The resolution was not up to them, in any case, but to the House of Representatives, which would choose the president after all, following another ungainly process. Each vote would be cast not by an individual representative, but by the delegation of each state, as determined by the majority. Although the Federalists outnumbered the Republicans in the House, they controlled only six states to the Republicans’ eight, with two other states lacking the majority needed to be officially for one candidate or the other. Some Federalists talked of maintaining the deadlock long enough to appoint an interim executive, presumably Adams, undoing the result of the election altogether. That prospect was so infuriating to Republicans that some vowed literally to execute anyone appointed to the office by such unconstitutional means, and James Monroe threatened to bring out state militias to suppress any such coup. Then the Federalists declared their militias would take on the Republican ones, creating the prospect of civil war. Jefferson said as much to Adams, threatening “incalculable consequences” if the Federalists tried to install a president of their own. Once they saw that the interim idea would likely lead to a general calamity, the Federalists decided to back the candidate more conducive to their interests.
At first blush, that was certainly not Jefferson. Loathed by Federalists before the election, he was loathed no less after. Many feared he was poised to destroy the financial machinery that Hamilton had assembled to generate the national prosperity, starting with the Bank of the United States. Others were afraid that, as an atheist, he would dispatch federal agents to seize their Bibles. Rumors abounded that with devilish intent he might even introduce the Hessian fly that so fascinated him into the country.
By contrast, people did not know what to fear from Burr except his ambition, which didn’t seem nearly so disturbing. For all his fears of the “fangs of Jefferson,” Hamilton was appalled that anyone could possibly be so blasé about Burr, whom he declared was “selfish to a degree that excludes all social affections.” He wrote this to House Speaker Theodore Sedgwick, even though he much preferred Burr’s brand of selfishness to Jefferson’s “pernicious theories.” But Hamilton went further to claim that Burr sought “supreme Power,” as one who “loves nothing but himself,” and was a “voluptuary” besides. He again assailed Burr as an “American Catiline,” who was not just a savage Roman conspirator, but one guilty of incest and the murder of his wife, sister, and son. He “talked perfect Godwinism,” referring to the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, who had been Burr’s inspiration as a feminist to his wife and daughter, but to Hamilton all too supportive of the French Revolution and of an upheaval in the social order. Burr would go to war with Great Britain on a whim. He was no soldier, Hamilton went on, since he had abandoned the war effort at a critical period, and, as a statesman, he was “far more cunning than wise.” And anyone who thought that any loyalty to the Federalist Party could possibly restrain him would be tragically mistaken. That would leave Burr “laughing in his sleeve.”
By now there were two Hamiltons, a solid one and an inflated one, and the gap between them was widening. In the best of times, no one pushed Hamilton to a sputtering extreme like Burr, but the prospect of a Burr presidency positively undid him. There were no lengths that he would not travel rhetorically to remove a threat he considered mortal. If the Hamilton of old was known for his temperate, well-reasoned, and persuasive arguments, now he was given to shameless hyperbole and foolish bombast. Did he imagine that anyone had forgotten what he’d said about Jefferson, and how he was the real danger to the country?
Gouverneur Morris knew Burr well enough to know that he was not the end of the world. He asked Hamilton straight out: How could Hamilton now support a man he’d always considered to be utterly “void of principle”? In reply, Hamilton conceded that he ought to “hate” Jefferson and like Burr, with whom “I have always been personally well.” But he continued to denigrate Burr at every opportunity—to little effect except to further marginalize himself in the party. He was leading a parade, but there was no parade behind him.
Throughout the period of maneuvering before the formal vote in February, most of the congressmen lived in that clutch of boardinghouses near the Capitol, where, over meals or drinks, they did their best to persuade their colleagues to switch positions and break the tie. But since the boardinghouses, like so much else, were divided by party, there were limits to what anyone could do to alter the outcome.
Jefferson remained in Monticello, although he was closely attuned to the political proceedings. Burr was in Albany, and he was so out of touch he might have been removed from the country altogether. One reason was that his daughter, Theodosia, had found a mate and was due to be wed on February 2, nine days before the House was to vote, and Burr could not bring himself to change the wedding day, even if his chances for the presidency hung in the balance. If Hamilton’s personality inflated during this period, Burr’s deflated, all passion spent. Rather than returning to that level of maniacal hyperactivity he’d reached for the New York elections, he settled into a mystifying state of quiescence in which he was scarcely heard from at all.
But his children had always been his country, and at eighteen, Theodosia might have been his own first lady. She had already been wooed by the painter John Vanderlyn, who’d lived with them at Richmond Hill through her teens, and whom Burr had packed off to Paris when his ardor got the better of him. Meriwether Lewis, the dashing twenty-six-year-old explorer whom Jefferson would soon dispatch to explore the American Northwest, had pursued her as well. But she finally settled on a gentlemanly twenty-one-year-old, Joseph Alston, who, by virtue of a bequest from his paternal grandfather, was one of the richest men in South Carolina, with vast rice holdings in the Georgia District and more than two hundred slaves to tend them. Dubbed the “Palmetto Plutocrat,” Alston had a softness to his cheeks and cheerfully curly hair that proved to be misleading, as it did not reflect the bearer’s stiff and overbearing personality, which only slowly revealed itself. Alston had met Theodosia on a languid northern tour the previous summer when Burr was traveling about New England in search of votes. Burr hoped that such a wealthy young man might be right for her, but he had his Boston friend Dr. William Eustis “anatomize him soul & heart & body.” Eustis gave Alston a good report, but Alston was probably better suited to the needs of Theodosia’s father, who soon enlisted him as his political emissary to the southern states, entrusting him with a letter to carry to Jefferson at Monticello. As satisfying as Alston was to Burr, he left Theodosia pining for something more, even if he was rich and well educated. He seemed brusque and standoffish. Well into their courtship, when she was impatient for a marriage proposal, Theodosia wrote him to say she’d “be happy to see you whenever you choose; that I suppose is equivalent to very soon.” She added, teasingly, “My father laughs at my impatience to hear from you, and says that I am in love; but I do not believe that to be a fair deduction.” After describing her plans through February, she declared, “My movements will after that depend on my father and you.” She concluded, “Adieu. I wish you many returns of the century.”
She was right about her father’s claim of love—it wasn’t a “fair deduction,” but the marriage proceeded just the same. A notice in the New-York Commercial Advertiser listed the details: the couple were married by the minister of the Dutch Reform Church in Albany as planned on February 2. Theodosia was listed as “the only daughter of Aaron Burr, Esq.,” with no mention of her late mother or his political accomplishments.
Alston soon proved to be insufferable. “The most intolerable mortal I ever beheld,” in the estimation of George Washington’s step-granddaughter Nelly Custis, who knew him socially. Added Maria Nicholson, the savvy daughter of Burr’s ally the commodore, the one pumping him for the presidency: “He is a great dasher, dissipated, ill-tempered, vain, and silly.” And: “He is ugly and of unprepossessing manners.” Troup suspected that Burr’s massive debts played a role in the marriage: “The money in questio
n was the predominating motive.” But there was politics, too, and Burr hungered for South Carolina’s eight electoral votes, the ones that Hamilton hoped Pinckney would bring to the Federalists. He imagined the politically connected Alston could help secure them (as, in fact, he did). All of which made Maria Nicholson fly into despair: “Can it be that the father has sacrificed a daughter to affluence and influential connections?”
Burr had given Theodosia a husband—and won himself a Burrite.
WHILE JEFFERSON MONITORED developments in Monticello, Burr remained in Albany and did nothing to stop the speculation that he was after the presidency—or to encourage it. He did not need to declare himself either way, since voters could not distinguish between the candidate they wanted for president and the one they wanted only for vice president. It was solely a presidential election, with the runner-up to be the winner’s vice president. This ambiguity served Burr’s purposes perfectly, as it allowed him to maintain his usual detachment from the events he had unleashed. It was as if he imagined himself merely an observer of this epic drama, when he was the one on whom all eyes were trained. There were other characters—Jefferson foremost among them—but unlike Burr, his position was fixed, leaving him almost no room to maneuver to win Federalist votes. He was obliged to be Jeffersonian. Not so Burr. To call Burr a Burrite was hardly to ascribe to him any political philosophy. He was what he always was—a code that could be read one way by one key, and another by another. Because any political position was available to him, he was free to redefine himself however he liked, even as a Federalist, and no one would have accused him of inconsistency. Burr was what he was not. As Theodore Sedgwick described Burr to his son: “He is not an enthusiastic theorist. He is not under the direction of Virginian Jacobins. He is not a declared infidel.” More to the point: “He would not be able to administer the government without the aid of the Federalists and this aid he cannot obtain unless his administration is Federal[ist].” In short, Burr was an opportunist, and others could find opportunity in that.
If Burr took no active role in securing the presidency, he did nothing to discourage the speculation that he might, and he expressed irritation that anyone might try to constrain him. Irked at the Republican insistence that he resign rather than be a pawn to Federalist ambitions, he let Samuel Smith, Jefferson’s lieutenant in the House, know that he considered such a request “unnecessary, unreasonable and impertinent.” Strong words that were sure to get back to Jefferson, which was doubtless his intent. The idea that the Federalists could play him was so preposterous that there was no need to deny it. Which, of course, was a denial, and an unconvincing one. Beyond that, he left it to surrogates to express his disavowal. Absent any Burr thunder from Albany, other theories rushed in to fill the vacuum, many of them feeding on Burr’s reputation as a man made for darkness.
The truth was that Burr had refused to disavow all interest in the presidency for the simple reason that he didn’t want to. Burr had always been an arrow pointed up, and he was not about to point down now. Besides, he had the vice presidency in his pocket, so what was there to lose? He said as much to General Smith when the two men met in Philadelphia one evening in early January, and Smith was plainly eager to gallop back to Washington City with the good news that Burr was backing Jefferson. The Federalists controlled the outcome, either by denying Jefferson the presidency and handing it to Burr, or by denying them both by holding out for a Federalist president, come what may. In response, Burr declared, “We cannot be without a president, our friends must join the federal vote.” Meaning that if Republicans wished to foil the Federalist plot to delay long enough to install a Federalist president, some of them would have to abandon Jefferson and join with the Federalists to elect Burr. Then Smith’s associate Gabriel Christie of Maryland had to ask: “Who is to be our vice president then?”
“Mr. Jefferson,” Burr replied.
That did not sit well in Monticello.
Still, it is one thing to desire an outcome, and another to make it happen, and there is no evidence that Burr made the attempt—overtly. But covertly? Hamilton suspected that Burr had enlisted the New Yorker Edward Livingston as a double agent, appearing to talk up Jefferson’s candidacy on Burr’s behalf, even as he actually was pushing Burr as president to the impressionable New York delegation. A New Jersey congressman was said to be working for Burr from the same angle. Hamilton wasn’t above doing a little double-dealing himself. He had the plan to try to entice Burr into backing a small piece of Federalist policy to win some Federalist votes, then leak the news of his perfidy to Jefferson and “lay the foundation of dissension between the two chiefs.” Then there were the many Burrites, such as Matthew Davis and the hearty Swartwout brothers, who scuttled about trying to find the soft places of the influential. More ominous for Hamilton, his own law partner, the loyal Federalist David A. Ogden, had been seen moving among the New York delegation, possibly with the aim of getting it to swing to Burr. But it was a shadowy time, this presidential season. No one knew who was up and who was down, and a hundred speculations bloomed in the darkness. Amid the feints and counterfeints, it was impossible not to suspect Burr of midnight skullduggery.
The fact is, for all his frustrations with party regulars trying to push him into doing their bidding, Burr never did the one thing that would have closed down the political carnival and brought about what Burr, along with virtually every prominent Republican, professed to want, namely, a Jefferson presidency. That was for Burr to announce publically and emphatically that he wanted that too, and that enough of his votes should be transferred to Jefferson to make him president on the first ballot, while reserving enough of his own to secure the vice presidency. Then, having demonstrated his loyalty to the leader of his party, he could wait eight years until he could succeed Jefferson for his heroic sacrifice. But this he did not do, and so the Federalists continued to believe that Burr was up for sale, and the Republicans continued to fear that too, and Jefferson built up such a revulsion at the very name of his vice president that Burr effectively removed himself from the administration before it even began, to say nothing of his presidential aspirations eight years later.
Altogether, it was a baffling performance—not just a terrible miscalculation, but a kind of political suicide, one that among political contemporaries was equaled only by Hamilton in his outlandish response to the revelation of the Reynolds affair. For it wasn’t a quiet going, a Roman bloodletting in the bathtub, but a screaming leap from a great height. It was the kind of death-seeking performance that called into question the many death-defying ones that preceded it.
Burr became something he had never before been, a negative, an empty space left to others to fill. And, mystified by his intentions, no one budged. In a desperate last attempt at getting Burr to commit, his old friend Gallatin wrote him in Albany to say that three key representatives in Maryland, New Jersey, and New York were prepared to defect to him and hand him the presidency, but to secure these gentlemen’s votes he needed to come down to Washington “without an instant’s delay.” In Albany, his “friends” urged him to do just that, posthaste. According to Burr’s ally and fellow assemblyman Peter Townsend, Burr “agreed to do so.” Then, in the shorthand of a New York merchant to whom Townsend hurriedly told the tale: “His friends left him—went to the legislature—Burr did not come—they supposed he was preparing—after the House adjourned, they called at his lodgings—they found his luggage packed and he ready—but at the critical moment his heart failed him—he remained in Albany.”
NO HAVEN ANYWAY, Washington had been enduring a long, brutal winter that February. In the Executive Mansion, the Adamses had kept all thirteen fireplaces blazing around the clock but still could not dispel the icy damp. When, in the officials’ efforts to warm themselves, small fires broke out in the War offices and Treasury, Republicans charged that the Federalists were burning evidence of their corruption.
For the first count on February 11,
a blizzard enveloped the city in a whirl of white, impeding the passage for so many congressmen that some observers figured the tie would be broken by Mother Nature. But everyone arrived, even Maryland representative Joseph H. Nicholson, who, stricken with a raging fever from his pneumonia, was carried on a litter for two miles through the snow, his wife trudging alongside.
At one o’clock that Thursday, Speaker Sedgwick called the House to order for the balloting. Despite all the stratagems, speculation, and politicking, the vote remained where it had stood after the election, with Jefferson winning the eight Republican delegations and Burr the six Federalist ones; the remaining two yielded majorities for neither man. It seemed impossible that such a tenuous tie would remain one, and countless rumors flew of backroom deals sending Jefferson votes to the Burr camp, or the reverse, to settle the matter. But no. Six more votes were taken in rapid succession, with the same result. At that, Sedgwick released the congressmen for one hour “to eat a mouthful,” as one representative put it. The balloting then went on through the night, one vote every hour, each one more tedious and predictable than the last, until eight the next morning. Nothing changed. After one more try to break the deadlock at noon, Sedgwick banged his gavel and recessed the House until Friday at eleven. “What the Feds . . . mean, I cannot tell,” Republican representative John Dawson wrote Madison. “We are resolved never to yield, and sooner hazard everything than to prevent the voice and wishes of the people being carried into effect.” He concluded, “I have not closed my eyes for 36 hours.” When the Federalists left, they endured taunts from Republican hecklers gathered by the doors. One Federalist newspaper urged their representatives to chastise any defectors from Burr to Jefferson as “consecrated to infamy.”
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 34