Joseph J. Ellis (5 page)

A
ARON
B
URR
left his home on Richmond Hill near the southern end of Manhattan at first light on Wednesday, July 11, 1804. 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. So Colonel Burr—the military title a proud emblem of his service in the American Revolution—was elegantly attired in a silklike suit (actually made of a fabric known as bombazine) and carried himself toward the barge on the bank of the Hudson River with the nonchalant air of a natural aristocrat strolling to an appointment with destiny.

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.
²

Meanwhile, just north of Richmond Hill, near present-day Wall Street, Hamilton was boarding a small skiff with two oarsmen, his physician, Dr. David Hosack, and his own loyal associate Nathaniel Pendleton. Like Burr, Hamilton was properly attired and also carried himself with a similar air of gentlemanly diffidence. He also carried a military title, thus outranking Burr with his honorary designation as “General Hamilton,” based on his last appointment, that of inspector general of the New Army in 1799. At forty-nine, he was a year older than Burr and, like him, was a relatively short man—an inch taller, at five feet seven inches—with similarly small hands and feet, a somewhat delicate bone structure, and a truly distinctive head and face. He was called “the little lion of Federalism” because he was, in truth, little.

But the head was the place where God had seen fit to mark the two men as polar opposites. Burr had the dark and severe coloring of his Edwards ancestry, with black hair receding from the forehead and dark brown, almost black, eyes that suggested a cross between an eagle and a raven. Hamilton had a light peaches and cream complexion with violet-blue eyes and auburn-red hair, all of which came together to suggest an animated beam of light to Burr’s somewhat stationary shadow. Whereas Burr’s overall demeanor seemed subdued, as if the compressed energies of New England Puritanism were coiled up inside him, waiting for the opportunity to explode, Hamilton conveyed kinetic energy incessantly expressing itself in bursts of conspicuous brilliance.

Their respective genealogies also created temperamental and stylistic contrasts. Unlike Burr’s distinguished bloodline, which gave his aristocratic bearing its roots and biological rationale, Hamilton’s more dashing and consistently audacious style developed as a willful personal wager against the odds of his impoverished origins. John Adams, who despised Hamilton, once referred to him as “the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar.” While intended as a libelous description, Adams’s choice of words was literally correct.

Hamilton had been born on the West Indian island of Nevis, the illegitimate son of a down-on-her-luck beauty of French extraction and a hard-drinking Scottish merchant with a flair for bankruptcy. In part because of his undistinguished origins, Hamilton always seemed compelled to be proving himself; he needed to impress his superiors with his own superiority. 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. Though he had not sought out the impending duel with Burr, there was nothing in Hamilton’s lifelong pattern that would permit a self-consciously bland and supremely triumphant refusal of the challenge. He was moving across the nearly calm waters of the Hudson toward Weehawken, then, because he did not believe he could afford to decline Burr’s invitation.
³

We actually know a good deal more about the thoughts in Hamilton’s mind at this propitious moment. The previous evening he had drafted a personal statement, which he enclosed with his last will and testament, declaring that he had sincerely hoped to avoid the interview. Moreover, he claimed to feel “no ill-will to Col. Burr, distinct from political opposition, which, as I trust, has proceeded from pure and upright motives.” What’s more, he had decided to expose himself to Burr’s fire without retaliating: “I have resolved, if our interview is conducted in the usual manner, and it pleases God to give me the opportunity, 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.” He did not think of this course of action as suicidal, but as another gallant gamble of the sort he was accustomed to winning.
⁴

The usual description of the duel’s location—the plains of Weehawken—is misleading. Indeed, if one were to retrace the Burr-Hamilton route across the Hudson and land just upstream from the modern-day Lincoln Tunnel, one would come face-to-face with a sheer cliff 150 feet high. Anyone attempting to scale these heights would hardly be capable of fighting a duel upon arrival at the top. The actual site of the duel was a narrow ledge, about ten feet wide and forty feet long, located only twenty feet above the water. It was a popular spot for duels precisely because of its relative isolation and inaccessibility. By prearranged agreement, the Burr party arrived first, just before 7:00 a.m., and began clearing away the incidental brush and rocks on the ledge.
⁵

Hamilton’s party arrived shortly thereafter, and the two seconds, Van Ness for Burr and Pendleton for Hamilton, conferred to review the agreed-upon rules of the interview. It was called an “interview” because dueling was illegal in many states, including New York. Therefore, in addition to the established etiquette of the
code duello
, veteran duelists had developed an elaborately elusive vocabulary, what we would now call the “language of deniability,” so that all participants could subsequently claim ignorance if ever brought to court. None of the oarsmen, for example, was permitted on the ledge to witness the exchange of fire. The physician, David Hosack, was also required to turn his back to the proceedings.
⁶

Because Hamilton had been challenged, he had the choice of weapons. He had selected a custom-made pair of highly decorated pistols owned by his wealthy brother-in-law, John Church. Apart from their ornate appearance, the weapons were distinctive for two reasons. First, they had been used in two previous duels involving the participants: once, in 1799, when Church had shot a button off Burr’s coat; then, in 1801, when Hamilton’s eldest son, Philip, had been fatally wounded defending his father’s honor only a few yards from the site at Weehawken. Second, they also contained a concealed device that set a hair-trigger. Without the hair-trigger, the weapon required twenty pounds of pressure to fire. With the hair-trigger, only one pound of pressure was needed. While Hamilton knew about the hair-triggers, Burr almost certainly did not.

After Pendleton and Van Ness loaded the pistols, which were smoothbore and took a quite large .54-caliber ball, Pendleton whispered to Hamilton, “Should I set the hair-trigger?” Hamilton responded: “Not this time.” As they prepared to take their designated places, then, both men were armed with extremely powerful but extremely erratic weapons. If struck in a vital spot by the oversized ball at such close range, the chances of a serious or mortal injury were high. But the inherent inaccuracy of a projectile emerging from a smoothbore barrel, plus the potent jerk required to release the cocked hammer, ignite the powder, and then send the ball toward its target, meant that in this duel, as in most duels of that time, neither party was likely to be hurt badly, if at all.
⁷

Burr and Hamilton then met in the middle to receive their final instructions. Hamilton, again because he was the challenged party, had the choice of position. He selected the upstream, or north, side, a poor choice because the morning sun and its reflection off the river would be in his face. The required ten paces between contestants put them at the extreme ends of the ledge. It was agreed that when both principals were ready, Pendleton would say, “Present”; then each man would be free to raise and fire his weapon. If one man fired before the other, the non-firer’s second would say, “One, two, three, fire.” If he had not fired by the end of the count, he lost his turn. At that point, or if both parties had fired and missed, there would be a conference to decide if another round was required or if both sides agreed that the obligations of honor had been met.
⁸

Upon reaching his designated location, just before the final command, Hamilton requested a brief delay. He pulled his eyeglasses out of his breast pocket, adjusted them, then squinted into the glare, raised his pistol, sighted down the barrel at several imaginary targets, then pronounced himself ready. Burr waited with patience and composure through this delay. Not only is there no evidence that he had any foreknowledge of Hamilton’s declared intention to reserve or waste his first shot, but Hamilton’s behavior at this penultimate moment certainly suggested more harmful intentions. Why he would don his eyeglasses if he did not plan to shoot at Burr remains a mystery.

What happened next is an even greater mystery. In fact, the contradictory versions of the next four to five seconds of the duel might serve as evidence for the postmodern contention that no such thing as objective truth exists, that historic reality is an inherently enigmatic and endlessly negotiable bundle of free-floating perceptions. For our story to proceed along the indisputable lines established at the start, we must skip over the most dramatic moment, then return to it later, after the final pieces of the narrative are in place.

Two shots had rung out and Hamilton had just been hit. The one-ounce ball had struck him on the right side, making a hole two inches in diameter about four inches above his hip. The projectile fractured his rib cage, ricocheted off the rib and up through his liver and diaphragm, then splintered the second lumbar vertebra, where it lodged. Even with all the benefits of modern medical science, the internal damage would have made Hamilton a likely fatality, most certainly a lifetime cripple. Given the limitations of medical science available then, there was no hope. Hamilton himself recognized his own condition almost immediately. When Dr. Hosack rushed forward to examine him, Hamilton calmly declared, “This is a mortal wound, Doctor,” then lapsed into unconsciousness.
⁹

Meanwhile, Burr seemed surprised and regretful at the outcome of his shot. He started toward the fallen Hamilton, but Van Ness stopped him and ushered him away from the scene and toward his boat, all the while shielding Burr behind an umbrella so that—the deniability motive again—the members of Hamilton’s party could claim in some prospective court that they had never seen him. Halfway down the path toward the river, Burr stopped and insisted on going back. “I must go and speak to him,” he pleaded. But Van Ness refused to comply
and headed Burr into his barge and back across the river to New York.
¹⁰

Hosack half-expected Hamilton to die on the spot. After a few minutes of ministrations, however, it was clear that the unconscious Hamilton was breathing regularly, so they carried him down to the river. On the trip back, Hamilton recovered consciousness for a time and muttered to Hosack, “Pendleton knows I did not mean to fire at Colonel Burr the first time.” When one of the oarsmen tried to move Hamilton’s pistol, which lay on the seat, Hamilton warned him, “Take care of that pistol; it is undischarged and still cocked; it may go off and do harm,” clearly indicating that Hamilton himself did not seem to realize the weapon had been fired. Upon arrival on the New York side, he was carried to the nearby home of James Bayard, a longtime friend and political disciple, where Hosack administered liberal doses of laudanum and waited for the end. Hamilton died at two o’clock on the afternoon of July 12, 1804, surrounded by the Episcopal bishop of New York, Benjamin Moore, as well as by David Hosack, Hamilton’s wife, Elizabeth, and their seven surviving children.
¹¹

The funeral two days later was an extravaganza of mourning. The mahogany coffin was trailed by Hamilton’s gray horse, with his boots and spurs reversed astride the empty saddle. Behind it marched his widow and children, the political and legal leaders of the city, the students and faculty of Columbia College, bank presidents, army and navy officers, local clergy and foreign dignitaries, followed by several hundred ordinary citizens. Gouverneur Morris, an old family friend and Federalist colleague, delivered the funeral oration in an overflowing Trinity Church.
¹²

The overwhelming popular consensus was that Burr had murdered Hamilton in cold blood. The anti-Burr character of the newspaper stories fed the popular frenzy with concocted claims (for example, Burr had worn a suit, specially prepared for the duel, made of material that could deflect bullets) and melodramatic fabrications (for example, while Hamilton’s widow and children shed tears over his dead body, Burr and his followers drank toasts to Hamilton’s death in the local tavern, Burr only expressing regret that he had not shot him in the heart). A wax replication of the duel depicted Hamilton being shot by Burr and several hidden accomplices from ambush. The sign beneath the wax version read: