Alexander Hamilton (134 page)

The courteous, dignified Pendleton was dismayed by Hamilton’s rigidity. “The truth is that General Hamilton had made up his mind to meet Mr. Burr before he called upon me, provided he should be required to do what his first letter declined,” Pendleton later told a relative. “And it was owing to my solicitude and my efforts to prevent extremities that the correspondence was kept open from 23 June to the 27th.”
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Burr, it must be said, proved no less obdurate. George Clinton later told one senator that “Burr’s intention to challenge was known to a certain club...long before it was known to Hamilton.... [T]his circumstance induced many to consider it more like an assassination than a duel.”
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Between Hamilton’s combative psychology and Burr’s need to solve his political quandary, there was little room for the seconds to hammer out a deal.

In replying to Hamilton’s unyielding second letter, Burr obeyed the inexorable logic of an affair of honor. He wrote to Hamilton and regretted that he lacked “the frankness of a soldier and the candor of a gentleman” and quoted Hamilton’s ominous phrase that he was ready to meet the consequences. “This I deemed a sort of defiance,” said Burr. “Thus, sir, you have invited the course I am about to pursue and now by your silence impose it upon me.”
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Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton had moved from frosty words to a mutual and irreversible commitment to a duel.

Hamilton spent that weekend at the Grange and did not set eyes on Burr’s letter until June 26. Over the weekend, Pendleton met several times with Van Ness, trying to arbitrate a solution. If Hamilton had been the more recalcitrant one at first, it was now Burr’s turn to throw up insurmountable obstacles. Pendleton thought he saw a way out of the impasse. If Burr asked Hamilton to specify whether there had been “any impeachment of his
private
character” (italics added) during the Albany dinner, Hamilton could disclaim such a statement.
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But Burr had drawn up truculent instructions for Van Ness that precluded any such harmonious resolution. For a long time, he said, he had endured Hamilton’s insults “till it approached to humiliation,” and he concluded that Hamilton had “a settled and implacable malevolence” toward him.
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By this point, Burr was clearly spoiling for a fight. On Monday, Pendleton asked Hamilton to recount what had been said at the Albany dinner. Hamilton’s recollections were fuzzy, and he remembered only that he had spoken of “the political principles and views of Col. Burr ...without reference to any particular instance of past conduct or to private character.”
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By this point, Burr had gone far beyond the Cooper slur and upped the stakes dramatically. Van Ness told Pendleton that Burr now wanted Hamilton to make a
general
disavowal of any previous statements that might have conveyed “impressions derogatory to the honor of Mr. Burr,” and he made clear that “more will now be required than would have been asked at first.”
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Burr was deliberately making impossible demands, asking Hamilton to deny that he had
ever
maligned Burr, at any time or place, in his public or private character. Hamilton could not sign such a document, which would have been untrue and which Burr might have brandished in future elections as an endorsement. Hamilton must have feared that such a concession would strip him of standing in Federalist eyes and make military leadership difficult. Burr’s provocation only adds to the suspicion that the “despicable” statement was just a transparent pretext to pounce on Hamilton. After discussing the latest demands with Hamilton, Pendleton reported back to Van Ness that Hamilton now perceived “predetermined hostility” on Burr’s part.
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At this point, a confrontation was unavoidable. On Wednesday, June 27, Van Ness delivered to Pendleton a formal duel request. Henceforth, Burr would entertain no further letters from Hamilton, and all communication would take place between the seconds. Duels tended to occur posthaste to prevent the secret from leaking out. But this duel was scheduled at a relatively distant date, July 11, for reasons that speak well of Hamilton. The New York Supreme Court was holding its final session in Manhattan on Friday, July 6, and Hamilton felt duty bound to satisfy clients who had lawsuits pending. His sense of professional responsibility was impeccable. He told Pendleton, “I should not think it right in the midst of a circuit court to withdraw my services from those who may have confided important interests to me and expose them to the embarrassment of seeking other counsel who may not have time to be sufficiently instructed.”
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He also needed time to put his personal affairs in order. For the next two weeks, Hamilton hid the situation from Eliza and the children, as Burr did from his daughter, Theodosia. Only a handful of politically well-connected people in New York knew of the unfolding drama.

Once a duel was agreed upon, Hamilton had to reconcile the two glaringly incompatible elements of the situation: his need to fight to preserve his political prestige and his equally powerful need to remain true to his avowed opposition to dueling. He opted for a solution chosen by honorable duelists before him: he would throw away his fire—that is, purposely miss his opponent. This was the strategy Hamilton’s son Philip had disastrously followed in his duel. It was likely Hamilton himself, writing in the
New-York Evening Post,
who gave this description of Philip’s approach: “[A]verse in principle to the shedding of blood in private combat, anxious to repair his original fault, as far as he was able without dishonor, and to stand acquitted to his own mind, [he] came to the determination to reserve his fire, receive that of his antagonist, and then discharge his pistol in the air.”
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Only after Philip threw his fire away was his second supposed to announce his reason for doing so and try to resolve the dispute.

Aside from Pendleton, Hamilton confided his plan to waste his shot to Rufus King, the former minister to Great Britain and “a very moderate and judicious friend,” who tried several times to talk him out of it.
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King found dueling abhorrent but told Hamilton that “he owed [it] to his family and the rights of self-defence to fire at his antagonist.”
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King sneaked out of town the morning of the encounter, leading to criticism that he had acted cravenly when he could have headed off the catastrophe. King said that even though Hamilton had the “most capacious and discriminating” mind he had ever known, he rigidly followed the rules known as the “code duello.”
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Pendleton was likewise horrified at Hamilton’s decision to throw away his shot and exhorted him not to “decide lightly, but take time to deliberate fully.”
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Hamilton would not listen. As so often in his career—the Reynolds and Adams pamphlets spring to mind—he became possessed by a notion and would not let it go. In this frame of mind and in spite of his son’s experience, he was impervious to reason.

Hamilton’s decision has given rise to speculation that he was severely depressed and that the duel was suicidal. Henry Adams phrased it, “Instead of killing Burr, [Hamilton] invited Burr to kill him.”
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Historian Douglas Adair has evoked a guiltridden Hamilton who planned to atone for his sins by exposing himself to Burr’s murderous gunfire. In 1978, four psychobiographers studied the duel and also concluded that it was a disguised suicide.

It is indisputable that in Hamilton’s final years he was seriously depressed by personal and political setbacks, and his judgment was often spectacularly faulty. Long beguiled by visions of a glorious death in battle, he had also never lost a certain youthful ardor for martyrdom. Yet in the duel with Burr, he obeyed the antique logic of affairs of honor. Because he followed a script lost to later generations, his actions seem lunatic rather than merely rash and wrongheaded. “He did not think of this course of action as suicidal,” Joseph Ellis has written, “but as another gallant gamble of the sort he was accustomed to winning.”
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While the duel shocked many contemporaries, Hamilton and Burr partisans understood its logic, even if they did not endorse it. Attorney David B. Ogden said that his friend Hamilton knew that if he did not duel, “it would in a great measure deprive him of the power of being hereafter useful to his country.”
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Likewise, William P. Van Ness said that Burr had to defend his honor, for if he “tamely sat down in silence and dropped the affair, what must have been the feelings of his friends?”
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Hamilton gambled that Burr would not shoot to kill. He knew that Burr had nothing to gain by murdering him. Burr would be denounced from every pulpit as an assassin, and it would destroy the remnants of his career. Since he had provoked the duel to rehabilitate his career, it did not make sense for him to kill Hamilton. Hamilton calculated (correctly, it turned out) that Burr could not kill him without committing political suicide at the same time. This did not rule out the possibility, of course, that Burr might kill him accidentally or that he might submit to a murderous rage that overrode his political interests. If Burr did kill him, Hamilton knew, he would at least have the posthumous satisfaction of destroying Burr’s alliance with the Federalists. On the other hand, Hamilton never wavered in his belief that if he did not face Burr’s fire, he would lose standing in the political circles that mattered to him. With an exalted sense of his place in history, he viewed himself as a potential savior of the republic. He once told a friend, “Perhaps my sensibility is the effect of an exaggerated estimate of my services to the U[nited] States, but on such a subject every man will judge for himself.”
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The antagonists approached their rendezvous in starkly different personal situations. Hamilton had a large family of dependents: Eliza and seven children ranging in age from two to nearly twenty. Some observers criticized Hamilton for having recklessly jeopardized his family to salvage his reputation. Burr, by contrast, was a widower with a daughter, Theodosia, who had married into the wealthy Alston family of South Carolina; he did not need to worry about the financial aftermath of his death.

Deeply conflicted about the duel, Hamilton displayed a fatalistic passivity. When King told Hamilton that Burr undoubtedly meant to murder him and that Hamilton should prepare as best he could, Hamilton replied that he could not bear the thought of taking another human life, to which King retorted, “Then, sir, you will go like a lamb to be slaughtered.”
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The day before the duel, Pendleton begged Hamilton to study the pistols and handed him one. “He quickly raised it to a line,” said Robert Troup, “but, dropping his arms as quickly, he returned the pistol to Pendleton and this constituted the whole of his preparation to fight an antagonist very adroit in firing with pistols. I verily believe that Hamilton had not fired a pistol since the termination of the revolutionary war.”
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Quite different was the diligent preparation of Aaron Burr, a superb marksman who had killed several enemy soldiers during the Revolution. After the duel with Hamilton, the press was awash with rumors that Burr had engaged in intensive target practice. One Federalist paper quoted a Burr friend as admitting “that for three months past, he had been in the constant habit of practicing with pistols.”
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The Reverend John M. Mason insisted that “Burr went out determined to kill” Hamilton and for a long time had been “qualifying himself to become a ‘
dead shot.
’”
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John Barker Church later said that he had reason to believe that Burr “had been for some time practising with his pistols for this purpose.”
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Burr’s friend Charles Biddle disputed this, saying that Burr “had no occasion to practice, for perhaps there was hardly ever a man could fire so true and no man possessed more coolness or courage.”
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So commonplace was the accusation that Burr had taken repeated target practice that it is probably more than mere Federalist mythology. George W. Strong, Eliza’s lawyer in later years, visited Burr’s home right before the duel. “He went out once to Burr’s place at Richmond Hill on business,” recalled his son, John Strong, “and there he saw the board set up and perforated with pistol balls, where the infernal, cold-blooded scoundrel had been practicing.”
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At least outwardly, Hamilton and Burr continued to mingle in New York society, pretending that nothing was amiss. Charles Biddle told of an acquaintance who “dined in company with Hamilton and Burr the week before the duel. He has since told me he had not the most distant idea of there being any difference between them.”
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Their final encounter before the duel occurred on the Fourth of July. Since Washington’s death, Hamilton had been president general of the Society of the Cincinnati, the order of retired Revolutionay War officers that had aroused suspicions of hereditary rule. Hamilton could not skip the group’s festivities without drawing notice, and he and Burr shared a banquet table at Fraunces Tavern. The year before, Burr had joined the society when courting the Federalist vote.

Burr sat morose and taciturn among the other members, averting his eyes from Hamilton. As John Trumbull recalled, “The singularity of their manner was observed by all, but few had any suspicions of the cause. Burr, contrary to his wont, was silent, gloomy, sour, while Hamilton entered with glee into the gaiety of a convivial party.”
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At first, Hamilton could not be induced to sing, then submitted. “Well, you shall have it,” he said, doubtless to cheers from the veterans.
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Some have said his valedictory song was a haunting old military ballad called “How Stands the Glass Around,” a song reputedly sung by General Wolfe on the eve of his battlefield death outside Quebec in 1759. Others said that it was a soldiers’ drinking song called “The Drum.” Both tunes expressed a common sentiment: a soldier’s proud resignation in the face of war and death. One version of the evening has Hamilton standing on a table, lustily belting out his ballad. As he delivered this rendition, Burr is said to have raised his eyes and watched his foe with fixed attention.