Founding Brothers: Chapter One

Although he slept that night on his couch and in his clothes, the vice president of the United States was a lifelong disciple of Lord Chesterfield’s maxim that a gentleman was free to do anything he pleased as long as he did it with style.

His grandfather, the great theologian Jonathan Edwards, had once said that we were all depraved creatures, mere spiders hanging precariously over a never-ending fire.

But Burr’s entire life had been a sermon on the capacity of the sagacious spider to lift himself out of hellish difficulties and spin webs that trapped others.

No one can be sure what was in Burr’s mind as a single oarsman rowed him and William Van Ness, his devoted disciple and protégé, toward the New Jersey Palisades on the other side, but the judgment of posterity would be that Burr had finally trapped Hamilton in his diabolical web, and he was now moving in for the kill.

Like Burr, Hamilton was properly attired and also carried himself with a similar air of gentlemanly diffidence.

Whether he was leading an infantry assault against an entrenched British strong point at Yorktown—first over the parapet in a desperate bayonet charge—or imposing his own visionary fiscal program for the new nation on a reluctant federal government, Hamilton tended to regard worldly problems as personal challenges, and therefore as fixed objects against which he could perform his own isometric exercises, which usually took the form of ostentatious acts of gallantry.

So there you have it: Hamilton safely buried and assuming legendary proportions as a martyr; Burr slipping out of town, eventually headed toward bizarre adventures in the American West, but already consigned to political oblivion.

But Pendleton’s attention had been fixed on his own chief and he apparently had lacked the wherewithal to say anything in this drawn-out moment of the drama.

The somewhat longer answer is that the exchange of words that preceded the exchange of shots was itself merely a culmination of long-standing personal animosity and political disagreement that emerged naturally, in retrospect almost inevitably, out of the supercharged political culture of the early republic.

On June 18, 1804, he called Hamilton’s attention to a letter published almost two months earlier in the Albany Register in which the author, Dr. Charles Cooper, recalled a harangue Hamilton had delivered against Burr the preceding February.

Therefore, all Hamilton had to do at this propitious moment was deny having said anything that could possibly fit that description, then express his personal regret that such slanderous insinuations had been attributed to him in the press.

He could not, he explained, “without manifest impropriety, make the avowal or disavowal you seem to think necessary.”

After delivering a brief lecture on the vagaries of grammar and syntax, calculated to irritate Burr, Hamilton went on the offensive.

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.

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.

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.

Strictly speaking, Hamilton’s concession should have been the end of it.

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.”

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.

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.

“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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The problem with Hamilton’s distinction, however, was that the putative barrier between personal and political criticism, or private and public behavior, kept getting overwhelmed by real choices.