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

by Sedgwick, John

  Finally, on October 29, Arnold’s team spotted the first houses along Chaudière Lake, meaning that Quebec was in reach. Of the original 1,100 men, only 650 had survived the passage. But by then, Montgomery had captured Montreal, and he was to be coming downriver with supplies and reinforcements. Arnold continued to the Saint Lawrence and soon saw the city rising on its promontory across the river.

  The British had filled the river with their own patrol boats to intercept any force that tried to cross. Somehow, Arnold found enough canoes to ferry his men past the British patrols. But on the Quebec side, the British had gotten wind of Arnold’s plans and brought in heavy reinforcements. Even with Montgomery’s men, the American forces were outnumbered two to one; the defenders were fresh, experienced, and numerous, and they were seemingly ready for any attack. But the Americans had come too far to turn back. Arnold sent Matthias Ogden under a white flag of truce to climb up to the citadel and try to bluff the British commanders into surrendering to superior forces, but the British sent off a cannon blast before he could even enter the city’s main gate.

  The vainglorious Arnold still seethed from the indignity of being passed over for the head of the Northern Department, whereas Montgomery would never keep track of anything as absurd as rank. But both men had a reckless side, and they both eschewed caution. They decided their only choice was forward, into the teeth of the opposition, no matter what. They’d storm the citadel, hoping to overwhelm the defenses with a full-out assault. The men would have been excused if they’d had a bitter sense of foreboding. To rouse themselves, they pinned a piece of paper to their uniforms—LIBERTY OR DEATH.

  High on a rocky promontory, the city’s defenses made Quebec a virtually impregnable fortress, probably the most forbidding in all North America, and guarded by sixteen hundred men. Climbing up three hundred feet from the riverbed, the attacking forces might have some surprise on their side, and they planned to have more by waiting for heavy weather to conceal their movements. When the first snowstorm blew in on December 31, Montgomery and Arnold began their ascent from two sections of the river, but the storm proved blinding and brought sheets of ice that impeded the climb. Still, some of the men might have reached the top but for a few young Quebec defenders, about two-thirds of the way up. While others fled in panic at the sight of the hundreds of rebels swarming their position, one stayed long enough to set off a cannon, and on that one blast, the entire campaign turned. Quebec’s defenders higher up scrambled to repel the assault, raining down grapeshot on the nearly defenseless men below.

  Arnold himself was felled by a musket ball that cut through the back of his leg and left him unable to walk. He was carried to the army’s hospital while men were slaughtered all around him in a fusillade of musket shot and cannonballs raining down from a height. Burr was right behind Montgomery, making for the gates. Montgomery turned and shouted reassurance. “We’ll be in the fort in two minutes!” Then he raised his sword to signal his men to charge a log house he assumed was lightly defended. But the British inside let loose a burst of artillery and grapeshot that cut Montgomery to ribbons. He staggered backward and died where he fell, his sword arm still raised. Two aides fell too, but not Burr. Rather than retreat to safety, he hoisted the larger man’s body onto one slim shoulder and struggled with it through the heavy snow toward the American lines, creating the first iconic moment of the young war. It was the chaplain, Spring, who first described the feat “amidst a shower of musquetry,” and then another Princeton classmate, the poet Hugh Henry Brackenridge, took Burr’s act to another, possibly more dubious, plane in his poem “The Death of General Montgomery, in Storming the City of Quebec,” which has Burr falling on the general’s corpse and kissing his face before hoisting it onto his back.

  The assault on Quebec was a tragic failure. Fifty died, thirty-four were wounded, and 372 were captured, including virtually everyone under Arnold’s command, and this was after his deadly bushwhack up through Maine. But Montgomery’s heroic death offered some redemption, as he pressed on into the teeth of the enemy. In dying, he became the first tragic hero of the revolution. Burr acquired noble stature too. As another Princeton graduate, William Bradford, a future state supreme court justice, told him, “Your praise is now in every man’s mouth.” The Connecticut reverend Joseph Bellamy’s chatty son Jonathan wrote Burr of a dream he’d had in which Burr had become Montgomery, to “stand up, clasp your hand upon your sword, look so fiercely . . . it almost frightened me.” But the whole vision filled Bellamy with “exquisite delight.” Stockbridge’s Theodore Sedgwick, who had new reason to befriend Burr, praised the “young, gay, enterprising martial genius.” Just the idea of it marked the culmination of the fierce ordeal that had come before, where Burr had survived the rigors of the wilderness and passed that most fundamental test of manliness, endurance. While he’d used his family credentials for preferment, he’d earned this accomplishment entirely on his own—“dirty, ragged, moneyless and friendless,” as he proudly said later. In the process, Burr attained the glory he’d sought. In the course of just a few wintry months, he’d emerged from dreamy adolescence to steely manhood and seized patriot consciousness as a man of honor.

  TEN

  Liberty or Death

  WHEN HAMILTON HEARD the news from Lexington and Concord toward the end of April 1775, he rushed to enlist, joining a uniform company in Manhattan dubbed the Hearts of Oak and headed by a Captain Fleming, who immediately set to work turning the rough volunteers into polished soldiers. Hamilton memorized Fleming’s instructions, and every morning, he pulled on a makeshift uniform of a short green coat and a cocked hat emblazoned with the same motto Burr bore on his chest, “Liberty or Death,” and shouldered his musket to go practice in the Saint George’s graveyard. There, among the mottled stones, he’d march about for an hour or more, halting here or there, as if he’d spotted the enemy, to ram some powder and shot down the musket barrel, take aim at an imagined redcoat, and pretend to fire. His friends soon marveled that he’d become “exceedingly expert.”

  Still a student, and always a student, Hamilton read everything on soldiering that he could find, just as Burr did. This was new terrain, and for their own sakes as much as for their country’s, they would both have to master it. If Burr’s reading smacked of the armchair general, Hamilton dug into technical details as if war were a piece of engineering. He thought ahead to the eventual peace, too, jotting down in his paybook, his son recalled, “tables of political arithmetic, considerations on commerce, the value of the relative productions which are its objects, the balance of trade, the progress of population, and the principles on which depend the value of a circulating medium.”

  But a revolution is a battle of ideas, and Hamilton began to put forth his in open letters, including an early one on the Quebec Act passed by Parliament the previous year. Burr may have raised a musket against it, but Hamilton lifted a pen. Hamilton saw the act, ostensibly a guarantee of full religious freedom for Catholic French Canadians, as an affront to colonists everywhere in the New World, as they would now have to contend with creeping papacy, the expansion of byzantine French law, and an encroachment of the province of Quebec well south of the Great Lakes down the Ohio River. As such, it was yet another example, Hamilton argued, of the British ministry’s “dark designs” to enlist the pope and his black-robed clerics in a “systematic project of absolute power” over all of Canada—and who knew where else from there. His letter went even beyond that dire specter, to demonstrate the necessity of disentangling church from state in the new America. Hamilton was only twenty, but he was already showing the vast and subtle reach of his mind—fiercely polemical, but exquisitely sensitive to the delicate interplay of religion, economics, culture, politics, and war.

  In Manhattan, Hamilton was well positioned to feel the tensions between the colonies and the Crown, for, of all the thirteen colonies, New York was the one in the most tenuous balance between the revolutionaries and the loyalists. I
t seemed a puff of air would shift it from one side to the other. After the rousing fights in Lexington and Concord, the invigorated revolutionaries threw out the Tory-dominated Assembly and put in a patriotic Provincial Congress, which proudly sent its representatives to the Second Continental Congress gathering in secret in the grandly Georgian statehouse in Philadelphia, no spectators allowed.* Under the leadership of Boston’s irascible John Adams, the Congress was frantically trying to put a proper Continental Army in the field. He’d nominated Washington, already a delegate to the Congress, to serve as commander in chief. Well positioned as the hero of the French and Indian War and a resident of mighty Virginia besides, he was clearly anticipating the appointment, as he appeared in his military uniform, and he’d be chosen without significant opposition on June 15, 1775.

  When New York’s representatives returned to the city later that month, they proudly brought Washington with them. Hamilton was in the crowd lining Broad Street watching his new commander in chief pass by in a fine carriage drawn by a pair of shining white horses. Hamilton could see little beyond a massive Roman head pointed resolutely forward, never once acknowledging the crowd, and the bright purple sash that slanted across his blue uniform. Tall and stately, Washington always conveyed tremendous self-assurance, his posture rarely deviating from plumb vertical. It was as if, amid the battles and intrigue, he alone remained above the fray. “No Harum-scarum, ranting, swearing fellow,” went one assessment, “but sober, steady, calm.”

  Beside him rode General Philip Schuyler, the commander of the Northern Forces under whom Burr would soon serve—via Montgomery and Arnold—in Quebec. Tremendously wealthy through a propitious marriage into a Dutch merchant family, he had created a vast estate, with a fine brick mansion in Albany. No one ever called Schuyler handsome. He was fleshy and thickset, with beady eyes under shaggy brows on either side of a prominent nose. But he was imposing, and wherever he went, he left his stamp. In two years, he would be Hamilton’s father-in-law.

  While this was a moment for some pomp, Washington did not tarry. After a brief appearance in the city, he pressed on to Cambridge hoping to rouse the sodden soldiers that would so distress Burr to capitalize on the tremendous victory at the Battle of Bunker Hill in nearby Charlestown, which had put a scare into the British.

  Besides, New York was hardly a parade ground. Hamilton could see that it was a prime military target. Valuable in itself, this jewel of an island was also the gateway to the fertile Hudson River valley, land of the Dutch barons, and fervidly patriotic New England to the east. If Quebec secured the Saint Lawrence for the British, Manhattan guarded the Hudson for the Americans. But Manhattan would be almost impossible to defend, as the ferocious Royal Navy could bomb the island from almost any direction, while the Americans lacked a single serviceable ship to fend them off. Worse, Manhattan was not solidly patriotic, but riddled with Tories or Tory sympathizers, all of them emboldened by a proclamation from their king that the colonists were in open rebellion. This made for spies everywhere. No plan for the city’s defense would remain secret for long.

  The schism also made for turmoil that put Hamilton back in the discomfort of divided loyalties. Just as he’d protected the granny Myles Cooper, he helped out a Tory printer named Rivington who’d printed too much loyalist opinion in his New-York Gazetteer for the liking of a gang of patriots, who burst in his door one night to ransack his house and destroy his print shop. They apparently didn’t realize that Rivington printed patriot articles, too, including the work of Hamilton. Appalled by the “contempt and disregard of all authority,” Hamilton complained bitterly about the ruffians to John Jay, whom Hamilton had known from his wooing days in Elizabethtown, despairing that such an attitude could lead to chaos. It would create a mob, in short. Slovenly, liquored up, ignorant—they were like a pack of wild dogs that would never obey. Hamilton found that terrifying; it was his worst fear of democracy.

  If anyone had any doubts about British sea power, they got a better idea that August when the Asia, with sky-high masts and iron sides studded with sixty-four guns, breezed into New York Harbor. It was like watching a mountain sail by, but it did not draw a single shot in opposition. The Asia dropped anchor offshore, furled its sails, and remained there as if to fish, not more than a hundred feet from the Battery. From there, a single well-aimed blast from one of its cannons could have burned down the whole city, but the Asia held its fire. At that point, England needed to show restraint. If it rained down too much destruction on the city, it would rouse the patriots to a fury and lose the sympathy of the loyalists on whom it depended.

  Although Hamilton was not yet a soldier, he already thought like one, and he realized that the seamen on the Asia might try to make off with the patriots’ only cannons, by Fort George, down by the Battery. Late one night, he led some other students to the shore, where they all roped themselves to the heavy cannons and like oxen hauled them back up the hill to the common by the college. There, for safekeeping, they buried them under the Liberty Pole. They were still at it, hauling and burying, when dawn broke and the officers of the Asia could see what the students had done. In a fury, the ship let loose with its big guns on Hamilton and the others. The students scrambled to safety, but Hamilton realized that his jovial friend Hercules Mulligan had left Hamilton’s musket down by the fort. Hamilton dashed through the firestorm to retrieve it, wrote Mulligan, “with as much unconcern as if the vessel had not been there.” Hamilton returned unharmed to the college. In frustration, the Asia’s gunners dropped a few cannonballs on the Fraunces Tavern, opening a gaping hole in its roof. But the gesture was largely futile—no one was inside at that hour, and it served only to raise the ire of its many patrons.

  The war for New York was on.

  ALEXANDER MCDOUGALL, FORMERLY the leader of the Sons of Liberty, now a colonel in the hastily formed First New York Regiment, picked Hamilton to be captain of an artillery company. Hamilton had to round up his own men, and, together with the silly and ubiquitous Mulligan, he collected twenty-five in the first afternoon and soon had sixty-eight. Many of the men were immigrants who entered their names in his ledger only as wobbly X’s, but Hamilton accorded everyone the same pay and rations, regardless of background. Hamilton did, however, insist they all look sharp “to stimulate [their] vanity.” As he explained: “Smart dress is essential [or a] soldier is exposed to ridicule and humiliation.” He dug into his own education fund to outfit his soldiers in handsome sky-blue coats with shiny brass buttons and gleaming white shoulder belts. And, following Captain Fleming, he trained the men hard. This won Hamilton the admiration of General Nathanael Greene, who saw Hamilton working his men on the parade ground one afternoon. An iron forger who was himself self-taught in military ways, Greene was impressed by how much this young captain seemed to know about soldiering without ever having gone to war. He would remember that later.

  An ingenious onetime bookseller, the gloriously fat Henry Knox had somehow managed to sled the army’s massive guns all the way from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston, from where they blasted the hated British ships to break the siege of the city. The ships flew north to mass in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then stormed down the coast under the command of the rheumy-eyed Admiral Richard Howe, bound for New York, bearing much of the British army with them. As the ships approached, they seemed to darken the skies with their vast sails, and many of the city’s patriots fled in a panic, leaving the city’s Tories to exult in their newfound dominance.

  To repel the invaders, Washington had relied on the intemperate General Charles Lee. A man of considerable military experience in England, he had developed a fevered eccentricity in America, engaging in a duel that cost him two fingers, traveling with a pack of barking hounds, and marrying an American Indian woman—and, for all this, winning himself the derisive epithet “Boiling Water.” Lee had expected to be named commander in chief and was not pleased to come in second, which may have dampened his enthusiasm for the task of defendi
ng the city. He put his few guns on Governors Island out in the bay, in Red Hook along the Brooklyn shore, and along the New Jersey coast of the Hudson; and he sank some decommissioned ships at the mouth of the Hudson too. But it was a paltry effort. Lord Stirling, that inflated cousin of William Livingston, threw up heavy wooden barriers to close off the city’s streets, and his men dug an earthworks that ran clear across the city from the Hudson to the East River to disrupt an invasion from the north. Hamilton’s company set to work building a small protective fort atop Bayard’s Hill, which once stood near present-day Canal and Mulberry Streets.

  Despite such barriers, Washington didn’t think his men could keep the British out of New York for long, not with their numbers and prowess. He was tempted to burn the city to the ground to keep the enemy from seizing anything of value. But he didn’t want patriots to see Manhattan engulfed in flames. Instead, in April of 1776 he hurried back from Cambridge to personally oversee the city’s protection, which did not endear him to General Lee. Washington set up headquarters in a fine mansion on Richmond Hill, a gentle rise not far from the Hudson.

  AFTER THE DISASTROUS Quebec venture, Burr was obliged to linger on there by the Saint Lawrence the entire bone-chilling winter while Arnold waited for a chance to avenge his losses and take the fort, but that chance never came. Ogden meanwhile had received orders to return to New Jersey. When he received no letters from his friend, Burr became increasingly fretful. Rivalrous, Burr wanted Ogden to do well, but not too well, not while he was bivouacked in the snow for months. When he finally learned in May that Ogden had been promoted to lieutenant colonel, Burr’s envy burned through as he lectured his friend on the hazards of success. “Promotion, the caresses of the great and the flatteries of the low are sometimes fatal to the noblest minds,” he counseled. He assured Matt that he would never abandon him. “Rely on the sincerity you never found to fail,” he declared.