When Hamilton’s Reynolds Pamphlet appeared, Betsey was pregnant with the couple’s sixth child after a previous miscarriage. Ever solicitous of his wife, even as he made her life hell, Hamilton often wrote her long, tender letters that ended, “Adieu, Angel.” Angelica was in New York with Church, and at the height of the scandal she joined with Hamilton to escort her sister to a sloop to sail her up the Hudson to her family retreat in Albany, safe from the madness. In his anguish, Hamilton turned to Betsey for an almost maternal comfort. “I always feel how necessary you are to me,” he wrote her after she left. “But when you are absent, I become still more sensible of it and look around in vain for that satisfaction which you alone can bestow.” Angelica wrote Betsey:
When [Hamilton] returned from the sloop, he was very much out of spirits and you were the subject of his conversation the rest of the evening. Catherine played at the harpsichord for him and at 10 o’clock he went home. Tranquilize your kind and dear heart, my dear Eliza, for I have the most positive assurance from Mr. Church that the dirty fellow [Monroe, most likely] who has caused us all some uneasiness and wounded your feelings, my dear love, is effectually silenced. Merit, virtue, and talents must have enemies and [are] always exposed to envy so that, my Eliza, you see the penalties attending the position of so amiable a man. All this you would not have suffered if you had married into a family less near the sun. But then [you would have missed?] the pride, the pleasure, the nameless satisfactions.
While Betsey was clearly the innocent, the Republican Aurora treated her as if she were somehow complicit. “Art thou a wife?” the editors hissed. “See him, whom thou has chosen for the partner of his life, lolling in the lap of a harlot.” As for Hamilton, the paper turned preacherly: “He acknowledges . . . that he violated the sacred sanctuary of his own house, by taking an unprincipled woman during the absence of his wife and family to his bed.” As ever, Betsey clung to the image of her pious husband.
In the midst of the pamphlet crisis, the Hamiltons’ oldest child, Philip, apple of his father’s eye, suffered at fifteen a “bilious fever” that might be the lethal typhus, according to Dr. David Hosack, the eminence from Columbia College who was summoned to attend to him. After the onset, Hamilton had to ride thirty miles north to Rye for a court case, but his anxiety for the boy was fierce, and he “pray[ed] heaven to restore him.” Nonetheless, for days, Philip sank ever deeper into a sweaty torpor and finally grew so feeble that Hosack decided to move Betsey into another room so she wouldn’t have to watch Philip’s death spasms. A rider was dispatched to rush Hamilton back to see his son once more before the end.
Arriving late that night, Hamilton jumped off his horse and raced into the house, where he braced himself to find a corpse, but Philip had miraculously shaken off the illness and returned to life. Hamilton was so overwhelmed at the sight, he found Hosack where he was sleeping and clasped the doctor’s hand. Hosack awoke to see Hamilton’s “eyes suffused with tears of joy.” After that, Hamilton alone nursed Philip around the clock, “administering with his own hand every dose of medicine or cup of nourishment that was required.” That was his custom for his children, and for his wife, if they fell sick. Hamilton could not have been a more devoted family man.
THIRTY-SEVEN
The Bubble of Speculation Is Burst
BY THE TIME he returned to New York, Burr’s penchant for secrecy had reached another level. It was no longer a matter of concealing the details of his legitimate activities that happened to be personal; now he was shrouding from view illicit ones, which were growing in number. He was like a mole that slunk about the forest floor, only to disappear into a labyrinth of tunnels below.
Much of his secrecy stemmed from the inherent awkwardness of his growing “pecuniary vexations,” as he termed them. A financial squeeze was uncomfortable anyway, but there was the added stress of being hounded by creditors (and the greater the debt, the more the creditors), the humiliation of constantly feeling pinched, and the prospect of rotting away in some hellish debtors’ prison. Burr had long taken loans from his legal clients, which was entanglement enough, but now, to escape his debts, he incurred more, borrowing more widely from friends, business relations, and relatives, much of it to fund increasingly desperate real estate speculations that were designed to free him from debt but were more likely to plunge him in all the deeper. And 1796 was no time to have bought, only to buy. “The Bubble of speculation is burst,” Burr’s confidant Theodore Sedgwick wrote to Rufus King, adding that Burr was “irretrievably ruined.”
Burr could not have had a worse investment touch. In his desperation, he’d tried a complicated speculative scheme in the French real estate market, only to run afoul of France’s moves against American ships, which had frozen financial transfers between the two countries. Then he turned to a once-wealthy financier, now little more than a confidence man, the Boston-born James Greenleaf, who’d acquired some respectability as US consul in Holland before returning to the United States in 1793 to become, briefly, the most lavish land speculator in the United States. He had purchased vast swathes of land in Washington City and in upstate New York. In partnership with Greenleaf, Burr somehow scraped up the funds to buy half the vast “Angerstein tract” north of the Mohawk River, so named for its original owner, John Julius Angerstein, the underwriter for Lloyd’s who was also a renowned art collector.* Burr took advantage of New York’s Alien Law prohibiting foreigners from owning any land in the state to extract his parcel from Angerstein for a very good price. Burr assumed that his partner, the illustrious Greenleaf, was good for the other half. But Robert Morris had made a similar assumption, and, for his folly, he would soon sit in the Prune Street debtors’ prison in Philadelphia writing beseeching letters to his creditors. It turned out that Greenleaf had deceived Burr no less than Morris; he didn’t have the money. So Burr was obliged to cough up Greenleaf’s half of the twenty-four-thousand-pound sale price, or pay a huge twenty-four-thousand-pound nonpayment penalty as well. Burr frantically tried to raise the cash by selling his scant other equity stakes in land and stock, and he collected personal notes from a half dozen friends. But it wasn’t enough. When word got out about Greenleaf’s failure, creditors swarmed, bringing about his total ruin. Impossibly indebted, Greenleaf would join Morris in debtors’ prison in Philadelphia, too.
When Burr failed to pay, Angerstein hired Alexander Hamilton to press the case against him. The matter dragged through the courts, and judgment was not rendered until 1803: Burr was obliged to pay Angerstein eighty thousand dollars, a colossal sum when the vice presidency of the United States paid a salary of just five thousand dollars annually. Hamilton marveled at the extent of Burr’s debts. “He [Aaron Burr] is without doubt insolvent for a large deficit. All his visible property is deeply mortgaged, and he is known to owe other large debts, for which there is no specific security.”
Meanwhile, Burr’s friend John Lamb was on the hook for fifty thousand dollars. A former Son of Liberty and hero of Yorktown, Lamb was the collector of customs for the port of New York when 150,000 dollars in federal funds under his care had somehow disappeared. No one accused Lamb of malfeasance, but he was held responsible all the same, and he would be forced to forfeit his two sureties, or bonds, totaling fifty thousand dollars. None were held by Burr, but by two close Burr associates, Melancton Smith and Marinus Willett. In the interlocking network of unhappy obligations, Lamb had once loaned Burr twenty thousand dollars and then served as his surety on Angerstein, costing Lamb twice. It pained Burr to see his friend in trouble. “That your peace of mind should be distressed or personal safety endangered by an act of friendship and generosity to me,” Burr confessed to Lamb, “is the most humiliating event of my life.” He provided legal services, but to no avail. Lamb died bitterly impoverished in 1800.
Into this shadowy milieu strolled Colonel Joseph Brant-Thayendanegea, the Indian King, as he was known, but more exactly the Mohawk chieftain of the Six Nations of the Iroqu
ois, and a man who came to represent the myriad of conflicts that converged in the tangle that was Burr. The image on the frontispiece of his two-volume biography from 1845 shows him adorned with a plume of feathers, thick leather belts crisscrossed over a flowing tunic, a heavy piece of ornamental silver dangling over his chest, and blowsy pantaloons below, the whole thing finished off with a tomahawk in his right hand.* But that was just for show; on government business he wore city dress, little different from Burr’s own. Far from a fierce warrior, he bore the air of a burdened romantic, with soft eyes and wistful expression.
Raised in Little Falls, New York, he’d joined the British to seize Canada from the French, and proved a savvy and savage warrior. “I like the harpsichord well, and the organ still better,” he once declared. “But I like the drum and trumpet best of all, for they make my heart beat quick.” Educated by Anglican missionaries, he’d become a devout Christian who later translated the Gospel of Saint Mark into his native language. After the Mohawks selected him as their chief, he led bloody raids against the Americans during the war, but he was betrayed by the British in the peace when they gave away all the Indians’ western lands and expelled them to Upper Canada, a peninsula by Lake Ontario. The British had promised them clear title but never delivered it, making it impossible to resell the land to American speculators. Seeing Brant’s distress, Washington tried to win his allegiance, but Brant preferred to deal with the French. He’d met with the French philosophe Compte de Volney in Albany to hear his outlandish plans to draw French soldiers up from New Orleans to steal north across the border and attack the scanty English defense. But such an ambition required money from a man desperate enough to spring for it. So when Burr, a financially strapped senator, French in orientation, long interested in Indian affairs, invited him to dinner in Philadelphia with Volney and Talleyrand, soon to assume a position in the French Directory, Brant was only too happy to attend. That dinner in Philadelphia was the beginning.
The actual scheme remains shrouded in the Burrian mystery of cryptic letters and destroyed evidence, but its outline is easy enough to discern: Talleyrand would extract money from his connections at the French Directory, presumably eager to embarrass the English, and assisted by Burr’s stepson John Bartow Prevost, installed as Monroe’s secretary; Volney would provide the French troops; Brant would command; and Burr would mastermind. Around this time, he put in twenty-three thousand dollars toward Canadian land purchases, and solicited poor John Lamb for much more.
To further cultivate Brant, Burr invited him to visit Richmond Hill in early 1797. Unable to be there himself, Burr left it to his daughter Theodosia, just thirteen, to handle the evening. He provided Brant a note of introduction for her. “This will be handed to you by Colonel Brant, the celebrated Indian Chief. I am sure that you and Natalie will be happy in the opportunity of seeing a man so much renowned. He is a man of education—speaks and writes English perfectly—and has seen much of Europe and America. Receive him with respect and hospitality. He is not one of those Indians who drink rum, but is quite a gentleman; not one who will make you fine bows, but one who understands and practices what belongs to propriety and good breeding.” With the chief as the guest of honor, Theodosia had invited fourteen dignitaries from New York, including New York’s Episcopal bishop Benjamin Moore, one of her mother’s last physicians, and Dr. David Hosack, who’d treated Philip Hamilton, and they gathered around the long table, with Theodosia at the foot and Brant at the head, the faces all lit up with candle flame.
Burr’s plans, however, had not gone unnoticed by the Crown’s many spies. In 1797, Robert Liston, the British envoy to the United States, told William Wyndham, Lord Grenville, that an American expeditionary force was plotting to expel Britain from Upper Canada. Burr was one of the two conspirators he named. When Hamilton got wind of the scheme, he declared that Burr’s perilous financial state forced him into “unworthy expedients,” including a possible “bargain and sale with some foreign power” and “probably to enlarge the sphere—a war.” The secret out, the plan fizzled.
Crushed by his debts, sometime after that Brant dinner in early 1797, Burr had no choice. He mortgaged his house and sold all his furnishings. Out went all the ornate mirrors, the inlaid tables—everything that was not needed for his daily existence. How the vast rooms must have echoed with their emptiness. The crusty Theodore Sedgwick, now a senator, happened to be visiting when the movers came to unload all the valuables, and it must have been quite a sight, for afterward Burr wrote to apologize to him for the “chaos” of his household.
THIRTY-EIGHT
An Absolute and Abominable Lie
WHEN BURR’S TERM as senator ended that year, 1797, he did the unthinkable. He took a seat in the state Assembly, about the humblest of all elected positions in the state of New York—and relocated to up-country Albany. He’d done the political math: with New England voting as a bloc for the Federalists, and the South solid for the Republicans, that left only a few mid-Atlantic states up for grabs to decide the election. None of them was as ripe for the plucking as New York. While it was solidly Republican upstate, New York City was still Tory at heart, balancing the state for the Federalists. To Burr, it was apparent that if someone could tip the Assembly for the Republicans, the party would reap rich rewards in the Electoral College for the next presidential season—and that someone would become a Republican darling. But with Burr, there was the overt, and there was the covert. A place in the Assembly would allow him to work the machinery of state governance for his own financial advantage.
Brooding in Philadelphia, Jefferson wrote Burr one of those effusive Jeffersonian letters that rings the chimes on ambiguity, but it seemed to invite Burr into his confidence. Seeing that a few other Republicans had joined the New York Assembly with him, Jefferson hailed a “dawn of change” in the state, and then, like an evangelist, asked if Republicans might still “hope for salvation” that would “come, as of old, from the east.” Could Burr “give me a comfortable solution of them?” Instead of Hamilton’s rational appeals, Jefferson made emotional ones, but this was deceptive nonetheless. For Jefferson later revealed what he really thought of Burr during this period. “His conduct soon inspired me with distrust,” he declared. “I habitually cautioned Mr. Madison from trusting him too much. I saw afterwards that under General Washington’s and Mr. Adams’ administrations, whenever a great military appointment or a diplomatic one was to be made, he came post to Philadelphia to show himself, and in fact that he was always at market.” True enough, but Jefferson could not imagine what Burr was selling this time.
Burr replied that he agreed completely, but it would not be “discreet” to say more by letter. So he rode off again to see Jefferson as he had four years before, this time in Philadelphia. Burr was at market again. For the meeting, Jefferson brought in Monroe, just back from France, Madison, and Albert Gallatin, the Swiss-born Pennsylvanian who’d been ousted from the Senate by the Federalists for being a foreigner. This was likely the time that Monroe passed on to Jefferson a few words about the Reynolds affair, for Callender published his History shortly after. The rest of the meeting is a matter of conjecture, but it almost certainly involved Burr’s elaborating on his plans to take back New York, and Jefferson trying to disguise his enthusiasm.
Back in the Assembly, Burr jumped right into national politics by putting forth a bill that would take away the right to select the state’s presidential electors from the assemblymen and give it to the voters. Since the Federalists still controlled the Assembly, the bill was a nonstarter, but Burr knew he could win by losing, as his bill revealed that the Federalists were neither of the people nor for them. And he rounded up more Burrites, starting with John Swartwout, a blond, Bunyanesque figure from Dutchess County, who became the Burrites’ Burrite, known for taking on the rough or exhausting tasks that nobody else would do. He came with three brothers—Robert, Samuel, and Henry—who became the muscle of the organization.
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bsp; While Burr played politics in the Assembly, he was there for more urgent reasons. The miserable Angerstein affair had been instructive on many levels, but not the least of them was the desire of foreigners to purchase New York lands. Not only would a change expand the market and raise prices, but the foreigners would pay Burr handsomely for the privilege of getting in on the land rush. So when the land agent of the Holland Land Company approached Burr with a proposition, the assemblyman listened attentively. Holland Land was an agglomeration of Dutch banks that had, through the agent, Théophile Cazenove, purchased almost 5 million acres of virgin land in Pennsylvania and New York. The problem was, this was illegal. To get around this, Cazenove had first hired Alexander Hamilton to persuade the Assembly to throw out the Alien Law, but the best he could do was to allow ownership for a period of seven years. Not good enough. Hamilton pushed it to sixteen years—if the real estate agent in question made a 250,000-dollar loan to the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company, of which Hamilton’s father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, happened to be president.
That was not much improvement, and likely to be a scandal of its own. So Cazenove turned to Burr. Somehow, even as a bankrupt, Burr had already managed to purchase one hundred thousand acres from the Holland Company, the money to be paid in installments, with a potential twenty-thousand-dollar penalty if he failed to deliver. He had yet to put down a penny, but for security, he mortgaged one of the few pieces of land that was still unencumbered and transferred a twenty-thousand-dollar bond he’d received from the lawyer for the Albany patroon, Hamilton’s brother-in-law Stephen Van Rensselaer. While Hamilton had tried to be artful, Burr told Cazenove to go right ahead and bribe the key members of the legislature into doing his bidding, and he provided the names.
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 30