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

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War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 24

by Sedgwick, John


  ROUNDING OUT HAMILTON’S efforts to remake the national economy, he turned to the annoyance of all the different currencies coursing through. Washington himself computed his daily expenses in British pounds, and a panoply of foreign coins filled everyone’s pockets. Just a week after the banking bill, Hamilton delivered a Report on the Establishment of a Mint to set the dollar as the standard unit of American currency. It was to be either a gold or silver coin, with smaller coins subdividing it into halves, quarters, tenths, and hundredths in a decimal system. He specified what the coins should look like—smaller but fatter than the foreign pieces, and adorned with the heads of presidents, done in fine workmanship. Each was a piece of the new country that every citizen could hold in his hand.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Botanizing

  LATE IN THE spring of that dramatic year of 1791, Jefferson and Madison took a trip up the Hudson, sailing from New York City clear up to Lake Champlain, and then returning down the western edge of New England. “Botanizing,” they claimed. The two great political leaders claimed they’d come to fish for trout and to shoot squirrels. Jefferson said he had a particular interest in examining the Hessian fly—a crop pest named for the Hessian troops that brought it in their bedding during the war—at the behest of the American Philosophical Society, of which he was a vice president, although he may have been teasing. Their itinerary, slicing through the northern Federalist stronghold, suggested that they were in search of a particular class of mammals, receptive to the new Jeffersonian persuasion, just beginning to be called Republicans. In Manhattan, Hamilton’s good friend Troup saw “every evidence of a passionate courtship” of converts and warned Hamilton: “Delenda est Carthago I suppose is the Maxim adopted with respect to you.” Hamilton was enough of a classicist to know the meaning: Carthage must be annihilated. And Hamilton with it. The trip would map the field of battle and recruit generals for the fight. The first was Philip Freneau, a Princeton schoolmate of Madison’s, who’d unsuccessfully wooed Freneau’s sister, Mary. Moody and romantic, the author of darkly sentimental verse that anticipated Poe, he’d served as a seaman in the Revolutionary War, only to be captured by the British and locked in the hellhole of a prison ship for six weeks. He emerged a savage anti-British propagandist, flaying George III as “the Caligula of Great Britain.” In him, Jefferson saw the perfect man to counter the Hamilton-worshipping Gazette of the United States, which was edited by a former Boston schoolteacher named John Fenno, handpicked by Hamilton to advance the Federalist line. To Jefferson, Hamilton’s Gazette dispensed nothing but the “doctrines of monarchy.” With his National Gazette, he’d extol the Republican virtues of farming and France. Now, over breakfast in New York, invigorated by his immersion in the wilderness, Jefferson offered Freneau a State Department post as a translator, an obvious sinecure since Freneau barely even knew French. He’d also be paid to print government notices that Jefferson would send his way. The real job was to lionize Jefferson and slice Hamilton to ribbons.

  Four columned, with a cheerfully flamboyant logo, the National Gazette flourished by playing up every imaginable claim against Hamilton, and many unimaginable ones, like the assertion that at a dinner of the Saint Andrew’s Society on November 21, 1792, Hamilton rose to offer a toast to George III, declaring, “there was no stability, no security in any kind of government but a monarchy.” The specificity of the date and place conveyed accuracy, but it fit too well Jefferson’s caricature of Hamilton as a man “bewitched and perverted by the British example.” Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton nearly gave his life to defeat the British, after all.

  AND THE OTHER man in New York that Jefferson and Madison entertained over breakfast? Aaron Burr. At first glance, he was an unlikely choice for such an honor. Just three years before, he had been a lowly attorney general, having been plucked out of even deeper obscurity by Governor Clinton for that post, and he might have remained there if, earlier in 1791, the New York Federalists, meaning Hamilton, hadn’t run into some bad luck. By draw, the Senate seat that Hamilton had delivered to Philip Schuyler ran only two years; Rufus King received the seat that ran six. Now Hamilton’s machinations to throw over the Livingston relation, Mayor Duane, for King came back to haunt him. Such were the byzantine politics of New York State that Clinton had quietly pushed King too, knowing that the clannish Livingstons would turn on Hamilton when their kinsman Robert R. Livingston lost. Hamilton first learned of their fury when he was seeking Federalist support for his assumption bill, and even though the Livingstons stood to profit handsomely from it, they assailed it as an invitation to “stock-jobbing”—an insidious form of speculation. Afterward, the Schuyler-Livingston alliance against Clinton became a Livingston-Clinton alliance against Schuyler, or more precisely, against Hamilton. So—who would the Clinton-Livingston faction put forward against Schuyler in 1791?

  Burr was the perfect man for Clinton for the same reason that Yates had been perfect for Hamilton in the governor’s race. It was the quality that had come to identify Burr above all others. The quality of no quality. No political quality, that is. Having played both political sides—working for Yates in ’89, serving Clinton since—Burr was no lightning rod, but a broad, flat meadow that didn’t offer so much as a single tree to strike, while Schuyler was a high fortress of haughty superiority.

  The election was decided in the Assembly where Burr had served. When a motion was put forth to offer Philip Schuyler to the federal Senate, it was defeated thirty-two to twenty-seven. When the name of Aaron Burr was offered, it passed by the same margin.

  In Philadelphia, Hamilton was crushed by the news. He’d failed his father-in-law and his party—and, in his mind, he had only one person to blame. Burr. Now US Senator Burr. Any cordial relations with Burr evaporated, replaced by the most savage contempt. Not even Jefferson aroused him to such a height of indignation. Every reference to Burr in his letters is black with scorn. He never acknowledged his own part in the catastrophe by blithely alienating the Livingstons so fiercely that he kicked away his majority in New York and would never recover it.

  Burr knew that his election would be “displeasing” to the Hamilton forces, but he never imagined the secretary would hold a grudge. “Burr is as far from a fool as I ever saw,” his later associate Andrew Jackson once said, “and yet he is as easily fooled as any man I ever knew.” It wasn’t that Burr opposed Hamilton on principle; it was that he didn’t. He rarely took a position on matters like the assumption bill, which Hamilton considered essential.

  All this explained why Jefferson and Madison were so eager to meet with the junior senator from New York. They imagined Burr would do in the political world what Freneau did in newspapers: drive Hamilton to a frenzy of irritation, causing him to bring about his own ruin with no further help from them.

  WHEN BURR ARRIVED in Philadelphia in October 1791, he took a seat in the Senate chambers upstairs in the high-spired Independence Hall, ready, as his wife put it, to “commence politics.” The irascible John Adams presided from a stiff chair beside a silk-skirted table, the thirty senators arrayed before him. In his thirties, Burr was not exactly handsome, but he was striking, and one imagines the other senators took a good look at this new man with deep-set eyes behind a sturdy brow, the thinning hair pulled back to expose the brilliance of his face, the proud, upright head above a swirling white cravat. Since minutes were not kept, and the public barred, it can’t be known what Burr said, but it appears he took little part in the discussions. He could be quite brilliant at summarizing the arguments of others—or so said New York’s other senator, Rufus King—but Burr rarely added any opinions of his own. Typically, when he broached the seminal topic of Hamilton’s proposed national bank, he hedged. Writing Theodore Sedgwick, the now-haughty congressman from Massachusetts, he acknowledged the idea of a US Bank was “interesting,” but the “promised advantages” were “problematic.” Then he conceded he knew little about it, as he had not “read with proper attention” Hamilto
n’s arguments, and would defer to Sedgwick’s opinion, whatever it might be, since it was likely born of “deeper study.”

  Burr did diligent service on a variety of committees, the bulk of them concerned with the affairs of Indians on the western border. He was much more keen to write a definitive history of the War of Independence—his definitive history. To the purpose, he spent several hours every morning copying out lengthy extracts from the war archives in the Department of State—until Washington got wind of the project and, loath to let someone so impudent determine his place in history, had him barred from the archives.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Embryo-Caesar

  AT THIRTY-SIX, HAMILTON was a young man on the verge of becoming an old one. For all his intellect, he had relied on his protean energy to attain his position and to hold it against all comers. As his hour lengthened, he was commanding attention less through his acts than through his stature. An anonymous dinner guest remembered an evening with Hamilton during this period. Ever the dramatist, Hamilton was the last to come to the table, but the group quieted when he appeared, and all eyes turned to him to extend their “respectful attention.” He was dressed with a nearly royal flamboyance, with bright buttons, “the skirts of his coat . . . unusually long,” “a white waistcoat, black silk small-clothes, white silk stockings.” As Hamilton went around the table, the host introduced him to the few people he didn’t know. “To each he made a formal bow, bending very low, the ceremony of shaking hands not being observed.” In the politics of the era, hand shaking was considered a vulgar Republican custom. From Washington on down, Federalists did not touch. “His appearance and deportment accorded with the dignified distinction to which he had attained in public opinion. At dinner, whenever he engaged in the conversation, every one listened attentively. His mode of speaking was deliberate and serious; and his voice engagingly pleasant. In the evening of the same day he was in a mixed assembly of both sexes; and the tranquil reserve noticed at the dinner table, had given place to a social and playful manner, as though in this he was alone ambitious to excel.”

  Despite his prodigious power as secretary of the treasury, as chief adviser to Washington on every aspect of his administration, and as de facto head of the Federalist Party, Hamilton did not act the part of the confident potentate. To the contrary, the higher he rose, the more precarious his position seemed—at least to judge by his fury in defending it from men he perceived to be his enemies, who were growing numerous. That energy that had once been put to such constructive uses now turned inward, feeding the most destructive passions. Hence his fury at Madison for his apostasy and his outrage at Jefferson for his “dangerous” opinions. It was as if there were demons on every side.

  And then there was Burr. With Burr the antagonism went beyond policy, for the threat was more than just political. To Hamilton, Burr must have been a ghoul, haunting him first at Elizabethtown, then at Princeton, in the war, in New York courtrooms, and now in government, and the conflict between them may have become existential—not that Burr would ever think this way. It is not so hard to imagine that Burr went so deep he threatened Hamilton’s reasons for being, making him not just purposeless but vulnerable, and raising the specter that must have always been there, on some level, of a forced return to a beggar’s life on Nevis. Hamilton would never forget how Burr had undone his father-in-law, snatching his prized Senate seat from him and ending his political career. That revealed a Burr that only Hamilton could see—the smug aristocrat unbound by the conventions of civilized behavior. And Burr’s shameless disregard of proper political conduct was exasperating, as Hamilton saw him as a man devoid of political beliefs. But far from being punished for such errant ways, he was being rewarded for them, whereas Hamilton, the virtuous immigrant, was being treated like a nonentity.

  Hamilton acted like a man filled with foreboding. His own greatness was starting to recede behind him; he had to have sensed that. Burr’s lay ahead. Only a year into a highly ineffectual Senate term, he was already being touted in some corners as a vice presidential candidate in the coming election, and could the presidency itself be far behind? Burr made Hamilton feel like yesterday’s man. As the Senate contest showed, he was too polarizing, too annoying, to win elective office. Jefferson had left State, Knox was about to leave War, and his own tenure at Treasury would not last much longer. He would soon return to a quiet private life as a New York lawyer, his only power his influence over the Federalist Party, and that was sure to wane if the party did, as it surely would if Adams—a man he viewed (in one of his typically unrestrained opinions) as a dyspeptic windbag—was elected to lead it.

  While it was plain that Washington could hold the presidency for as long as he wanted, Adams’s position as vice president was not so secure. And in the summer before the December election of 1792, the unstoppable George Clinton was urged to take Adams on. When the Old Incumbent—as he was called even at fifty-three—temporized, he left Burr an opening. He dispatched Melancton Smith—the Burrite whom Burr touted as “the man of the first Influence” in New York State—to make a foray into the South to test the political waters for Burr. But the national Republican caucus in Philadelphia got word and insisted that Burr stop. Adams scoffed at the gathering as expressing “the pure Spirit of Clintonian Cabal [and] of Virginia Artifices.” But it was the first national political convention, and it forced Burr out in favor of Clinton. It was significant that the convention was largely inspired by opposition to Burr, not support for him. Burr dutifully dropped out of the race and pledged to “lend every aid in his power to C[linton]’s election.” He sent Smith out to campaign throughout New England for Clinton, to no discernible effect, as Clinton would garner no electoral votes there.

  Grateful for Burr’s support, nonetheless, Clinton tried to repay him with an appointment to the Supreme Judicial Court of New York State. A shrewd move, as, in a stroke, it extended a bouquet to a rival and generously offered to ease Burr’s financial burdens—and potentially retire a tenacious rival from politics forever. Burr declined. Money was an attraction, no question, but not enough of one. “There was not that instinctive shrinking from debt,” wrote a somewhat mystified Parton, “that caution . . . which indicates the entirely honest man.”

  Increasingly preoccupied with Burr, Hamilton dispatched Rufus King to do some reconnaissance on his rival’s popularity outside of New York. When King’s report came back to reveal that Burr was indeed seen as a potential vice president both in the Federalist heartland of Connecticut and in the swing state of Pennsylvania, Hamilton was furious and dashed off a screed to an unnamed political correspondent. While he affected a nose-in-the-air detachment, the vitriol had force. Burr was so offensive, he made Hamilton long for Clinton, the lumpen Constitution hater Hamilton had spent more than a decade trying to unseat.

  “Mr. C—— is a man of property, and, in private life, as far as I know of probity,” Hamilton began airily. “I fear the other Gentleman [Burr] is unprincipled both as a public and private man. When the constitution was in deliberation, his conduct was equivocal; but its enemies, who I believe best understood him considered him as with them. In fact, I take it, he is for or against nothing, but as it suits his interest or ambition. He is determined, as I conceive, to make his way to be the head of the popular party and to climb per fas et nefas to the highest honors of the state; and as much higher as circumstances may permit.”

  Then he turned pitying, which is crueler. “Embarrassed, as I understand, in his circumstances, with an extravagant family—bold enterprising and intriguing, I am mistaken, if it be not his object to play the game of confusion, and I feel it a religious duty to oppose his career.” A religious duty—from a man who was not then religious in any other way.

  He concluded: “I have hitherto scrupulously refrained from interference in elections.” That was hilarious, as he did little else now. “But the occasion is in my opinion of sufficient importance to warrant in this instance a departu
re from that rule.” He was duty bound. “I therefore commit my opinion to you without scruple; but in perfect confidence I pledge my character for discernment that it is incumbent upon every good man to resist the present design.”

  Like a man obsessed, Hamilton returned to the theme of Burr’s perfidy as he anatomized his rival to another anonymous correspondent just a few days later.

  As a public man, he is one of the worst sort—a friend to nothing but as it suits his interest and ambition. Determined to climb to the highest honours of the State, and as much higher as circumstances may permit—he cares nothing about the means of effecting his purpose. ’Tis evident that he aims at putting himself at the head of what he calls the “popular party” as affording the best tools for an ambitious man to work with. Secretly turning Liberty into ridicule, he knows as well as most men how to make use of the name. In a word, if we have an embryo-Caesar in the United States ’tis Burr.

  As it happened, Hamilton had had no reason to fear. Having withdrawn from the race, Burr was not selected as a vice presidential candidate at the Republican caucus, needless to say. He did not receive even a single vote. The honor went instead to New York’s perennial governor George Clinton. Hamilton ran the risk of building Burr up by tearing him down. As it was, Hamilton made a far greater impression on the delegates than Burr. “There is no inferior degree of sagacity in the combinations of this extraordinary man,” one member declared. “With a comprehensive eye, a subtle and contriving mind, and soul devoted to his object, all his measure are promptly and aptly designed, and, like the links of a chain, depend on each other [and] acquire additional strength by their union.” Hamilton was the man on the high throne, and the Republicans were already contriving a means to haul him down.

 

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