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

by Sedgwick, John

  When Hamilton settled down to his parlor writing desk to begin the business of cajoling a reluctant Washington into doing his duty, he was canny enough not to make a straight-out plea, which might have been rejected. Knowing his man, he began by merely touching on this immense topic at the bottom of a letter offering his general a two-volume set of his Federalist Papers. But he may have taken a peremptory tone that betrayed too much of Hamilton’s impatience with a leader who, while illustrious, was never known for his dispatch. “I take it for granted, Sir, you have concluded to comply with what will no doubt be the general call of your country in relation to the new government,” he declared, charging headlong into the breach. Then he recovered himself. “You will permit me to say that it is indispensable you should lend yourself to its first operations.” But then he ended on a note of pique. “It is to little purpose to have introduced a system, if the weightiest influence is not given to its firm establishment, in the outset.” When he responded two weeks later, Washington clung to the determination only to “live and die, in peace and retirement, on my own farm.” But his objections seemed wistful, not definitive. Or so Hamilton preferred to think. And the same went for Washington’s grumblings about his “increasing infirmities of nature.” Hamilton knew that, having received huzzahs from one end of the country to the other for his military service, Washington would miss them when they receded. In some frustration, Hamilton declared that it would be “inglorious” if Washington did not answer the call of his country. Finally, Washington admitted to Hamilton that he faced a “dreaded dilemma.” Having made such a beautiful gesture of surrendering power, how could he reach for it now?

  That was easy, Hamilton knew: by not seeming to. Washington would not seek the presidency, but let it seek him. Hamilton would attend to all the unseemly details of electioneering, raising a national clamor for his service, leaving Washington only to bask in the adoration. In a last effort to escape the burden of office, Washington expressed the wan hope that he could limit his service to two years, then turn the country over to a younger and more vigorous man. The Constitution made no provision for early retirement, as Hamilton well knew, but he kept his silence, and the deal was struck.

  If Washington did want to be the indispensable man in the new nation, Hamilton wanted to be only a little less than that, and he knew that Washington would be his ticket to power. Washington might be king, but Hamilton would be the kingmaker. For someone so preternaturally self-assured, Hamilton retained an eager boyishness that could be charming to those not put off by his political views, and ever since the war, he had always been indulged by this childless older man who would soon be called the father of his country. Washington was not unaware of Hamilton’s edginess, but he forgave such faults in his prodigal son.

  And so it began: From that moment forward, as in the army, Washington would depend on Hamilton as he depended on no other. He would never make a significant decision without Hamilton’s advice, often doled out in ten-thousand-word installments, his quill flying, and he would never question that advice, no matter how it turned out. Washington had plenty of wise men in his circle—Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Edmund Randolph, James Madison, all but the last of them in his cabinet, and all of them older, some substantially so—but it was Hamilton he turned to, over and over. He emerged as Washington’s alter ego, the first among equals.

  THAT FIRST PRESIDENTIAL election proved ungainly, largely because the Constitution’s framers, frightened of divisive factionalism, had failed to see that the common patriotism of the president and vice president might not be enough to unite them to a common purpose, and they made no provision for letting a president and his preferred vice president run as a team. Instead, the top offices were assigned by a kind of popularity contest, with the presidency awarded to the highest vote getter, and the vice presidency to the next, regardless of the electors’ intentions as to who should fill which office.

  In the first election, it went without saying that Washington was to be president. But vice president? For that role, the tart-tongued John Adams was widely put forward by Washington’s supporters, although exactly who first proposed him is open to question. It was clear enough why. As a New Englander he would balance the Virginian. Also, as a prominent Boston lawyer, he had been a staunch backer of the Declaration, and he’d lately been serving the Continental Congress as its minister to France, where he’d brilliantly negotiated an end to the war with the Treaty of Paris. And if a winning personality was required, precious few in that contentious age would be eligible for service.

  Hamilton was alert to character flaws that others would dismiss, and he’d had misgivings about Adams ever since Adams had sided with Horatio Gates in that attempted coup against Washington by the Conway Cabal. That was understandable, since loyalty to Washington was now essential. Hamilton was also suspicious of Adams’s service in a country, France, that Hamilton considered politically degenerate. But, for now, he largely put those reservations aside. “Mr. A, to a sound understanding, has always appeared to me to add an ardent love for the public good,” Hamilton told a friend tepidly.

  Now, how to keep Adams from somehow lucking into the presidency? In a near panic, Hamilton asked a half dozen of Washington’s electors to hold back their votes from him, but then he was afraid that might tip the vice presidency, or even the presidency, to the Constitution-hating “Pharaoh,” George Clinton of New York. So Hamilton frantically wrote to supporters around the country to back Adams for vice president after all.

  In the end, all went as Hamilton intended: Washington was elected president, and Adams vice president. But the peevish Adams did not fail to notice that, while Washington had been elected unanimously with sixty-nine votes, he had himself received just thirty-four. This shortfall left him “incensed” later when he discovered Hamilton’s “dark and dirty intrigue” that had left a “stain” upon his character.

  AS HAMILTON’S STANDING increased, so did his ferocity. Having deprived Clinton of a chance at higher office, he set about to turn his portly antagonist out of his present one. Having been New York’s governor since 1777, Clinton had a formidable hold on the state. But the groundswell of enthusiasm for the new Constitution he’d bitterly opposed gave Hamilton an opening, one that he planned to exploit at the next election, in the spring of 1789, when he and his father-in-law planned to “kill the governor politically,” as the Massachusetts Federalist Samuel Otis put it. If it was an assassination, it would stem from a broader war among the political classes that fought to rule the state. There were three in all, and the early Burr biographer, Parton, identified them: the Clintons, at first George but then his nephew DeWitt; then the numerous and wealthy Livingstons, who overspread much of the state; and finally the Schuylers, that tight cluster of interlocking Albany-based families of which Philip Schuyler, the general turned senator, was the titular head. “The Clintons had power,” went Parton’s adage, “the Livingstons had numbers, and the Schuylers had Hamilton.” Of these assets, Hamilton imagined himself the most valuable after almost single-handedly pushing through the Constitution. While the Livingstons held back this time around, the other two elements were very much in play. Hamilton’s father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, might have been tempted to mount a challenge, but having fallen short in 1784, he was loath to try again. So Hamilton sought out another candidate and came up with the supreme court justice Robert Yates.

  A hard, skeptical man, Yates was not an obvious choice. As a New York delegate, with Hamilton, to the Constitutional Convention, Yates had fired off fierce Anti-Federalist tracts under the nom de guerre Brutus, and then left early, disgusted by the whole idea of a Constitution that gathered so much power in the hands of a centralized government. He made straight for Clinton’s office in Albany and poured out to him all the confidential deliberations, so Clinton might put a stop to them.

  After the Constitution was ratified into law, however, Yates became a believer. The spectacle of a state supr
eme court justice who’d seen the light—and could draw support from both sides of the constitutional divide—had attractive symbolism for Hamilton. After he persuaded Yates to run, Hamilton himself took over the thirteen-man committee of correspondence to win statewide support and gathered everyone at Bardin’s Tavern, one of the city’s plusher drinking establishments, on Broad Street in Manhattan.

  Hamilton’s King’s College friend the ubiquitous Robert Troup was there. So was William Duer, the crafty financier who would soon prove a vexation to Hamilton.

  And so was the mysterious Aaron Burr. He always said he’d come to pay Yates back for supporting the measure that opened the New York bar to him (and Hamilton) after the revolution. But, with Burr, there was always more to it, and it was a better guess that the real beneficiary was Burr. He never liked to limit himself just to one side of a political issue. While Hamilton threw himself into the effort, writing to all the county committees in the state to warn them of Clinton’s near treasonable stance regarding the Constitution, Burr left no record of what he did, or said, if in fact he did or said anything at all. Hamilton worked himself into a froth extolling Yates as a “man of moderation, sincerely disposed to heal, not to widen those divisions, to promote conciliation, not dissension, to allay, not excite the fermentation of party-spirit,” and so forth. In a sharply divided state, Hamilton’s plea for moderation was not always warmly received. In Ward’s Bridge, where voters from Orange and Ulster Counties were assembled, freemen ordered Hamilton’s letters “thrown under the table” in disgust, and Yates’s nominating papers to be burned on “an elevated pole.”

  Hardly deterred, Hamilton hit the newspapers with anonymous attacks on Clinton under the byline “H.G.” Fifteen in all, the diatribes savaged Clinton’s military career as “cunning,” with some cowardice thrown in, his governorship a warning that “the transition from demagogues to despots, is neither difficult nor uncommon” and his politics merely “a system of STATE POWER unconnected with, and in subversion of the union.” The missives were electrifying, if only because they crossed the line that separated a legitimate political attack from a nasty personal smear. Federalists exulted that nothing had ever been read “with more avidity and with greater success,” but the Anti-Federalists protested that “the torrent of scurrility . . . argues a want of every manly generous principle.” In the end, Clinton survived, but narrowly, winning the election by just 429 votes. The close result left him in a quandary about how to reclaim the Federalists that now made up half the electorate. In the end, he turned for help to a compromise figure, a straddler, who had positioned himself for just that eventuality—Aaron Burr. Clinton selected him as his attorney general, an obscure but influential position that, ironically, involved squaring New York’s state laws with the requirements of the new Constitution.

  But it also involved something else. As attorney general, Burr served, ex officio, as a commissioner of the land office, which was overseeing the sale of the vast tracts of “unappropriated”—meaning unsold—land upstate. This was a major source of state revenue now that the federal government had taken over the collection of duties in the Port of New York. Typically, the land sold for nineteen cents an acre, but one massive exception was a parcel the size of Connecticut that was purchased by a speculator named Alexander Macomb. It went for just eight cents an acre. Speculation was rife that Governor Clinton had delivered such a sweet deal, but Burr’s land office investigation proved helpfully inconclusive. Burr later acquired two hundred thousand acres from Macomb. The price is unrecorded, but any would have been prohibitive, as Burr was, as usual, virtually penniless at the time. Burr’s political fortunes rose from there, with George Clinton’s assistance. Macomb’s did not, and when the Panic of 1792 deflated the market for land, he fell three hundred thousand dollars in debt and was sent to debtors’ prison.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  To a Mind Like His Nothing Comes Amiss

  WASHINGTON WAS INAUGURATED at the freshly designed Federal Hall in New York City at the stroke of noon on April 30, 1789. A broad, handsome, perfectly symmetrical building, Federal Hall was a prime example of the confident new Federal style—a variant of the Georgian style in London—just sweeping into fashion. It was designed by the French architect and civil engineer Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who was soon to create much of Washington City. It was a dazzling, inspiring design—the front portico emblazoned with an immense and triumphant eagle; Roman laurel leaves adorned the interior. Both were intended to wrap the new Republic in the symbolism of the classical Roman one. Along with grand meeting halls for the House on the ground floor and the Senate above, it provided an extensive library and a “machinery room” to display models of the new inventions the nation was sure to generate.

  Washington crossed the Hudson in a velvet-lined barge and then rode to the hall in a canary yellow carriage that brought cries of delight from onlookers. When he emerged, his tall, stately figure was topped by an unsmiling visage under a powdered wig and adorned with a ceremonial sword dangling beside his suit of patriotic American broadcloth. He climbed to Federal Hall’s second-story balcony to take the oath of office from the first chancellor of New York, Robert R. Livingston, before a vast crowd extending in every direction, their enthusiastic shouts like cannon blasts. Vice President John Adams stood beside the president, a roundness for his verticality, but dressed identically except for different buttons.

  Washington shifted indoors to deliver his inaugural address. Now, under the weight of history, his fabled nerves betrayed him. His left hand thrust awkwardly into his pocket, his quivering right holding his text, he was so tight he could scarcely make himself heard.

  Hamilton was not there to see any of it. Elected to no public office, he was obliged to watch from his balcony more than a block away down Wall Street.

  HAMILTON AND BETSEY did attend the inauguration ball, held at a dance hall on Broadway, a lively affair with most of Congress and a range of foreign ministers in attendance, and an occasion to show off the new exuberance that had returned to the city after the hard years of war and occupation. A social observer named Brissot de Warville detected some creeping Englishness in the style and fashion of the ladies in particular, a trend Hamilton would have welcomed. “If there is a town on the American Continent where the English luxury displays its follies, it is New York,” de Warville declared. “You will find there the English fashions. In the dress of the women you will see the most brilliant silks, gauzes, hats, and borrowed hair.” To be sure, he spotted few “equipages”—especially elegant carriages—and the men dressed more simply, disdaining “gewgaws,” but they loved the “luxury of the table.”

  Since Martha was still at Mount Vernon, delaying her entrance into public life, Washington paired off with Betsey for the dancing. The general did not dance, exactly, but walked through the steps, with a certain “gravity,” she wrote, that may have befit his notion of a president.

  But then, it was anyone’s guess as to how an American president should comport himself. Was he an elected monarch, as Hamilton might imagine, maintaining a certain superiority? Or was he a powerful commoner, exhibiting more of a democratic touch? A Senate committee was convened to decide how Washington was to be regarded. Here John Adams, fresh from France, revealed his taste for titled nobility, and, after considerable deliberation, offered that Washington should be referred to as “His Highness, the President of the United States and Protector of their Liberties.” Poor Adams never lived that down. One wag responded by offering the tubby vice president a title of his own: “His Rotundity,” a barb that stuck. Eventually, the Senate decided that the president of the United States should be addressed as “the President of the United States.”

  Now, how should Washington mingle with his fellow Americans? For this the new president turned to Hamilton, who revealed his own disposition by recommending a British “levee,” or formal reception, for a brief, ceremonial appearance on Tuesday afternoons. Washing
ton accepted the recommendation gratefully, and he soon appeared at the levees in a black velvet coat and satin breeches, drifting slowly about, bowing but never touching, and certainly never shaking hands, before he drifted away from the gathering after half an hour. The whole business was insufferable, but it preserved the illusion that the president was approachable and that the people’s will was to be taken into account.

  Hamilton also recommended occasional dinners of eight at which Washington should not stay the entire meal; and larger state affairs for members of Congress, his cabinet, and “distinguished strangers.” The gatherings maintained Washington’s social distance, a preference Hamilton may have remembered from their soldiering days. “Be easy and condescending in your deportment to your officers,” Washington once told a young commander, “but not too familiar, lest you subject yourself to a want of respect.”

  THE CONSTITUTION MADE no provision for a cabinet, leaving all power concentrated in the president’s office, and it took some time to piece out the proper channels for presidential authority. Pondering the matter in the fine city house on Cherry Street by the East River that had been commandeered from Samuel Osgood for the President’s Mansion, Washington had Jefferson in mind for secretary of state, handling international relations, and General Henry Knox for War. His first choice for the powerful post of secretary of the treasury was Robert Morris, the ingenious, if overfed, speculator, born in Liverpool, who’d provided crucial financial aid to Washington’s war effort and served as finance minister under the confederacy. He was now a senator from Pennsylvania, but his financial luck had started to turn against him, and he told Washington he needed to give his full attention to business. He recommended “a far cleverer fellow” for the post—a man Washington knew well. At that point, shortly before the inauguration, Washington had not considered Hamilton for the position, and not from any lingering ill will after the staircase contretemps. Washington simply imagined Hamilton too young for such an important post. As Washington told Morris with some exasperation, Hamilton had “no knowledge of finance.” Morris disagreed: “He knows everything,” he said. “To a mind like his nothing comes amiss.” When Morris told Hamilton he was under consideration for the position at the political epicenter of the new nation, Hamilton expressed a calm satisfaction: “It is the situation in which I can do the most good.” The salary of thirty-five hundred dollars would make things tight for a growing family, but Hamilton deemed it worth the sacrifice to set the country on a solid financial footing. But there was a third candidate, Robert R. Livingston, who had just sworn Washington in for his inauguration. Hamilton had already antagonized him by pushing Rufus King, the eloquent, Harvard-trained lawyer from Massachusetts, for one of New York’s two Senate seats, and his father-in-law, Schuyler, for the other. Livingston believed one of the two spots had been due to him. In selecting King, Hamilton bypassed New York’s mayor, James Duane, the judge in the Rutgers case, who was a Livingston by marriage. (Hamilton feared any successor to Duane might prove “injurious to the city,” meaning to his political interests in the city.) The Livingstons resented an upstart handpicking New York’s senators anyway, and they’d be all the more bothered if a Livingston wasn’t selected as one of them. And now Hamilton himself was going to make off with the best appointive prize of all as treasury secretary? The Livingstons still represented the third great political faction in New York—and, like all politicians, they had good memories for slights. The Livingstons might have fussed over their political standing in New York, but Washington had larger concerns, and he passed over Robert Livingston for treasury and then rejected him for chief justice, too.