Alexander Hamilton (143 page)

In the statement, Hamilton acknowledged the grievous pain he might cause his family and even the harm he would do to his creditors. Writing for public consumption, Hamilton sounded more statesmanlike toward Burr than he probably felt. It is hard to take at face value his contention that he bore “no
ill-will
to Col Burr distinct from political opposition.”
⁷¹
He saw that while he had much to lose by refraining from the duel, he had precious little to gain by facing it: “I shall hazard much and can possibly gain nothing by the issue of the interview.”
⁷²
Why then did he fight? To maintain his sense of honor and capacity for leadership, he argued, he had to bow to the
public’s
belief in dueling: “The ability to be in future useful, whether in resisting mischief or effecting good, in those crises of our public affairs which seem likely to happen would probably be inseparable from a conformity with public prejudice in this particular.”
⁷³
In other words, he had to safeguard his career to safeguard the country. His self-interest and America’s were indistinguishable. For Burr, Hamilton’s letter reeked of sanctimony. When he later read it, he reacted with coldhearted contempt: “It reads like the confessions of a penitent monk.”
⁷⁴

FORTY-TWO

FATAL ERRAND

I
n his last days, Hamilton seemed wistful but not distraught. He seems to have made peace with his decision to duel and elected to savor his remaining hours with his family. On Sunday morning, July 8, he, Eliza, and the children wandered the shady grounds of the Grange in the morning coolness. Back at the house, encircled by his family, he “read the morning service of the Episcopal church,” recalled John Church Hamilton.
¹
Then, later in the day, “gathering around him his children under a near tree, he laid with them upon the grass until the stars shone down from the heavens.”
²

On Monday morning, July 9, Hamilton left Eliza at the Grange and rode down to lower Manhattan, where he drafted a will at his last Manhattan town house at 54 Cedar Street. He named John B. Church, Nicholas Fish, and Nathaniel Pendleton as executors. In this document, he again stated, with more hope than true conviction, that his assets would extinguish his debts: “I pray God that something may remain for the maintenance and education of my dear wife and children.”
³
As a man devoted to property rights and the sanctity of contracts, he also fretted about the fates of his creditors: “I entreat my dear children, if they or any of them shall ever be able, to make up the deficiency.”
⁴
And again he expressed the tentative hope that the Schuyler fortune would save Eliza: “Probably her own patrimonial resources will preserve her from indigence.”
⁵
That the methodical Hamilton left dangling the critical question of Eliza’s future solvency seems shockingly out of character.

More than Hamilton, Burr found waiting for the duel unbearable, telling William Van Ness that he preferred an afternoon duel and did not care to “pass over” another day of delay. “From 7 to 12 is the least pleasant [time], but anything so we
but
get on,” he moaned.
⁶
A surgeon usually attended duels, and Hamilton proposed his friend Dr. David Hosack. Burr seemed inclined to skip medical attention, appending this curious postscript to Van Ness: “H[osack] is enough and even that unnecessary.”
⁷
Does this signify that Burr planned to kill Hamilton, making a surgeon superfluous? Did he hope that, if wounded, Hamilton would simply bleed to death? Or did he think that nobody would be injured? We’ll never know. On the afternoon of July 9, Van Ness and Pendleton finalized plans for the duel, which would take place at dawn on Wednesday, July 11, across the river in Weehawken, New Jersey.

Right up until the end, Hamilton comported himself with stoic gallantry, giving no hint of what was to come. He spent the afternoon and evening of July 9 with his old Treasury protégé, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., who found Hamilton “uncommonly cheerful and gay.”
⁸
On his last workday, July 10, Hamilton ran into a family friend and client on Broadway, Dirck Ten Broeck, who reminded him that he had forgotten to deliver a promised legal opinion. Afterward, Ten Broeck reflected with astonishment on Hamilton’s reaction: “He was really ashamed of his neglect, but [said] that I must call on him the next day, Wednesday—(
the awful fatal day
)—at 10 o’clock, when he would sit down with me, lock the door, and then we would finish the business.”
⁹
This represents, again, extraordinary proof of Hamilton’s sense of responsibility. Far from being suicidal, Hamilton planned to go straight from the early-morning duel to his office to catch up on work—hardly the behavior of a depressed man meditating suicide. Nobody who saw Hamilton right before the duel reported any special symptoms of gloom.

During Hamilton’s final day at his Garden Street (today Exchange Place) law office, his clerk, Judah Hammond, observed nothing untoward in his demeanor: “General Hamilton came to my desk in the
tranquil
manner usual with him and gave me a business paper with his instructions concerning it. I saw no change in his appearance. These were his last moments in his place of business.”
¹⁰
Hamilton drafted an elaborate opinion in a legal matter. Late in the afternoon, he made a last stop on his itinerary, one that must have carried sentimental meaning. For weeks, his King’s College chum Robert Troup had lain bedridden with a grave illness that Hamilton feared might prove mortal. When he dropped by to visit Troup, Hamilton did not mention the duel and overflowed with medical suggestions. “The General’s visit lasted more than half an hour,” said Troup, “and after making particular inquiries respecting the state of my complaint, he favored me with his advice as to the course which he thought would best conduce to the reestablishment of my health. But the whole tenor of the General’s deportment during the visit manifested such composure and cheerfulness of mind as to leave me without any suspicion of the rencontre that was depending.”
¹¹

On the eve of the duel, Nathaniel Pendleton stopped by Hamilton’s town house and made a last-ditch effort to dissuade him from his resolution to squander his first shot. Once again, Hamilton insisted he would fire in the air. When Pendleton protested, Hamilton indicated that his mind was made up. “My friend,” he told Pendleton, “it is the effect of a religious scruple and does not admit of reasoning. It is useless to say more on the subject as my purpose is definitely fixed.”
¹²

Hamilton dedicated his last night to the activity that had earned him such lasting fame: framing words. Since one purpose of the duel was to prepare to head off a secessionist threat, he wrote a plea to Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, warning against any such movement among New England Federalists: “I will here express but one sentiment, which is that dismemberment of our empire will be a clear sacrifice of great positive advantages without any counterbalancing good.”
¹³
The secession movement would provide no “relief to our real disease, which is democracy”—by which he meant unrestrained, disruptive popular rule.
¹⁴

That evening, in surveying his life, Hamilton was evidently transported back to his West Indian boyhood and the near-miraculous escape that he had made from St. Croix more than three decades earlier. His mind turned to his cousin, Ann Mitchell, who had rescued him with money for his education. At ten o’clock, Hamilton took up his quill and wrote to Eliza, “Mrs. Mitchell is the person in the world to whom as a friend I am under the greatest obligations. I have [not] hitherto done my [duty] to her.”
¹⁵
Ann Mitchell was struggling in impoverished circumstances, and Hamilton expressed a fervent wish that his estate might “render the evening of her days comfortable.” Should that prove impossible, he told Eliza, “I entreat you to…treat her with the tenderness of a sister.”
¹⁶
He also told Eliza that he could not bear to kill another human being and that the “scruples of a Christian” had convinced him to expose his life to Burr: “This must increase my hazards and redoubles my pangs for you. But you had rather I should die innocent than live guilty. Heaven can preserve me and [I humbly] hope will, but in the contrary event, I charge you to remember that you are a Christian.”
¹⁷
In contemplating the duel, Hamilton may have miscalculated, may have been egregiously foolish, may have talked himself into the mad and elliptical logic of dueling, but he definitely was not in a suicidal state of mind.

Many thoughts swirled through Aaron Burr’s brain in his last days, and some of the most vexing pertained to money. The profligate Burr was more than short of cash: he was dead broke. The previous fall, he had contemplated selling his Richmond Hill estate to ward off demanding creditors. That he faced financial as well as political ruin may help to explain his almost palpable mood of desperation while seeking a duel with Hamilton. According to John Church Hamilton, in the period immediately preceding the duel (presumably before the challenge was issued) Burr was so harried by debt that he appealed even to Hamilton for help. Hamilton’s son related this incredible tale that Eliza told her children:

Hamilton was at his country seat and, soon after the early summer sun had arisen, was awakened by a violent ringing at the bell of his front door. He arose, descended, and found Burr at the door. With great agitation, he related circumstances which rendered immediate pecuniary assistance absolutely necessary to him. On returning to his bed, Hamilton relieved the anxiety of his wife caused by his early call. “Who do you think was at the door? Colonel Burr. He came to ask my assistance.”
¹⁸

With astonishing generosity, Hamilton solicited money from John Church Barker, who had dueled with Burr, and other friends to raise ten thousand dollars in cash. Burr also scrambled to scrounge up another $1,750 for an unforgiving creditor who had demanded sudden repayment.

Burr had always doted on his daughter, Theodosia, playing a Pygmalion role as he molded her into his image of womanly perfection. In so doing, he converted her into one of America’s most literate young women. Burr wrote to his daughter in an intimate shorthand, chockful of clever jokes and gossipy references to his various amours. He gave her critical appraisals of the faces and figures of his many lovers. On June 23, the day after writing the defiant letter to Hamilton that guaranteed the duel, he celebrated his daughter’s birthday at Richmond Hill in her absence, telling her the next day how the guests “laughed an hour and danced an hour and drank her health.”
¹⁹
(Theodosia was then in South Carolina.) He advised her to study history, botany, and chemistry and gave her tips on how to form a first-class library. In these letters, Burr kept hinting at some unspoken crisis but never mentioned the duel. While Hamilton’s last days were crammed with family and friends, Burr spent much of his time in solitude. On July 1, he told his daughter that he was sitting alone by the library fire at sundown, shivering from a sudden chill in the summer heat.

Burr had taken a personal interest in educating his slaves, though he never planned to free them. The night before the duel, he jotted down a sheet of instructions dictating their fates. It showed that the previous fall, this so-called abolitionist was still buying slaves, in this case a black boy named Peter, whom he hoped to groom as a valet for his grandson. Burr spoke kindly of a slave named Peggy and hoped Theodosia would retain her ownership, but the other servants were not nearly so lucky. “Dispose of Nancy as you please,” he told his daughter. “She is honest, robust, and good-tempered.”
²⁰
Having married into a large South Carolina slave-owning family, Theodosia scarcely required more servants, making Burr’s refusal to free his slaves the more inexcusable.

The final letters written by Hamilton and Burr provide an instructive comparison. As the two men contemplated eternity, Hamilton feared for America’s future and the salvation of the union, while Burr worried about incriminating letters he had written to his mistresses, urging Theodosia to “burn all such as…would injure any person. This is more particularly applicable to the letters of my female correspondents.”
²¹
Long reviled as an archconspirator by the Jeffersonians, Hamilton had nothing whatsoever to conceal and did not ask that any personal papers be destroyed. Burr, by contrast, wanted to incinerate many worrisome documents, telling Theodosia to burn one small bundle of letters tied with red string and another wrapped in a white handkerchief. Since he made these last-minute arrangements, Burr must have imagined, at least in theory, that he could die in the duel. This confirms that he had no idea that Hamilton planned to withhold his fire at Weehawken.

The night before the duel, Burr lost no sleep and dozed off quickly on the couch in his library. His slumber was neither fitful nor agitated. “Mr. Van Ness told me that the morning of the duel when he went to Colonel Burr, he found him in a very sound sleep,” reported Charles Biddle. “He was obliged to hurry on his clothes to be ready at the time appointed for the meeting.”
²²
Burr donned a black silk coat that was to provide grist for interminable speculation. James Cheetham described its fabric as “impenetrable to a ball”—a sort of eighteenth-century equivalent of a bulletproof vest.
²³
Burr partisans portrayed their hero as simply garbed in a bombazine coat and cotton pants. Burr was escorted to a boat awaiting him at a Hudson River dock by the most trusted lieutenants of his recent campaign—John Swartwout, Matthew L. Davis, and others—as if they were sending him off to a rousing election rally.