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

by Sedgwick, John

  The letters reveal the range of their book-fed minds, for which ideas shot off like fireworks, snapping and sizzling as they lit up the sky. Both of them were ardent feminists, inconceivable as that concept might have been in a time when women were scarcely above slaves in legal standing. Theodosia worshiped Russia’s dynamic empress, Catherine the Great, who’d come to power after having her inept husband, Peter III, arrested. “The ladies should deify her, and consecrate a temple to her praise,” she wrote Burr. “It is a diverting thought, that the mighty Emperor of the Turks should be subdued by a woman,” she added, referring to the two Russo-Turkish wars that led to Russia’s seizing Turkish territory on the Black Sea. “How enviable that she alone should be the avenger of her sex’s wrongs for so many ages past. She seems to have awakened Justice, who appears to be a sleepy dame in the cause of injured innocence.” Burr was entranced by Mary Wollstonecraft, the fountainhead of feminism, whose admiration for the French Revolution had led her to champion female equality. A fiercely controversial work, her Vindication, when published in 1792, expressed something essential but forbidden in the Burr psyche, namely, that women had all the depth and majesty of men—and it was a scandal that they should be so desecrated by society: “It would be an endless task,” she wrote, “to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows, into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion, that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain, must be obtained by their charms and weakness.”

  Burr would have agreed wholeheartedly, but Hamilton would have sided with her antagonist, Lord Chesterfield, who brazenly put forth the contrary view in one of his famous letters to his son, which Hamilton, and many of his circle, considered required reading for a gentleman: “Women . . . are only children of a larger growth; they have an entertaining tattle, and sometimes wit; but for solid reasoning, good sense, I never knew in my life one that had it . . . A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly, forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters; though he often makes them believe that he does both.”

  Wollstonecraft fired back.

  My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists—I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.

  This sentiment, radical as it was, came to be so deeply associated with Burr—acting upon it both as a husband to one Theodosia and as a father to the other—he must have believed it already, lacking only the terms to express it. Still, he found the ideas electrifying, and they became a core principle in a life that otherwise was short of them. He wrote his wife:

  I had heard [Vindication] spoken of with a coldness little calculated to excite attention; but as I read with avidity and prepossession every thing written by a lady, I made haste to procure it, and spent the last night, almost the whole of it, in reading it. Be assured that your sex has in her an able advocate. It is, in my opinion, a work of genius. She has successfully adopted the style of Rousseau’s Emilius; and her comment on that work, especially what relates to female education, contains more good sense than all the other criticisms upon him which I have seen put together. I promise myself much pleasure in reading it to you. Is it owing to ignorance or prejudice that I have not yet met a single person who had discovered or would allow the merit of this work.

  It was this principle of female equality, that “women have souls,” as he put it, that he applied assiduously to the upbringing of his young daughter, Theodosia, which may have been the greatest accomplishment of his life, as she ultimately ascended to a height of learning and sophistication and poise that was unmatched by nearly all women and most men. He bought a portrait of Wollstonecraft and kept it until shortly before he died, when he sold it to clear some last debts.

  For all their range and intensity, the letters inevitably provide a skewed view of the marriage, as each spouse is viewing the other from afar, with a mixture of longing and vexation. If Burr had been able to control his spending, he might not have been away so much. But there was not enough work in New York City, and he soon had to rove about an expanding orbit from New York City that culminated in months-long sessions in Congress in Philadelphia. Hamilton followed a similar route, but tellingly he usually traveled the legal circuit in a kind of caravan with other lawyers including Kent and John Jay, who became lifelong friends. Burr always worked alone and traveled by himself. And his could be arduous journeys. He describes one hellish trip up the Hudson to Albany, made all the worse by one of the migraines that had plagued him since the war. “The headache with which I left New York grew so extreme, that, finding it impossible to proceed in the stage, the view of a vessel off Tarrytown, under full sail before the wind, tempted me to go on board,” he wrote his wife in October 1788. “We reached West Point that night, and lay there at anchor near three days. After a variety of changes from sloop to wagon, from wagon to canoe, and from canoe to sloop again, I reached this place last evening.” Once there, he was obliged to remain until the case was complete, and inevitably it dragged on longer than he could bear, “wearied out with the most tedious cause I was ever engaged in.” From afar he could only fret about his wife’s health, which was always a worry. He insisted that she walk twice around the garden before breakfast, and ride in the afternoon. “I shall be seriously angry if you do not,” he assailed her. He is hardly reassured to learn that measles has broken out in the city. “You must assure me that I shall find you in good health and spirits.”

  Burr’s own health was hardly secure. His letters are studded with references to the aches and troubles that had been routinely afflicting him after the war, and he rarely slept well. “I lay awake till after three o’clock this morning; then got up and took a large dose of medicine. It was composed of laudanum, nitre, and other savoury drugs, which procured me sleep till now: have no headache; must eat breakfast, and away to court as fast as possible.”

  But the real disease may have been Burr’s relentless quest for more, particularly as manifested in his lust for land. At one point, he had his eye on a lovely estate outside Albany. Although called Fort Johnson, it was a private piece of property, and Burr was desperate to get his hands on it. Knowing his proclivities, Theodosia forbade him even to see it, but Burr couldn’t help going. He wrote like a man possessed, revealing an attraction to this “amiable bower,” as he called the property, that was nearly sexual, as it offered a luscious beauty for him alone to penetrate. “Oh Theo!” he exclaims; “there is the most delightful grove—so darkened with weeping willows that at noonday a susceptible fancy like yours would mistake it for a bewitching moonlight evening. These sympathizing willows, too, exclude even the prying eye of curiosity. Here no rude noise interrupts the softest whisper. Here no harsher sound is heard than the wild cooings of the gentled dove, the gay thresher’s animated warbles and the soft murmurs of the passing brook. Really, Theo., it is charming.”

  He continued in this vein for several more paragraphs, extolling the “cluster of lofty oaks,” the “gentle brook.” He reminded Theodosia of how much she’d admired the “lofty Apalachians” and added, “Here the mind assumes a nobler tone, and is occupied by sublime objects. What there was tenderness, here swells with rapture. It is truly charming.”

  He went on to fantasize about what they would do with such a property, planting “jessamines” and woodbine. He longed to possess the property, even though he coul
dn’t think of any particular use for it, and Theo would be furious. That made him ponder why he could think this, and his beloved wife think that. What was it about his “singularity of taste” that ran so counter to hers? Philosophizing done, he bade her to summon her “fortitude” for what he was about to write, and apologized for it in advance. Surely, she was bracing herself for yet another heedless extravagance. But then, with one last evocation of the many stimulations of this forbidden land, Burr sharply returned to his senses, right there on the page. He wrote:

  In short, then, my dear Theo., the beauty of this same Fort Johnson, the fertility of the soil, the commodiousness and elegance of the building, the great value of the mills, and the very inconsiderable price which was asked for the whole, have not induced me to purchase it, and probably never will: in the confidence, however, of meeting your forgiveness.

  Not? Not induced him to purchase? Burr was like an alcoholic who teasingly brought a brimming glass of whiskey to his lips while his wife watched aghast—and then pitched it into the fire, laughing at her fears. Herewith the Burr essentials—insatiable desires, exquisitely evoked and brilliantly defended, and then surrendered to the one thing larger—his wife’s maternal hold over him.

  Whatever message they might bear, the letters were a precious lifeline between them, and both of them clung to the missives, reading and rereading and then rereading again, as if the letter itself—each one a soft, fleshy sheet folded in on itself to be its own envelope—were by some transmogrification a representation of the sender, to be scrutinized and held like his or her face or hands. Their pens are both such tender, delicate instruments, their letters inscribe them. “’Tis impossible for me to disguise a single feeling or thought when I am writing or conversing with the friend of my heart,” Theodosia confides. For too long, letters were all the Burrs had of each other. The thrill of fresh tales from the far side was electric. Once, receiving a fresh batch of Burr’s letters for herself and the children, Theodosia propped them up on the mantelpiece and then invited the children to come down for dinner, and waited. It was Bartow, the oldest, who noticed the letters first. He gave out a yelp and lunged for his letter, and the rest of the children quickly followed suit, and finally Theodosia herself reached for hers. “The surprise, the joy, the exclamations exceed description,” she wrote her husband.

  The greatest stoic would have forgot himself. A silent tear betrayed me no philosopher. A most joyous repast succeeded. We talked of our happiness, of our first of blessings, our best of papas. I enjoyed, my Aaron, the only happiness that could accrue from your absence. It was a momentary compensation; the only one I ever experienced. Your letters always afford me a singular satisfaction;—a sensation entirely my own; this was peculiarly so. It wrought strangely on my mind and spirits. My Aaron, it was replete with tenderness! With the most lively affection. I read and re-read, till afraid I should get it by rote, and mingle it with common ideas; profane the sacred pledge. No, it shall not be.

  Burr felt no less, but it left him to a wretched sense of deprivation when fresh letters were not forthcoming, tipping his mood from exultation to pique. “With what pleasure have I feasted for three days past upon the letters I was to receive this weekend,” Burr wrote from Albany, where he was on business, in 1789. “I was engaged in court when the stage passed. Upon the sound of it I left court and ran to the post office; judge of my mortification to find not a line from your hand. Sure, in the course of three days, you might have found half an hour to have devoted to me. You well knew how much I relied on it; you know the pleasure it would have given me, and the disappointment and chagrin I should feel from the neglect. I cannot, will not believe that these considerations have no weight with you.”

  Of course, without information Burr can’t think why she hasn’t written, and he filled in his ignorance with whatever distressed him most—that, despite all her testaments of love, his wife didn’t care about him. In this case, however, she’d been unable to write because she had scalded herself on the side of her face, leaving a nasty burn that would disfigure her for the rest of her life—and that might be the one Burr’s biographer James Parton was thinking of when he appraised her. Either way, it might account for the fact that Burr never had her portrait painted, although he had several portraits done of their daughter. Still, Burr’s deprivation was such that he was convinced that she had done this purposefully to hurt him. “I cannot help feeling a resentment which must not be in this way expressed. I am sure your sufferings might have been prevented. I had promised myself that they were at an end many days ago.”

  Beastly and petulant as he could be, Theodosia never held his irritation against him, but always took it as a sign of his own suffering or ignored it altogether. Whenever he was away, she wanted nothing except his return. And when he did not materialize as she had hoped, she suffered unduly: “I have counted the hours till evening; since that, the minutes, and am still on the watch; the stage has not arrived; it is a cruel delay. Your health, your tender frame, how are they supported! Anxiety obliterates every other idea; every noise stops my pen; my heart flutters with hope and fear; the pavement from this to the Cape’s [the stage house] is kept warm by the family; every eye and ear engrossed by expectation; my mind is in too much trepidation to write. I resume my pen after another message, in vain.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Come My Charmer and Relieve Me

  AT 57 WALL Street, the Hamiltons lived somewhat more modestly than the Burrs. While undeniably impressive, their three-story brick house wasn’t all that eye-catching on a block of many such homes. And unlike Burr’s Theodosia, Betsey was not the center of Hamilton’s world. He was primarily a public man, keen on statecraft, while Betsey busied herself with the domestic arts, and fairly humble ones, making pot holders and sewing undergarments for the children. Betsey made sure that the larder was well stocked with fresh produce from Albany, courtesy of her parents, and laid in mutton and wine to entertain Hamilton’s legion of friends and colleagues, most of them drawn from the legal and political ranks, who might drop in at any moment. Not for nothing was his first purchase after leaving the army a dozen wineglasses.

  While Burr had just the one child, Hamilton would have eight, starting with the much-loved Philip, born when Hamilton was at Yorktown, and the rest coming along almost biannually after that, creating a solid sense of family, with himself the proud patriarch, that dispelled the last vestiges of his shiftless Caribbean childhood. After their third child, Alexander, was born, they adopted a cheerful little two-year-old named Fanny, the daughter of a Revolutionary War veteran and King’s College graduate who had suffered a breakdown after the death of his wife. Of the two men, Burr was the sterner father, viewing childhood as preparation for adulthood, rather than, for Hamilton, the last stretch of freedom before the hard work begins. Both men were supremely erudite, but Burr concentrated on philosophical tracts, while Hamilton’s reading was more playful, taking in Henry Fielding’s novels and Jonathan Swift’s satires along with the obligatory Chesterfield and Hume. He was a doting father, but he left it to Betsey to do the child raising. In a rare vignette, James Hamilton recalls her “seated, as was her wont, at the head of the table with a napkin in her lap, cutting slices of bread and serving them with butter for the younger boys, who, standing at her side, read in turn a chapter in the Bible or a portion of Goldsmith’s Rome. When the lessons were finished, the father and the elder children were called for breakfast, after which the boys were packed off to school.” By the time Hamilton took it upon himself to enlist the nation’s first president, Betsey had delivered four of their eight children, most recently James. His brood brought out the giddy side in Hamilton, which had been invisible during the war. Now that his firstborn, Philip, had developed into a ruddy-haired toddler, his father could scarcely contain his excitement. “You cannot imagine how entirely domestic I am growing,” he told the revolutionary general Richard Meade. “I lose all taste for the pursuits of ambition. I
sigh for nothing but the Company of my wife and my baby. The ties of duty alone, or imagined duty, keep me from renouncing public life altogether. It is, however, probable I may not any longer be engaged in it.”

  A decade later, his children would still receive the bulk of his devotion, but far less of his time. Unlike Burr, Hamilton took little interest in their intellectual development, concerned far more with their grades than with their learning. He laid out his expectations to Alexander Jr. after he sailed across the Hudson for boarding school in Trenton at nine: “I expect every letter from [your teacher] will give me a fresh proof of your progress, for I know you can do a great deal if you please,” Hamilton intoned. “And I am sure you have too much spirit not to exert yourself that you may make us every day more and more proud of you.”

  Manners were another matter. When his daughter Angelica turned nine, she went upriver to live with her grandparents, the Schuylers, at the Pastures, their formidable home in Albany. “We hope you will in every respect behave in such a manner as will secure to you the goodwill and regard of all those with whom you are,” Hamilton instructed the little girl. “If you happen to displease any of them, be always ready to make a frank apology. But the best way is to act with so much politeness, good manners, and circumspection as never to have an occasion to make any apology.” Those words would prove ironic.