Alexander Hamilton (142 page)

Once a duel was agreed upon, Hamilton had to reconcile the two glaringly incompatible elements of the situation: his need to fight to preserve his political prestige and his equally powerful need to remain true to his avowed opposition to dueling. He opted for a solution chosen by honorable duelists before him: he would throw away his fire—that is, purposely miss his opponent. This was the strategy Hamilton’s son Philip had disastrously followed in his duel. It was likely Hamilton himself, writing in the
New-York Evening Post,
who gave this description of Philip’s approach: “[A]verse in principle to the shedding of blood in private combat, anxious to repair his original fault, as far as he was able without dishonor, and to stand acquitted to his own mind, [he] came to the determination to reserve his fire, receive that of his antagonist, and then discharge his pistol in the air.”
⁴⁴
Only after Philip threw his fire away was his second supposed to announce his reason for doing so and try to resolve the dispute.

Aside from Pendleton, Hamilton confided his plan to waste his shot to Rufus King, the former minister to Great Britain and “a very moderate and judicious friend,” who tried several times to talk him out of it.
⁴⁵
King found dueling abhorrent but told Hamilton that “he owed [it] to his family and the rights of self-defence to fire at his antagonist.”
⁴⁶
King sneaked out of town the morning of the encounter, leading to criticism that he had acted cravenly when he could have headed off the catastrophe. King said that even though Hamilton had the “most capacious and discriminating” mind he had ever known, he rigidly followed the rules known as the “code duello.”
⁴⁷
Pendleton was likewise horrified at Hamilton’s decision to throw away his shot and exhorted him not to “decide lightly, but take time to deliberate fully.”
⁴⁸
Hamilton would not listen. As so often in his career—the Reynolds and Adams pamphlets spring to mind—he became possessed by a notion and would not let it go. In this frame of mind and in spite of his son’s experience, he was impervious to reason.

Hamilton’s decision has given rise to speculation that he was severely depressed and that the duel was suicidal. Henry Adams phrased it, “Instead of killing Burr, [Hamilton] invited Burr to kill him.”
⁴⁹
Historian Douglas Adair has evoked a guilt-ridden Hamilton who planned to atone for his sins by exposing himself to Burr’s murderous gunfire. In 1978, four psychobiographers studied the duel and also concluded that it was a disguised suicide.

It is indisputable that in Hamilton’s final years he was seriously depressed by personal and political setbacks, and his judgment was often spectacularly faulty. Long beguiled by visions of a glorious death in battle, he had also never lost a certain youthful ardor for martyrdom. Yet in the duel with Burr, he obeyed the antique logic of affairs of honor. Because he followed a script lost to later generations, his actions seem lunatic rather than merely rash and wrongheaded. “He did not think of this course of action as suicidal,” Joseph Ellis has written, “but as another gallant gamble of the sort he was accustomed to winning.”
⁵⁰
While the duel shocked many contemporaries, Hamilton and Burr partisans understood its logic, even if they did not endorse it. Attorney David B. Ogden said that his friend Hamilton knew that if he did not duel, “it would in a great measure deprive him of the power of being hereafter useful to his country.”
⁵¹
Likewise, William P. Van Ness said that Burr had to defend his honor, for if he “tamely sat down in silence and dropped the affair, what must have been the feelings of his friends?”
⁵²

Hamilton gambled that Burr would not shoot to kill. He knew that Burr had nothing to gain by murdering him. Burr would be denounced from every pulpit as an assassin, and it would destroy the remnants of his career. Since he had provoked the duel to rehabilitate his career, it did not make sense for him to kill Hamilton. Hamilton calculated (correctly, it turned out) that Burr could not kill him without committing political suicide at the same time. This did not rule out the possibility, of course, that Burr might kill him accidentally or that he might submit to a murderous rage that overrode his political interests. If Burr did kill him, Hamilton knew, he would at least have the posthumous satisfaction of destroying Burr’s alliance with the Federalists. On the other hand, Hamilton never wavered in his belief that if he did not face Burr’s fire, he would lose standing in the political circles that mattered to him. With an exalted sense of his place in history, he viewed himself as a potential savior of the republic. He once told a friend, “Perhaps my sensibility is the effect of an exaggerated estimate of my services to the U[nited] States, but on such a subject every man will judge for himself.”
⁵³

The antagonists approached their rendezvous in starkly different personal situations. Hamilton had a large family of dependents: Eliza and seven children ranging in age from two to nearly twenty. Some observers criticized Hamilton for having recklessly jeopardized his family to salvage his reputation. Burr, by contrast, was a widower with a daughter, Theodosia, who had married into the wealthy Alston family of South Carolina; he did not need to worry about the financial aftermath of his death.

Deeply conflicted about the duel, Hamilton displayed a fatalistic passivity. When King told Hamilton that Burr undoubtedly meant to murder him and that Hamilton should prepare as best he could, Hamilton replied that he could not bear the thought of taking another human life, to which King retorted, “Then, sir, you will go like a lamb to be slaughtered.”
⁵⁴
The day before the duel, Pendleton begged Hamilton to study the pistols and handed him one. “He quickly raised it to a line,” said Robert Troup, “but, dropping his arms as quickly, he returned the pistol to Pendleton and this constituted the whole of his preparation to fight an antagonist very adroit in firing with pistols. I verily believe that Hamilton had not fired a pistol since the termination of the revolutionary war.”
⁵⁵

Quite different was the diligent preparation of Aaron Burr, a superb marksman who had killed several enemy soldiers during the Revolution. After the duel with Hamilton, the press was awash with rumors that Burr had engaged in intensive target practice. One Federalist paper quoted a Burr friend as admitting “that for three months past, he had been in the constant habit of practicing with pistols.”
⁵⁶
The Reverend John M. Mason insisted that “Burr went out determined to kill” Hamilton and for a long time had been “qualifying himself to become a ‘
dead shot.
’”
⁵⁷
John Barker Church later said that he had reason to believe that Burr “had been for some time practising with his pistols for this purpose.”
⁵⁸
Burr’s friend Charles Biddle disputed this, saying that Burr “had no occasion to practice, for perhaps there was hardly ever a man could fire so true and no man possessed more coolness or courage.”
⁵⁹
So commonplace was the accusation that Burr had taken repeated target practice that it is probably more than mere Federalist mythology. George W. Strong, Eliza’s lawyer in later years, visited Burr’s home right before the duel. “He went out once to Burr’s place at Richmond Hill on business,” recalled his son, John Strong, “and there he saw the board set up and perforated with pistol balls, where the infernal, cold-blooded scoundrel had been practicing.”
⁶⁰

At least outwardly, Hamilton and Burr continued to mingle in New York society, pretending that nothing was amiss. Charles Biddle told of an acquaintance who “dined in company with Hamilton and Burr the week before the duel. He has since told me he had not the most distant idea of there being any difference between them.”
⁶¹
Their final encounter before the duel occurred on the Fourth of July. Since Washington’s death, Hamilton had been president general of the Society of the Cincinnati, the order of retired Revolutionay War officers that had aroused suspicions of hereditary rule. Hamilton could not skip the group’s festivities without drawing notice, and he and Burr shared a banquet table at Fraunces Tavern. The year before, Burr had joined the society when courting the Federalist vote.

Burr sat morose and taciturn among the other members, averting his eyes from Hamilton. As John Trumbull recalled, “The singularity of their manner was observed by all, but few had any suspicions of the cause. Burr, contrary to his wont, was silent, gloomy, sour, while Hamilton entered with glee into the gaiety of a convivial party.”
⁶²
At first, Hamilton could not be induced to sing, then submitted. “Well, you shall have it,” he said, doubtless to cheers from the veterans.
⁶³
Some have said his valedictory song was a haunting old military ballad called “How Stands the Glass Around,” a song reputedly sung by General Wolfe on the eve of his battlefield death outside Quebec in 1759. Others said that it was a soldiers’ drinking song called “The Drum.” Both tunes expressed a common sentiment: a soldier’s proud resignation in the face of war and death. One version of the evening has Hamilton standing on a table, lustily belting out his ballad. As he delivered this rendition, Burr is said to have raised his eyes and watched his foe with fixed attention.

During this strange period of concealment, Hamilton continued to perform his fatherly duties. His son James, now a student at Columbia College, asked him to review a speech he had written. James was mystified by his father’s response and only later understood its import. “My dear James,” Hamilton began, “I have prepared for you a thesis on discretion.
You may need it.
God Bless you. Your affectionate father. A.H.”
⁶⁴
In retrospect, this homily sounds like the confessions of a man who had never learned to be discreet himself. Hamilton told his son: “A prudent silence will frequently be taken for wisdom and a sentence or two cautiously thrown in will sometimes gain the palm of knowledge, while a man well informed but indiscreet and unreserved will not uncommonly talk himself out of all consideration and weight.” Someone without discretion, Hamilton added, was apt to have “numerous enemies and is occasionally involved by it in the most [difficul]ties and dangers.”
⁶⁵
Did Hamilton here give vent to tacit regret for the loose language he had employed toward Burr?

By the spring of 1804, Alexander and Eliza had completed their retreat, the Grange, and begun entertaining on a grander scale. In May, they had hosted a dinner for Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoleon’s youngest brother, who had just married Elizabeth Patterson of Baltimore. Then, in the week preceding the duel, Hamilton invited seventy people to the Grange for a lavish ball that included John Trumbull, Robert Troup, Nicholas Fish, and William Short, Jefferson’s onetime secretary in Paris. Hamilton was fascinated by the French
fête champêtre,
the elegant alfresco parties held in wooded surroundings, favored by the French aristocracy. In the woods, Hamilton had planted a small cluster of unseen musicians, so that guests caught faint strains of a horn and clarinet as they strolled. John Church Hamilton left a sketch of his father at this dinner that conveys his social magnetism:

Never was the fascination of his manner more remarked, gay and grave as was the chanced topic…. Never did he exhibit more the safe softness with the man of society. Eloquent feelings, sportive genius, graceful narrative—all spoke the charm of a generous, rich, and highly cultivated nature. Even at this time, amid the brilliant circle, he brought forward the son of a deceased friend, commended him to the attention of an influential friend, then took him aside and conferred with him as to his plans for the future. This was one of the last sunny days of Hamilton’s short life.
⁶⁶

Hamilton devoted considerable time to arranging his affairs and drawing up farewell letters. The solemnity with which he performed these duties seems to bespeak some premonition that he might die. On July 1, he drew up a statement of assets and liabilities that showed him with a comfortable net worth. Yet he acknowledged that, if death prompted a forced sale of his property, the proceeds might not suffice for his fifty-five thousand dollars in debt. Most of the money had been spent on the Grange, so he needed to defend this splurge: “To men who have been so much harassed in the busy world as myself, it is natural to look forward to a comfortable retirement in the sequel of life as a principal desideratum. This desire I have felt in the strongest manner and to prepare for it has latterly been a favourite object.”
⁶⁷
Hamilton had expected to retire his debts with his twelve thousand dollars in annual income. Now he had to reckon on the chance that Eliza might be deprived of this money. Trying to console himself, he computed that Eliza stood to inherit some money from her recently deceased mother, and “her father is understood to possess a large estate.”
⁶⁸
He further noted that the Grange, “by the progressive rise of property on this island and the felicity of its situation,” would “become more and more valuable.”
⁶⁹
Unfortunately, Hamilton’s estimates were to prove grossly optimistic, so that the man who had so ably managed the nation’s finances left his own family oppressed with debts.

Aware of the duel’s political dimensions, Hamilton labored over a statement that would justify his conduct to the public. He admitted that he might have injured Burr, even though he had spoken only the truth. As a result, he wrote, he planned “to
reserve
and
throw away
my first fire and I
have thoughts
even of
reserving
my second fire and thus giving a double opportunity to Col Burr to pause and to reflect.”
⁷⁰
The wording here is significant. Hamilton assumed that Burr would have two such opportunities. Thus, Hamilton would have to signal to Burr his intention to waste his shot. He could either, as Philip had, fail to lift his pistol, or fire first and very wide of the mark.