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

by Sedgwick, John

  By March 10, he was confidently writing to his old associate General Alexander McDougall when Washington was ill not just over Washington’s signature, but in his place. “Though he has grown considerably better than he was,” Hamilton informed McDougall, “I find he is so much pestered with matters, which cannot be avoided, that I am obliged to refrain from troubling him on the occasion; especially as I conceive the only answer he would give, may be given by myself.”

  While this was a relationship of convenience, it had its psychological component. The orphaned son and the childless father of his country—it is hard to shake the notion that Hamilton had found a father, and a family, too. But to Hamilton, just to put it that way would have invoked a paternal encumbrance he did not welcome. The last surrogate father, Thomas Stevens, had not lingered in his affection after Hamilton left the island for New York. To Hamilton, a son was subservient, and to him subservience was never appealing.

  With no children of his own, Washington did not have a father’s knack anyway. Pressured by events, he showered on his staff the wrath he withheld from others—when he didn’t withdraw into an icy silence. He preferred, as he once said, “to let my designs appear from my works than by my expressions.” By works, he meant acts. If the two men were father and son, they were remote, wary ones, their many differences consigning them to opposite sides of a wall that neither acknowledged. Washington called his aide “Colonel Hamilton,” who referred to him as “Your Excellency.”

  AND THEN, IN October 1777, the skies around Morristown lifted and brightened, for John Laurens arrived on the scene. A handsome, trim, spirited young man, he was about Hamilton’s age, but nearly as highborn as Burr; his father, an aristocratic Charleston planter, would soon succeed Elias Boudinot as the president of the Continental Congress. Laurens had attended school in Geneva, where he’d learned to fence, draw, and dabble in philosophy; he was brilliant and cocky and fun and blazingly quick—with a remark, an idea, a gambit—which fit his sleek, wiry body and bright eyes. He’d prepared for the law but hated the idea of getting “my Bread by the Quarrels and Disputes of others.” Like Hamilton, he had no shortage of “secretions,” and he’d had a fling with the daughter of an English friend of his father, a girl named Martha Manning, and this led to “an important Change in my Circumstances.” He seems to have had no feelings for Manning whatsoever, but Laurens felt obliged to marry her quickly, before her father required him to stay in England as a condition of marriage. Five months into the pregnancy, the two were duly wed, and shortly after daughter Fanny’s birth, he was gone to fight for his country. He never saw his wife again, and never met his daughter.

  Sailing from England, he arrived in Charleston in April 1777, after the victories at Trenton and Princeton, and that summer, with a note from his father, he applied for a position on Washington’s staff and was appointed an aide-de-camp too. Seeing him, Hamilton must have thought he was seeing himself with an aristocrat’s self-assurance. One portrait shows Laurens with one hand on his hip, the other on the hilt of a long, graceful sword. Laurens must have seen in Hamilton what comes of a man who can create himself. From the first, they were nearly inseparable, almost like lovers. The fraternal tightness recalls Hamilton’s bond with Ned Stevens, and even evokes his relationship with Burr; that’s the darkly obsessive version, but it operated at a similar depth of manly intimacy. Laurens, Stevens, and Burr were all of the same physical type—short, slender, alert, sensitive—and all of them, in their different ways, captivated him.

  Shortly after he arrived, Laurens’s wife, Martha, begged him to allow her to sail over with their daughter, but Laurens insisted such a sea voyage was too dangerous. He would remain with his other family, Washington’s, with Hamilton. He was drawn to several other members of Washington’s staff, especially Richard Meade, to whom he professed an “unbounded and inviolable attachment.” It was a world of men, and Laurens delighted in it. He had an extraordinary devil-may-care approach to soldiering, as if he really did not care if he lived or died. In his first battle, at Chadd’s Ford, intended to keep Howe out of Philadelphia, Laurens was hit by a musket ball that passed clean through the flesh of his shoulder and then took a whack from a spent ball on his side, which produced only swelling. Yet he still volunteered to dump lit straw against the front door of a large stone house to smoke out a hundred redcoats crammed inside. That gambit failed, but he lived to regale everyone with the recounting of it.

  But it was Hamilton he loved. It wasn’t long before Laurens was freely addressing him as “My Dear”—and his letters were answered, “I love you.” For educated men like Hamilton and Laurens, male friendship had a classical overlay, by which manliness could include tenderness and sensitivity. It is highly unlikely that Laurens and Hamilton took their affection for each other into the physical realm of what was called “sodomy”—a hanging offense throughout the thirteen states and not likely to be treated any more leniently by Washington in wartime.

  Letters require distance, and there is little record of their intimate life when Laurens and Hamilton were together. It wasn’t until two years later, when Laurens left to recruit black soldiers in South Carolina for the war effort, that Hamilton wrote down what was in his heart, and his letter reveals a man who was quite undone. If Hamilton had striven to create himself as the decisive commander of his own heart, the letter shows that, when it came to love, he was as vulnerable and unsure as any conscript. He writes:

  Cold in my professions, warm in my friendships, I wish, my Dear Laurens, it might be in my power, by action rather than words to convince you that I love you. I shall only tell you that ’til you bade us Adieu, I hardly knew the value you had taught my heart to set upon you. Indeed, my friend, it was not well done. You know the opinion I entertain of mankind, and how much it is my desire to preserve myself free from particular attachments, and to keep my happiness independent of the caprice of others. You should not have taken advantage of my sensibility to steal into my affections without my consent. But as you have done it, and as we are generally indulgent to those we love, I shall not scruple to pardon the fraud you have committed, on condition that for my sake, if not for your own, you will always continue to merit the partiality, which you have artfully instilled into me.

  It is a startling letter, so startling that it might read like a piece of romantic comedy at a gentlemen’s club, with hairy-chested men throwing on ladies’ dresses and speaking in falsetto. But this is Hamilton, and it seems he is finally uncorking years of longing, which take on a sexual cast but may be simply an eagerness for a spiritual union with someone worthy of it. The letter “approached the tenderness of female attachment,” Hamilton’s son acknowledged uneasily, but if so, it is only because we ascribe such yearning to the female side of our being. It is love, but it is more than that, as it draws on years of silent yearning for someone who can meet him where he is. Laurens, because he is Hamilton in another guise, is one of the few to qualify as an object of his desire.

  Soon after Laurens’s arrival, a third young officer, this one the ascendant young French nobleman the Marquis de Lafayette, galloped into their midst, drawn to the mystique of Washington, the cause of liberty, and a chance for la gloire. Offering contacts in the French court and bearing a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, he wrung from Washington, increasingly inundated with French seeking to bolster their social credentials with military ones, an appointment as an honorary major general, a title that granted the bearer everything except troops and pay. A ravishing nineteen-year-old, with lightly arched eyebrows and a powdered wig that smelled of nobility, Lafayette could be flighty and whimsical, but he was fearless and would do anything for victory.

  Hamilton, Laurens, Lafayette, all three of them young, brash, brilliant, and glamorously handsome, quickly formed a three-way attachment that was unusual by the standards of a ragtag army. It was advanced by Lafayette’s native French, which both Americans spoke freely, creating for themselves
a private line of communication, a kind of whisper no one else could hear. But there was a common panache, too, like that of Dumas’s Three Musketeers, in the view of Hamilton’s grandson, if a gruesome war of attrition had room for such plucky chivalry.

  THAT SUMMER OF 1777, encamped in the highlands above the Hudson River, Washington was mystified to discover from a variety of dispatches that the British troops had vanished. Apparently, sometime in July, Howe had boarded more than eighteen thousand men onto 267 ships in New York Harbor and sailed them out to sea past the horizon line. They could have been bound for almost anywhere on the American coast, if not for their home port in England, but another month revealed the answer: Chesapeake Bay, and from there most likely to seize the capital city of Philadelphia, rout the Continental Congress meeting there in the statehouse, and further demoralize the already frightened colonists and their bedraggled army.

  Washington was determined to defy the British and make a stand at the quiet, meandering Brandywine Creek, just past the Schuylkill outside Philadelphia, where the British would need to pass if they were to attack the city. But first he had to unchain Hamilton from his desk at Morristown and dispatch him to destroy a flour mill in the vicinity before it resupplied the enemy with bread to feed its troops. Accompanied by the unforgettably named “Light-Horse Harry” Lee III, a brisk cavalry officer whom Burr had known at Princeton, and a few other cavalrymen, Hamilton located the mill on the river shore and quickly set it ablaze. But the fire drew the attention of several dozen helmeted British dragoons—mounted infantrymen—who approached at a gallop. Lee and some of the soldiers tried to draw them off by bolting across the fields, but the British let them go and doubled back to pursue the easier prey: Hamilton, who’d scrambled into a flat-bottomed boat berthed by the shore to make his crossing. A hail of grapeshot dropped his horse into the muck and ripped up the boat, an unwieldy vessel that was making slow headway across the water. One of Hamilton’s men gave out a scream as he was shot dead; another was ripped open by grapeshot. Seeing some of the dragoons jump into another boat to chase them, Hamilton ordered his men to leap over the side and swim for it. Safe and dripping on the far shore, he dashed off a panicked note for a horseman to take to John Hancock, saying Congress ought to leave Philadelphia “immediately without fail.” The British were descending on the city.

  Then he gathered his men and rushed to rejoin the army, where Washington’s family had given him up for dead and greeted him with tears. Before ordering Philadelphia’s evacuation, Washington assigned Hamilton the rough duty of going from house to house requisitioning supplies—blankets, clothes, for the desperate soldiers—from the hard-pressed inhabitants, and doing it “with as much delicacy and discretion as the nature of the business demands.” A sensitive task that Hamilton performed flawlessly, depriving the British of essential supplies and delivering them to the Americans, every item duly noted in his account book, a receipt delivered to its owner.

  Meanwhile, Laurens was at Chadd’s Ford on the Brandywine, where Washington expected Howe to cross, as he’d given every indication of doing, and press on to Philadelphia, twenty-five miles to the northeast. But it was another of those feints that too often fooled the Americans, and Howe, in a heavy mist well before dawn, wheeled due north and rushed to outflank the Americans’ right by crossing Jeffries’ Ford well upstream. When Washington hurried to block them, Howe’s Hessians went at Chadd’s Ford after all, which Laurens had been left to hold under the command of General Nathanael Greene, and which he did valiantly amid all the terror that the Hessians could bring down upon him. Lafayette was there, too, and he was shot in the leg, but he was astonished that Laurens survived the carnage. “It was not his fault he was not killed or wounded,” he marveled afterward. “He did everything that was necessary to procure one or t’other.” As the Continental forces fell back, the British poured into Philadelphia in late September as the congressional delegates fled. Hurrying off by carriage, John Laurens’s father, Henry, spotted the injured Lafayette and rushed him to surgeons in Bethlehem.

  TWELVE

  The Malcolms

  WHILE HAMILTON HAD moved into the affections of Washington back at Harlem Heights, Burr had brooded over the fact that Washington did not offer more appreciation for his saving Silliman’s brigades from being destroyed or captured, likely bound for hideous incarceration in the hellhole of a British prison ship. It was an “intentional slight,” he groused. So it wasn’t a good time for his old friend Ogden to tease him about his slow progress up the ranks, as Burr was merely a major, whereas Ogden was a lieutenant colonel, one step up, on his way to becoming a full colonel. Burr claimed to be “happy in the esteem of my good old general,” Ol’ Put. When the promotion finally did arrive, it made Burr only a lieutenant colonel, when Burr had been expecting far more. Burr had no compunctions about complaining about it directly to Washington, declaring himself “constrained,” as he said, to “observe” that he would now have to suffer the indignity of reporting to officers “younger in the service and junior officers in the last campaign.” Was he being punished for some “misconduct”? He didn’t mention the specifics: his heroism at Quebec, his valor in the retreat from Manhattan, but asked only, and rather pathetically, hadn’t his conduct been marked by “uniform diligence”? Surely this was an “accident,” as “a decent regard to rank is both proper and necessary.” If Burr saw this as a plea for justice, Washington considered it an affront from a subordinate who had an inflated view of himself.

  Bad as it was to have received such a limited promotion, it was worse to have been moved from Ol’ Put to the newly formed regiment created by a jumbo-size New York merchant named William Malcolm, who knew everything about commerce and nothing about war. Colonel Malcolm had bought a colonelcy by recruiting, outfitting, and equipping what amounted to a private regiment—dubbed the Malcolms, appropriately—out of his own pocket. Malcolm needed a tutor in war, and he wasn’t entirely pleased to discover a slim, dark-eyed boy sliding down off his horse to shake his hand as his aide-de-camp. But Malcolm soon knew better. The boy knew how to fight. Malcolm left the training of his raw recruits to Burr while he retired with his family to his country home, twenty miles from the action. “You shall have the honor of disciplining and fighting the regiment,” he told Burr, “while I will be its father.” So Burr took it upon himself to create some soldiers, drilling them, bolstering them with small comforts he purchased himself, and whipping them as necessary.

  When they were finally ready for combat, the Malcolms were given the task of guarding the “back door” to the forts along the Hudson through a fourteen-mile gap in the Ramapo Mountains. Burr was still training his Malcolms when, late in September, a band of marauding loyalists from New York swept through Bergen County, just south of his outpost, ripping up farms as they went, trampling crops, breaking fences, and scattering horses and cattle. Thinking the Malcolms too green, General Putnam had advised Burr to hide them in the mountains. But Burr would have none of that. Battle ready or not, he would take his men to the enemy, and that September, as the summer light was fading, he sent them on a forced march deep into the enemy territory of Bergen County. Leaving his men to rest along the Hackensack River, Burr pressed on alone later that night to reconnoiter. Stealing through the fields in the moonlight, he came across an enemy picket of thirty men, all asleep except for two lonely sentinels. He crept back to gather some soldiers and quietly led them back to the site. As they approached, one sentry called out for Burr and his men to halt and identify themselves. Burr raised his pistol and shot the man dead. Then he waved his men on, and in moments they took all the rest of the sleepy picket as their prisoners.

  When the news broke about Burr’s work, hundreds of farmers clamored to join his Malcolms, but there was no enemy for them to fight. The loyalists had slunk back to New York. Now Washington had new plans for Burr and his Malcolms—to join him for the winter in the frozen hell of Valley Forge.

  WHILE HAMILT
ON WAS with Washington in Monmouth, New Jersey, the Americans won the first great victory of the war. Unfortunately for Washington, he was not the general involved. Rather, it was the insufferable Horatio Gates who had beaten “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, a craven toady who never gave his full attention to the battlefield if there was a voluptuous young lady or a chilled jeroboam somewhere in sight, as there usually was. The battle was in upstate New York, in Saratoga, and Gates had so thoroughly overwhelmed the redcoats that the patriots had taken prisoner nearly six thousand of them, making this the Americans’ most explosive victory since Trenton, and infinitely larger. The French, ready to come in against their perennial enemy if they could be beaten, were now ready to take the American side, dramatically increasing the chances for victory.

  Saratoga could not have come at a better time—or enhanced the reputation of a worse general. For all Washington’s talk of “family,” his generals were never part of it. A fractious lot, most of them were more interested in buffing their reputations than in advancing the cause, and Gates was probably the best example. After Saratoga, Gates was lionized as America’s preeminent general, ignoring that Washington deserved that distinction. The matter came to a head when Washington needed more troops to carry the battle to the enemy in Pennsylvania, but Gates wanted to keep his troops in New York. Washington sent the only man he trusted for such a sensitive assignment.