Founding Brothers (7 page)

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.
³⁷

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.
³⁸

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.
³⁹

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.
⁴⁰

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.
⁴¹

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. Personal character was essential in order
to resist public temptations. In Burr’s case, for example, the decision
to support or betray Jefferson in 1801; or to conspire with Federalists
promoting a northern secession in 1804; or, a few years later, to detach the
American Southwest from the United States. Character counted in each of these
choices, because the temptations being served up by the political conditions in
this formative phase of the American republic put the moral fiber of national
leadership to a true test.

It was Burr’s unique distinction, at
least as Hamilton saw it, to fail every such test. Whereas no one else in the
revolutionary generation wanted the role of Catiline, Burr seemed to be
auditioning for the part at every opportunity. To put it somewhat differently,
if the dispute between Burr and Hamilton had been settled in the courts rather
than on the dueling grounds, and if one admitted the legal principle that truth
constituted a legitimate defense against charges of libel (a principle,
intriguingly, that Hamilton insisted on in the last case he ever argued),
Hamilton would almost certainly have won.
⁴²

It is
difficult for us to fathom fully the threat that Burr represented to Hamilton
because we know that the American experiment with republican government was
destined to succeed. We know that a nation so conceived and so dedicated could
and did endure, indeed flourish, to become the longest-lived republic in world
history. Not only was such knowledge unavailable to Hamilton and his
contemporaries, the political landscape they saw around themselves was a
dangerously fluid place, where neither the national laws nor institutions had
yet hardened into permanent fixtures. Or if one wished to think biologically
rather than architecturally, the body politic had yet to develop its immunities
to the political diseases afflicting all new nations. What seems extravagant
and hyperbolic in Hamilton’s critical description of Burr, then, was not
a symptom of Hamilton’s paranoia so much as a realistic response to the
genuine vulnerability of the still-tender young plant called the United States.
So much seemed to be at stake because, in truth, it was.
⁴³

Our search
for the full meaning of the duel has led us backward, past the purely personal
jealousies, through the only partially resolvable mysteries of what happened
beneath the plains of Weehawken on the fateful day, and beyond the history of
dueling as a dying institution. It has become an excursion into the highly
problematic political world of the newborn American republic, a place where
real and not just imagined conspiracies were prevalent, where the endurance of
the political entity called the United States was still very much up in the
air. As is more or less true about any famous event that is deeply imbedded in
the historical soil of a particularly fertile time and place, the real
significance of the duel lies beyond the specific parameters of the event
itself, beyond that narrow ledge above the Hudson River. It expands to
encompass an entire but still-emerging world that Burr threatened and Hamilton
believed himself to be defending.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed
that “a great man represents a strategic point in the campaign of
history, and part of his greatness consists of his being there.” Both
Burr and Hamilton thought of themselves as great men who happened to come of
age at one of those strategic points in the campaign of history called the
American revolutionary era. By the summer of 1804, history had pretty much
passed them by. Burr had alienated Jefferson and the triumphant Republican
party by his disloyalty as a vice president and had lost by a landslide in his
bid to become a Federalist governor of New York. Hamilton had not held national
office for nine years and the Federalist cause he had championed was well on
its way to oblivion. Even in his home state of New York, the Federalists were,
as John Quincy Adams put it, “a minority, and of that minority, only a
minority were admirers and partisans of Mr. Hamilton.” Neither man had
much of a political future.
⁴⁴

But by
being there beneath the plains of Weehawken for their interview, they managed
to make a dramatic final statement about the time of their time. Honor mattered
because character mattered. And character mattered because the fate of the
American experiment with republican government still required virtuous leaders
to survive. Eventually, the United States might develop into a nation of laws
and established institutions capable of surviving corrupt or incompetent public
officials. But it was not there yet. It still required honorable and virtuous
leaders to endure. Both Burr and Hamilton came to the interview because they
wished to be regarded as part of such company.

CHAPTER TWO

The Dinner

T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON
’
S
version of the story
follows a plotline that illustrates the natural and almost nonchalant way that
history happens in an ideal Jeffersonian world. One day in mid-June of 1790, he
encountered Alexander Hamilton by chance as the two members of President
Washington’s cabinet—Jefferson was secretary of state and Hamilton
was secretary of treasury—waited outside the presidential office.
Hamilton was not his customarily confident and resplendent self. Jefferson
thought he looked “sombre, haggard, and dejected beyond
comparison.” Even his manner of dress appeared “uncouth and
neglected.” He was, at least as Jefferson described him, a beaten
man.

While they stood in the street outside Washington’s
residence, Hamilton confided that his entire financial plan for the recovery of
public credit, which he had submitted to Congress in January, was trapped
within a congressional gridlock. Southern congressmen, led by James Madison,
had managed to block approval of one key provision of the Hamilton proposal,
the assumption of state debts by the federal government, thereby scuttling the
whole Hamiltonian scheme for fiscal reform. Hamilton was simultaneously
fatalistic and melodramatic. If his financial plan were rejected, as now seemed
certain, then “he could be of no use, and was determined to
resign.” And without his plan and his leadership—these two items
seemed inextricably connected in his own mind—the government and
inevitably the national union itself must collapse.

Jefferson suggested
that perhaps he could help. “On considering the situation of
things,” he recalled, “I thought the first step towards some
conciliation of views would be to bring Mr. Madison and Colo. Hamilton to a
friendly discussion of the subject.” Though he was still suffering from
the lingering vestiges of a migraine headache that had lasted for over a month,
and though he had only recently moved into his new quarters at 57 Maiden Lane
in New York City, Jefferson offered to host a private dinner party where the
main players could meet alone to see if the intractable political obstacles
might melt away under the more benign influences of wine and gentlemanly
conversation.

Jefferson’s version of what occurred that evening,
most probably Sunday, June 20, contains some misleading and self-serving
features, but since it is the only account that has survived in the historical
record, and since Jefferson’s justifiably famous way with words possesses
a charming simplicity that embodies nicely the elegant atmosphere of the dinner
party itself, it deserves our extended attention:

They came. I opened
the subject to them, acknoleged that my situation had not permitted me to
understand it sufficiently but encouraged them to consider the thing together.
They did so. It ended in Mr. Madison’s acquiescence in a proposition that
the question [i.e., assumption of the state debts] should be again brought
before the house by way of amendment from the Senate, that he would not vote
for it, nor entirely withdraw his opposition, yet he would not be strenuous,
but leave it to its fate. It was observed, I forget by which of them, that as
the pill would be a bitter one to the Southern states, something should be done
to soothe them; and the removal of the seat of government to the Patowmac was a
just measure, and would probably be a popular one with them, and would be a
proper one to follow the assumption.

In other words, Jefferson
brokered a political bargain of decidedly far-reaching significance: Madison
agreed to permit the core provision of Hamilton’s fiscal program to pass;
and in return Hamilton agreed to use his influence to assure that the permanent
residence of the national capital would be on the Potomac River. If true, this
story deserves to rank alongside the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of
1850 as one of the landmark accommodations in American politics. And, without
much question, what we might call “The Compromise of 1790” would
top the list as the most meaningful dinner party in American history.
¹

But is it
true? The verdict of history, or at least the reigning judgment of most
historians, is that the story is
essentially
true. Hamilton and
Madison did meet at Jefferson’s quarters in late June of 1790. On July 9
the House passed the Residence Bill, locating the permanent national capital on
the Potomac after a ten-year residence in Philadelphia, all this decided by a
vote of 32 to 29. On July 26 the House passed the Assumption Bill by a nearly
identical vote of 34 to 28, Madison voting against but, in keeping with
Jefferson’s version of the bargain, not leading the opposition in his
previously “strenuous” fashion. Moreover, several different
political observers and newspaper editors of the day clearly believed that some
kind of secret deal had been made to effect the switching of votes necessary to
break the long-standing deadlock on both issues. A disgruntled New York editor,
for example, was quite explicit: “The true reason of the removal of
Congress from this city will be explained to the people in the course of a very
few days. To the lasting disgrace of the majority in both houses it will be
seen, that the Pennsylvania and Patowmack interests have been purchased with
twenty-one and one-half million dollars,
” which just happened to
be the size of the assumed state debts.
²

What’s
more, on the very day that the bargain was struck, Jefferson wrote a long
letter to James Monroe, his loyal Virginian disciple, preparing him for news of
precisely the kind of compromise that eventually occurred. Monroe, like Madison
and most Virginians, adamantly opposed assumption. Jefferson assured him that
he too found the measure repulsive: “But in the present instance I see
the necessity of yielding for this time … for the sake of the union, and
to save us from the greatest of all Calamities.” He even spelled out what
he meant by such alarming words. The congressional debate over Hamilton’s
financial plan and the location of the national capital had produced total
legislative paralysis. If this was the first test of the viability of the new
federal government under the Constitution, the government was failing
miserably. Without some kind of breakthrough, the entire experiment with
republican government at the national level would “burst and vanish, and
the states separate to take care of everyone of itself.” Either the
peaceful dissolution of the United States or a civil war would occur unless
some sort of political bargain was struck. “Without descending to talk
about bargains,” Jefferson wrote—suggesting that making such deals
work required not talking about them publicly—a negotiation was in the
works that would make assumption more palatable to Virginians of Monroe’s
persuasion: a trade of assumption for the Potomac location of the permanent
capital. “If this plan of compromise does not take place,”
Jefferson warned, “I fear one infinitely worse.” Upon receiving
Jefferson’s letter, Monroe responded immediately with a warning of his
own. The political deal Jefferson described would never go down in Virginia,
where assumption was regarded as a “fatal poison” and the Potomac
location “of but little importance” in comparison.
³

Two years
later Jefferson himself concluded that Monroe had been right. In 1792 he told
Washington that the bargain made that evening with Hamilton was the greatest
political mistake of his life. In fact, Jefferson’s version of the
dinner-table bargain dates from that later time, probably 1792, when he deeply
regretted his complicity. “It was unjust,” he had by then decided,
“and was acquiesced in merely from a fear of disunion, while our
government was still in its infant state.” The ever-agile Hamilton had
outmaneuvered him to support assumption, which had then become “a
principal ground whereon was reared up that Speculating phalanx,” which
had subsequently conspired so insidiously, as Jefferson put it, “to
change the political complexion of the government of the U.S.” Perhaps a
final reason to accept the credibility of Jefferson’s version of the
story, then, is that he was not boasting about his political influence, but
confessing his profound regret. Why fabricate a tale in which one comes off as
a self-confessed dunce?
⁴

Any attempt to
answer that question would carry us into the labyrinthine corridors of
Jefferson’s famously elusive mind. Suffice to say that there is a core of
truth to Jefferson’s account of the dinner-table bargain, though it
vastly oversimplifies the history that was happening at that propitious moment.
Which is to say that several secret meetings were occurring at the same time;
and the political corridors were even more labyrinthine than Jefferson’s
imperfect memory of events. Most importantly, the conversation at
Jefferson’s quarters was merely one part of an ongoing and larger
conversation in which the very survival and subsequent shape of the American
republic seemed at stake. The more one looks at the chief characters in this
scene and listens to their voices, the more the salient question changes. It is
not: Was Jefferson telling the truth? It is, instead: Why were such
otherwise-sensible statesmen as Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton all convinced
that the newly established government of the United States was so precarious
and problematic? Why was the passage of assumption so threatening? Why was the
Potomac so symbolic? Jefferson’s version of the story to the contrary
notwithstanding, what was going on here?

A
S
MIGHT BE
expected, the answer the various participants gave to such an
overarching question depended a great deal on the ground on which they were
standing. And this, in turn, meant that Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison
arrived at the dinner with different agendas, different experiences, and
different stories to tell. Within this formidable trio, it makes most sense to
start with Madison.

He was the most centrally situated, having led
the debate over both assumption and the residence question in the House. He
also enjoyed the reputation as both a preeminent nationalist and favored son of
Virginia and had already become famous at the tender age of thirty-nine as the
shrewdest and most politically savvy veteran of the tumultuous constitutional
battles of the 1780s. Indeed, in 1790 Madison had just completed what turned
out to be the most creative phase of his entire career as an American
statesman, which several historians would subsequently describe as the most
creative contribution to political science in all of American history.
⁵

Distressed by
the political disarray in the state governments in the 1780s and the congenital
weakness of the Articles of Confederation, Madison had helped mobilize the
movement for the Constitutional Convention. His arguments for a fortified
national government became the centerpiece around which all the compromises and
revisions of the eventual document congealed, giving him the honorary title of
“Father of the Constitution.” He had then joined forces with
Hamilton (with a modest assist from John Jay) to write
The Federalist
Papers,
which was instantly recognized as an American classic, most
especially in its ingenious insistence that republican government would prove
more stable when extended over a large landmass and diverse population. In the
Virginia ratifying convention he had outmaneuvered the apparently unbeatable
opposition led by Patrick Henry, prompting John Marshall, his fellow Virginian
Federalist, to observe that Henry might be the all-time oratorical champion in
his capacity to persuade; but that Madison was his superior in his capacity to
convince. Then, to top it off, he had drafted and ushered the Bill of Rights
through the First Congress. In 1790, in short, Madison was at the peak of his
powers and, after George Washington and Benjamin Franklin (who died that year),
was generally regarded as the most influential political leader in the new
nation.
⁶

He did not look the part. At five feet six and less than 140 pounds
“little Jemmy Madison” had the frail and discernibly fragile
appearance of a career librarian or schoolmaster, forever lingering on the edge
of some fatal ailment, overmatched by the daily demands of ordinary life. When
he left his father’s modest-sized plantation at Montpelier in Virginia to
attend Princeton in 1769—Aaron Burr was a classmate—the youthful
Madison had confessed to intimations of imminent mortality, somewhat morbidly
predicting his early death. (As it turned out, he survived longer than all the
leaders of the revolutionary generation, observing near the end, “Having
outlived so many of my contemporaries, I ought not to forget that I may be
thought to have outlived myself.”) Not only did he look like the epitome
of insignificance—diminutive, colorless, sickly—he was also
paralyzingly shy, the kind of guest at a party who instinctively searched out
the corners of the room.
⁷