Alexander Hamilton (144 page)

After Hamilton completed his valedictory note to Eliza in his upstairs study at 54 Cedar Street, he went downstairs and entered a bedroom where a boy was reading a book. This must have been the orphaned boy who had attended the recent outdoor party at the Grange. In an unpublished fragment that may have embroidered the truth, John Church Hamilton reveals that his father entered the room, gazed pensively at the boy, and asked if he would share his bed that night. Hamilton “soon retired, and placing [the boy’s] little hands on his own, he repeated with him the Lord’s Prayer.”
²⁴
The child then fell asleep in his arms. This image of Hamilton sleeping with his arms wrapped around an orphaned youth during his last night on earth is inexpressibly poignant and makes one think that his own tormented boyhood weighed on his mind that night. At three o’clock in the morning, Hamilton awoke one of his sons and asked the drowsy boy to light a candle. He made up a story that his four-year-old sister, Eliza, who had stayed at the Grange with her mother, had been taken ill and that he had to head up there with Dr. Hosack. In the dim candlelight, Hamilton composed a beautiful hymn to Eliza that was to become one of her sacred heirlooms.

By the time he finished, Nathaniel Pendleton and Dr. Hosack had arrived, ready to accompany him to Weehawken, and they all went off in a carriage. To avoid detection, Pendleton and Van Ness had worked out a precise timetable, with both parties scheduled to depart from separate Manhattan docks around 5:00
A.M.
Each boat was to be rowed by four weaponless oarsmen whose identities would remain secret, sparing them any legal liability. The pistols were secreted in a leather case so that the boatmen could later swear under oath that they had never set eyes on any guns. Aside from the oarsmen, only the duelist, his second, and his surgeon were allowed on each boat.

Instead of the usual muggy July weather, the day dawned fine and cool on the water. Weehawken then stood far north of the city, so the seconds had allotted two hours for the journey upriver. (The dueling ground stood opposite today’s West Forty-second Street.) Hamilton’s boat departed from the vicinity of Greenwich Village. As the boat pushed north across a brightening river, Hamilton seemed relaxed and reiterated to Pendleton his vow “that he should not fire at Col. Burr as he had not the most distant wish to kill him.”
²⁵
At one point, Hamilton glanced back at the raucous, lively city that had given this outcast of the West Indies a home. During the past decade, New York’s population had doubled to eighty thousand, and the vacant downtown lots had disappeared. The sight of the growing city apparently touched something in Hamilton, for “he pointed out the beauties of the scenery and spoke of the future greatness of the city,” wrote his son.
²⁶

Because New York law dealt severely with dueling, local residents frequently resorted to New Jersey, where the practice was also banned but tended to be treated more leniently. At Weehawken, the Hudson Palisades form a steep cliff rising nearly two hundred feet from the water, and they were overgrown by thick woods and tangled brush. From afar, the cliff looked like a straight drop to the water, an impenetrable wall of rock clothed with dense vegetation. But at low tide, a little beach appeared down below. If the duelists pushed aside the bushes and tramped up a narrow path, they came upon a rocky ledge twenty feet above the Hudson that was well screened by trees. Idyllic and secluded, it faced an uninhabited stretch of Manhattan shoreline. Flanked by boulders and an old cedar tree, this level shelf was about twenty-two paces long and eleven paces wide—just large enough to accommodate a duel. The property was owned by Captain William Deas, who resided atop the cliff and was frustrated that his ledge was constantly used for duels. He heard the pistol reports, but could not see the duelists.

Vice President Burr arrived at 6:30
A.M.
He and Van Ness stepped from their boat, ascended the dirt path, and began to sweep away underbrush and other debris from the dueling space. The rising sun began to shine down and they peeled off their jackets as they worked. Shortly before 7:00, the second barge arrived with Hamilton and Pendleton, who clambered up to the ledge and left Dr. Hosack down below. This was to protect the surgeon and boatmen from any legal consequences. The surgeon was expected to be close enough to the duel to heed cries for help but far enough away to profess ignorance, if necessary, of the whole transaction.

Thus, at 7:00
A.M.
on July 11, 1804, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr stood face-to-face, ready to settle their furious quarrel. Both gentlemen followed strict etiquette and “exchanged salutations.”
²⁷
Twenty-three days had elapsed since the onset of their clandestine imbroglio. For two decades, they had met in New York courtrooms and salons, election meetings and legislatures, and had preserved an outward cordiality. Had it not been for their political rivalry, they might have been close friends. Both entered the duel from weak positions, hoping to reap some measure of political rehabilitation. To judge from a final painting of him by John Trumbull, Hamilton retained his keen, steady gaze, but melancholy clouded his face. And to judge from a John Vanderlyn painting done two years earlier, Burr had receding hair, graying at the edges, and a hint of anger darkened his expression. He was handsome and elegantly attired, however, and fearless on the field of honor.

In businesslike fashion, Pendleton and Van Ness marked out ten paces for the duel and drew lots to choose positions for their principals. When Pendleton won, he and Hamilton oddly decided that Hamilton would take the northern side. Because of the way the ledge was angled, this meant that Hamilton would face not just the river and the distant city but the morning sunlight. As Burr faced Hamilton, he would have the advantage of peering deep into a shaded area, with his opponent clearly visible under overhanging heights.

As the challenged party, Hamilton had picked the weapons and chosen flintlock pistols. Pendleton and Van Ness had drawn up guidelines specifying that the barrels could not extend more than eleven inches and had to be smoothbore. (Smoothbore pistols were unreliable; by contrast, if the pistol barrels were rifled, the inner grooves made possible greater accuracy.) Hamilton brought the brace of dueling pistols owned by John Barker Church, the same pistols used by Philip Hamilton and George Eacker in 1801. Hamilton might have wanted to use these pistols in homage to his dead son. More likely, he needed to confine knowledge of the duel to a tiny circle of confidants. John Barker Church was a trusted, intimate friend, possibly the only one with a pair of dueling pistols, though many fashionable gentlemen of the day owned such pistols. Though he often had recourse to affairs of honor, Hamilton himself possessed no such pistols, underscoring that he had used these affairs to silence critics, not to harm them. The Church pistols had been manufactured by a celebrated London gunsmith, Wogden, in the mid-1790s. They were long, slim, and elegant, with lacquered walnut handles, ornamental designs, and gold mountings along their brass barrels. While they looked light and easy to handle, they weighed several pounds apiece, and their large lead bullets weighed an ounce apiece. It took practice to handle these unwieldy guns with speed and finesse.

During an examination of the pistols for the 1976 bicentennial celebration, experts discovered an optional hair-trigger mechanism, which, when set, allowed a much lighter squeeze than if the regular trigger was used. Some commentators have found something suspect about Hamilton’s choice of these pistols, as if this hidden feature unmasked his true intention to fire at Burr. Yet historians have always known about the hair trigger. When Pendleton handed Hamilton his weapon on the dueling ground, he asked “if he would have the hair spring set” and Hamilton replied, “Not this time.”
²⁸
Thus, even if Hamilton had intended to conceal the hair trigger from Burr, he decided not to exploit it. Hamilton’s reply shows that he was still vacillating over whether to throw away his fire on the second shot as well.
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Pendleton and Van Ness again drew lots, and it fell to Pendleton to supervise the duel. The seconds loaded the pistols in each other’s presence, then handed them, already cocked, to Hamilton and Burr, who took up their assigned places. Pendleton recited the rules. He would ask them if they were ready. If they agreed, he would say “Present,” at which point they could fire. If one party fired and the other did not, the duelist who had fired had to wait for the opposing second to say, “One, two, three, fire,” giving his foe a chance to return fire. If the opponent refused to do so, then the sides would confer to see whether the dispute could be settled verbally or whether a second round was required.

Fanned by a light morning breeze, Hamilton and Burr now assumed sideways poses, presenting the slim silhouettes preferred by duelists. The sun was rising fast, and when Pendleton asked if they were ready, Hamilton, unnerved by light bouncing off the river, called out, “Stop. In certain states of the light one requires glasses.”
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He lifted his pistol and took several sightings, something that might have misled Burr about his intentions. Then he fished in his pocket for spectacles, put them on with one hand, and aimed the pistol in several directions. Burr and Van Ness later made much of the fact that Hamilton aimed the pistol once or twice at Burr. “This will do,” Hamilton finally said, apologizing for the delay. “Now you may proceed.”
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That Hamilton put on his glasses has been given a sinister meaning by some commentators, but he may have wanted to ensure that he
didn’t
hit Burr. We also know that he had not ruled out firing accurately on a second round.

Van Ness later confirmed that Burr had no idea of Hamilton’s vow to fire into the woods. Hamilton did not have the option of standing there with his arms slackly at his sides. To have done so would have been interpreted as a cowardly refusal to duel, detracting from the heroic aura that Hamilton wished to project and defeating the whole purpose of submitting to the duel. So as Burr glared at Hamilton, he saw a guilt-ridden malevolence that did not exist. “When he stood up to fire,” Burr later said of Hamilton, “he caught my eye and quailed under it. He looked like a convicted felon.”
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On another occasion, Burr said that Hamilton “looked as if oppressed with the horrors of conscious guilt.”
³³
Hamilton gave no evidence to anyone else of being bowed down by guilt.

Hamilton and Burr now braced for the event that Henry Adams later described as “the most dramatic moment in the early politics of the Union.”
³⁴
When Pendleton asked if they were ready, they both answered yes, and he then uttered the word
Present.
Hamilton lifted his pistol, as did Burr. Both guns were discharged with explosive flashes, separated by a split second or perhaps several seconds. Pendleton was adamant that Burr had fired first and that Hamilton’s shot was merely “the effect of an involuntary exertion of the muscles produced by a mortal wound,” a terrible blow in the abdominal area above his right hip, Pendleton wrote.
³⁵
Hamilton rose up on his toes, writhing violently and twisting slightly to the left before toppling headlong to the ground. Hamilton seemed to know that his wound was mortal and proclaimed instantly, “I am a dead man.”
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Pendleton called for Hosack, who came charging up the path. In Pendleton’s recollection, Burr started toward the fallen Hamilton in a manner “expressive of regret,” until Van Ness warned him that Hosack and the boatmen were approaching. From a legal standpoint, Van Ness feared this would place Burr at the crime scene in full view of witnesses, and the two men therefore withdrew as Van Ness tried to shield Burr’s face with an umbrella. Right before they stepped onto their boat, Burr said to Van Ness of Hamilton, “I must go and speak to him!”
³⁷
Van Ness counseled him that this was ill-advised. To placate Burr, Van Ness ran up the footpath himself and reported back on Hamilton’s condition before they pushed off from shore.

Van Ness never deviated from his insistent claim that Hamilton had fired first. “That Gen[era]l Hamilton fired first, I am as well persuaded as I ever was of any fact that came under my observation,” he said.
³⁸
He recalled this distinctly, he contended, because as soon as he heard the first shot, he swiveled around to see if Burr had been struck by Hamilton’s bullet. For a moment, he even imagined that Burr had been hit because he seemed to falter. Afterward, Burr told Van Ness that he had stumbled on a stone or branch in front of him and sprained his ankle. He also explained that he had paused several seconds before firing back at Hamilton because the breeze had swirled the smoke from Hamilton’s pistol in obscure eddies before his face and he was waiting for the smoke to clear.

Neither Burr nor Van Ness ever explained why, if Hamilton shot first, he missed his target by so wide a margin. When Pendleton returned to the scene the next day, he tracked down Hamilton’s bullet and discovered that it had smashed the limb of a cedar tree more than twelve feet off the ground. The spot was also approximately four feet to the side of where Burr had stood—in other words, nowhere in his vicinity. (Pendleton sawed off the limb and gave it to John Barker Church, as either legal evidence or a memento.) If Hamilton had shot first, he had wasted his fire, exactly as foretold. And if Burr had fired first, as Pendleton alleged, then Hamilton seems to have squeezed the trigger in a reflexive spasm of agony and shot involuntarily into the trees. In neither scenario did Hamilton aim his gun at Aaron Burr.