Founding Brothers (6 page)

All of which
suggests that the impending duel with Burr was prompting some second thoughts
on Hamilton’s part about the sheer intensity of his past political
disagreements, as well as about his own periodic lack of discretion in these
highly personalized debates. Those predisposed to detect hints of suicidal
intentions during Hamilton’s last days might wish to speculate at great
length on such tidbits. The main outline of the visible and available evidence,
however, reveals a man questioning his own characteristic excesses, which had
somehow put him on a course that led to the current impasse. Hamilton did not
believe that in going to Weehawken to meet Burr he was most probably going to
meet his Maker. But the looming threat of possible injury and perhaps even
death did tend to focus his mind on the downside of his swashbuckling style. He
was less suicidal than regretful, less fatalistic than meditative.

The
regrets and meditations, however, did not spread as far as Aaron Burr. The
evidence here does not require inspired conjecture or nuanced analysis.
Hamilton wrote out his “Statement on the Impending Duel” to answer
those critics who wondered how a statesman of his maturity and distinction
could allow himself to be goaded into a juvenile exchange of shots at ten
paces. “There were intrinsick difficulties in the thing,” Hamilton
explained in his statement, rooted in the reality “not to be denied, that
my animadversions on the political principles, character and views of Col
Burr” had been extremely severe, “to include very unfavourable
criticisms on particular instances of the private conduct of the
Gentleman.” In other words, Burr’s allegation that Hamilton had
made a practice of vilifying him for many years was essentially correct. For
that reason, “the disavowal required of me by Col Burr, in a general and
indefinite form, was out of my power.” He could not apologize without
lying. What ultimately blocked any prospect of an apology or retraction was
Hamilton’s abiding conviction that his libels of Burr were all true:
“I have not censured him on light grounds,” Hamilton concluded,
“or from unworthy inducements. I certainly have had strong reasons for
what I may have said.”
²⁹

The answer,
then, to the salient question—What were these two prominent American
statesmen doing on that ledge beneath the plains of Weehawken?—is
reasonably clear. Burr was there because Hamilton had been libeling him
throughout their crisscrossing careers in public life. Despite earlier promises
to cease this practice, Hamilton had persisted. Burr’s patience had
simply worn out.

Hamilton was there because he could not honestly deny
Burr’s charges, which he sincerely believed captured the essence of the
man’s character. What’s more, Hamilton also believed, as he put it,
that his own “ability to be in future useful, whether in resisting
mischief or effecting good, in those crises of public affairs, which seem
likely to happen, would probably be inseparable from a conformity with public
prejudice in this particular.” In other words, if he did not answer
Burr’s challenge, he would be repudiating his well-known convictions, and
in so doing, he would lose the respect of those political colleagues on whom
his reputation depended. This would be tantamount to retiring from public life.
And he was not prepared to do that. If Burr went to Weehawken out of
frustration, Hamilton went out of a combination of ambition and
insecurity.
³⁰

W
HAT DID IT
mean? For those at the time
it meant that Hamilton became a martyr to the dying cause of Federalism and
Burr became the most despised national leader since Benedict Arnold. Indeed,
less than a year after the duel, Burr made secret contact with British
officials for the purpose of seizing some substantial portion of the
trans-Mississippi territory and placing it under British control, presumably
with Burr himself as governor. Perhaps Burr reasoned that, since he was being
treated as a new Benedict Arnold, he might as well enjoy the fruits of a
similar treason.
³¹

Meanwhile, clergymen, college presidents, and other self-appointed
spokesmen for communal standards of morality seized upon the Burr-Hamilton
encounter to launch a crusade against dueling throughout most of the northern
states. What had once seemed an honorable if illegal contest of wills, bathed
in a mist of aristocratic glamour and clad in the armor of medieval chivalry,
came to be regarded as a pathological ritual in which self-proclaimed gentlemen
shot each other in juvenile displays of their mutual insecurity. Though the
practice of dueling survived in the South, and in its more democratic
blaze-away version on the frontier of the West, the stigma associated with the
Burr-Hamilton duel put the
code duello
on the defensive as a national
institution. Not that it would ever die out completely, drawing as it did on
irrational urges whose potency defies civilized sanctions, always flourishing
in border regions, criminal underworlds, and ghetto communities where the
authority of the law lacks credibility. Nevertheless, the Burr-Hamilton duel
helped turn the tide against the practice of dueling by providing a focal point
for its critics and serving as a dramatic object lesson of its self-destructive
character. One of the reasons the Burr-Hamilton duel became legendary as the
most famous duel in American history is its cautionary role as the most
memorable example of how not to do it.
³²

The chief
reason, however, for its legendary status, and the main reason why we can call
it “The Duel” without much fear of being misunderstood, is the
relative prominence of the two participants. Burr was the second-ranking
official in the federal government. Hamilton was, after George Washington, the
most powerful figure in the Federalist party and, his advocates would have
added, the intellectual wellspring for all the political energy that Washington
merely symbolized. Their fatal encounter represented a momentary breakdown in
the dominant pattern of nonviolent conflict within the American revolutionary
generation.

In the wake of other national movements—the French,
Russian, and Chinese revolutions, as well as the multiple movements for
national independence in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—the leadership
class of the successful revolution proceeded to decimate itself in bloody
reprisals that frequently assumed genocidal proportions. But the conflict
within the American revolutionary generation remained a passionate yet
bloodless affair in which the energies released by national independence did
not devour its own children. The Burr-Hamilton duel represented the singular
exception to this rule. Perhaps this is what Henry Adams had in mind when, in
his inimitable style, he described the moment at Weehawken with its
“accessories of summer-morning sunlight on rocky and wooded heights,
tranquil river, and distant sky, and behind [it] all … moral gloom,
double treason, and political despair,” calling it “the most
dramatic moment in the early politics of the Union.”
³³

What made it
truly dramatic, in the Henry Adams sense, was not the sad consequences of a
merely personal feud, but, rather, the underlying values of the political
culture that made the encounter simultaneously so poignant and so symbolic. The
full meaning of the duel, in other words, cannot be captured without recovering
those long-lost values of the early American republic, which shaped the way
Burr and Hamilton so mistrusted and even hated each other. More was at stake,
much more, than the throbbing egos of two ambitious statesmen vying for
personal honor. Hamilton believed—and he had a good deal of evidence to
support his belief—that the very survival of the infant American nation
was at stake. Understanding why he entertained such hyperbolic thoughts is the
key to the core meaning of the duel.

When Burr first demanded an
apology, Hamilton refused to comply, complaining that he could not possibly be
expected to recall all his remarks about Burr over a fifteen-year period of
interaction. Actually, Burr and Hamilton had known each other almost twice that
long, from their youthful days as officers in the Continental Army. But
Hamilton’s reference to “fifteen years” turned out to be a
precise estimate of their history as political antagonists. The hostility began
in 1789, when Burr accepted the office of attorney general in New York from
Governor George Clinton after campaigning for Hamilton’s candidate, who
lost. Burr’s facile shift in his allegiance, the first in what would be
several similarly agile switches during his career, captured Hamilton’s
attention and produced his first recorded anti-Burr remarks, questioning
Burr’s lack of political principle.

If the first crack appeared
in 1789, the real break occurred two years later. In 1791 Burr defeated Philip
Schuyler, Hamilton’s wealthy father-in-law, in the race for the United
States Senate, when several rival factions within the clannish, even
quasi-feudal, politics of New York united to unseat the incumbent, who was
generally perceived as a Hamilton supporter. It was all downhill from there.
Burr used his perch in the Senate to oppose Hamilton’s fiscal program,
then to decide a disputed (and probably rigged) gubernatorial election in New
York against Hamilton’s candidate. Hamilton, in turn, opposed
Burr’s candidacy for the vice presidency in 1792 and two years later
blocked his nomination as American minister to France. The most dramatic clash
came in 1800, when Burr ran alongside Jefferson in the presidential
election—his reward for delivering the bulk of New York’s electoral
votes, which made Jefferson’s victory possible. The election was thrown
into the House of Representatives because of the quirk in the electoral
college—subsequently corrected by the Twelfth Amendment—which gave
Burr and Jefferson the same number of votes without specifying which candidate
headed the ticket. Hamilton lobbied his Federalist colleagues in the House to
support Jefferson over Burr for the presidency, a decision that probably had a
decisive effect on the eventual outcome. Finally, in 1804, in the campaign for
governor of New York, which actually produced the remarks Burr cited in his
challenge, Hamilton opposed Burr’s candidacy for an office he was
probably not going to win anyway.
³⁴

This brief
review of the Burr-Hamilton rivalry provides a helpful sense of context, but to
fully appreciate Burr’s eventual charges, and Hamilton’s private
acknowledgment that they were justified, one needs to know, specifically, what
Hamilton said about Burr. Throughout this same period, Hamilton made a host of
political enemies about whom he had extremely critical things to say (and vice
versa). Indeed, Jefferson, rather than Burr, was Hamilton’s chief
political enemy, followed closely behind by Adams. This made logical as well as
political sense, since Jefferson was the titular leader of the Republican
opposition and Adams was the leader of the moderate wing of the Federalists, a
group that found Hamilton’s policies sometimes excessive and his
flamboyant style always offensive. But within this Hamiltonian rogues’
gallery, Burr was always the chief rogue, and what Hamilton said about him was
truly distinctive.

Whereas Hamilton’s central charge against
Jefferson was that he was a utopian visionary with a misguided set of political
principles, his core criticism of Burr was that he was wholly devoid of any
principles at all. Burr was “unprincipaled, both as a public and private
man,” Hamilton claimed, “a man whose only political principle is,
to mount at all events to the highest political honours of the Nation, and as
much further as circumstances will carry him.” Sporadic attacks on
Burr’s character along the same lines—“unprincipaled in
private life, desperate in his fortune,” “despotic in his ordinary
demeanor,” “beyond redemption”—are littered throughout
Hamilton’s correspondence in the 1790s, and they probably reflect a mere
fraction of his unrecorded comments to Federalist colleagues.
³⁵

The full
and better-recorded salvo came late in 1800 and early in 1801, during the
debate in the House of Representatives over the presidential deadlock between
Burr and Jefferson. Since everyone knew that Jefferson was Hamilton’s
implacable political enemy, the kind of elusive target who seemed to be put on
earth by God to subvert Hamilton’s visionary plans for a powerful federal
government, Hamilton’s strong endorsement of Jefferson as “by far
not so dangerous a man,” who possessed “solid pretensions to
character,” only served to underline his contempt for Burr. “As to
Burr there is nothing in his favour,” Hamilton observed, then went on:
“His private character is not defended by his most partial friends. He is
bankrupt beyond redemption except by the plunder of his country. His public
principles have no other spring or aim than his own aggrandizement.… If
he can he will certainly disturb our institutions to secure himself
permanent power
and with it
wealth.
He is truly the Catiline
of America.”
³⁶

This
mention of Catiline is worth a momentary pause, in part because the reference
is so unfamiliar to modern ears as to seem meaningless, and also because it was
so familiar to the leaders of the revolutionary generation as to require no
further explanation. By accusing Burr of being Catiline, Hamilton was making
the ultimate accusation, for Catiline was the treacherous and degenerate
character whose scheming nearly destroyed the Roman Republic and whose
licentious ways inspired, by their very profligacy, Cicero’s eloquent
oration on virtue, which was subsequently memorized by generations of American
schoolboys. No one in the political leadership of the early American republic
needed to be reminded who Catiline was. He was the talented but malevolent
destroyer of republican government. If each member of the revolutionary
generation harbored secret thoughts about being the modern incarnation of a
classical Greek or Roman hero—Washington was Cato or Cincinnatus, Adams
was Solon or Cicero—no one aspired to be Catiline.