While it was obvious that the shift of a single delegation would change the outcome, it was also apparent that the movement of one man would have made that unnecessary. That was Burr, of course. But he remained silent in Albany, although he doubtless was following the proceedings by post rider from the capital. “Had Burr done anything for himself, he would long ere have been President,” wrote Federalist representative William Cooper. The air was so thick with intrigue that Madison installed a relay system of militia riders to convey up-to-the-minute reports to him in Richmond. For all the speculation, no vote changed on Friday or Saturday. The House had gone through thirty-three ballots, and no one had given ground.
And then someone did: James A. Bayard, Federalist representative from tiny Delaware, who had, with his party, voted diligently for Burr. He finally concluded that the Republicans would never yield from electing Jefferson and that Burr would never dare offer the concessions that would win enough Federalists over. “Burr has acted a miserable paltry part,” Bayard groused. “The election was in his power, but he was determined to come in as a Democrat, and in that event would have been the most dangerous man in the community.” Bayard came to this conclusion over the weekend, but he needed some reassurances from Jefferson before he was ready to crown him on Monday. Would he continue Hamilton’s system of finance, maintain the navy, and leave Federalists in their government jobs? If the answers were yes, he would be president. He revealed his thinking at a party caucus on Monday morning. “The clamor was prodigious. The reproaches vehement,” he wrote a cousin. “We broke up in confusion.”
The Federalists needed time to discover Burr’s intentions—and Jefferson’s. In the meantime, everyone continued to vote the party line through the thirty-fifth ballot. Jefferson’s answer had been cloudy, giving the Federalists hope that Bayard would not go for him after all. But Burr, at long last, became crystal clear: Words he should have spoken immediately after the popular election, he now said after a calamitous and protracted House procedure had almost split the nation in two. He “explicitly resigns his pretensions” to the presidency, Sedgwick reported bitterly to his son. “The gigg is therefore up.”
And so it was. The Federalists never did cast a single vote for Jefferson, but on the thirty-sixth ballot, at one o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, February 17, enough of them, starting with Bayard, abstained to make Thomas Jefferson the third president of the United States, with Aaron Burr his vice president. In an irony, it was the vote of Matthew Lyon, the Vermont representative who had been bludgeoned on the House floor, that put Jefferson into office. When the electrifying news went out, Republicans burst forth with parades, cannon fire, banquets, bonfires, and fireworks, a celebration rivaled only by the announcement of the peace agreement after the American Revolution, which, to Republicans, it closely resembled.
It wasn’t until two days after the vote, on February 19, that Burr, still in Albany, got word of the result, and he set out to Washington immediately, but not hastily, stopping over in New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, where he collected Theodosia and her husband, to bring them back to Washington for the inauguration on March 4. It was held in the Senate chamber, where Burr would preside for the next four years as his sole governmental duty. Tellingly, at the ceremony, Burr spoke only to take the oath of office. In his address, Jefferson delivered the memorable line, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” A statement that the election had shown to be manifestly untrue, as would his presidency. Rather than attend the ceremony in a show of national unity, Adams and Speaker Sedgwick had fled the capital by stagecoach at four o’clock that morning, headed into retirement.
FORTY-THREE
A Damn’d Rascal
WHILE JEFFERSON SETTLED in to the still-chilly President’s House that March, Burr himself took up residence in Georgetown, a separate township of five thousand people, three miles upriver. Roads connected the two, but they were often too rutted and muddy to offer easy passage to the capital. If Washington was a boomtown of ramshackle boardinghouses, Georgetown provided more stately residences and so was the preferred home for foreign dignitaries, of whom Burr might have been considered one. To him, Washington City might as well have been a foreign capital, a city clotted with dignitaries who harbored dark suspicions about the sitting vice president.
By starting the year as an assemblyman, Burr had made a political ascent worthy of the Montgolfier brothers,* but, as with any balloonist, he had only air under him when he was at his height. He had not been lifted by anything like the national groundswell that had elevated Jefferson. People knew Jefferson. People knew nothing about Burr except that his machinations had nearly won him the presidency. Burr had been lifted not by the people, but by his Burrites. So there was almost no one to catch him when he fell.
The peak moment of his term as vice president occurred as the inauguration ceremony began, when Burr had graciously offered the incoming president his chair and Jefferson had taken it. A simple gesture, it was nonetheless duly noted and praised as a lovely, if belated, acknowledgment by Burr of Jefferson’s superior position. It would be the last such moment between the two men ever. For Burr was still falling, a calamitous drop that would take him not just down to the ground, but, as in a tale from Greek mythology, into the underworld below, where he would stagger about the dead. Burr himself professed to be oblivious of his dire circumstances. Some of this was his aristocratic disdain of unpleasant truths; some his disbelief that anyone would ever take such political shenanigans seriously; and some his conviction that he should pay no penalty because he had done nothing wrong.
Writing to party chieftain Albert Gallatin from Philadelphia shortly before the inauguration, Burr had scoffed at the idea that anyone would be troubled by all the preposterous rumors about a supposed Burr intrigue for the presidency: “They are now of little consequence, & those who had believed them will doubtless blush at their own weakness.” Unfortunately for Burr, President Jefferson was one of the ones who believed them, and with good reason. As early as April 24, Samuel Osgood—the Massachusetts merchant who’d supplied Washington with his executive mansion in New York, now the Speaker of the New York Assembly—wrote Madison to warn him that he had proof that Burr had indeed intended to seize the presidency. “Strong evidence,” Osgood called it, although he did not reveal any in the letter. “[The Burrites] are entirely devoted to the Vice President; and had it been in their Power we have reason to believe Mr. Jefferson would not have been President.”
Jefferson was set to take his revenge with his usual stealth, leaving no evidence of his complicity. He did not even make a show of consulting his vice president when selecting his cabinet; nor did he take the slightest interest in Burr’s views on a single matter of policy or politics. It was as if Burr had somehow ceased to exist. Most wounding of all, when Burr sought to capitalize on all the federal offices opening with the change of administrations—rewarding his key Burrites, who had worked so hard in the campaign, with plum appointments, and providing himself with a power base for his own future run for the presidency in the bargain—Jefferson did not even give him the favor of a reply. Burr specified posts for five of his closest associates, including John Swartwout and Matthew Davis, whom he was pushing to be naval officer of New York. In truth, Jefferson did quietly make two of the appointments, installing the two Burrites with demonstrable talent. But the question of the remaining three, Davis especially, dragged on through the summer. In increasing frustration, Burr made inquiries of everyone but the president, confiding to Gallatin, now secretary of the treasury, his fear that the appointments had been sidetracked by “Jesuit machinations.” For someone normally so cautious about what he wrote, it was an indelicate construction to apply to an avowedly atheistic president, especially since he was likely to see Burr’s letter. But the issue was far less about Davis than about Burr. As Gallatin put the matter to Jefferson: Did he want to oblige his vice president at all, and, more to the point, would he
support a Burr presidential bid when his own term was up? Jefferson was not one to commit the answers to such questions to paper, but they would have certainly been no in both cases. The truth was, he’d had quite enough of Burr and would have liked nothing more than to excise him from his administration at the earliest opportunity.*
Jefferson’s antipathy was only amplified by events in New York, where the state’s politics were now running sharply against Burr. In the fall of 1801, the indefatigable Governor Clinton had defeated Hamilton’s brother-in-law, the patroon Stephen Van Rensselaer, to win the governor’s chair for yet another term, and had placed his cunning nephew, DeWitt Clinton, just thirty-two, at the head of the state’s Council of Appointments. There he emptied all the Federalists out of state offices and installed loyal Clintonians and not a single Burrite. Following the developments from Washington, Jefferson could see this meant that Burr was persona non grata in his home state, offering even less reason to reward any of his people with federal jobs.
To press his cause for employment, Davis rode to Monticello to plead his case with Jefferson. It did him no good. “Nothing is decided,” Jefferson wrote Gallatin afterward. And nothing would ever be decided, which is to say, the decision was no. Burr was rarely frightened, but this was one of those times. Knowing that a decision about Davis was a decision about him, Burr wrote Jefferson twice more that fall, but the president did not deign to respond until mid-November. His tone could scarcely have been colder. He curtly informed his vice president that, as a general rule, he did not answer letters “relating to office.” If Burr sought a response, “The answer is to be found on what is done or not done with them.” In other words, Jefferson would not even lift a pen to oblige his vice president on a matter of supreme importance to him. The post of naval officer of New York remained occupied by a Federalist.
BURR WAS NOT alone in seeing his influence wane both federally under the new president and in New York State under a new governor. Hamilton had the same miserable experience. Having created national policy under Washington and influenced it under Adams, he was now reduced to watching Jefferson from the balcony seats, hoping that he would not kill off the financial programs he’d slaved to create. Happily, many of Jefferson’s positions proved rhetorical. He did not in fact try to shrink the bloated federal bureaucracy—of 130 employees, no less—to “a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants,” as he had pledged, although he did scuttle the navy, to the country’s regret later. Of particular interest to Hamilton, he left in place the Bank of the United States he professed to loathe, and when Jefferson dispatched Gallatin to uncover any frauds hidden in the archives of Hamilton’s Treasury Department, Gallatin duly investigated and then confessed he could not find any. “I have found the most perfect system ever formed,” Gallatin reported. “Any change that should be made in it would injure it. Hamilton made no blunders, committed no frauds. He did nothing wrong.” For Jefferson, that was not good news. As he later groused, “we can never completely get rid of [Hamilton’s] financial system.”
In the governor’s race, Hamilton had shouted himself hoarse with campaign speeches that pushed his brother-in-law and the Federalist cause, but they may have only contaminated both with the Hamilton toxin, and Van Rensselaer had been routed by a wide margin, making a clean sweep of Federalist losses since the Washington administration.
With the Federalists in retreat nationally and on the defensive in the state, Hamilton moved to create a vibrant Federalist paper to fend off the propaganda spewed by the various Republican sheets in town. The New-York Evening Post, it was to be called. Hamilton himself put up a thousand dollars of the ten thousand needed to start it, and he picked the editor too: William Coleman, a ruddy-cheeked Irishman from Boston who’d met Hamilton when he had barnstormed New England in the 1796 campaign. Coleman was convinced he had seen God. “The greatest statesman beyond comparison of any age,” he declared. Then he won Hamilton’s heart by accusing Jefferson of pulling down the Federalist cathedral of order and putting up “a foul and filthy temple consecrated to atheism and lewdness.”
The Evening Post’s first issue, on November 16, 1801, struck an elevated tone, offering readers “correct information” with an eye toward promoting “just principles.” It proved to be a handsome publication, which quickly established the standard for newspapers across the country. None other than James T. Callender, who had done more than anyone to ruin Hamilton’s reputation, called it “the most elegant piece of workmanship that we have seen in either Europe or America.” Principled as the publication might be, Hamilton would rely on it as his preferred place to run his vitriolic indictments of the Jefferson administration.
He had scarcely settled into his new role as a publisher when, on November 23 of that year, the Evening Post was obliged to cover an unspeakable tragedy involving his family. Hamilton’s nineteen-year-old son, Philip, had been killed in a duel with a young Republican lawyer named George I. Eacker. Tousle haired and quick-witted, if somewhat impetuous, a recent graduate from Columbia with high honors, Philip was said by his father to be the family’s “eldest and brightest hope.” He was the adored one. Hamilton had overseen Philip’s studies almost as assiduously as Burr had Theodosia’s, and when Philip had fallen sick that time as a teenager, his father had never left his side, administering his medicine around the clock.
As part of the July Fourth festivities, promoted by Jefferson to make his party the source of the American religion, New York had been thrilled by cannon fire and bell ringing—and also by speeches on Broadway, many of them quite partisan. Strolling about, Philip Hamilton happened to hear Captain Eacker loudly blaming the notorious XYZ Affair on England, not France, and declaring that General Hamilton’s army had been raised not to defend America, but to intimidate Republicans.
That was irritating, but Philip forgot about it until he spotted Eacker at the Park Theater in Manhattan a few months later. Outraged to see him there chatting with some friends before the show, Philip and a friend named Price barged into George Eacker’s box and started ragging him about his July Fourth oration. Eacker insisted they take this up in the lobby. As Eacker made his way there, he muttered: “It is too abominable to be publicly humiliated by a set of rascals.”
“Who do you call damn’d rascals?” Philip snapped. To a gentleman, “rascal” was a terrible insult.
Eacker grabbed Philip by the collar and yanked him close, nearly bringing them to blows right there in the theater. They continued on to the lobby, where more harsh words were exchanged, and still more in a nearby tavern. Finally Eacker had had enough. “I expect to hear from you,” he told Philip as he left.
“You shall,” Philip replied.
Eacker stormed back to his box in the theater. Before long, Price scrawled out a challenge and delivered it to Eacker in his seat. Eacker accepted immediately.
Philip was more cautious; he knew the political implications of a Hamilton dueling with a Jeffersonian. He consulted his uncle John Barker Church, who, after his duel with Burr, and quite likely some others, knew a bit about dueling, and he recommended trying to come to some accommodation. While Philip pondered what to do, Price and Eacker rowed across the Hudson to fight their duel in New Jersey. At the field, they each fired off two shots. None hit. Eacker considered the matter closed. Price was not his target.
It was Alexander Hamilton, who was riding a knife’s edge—keen to protect his son’s reputation, and his own, but also desperate to see Philip survive. Paralyzed, he left the matter to Church, but the negotiations he advised stalled. Eacker refused to retract the inflammatory word rascal—even if Philip apologized for charging into his box, as he offered to do. Left with no choice, Philip agreed to meet Eacker at three o’clock the next afternoon at the field of honor at Paulus Hook, down the coast in New Jersey. When the duel was on, Hamilton counseled his son to rise above the foolishness of dueling and “throw away” his ball, shooting in the air. That way, he woul
d demonstrate his gentlemanly virtues to Eacker, encouraging him to do the same. They would settle the disagreement peacefully, their honor intact, as Eacker had with Price.
It sounded reasonable and high-minded, but unilateral disarmament is a dangerous approach to an armed man bent on vengeance. Besides, if the point is to protest the barbaric custom of dueling, why not just refuse to participate?
At Paulus Hook, the seconds paced off the distance and the two men faced off. When a second shouted out to fire, Philip did not raise his pistol, and neither did Eacker. The two of them stared at each other, pistols down, for a small eternity. Then Eacker slowly raised his pistol and aimed it at Philip, and Philip mirrored him, aiming his pistol at Eacker. Then Eacker fired, and the bullet cracked into Philip’s right side. With Philip standing sideways to minimize exposure, the bullet slammed sideways through his entire abdomen, wreaking havoc on his internal organs, and finally broke through the other side to lodge in his left arm. In shock and overwhelmed with pain, Philip slumped to the ground, firing his ball uselessly as he fell. He lay on the ground unmoving as his second rushed to him. Philip was carried to shore and rowed hurriedly across the choppy Hudson to Manhattan, where bearers carried him to Hamilton’s in-laws, the Churches, whose house was close by, and settled him on a bed. The eminent Dr. David Hosack, who had saved his life once before, rushed to his aid, but the case was hopeless.
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 35