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

by Sedgwick, John

  While the Burrs’ letters plumbed their souls, the Hamiltons’ barely skimmed the surface, limited by differences in style and orientation. While Hamilton was deeply analytical in his thinking, inclined more toward treatises than revelations, he was also the more passionate of the two, while Betsey was the more religious. For the bulk of their married life, she was the one in regular attendance at the family pew, number 92, in Trinity Church, just up the street from their Wall Street house, not he.

  That discrepancy was mirrored by another. Betsey had a sisterly devotion to the flashy Angelica, the wife of that plump and dubious Englishman John Barker Church. Hamilton had been infatuated with her from the first. How far the relationship went is anyone’s guess, but it went far enough to reveal that streak of abandon in Hamilton that threatened to undo all his efforts to establish himself, pushing him to the edge of annihilation, and ultimately over it. In his disorientation, he was left writing Betsey letters that were probably intended to be ringing assertions of his love for her but come across as something else. When he was still a newlywed in 1782, he assured Betsey “there never was a husband who could vie with yours in fidelity and affection,” as if that needed to be stated. Even the love notes conveyed his eagerness for company, not necessarily for her. “Come my charmer and relieve me. Bring my darling boy to my bosom.” To Angelica, his words were far more heartfelt. In 1785, when she left with her husband for London, possibly permanently, Hamilton struggled to keep his feelings in check. “I saw you depart from Philadelphia with peculiar uneasiness, as if foreboding you were not to return. My apprehensions are confirmed and, unless I see you in Europe, I expect not to see you again. This is the impression we all have. Judge the bitterness it gives to those who love you with the love of nature and to me who feel an attachment for you not less lively.” Eventually, that distance left him less constrained, as he teased her: “I seldom write to a lady without fancying the relation of lover and mistress.”

  NOT UXORIOUS LIKE Burr, Hamilton felt an affection for Betsey that had a tenderness that was almost maternal. In his memoir Hamilton’s lifelong friend James Kent recalled a moment from their legal rounds when he was judge and Hamilton a lawyer. As they roamed about the state in pursuit of legal business, he and Hamilton often bunked in together at some meager inn or other, to economize, and, as friends, they might share a bed.

  One freezing winter night, after a long day of hard travel, Hamilton stayed up late before the fire with some of the other lawyers traveling with them, doubtless expounding at length on his theories of government. Feeling ill, Kent retired early. Worried about him, Hamilton soon left the fire to find an extra blanket for the judge and take it back to their chambers. Finding Kent huddled on the bed, shivering, Hamilton tucked the warm blanket around him as he might a child and whispered to his sleeping friend, “Sleep warm, little Judge, and get well. What should we do if anything should happen to you?”*

  TWENTY-TWO

  You Will Become All That I Wish

  WITH TWO GENERATIONS of college presidents behind him, Burr had been determined to continue the family’s aristocracy of knowledge, if not of wealth, into a fourth generation, and turn a “little girl rosy-cheeked and plump as a partridge,” as her mother called Theodosia at eight, into a crisply educated, highly disciplined paragon of femininity—a female Aaron Burr, one might even say—by her teens. “Go on, my dear girl, and you will become all that I wish,” Burr wrote her that year, in words simultaneously loving and diabolical. In this ambition, Burr had been encouraged by the free-spirited French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who’d declared in Émile: “All that we lack at birth and all that we need when grown is given by education.” But Burr also revered Lord Chesterfield, whose instructional, if somewhat overbearing, letters to his son offered a model for his own epistles to Theodosia, and he would have said exactly the same, except for this: Education should be confined to males alone, as it would be wasted on “children of a larger growth,” as Chesterfield termed females. To Chesterfield, women were literally skin-deep. They have, he writes, “but one object, which is their beauty; upon which, scarce any flattery is too gross for them to swallow.” The man’s role, according to Chesterfield, is to provide that flattery, which is easy enough. “Nature has hardly formed a woman ugly enough to be insensible to flattery upon her person; if her face is so shocking, that she must, in some degree, be conscious of it, her figure and her air, she trusts, make ample amends for it.” There is more, but that was plenty for Burr’s wife, Theodosia. “The indulgence you applaud in Chesterfield is the only part of his writings I think reprehensible. . . . If Rousseau’s ghost can reach this quarter of the globe, he will certainly haunt you for this scheme.” While his wife was alive, he heartily concurred about her views of women, especially where their daughter was concerned. Afterward, he reverted to the Chesterfieldian view, as the grown women of his many romances were rarely more than baubles to distract him from serious business.

  If there had been any doubt, Burr was now convinced he was absolutely right to educate Theodosia just like a man. “If I could foresee that Theo. would become a mere fashionable woman, with all the attendant frivolity and vacuity of mind, adorned with whatever grace and allurement, I would earnestly pray God to take her forthwith hence,” he wrote his wife. “But I yet hope, by her, to convince the world what neither sex appear to believe—that women have souls!” And he threw himself into the task as if he were sculpting the perfect woman in modeling clay. He made sure Theodosia could read and write by age three, then enlisted a cadre of tutors to teach her mathematics, geography, Latin, Greek, and French by eight. It was a punishing routine for the little girl—starting at five A.M., she worked on her writing for three hours and then pushed through the day’s curriculum from there—but there is no indication she resented it. Rather, the more overweening her father, the more she loved him. “From her earliest years, she began to manifest a singular, almost morbid fondness for her father, who, on his part, was resolved that she should be peerless among the ladies of her time,” wrote Parton, the adoring early biographer. Concerned with her physique no less than her mind, he set his “Miss Prissy” to galloping on horseback about the grounds with her favored half brother Frederick, now in his late teens; vigorous dancing from a French instructor; and skating on the pond. When she complained to her father that she kept falling, he just laughed. “Even if you should fall twenty times,” he teased, “that teaches you the advantage of a hard head.”

  Inevitably, it fell to wife Theodosia to organize a phalanx of instructors for her daughter, all of them posing problems of their own, either in timing or in their own messy lives. None of it was easy when she was already running a vast home with four other children, copious grounds, and a dozen servants and workmen who seemed to consume more of her energy than they saved. Not to mention her own uncertain health. And so she complains to her husband:

  Theo. never can or will make the progress we would wish her while she has so many avocations. I kept her home a week in hopes Shepherd would consent to attend her at home, but he absolutely declined it, as his partners thought it derogatory to their dignity. I was therefore obliged to submit, and permit her to go as usual. She begins to cipher. Mr. Chevalier attends regularly, and I take care she never omits learning her French lesson. I believe she makes most progress in this. Mr. St. Aivre never comes; he can get no fiddler, and I am told his furniture &c. have been seized by the sheriff. I don’t think the dancing lessons do much good while the weather is warm; they fatigue too soon. . . . As to the music, upon the footing it now is she can never make progress, though she sacrifices two thirds of her time to do it. ’Tis a serious check to her other acquirements. She must either have a forte-piano at home, or renounce learning it. For these reasons I am impatient to go in the country. Her education is not on an advantageous footing at present. . . . The moment we are alone she tries to amuse me with her improvement, which the little jade knows will always command my atte
ntion; but these moments are short and seldom. I have so many trifling interruptions, that my head feels as if I had been a twelvemonth at sea. I scarcely know what I speak, and much less what I write. What a provoking thing that I, who never go out, who never dress beyond a decent style at home, should not have a leisure moment to read a newspaper. It is a recreation I have not had since you left home, nor could I get an opportunity by water to send them to you. Albany will be a more favourable situation for every conveyance. But I don’t understand why your lordship can’t pay your obeisance at home in this four week vacation. I think I am entitled to a reason.

  In his reply, Burr provided no reason for his absence, but testily demanded the cause of her obvious ill health. “You seem fatigued and worried, your head wild and scarcely able, but do not name the cause.” Whatever the cause, his educational program certainly didn’t help, as he must have known. She should take the air more, he tells Theodosia. Try “gentle exercise” but avoid “extreme heat.” Ride early in the morning, but walk later “on account of the dew.” Anything. “The freshness of the air, and the sprightliness of all animated nature, are circumstances of no trifling consequence.”

  Theodosia came around, as she always did. “O! my love, how earnestly I pray that our children may never be driven from your paternal direction,” she exclaimed. “Had you been at home today, you would have felt as fervent in this prayer as your Theo. . . . I really believe, my dear, few parents can boast of children whose minds are so prone to virtue. I see the reward of our assiduity with inexpressible delight, with a gratitude few experience. My Aaron, they have grateful hearts.”

  Burr pressed his advantage. There was no aspect of his daughter that he did not shape and reshape to his liking, and he could be merciless in his demands. He was doing it for her, but to her, too. Burr’s earliest surviving letter to Theodosia, just eight, established a tone, as he snapped at her. “Why do you neither acknowledge nor answer my last letter?” he demanded. “That is not kind—it is scarcely civil.” He did not ease off over time. At eleven, when Theodosia wrote a pathetic letter about her mother’s desire for laudanum to ease her pain—writing, “It was what she had long wished for, and was at a loss to procure it”—Burr pounced on her phrasing. She should have struck that second it, Burr declared. Then the sentence would have been “perfect, and much more elegant.” It must have seemed to Theodosia that she could do nothing right. Rather than say something of hers was marvelous, excellent, fantastic, he’d say only that it was better than her previous efforts, diminishing her achievement even as he extolled it. And then he was likely to sprinkle in a few criticisms, like her dropping an occasional word, to render “some clauses . . . absolutely unintelligible.” And then came Nathalie, further complicating the picture. In the early 1790s, an eleven-year-old Parisian, Nathalie de Lage de Volude, her governess, Madame de Senat, and the madame’s daughter came to stay with the Burrs at their Manhattan address, ostensibly for the young Theodosia’s improvement. They arrived as destitute French refugees from the slaughter of the French Revolution. Nathalie had grown up in Versailles, the goddaughter of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Such good fortune, of course, became a serious hazard during the Reign of Terror, when the king and queen were beheaded, along with more than fifty thousand of their royalist sympathizers. Nathalie’s family scattered, her father to a royalist encampment and her mother to a ship bound for America, only to be swamped in a storm, barely making it back to Spain. Nathalie’s two sisters remained in hiding on the continent. Nathalie came alone with her governess, who established a French academy for the New York elite, including the Hamilton children, before Burr swept them up. Then, taken by the beauty of French culture, eager to advance Theodosia’s French, and entranced by the slender, brown-eyed Nathalie, he offered to relocate the school to his town house. Nathalie quickly became Theodosia’s best friend—and main rival for her father’s attention. After he chastised Theodosia for her posture and complained about her indifference to her lessons, he noted that Nathalie would never behave that way. “Observe how Natalie replies to the smallest civilities which is offered to her.”

  Burr observed her, no question. Late one night in November 1795, his mind no doubt loosened by Madeira, he wrote of Nathalie to his close friend Dr. William Eustis, saying that, as he wrote, he was staying up with her in the library during a storm. She sat beside him, reading “but more than half the time laughing & talking,” he reported. “The loveliest creature that I know of her age.”

  Theodosia was only a year younger.

  Late in 1794, Burr commissioned Gilbert Stuart to paint a life-size portrait of his daughter, shortly before his wife died. Stuart had done Burr himself a few years before, evoking the dreamy and poetic side, rather than the serious-minded lawyer and politician, and Burr was delighted. Completed in January, the portrait shows a charming, wide-eyed girl, dressed in silk, her hair coiffed, but it reveals little of the sophistication that Burr had labored to instill. The girl was plain. Burr was dismissive. “Your picture is really quite like you, still it does not quite please me. It has a pensive air; that of a love-sick maid.” Afterward, he complained about her, deciding she was unladylike. “Your habit of stooping and bringing your shoulders forward on to your breast not only disfigures you, but is alarming on account of the injury to your health,” he complained. “The continuance in this vile habit will certainly produce a consumption: then farewell papa; farewell pleasure; farewell life!” Coming a year after her mother’s death, his words must have stung. But then, this may have been the way Burr grieved—assaulting the living with his anger at the dead.

  As harsh as Burr may have been, his efforts did pay off spectacularly as, by the time she was ten, even before Nathalie arrived, Theodosia spoke decent French, could translate forty lines of Virgil a day, was proficient in “cipher,” or mathematics, read widely in English, and whatever her father might say, wrote well for her age, in a nearly calligraphic hand. At fifteen, she captivated a visiting Englishman named John Davis, who’d been introduced by her father, for being “elegant without ostentation, and learned without pedantry,” and other praise that is normally reserved for adults, to say nothing of her graceful dancing, her fluency in French and Italian, and her knowledge of Homer. Davis added, perhaps jealously, that a French poet named Martel had dedicated a volume of his poems to her. “Like her father, her person was small, while to its enchanting symmetry and expression of countenance illuminated by vast reading and general knowledge, her imposing mien and flashing wit made her the ruling spirit to every circle.” She would be the new Theodosia, and just in time.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Two Men of Politics

  BURR NEVER PLANNED to enter politics. But in April of 1784, Alexander McDougall, the fiery Son of Liberty who’d befriended Hamilton and later was Burr’s commander during that Westchester ordeal, named him to his slate of representatives from New York City. It was a testament to his high standing as a lawyer and to his elite background. Under the state constitution of 1777, only free, adult men of significant property could vote, restricting the electorate to one man out of ten and excluding women and slaves entirely. Such restrictions allowed powerful political alliances to hold sway, making a seat more a matter of appointment than of election. Burr thought the title of assemblyman would add to his luster as a lawyer with only a little inconvenience, since the Assembly met in the Exchange building right by his law office. Even so, Burr didn’t actually show up at the Assembly for nearly a month after his election, and sporadically after that. That entire first term, he offered no legislation, served on no committees, and scarcely bothered even to vote. Reelected for the term that began in January of 1785, he made an audacious, but hopeless, move to end slavery in the state. It went nowhere, and Burr continued to hold slaves himself.

  Burr’s turn in the legislative spotlight came when a group of New York “mechanics”—the common term for workingmen—sought articles of incorporation, giving them legal
recognition as an entity. Burr was the only one of the city’s nine assemblymen to be opposed. He might have feared incorporation would invite political manipulation or raise labor costs in the city, two objections he had raised in the past. Whatever the motivation, the move shifted him publicly to the other side of the class divide, as the mechanics attacked him for preying on “the weak, the poor, the helpless,” and threatened to assault him and stone his house. When Burr’s friends offered to stand by his house to protect it from harm, Burr insisted there was no need. “Gentlemen,” he grandly replied, “I will live no longer than I can protect myself.”

  In April of 1787, when Burr’s second term ran out, the Assembly adjourned sine die—or indefinitely. Like the rest of the political structure, it had to wait for the results of the deliberations in Philadelphia to know if it was to remain in existence.

  IN APRIL TWO years before, Hamilton was reading the political news in The New-York Packet when something caught his eye. His name. It had been included on the list of candidates for the New York Assembly. It was a discovery similar to Burr’s of the previous year, but Hamilton had no intention of seeking such an office, and he insisted his name be withdrawn. A year later, he reconsidered. Dispirited by the country’s fading prospects under the anemic Articles of Confederation, he offered himself as a candidate for assemblyman from New York City. Riding on his military record and his reputation as a lawyer, he was elected along with Burr, who was then seeking a second term.