Joseph J. Ellis (7 page)

Hamilton’s fate was effectively sealed once he sent this letter. Not only did he miss the opportunity to disown the offensive characterization of Burr; he raised the rhetorical stakes with his dismissive tone and gratuitously defiant counterthreat. Burr’s response was incisively curt: “having Considered it attentively,” he wrote, “I regret to find in it nothing of that sincerity and delicacy which you profess to Value.” Then he raised the verbal game to yet a higher level of insult: “I relied with unsuspecting faith that from the frankness of a Soldier and the Candor of a gentleman I might expect an ingenuous declaration.” But such expectations were obviously too much for such a duplicitous character as Hamilton, who lacked “the Spirit to Maintain or the Magnanimity to retract” his own words.
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Moreover, Hamilton’s complaint—that he could hardly be expected to remember everything he had said over “the course of a fifteen year competition”—inadvertently opened up a whole new and much larger field of conflict. In his instructions to Van Ness, who had become his designated representative in the exchange, Burr explained that the Cooper letter was merely the most recent libel against him by Hamilton. While Burr claimed that he had always restrained himself when criticized by his political enemies, “in regard of Mr. H there has been no reciprocity—for several years his name has been lent to the support
of Slanders.” Two years earlier, in fact, Burr had claimed to have confronted Hamilton with a personal complaint about incessant vilifications of his character, and Hamilton had acknowledged his indiscretion. Despite the apology and apparent promise to stop, Hamilton had then resumed his back-stabbing campaign. According to Burr, the immediate incident only proved that Hamilton’s libelous ways were incorrigible. Now, however, “these things must have an end.”
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As a result, the form of satisfaction Burr now demanded expanded beyond one single utterance reported in an Albany newspaper. Van Ness relayed the new terms on June 25, 1804: “Col: Burr required a General disavowal of any intention on the part of Genl Hamilton in his various conversations to convey impressions derogatory to the honor of M. Burr.” Burr was now demanding a general apology for all past indiscretions. He acknowledged that this represented an escalation, but given Hamilton’s arrogant evasiveness, “more will now be required than would have been asked at first.”
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By now Pendleton had entered the negotiations as Hamilton’s representative. He attempted to exercise his influence, as in fact the etiquette of the
code duello
required, to find a way out of the impasse. Under Pendleton’s prodding, Hamilton agreed to a statement disclaiming any recollection of the conversation as recounted by Cooper. That conversation, as Hamilton now remembered it, “consisted of comments on the political principles and views of Col. Bur … without reference to any instance of past conduct, or to private character.” Hamilton saw fit to repeat his main point, “that the conversation to which Doctr Cooper alluded turned wholly on political topics and did not attribute to Colo Burr, any instance of dishonorable conduct, nor relate to his private character.”
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Strictly speaking, Hamilton’s concession should have been the end of it. Affairs of honor were supposed to involve only
personal
charges. Political or ideological disagreements, no matter how deep, lay outside the field of honor on which a gentleman could demand satisfaction. Hamilton’s distinction between personal and political criticism was designed to change the dispute with Burr from an affair of honor to a political difference of opinion. Technically, given the rules of the
code duello
, Burr should have felt obliged to accept Hamilton’s explanation as the equivalent of an apology.

Except that Burr’s blood was now up. If Hamilton had presented his distinction between personal and political criticism earlier, the affair would most probably have ended before it began. Now, however, Burr would be satisfied with nothing less than a wholesale and unqualified apology for all previous remarks about his personal and political character: “No denial or declaration will be satisfactory,” Van Ness explained, “unless it be general, so as to wholly exclude the idea that rumors derogatory to Col. Burr’s honor have originated with Genl Hamilton or have been fairly inferred from anything he has said.” There must be no room in which Hamilton could maneuver; it must be a blanket apology. “A retraction or denial therefore of all such declarations or a disavowal of any intention to impeach Col Burr without reference to time and place,” Van Ness concluded, “is the only reparation that can be made.” Later on, when this part of the correspondence between the two sides was published, that eccentric Virginia statesman and veteran of multiple duels, John Randolph, observed that Hamilton came off as “a sinking fox,” while Burr was “a vigorous old hound” resolutely determined to hunt down his prey with “an undeviating pursuit … not to be eluded or baffled.”
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Just as most duels in this era did not end in death or serious injury, most negotiations over matters of honor did not end in duels. The Burr-Hamilton affair was destined to prove an exception on both counts. Once Burr extended his demands to cover their entire public careers, and then also refused to recognize the traditional distinction between personal and political criticism, Hamilton was truly trapped. Several more letters were exchanged, as Pendleton groped for an honorable exit. He protested that Burr’s terms “have greatly changed and extended the original ground of inquiry,” requiring Hamilton to assume responsibility for “any
rumours
which may be afloat … through the whole period of his acquaintance with Col Burr.” But Burr did not budge, repeating his accusation that “secret whispers traducing his fame and impeaching his honor” over more than a decade demanded an unqualified apology, and that Hamilton’s insistence on distinctions and qualifications “are proofs that he has done the injury specified.” On June 27, 1804, Burr’s patience ran out: “The length to which this correspondence has extended only tending to prove that the satisfactory redress … cannot be obtained,” Van Ness explained, “he
deems it useless to offer any proposition except the simple Message which I shall now have the honor to deliver.” It was the invitation for “the interview at Weehawken.”
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Hamilton requested a brief delay so that he could complete some pending legal business and put his personal affairs in order. Both men prepared their wills and left sufficient evidence to piece together some, albeit hazy, picture of what was on their minds. Burr wrote his beloved daughter Theodosia and her husband, extracting a promise that she would be allowed to pursue her study of Latin, Greek, and the classics. Then, in a typically bizarre act of Burrish dash, he requested that, if anything unforeseen should befall him, his daughter and son-in-law convey his respects to one of his former paramours, now a married woman living in Cuba.
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On July 4, at the annual Independence Day dinner held by the Society of the Cincinnati, Burr and Hamilton actually sat together at the same table. The artist John Trumbull, who was also present, recorded the scene: “The singularity of their manner was observed by all, but few had any suspicion of the cause. Burr contrary to his wont, was silent, gloomy, sour; while Hamilton entered with glee into the gaiety of a convivial party, and even sung an old military song.” The tune that Hamilton sang, called “General Wolfe’s Song,” was supposedly written by the great British general on the eve of his glorious death on the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec in 1759. It was, therefore, an eerily prophetic song, especially the stanza that went:

Hamilton’s last days contained several other incidents of equivalent poignancy, though they were only recognizable when viewed through the knowledge of the looming duel. On July 3, the day before the Society of the Cincinnati dinner, he had a dinner party of his own at his new country house, the Grange. The list of guests included William
Short, formerly Thomas Jefferson’s personal secretary in Paris and a lifelong Jefferson protégé. Also invited were Abigail Adams Smith and her husband, the daughter and son-in-law of John and Abigail Adams. Since Jefferson was Hamilton’s primal political enemy, and since Adams was his bitterest opponent within the Federalist party, a man whom Hamilton had publicly described as mentally deranged and unfit for the presidency, the choice of guests suggests that Hamilton was making some kind of statement about separating political and personal differences. About this same time, he drafted a “Thesis on Discretion” for his eldest surviving son. It singled out discretion as “if not a splendid … at least a very useful virtue,” then went on to offer an obviously autobiographical warning: “The greatest abilities are sometimes thrown into the shade by this defect or are prevented from obtaining the success to which they are entitled. The person on whom it is chargeable [is] also apt to make and have numerous enemies and is occasionally involved … in the most difficulties and dangers.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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