Alexander Hamilton (137 page)

Hamilton and Burr now braced for the event that Henry Adams later described as “the most dramatic moment in the early politics of the Union.”
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When Pendleton asked if they were ready, they both answered yes, and he then uttered the word
Present.
Hamilton lifted his pistol, as did Burr. Both guns were discharged with explosive flashes, separated by a split second or perhaps several seconds. Pendleton was adamant that Burr had fired first and that Hamilton’s shot was merely “the effect of an involuntary exertion of the muscles produced by a mortal wound,” a terrible blow in the abdominal area above his right hip, Pendleton wrote.
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Hamilton rose up on his toes, writhing violently and twisting slightly to the left before toppling headlong to the ground. Hamilton seemed to know that his wound was mortal and proclaimed instantly, “I am a dead man.”
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Pendleton called for Hosack, who came charging up the path. In Pendleton’s recollection, Burr started toward the fallen Hamilton in a manner “expressive of regret,” until Van Ness warned him that Hosack and the boatmen were approaching. From a legal standpoint, Van Ness feared this would place Burr at the crime scene in full view of witnesses, and the two men therefore withdrew as Van Ness tried to shield Burr’s face with an umbrella. Right before they stepped onto their boat, Burr said to Van Ness of Hamilton, “I must go and speak to him!”
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Van Ness counseled him that this was ill-advised. To placate Burr, Van Ness ran up the footpath himself and reported back on Hamilton’s condition before they pushed off from shore.

Van Ness never deviated from his insistent claim that Hamilton had fired first. “That Gen[era]l Hamilton fired first, I am as well persuaded as I ever was of any fact that came under my observation,” he said.
³⁸
He recalled this distinctly, he contended, because as soon as he heard the first shot, he swiveled around to see if Burr had been struck by Hamilton’s bullet. For a moment, he even imagined that Burr had been hit because he seemed to falter. Afterward, Burr told Van Ness that he had stumbled on a stone or branch in front of him and sprained his ankle. He also explained that he had paused several seconds before firing back at Hamilton because the breeze had swirled the smoke from Hamilton’s pistol in obscure eddies before his face and he was waiting for the smoke to clear.

Neither Burr nor Van Ness ever explained why, if Hamilton shot first, he missed his target by so wide a margin. When Pendleton returned to the scene the next day, he tracked down Hamilton’s bullet and discovered that it had smashed the limb of a cedar tree more than twelve feet off the ground. The spot was also approximately four feet to the side of where Burr had stood—in other words, nowhere in his vicinity. (Pendleton sawed off the limb and gave it to John Barker Church, as either legal evidence or a memento.) If Hamilton had shot first, he had wasted his fire, exactly as foretold. And if Burr had fired first, as Pendleton alleged, then Hamilton seems to have squeezed the trigger in a reflexive spasm of agony and shot involuntarily into the trees. In neither scenario did Hamilton aim his gun at Aaron Burr.

Curiously enough, twenty-five years later, apparently without realizing the significance of his own statement, Burr himself confirmed that Hamilton’s bullet had hit the tree overhead. In his seventies, he returned to the dueling ground with a young friend and relived the dramatic encounter. Of Hamilton’s shot, he remembered that “he heard the ball whistle among the branches and saw the severed twig above his head.”
³⁹
Burr thus corroborated that Hamilton had honored his pledge and fired way off the mark. In other words, Burr
knew
that Hamilton had squandered his shot before he returned fire. And how did he react? He shot to kill, even though he had a clear shot at Hamilton and could have just wounded him or even stopped the duel. The most likely scenario is that Hamilton
had
fired first but only to show Burr that he was throwing away his shot. How else could he have shown Burr his intentions? As he had written the night before, he wanted to give Burr a chance “to pause and to reflect.” He must have assumed that, once he fired, Burr would be too proud or too protective of his own political self-interest to try to kill him.

Once Hamilton had been shot, Pendleton propped him up on a reddish-brown boulder that is still preserved at Weehawken, the sole relic of the duel to survive other than the pistols. Hosack found his friend sitting on the grass, his face livid and ghastly. “His countenance of death I shall never forget,” Hosack wrote. “He had at that instant just strength to say, ‘This is a mortal wound, Doctor,’ when he sunk away and became to all appearance lifeless.”
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Hosack slit away Hamilton’s bloodstained clothes and examined the dying man. The bullet had fractured a rib on the right side, ripped through Hamilton’s liver and diaphragm, and splintered the second lumbar vertebra, coming to rest in his spine. Hamilton was so weak that Hosack could not locate a pulse or detect any breathing and feared that his friend was dead. The only hope, he thought, was to get Hamilton out on the water. Assisted by the oarsmen, Pendleton and Hosack lifted Hamilton and carried the bleeding man down the footpath. They spread him out in the bottom of the boat and departed immediately for Manhattan, as Hosack administered ammonia-based smelling salts to his unconscious friend: “I now rubbed his face, lips, and temples with spirits of hartshorne, applied it to his neck and breast and to the wrists and palms of his hands, and endeavoured to pour some into his mouth.”
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As they crossed the Hudson, Hamilton was revived by the river breeze and suddenly blinked open his eyes. “My vision is indistinct,” he said, and his gaze appeared to wander.
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Hamilton spotted the pistol he had used in the duel and, apparently convinced that he had never fired it, said, “Take care of that pistol. It is undischarged and still cocked. It may go off and do harm. Pendleton knows that I did not intend to fire at him.”

It was a very characteristic moment for Hamilton: the instinctive sense of responsibility, the fear of violence and disorder, the mental lucidity and self-possession even in his greatest agony. Hamilton’s comments also suggest that Burr may have fired first and that his own unremembered shot had been a spasmodic reaction. Trying to conserve his ebbing energy, Hamilton again shut his eyes. He informed Hosack that he had lost all feeling in his legs, and the doctor verified this total paralysis. When the boat approached William Bayard’s dock on the Manhattan shore, Hamilton told the doctor, “Let Mrs. Hamilton be immediately sent for. Let the event be gradually broken to her, but give her hopes.”
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Eliza, still at the Grange, knew nothing of what had happened, and it would take time to bring her downtown.

Notified by his servant that Hamilton and Pendleton had pushed off toward New Jersey at dawn, apparently from his own dock, the waiting William Bayard later said that “too well he conjectured the fatal errand and foreboded the dreadful result.”
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Bayard, a rich merchant and Bank of New York director, watched the incoming boat with trepidation and burst into tears when he saw Hamilton lying at the bottom. Servants brought a cot down to the water and gently transported Hamilton across Bayard’s garden to his mansion, which stood at what is now 80–82 Jane Street. Taken to a large, second-floor bedroom, Alexander Hamilton was never to emerge from the house.

Soon after Hamilton was deposited in the upstairs room, word of what had occurred spread with electrifying speed. At the Tontine Coffee House, watering hole for the city’s business elite, a sensational bulletin was posted: “GENERAL HAMILTON WAS SHOT BY COLONEL BURR THIS MORNING IN A DUEL. THE GENERAL IS SAID TO BE MORTALLY WOUNDED.”
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As onlookers absorbed this shocking news, they blanched with horror. Dirck Ten Broeck, threading his way through the streets en route to his scheduled appointment with Hamilton, encountered a friend who told him of the duel. “I was thunderstruck,” he said, “but alas the report was true.”
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Pretty soon, knots of anxious New Yorkers gathered on street corners to discuss the still fragmentary reports. As the hours passed, the frenetic life of the city that Hamilton had enriched so immeasurably ground to a halt. “This is indeed a sad day,” wrote Hamilton’s associate David Ogden. “All business seems to be suspended in the city and a solemn gloom hangs on every countenance.”
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Throughout the day came bulletins on the dying man’s state, and a mass of people congregated before the Bayard mansion. Some French ships anchored in New York harbor sent surgeons specially trained in treating gunshot wounds to see if they could resuscitate Hamilton.

At first, Hamilton suffered such exquisite pain that Dr. Hosack did not strip off his bloody garments but just plied him with weak wine and water. When Hamilton complained of acute back discomfort, Hosack and other attendants took off his clothes, darkened the room, and began to administer sizable doses of laudanum to dull the ache. Despite the pain, Hamilton reacted to the situation with stoic fortitude and an impressive regard for others, worrying constantly about the plight of Eliza and the children. Following his advice, Eliza had been summoned from the Grange but was told at first only that her husband was suffering from “spasms.” Initially she trusted this fiction, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., wrote, and nobody dared to tell her the truth because it was “feared she would become frantic.”
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The concern for Eliza’s mental health was not misplaced. When she discovered the horrid truth, she grew “half-distracted” and gave way to “frantic grief,” said Hosack.
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To comfort her, Hamilton kept intoning the one refrain he knew would soothe her troubled spirit above all others: “
Remember, my Eliza, you are a Christian.
”
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For those packed into the Bayard household, the scene of grief was unbearable. David Ogden watched as Eliza sat devotedly at her husband’s bedside, fanning his feverish face. Ogden wrote a friend that “it is but two years since her eldest son was killed in the same manner. Gracious God! What must be her feelings?”
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Angelica Church hastened to succor the man who had been her obsession for so many years. Gouverneur Morris would remember an inconsolable Angelica “
weeping her heart out.
”
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She expressed her profound admiration for Eliza in the face of such intolerable adversity. “My dear sister bears with saintlike fortitude this affliction,” she told their brother Philip.
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Aside from his strongly protective feelings toward his family, Hamilton was preoccupied with spiritual matters in a way that eliminates all doubt about the sincerity of his late-flowering religious interests. It is not certain that Hamilton was as eloquent on his deathbed as his friends later attested, but their accounts corroborate one another and are remarkably consistent. No sooner was he brought to the Bayard house than he made it a matter of urgent concern to receive last rites from the Episcopal Church. He asked to see the Reverend Benjamin Moore, who was the rector of Trinity Church, the Episcopal bishop of New York, and the president of Columbia College. The eminent Moore balked at giving Hamilton holy communion as he wrestled with two nagging reservations. He thought dueling an impious practice and did not wish to sanction the confrontation with Burr. He also knew that Hamilton had not been a regular churchgoer. As a result, Bishop Moore could not, in good conscience, comply with Hamilton’s wishes.

In desperation, Hamilton turned to a dear friend, the Reverend John M. Mason, the pastor of the Scotch Presbyterian Church, which stood near the Hamilton home on Cedar Street. A Columbia College graduate and trustee and a confirmed Federalist, Mason revered Hamilton’s talents, and the latter reciprocated the affection. “He is in every sense a man of
rare merit,
” Hamilton once said.
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When Mason entered the chamber, he took Hamilton’s hand, and the two men exchanged a “melancholy salutation” before they studied each other in mournful silence.
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Hamilton asked if Mason would administer communion to him. The abashed pastor said that it gave him “unutterable pain” to receive from Hamilton any request to which he could not accede, but in the present instance any compliance would be incompatible with his obligations. He explained that “it is a principle in our churches never to administer the Lord’s Supper privately to any person under any circumstances.”
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Hamilton respected Mason’s candor and prodded him no further.

Mason tried to console Hamilton by saying that all men had sinned and were equal in the Lord’s sight. “I perceive it to be so,” Hamilton said. “I am a sinner. I look to His mercy.”
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Hamilton also stressed his hatred of dueling: “I used every expedient to avoid the interview, but I have found for some time past that my life
must
be exposed to that man. I went to the field determined not to take
his
life.”
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As Mason told how Christ’s blood would wash away his sins, Hamilton grasped his hand, rolled his eyes heavenward, and exclaimed with fervor, “I have a tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
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Hamilton, struggling for breath, promised that if he survived he would repudiate dueling.

Rebuffed by Mason, Hamilton redirected his hopes of communion to the skittish Benjamin Moore. The bishop now faced considerable pressure to appease Hamilton, whose friends thought it heartless to refuse a dying man’s last wish. “This refusal was cruel and unjustifiable,” wrote David Ogden. “Why deny a man the consolation and comforts of our holy religion in his last moments?”
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Willing to reconsider, the stern prelate with the bald pate and long, grave face returned to the scene at one o’clock that afternoon. As befits a great orator, Hamilton roused himself for one last burst of persuasion. “My dear Sir,” he told Moore, “you perceive my unfortunate situation and no doubt have been made acquainted with the circumstances which led to it. It is my desire to receive the communion at your hands. I hope you will not conceive there is any impropriety in my request.” Then he added, “It has for some time past been the wish of my heart and it was my intention to take an early opportunity of uniting myself to the church by the reception of that holy ordinance.”
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Hamilton expressed his faith in God’s mercy. When Moore termed dueling a “barbarous custom,” Hamilton assured him, too, that he would renounce it if he lived.
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Lifting his hands beseechingly, he said, “I have no ill will against Col. Burr. I met him with a fixed resolution to do him no harm. I forgive all that happened.”
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At that point, Moore relented and gave holy communion to Hamilton, who then lay back serenely and declared that he was happy.