Joseph J. Ellis (9 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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:

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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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?