to whipping posts. But Hamilton took him on in “A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress.” The essay promised to leave the farmer’s folly “exposed, his cavils confuted, his artifices detected, and his wit ridiculed,” and it largely did. Hamilton slyly allowed that he was “neither merchant, nor farmer,” never hinting he was actually just a callow student, and insisted he wrote only because “I wish well to my country.” He defended the Tea Party, laid out the economic case for a break from England, and went on to observe that any war would not go well for the mother country, as foreign armies rarely win wars of attrition. And then he tossed in the sort of observation that revealed, once again, the fact that for someone so inexperienced, Hamilton could sound very sage. “In common life, to retract an error even in the beginning is no easy task,” he observed. “Perseverance confirms us in it and rivets the difficulty.”