A master of rhetoric and verbal craftiness, Jefferson was personally rather shy, with talents of persuasion that were better given to the page than to voicing in person, and certainly not with an ordinary citizen. He considered such an approach rather brazen. But he saw that Burr was clearly capable of making dramatic inroads in the critical New York vote, and this approach of his might open up Jefferson’s path to the power he craved.
With Jefferson’s blessing, Burr rushed back to New York and jumped right into the effort, creating the grandly titled General Republican Committee, with himself at its head. Headquartered at Burr’s city house, with a fully laden table for the hungry and a mattress or two for the exhausted, the committee would serve as a command center for the military-style campaign, dispatching loyal Burrites such as Davis, the Swartwout brothers, and perhaps a dozen more, and their many minions, to every ward in the city. They would be the ones to create that dossier on every voter, making a note as to which ones should be revisited on Election Day, with a wagon to carry them to the polls if necessary. The city still had a property requirement for voters, a holdover from Federalist control, but Burr got around that with the “tontine,” a banding together of tenants and others without property as collective owners of a tiny piece of legitimate real estate, even if each share was just a few square inches.
He also looked to organizations that might deliver voters in large batches, and turned first to the Society of Saint Tammany, later Tammany Hall, which was then essentially a social club for Irish immigrants who gathered regularly with their leader, the “Grand Sachem,” at the “Wigwam”—also known, affectionately, as “the pig sty”—at the City Tavern. Tammany was at the other end of the social scale from Hamilton’s Society of the Cincinnati, which was made up of the city’s elite. And Burr would make Tammany highly functional, turning the members who gathered at the City Tavern for a glass or two of porter into workhorses of the Republican Party.
Concerned that his Federalists not look too imperious, Hamilton had stocked his list of candidates with workingmen whose democratic appeal would cut into the Republican base. But he went so far as to select political nonentities—a potter, a grocer, a shoemaker, a mason, among them—that were only a Federalist’s idea of the kind of men a Republican might want to vote for. When Burr examined Hamilton’s list, he “read it over with great gravity,” one observer noted, “folded it up in his pocket, and . . . said, ‘Now I have him all hollow.’” A morose President Adams could only agree. “Men of little weight,” he called the thirteen, “obscure in name, poor in purse, mean in talents and meritorious only in [that] they were confidential friends of the great and good Hamilton.” Two days later, on April 17, Burr revealed his list, and the contrast could scarcely have been sharper, for he had recruited some of the most illustrious Republicans in the state. His list started with the Old Incumbent himself, George Clinton, and General Horatio Gates, the hero of Saratoga, and it continued through the president of the New York Insurance Company, the esteemed Brockholst Livingston, the former postmaster general of the United States, and several more, altogether a breathtaking display of political firepower. Impressive in itself, it was all the more impressive that Burr had been able to persuade such grandees to labor for a year in virtual anonymity, for measly pay, in Albany. All is “Joy & Enthusiasm,” reported one ecstatic Republican. “Never have I observed such a union of sentiment; so much zeal and so general a determination to be active,” added another. More to the point, Edward Livingston told Jefferson, “there is a most auspicious gloom on the countenance of every tory and placeman.” He referred to the avaricious political appointees Jefferson loved to decry.
On the day of the voting, April 29, Burr’s headquarters was a madhouse of activity: Tracking reports came in from every ward in the city, dispatching campaign workers to pull out missing voters, and Burr there to oversee it all, if he wasn’t dashing out into the hurly-burly himself. The Federalist Daily Advertiser professed to be shocked that a presidential candidate would “stoop so low as to visit every corner in search of voters.” But Hamilton had not sat back. The Republican General Advertiser spied him all over the city—“Hurrying this way, and darting that; here he buttons a heavy hearted fed, and preaches up courage, there he meets a group, and he simpers in unanimity, again to the heavy headed and hearted, he talks of perseverance, and (God bless the mark) of virtue.” The loyal Troup tried to keep up with his friend but found it nearly impossible. “Never have I witnessed such exertions before. I have not eaten dinner for three days and have been constantly on my legs from 7 in the morning till 7 in the afternoon.”
A storm had been brewing for days, and it disgorged a flood of rain the day before the balloting began, leaving an unusual sheen that Federalists took to be an aura of “brimstone” that was all too portentous. Indeed, once the first of the three Election Days broke, the city had never seen such a frenzy. The streets were jammed with “carriages, chairs and waggons” bearing the party faithful to the polls, many of them escorted by partisans who kept up a stream of encouragement in one of the many languages—German, Italian, Polish, Russian—of the polyglot city. Hamilton and Burr were nearly ubiquitous presences, Hamilton aboard a handsome white horse, giving rasping speeches, sometimes almost back to back with his antagonist, who was doing the same on foot. Each of them tried to outshout the other as each urged on his campaign workers and derided the opposition. In growing desperation, if not exhaustion, Hamilton turned to assailing the Republicans as “scoundrels” and “villains,” but Burr, more confident, did not resort to such language. He kept at it from daybreak to nightfall, and then, when the voting was finally complete, he posted guards at all the polling places in the city to make sure that the ballot boxes were secured, the “leading Federalist gentlemen” were kept away, and the count was accurate.
After that final sunset on May 1, it was soon clear that Burr’s slate had swept the entire city. Every single one of his thirteen candidates had won, by an average margin of two hundred fifty votes each—in a city the Federalists had taken by nearly a thousand in the last election. Hamilton had been utterly routed. One ecstatic Republican attributed the victory to “the Intervention of a Supreme Power, and our friend Burr the agent.” The Federalist Robert Troup saw the opposite, as he discerned “shadows, fiends and darkness” everywhere. In a fury, a disbelieving Hamilton begged Governor Jay, his longtime friend, to have the current Assembly pass a law to transfer the right to choose electors to the people after all, in hopes they might vote differently this time. Never mind that he had been appalled when Burr had recommended exactly this move scarcely more than a year before. Otherwise, he told Jay, the Mephistophelian Jefferson would likely be elected the next president. “Scruples of delicacy and propriety,” he said, “ought not to hinder the taking of a legal and constitutional step to prevent an atheist in Religion and a fanatic in politics from getting possession of the helm of state.”
But Burr’s fingers were everywhere, and a Republican paper soon printed Hamilton’s undemocratic appeal, creating a firestorm of outrage and blackening Hamilton’s name further. Worse for him, Jay did not go along. Across the top of Hamilton’s request, he wrote: “Proposing a measure for party purposes, which I think it would not become me to adopt.”
IT WAS CLEAR that Jefferson and Adams would each top his party’s ticket, but the question was—who would be their respective vice presidents? Pressed by the tireless Hamilton, the Federalists turned to General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, the South Carolinian who was one of the three commissioners sent to negotiate with France, precipitating the Quasi-War in 1797. He still rode high on his indignant reply to Talleyrand’s request for a bribe: “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.” He was the elder brother of Thomas Pinckney, the losing vice presidential candidate Hamilton had picked to run with Adams last time. Fed up with the erratic Adams, Hamilton would have preferred C.C. Pinckney to run at the top of the ticket, but, even if not, he
hoped that Pinckney had a chance of bringing South Carolina into the Federalist column.
On the Republican side, the selection wasn’t so obvious. Everyone recognized that a New Yorker would probably be needed to take the state’s freshly available twelve electoral votes. But which one? The names of the ageless George Clinton and lesser-known Chancellor Robert Livingston inevitably came up in any discussion, but so did the name of the wunderkind who had made New York’s votes available, Aaron Burr. Each represented one of the three major factions that held the state in their grip—Clinton and Livingston being two, both time-honored, and now Burr, with his Burrites, supplanted Hamilton’s Schuyler as the third. To weigh their relative strength, Albert Gallatin was dispatched to the state to do some reconnaissance. There, Gallatin put the question first to Davis, the Burr loyalist, who was hardly disinterested. He replied that Clinton was too old for the job and Livingston too timid, and he reminded Gallatin that, if Burr were passed over, “many of us will experience much chagrin and disappointment.” Gallatin would be forgiven for taking this as a threat.
Gallatin learned from his father-in-law, Commodore Nicholson, that only Clinton and Burr should be seriously considered and that Clinton himself had deferred to Burr as “the most suitable person and perhaps the only Man.” But when Gallatin asked Burr, he sharply declared that he was “averse” to being a candidate since he had been humiliated by Jefferson’s Virginia when their promised support in the last election had not materialized. Gallatin must have known Burr well enough to know that, of all his emotions, humiliation was the most unbearable, and drove him to say what he did not mean. Burr must have also realized that, now that he had just given Jefferson a chance to win the long-sought presidency, Jefferson was not likely to throw him over. If so, it was probably prudent not to seem overeager.
Three years later, another story line emerged, with the odd detail that Clinton told Gallatin he would accept the vice presidency—but only if he was allowed to resign the office shortly after the election. How this could make a winning argument for Gallatin, let alone for Jefferson, is difficult to imagine, but Clinton committed the claim to paper in 1803. Supposedly Nicholson agreed and detailed the Clinton plan to Burr. When Burr read it, he grew “much agitated,” a Burrite remembered. “He declared he would have nothing more to do with the business.” He would seek the New York governorship instead. Later, when Nicholson brought by two versions of a letter to Gallatin, one supporting Clinton, the other Burr, Burr charged out of the room in a fury, leaving Nicholson alone with a couple of Burrites, one of whom “declared with a determined voice that Colo. Burr should accept and that he was obliged to do so on principle.” And, even though Burr had not been consulted, that stood as his answer. He would be a candidate in the 1800 election, not because he sought to be, but because he felt “obliged.”
Nicholson told Gallatin that Aaron Burr was the best choice for the office. It could well be that the ambivalence did not extend upward from Burr’s General Republican Committee but downward from the so-called Sage of Monticello, who was deeply leery of Aaron Burr. Under the Constitution, of course, Burr and Jefferson would each vie for presidency, even if they were meant to be running mates; they might well receive the same number of votes, throwing the matter to the House of Representatives. At that point, Hamilton professed to welcome the arrangement, telling his friend Theodore Sedgwick, now risen from senator to Speaker of the House, it was “the only thing that can save us from the fangs of Jefferson.”
Having sabotaged every aspect of the election for the Federalists, Hamilton sallied forth to wreck the rest by cutting the legs out from under the Federalist president, Adams. Alarmed by the results from New York, Adams had decided that he needed finally to create a cabinet that answered to him, not to Hamilton, and purged the last two of the most blatantly pro-Hamilton secretaries. One was War Secretary James McHenry, and Adams did not do it gently. The president “became indecorous, and at times outrageous,” McHenry reported to Hamilton. But that was Adams. McHenry observed that whether the president was “sportful, playful, witty, kind, cold, drunk, sober, angry, easy, stiff, jealous, cautious, confident, close, open,” it was “almost always in the wrong place or to the wrong persons.” Like Hamilton, he thought Adams was “insane.” In firing McHenry, Adams directed most of his ire at Hamilton, whom he called a “bastard” and “the greatest intriguant in the world.” When this flew back to Hamilton, he threw up his hands. “Oh mad! Mad! Mad!”
In Quincy for the entire summer and fall, Adams continued to peck away at Hamilton as a “little cock sparrow general,” and Abigail would occasionally chime in, assailing Hamilton and his followers as “boys of yesterday.” Then Adams raised the stakes, asserting that Hamilton headed an “English faction” bent on seizing the government. Outraged by the charge, even though it had been a staple of anti-Hamilton commentary since 1787, Hamilton called it “base, wicked, cruel calumny, destitute even of a plausible pretext to excuse the folly or mask the depravity that must have dictated it.” If Adams had not been president, Hamilton might have challenged him to a duel. Instead, Hamilton was determined to expel Adams from his office, journeying to the capital to gain more evidence and anecdotes in support of his claims. In October, just as the voting was set to begin in several states, Hamilton published his character assassination of the president under a pseudonym as an open letter entitled The Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq., President of the United States. Initially limited in its circulation to C.C. Pinckney’s native South Carolina, the diatribe was supposedly intended just to elevate Pinckney to parity with Adams, so that he would have a shot at the presidency, but of course the effect was to provide all the more reasons for the country to dump Adams. As always, Hamilton chased his argument to the very end and produced a stunningly vicious portrait of a sitting president by a leading member of his party, one littered with cruel throwaways like his reference to “the disgusting egotism, the distempered jealousy, and the ungovernable indiscretion of Mr. Adams’s temper.”
If this sally was meant to be surgical, cutting away support for the president and building it up for Pinckney in his home state, it didn’t work out that way. The letter got out, and not by accident. Burr got his fingers on an early copy, divined its author, and grasped the possibilities. He showed it to John Beckley, the man who’d released the Reynolds Pamphlet, and arranged for publication of choice excerpts to the Republican Aurora.
Stung, Hamilton responded by releasing the whole pamphlet, a move that went no better for him than it had in the Reynolds case. The revelations hurt Adams less than they damaged Hamilton, busy savaging his president for emotional instability, of which he himself was possibly more guilty. Even his friend Troup said it was Hamilton, not Adams, who was the one “radically deficient in discretion.” But the revelations injured the Federalist Party as a whole more than they damaged either man, as they raised questions about its principles, decorum, reliability, and leadership. Hamilton was a battered ship in a wild storm of his own making. Adams’s temper was legendary, but Hamilton’s was no less, as he now flew into ever-higher rages at apparitions only he could see. It must have been unnerving to be so inept when he used to be so able. Long after others might retire from the fray, Hamilton continued to thrash about, each time hoping for a better result, and then receiving a worse one, undermining confidence while raising the stakes, which only made the issue more desperate next time. The campaign of 1800 was the most recent next time, but there would be more. He was falling, and he would continue to fall.
FORTY-TWO
The Gigg Is Therefore Up
BY THE TIME of the election in early December 1800, the federal government had finally moved from stately Philadelphia to the onetime swamp of Washington City on the banks of the meandering Potomac, whose banks were still thick with wild turkeys. For all the efforts of Benjamin Latrobe, the architect of the original federal building in New York, to create a new Paris, Washington was a dispir
iting hodgepodge of undistinguished federal buildings and mostly flimsy homes to ten thousand whites and three thousand black slaves who had been conscripted into constructing this citadel of freedom. The most impressive show buildings, the President’s Mansion and the Capitol building, were still woefully incomplete, and they stood amid a shantytown of boardinghouses for Rabelaisian elected officials, their abodes rigorously separated by party.
As such, the city seemed an apt metaphor for the nation’s politics. When the results of the voting were made known toward the end of December, the election had gone as the Republicans had both hoped and feared. Jefferson and Burr were tied at seventy-three votes each, and Adams and Pinckney trailed with sixty-five and sixty-four respectively. While everyone knew a tie was possible, few expected that every last Republican elector would follow party instructions and split his two votes evenly between the candidates to produce it. It was as if a coin had been flipped in the air and landed on its edge. Jefferson’s ticket had swept nearly the entire South, and Adams’s had taken all the North, and New York’s twelve votes had indeed been the difference. It put Jefferson in a ticklish position regarding his running mate, as Jefferson could not bring himself to assert publicly that he was the preferred candidate, probably because he imagined that went without saying. For a political colossus, a man bent on shifting the course of the nation, Jefferson could be oddly lacking in confidence, and, after the vote came in, he wrote Burr a letter of congratulations that was a masterpiece of timid backhandedness. He expressed his dismay that, as vice president, Burr now would sadly be unavailable to serve in his administration, leaving a “chasm . . . which cannot be adequately filled up.” It was praise as derision. What made Jefferson so sure that Burr wouldn’t be president? Burr played along with this charade, offering to “cheerfully abandon the office of V.P.” if he could be more useful to Jefferson elsewhere. Each man was brazenly lying to the other.
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 33