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

by Sedgwick, John

  That courtship had culminated in a mad dash to Angelica’s grandparents, the Van Rensselaers, for immediate nuptials. “The ceremony,” the society portraitist John Trumbull reported breathlessly, “passed at the Manor without the knowledge of the Parents.” When they learned of the developments, the parents were beside themselves. General Schuyler “scarcely spoke a dozen words,” it was reported, and Mrs. Schuyler was “in a most violent Passion and said all that Rage & Resentment could inspire.” The marriage survived, but the Schuylers’ fondness for Church took some time to kindle.

  Schuyler was no fool, and he could see that whatever Hamilton lacked in breeding, he more than made up for in capability, and Betsey could do far worse. More to the point, Schuyler could do far worse. It would not hurt him to have an in with Washington or to latch onto a brilliant young man of such energy. Partly to oversee the courtship, the Schuylers moved down to Morristown themselves, and Hamilton paid them a call most every evening, often conversing in French to the burly but surprisingly cultivated general by the fire deep into the night. When Hamilton wrote to ask General Schuyler for his daughter’s hand in marriage in February, he did not have to wait long for a reply. Agreed. Hamilton did not get too swept up in the good news, however. He didn’t tell Laurens about his engagement for three months.

  If there was any doubt that his marriage to Betsey might have been wanting in love, his obvious fondness for her sister Angelica did nothing to dispel it, for Hamilton fell for her hard. It showed what was in Hamilton’s heart when it wasn’t clotted with material calculations, and all the enthusiasm he’d first expended on Kitty Livingston, that great tumble of playfulness and mad passion, was now directed at an utterly unavailable woman who was not just married, but on course to be his sister-in-law. For all his calculating nature, Hamilton could be impetuous, and he had a powerful fondness for the self-destructive act. He couldn’t help it; it was as if some hot lava just bubbled up inside him. The Schuyler sisters were born under different stars: while the firstborn, Angelica, took over the ethereal realms, Elizabeth laid claim to the social proprieties. If Elizabeth was about order, Angelica was about fun. To Hamilton, Angelica was sunshine itself. The relationship revealed a gushing enthusiasm for a woman that ran the gamut from playfulness to desire and back again. From the first, he was so taken by Angelica, and so bad at concealing it, that many people assumed that they were the lovers. A friend congratulated him on his conquest. “No one has seen [Angelica] who has not been pleased with her and she pleased everyone.”

  In a portrait from these years, Trumbull captured much of what was so intoxicating about Angelica, with her bouffant hair, refined nose, and sophisticated air, all suffused with a shimmer of mischief. It was not just Hamilton who fell. She bewitched Thomas Jefferson and the lordly Robert Livingston, too. But, of course, she was married to another, that wildly wealthy John Barker Church, and so Hamilton must marry another, too. As the years proceeded, Hamilton tried to view the sisters as two halves of a whole, as he called them “my beautiful brunettes,” but Angelica would continue to tantalize him as the woman he should never have.

  But it was Betsey he did have, and the wedding service was held at noon on December 14, 1780, in the southeast parlor of the Pastures, the formal interior alive with brilliant light reflecting off the snow outside. With Hamilton’s friends, including Laurens and Lafayette, all taken up by the war, it was only the Schuylers and their many relations who attended. But for James McHenry, a friend from Washington’s staff, the groom was there alone, representing all that remained of his family.

  SIXTEEN

  But a Single Word, Burr

  THE LADY WAS married, as it happened. Mrs. Theodosia Prevost. She lived in Paramus, New Jersey, well inland from the Hudson in a fine house called the Hermitage on an estate of nearly a hundred acres. Burr had probably known her since 1777, when he would have been one of a bevy of officers and gentlemen gathering for a taste of her elegant society, which offered a cultural oasis from the war, a place of music and fine talk. The relationship tightened in August 1778, when Washington picked Burr to escort Theodosia and three loyalist prisoners of war from New Jersey to New York, where he was to deliver the prisoners under a white flag to a British fort. It was a journey of five days in close quarters. And then he came for more.

  It’s unknown now what Prevost looked like. Betsey Schuyler was many times painted, but Theodosia Prevost’s image is recorded only once, in blurry miniature, no more than a half inch high, beside the time on Burr’s pocket watch. The explanation is made clear with the first detailed description of her appearance in the first Burr biography, published by James Parton in 1877. He does not equivocate. “The lady was not beautiful,” he writes. He gives no details except this: “She was slightly disfigured by a scar on her forehead,” although it likely came after the couple met. Nothing more about her appears in any of the contemporary accounts either, including Burr’s own. Not her height, the color of her eyes or hair, her shape, delicacy, any of the usual feminine details. Still, she didn’t lack for admirers, including future president the oafish James Monroe, who sent her a flirtatious note when she fell for Burr, calling her “the most unreasonable creature in existence” for being so obviously in love with Burr instead of himself.

  Theodosia was an unlikely object for Burr’s ardor in other respects as well. She’d been born in England and was married to a British officer, Lieutenant Colonel James Mark Prevost, and—shades of Margaret Moncrieffe—there were questions about her loyalty to the patriot cause. Her two sisters had married British soldiers, her brother had been imprisoned as a Tory sympathizer, Paramus was said to be a virtual province of the Crown, and there were plenty of cruel suggestions among begrudging patriots in town that she herself should be deported and her property seized. Prevost was ten years older than Burr, thirty-four to his twenty-four, and the mother of five children—significant impediments for a man seeking to have a family of his own. And she was of even more frail health than he. It seemed she suffered from an “incurable disorder of the uterus,” a cancer that would kill her, but the symptoms sometimes left her crippled with pain in her abdomen, laudanum—a tincture of opium taken for pain—her only comfort.

  Burr paid no heed to any of these drawbacks. For her medical complaints, Burr had, Theodosia marveled, only “friendly sympathy,” never frustration, at least at first. That may have been one of the bonds between them. Of course, this may have been because he had plenty of ailments of his own. After a day of debilitating headache, he wrote her, “If you could sit by me, and stroke my head with your little hand, it would be well.”

  BY 1780, HE’D settled himself in Albany, studying with Titus Homer, a delegate to the Continental Congress, in preparation for the legal career he’d set aside for the war. The normal course of study took three years. He bargained with the legal authorities to make it one and a half, but even that meant excruciating sixteen-hour days—reminiscent of his brutal schooling—much of it peering at handwritten notes and blurry texts in the flickering candlelight. Because of the distance, his relationship with Theodosia was largely epistolary; anything more would have been adulterous in any case. Sorely pressed, he could promise to devote a quarter of an hour out of his day to write Theodosia. In return, he begged for half an hour of hers but allowed her to split it with the five children, who each should contribute a sheet, even, he wrote, if they set down “but a single word, Burr,” to remember him by. And, when his day was finally done, he begged that she would “visit me in my slumbers.”

  Theodosia had something that Burr prized above everything else: a “cultivated mind.” A clear thinker, well-read, and astute in the ways of the world, Theodosia offered Burr the brilliant and fully equal companion—the ideal woman described by Wollstonecraft—he’d lacked since college and probably even there. The lovers joined over books, a notion that would have left the Hamiltons mystified, and one that Burr himself would have found inconceivable before Theodosia
appeared. In late 1781, Burr encouraged Theodosia to install a Franklin stove in a quiet back room, where she could have “a place sacred to love, reflection and books.” Under her influence, the three had become nearly indistinguishable to him. Many of the letters that survive are devoted to discussing the merits of various philosophers, but the epistolary back-and-forth had an unmistakable sexuality, as Burr wrote sending her an “impulse of feeling” that expressed his “whole soul.” Those were the letters Theodosia loved; she was bored by fine writing. “Candour” was what she craved, and the trust that it implied. “You have a heart that feels: a heart susceptible to tender friendship,” she swooned. But she liked his intelligence, too, and like a professor, graded it. “Your opinion of Voltaire pleases me,” she announced, “as it proves your judgment above being biased by the prejudices of others. The English”—her English—“from national jealousy and enmity to the French, detract him.”

  “Burr was a lover of books, a lover of pictures, a lover of everything that distinguishes man from Puritan,” Matthew Davis marveled of his friend, not that he was fully of that persuasion himself. “And it was rare, indeed, in those days, to find a lady in America who had the kind of culture which sympathizes with such tastes.” The interests of most fine ladies, like Betsey, ran to quilting and knitting. And none of them were, says Davis, “familiar with the most recent expressions of European intellect, who could talk intelligently with him about Voltaire, Rousseau and Chesterfield.” Davis sums Theodosia up with a tribute: “[Burr] used to say, in after years, that in style and manners [Theodosia] was without a peer among all the women he had known, and that if his own manners were in any respect superior than other men’s it was due to her.”

  Still, Theodosia was certainly an unexpected choice by Burr; none of her predecessors were remotely like her. Perhaps because it was conducted by letter over a great distance, the courtship is nearly impossible to visualize. There is nothing to see: no walks in the woods, no outings to the theater, no snuggling in bed. There is instead a vacancy filled only by words, and it made a blank that their enemies moved to fill with their own dark speculations. The mystery of it evokes again the shadows that enclose Burr. The fact that no one knew for sure which side Mrs. Prevost, there in shady Paramus, was on makes one wonder how, or if, he knew—and whether that ambiguity was part of the appeal for a man who thrived on mystery.

  This was not an academic matter. Just two summers before, in 1779, a Major John André of the British army was arrested as an accessory to the treasonous schemes of the almost insufferably ambitious Benedict Arnold, the onetime hero who had led Burr in the siege of Montreal. He was now revealed to be a vile traitor for divulging secrets about the American defenses at West Point, endangering countless American lives, if not the cause of independence. Alexander Hamilton was there when Arnold’s plot was exposed. A man of darkness himself, Arnold slipped away to England, but André was tracked and captured and detained in an upstate tavern that served as a temporary jail. Curious to meet a man who seemed daring to one side and despicable to the other, Hamilton went to see him, and he came away impressed with this British major, so cool in the face of a terrible turn of fate.

  The punishment for spying was death, but where Burr had insisted on setting out harsh penalties on his reprobates and watching them meted out, Hamilton now begged Washington instead to place André in a stockade for the rest of the war. Washington would not relent: Major André was to be hung. And Hamilton was there to watch his new friend be taken by cart to the makeshift gallows, where he was obliged to stand in the coffin that was soon to hold him forever. Hamilton’s view of the scene was gauzy, but he detected a “smile of complacency” from André that “expressed the serene fortitude of his mind.” André drew the noose tight around his own neck and bound his own eyes with a white handkerchief. Then, at a signal, the cart lurched forward, leaving André hanging from the rope, his legs kicking briefly in the air.

  Although her husband fled to England, the histrionic Mrs. Arnold, to avoid suspicion, contrived fits of hysteria over her husband’s duplicity, making it seem as though she didn’t have the first idea about his treasonous activities. When attention finally shifted away from her, she paid a visit to her good friend Mrs. Prevost at the Hermitage. There, confident she was speaking to a British loyalist, she told her everything. She’d been in on her husband’s plot from the beginning. She had herself passed on the critical documents, wrapped in precious millinery, to Major André. Theodosia told Burr, who told no one.

  During this period, the two often communicated in a cipher of Burr’s devising, one he would use regularly later on, when he had even more to conceal. It is hard to imagine that Theodosia, or any of his later correspondents, would think of such a stratagem, a painstaking matter for creator and translator alike, on their own, or make time for it. It is unclear whether this was intended to conceal the truth about Theodosia’s loyalty or just to maintain the privacy of a relationship that had become a matter of increasing gossip. Either way, there was something about Burr—a heightened sense of exclusivity, or self-importance, perhaps—that sought out secrets, and kept them.

  As the affair went on, there was much to bear for both of them, not the least of it the fact that people were starting to wonder about the fundamental propriety of an American soldier so plainly dallying with a married Englishwoman. Theodosia professed not to be troubled. “Our being the subject of much inquiry, conjecture, and calumny, is no more than we ought to expect,” she told Burr. “My attention to you was ever pointed enough to attract the observation of those who visited the house. Your esteem more than compensated for the worst they could say. When I am sensible I can make you and myself happy, will readily join you to suppress their malice. But, till I am confident of this, I cannot think of our union. Till then I shall take shelter under the roof of my dear mother, where by joining stock, we shall have sufficient to stem the torrent of adversity.”

  But the fact remained that Mrs. Prevost was still married to Lieutenant Colonel Prevost. He was never mentioned in her letters, and it’s plain why. He’d disappeared from her thoughts practically the moment Burr appeared. Herself part of a military family, Theodosia had married Prevost, of Swiss descent, at seventeen, when he was a captain. Originally stationed in New Jersey, he was promoted in 1779 to become lieutenant governor of occupied Georgia, and before the year was out he was shifted from there to the West Indies (although not to Nevis or Saint Croix, the islands Hamilton had come from). Now a lieutenant colonel, lonely in the broiling, godforsaken islands where Hamilton was born, Prevost begged Theodosia to come down to him with their children. Theodosia’s sister assured him she would, but Theodosia wouldn’t think of it. Her life was in New Jersey, not the tropics; and, of course, there was Burr to think of. Instead, she sent her husband a lock of her hair, although it is doubtful he considered himself well compensated.

  By then, the two lovers couldn’t keep themselves from each other whenever they were together. Burr once wrote to his sister that Theodosia was curled up with him as he wrote, “And is this moment pinching my ear, because I will not say anything about her to you.”

  Theodosia was unwilling to go but unsure she could stay. Hence the lock of hair, the most tenuous declaration of affection. The whole situation was unbearable, made all the worse by the fact that this was a state and time that scorned divorce. If by a miracle she managed a legal separation, she would emerge from the marriage penniless, owning not even her clothes. It couldn’t have helped the shaky health of either that neither could see a decent future for themselves.

  SEVENTEEN

  A Little Sorceress

  AGAINST ALL EXPECTATIONS, Hamilton found a home with the Schuylers. To hear his father-in-law tell it, he’d become a virtual Schuyler himself. “You can not my Dear Sir be more happy at the Connection you have made with my family than I am,” Schuyler exclaimed, with an epistolary clap on the back. “Until a child has made a judicious choice
the heart of a parent is continually in anxiety but this anxiety vanished in the moment that I discovered w[h]ere you and she had placed your affections.

  “I am pleased with every Instance of delicacy in those that are so dear to me, and I think I read your soul,” Schuyler went on, gently absolving Hamilton of his illegitimacy. “I shall therefore only intreat you to consider me as one who wishes in every way to promote your happiness and that I shall never give or loan but with a view to Such Great Ends.”

  A tenderness enters his letters to Betsey, too, a wistful longing that was new. With Washington in Dobbs Ferry, New York, Hamilton had been carousing with his fellow officers, when, he writes her, “I stole from a croud of company to a solitary walk to be at leisure to think of you, and I have just returned to tell you by an express this moment going off that I have been doing so.” A love for Betsey had stolen over him.

  You are certainly a little sorceress and have bewitched me, for you have made me disrelish every thing that used to please me, and have rendered me as restless and unsatisfied with all about me, as if I was the inhabitant of another world, and had nothing in common with this. I must in spite of myself become an inconstant to detach myself from you, for as it now stands I love you more than I ought—more than is consistent with my peace. A new mistress is supposed to be the best cure for an excessive attachment to an old—if I was convinced of the success of the scheme, I would be tempted to try it—for though it is the pride of my heart to love you it is the torment of it to love you so much, separated as we now are. But I am afraid, I should only go in quest of disquiet, that would make me return to you with redoubled tenderness. You gain by every comparison I make and the more I contrast you with others the more amiable you appear.