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

by Sedgwick, John

  As Burr and Wilkinson peered at their maps, they could see that the lands ran from the Mississippi, fed by countless twisting tributaries including the Ohio and the Missouri, down to New Orleans on the Gulf of Mexico; west to the “Montagnes de la Roche,” as the French called the Rockies, rendered only as a blunt and unimposing ridge snaking along the edge of the Pacific Ocean; and then up to what was termed the British South Wales Possessions to the north. Most of this was terra incognita, even to its inhabitants. Jefferson had just that month sent out the roughhewn explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to hunt up a passage to the Pacific and to find out what they could of the lands along the way.

  While the geological features were all crudely depicted, none of the maps showed any human habitation. Not a town, village, fort, settlement. But Burr knew that would change. He knew the inexorable surge of easterners eager for land and opportunity. He’d engaged in enough land speculation to have the feel of it. If the West was empty now, it would not be empty long. And if it was empty now, that meant it was his for the taking.

  If Burr was the man for that, his guest was the man to help him. The plan that Burr had in mind required soldiers, and a commander to lead them. And it would require unusual talent for deception, since it had to unfold in secrecy if it was to unfold at all. Such deception created a unique intimacy, as each man could ruin the other. This created an odd fondness at least on Wilkinson’s part: “I think of you always my handsome and dear devil.”

  The plan would evolve, but the rudiments were set: to seize the nearly 1 million square miles of the Louisiana Purchase—all the new western lands from the Mississippi across to the Rockies—and to turn them into Aaron Burr’s personal empire. The ambition was inspired by Napoléon, then overrunning Europe. Burr would call himself emperor as well, with Theodosia his empress, and her son, Aaron Burr Alston, the heir to the throne. Burr of course was no Napoléon. He’d never commanded men in battle, and he had nothing like Napoléon’s vast army of a half million men. But then, the land that he sought to conquer was undefended, and westerners might welcome Burr’s arrival as a liberator from the strictures emanating from Washington. On the western side of the Alleghenies, settlers sent their goods down the Mississippi, not east through the Alleghenies, so few felt much commercial connection to the Atlantic states. To many in the West, the American government was an occupying force, its governors appointed by a distant Congress like the Crown of old.

  By the middle of June, Wilkinson left for his headquarters at Fort Massac, and from then on, the two communicated only by cipher—a fitting medium for such a shadowy duo.* The first step was to raise some money. As always, Burr was mired in debt, and his beloved Richmond Hill was soon to be seized by his creditors—ultimately to be claimed by John Jacob Astor. It was the last of his assets. Burr insisted to Theodosia that this was all to the good. “A huge weight it has taken from the head and shoulders, and every other part, animal and intellectual, of A.B.” But it added a huge weight, too.

  Burr imagined that King George III might pay for the chance to take revenge on his runaway colonies, and thought his hearty, knockabout friend Charles Williamson might be just the man to plead their case. English by birth, he’d become an American citizen after the war and served with Burr in the Assembly, where they’d joined in some lavish land speculations in New York. More recently, Burr had helped him secure a divorce from his American wife. Burr had a passion for Williamson, he told Theodosia, one “such as had I with no other man living, and such as it is utterly improbable I should ever have with any one again.”

  When he learned of Burr’s plan, Williamson passed him on to the British ambassador, Anthony Merry, in Philadelphia. But he had some other conspirators to round up first. One of them was that Commodore Truxtun. While Burr had ostensibly visited Truxtun to find a place of refuge, he was actually soliciting him to join their secessionist cause. When Truxtun put it out in the newspapers that he had received Burr with misgivings, since his greater loyalty was to Hamilton, that was cover, for Truxtun’s greater loyalty always was to Burr, which is why Burr had gone to him. He hoped Truxtun would provide at sea what Wilkinson had agreed to deliver on land, commanding Burr’s navy to project power out from the Gulf of Mexico, not across the Atlantic. But when asked, Truxtun rather sensibly equivocated, preferring to see how events unfolded.

  With that, Burr hurried on to Philadelphia, where he addressed secret number three—Celeste, who had signaled that she might be open to his advances after all. Despite his suits for La G and La Plante, among other anonymous beauties, he returned in secret to Celeste, whom he’d swooned over ever since he first laid eyes on her at a dinner of her father’s. Of late, she’d been tormenting him with declarations that she could never, ever marry him, never marry anyone, only to beg him to come back, please, so he could continue his delightful advances. Recently, though, she had turned enticingly “pliant” after an exchange of letters, and now he made his way to her Philadelphia town house, attempting to renew his courtship once more.

  But Celeste declared that she had decided, irrevocably, that she would never marry after all. With that, her door was shut to him. “Nothing can be done with Celeste,” he told Theodosia wearily. “There is a strange indecision and timidity which I cannot fathom.” Basta! “The thing, however, is abandoned.” In fact, he was giving up “all such things”—meaning women—for the duration; under the circumstances, such romantic follies were all too much even for him: “If any male friend of yours should be dying of ennui,” he told his daughter, “recommend to him to engage in a duel and a courtship at the same time.”

  Now he paid his call on Williamson’s friend Anthony Merry, the British minister who was the king’s personal representative in the United States. Despite his name, Merry was a dour, grim-faced creature who was aquiver with fussy English proprieties. He’d been appalled that, when he paid a call on the president at the Executive Mansion, Jefferson had greeted him in bedroom slippers. It was a political statement, of course, but Merry took it as a dire insult. So when Burr approached him with his proposal to take his revenge, he listened attentively. Rearranging the cartography of North America—who wouldn’t smile at that? To have a chance to teach that insufferable Jefferson a lesson? And for Anthony Merry, far too long overlooked, to emerge as the power broker?

  Merry passed along to his royal minders Burr’s offer: Burr would resign the vice presidency and serve the British in any capacity it wished—if the British government would do what it could to detach the American West from its current owners, specifically: “To effect a Separation of the Western Part of the United States from that which lies between the Atlantick and the Mountains, in its whole Extent.” The sensitive question of what would become of the American West when it was liberated, whether it was to be British or Burr’s, that was left for Williamson, who would be sailing for London shortly, to discuss with members of the British cabinet in person. Merry prudently cautioned his superiors about the “profligacy of [Burr’s] character,” since that was as well known on that side of the Atlantic as it was on this. But he did trumpet Burr’s “talents and activity” and “connections” and urged His Highness not to overlook Burr’s “spirit of revenge against the present administration.”

  With that, Burr moved on farther south. Ostensibly this was to evade a murder warrant, but that imperative eased with each mile. Gradually, he was treated less like a fugitive and more like a conquering hero who had stood up to dishonor. But he wasn’t seeking relief. He’d gone south to Spanish Florida to seize it.

  SPAIN HAD BEEN a subject of speculation for ambitious Americans for two decades. With the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War, England had retreated from all North American territory south of Canada, surrendering to the United States its lands in the Ohio Valley and giving to the Spanish all its lands along the Gulf Coast. Spain thus had a chokehold on the agricultural goods that descended the Mississippi, and it was thought
to be hoping to reach to the north and west from there. That was irritant enough, but the deeper antagonism with Spain stemmed from the years after the revolution, when ambitious Americans—Hamilton among them—sought to liberate South America from the Spanish as they had done against the English. Adams could see that Americans had enough to handle in North America and had put a stop to such an adventure, but Jefferson was determined to drive Spain out of the continent.

  Neither Spain nor the United States, however, was willing to risk open war. The Americans did not have a sufficient military, and the Spanish did not want to fight a war across the Atlantic. So, instead, both sides undertook a war of maneuvering—of intrigues, essentially—that would gain them geopolitical advantage without gaining actual territory.

  At this point, the Spanish had attracted to their cause any number of key figures who were putatively on the other side. Unknown to Burr, one of the most outrageous traitors was Wilkinson, who served as Spanish Secret Agent “No. 13” reporting directly to the king of Spain. His task was to enlighten the king on American political developments and troop movements, and also to shift the western allegiance toward the Spanish by playing up any antagonism with Washington and playing down any problems with Spain. At the same time, of course, Wilkinson was also working covertly with Burr to advance an entirely different agenda.

  For now, Burr was attending only to Spanish Florida; he would go after the rest of the Spanish lands later. He told everyone, even Theodosia, that he was in Georgia just to pay a visit to his friend Pierce Butler, whom Burr knew from their days together in the Senate, on the windswept barrier sea island of Saint Simons off the Georgia coast. With his vast acreages of rice and cotton, Butler was one of the wealthiest men in America, possessing a thousand slaves to tend his plantations.*

  Saint Simons was a delight, and Burr regaled Theodosia with the retinue in his lavish guesthouse: a personal housekeeper, cook, chambermaid, seamstress, and two footmen, not to mention the pair of fishermen and four bargemen he also had at his disposal if he wished to return to the water. The plantation islands themselves were garden paradises that extended from horizon to horizon, growing everything from turkeys to pomegranates, not just cotton and rice.

  He would use Butler’s plantation as a secure base of operations from which to launch some preliminary investigations of this foreign territory—its population centers, serviceable roads, political organization. He’d originally set aside five or six weeks for the purpose. But he’d been delayed coming south and was obliged to head north again sooner than he had intended. So now, to his frustration, he would be in Florida for only two weeks at most. Since he had no horse, he feared he wouldn’t be able to penetrate deeply into the peninsula, but have to cling to the coast, with Saint Augustine, one of the larger settlements, his likely target.

  He was just preparing for his first foray over the border when, around noon one day, the winds suddenly rose and then started ripping at the trees and slamming his guesthouse. By the afternoon, the furious hurricane was at its height, smashing against the length of the island’s shoreline and sending up huge seas, seven feet above the normal high tide, to crash on the beach. The winds shattered outbuildings and ripped live oaks out of the ground to smash them down on frail rooftops. Burr watched the devastation through storm-splattered windows from inside his guesthouse, where he could feel the structure “shake and rock”; he was afraid the whole building might go over and be scattered to the winds. As it was, a chimney toppled over onto the roof, and the tide surged up the beach and burst through the front door to flood the ground floor.

  The ironic Burr professed detachment to Theodosia. “You may imagine, in this scene of confusion and dismay, a good many incidents to amuse one if one had dared to be amused in a moment of much anxiety.” A neighbor insisted that Burr take refuge in a nearby storehouse that was more secure—well back from the water, solidly built, and lower to the ground. With others from the plantation, Burr huddled around lanterns as the storm swirled around them. The winds eased off briefly in the midafternoon but then regained their fury and pounded the island for the rest of the night.

  By morning, the storm had passed. The skies were clear and the seas quiet. As Burr stepped about to survey the damage, he could see that dozens of houses had been flooded and discovered that hundreds of acres of Butler’s rice fields had been ruined, costing him a fortune in lost rice. Nineteen slaves had drowned. Most of the local roads were washed out, and virtually all the boats along the shore had been reduced to kindling.

  Because of the devastation, it would be some days before Burr could return once more to his mission. He hesitated to write anything more about it to Theodosia, for fear that the letter might be intercepted. As it was, it would be taken in hand by a black slave, who’d have to swim “a half a dozen creeks,” and it was easy to imagine the letter might get loose. Burr hated to think it might end up in the newspapers, not because it might reveal his plot for Spanish Florida, but because it would reveal the latest details of his romance with “pauvre Celeste,” who had still not let go her hold on him.

  With that, he secured one of the still-intact boats for a trip down the Florida coast. He’d hoped to reach Saint Augustine, but he got no farther than Saint Johns, about fifteen miles shy. Whatever intelligence he gleaned from this trip, all that survives is this one observation: “It is a fact that the Spanish ladies smoke segars,” he declared, explaining that the lady “takes a few puffs” then hands the cigar to her lover “as a mark of great kindness.”

  RETURNING TO SAVANNAH, Burr was delighted to be serenaded by a band outside his hotel window, as part of an effort by local citizens to get the vice president to come out and say a few words. This Burr did, only to be tendered yet more invitations for more appearances. Was it possible, he wondered, he had misjudged the popular response to Hamilton’s death? Might he not emerge as the hero of that tale after all? And might he not be able to convert such heroism into yet more magnificent grandeur?

  From there, he continued by boat up the coast to Washington City to perform his last official act as vice president: to preside over the Senate’s impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. If the Federalists had attempted to go after the Republicans through the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson would now retaliate by calling for the impeachment of Federalist judges who did not adhere to his interpretation of the Constitution. Of them, by far the most prominent was Chase. By the time Burr arrived in Washington, he learned that he had been indicted for murder in New Jersey, too. So a man wanted for murder in two states would stand in judgment over a Supreme Court justice.

  To see that he had his way, Jefferson had his vice president several times to dinner and, at Burr’s urging, added a couple of sweeteners: He named Burr’s brother-in-law Dr. Joseph Browne to the office of secretary of all of Louisiana, and, obviously unaware of the plot against him, made General Wilkinson governor of the entire Louisiana Territory. Jefferson had already made Burr’s stepson John Bartow Prevost the federal judge in New Orleans. Through these men, Burr would gain political influence over much of the region, and even more in New Orleans, which he envisioned to be the capital of his empire.

  Despite Jefferson’s inducements, Burr proved an even-handed judge, never once veering off the course of legal probity, although he occasionally revealed traces of bitterness. “He conducted with the dignity and impartiality of an angel,” wrote the Washington Federalist, “but with the rigor of a devil.” At one point, he called out a senator for nibbling cake during the proceedings and derided another for breaking decorum in the Senate chamber by wearing a heavy coat against the blasts of arctic air seeping in around the window edges.

  When the trial was done, Burr tendered a verdict of not guilty, much to Jefferson’s fury, leaving himself one last task as vice president, to give an envoi to the Senate where he had served his term. It was the first time in the short history of the nation that the vice president ha
d not been returned to high office, and the Constitution held no provision for a speech. He selected a moment in the Senate’s executive session, and, waiting until the senators fell silent around him, he stood ramrod straight and, speaking extemporaneously, adopted the solemn tone of a Roman valedictory. Gesturing to the hall about him, he called the Senate chamber:

  a sanctuary and a citadel of law, of order, of liberty—and it is here—in this exalted refuge—here if anywhere will resistance be made to the storms of popular frenzy and the silent arts of corruption; and if the Constitution be destined ever to perish by the sacrilegious hands of the demagogue or the usurper, which God avert, its expiring agonies will be witnessed on this floor.

  It was an extraordinary performance, one that left many of the senators weeping, they were so moved by his words. But it is a wonder they weren’t speechless with indignation, instead. For flights of rhetoric, this had to have been one of the more preposterous heard in that young chamber. While it was intended to exalt the Senate, it could as easily be heard as Burr’s self-pitying tribute to himself as a political refugee. In hailing the Senate as an “exalted refuge” and a “citadel of law,” he meant for him. If anyone was desecrating the Senate, it was himself, a fugitive from the law at that very moment! For “corruption” he had no equal. And if anyone was threatening the Constitution—Hamilton’s Constitution, one might add—it was Burr himself, by virtue of the conspiracy he had already begun and would return to shortly. If Burr were speaking ironically, his words would have the advantage of humor, but instead these high-flown sentiments seem to have emerged from that part of his moral imagination that turns black into white, and back again, as needed, so that Aaron Burr need never be in the wrong, whatever he did. It was a handy skill, and he would use it often.