Hamilton set off at a full gallop to Albany, covering sixty miles a day and stopping only to sleep or confer with generals in the field, including Burr’s mentor General Israel Putnam. On November 5, with winter coming on, he finally hurried in to see Gates. For all of Gates’s bulk, Hamilton saw a man without substance—vain, stuffy, feeble. English by birth, he was an illegitimate son of a duke’s maid, which might have aroused Hamilton’s sympathy but did not. Overstuffed, with spectacles that slid down his nose, Gates was called “Granny” Gates for a reason.
At first Hamilton tried to persuade Gates that Washington needed two of Gates’s brigades while Gates did not. But Gates had no interest in giving in to an overweening schoolboy. Hamilton persisted: Washington must have them. Finally, Gates allowed he might be able to part with one of the three brigades in a General Patterson’s regiment, but Hamilton knew he’d selected the worst of the three and demanded better. Finally, Gates relented and allowed him to take the better. But Hamilton was still not satisfied, and, with considerable exasperation, Gates gave him the full two he sought, one from Patterson, one from Putnam.
On his return, Hamilton discovered that Putnam had not delivered on his promise. “I am astonished,” he began, plainly furious. “And alarmed beyond measure to find all his Excellency’s views have been hitherto frustrated and that no single step of those I mentioned has been taken to afford him the aid he absolutely stands in need of and by delaying which the case of America is put to the utmost conceivable hazard.” It was brilliant to make this Washington’s request, not his, and make clear that Washington was asking not for himself, but for the good of the country.
Putnam saw no choice but to oblige him. It was another triumph over a powerful elder who might have obliterated him. Washington was overjoyed, but Hamilton was utterly drained by the negotiations, so spent he could scarcely stay on his horse and had to stop in Windsor, Connecticut, to rest. There, shivering from icy chills and a burning fever, he dropped into bed at the home of a friend named Dennis Kennedy. His condition was so extreme, it looked to Kennedy like Hamilton might not survive, but after several frightening days the fever finally broke, and he was able to continue on his way.
LEARNING OF BURR’S experience at using relatively untrained troops to defend natural passageways, Washington put him and his Malcolms in the Gulph, an opening cut by a slender stream through the low hills encircling the patriots’ winter camp at Valley Forge. It was a freezing cold, sodden, nasty place that made for a devil’s Christmas all too reminiscent of the Quebec campaign, and it froze whatever soldiers it didn’t kill. The idea was to keep the British from bursting through and hacking the patriots to bits with artillery and musket fire. But the spot was so raw and desolate, the previous occupants had taken to staging false alarms, just for some excitement. Burr would have to teach the men some discipline. In the dead of winter, the men were not overjoyed by the relentless drilling that Burr required, or by the fact that he had a way of sneaking up on them when they least expected it. Finally, some of the men decided they’d had enough and had the remedy: murder him. But Burr had spies among the mutineers, and he emptied all their cartridges. At parade the next day, when the leader leapt out of line with a shout, “Now is the time, boys,” aimed his musket at Burr, and squeezed the trigger—it produced nothing more than an ominous click. Burr unsheathed his sword and brought it sharply down on the man’s arm, nearly severing it. The surgeon detached it later, with nothing for the pain.
While Burr was off with his Malcolms at the Gulph, Hamilton was quartered with Washington and the other officers in the handsome stone house of Isaac Potts, while more than ten thousand men, many of them scarcely clothed, many more half dead from hunger or disease, did their best to shelter themselves from the brutal cold in makeshift cabins of branches and loose timber. The snow was streaked with blood from men going barefoot, their skin rubbed raw, and, as the famine worsened, the corpses mounted. Burdened by the strains of war in any case, Washington’s spirits drooped at the suffering of his troops. His struggles were compounded by the threats of insurrection against him by the vainglorious General Gates. His cause was being pushed by a scheming brigadier general, Thomas Conway, an Irishman who’d trained with the French army, pushing the Gates cause to a broader conspiracy of the so-called Conway Cabal (with Burr a quiet sympathizer). When Washington got his eyes on Conway’s sneering critique of him, meant only for Gates, he responded with uncharacteristic fury. At the height of his power, he could have pounded the two men into the ground, but now Washington had to watch while Congress appointed Gates president of its Board of War, making him Washington’s supervisor. And it made Conway inspector general. It was as if their coup had succeeded.
At Valley Forge, as Hamilton gradually recovered his health after the trials of early December, he turned increasingly to those books he toted around with him, expanding his list of classics to include philosophers like Bacon, Hobbes, and Montaigne even as he boned up on the essential principles of economics with a massive, two-volume Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, divined political essentials from the Greeks and Romans, and amused himself with the tales of ambition in Plutarch. Even in the midst of an unbearable winter, with pain and starvation all about him, he spent every free minute poring over his books, questing for a bigger future for himself in this rich, new country he was then beginning to imagine.
THAT WAS NOT the end of the political machinations against Washington, for by that June, there was another general spoiling to take his place as commander in chief: Charles Lee, the one who had been passed over once before. Nearly two years back, he’d foolishly gotten himself captured by the British in a tavern and had only recently been released. But that didn’t keep him from returning to his noisome ways as a self-appointed military genius. Despite his absurd mishap, he would not let go of the idea that he knew better than Washington how to fight a war, and he immediately took to overruling the battle plan for the critical fight with Howe’s army at Monmouth Court House in Freehold, New Jersey. When Washington refused to oblige, Lee went ahead into battle—only to defy Washington’s order to strike at the British rear guard, and retreat instead. Infuriated, Washington leveled Lee with a blast of profanity “till the leaves shook on the trees,” as another general put it.
With that, Washington ordered Lee to remove himself from the fray, while he took over, riding one resplendent horse after another, as each one dropped in the hundred-degree heat. The only officer to come close to keeping up with him was Hamilton, who was as happy as a colt to be on the battlefield again, tearing this way and that, urging some troops on, instructing others to pull back, until finally his horse was shot out from under him, and he pitched forward to the ground, hurt badly enough that he couldn’t continue.
LEADING ON HIS Malcolms, the dark-eyed Burr fought valiantly at Monmouth too. Serving under Lord Stirling, now a major general, Burr spotted a small company of redcoats trying to slip away from a bombardment, emerging from a copse at one end of a ravine below him. Burr signaled his men to give chase, when one of Washington’s aides raced up with orders to stay where he was. That left all the Malcolms terribly exposed to cannon fire, annihilating Burr’s second-in-command, knocking Burr’s horse out from under him, and leaving all the men to roast in the heat. Delirious from heatstroke and stricken with violent headaches, Burr retired from the field of battle and never returned to it. He wrote Washington afterward asking to “retire from pay and duty” until he was well again, and Washington granted the request “until your health is so far reestablished as to enable you to do your duty”—a crisp message that may have been penned by Hamilton. Although the fight at Monmouth was in June, Burr wasn’t ready to report for service again until the end of November, for he had something he deemed more important to attend to. When he was able, Washington asked him to perform some reconnaissance, gathering information about the British troop movements along the Hudson. In this, Washington knew his man. Burr did well in the shadows.
NEITHER SIDE EMERGED victorious at Monmouth, but Washington ended up routing his errant general Lee by slapping him with a court-martial for ignoring the orders of his commander. Hamilton was one of the witnesses against Lee, and his testimony in the trial, which ran twenty-six laborious sessions, revealed his temper. Lee himself performed the cross-examination, accusing Hamilton of saying one thing in the field and another in court. “I did not,” Hamilton fired back. “I said something to you in the field expressive of an opinion that there appeared in you no want of that degree of self-possession, which proceeds from a want of personal intrepidity.” Even in a fury, Hamilton was never shy about the most baroque expression. The court found Lee guilty of three counts and suspended him from command. But Lee would not let the matter drop and encouraged his minions to go after Washington and Hamilton, too. One of his supporters was Burr, who had reasons of his own to be irritated at Washington. His endorsement of Lee has been lost, but Lee’s reply gives a pretty good idea of what was in it, as Lee says that in his retirement from the military, he would return to Virginia and grow tobacco—a dig at the commander in chief, who had once done that and aspired to again—“which I find is the best school to form a consummate general.” After Lee repeated such vituperations in print, John Laurens decided that enough was enough and challenged him to a duel.
Duels were surprisingly common during a war that offered plenty of killing already. To a French observer it was a “rage” that had reached an “incredible and scandalous point.” But they did at least offer a means of resolving disputes quickly, without a cumbersome court-martial. Theoretically, by the code of honor that governed duels, only the man who’d been directly accused—Washington, in this case—could make such a challenge, but when Laurens spoke for him, Lee accepted. Laurens picked Hamilton as his second.
The duel was fought on December 23, 1778, in a snowy wood outside Philadelphia. Every duel is fought by its own rules, and these were especially murderous, as the two duelists stood at the customary ten paces, pistols in hand, and then walked toward each other and commenced firing when they were just six paces apart. From there, it might seem impossible to miss, but nerves are a factor even for military men, and once the two men started to close on each other, only Laurens was able to hit the mark, bloodying Lee on his right side. After a hit, both sides have the option of demanding a second round; at first Lee did demand it, and Hamilton wanted to honor his request and finish off this usurper. But then Lee reconsidered and issued a statement saying that he “esteemed General Washington” and would never again speak ill of him. Laurens deemed this satisfactory, and he and Hamilton galloped away to share the glorious adventure with their third musketeer, Lafayette, at a nearby tavern.
THIRTEEN
A Lady with a Beautiful Waist
EVEN MORE THAN most wars, the Revolutionary War was horrendously destructive—to minds, bodies, property, and order—but it was creative, too, and Hamilton and Burr both saw their essential personalities forged and hardened by the conflict. Hamilton had wished for a war, and now it was doing everything he’d hoped, vaulting him to the military pinnacle as Washington’s indispensable man, and it did only a little less for Burr, as it gave him the confidence to trust his instincts, no matter how unconventional. Both men were tested—Hamilton by the strain of running a war and Burr by the fearful dangers of fighting one. The war fostered Hamilton’s sense of order; it brought out Burr’s quiet savagery.
And then it delivered them something else.
IN DECEMBER OF 1779, General Washington shifted his encampment from Princeton to the farming village of Morristown. Protected by a low ring of mountains, it was just twenty-five miles west of New York City and allowed Washington to monitor the massive British army and quickly contest any move General Gage might make on Philadelphia. But it was hardly a pleasant refuge. Fierce as the preceding winter in Valley Forge had been, this one immediately threatened to be far worse, as the temperatures started plunging in late fall, and blizzards would eventually heap up as much as six feet of snow in twenty-eight snowfalls, leaving his men—about eighty-five hundred altogether—shivering in frigid huts they’d hewed out of the woods and gnawing on sticks or sucking a tea of boiled boot leather for sustenance. Any soldiers who schemed to save themselves at the expense of the regiment were whipped nearly to death if their plans were uncovered.
Already depressed not to have been offered a field command by Washington, and saddled with the endless letters and ledger accounts of his administrative duties, Hamilton had not been cheered by the change of scene, although his lot as an officer was infinitely better than that of the enlisted men. With Washington and the rest of his senior staff, Hamilton was billeted in Judge Jacob Ford’s mansion, a stately white house with green trim that commanded the village. He slept upstairs in a room with two others and worked out of the wooden hut adjoining. In a letter to Laurens he declared himself “disgusted with everything in this world but yourself and very few more honest fellows.” The next line revealed the profound depths of his distress: “I have no other wish than as soon as possible to make a brilliant exit. ’Tis a weakness, but I feel I am not fit for this terrestrial country.”
Sensitive to the plunging morale of all the officers, the ever-kindly Martha Washington had the idea of inviting some fashionable young women from town for a series of dinner dances and other social amusements. The Continental Army had often been trailed by “camp ladies,” and the normally good-natured frontiersman John Marshall, the future Supreme Court judge, decried the “lewdness” he’d sometimes witnessed. But these pretty, well-coiffed visitors, in their fine European fashions, were a cut above, as Hamilton—never oblivious to the ladies—immediately noticed. Their cheeks reddened by a few miles’ sleigh ride, their hearts beating with excitement, they could not fail to gain a soldier’s attention.
For these cheerful soirees, Hamilton—apple-cheeked, and resplendent in his brown uniform with yuletide-red vest—often manned the punch bowl and provided the toasts, the better to survey the crowd, and then helped lead the “dancing assemblies” at a nearby storehouse. Washington always claimed that he would never “give in to such amusements,” as an example to the men, but he often attended all the same, cutting a fine figure in a black velvet suit.
If Hamilton was crisply decisive about practical matters, in love he could be flighty, drawn to this one, then that. At first he was taken by a slender beauty named Cornelia Lott, much to the amusement of his fellow officers, one of whom composed a teasing ditty: “Now Hamilton feels the inexorable dart / And yields Cornelia all his heart.” Cornelia soon gave way to a young lovely remembered only as Polly. Then a series of . . . others, as a military friend arranged for Hamilton to visit a nearby boardinghouse where he might find welcome from “a lady with a beautiful waist.” With them all, Hamilton would woo them in person but follow up by letter, his hand racing excitedly across the page.
Such puppyish eagerness was charming, especially from Washington’s cultivated and fine-featured top aide. With those keen eyes of his, no one doted like Hamilton. But his gaze rarely rested on anyone for very long. “In youth and maturity Hamilton loved the ladies, and they him,” one early biographer concluded. “There was scarcely a one he could not charm, and none who could not deceive him. They were susceptible to him because of his attentiveness and flirtatious pleasantries, his polished manners, his gracefulness as a dancer, his wit and his good looks.”
He was no cad, but women too often misunderstood the exact nature of his ardor. The most intimate details of these encounters have been lost, but in the depths of winter, with little privacy, official discouragement of frolicking, and scant access to the French “cundums,” as they were often spelled—the word rarely being printed—it isn’t likely that Hamilton was able to consummate many of these attachments. Hamilton was a man on the prowl and had been ever since he was a randy teenager on Saint Croix. No wonder Martha Washington named her frisky tomc
at Hamilton. Out of jealousy, his male friends called him “Little Hammy” and dismissed his magnetism as a kind of parlor trick. Still, there was never any shortage of women to oblige him.
For Hamilton, however, romance was not a frivolous matter, and his more serious affairs had a military quality, as if the flirtation was a way to test a woman’s defenses and determine the value of her assets. For Hamilton, without family or property, the right wife was key to his aspirations. While he had not yet seen her, he knew what she looked like, and, more important, he knew her qualities. And in knowing those things without knowing her, Hamilton revealed much.
In April of 1779, he’d laid it all out to John Laurens not long after that astonishing proclamation he wrote that amounted to a love letter to him. No sooner had he plighted his troth to Laurens than he drastically changed tone and direction and asked him for a favor: to find him a wife. Laurens could do that, Hamilton implied, since he was already down in South Carolina picking black soldiers for the army. The whole matter is all topsy-turvy, as it is introduced with a bit of jejune humor regarding the length of his nose, but revealing all the same.
For the matter of matrimony was indeed on his mind, so much so that the joke soon wore thin for him, leaving him in the awkward position of asking a man he loved to find him a woman he might love more. But that didn’t keep him from laying out exacting specifications for the perfect wife.
She must be young, handsome (I lay most stress upon a good shape), sensible (a little learning will do), well bred (but she must have an aversion for the word ton), chaste and tender (I am an enthusiast in my notions of fidelity and fondness), of some good nature, a great deal of generosity (she must neither love money nor scolding, for I dislike equally a termagant and an economist). In politics, I am indifferent what sides she may be of; I think I have arguments that will easily convert her to mine. As to religion, a moderate streak will satisfy me. She must believe in god and hate a saint.
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 12