Alexander Hamilton (40 page)

In speech no less than in writing, Hamilton’s fluency frequently shaded into excess. Hamilton had the most durable pair of lungs in the New York bar and could speak extemporaneously in perfectly formed paragraphs for hours. But it was not always advantageous to have a brain bubbling with ideas. Robert Troup complained that the prolix Hamilton never knew when to stop: “I used to tell him that he was not content with knocking [his opponent] in the head, but that he persisted until he had banished every little insect that buzzed around his ears.”
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Troup also speculated that Hamilton was so distracted by public matters later on that he never had the chance to become deeply read in the law. This was probably true. On the other hand, the myriad claims on his time forced Hamilton to avoid trivia and plumb the basic principles of a case. “With other men, law is a trade, with him it was a science,” said Fisher Ames.
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He forced other lawyers to fight on his turf, starting out with a painstaking definition of terms and then reciting a long string of precedents. He brought into court lengthy lists of legal authorities and Latin quotations he wished to cite. His sources were varied, esoteric, and unpredictable. His legal editor, Julius Goebel, Jr., has observed: “Hamilton’s reading was not confined to English law, for in addition to citations to basic Roman law texts we find him proffering passages from exotics like the Frenchman Domat, the Dutchman Vinnius, and the Spaniard Perez.”
¹⁹

A good-natured legal rivalry arose between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Sometimes they worked on the same team, more often on opposing sides. Hamilton did not drag political feuds into dinner parties and drawing rooms, and so he mingled with Burr cordially. Later on, Hamilton said that in their early relationship they had “always been opposed in politics but always on good terms. We set out in the practice of the law at the same time and took opposite political directions. Burr beckoned me to follow him and I advised him to come with me. We could not agree.”
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Burr’s friend Commodore Thomas Truxtun verified this rapport in nonpolitical matters: “I always observed in both a disposition when together to make time agreeable…at the houses of each other and of friends.”
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Burr and Hamilton supped at each other’s homes, and Burr’s wife, Theodosia, visited Eliza. In 1786, the two men helped to finance the Erasmus Hall Academy in Flatbush, the forerunner of Erasmus Hall High School, today the oldest secondary school in New York State.

Many weird coincidences stamped the lives of Hamilton and Burr, yet their origins were quite dissimilar. Burr embodied the old aristocracy, such as it then existed in America, and Hamilton the new meritocracy. Born on February 6, 1756, one year after Hamilton, Burr boasted an illustrious lineage. His maternal grandfather was Jonathan Edwards, the esteemed Calvinist theologian and New England’s foremost cleric. Edwards’s third daughter, Esther, married the Reverend Aaron Burr, a classical scholar and theologian who became president of Princeton.

The infant Burr was born into the most secure and privileged of childhoods, yet it was steeped in horror. At the time of Burr’s birth, the college was moving from Newark to Princeton, and in late 1756 the family took up residence in the new president’s house. Then came a nightmarish chain of events. In September 1757, Aaron Burr, Sr., died at forty-two and was replaced five months later as president by his father-in-law, Jonathan Edwards. Soon after arriving, Edwards was greeted with the news that his own father, a Connecticut clergyman, had died. Princeton had recently been struck by smallpox, which Edwards promptly contracted by inoculation, dying two weeks after settling in. Then Burr’s mother, Esther, came down with smallpox and died two weeks after her father. Dr. William Shippen took Burr and his orphaned sister into his Philadelphia home. When Grandmother Edwards came to reclaim the children, she contracted virulent dysentery and died shortly afterward. Thus, by October 1758, two-year-old Aaron Burr had already lost a mother, a father, a grandfather, a grandmother, and a great-grandfather. Though he lacked any memory of these gruesome events, Burr was even more emphatically orphaned than Hamilton.

Raised in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and Elizabethtown, New Jersey, by his uncle, the Reverend Timothy Edwards, Burr attended the same Presbyterian academy that later educated Hamilton. Entering Princeton at thirteen, he developed into a first-rate scholar and delivered a commencement speech entitled “Building Castles in the Air,” in which he declaimed against frittering away energy on idle dreams. Burr studied law with his brother-in-law, the Connecticut jurist Tapping Reeve, then fought courageously in the Revolution.

Like Hamilton, the impeccably tailored Burr made an elegant impression, with his lustrous dark eyes, full lips, and boldly arched eyebrows. He was witty, urbane, and unflappable and had a mesmerizing effect on men and women alike. Despite his later courtship of the Jeffersonians, Burr never shed a certain patrician hauteur, epicurean tastes, and a faint disdain for moneymaking activities. He believed that through self-control he could learn to control others. With his impervious aplomb, he was a better listener than talker. Hamilton was easy to ruffle, whereas Burr hid his feelings behind an enigmatic facade. When faced with confessions of wrongdoing, Burr said coolly, “No apologies or explanations. I hate them.”
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Unlike Hamilton, he could store up silent grievances over extended periods.

Throughout his career, Hamilton was outspoken to a fault, while Burr was a man of ingrained secrecy. He gloried in his sphinxlike reputation and once described himself thus in the third person: “He is a grave, silent, strange sort of animal, inasmuch that we know not what to make of him.”
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As a politician, Burr usually spoke to one person at a time and then in confidence. Starting in college, he wrote coded letters to his sister and classmates and never entirely discarded the self-protective habit. Nor did he commit ideas to paper. Senator William Plumer remarked, “Burr’s habits have been never to trust himself on paper, if he could avoid it, and when he wrote, it was with great caution.”
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As Burr once warned his law clerk, “Things written remain.”
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This caution reflected Burr’s principal quality as a politician: he was a chameleon who evaded clear-cut positions on most issues and was a genius at studied ambiguity. In his wickedly mordant world, everything was reduced to clever small talk, and he enjoyed saying funny, shocking things. “We die reasonably fast,” he wrote during a yellow-fever outbreak in New York. “But then Mrs. Smith had twins this morning, so the account is even.”
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By contrast, Hamilton’s writings are so earnest that one yearns for some frivolous chatter to lighten the mood.

It is puzzling that Aaron Burr is sometimes classified among the founding fathers. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin, and Hamilton all left behind papers that run to dozens of thick volumes, packed with profound ruminations. They fought for high ideals. By contrast, Burr’s editors have been able to eke out just two volumes of his letters, many full of gossip, tittle-tattle, hilarious anecdotes, and racy asides about his sexual escapades. He produced no major papers on policy matters, constitutional issues, or government institutions. Where Hamilton was often more interested in policy than politics, Burr seemed interested
only
in politics. At a time of tremendous ideological cleavages, Burr was an agile opportunist who maneuvered for advantage among colleagues of fixed political views. Hamilton asked rhetorically about Burr, “Is it a recommendation to have
no theory
? Can that man be a systematic or able statesman who has none? I believe not.”
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In a still more severe indictment, Hamilton said of Burr, “In civil life, he has never projected nor aided in producing a single measure of important public utility.”
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Burr’s failure to make any notable contribution in public policy is mystifying for such a bright, literate man. He was an omnivorous reader. The records of the New York Society Library show that in 1790 Burr read nine consecutive volumes of Voltaire. He then spent a year and a half poring over all forty-four volumes of
Modern Universal History.
How many men at the time both read and ardently recommended Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist tract,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
? “Be assured,” he told his educated wife, Theodosia, “that your sex has in
her
an able advocate. It is, in my opinion, a work of genius.”
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Yet this same Burr could take cruel swipes at his wife, responding to one of her letters with the acid remark that her note had been “truly one of the most stupid I had ever the honour to receive from you.”
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If not a deep thinker as a politician, Burr was a proficient lawyer who vied with Hamilton for standing at the New York bar. He knew that Hamilton was the better orator, despite his sometimes windy bombast. He also said that anyone who tried to compete with Hamilton on paper was lost.
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Nevertheless, some of Burr’s associates thought he was the superior lawyer, a man who went straight to the nub of the matter. “As a lawyer and as a scholar Burr was not inferior to Hamilton,” insisted General Erastus Root. “His reasoning powers were at least equal. Their
modes
of argument were very different…. I used to say of them, when they were rivals at the bar, that Burr would say as much in half an hour as Hamilton in two hours. Burr was terse and convincing, while Hamilton was flowing and rapturous.”
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Hamilton smothered opponents with arguments, while Burr resorted to cunning ruses and unexpected tricks to carry the day.

Though Hamilton appreciated that Burr could be resourceful in court, he found something empty beneath the surface. “It is certain that at the bar he is more remarkable for ingenuity and dexterity than for sound judgment or good logic,” he said.
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On another occasion, Hamilton elaborated on this critique: “His arguments at the bar were concise. His address was pleasing, his manners were more—they were fascinating. When I analyzed his arguments, I could never discern in what his greatness consisted.”
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Hamilton venerated the law, while Burr often seemed mildly bored and cynical about it. “The law is whatever is successfully argued and plausibly maintained,” he stated.
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That the competition between Hamilton and Burr originated in their early days in legal practice is confirmed by a tale told by James Parton, an early Burr biographer. The first time that the two men jointly defended a client, the question came up as to who would speak first and who would sum up. Protocol stipulated that the lead attorney would do the summation, and Hamilton wished to be the one. Burr was so offended by this patent vanity that in his opening speech he tried to anticipate all the points that Hamilton would likely make. Apparently, he was so effective at this that Hamilton, embarrassed, had nothing to say at the end. If the story is true, it was one of the few times that Alexander Hamilton was ever left speechless.
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As a New York lawyer, Hamilton was well positioned to help the country negotiate the passage from the rosy flush of revolution to the sober rule of law. The management of the peace, he knew, would be no less perilous a task than the conduct of the war. Could the fractious tendencies engendered by years of fighting be channeled in constructive directions? The Revolution had unified sharply disparate groups. Without the bonds of wartime comradeship, would the divisive pulls of class, region, and ideology tear the new country apart?

These questions took on special urgency in New York, the former citadel of the British Army. Even before the war, the enthusiasm for revolution had often seemed more tepid in New York than elsewhere, and the state had been occupied by British forces longer than any other. Hamilton knew that many New Yorkers had been fence-sitters or outright Tories during the war and regretted to see the British depart. To Robert Morris, Hamilton surmised of New Yorkers that at the war’s outbreak “near one half of them were avowedly more attached to Great Britain than to their liberty…. [T]here still remains I dare say a third whose secret wishes are on the side of the enemy.”
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Many patriots found it hard to sympathize with the Loyalists, who were often well-to-do Anglican merchants and members of the old social elite. To aggravate matters, New York City had witnessed many British atrocities. Hordes of American soldiers had been incarcerated aboard lice-ridden British prison ships anchored in the East River. A staggering eleven thousand patriots had perished aboard these ships from filth, disease, malnutrition, and savage mistreatment. For many years, bones of the dead washed up on shore. How could New Yorkers forgive such unspeakable deeds? During Hamilton’s tour of the city in August 1783, street-corner scuffles were already commonplace as returning veterans demanded back rent or damage awards from residents who had occupied their properties during the war. For many patriots, the Tories were traitors, pure and simple, and they would fight anyone who sought to stop them from exacting revenge.

Alexander Hamilton became that brave, unfortunate target. His motives for such martyrdom have long stirred debate. Cynics scoffed that he had acquired a long list of rich Loyalist clients and peddled his soul for British gold. Another theory portrayed him as the pawn of patriotic landowners, who dreaded an upsurge of postwar radicalism and wanted to make common cause with conservative Tories. After all, if the patriots could pounce on Tory estates, might not their own fiefdoms be next? Many Hudson River grandees had enjoyed social and business contacts with wealthy Loyalists before the war and viewed them as potential allies in the postwar era. And Hamilton did indeed later forge an alliance of progressive landowners and former Tories into the nucleus of the Federalist party in New York.