Joseph J. Ellis (8 page)

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.

Did Burr fit the role? Put differently, were Hamilton’s accusations of Burr true? It is an intriguing question, and given Burr’s matchless skill at concealing his motives, covering his tracks, and destroying much of his private correspondence, unambiguous answers are not a realistic prospect. The recurrent pattern in Burr’s political behavior that caught Hamilton’s eye, however, made him eminently vulnerable to the Catiline charge. Whether in the labyrinthine politics of New York or the emerging party wars between Federalists and Republicans at the national level, Burr possessed an absolute genius at positioning himself amid competing factions so as to make himself readily available to the side most desperate for his services.

The presidential election of 1800 is the most politically significant and most illustrative example of the pattern: Burr allowed the voting between him and Jefferson to go on for thirty-six ballots in the House of Representatives without ever indicating his principled recognition that the mass of the electorate had clearly intended to designate Jefferson as president. In his own defense, Burr might have pointed out that he never actively sought Federalist support. But he never repudiated it either. His enigmatic silence, however, unquestionably had mischievous consequences, for it prolonged the scheming in the House and, somewhat ironically, convinced Jefferson that Burr could never be trusted.
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His knack for injecting himself into the cracks between warring political factions might have been interpreted as a sign of his independence. Like Washington, so his defenders might have argued, Burr refused to place his own political convictions at the service of any party. But while Washington attempted to transcend the ideological wars of the 1790s, Burr seemed disposed to tunnel beneath the warring camps, then pop up on the side promising him the bigger tribute. If Washington was the epitome of the virtuous leader who subordinated personal interest to the public good, Burr was a kind of anti-Washington, who manipulated the public interest for his own inscrutable purposes.
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At least so it appeared to Hamilton. As if to demonstrate that his questionable behavior in the presidential crisis of 1801 was no aberration, Burr repeated the pattern in 1804 during the campaign for governor
of New York. Although still serving as vice president under Jefferson, Burr realized that the Republicans intended to drop him from the ticket when Jefferson ran for his second term. And so when Federalist leaders from New York approached him as a prospective candidate for the gubernatorial race, he indicated a willingness to switch party affiliations and run in his home state as a Federalist. This was the decision that caused Hamilton to repeat his earlier characterizations of Burr as the unprincipled American Catiline, which in turn generated the newspaper reports containing the offensive word “despicable.”

But that was only half the story. For the Federalist leaders in New England were interested in recruiting Burr as part of a larger scheme that aimed at nothing less than the dismemberment of the American republic. (This was really what Henry Adams was referring to by the phrase “the most dramatic moment in the early politics of the Union.”) Their plan envisioned the secession of New England in the wake of Jefferson’s reelection and the simultaneous capture of New York, which would then join the secessionist movement to create a Federalist-controlled confederacy of northern states. Burr, true to form, refused to make any promises to deliver New York to the secessionists, but he also would not repudiate the conspiracy.
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Hamilton was aware of the Federalist plot, which was no half-baked scheme hatched by marginal figures, involving as it did several Federalist senators from New England and Timothy Pickering, the former secretary of state. “I will here express but one sentiment,” Hamilton warned his Federalist colleagues, “which is, the Dismemberment of our Empire will be a clear sacrifice … without any counterballancing good.” When apprised that the leading New England Federalists were waiting to hear that their old chief was committed to the secessionist plot, Hamilton made clear his opposition: “Tell them from ME, at MY request, for God’s sake, to cease these conversations and threatenings about a separation of the Union. It must hang together as long as it can be made to.” The last letter that Hamilton ever wrote, composed the night before the duel, was devoted to squelching the still-lingering Federalist fantasies of a separate northeastern confederation, a dream that refused to die until the moribund effort at the Hartford Convention in 1815 exposed it as a fiasco.
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What Hamilton seemed to see in Burr, then, was a man very much like himself in several respects: ambitious, energetic, possessing an
instinctive strategic antenna and a willingness to take political risks. Hamilton understood the potency of Burr’s influence because he felt those same personal qualities throbbing away inside himself. Both men also shared a keen sense of the highly fluid and still-fragile character of the recently launched American republic. The hyperbolic tone of Hamilton’s anti-Burr comments derived not so much from intense personal dislike
per se
as from his intense fear that the precarious condition of the infant nation rendered it so vulnerable to Burr’s considerable talents. Burr embodied Hamilton’s daring and energy run amok in a political culture still groping for its stable shape.

The kernel of truth in Hamilton’s distinction between personal and political criticism of Burr resides here. In a sense it was an accurate statement of Hamilton’s assessment. Burr’s reputation as a notorious womanizer or as a lavish spender who always managed to stay one step ahead of his creditors did not trouble Hamilton. What did worry him to no end was the ominous fit between Burr’s political skills and the opportunities for mischief so clearly available in a nation whose laws and institutions were still congealing.
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