A Magnificent Catastrophe

by Edward J. Larson

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BURR V. HAMILTON

  IF THE ROAD to the presidency in 1800 lay through New York, then Jefferson would have to ride to victory on Aaron Burr’s Republican campaign machinery. At the time, few politicians fully trusted Burr and many actively disliked him—but no one doubted his influence over local politics in New York City, which then dominated that of its state. In April 1800, New York voters would elect the legislature empowered to select the state’s twelve presidential electors, with New York City’s large delegation in the lower house holding the balance of power. In 1796, Federalists controlling the state legislature had selected electors loyal to Adams and Thomas Pinckney. If Jefferson could capture those votes this time, he would likely win the election. Only Burr could deliver them by orchestrating a Republican takeover of the state legislature, but he would have to beat Alexander Hamilton to do so.

  New York boasted a gallery full of High Federalist luminaries. During the spring of 1800, Alexander Hamilton commanded the nation’s Army from his headquarters in New York City, Gouverneur Morris took office as the state’s new senator, and John Jay served as governor in Albany. Federalists controlled both houses of the state legislature going into the April legislative elections and rejected a Republican proposal to choose presidential electors by district elections, which surely would have split the state’s electoral vote in 1800. By retaining legislative appointment for presidential electors, New York Federalists hoped to deliver all of them for their party’s candidates just as they had in every previous presidential contest. Burr had other ideas, which required a Republican victory in the April elections. With a singleness of purpose that awed friend and foe alike, he set about to make it happen. Hamilton, already Burr’s rival, stood determined to stop him and maintain Federalist rule in New York. The contest became a historic clash within the larger presidential campaign.

  The 1800 census reported that New York City had finally surpassed Philadelphia as the nation’s largest city and principal port. Yet, this increasingly cosmopolitan city—founded by the Dutch in 1626, conquered by the British in 1664, and bloated by German and Irish immigrants during the late 1700s—could not comfortably contain two men with such enormous egos and soaring ambitions as Burr and Hamilton. Short in stature but strikingly handsome and able to charm, they were destined to come into conflict repeatedly and have their relationship end in a deadly duel. The election of 1800 neither began nor finished their rivalry for power and influence; rather, it intensified it greatly.

  The parallels and perpendicularities between the two men were almost eerie. Born during the mid-1750s within a year of each other, Burr and Hamilton came from dramatically different backgrounds. Son of Aaron Burr Sr., a noted theologian and Princeton College president, and Esther Edwards, the scholarly daughter of the legendary evangelical minister Jonathan Edwards, Burr boasted a matchless American pedigree dating back to the earliest Puritan settlers of New England. “I have never known, in any country, the prejudice in favor of birth, parentage, and descent more conspicuous than that in the instance of Colonel Burr,” John Adams once observed. In contrast, Adams slurred Hamilton as “a bastard brat of a Scotch peddler” for his out-of-wedlock birth to a drifting trader and married Frenchwoman on the British West Indies island of Nevis. Adams made the comment about Hamilton in 1806, long after their bitter personal and policy disputes, which Adams never forgot or forgave, became public.

  Both Burr and Hamilton lost their parents at an early age and became wards of maternal relatives. Burr gained easy entry into Princeton while Hamilton overcame all odds by securing a place at King’s College (later Columbia) in New York. Burr considered following his father and grandfather into the ministry but soon rejected the idea and never again showed marked interest in religion. Like Hamilton, Burr enjoyed a self-gratifying life punctuated with extramarital affairs. The Revolutionary War interrupted their academic studies, with both men joining the patriot army, serving on Washington’s personal staff, and rising to the rank of colonel. Whereas Washington grew to rely heavily on Hamilton and trust him implicitly, the General quickly lost faith in Burr and had him transferred to combat positions, where he served with distinction. Years later, Washington insisted that Hamilton become his second-in-command for the Additional Army over President Adams’s objection, but refused Adams’s recommendation that Burr become a brigadier general in the same force. “Colonel Burr is a brave and able officer,” Washington conceded at the time, “but the question is, whether he has not equal talents at intrigue.” The comment infuriated Adams, who, when later recalling it, denounced Washington’s pick, Alexander Hamilton, as “the most restless, impatient, artful, indefatigable and unprincipled intriguer in the United States, if not the world.” Burr and Hamilton inevitably excited passions.

  After the Revolutionary War, both men gained eminence as two of the brightest lawyers in the booming city of New York. As attorneys, Burr and Hamilton occasionally collaborated on cases—including as co-counsel for the defense in a sensational murder trial during the weeks leading up to the election of April 1800. They married well and joined the city’s social elite, although Burr’s extravagant expenses often exceeded his sizable income. Each of them compounded his personal influence by attracting and sustaining a trusted circle of loyal lieutenants. Hamilton tended to draw in men of independent means and social standing, some much older than himself. Burr, in contrast, attracted a small corps of rising young New Yorkers, known as Burrites, who devoted themselves to his causes. “It was ever one of his characteristics to secure inviolable the attachment of his friends,” one of them later wrote. “It was here that Colonel Burr was all powerful, for he possessed in a preeminent degree the art of fascinating the youthful.”

  Politics consumed both men by the late 1780s, but they chose different sides. Hamilton and his father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, became leading Federalists; Burr gravitated toward the circle of the state’s seven-term Anti-Federalist (and later Republican) governor, George Clinton, first when serving in the state legislature and then as Clinton’s attorney general. Within state politics, their relative prominence rose and fell as power passed back and forth between the two parties during the 1790s, even as Hamilton gained national influence as Washington’s principal adviser and Treasury Secretary. When Clinton’s faction took over the state legislature in 1791, for example, legislators chose Burr to replace Schuyler in the United States Senate, but Schuyler reclaimed the seat from Burr six years later after Federalists took back the legislature. In an effort to reach beyond their Southern base, Republicans looked to New York—a critical battleground state in the North—for their vice presidential candidates. The first nod went to Clinton, in 1792, and then again to him in 1804 and 1808. In 1796, however, many national Republicans favored Burr, but he secured only thirty electoral votes when some Southern Republican electors gave their second votes to Samuel Adams or Clinton. The experience both fed Burr’s national ambitions and drove him to insist on strict party loyalty should he again stand for the vice presidency.

  In contrast to Hamilton, who remained a principled High Federalist and accumulated political power through ideological purity, Burr saw his path to glory through pragmatic politics. He took ideologically inconsistent stands on various issues and even courted Federalist support for a possible run against Clinton as governor in 1792—a move that Hamilton blocked within his party. Still smarting from his father-in-law’s defeat for the Senate at Burr’s hands a year earlier, Hamilton warned a Federalist confidant at the time, “As a public man [Burr] is one of the worst sorts—a friend to nothing but as suits his interest and ambition. Determined to climb to the highest honors of state and as much higher as circumstances may permit—he cares nothing about the means of effecting his purpose.” Drawing on a historical analogy that his own opponents leveled against him, Hamilton concluded, “If we have an embryo-Caesar in the United States, ’tis Burr.”

  Losing his U.S. Senate seat in 1797 did not deter Burr. Again elec
ted to the state legislature a year later, he supported legislation benefiting his investments, including a bill chartering the Manhattan Company, a banking institution disguised as a water company that offered borrowers a Republican alternative to the Bank of New York and the local branch of the Bank of the United States, both of which Federalists controlled. Defeated for reelection in 1799 amid accusations of self-dealing, Burr determined to build a Republican political machine that would stabilize his political fortunes. He set his sights on the April 1800 legislative election with the goal of securing the state for Jefferson and the vice presidency for himself. Hamilton stood in the way. In his brooding historical novel about Burr, Gore Vidal has his antihero say at this point in the narrative, “I suspect that when Hamilton looks at me he sees, in some magical way, himself reflected.” It would have been a mirror image with many parts reversed.

  Partisans on both sides and in all parts of the country watched the New York City election closely. Analyzing the overall contest for President in a March letter to Madison, Jefferson stressed the significance of that one local election for the ultimate outcome. “If the city election of New York is in favor of the Republican ticket, the issue will be Republican; if the Federal ticket for the city of New York prevails, the probability will be in favor of a Federal issue,” he wrote. “The election of New York being in April, it becomes an early and interesting object.”

  Federalists attached similar importance to the event. “We are full of anxiety here about the election of our members to the legislature,” Hamilton’s close friend and political ally Robert Troup observed in March. “We must bring into action all our energies; if we do not…Jefferson will be in.” As the election neared, Maryland’s Charles Carroll of Carrollton wrote nervously to Hamilton, “It is asserted with confidence by the anti-federal party here that all your electors will vote for Mr. Jefferson as president; if such an event shall really happen, it is probable he will be chosen; of such a choice the consequences to this country may be dreadful.”

  The precarious balance of both national and New York State politics made the city election pivotal. Assuming, as most then did, that Adams would carry the Northeast and Jefferson would sweep the South and West, New York’s twelve electoral votes might well decide the difference. Certainly they were critical for Adams’s victory in 1796, and could be again in 1800.

  Federalists held an eight-or nine-seat majority in the New York Senate prior to the April election, but only a slight edge in the lower house (or State Assembly). Members of both houses voted as a single body for presidential electors, with each senator and assemblyman having an equal vote. New York City, then a densely packed urban center confined to the southern end of Manhattan Island, chose its thirteen members of the State Assembly in a single citywide election, with voters from all seven of the city’s wards able to vote for each of the seats. If either party swept the city’s thirteen Assembly contests—which the Federalists had done by a wide margin in the previous election—then that party would likely hold a majority of seats in the next state legislature and gain all of New York’s electoral votes.

  Burr explained this to Jefferson in a private meeting on January 18, 1800, and Jefferson passed the explanation on to Virginia Governor James Monroe. “In the new election which is to come along in April, three or four in the Senate will be changed in our favor,” he wrote based on Burr’s analysis. “In the [Assembly], the county elections will still be better than last, but still all will depend on the city election.”

  Going into the city election, party leaders on both sides expected to win. Following his meeting with Burr, Jefferson confidently predicted, “At present there would be no doubt of our carrying our ticket there.” On the eve of the election, High Federalist Christopher Gore, a future Massachusetts governor and United States senator, wrote from New York City to the American ambassador in London, “Your fellow citizens here are busy electioneering. The parties are desirous of securing their favorites, and each is sanguine. Hamilton is sure of success and I understand the other side is equally so.” By their nature, both Burr and Hamilton exuded confidence, but only one of them could win this contest.

  Despite its early date, the New York City election became the clearest test of popular opinion on the 1800 presidential race ever conducted in a competitive setting. The local press focused squarely on national issues, not state ones. The looming showdown between Jefferson and Adams subverted the local race to national ends and relegated the Assembly candidates to the role of willing surrogates for the presidential aspirants.

  Observing in late April that “the election of a president on either side depends upon the city of New York,” the Federalist Commercial Advertiser urged “every friend to the Constitution and peace of his country to make the most vigorous exertions in favor of the Federal interest.” Those became the Federalist campaign themes: preserve the current constitutional order and domestic security by voting for the entire party ticket. The local press rarely mentioned any of the state issues that normally dominate legislative campaigns. “Citizens choose your sides,” another New York Federalist newspaper proclaimed. “You who are for French notions of government; for the tempestuous sea of anarchy and misrule; for arming the poor against the rich; for fraternizing with the foes of God and man; go to the left and support the leaders, or the dupes, of the anti-federal junto. But you that are sober, industrious, thriving, and happy, give your votes for those men who mean to preserve the union of the states, the purity and vigor of our excellent Constitution, the sacred majesty of the laws, and the holy ordinances of religion.” Christianity means nothing to Jefferson and his friends, many articles charged: “The devil is in their hearts,” one declared.

  In a flood of editorials, articles, and letters published in local Federalist newspapers during the weeks leading up to the April election, writers argued that Jefferson, Burr, and Clinton had opposed ratifying the Constitution and still hoped to abolish it—and with it, domestic peace and prosperity—for their own personal gain. “Great God, is it possible?” one Federalist asked, even “the apostate Madison,” who coauthored the Constitution, is “now leagued with them.” Clinton served as an easy target because, as governor, he led the opposition to ratifying the federal Constitution in New York. Jefferson and Burr initially had qualms about the amount of power concentrated in the national government under the Constitution, but they did not oppose its ratification.

  Federalists warned that with Jefferson at the helm, the United States would become like revolutionary France, where Jacobins overthrew the civil order and Christian religion. “Merchants, your ships will be condemned to rot in your harbors for the navy which is their protection Jefferson will destroy,” a typical Federalist editorial charged. “The temples of the most high will be profaned by the impious orgies of the Goddess of Reason, personated as in France by some common prostitute.” After relating a long parade of horribles, another editorial implored voters, “It is for you to decide whether these gloomy presages shall be realized, or whether we shall continue to flourish in our present splendor.” In a single sentence that summarized the entire campaign, one editorial declared, “Those of you who wish to preserve your liberty, religion, and the Constitution of the United States will support the Federal ticket with a long pull, a strong pull, and ALL pull together.” Vote for the entire Federalist slate, it urged New Yorkers.

  Federalist publications, while explicit in their attacks on Jefferson, spoke in generalities about their own candidates and policies. Beyond their names and party affiliations, little appeared in the press about the thirteen candidates whom Hamilton rounded up to run on the Federalist ticket for the Assembly. Only two incumbents chose to stand for reelection, and the others had virtually no political experience. Most were tradesmen. John Adams later dismissed them as “men of little weight, obscure in name, poor in purse, mean in talents, and meritorious only in [that] they were confidential friends of the great and good Hamilton.” Abigail Adams called them “men of no n
ote, men wholly unfit for the purpose.” Republicans openly speculated that Hamilton picked them solely because of their personal loyalty to him.

  In 1796, even though Hamilton had tried to swing the final electoral-vote tally to Thomas Pinckney over Adams, he had worked vigorously to deliver New York for the Federalist ticket. The relationship between Adams and Hamilton, never good, had soured still further since 1796, and this may have influenced Hamilton’s choice of legislative candidates. Adams’s impulsive temperament, independent streak, and distrust of Hamilton had fueled the tensions between these two proud men, but his decision to send peace negotiators to France in 1798 and hostility toward the Additional Army had turned Hamilton into an implacable foe.

  By the time of the New York elections, Hamilton told friends that he could no longer support the President’s reelection. Adams knew of these comments and thereafter viewed Hamilton’s actions with utmost suspicion. Indeed, Hamilton at this time was actively, if still secretly, conspiring with other High Federalists to replace Adams as the party’s presidential candidate with some politically viable member of their own faction, most likely Thomas Pinckney’s brother, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Having New York’s twelve electors in his pocket could give to Hamilton as much influence over the Federalists’ choice for President as those same electors would give to Burr over the Republicans’ choice for Vice President. “Hamilton, who ruled Washington,” Adams bitterly observed at the time, “would still rule if he could.”

  Not feeling the sting of Adams’s temper and naturally favoring peace over war, the public tended to side with the President over Hamilton and the High Federalists, which incensed them all the more. To keep out the Republicans, Hamilton would not yet risk an open break with Adams even as he schemed to unseat him. To achieve his objectives, Hamilton instead apparently decided to promote individuals loyal to him for the New York legislature rather than secure the strongest Federalist candidates, some of whom might favor Adams. With the New York legislature under his sway, Hamilton could then secure the selection of High Federalist electors more loyal to him than to Adams. At least Adams believed this was the motive for Hamilton’s choice of lackluster legislative candidates. If true, it was a high-stakes gambit. Some historians have suggested that Hamilton simply wanted to reach out to common voters with a commoner’s ticket—but that hardly fit his elitist style. He typically sought to stand tall rather than stoop low. Perhaps defensive about the Federalist slate, Hamilton’s friend Robert Troup observed at the time, “It is next to an impossibility to get men of weight and influence to serve” in the lowly legislature. Regardless of the reason for their choice, according to reports that later reached Adams, when Burr read the list of Federalist candidates, he said of Hamilton, “Now I have him all hollow.”