War of Two: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Duel that Stunned the Nation, by John Sedgwick
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War of Two: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Duel that Stunned the Nation, by John Sedgwick
Free PDF Ebook Online War of Two: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Duel that Stunned the Nation, by John Sedgwick
A provocative and penetrating investigation into the rivalry between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, whose infamous duel left the Founding Father dead and turned a sitting Vice President into a fugitive. In the summer of 1804, two of America’s most eminent statesmen squared off, pistols raised, on a bluff along the Hudson River. That two such men would risk not only their lives but the stability of the young country they helped forge is almost beyond comprehension. Yet we know that it happened. The question is why. In War of Two, John Sedgwick explores the long-standing conflict between Founding Father Alexander Hamilton and Vice President Aaron Burr. A study in contrasts from birth, they had been compatriots, colleagues, and even friends. But above all they were rivals. Matching each other’s ambition and skill as lawyers in New York, they later battled for power along political fault lines that would not only decide the future of the United States, but define it. A series of letters between Burr and Hamilton suggest the duel was fought over an unflattering comment made at a dinner party. But another letter, written by Hamilton the night before the event, provides critical insight into his true motivation. It was addressed to former Speaker of the House Theodore Sedgwick, a trusted friend of both men, and the author’s own ancestor. John Sedgwick suggests that Hamilton saw Burr not merely as a personal rival but as a threat to the nation. Burr would prove that fear justified after Hamilton’s death when, haunted by the legacy of his longtime adversary, he embarked on an imperial scheme to break the Union apart.
War of Two: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Duel that Stunned the Nation, by John Sedgwick - Amazon Sales Rank: #38758 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-20
- Released on: 2015-10-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.31" h x 1.50" w x 6.38" l, 1.60 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 480 pages
War of Two: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Duel that Stunned the Nation, by John Sedgwick Review
Praise for In My Blood“[Sedgwick] can take on any subject he chooses.”—The New York Times“Sedgwick, an acclaimed novelist, has written a gorgeous memoir, a fascinating, impressively researched account.”—USA Today“A grand, candid, and sensitive family memoir...An enlightening inquiry, unique in its perspective on American history and trenchant in its insights.”—Chicago Tribune
About the Author
John Sedgwick is a journalist, novelist, memoirist and biographer who has written or co-written numerous books ranging from his psychological thriller, The Dark House, to his multi-generational family memoir, In My Blood. He has also written many articles for GQ, The Atlantic, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, and other magazines. He lives with his wife, the Time columnist Rana Foroohar, and her two children in Brooklyn.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The case of dueling pistols owned by Hamilton’s good Federalist friend New York senator Rufus King. Similar to the Robert Wogdon flintlock pistols used in the fatal duel between Hamilton and Burr, these were made by H.W. Mortimer. They were never fired but demonstrate that such equipment was de rigueur for a gentleman of the political class and indicate the elaborate machinery involved in defending one’s honor.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ONE FALL AFTERNOON several years ago, I was in the reading room of the Massachusetts Historical Society, a splendid brick bastion in Boston’s leafy Fenway neighborhood. I was prowling through the society’s extensive collection of Sedgwick family papers for a book I was writing about my family’s history when the head librarian, Peter Drummey, came up and tapped me on the shoulder and said he had something to show me.
“We’ve got this one on display up front,” he whispered. “Come, you should see it.” He led me through a series of rooms to an exhibition space showing the society’s prized holdings in long glass cases. Peter stopped beside one of them and pointed toward a wrinkled letter, yellowed with age, its once-black ink long since faded to brown, that was propped up on glass. “There. Take a look.”
I bent over the case. “New York, July 10, 1804,” I read out.
My Dear Sir
I have received two letters from you since we last saw each other—that of the latest date being the 24 of May. I have had in hand for some time a long letter to you, explaining my view of the course and tendency of our Politics, and my intentions as to my own future conduct. But my plan embraced so large a range that owing to much avocation, some indifferent health, and a growing distaste for Politics, the letter is still considerably short of being finished—I write this now to satisfy you, that want of regard for you has not been the cause of my silence—
“Wait, this isn’t—?” I asked.
Peter nodded. “Yes—Alexander Hamilton’s last letter. Written the night before he was shot.” By the sitting vice president Aaron Burr, he need hardly have added, in the famous duel at Weehawken, New Jersey, in 1804, an event that Henry Adams called the most dramatic moment in the politics of the early Republic.
“And look, it’s to one of yours.” He beamed. “His good friend and legislative ally Theodore Sedgwick.” Of course—the name was scrawled hastily across the bottom.
I’d known about the letter, but I’d never seen it. Theodore was my great-great-great-grandfather. A career politician, he’d helped push Hamilton’s economic agenda through the House when he was a representative from Massachusetts, and ultimately rose to become Speaker of the House for the fateful election of 1800 that wrested control away from his Federalist Party and turned it over to Thomas Jefferson and the Republican “Jacobins,” as he thought of them, alluding to the bloodthirsty radicals of the French Revolution. Much to Hamilton’s distress, Theodore had tried fruitlessly to steer the election to Burr, a friend from the Berkshires. Still, Theodore had been one of the only politicians who’d remained a trusted friend of both men, which was why Hamilton was writing him then.
We will return to the letter later, in its time. Taken out of context, it may seem tangential and, unusually for Hamilton, wildly overblown. It is likely to defy expectations as to why Hamilton crossed the Hudson at daybreak and faced his doom. In a few choice sentences, Hamilton offered a better explanation about his part in the duel, and a better prediction of what would come from it, than he did anywhere else. Theodore Sedgwick never responded, since by then there was no one to respond to.
When earlier members of the family encountered the letter, they could see its value to history, for several added urgent notations on the back before they passed the letter down to the next generation. All conveyed the same message: This letter must be preserved.
INTRODUCTION
The Fatal Dinner
SEARCHING FOR THE true origins of the fatal hatred between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr is like trying to trace the wind to its source. It is easier to detail how the gusts are knocking tree limbs about. There was never any question that Burr shot Hamilton in anger. As for why, everyone turned to a remarkable series of letters, eleven in all, that Hamilton and Burr, or their surrogates, volleyed back and forth in the run-up to the slaughter and that filled the newspapers afterward. The letters have much of the quality of legal arguments, as befits the work of the two most prominent lawyers in the city, as each tried to pin the blame on the other, and they make up a duel of their own, a war of words.
While each man clearly disdained the moral character of the other, the issue at hand was far more limited, and more precise, as it turned, remarkably, on a single word, spoken in haste at a dinner party in Albany that February, in the midst of an abominable winter that, from November to May, was the coldest and snowiest on record. Only the steep roofs of the city’s Dutch houses were clear of the otherwise endless freezing white. The event was held at the State Street home of a powerful local judge named John Tayler, whose mouth seemed always down turned in displeasure. He ran nearly everything in town from the waterworks to the local New York State Bank, which he’d conveniently located directly across the street, and he was at work on plans for a new granite statehouse a few blocks away. The city had long been so Dutch that, it was said, even the dogs barked in Dutch. The Reformed Protestant Dutch Church still commanded one end of State Street—but a sturdy new Episcopal church had risen at the other, reflecting the developing political tensions of the city.
Tayler had invited in a few gentleman friends who were staying in the city for an ample repast before a roaring fire. The men duly arrived by sleigh on the snow-packed street. Their cheeks must have been raw as they came stamping into the front hall, their top hats and capes dusted with white. Federalists all, they dressed in the Federalist fashion; for clothing, too, was divided by party. Unlike Republicans, these good Federalist men all wore traditional knee-high silk stockings and buckled shoes, eschewing the blowsy shirts and crude trousers affected by the Republicans. Or worse. Even on formal occasions, President Jefferson was known to lounge about the President’s Mansion in a dressing gown and slippers.
The purpose tonight, however, was not mere conviviality. Since this was Albany in an election season, and one that featured the almost lubricious prospect of the disgraced vice president Aaron Burr’s attempt to seize the governor’s chair, the topic would be politics and, for a diversion, more politics. But for its designation as the state capital, after all, Albany would have remained what it once was: a nice piece of land along the Hudson, rich in strawberries. And these men possessed political opinions of value. Among them were the eminent James Kent, chief justice of the New York State Supreme Court, and the Dutch aristocrat Stephen Van Rensselaer, the eighth patroon, or lord of the manor, a onetime candidate for governor himself whose estate, Rensselaerswych, once encompassed all of Albany. But the prize guest of the evening was Alexander Hamilton.
In his younger days, Hamilton had cut a girlish figure, wasp-waisted, slim limbed, with none of the manly chest you’d associate with an orator who could dominate a hall for hours. He’d had a dancer’s grace, too, pirouetting and gesturing as he kept up an endless stream of talk. (No one had ever talked as much as Hamilton—the world might have drowned in his words.) Now it was only the talk anyone remembered. At forty-nine, he’d aged noticeably, thickened up, slowed. Even his electric, violet-blue eyes had dimmed, like a fire that had burned down to embers. And his hair, once a lustrous strawberry blond—a token of his Scottish heritage, it was said—had gone pale and brittle, but Hamilton still wore it straight back, clasped in his trademark club behind.
America was still a thinly populated country of only a few million free whites, most of them clumped in a few cities from Georgia to the Massachusetts coast that was not yet called Maine. If the elite weren’t related by blood or marriage, they’d served together in the war or gone to college together. So here, Hamilton knew Kent from his earliest days as a lawyer, and he knew Van Rensselaer because Van Rensselaer was married to Hamilton’s wife’s sister. But, of course, familiarity doesn’t always guarantee warmth. Among intimates, a slight can cause a cooling, and then chill into an icy fury, and so the political world of the young America was driven by the dual polarities of Anton Mesmer, the German physician who believed that everyone and everything is held together by a magnetic force. Those who loved, loved like newlyweds. Those who hated, hated like demons. Thinking he was among men he loved and who loved him, Hamilton ventured an opinion of a man he didn’t. When questioned about Burr’s candidacy for governor of New York, Hamilton was dismissive, but, being Hamilton, he expressed himself with memorable acuity. He said that he found Burr to be “dangerous.” He said other things too, but that was the only one that mattered.
Hamilton had said so many words, it was probably inevitable that he would say a wrong one. This was a wrong one, and no more words from him could make it right. For there was another man there that night, one whom Hamilton failed to take into account. It was Tayler’s young son-in-law Dr. Charles D. Cooper, who was staying over. He was so taken by Hamilton’s fevered denunciations of the vice president that he did something dangerous. He jotted down a summary for a political friend in Manhattan, and that man—unidentified—must have found the comments of larger interest, for he passed them along to the Evening Post’s editor, William Coleman, who was eager to run them, but with a disclaimer in case Burr take offense and make a challenge against him. The editor persuaded Hamilton’s father-in-law, the former New York senator General Philip Schuyler, to add a line expressing doubt that Alexander Hamilton would say anything so harsh about Burr after he’d pledged neutrality in Burr’s gubernatorial contest. That was a howler. Everyone knew that Hamilton had been anything but neutral in that election.
Up in Albany, Dr. Cooper read the Schuyler note in the Post, and he took offense at Schuyler’s insinuation that he’d gotten the story wrong or possibly had made it up entirely. Furious, he wrote a stiff letter to the Federalist Albany Register, to reiterate that Hamilton absolutely had called Burr “dangerous,” and that was not all. He added, tantalizingly, “I could detail for you a still more despicable opinion which Mr. Hamilton has expressed to Mr. Burr.”
Still more despicable.
That did it.
As Burr told a friend later, with the lightly veiled anger that was the purest expression of his breeding: “[Hamilton] had a peculiar talent of saying things improper and offensive in such a manner as could not well be taken hold of.” Dr. Cooper’s letter in the Register didn’t come to Burr’s attention for a full two months, in the middle of June, by which time Hamilton had succeeded in snatching the governorship from him in humiliating fashion: Burr lost by the greatest margin of any gubernatorial candidate in the state. Burr was not inclined to be forgiving. He intended to extract from Hamilton the full meaning of Cooper’s words, if he had to use pincers to do it.
On June 18, 1804, he dispatched a note to Hamilton at his law office in New York.
Sir:— I send for your perusal a letter signed Charles D. Cooper, which, though apparently published some time ago has but very recently come to my knowledge. Mr. Van Ness, who does me the favor to deliver this, will point out to you that clause of the letter to which I particularly request your attention.
You must perceive, sir, the necessity of a prompt and unqualified acknowledgement or denial of the use of any expression which would warrant the assertions of Dr. Cooper.
I have the honor to be,Your obedient servant,Burr.
With that, the game was on. Those eleven letters passed between them, but when the third, from Burr, declared that he had been dishonored, it became clear that the men would be headed across the Hudson to the dueling ground in Weehawken to resolve the matter at dawn with pistols.
BUT IT IS the rare lethal dispute that stems from a single word, or even several words. And, while “dangerous” was insulting, and “despicable” more so, the words merely evoked a string of calumnies that Hamilton had leveled against Burr at every presidential election up through the last one, the epic contest of 1800, when Jefferson and Burr tied in the Electoral College, throwing the matter to the House of Representatives. While Hamilton had always disdained Jefferson, he loathed Burr so utterly that he fought to counter every attempt by the Federalists to cut a deal with him that would award him the presidency, not Jefferson. It is a mark of Hamilton’s aversion to Burr that he embraced the anti-Christ instead.
As to Burr, there is nothing in his favour. His private character is not defended by his most partial friends. He is bankrupt beyond redemption, except by the plunder of his country. His public principles have no other spring or aim than his own aggrandizement. . . . If he can, he will certainly disturb our institutions to secure to himself permanent power and with it wealth. He is truly the Catiline of America.
As every classicist knew, the dissolute Catiline was one of the greatest traitors of the classical age, leading troops against the Roman Republic in a monstrous conspiracy that was foiled by Cicero, the canny orator in whom Hamilton may have seen a little of himself.
But Hamilton’s political antipathy dated back to the presidential contest of 1792, when Burr rather audaciously put himself forward as a vice presidential candidate for the nascent Republican Party against the Federalist incumbents, Washington and Adams. At that point, Burr had been elected New York assemblyman, then appointed attorney general by the governor, who later persuaded the Assembly to make him senator from New York just the year before his vice presidential bid. He was hardly a political threat to the Federalists, and certainly not in a campaign against Washington. Yet Hamilton savaged him:
I fear [Burr] is unprincipled both as a public and private man. . . . I take it he is for or against nothing but as it suits his interest or ambition. . . . I am mistaken if it be not his object to play the game of confusion and I feel it a religious duty to oppose his career.
A religious duty, no less. Divinely inspired, and permanent. And this for a man who went on to garner just one electoral vote, from South Carolina.
While Hamilton did not hesitate to say such things, and more, against Burr, Burr never responded in kind, preferring to answer Hamilton’s contempt with silence, which may have been all the more infuriating. Hamilton’s vituperation was unanswerable in any case, as it stemmed from something far deeper than any transient political disagreement but may have been embedded in his psyche. But in seeing evil in Burr, he brought some out in himself. The duel did not derive from circumstances, but from the essence of who these men were and aspired to be.
Who you are can depend on where you are, just as what you seek can depend on where you’ve come from. The past is always pertinent. Hamilton came to America alone at sixteen, a penniless immigrant, from the West Indian island of Saint Croix, the only one of the original Founding Fathers not born on the continent; Burr was raised comfortably in New Jersey, the son of the second president of the college that became Princeton University, and the grandson of the greatest theologian of the age. “I have never known, in any country,” John Adams once declared, “the prejudice of birth, parentage and descent more conspicuous than that in the instance of Colonel Burr.” As for the illegitimate Hamilton, Adams derided him as “the bastard brat of a Scotch peddler.”
The differences followed from there. Eager for acclaim, Hamilton was resplendent in dress and fair in coloring, with those violet eyes; reserved, Burr dressed most customarily in black, his eyes were black too, bottomless, and he wore his fine dark hair straight back, to reveal a luminous white forehead. In argument, Hamilton could take four hours to say what Burr could say in thirty minutes. Burr was the one with the common touch, whereas Hamilton could sound superior. All the same, Burr was the furtive one, writing many of his letters in code and keeping no notes. Hamilton was a straight party man; Burr was impossible to categorize politically. Hamilton believed in an almost neoclassical sense of order, balance, and regularity; Burr was a dreamy and impetuous romantic. While both devoted themselves to the ladies, Hamilton strayed only once in his marriage, catastrophically. Burr remained faithful in his but was an epic lothario outside of it.
There were plenty of similarities, of course, but they may have only encouraged the antagonism. They had nearly identical builds, both short and slender—Hamilton about five-seven and Burr an inch less—and may both have felt they had something to prove. They were just a year apart in age, with Hamilton the elder, which may have encouraged a kind of sibling rivalry. Both were extraordinarily intelligent—quick, insightful, articulate, educated. But in the small public arena of a young country, their rare talents may have only pulled them into tighter conflict as they ascended into an ever narrower circle of influence. Personally magnetic and immensely capable, they were born leaders, a fact demonstrated both in war and in peace, but in politics they had sharply contrasting styles and skills, as Hamilton was brilliant at backroom politicking while Burr was the first political candidate to campaign openly for his office, rather than leave the electioneering to surrogates. Each envied, and feared, the abilities of the other.
Their rivalry became a study in contrasts by which each man came to define the other, and be defined by the other, as light defines shadow, or up defines down. Each was what the other was not, Hamilton the man who would never be Burr, Burr the man who would never be Hamilton. The differences, however, were oddly complementary, like the competing images of an optical illusion: Both couldn’t be taken in simultaneously, but neither could be removed, either, without destroying the picture.
So, no, the duel did not start on the morning of July 11, 1804, with a stray word from Hamilton earlier that year. Conflicts do not begin at the end. It had begun like a cancer, imperceptibly, and only gradually turned lethal. A mild irritation had evolved into disdain, then into dislike, then into a hatred, and finally into a war that transcended all reason and eclipsed everything else. When the two men faced each other down at sunrise at Weehawken, each did it to save himself. If one was to live, the other had to die.
Part One
The Roots of the Hatred
Nassau Hall, the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, in 1764, five years before Burr was admitted at the age of thirteen. To the right stands the president’s house, where Burr’s father and grandfather died before Aaron Burr was two. When Hamilton realized he would be older than Burr had been when he’d graduated from the college, he attended King’s College, later Columbia University, instead.
ONE
In the Hands of an Angry God
IN EARLY JUNE of 1752, a wizened figure, cloaked in black, made his slow way north from Newark, New Jersey, to Stockbridge, a farming village arrayed on either side of a broad, rutted street on the edge of civilization in the chilly Berkshires of western Massachusetts. It was a treacherous three-hundred-mile journey that could take a week—by sail up the Hudson to Albany, then east by wagon through pine forests that were said to be thick with Mohawks.
The traveler was the thirty-eight-year-old Reverend Aaron Burr Sr., president of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, which had been founded recently in Elizabethtown. A kindly character with a penetrating gaze, he was unusually forceful for someone so slight. He possessed a vast storehouse of classical knowledge, some humor, and, according to a contemporary, a “lofty style,” the italics suggesting this was not entirely a compliment. He was coming to Stockbridge in search of a wife, and he had every reason to think he would find one.
Pastor of the First Church of Newark, the most prominent church in New Jersey, since he was twenty-two, he’d taken over the presidency of the college after the death of its founder, four years into the school’s existence. He moved it from Elizabethtown to Newark, and, without compensation, taught eight students the Hebrew Bible, Greek and Latin, rhetoric, natural and moral philosophy, history, divinity, and politics. After boosting the enrollment to nearly fifty, he’d undertaken to move the college to the village of Princeton. He’d been raising the funds for a proper campus by running lotteries in local towns, soliciting potentates like New Jersey’s royal governor, Jonathan Belcher, and importuning a variety of English aristocrats eager to educate the colonists.
He’d come to Stockbridge because he had set his eye on Esther Edwards, a cheerful, moon-faced beauty of twenty. He’d met her only once, six years before, when she was barely a teenager, but he’d never forgotten her spirited ways. To some at the college, the prospect of their esteemed president betrothed to a flirtatious twenty-year-old was unnerving, but Burr himself had no reservations. He’d allotted three days to the task of securing Esther’s assent at the snug Edwards house on Main Street, and that is precisely how long it took. Esther was quite candid when she told a friend why she’d agreed: to gain “a bedfellow.” Then she added with a silent cackle, “Tis better to Marry than to—!” The nuptials were set for Newark a fortnight later.
The whole operation was conducted so briskly that Burr had plenty of time left over to devote to Esther’s father, Rev. Jonathan Edwards. A Calvinist theologian of vast renown throughout the colonies, he was also a prominent member of the New England elite, the so-called River Gods who governed every aspect of life—political, judicial, military, and much more—in the wide plain of the Connecticut River valley that pushed up into western Massachusetts. Serene looking despite his wiry intensity, Edwards had a high forehead that conveyed an almost eerie intelligence, all-seeing eyes, and a slender mouth that rarely curved into a smile.
Back in 1734, Edwards had unleashed a bone-shaking religious fervor, known as a Great Awakening, that ripped like a wind out from his pulpit in Northampton, down through the valley’s broad reach, as far east as New Haven, and southwest into New York and New Jersey. It had begun with an impassioned funeral sermon he had delivered at the service for a young man who had died in agony of pleurisy, every breath labored, as if his chest was being crushed by a force he couldn’t see. To Edwards, that was God’s punishment for his wasting his precious youth, as so many did, in a life of “levity and vain mirth,” rather than in devotion to the Lord. Let his death be a lesson to young people everywhere, Edwards thundered. That made an impression, but when a young wife died shortly after, his sermon struck the parish like lightning. For this woman had devoted herself to God—and everyone noticed that she had died without a flicker of distress. Proof, Edwards said, “of God’s saving mercy.” With that, Edwards’s evangelism swept up the young, who inspired their parents to rededicate themselves to the church. In short order, the ways of God became the only topic in Northampton. “Other discourse,” Edwards noted approvingly, “would scarcely be tolerated in any company.” As his message of God spread parish by parish, throughout the northern colonies, Edwards became something close to a divinity himself.
In 1736, when he was a recent Yale graduate, Aaron Burr Sr. had been inclined toward a scholar’s life, but with the Great Awakening, “God saw fit to open my eyes” to religion. Or Rev. Edwards had. Burr might have been one of the wayward youths Edwards had fulminated against, a young man “polluted,” as Burr himself put it, “by nature and practice.” Newly penitent, Burr declared himself the recipient of “the Divine wrath I deserved.” To restore himself, he accepted the call.
It was on a visit to the Reverend Edwards in Northampton that Burr had first met Esther. By the time Burr came courting his daughter, Edwards had fallen victim to some of the very passions he had unleashed. In 1750, the congregation had tired of his frightful severity and cast him out of the church he had once ruled. It was in exile that Edwards came to Stockbridge, amid the wilderness of the chilly, low-slung Berkshires. Here he presided over the town’s Congregational church and served as a missionary to the Stockbridge Indians who had settled there among a clutch of hut-wigwams to receive religious instruction and social guidance from the English in that “praying town.” Rather than seek to stir another awakening, Edwards devoted himself to towering religious works like The Freedom of the Will and The Nature of True Virtue, which pushed theology deep into psychology and onto the verge of metaphysics.
Edwards’s driving interest was in man’s relationship with God, but he never entirely acknowledged that that was never mutual. While God could plumb the soul of the believer, the believer could never discern the mind of God. He must take God’s love on faith, no matter how many cruelties he visited on the faithful. All human suffering was deserved, Edwards argued, punishment for sins that God alone could detect.
In his most memorable sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Edwards depicts the errant soul as a helpless spider dangled by the Almighty over the fires of hell. Terrifying as the prospect of being cast forever into this burning pit might be, it is far worse, Edwards insists, to contemplate God’s disgust at what makes that act so necessary.
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.
The ferocious imagery of damnation aside, the sermon captures the terrors of daily life in Stockbridge, and throughout the colonies, where the Christian settlers were supposed to count themselves lucky whatever happened, even if they were scalped by marauding Indians, slaughtered by the militant French, or assaulted by one of the many contagions that swept through the colonies. To Edwards, it was meant to be reassuring that, despite such perils, God alone decides the settler’s fate. To him, the true hazard is not sickness or war, but sin.
The clucking in the college over the difference in age between the Burrs did not quickly dissipate. While one student found Esther “amiable in her person, of great affability and agreeableness in conversation,” that was a minority view, and local wags found much to dislike in a dainty young thing with her “Calimaco gown” and “Corded Dimity.” Her husband had to warn her to “expect to hear, & Bare a great deal of ill nature.”
Esther resolved to take all of it, and more, to be the wife of such a wonderful husband. As she wrote her bosom Boston friend Sally Prince: “Do you think I would exchange my good Mr. Burr for any person or thing on Erth! No sire! Nor for a Million Such worlds as this yt had no Mr. B——r in it.” Whenever they were apart, she counted the minutes until his return. “O my dear it seems as if Mr. Burr had been gon a little Age! & it is yet but one Fortnight!” she wrote Prince when Burr had gone to visit Prince’s father and her own. “I imagine now this Eve Mr. Burr is at your house, Father is there & some others, you all set in the Middleroom, Father has the talk, & Mr. Burr has the laugh, Mr. Prince get room to stick in a word once in a while.” Life wasn’t a complete delight for Esther in the president’s tight, hip-roofed house under the buttonwood trees between his Presbyterian church and the town jail. As the wife of the president cum parson, Esther was obliged to bake “Mince-pyes & Cocoa-nut-Tarts” for thirty at a moment’s notice. And there were existential worries. In the sweaty heat of summer on July 9, 1755, an entire English regiment headed by General Edward Braddock was annihilated when it staged an attack on the French stronghold of Fort Duquesne, outside Pittsburgh. If their British protectors could be destroyed there, they certainly could be slaughtered in Newark—and then what? “O the dreadful, awful news!” Esther fairly shrieked to Sally Prince. “General Braddock is killed and his army defeated. Oh my dear, what will, what must become of us!” She tried to think of it as God’s justice. “O our sins, our sins—they are grown up to the very heavens, and call aloud for vengeance, the vengeance that the Lord has sent—’Tis just, ’tis right.” But her heart wasn’t in it.
Her husband took up her father’s line as he bellowed from the Newark pulpit that the Duquesne massacre only portended worse calamities to come, all of them richly deserved. “Our men slaughtered! Our wives and daughters delivered to the lusts and fury of a lawless soldiery! Our helpless babes dashed against the stones!” It was too much for Esther. “’Tis very probable that you and I may live to see persecution,” she soberly told Sally Prince, “and may be called to give up everything for the cause of God and a good conscience—even to burn at the stake.”
In 1754, Esther had given birth to her first child, Sarah, whom neither parent admired, Burr predicting she’d be a “numbhead,” and Esther insisting, rather tepidly, she’d be “above middling on all accounts.” In the snows of early February, two years later, the Reverend Burr was off attending to his pastoral duties—leaving Esther, almost nine months into her second pregnancy, feeling that the “Sun does not give as much light as it did when my best Self was at home.” Heavy with child, she lumbered through the snowdrifts to a friend’s that chilly Wednesday evening, February 5, to keep her spirits up. The next morning she was feeling “very poorly unable to write.” That afternoon, her husband still away, she delivered Aaron Burr Jr.
Aaron proved a weakly baby, prone to flu and other illnesses. His health gradually improved, but Esther was not drawn to him. “A little dirty Noisy Boy,” she called him, fairly hissing. “Very sly and mischievous.” It was with some reluctance that she admitted he was more energetic than Sally, “and some say handsomer, but not so good tempered.” He must have cried, fussed, refused to be calmed, for she concluded: “He requires a good governor to bring him to terms.”
After Aaron turned one, Esther bundled him up for the long journey by sled to Stockbridge to show him to her parents. A frightening passage anyway, it was made all the worse by the terrible news from August 10 that the British Fort Oswego in upstate New York had fallen to the French and Indians. Worse still was the duplicity: As terms of the surrender, the French general Montcalm had assured the English soldiers that they would be unharmed once his troops entered the fort. The French observed the agreement, but once the soldiers were inside, the Indians sprang on the defenseless English, scalped dozens of them, butchered others, and made off with the rest.*
To Esther, it was all too awful. In her imagining, Indians were everywhere. The Mohawks were keen to take revenge on the turncoat Stockbridge Indians and their English keepers. Esther imagined she could see savages flitting in the shadows of the thick, leafy woods all around, their faces streaked with war paint, bows drawn to pierce her and her baby Aaron with arrows, or butcher them both with tomahawks, all amid fearful screams of battle, knives at the ready to scalp her and who knew what else.
At the family house on Main Street, the Reverend Edwards tried to reassure her that God never punished without good reason. If the English had suffered, it was because they deserved it. From the pulpit, he insisted to his anxious parishioners that it would be far worse to lose God than to lose their lives. Esther found that some comfort, but still, she decided to return home directly with young Aaron; it was too frightening to stay. Before she left, her father instructed her to remain close to God and all would be well. “What a mercy that I have such a Father!” she declared after she left. “What a guide!”
When she returned, the new college in Princeton was almost complete, a staggering accomplishment, a new Jerusalem. The main building, Nassau Hall, rose three stories and was 176 feet long and a third as wide. Esther was sure it was the biggest “on the continent.” A handsome president’s house stood beside. The students responded with such enthusiasm that it seemed the college was experiencing an “awakening” all of its own, Aaron Burr Sr. noted proudly. “Religious concern has been universal. Not one student excepted.”
The next summer, 1757, Burr Sr. rode to Stockbridge to tell his father-in-law the thrilling news in person. By now, though, the town was virtually under siege. The French and Indian forces had taken the British fort at Lake George, less than a hundred miles away—close enough, Burr wrote Esther, that they could “hear the firing at the fort” in Stockbridge. Rev. Burr decided not to tarry, but hurried home again, arriving at their impressive new Princeton quarters as the leaves fell in October. He’d hardly gotten there before he had to set out again to Elizabethtown, ten miles distant, to see what he could do about exempting a student from military duty.
When he returned this time, he was crushed to discover that New Jersey’s governor Belcher, loyal supporter of the college, had just died at seventy-five. “Such a loss,” he lamented to Esther.* Already exhausted from his travels, he felt obliged to labor over the funeral sermon, but the strain brought on a burning fever that left him delirious. “The whole night after he was irrational,” Esther reported. Weak, blurry, Burr was determined to deliver the oration in Newark all the same. When he came back, he was ghostly pale. Drenched with fever, wheezing, white, he collapsed into bed and never rose again. He died three weeks later. He was forty-two.
Esther was devastated. As awful as it was to lose her bedmate, she was frightened she would not set a proper Christian example for her children, as her father had made clear was essential to warding off such calamities. “I am afraid I shall conduct myself so as to bring dishonor on my God, and the religion which I profess!” she wrote her mother. “No, rather let me die this moment than be left to bring dishonor on God’s holy name.” Pathetically, she begged her not to “forget their greatly-afflicted daughter (now a lonely widow), nor her fatherless children.” She tried to see by her suffering that God was close by. And he sometimes truly seemed to be. After burying her husband, Esther told her mother, “God has seemed sensibly near”—and shown her the way to deliverance. “God has given me such a sense of the vanity of the world, and uncertainty of all sublunary enjoyments as I never had before,” she announced. “The world vanishes out of my sight! Heavenly and eternal things appear much more real and important, than ever before.”
In the midst of these trials, Aaron Jr. came down with a raging fever of his own that left him churning on the bed, his hair drenched with sweat. Esther took that as a sign of God’s love too. He wished to claim her boy. It was all too beautiful, to be immersed in so much divine love. “I was enabled to resign the child,” she wrote her father. “God showed me that the child was not my own, but his.” Her husband dead, the boy’s life ebbing—the very gloom was thrilling. “He enabled me to say, Although thou slay me, yet will I trust in thee.” “One evening, in talking of the glorious state my dear departed must be in,” she confided to her father, “my soul was carried out in such long desires after this glorious state, that I was forced to retire from the family to conceal my joy.” It was beyond happiness. “When alone, I was so transported and my soul carried out in such eager desires after perfection, and the full enjoyment of God, and to serve him uninterruptedly, that I think my nature would not have borne much more.” She ended: “I think I had a foretaste of Heaven.”
It was the full flower of her father’s preaching. Hell may be below, but God was above, and one need only reach for him. The Reverend Edwards himself came to Princeton to take over the presidency vacated by his son-in-law and to occupy the house in which he’d died. He had been in Princeton only a few months, when, to protect himself from an epidemic of smallpox that was sweeping through the colonies, he had himself inoculated by a Philadelphia physician, Dr. William Shippen, the founder of the medical college there, and a good friend of the family. Edwards had been a naturalist before he was a theologian, and he wished to demonstrate the value of medical science to the academic community. The inoculation was a fairly simply matter of slicing open a small wound, inserting a few pustules of the disease, and letting the body develop immunity as it healed. By a quirk, the technique had been brought from Africa by a “Negro-man” owned by the prominent Puritan minister Cotton Mather, and it may have taken on a tinge of divine providence. In this case, however, the inoculation did not confer immunity. It gave him the full-blown disease.
Smallpox is hideous and excruciating, as the pox bubble up, lifting off bloody sheets of crusty skin, torturing the sufferer in his bed, every movement a dagger slice of pain. Worse for Edwards, the pox encrusted the roof of his mouth and throat so thickly he couldn’t speak above a whisper, and eating or drinking was impossible. But Edwards bore it all stoically, unmoving, his eyes on the ceiling, his afflictions a sign of God’s tender, embracing love. He rasped to his daughter Lucy, who had rushed down from Stockbridge: “It seems to me to be the will of God that I must shortly leave you.” He told her to thank their mother for producing “a most uncommon union” with him, and he directed his children, after his death, “to seek a Father, who will never fail you.” The end came on March 22. Dr. Shippen attended him; he said he had never seen anyone go with such “continued, universal, calm, cheerful resignation.”
Esther was inoculated successfully, but she soon came down with a fever that produced such hellish sweats and violent headaches that her mind floated free of reality altogether. Unmindful of her two children, she babbled incoherently for two weeks until she died, too, on April 7. She was twenty-seven. At the news, her friend Sally Prince fell into a pit of mourning for her beloved “Burrissa,” who “held the empire of my breast.” But she resolved to love the Lord all the more.
TWO
Contentment
IN 1745, ON the West Indian island of Saint Croix, three weeks’ sail from New York, a cheerful, rather flirty sixteen-year-old redhead named Rachel Faucette lived with her mother, Mary, on a small plantation called the Grange. It was owned by Rachel’s sister Ann and her prosperous husband, James Lytton. It was perhaps an hour’s climb by horse up from the main port of Christiansted, with a fine view of the Caribbean and a steady breeze to counter the dusty island’s baking heat. Mary had come there with Rachel to escape her husband, John Faucette. A French Huguenot, he’d come to the nearby island of Nevis to escape the brutal French persecution after the religiously tolerant Edict of Nantes had been summarily revoked at the end of the previous century. John Faucette had learned doctoring, enough to pass himself off as a healer, and probably as a veterinarian, too. The couple had seven children, but despite John’s medical skills, five of them died from one or another of the many contagions—malaria, dysentery, yellow fever—that burned through the island. That was hard enough for both parents to bear, but when some land investments soured, dropping the family into poverty, John Faucette turned bitter, then outright cruel, and Mary decided to take Rachel and leave him. The abuse from him must have been extreme, for she obtained from the island’s chancellor the right, rarely granted, to “live apart for the rest of their lives,” and also won a writ of “supplicavit,” enjoining her husband not to injure her physically or to “vex, sue, implead” her legally.
But the agreement also required Mary to renounce all rights to her aging husband’s property after his death; her share would go to Rachel instead. While she did receive a scant annuity, it would be hardly enough to keep the two from starvation. A marriageable daughter was about the only asset Mary possessed.
A Dane lived on the next estate, lower down the hill. Thirty years old, Johann Michael Lavien was tall, pale, and handsomely dressed in laced vests and dress coats, and, while he was neither vigorous nor charming, he expressed a romantic interest in Rachel that was welcomed by her mother, Mary, if not by her. To Mary, Lavien seemed like the perfect man to restore her fortunes: a well-to-do planter who’d been highborn in Danish society and retained his standing in the Danish court. To Rachel, there was something drooling about Lavien that made her uneasy. As was said later, he seemed to have the “mouth of a shark.”
Nonetheless, Rachel married Lavien at the Grange, with her sister and brother-in-law attending, and they settled next door on the broad estate he called Contentment. As soon as the couple was wed, the name proved bitterly ironic. For far from being highborn and prosperous, Lavien came to the marriage possessing little more than the fine clothes he’d worn to win Rachel, and his property was mortgaged to the hilt. Like so many other islanders, he’d come to Saint Croix to make a fortune in the sugar trade, only to lose whatever money he had. By marrying him, Rachel had taken a similar gamble, with a similar result.
No longer was he the genteel, courtly man he’d seemed to be while wooing. “A coarse man of repulsive personality,” sniffed a Hamilton descendant. In the records at Saint Croix, he spelled his last name half a dozen ways—Lovien, Lawine, and so on—probably to disguise his origins as a Sephardic Jew, not that such a background would have been a liability on an island like Saint Croix with a significant Jewish population. Still, his reversal of fortune did for him what a similar turn had done for Rachel’s father. It made him angry, and then mean, and then Lavien took it out on his wife. Rachel bore it for five miserable years, and then, in her desperation, left him, and even abandoned their son, Peter, not much more than a toddler. In his fury, Lavien brought the Danish court down on her, charging her not only with marital abandonment, but also with the worse crime of adultery, as he insisted that she had committed “errors” while they lived together, not just afterward. The fact that Rachel did not dispute the charge suggests it must have been true. That left the Danish authorities with no choice but to clap her in prison—a grim, dark, low-ceilinged hell in the Christiansted fort by the boisterous harbor. There, kept alive on cornmeal mush and an occasional scrap of cod, she sprawled on a dank stone floor, staring out a window slit through some sharply tipped iron bars at a slender patch of sky.
When she was released months later, she fled the island and made for nearby Saint Kitts to start afresh. Despite her tortured history, Rachel was still pert and enticing at twenty-one, and men noticed, one of them a Scotsman named James Hamilton, who, like Lavien, had come to the islands to make a fortune in the sugar trade and largely failed. Unlike Lavien, however, his lineage was genuine: the son of the fourteenth laird of the so-called Cambuskeith line of Hamiltons, who traced their lineage back to a twelfth-century castle ironically also called the Grange. James Hamilton was raised in Kerelaw Castle, an ivy-draped pile by the Firth of Clyde with a view of a rolling green landscape, where the Hamiltons owned half the arable land in the parish.
Since James was one of eleven children, including nine sons, and nowhere near the oldest, he had no chance of becoming the fifteenth laird, and he utterly lacked the qualities of industry and imagination to make up the deficit. “Bred to trade,” his grandson John Church Hamilton admitted.* He was hired out by an older brother to work in an inkle factory producing linen tapes, but James didn’t catch on, and, all his options exhausted, he went to sea.
Sugar was so profitable that competence was not essential to success, but it did help. James was undercapitalized and unlucky, but most of all he was inept. His brother John sent enough money to keep him from starving—but not enough to allow him to leave. The islands became his prison, just as they were for Rachel. Hamilton was working a menial job in the harbor at Saint Kitts when he met Rachel sometime in the early 1750s. Both were in social free fall—Rachel by her jail stay and Hamilton because of his financial failings. But Rachel had a flair, nicely symbolized by her flaming red hair, and obvious gumption to have risked everything to flee a husband she loathed. And James Hamilton’s aristocratic pretensions might have given her soul a lift. Relationships outside of marriage weren’t approved on Saint Croix, but they were common enough, and the two felt no obligation to withdraw from each other for lack of a marriage certificate. To start over, Rachel and Hamilton crossed to Nevis, the island from which her mother had fled, and where she’d inherited from her father, recently deceased, a small, two-story stone cottage by the sea in the port town of Charlestown. The thick limestone blocks of the house were a product of the slave economy. (With free slave power, heavy blocks were no more expensive than light ones, and held a tighter seal.) Cramped and ill lit, the house was not pleasant on the bottom floor, which they reserved for themselves, but this was the tropics, and, for all but sleeping and the most private acts, life was lived in the open air. And it was here, on January 11, 1755, that Rachel squatted over the earthen floor, a midwife hovering over her, straining to give birth to a son whose name would reflect James Hamilton’s frustrations and his aspirations both. He would be Alexander Hamilton, named for James’s father, the fourteenth laird, and heir to the Grange. Alexander was the couple’s second son after James, who’d been named for his father and was two years older. Alexander would be the couple’s last child.
ON A MAP, the island of Nevis was nearly a perfect oval, just seven miles across. Viewed from the sea, however, it seemed to go almost straight up, a steep, greened-over, jagged-topped volcano that rose more than three thousand feet to disappear into the swirling clouds. If Saint Croix and Saint Kitts and the other Leeward Islands were flat and peaceable, Nevis was bulked up, an angry god that cast a dark shadow across the sea.
In 1755, Nevis was home to about a thousand European settlers, most of them planters like Johann Lavien and James Hamilton who’d come to make or restore their fortunes. But they were vastly outnumbered by the ten thousand “nigro” slaves, a churning mass of African muscle imported by slave ships that unloaded their wares in the harbor not far from the Hamiltons’ stone house, their cargo to be paraded into the town square, where they would be displayed in cages, often naked, for bulk purchase. The slaves worked the sugar fields that made Nevis some of the richest land in the world.
In 1755, Nevis and the five other sugar-producing Leewards exported goods of greater value than all thirteen American colonies combined, and when the English were trying to decide whether to give France all of Canada or the single sugar-producing island of Barbados, it was a very close decision. Once reserved for sweetening the tea and coffee of European nobles, sugar had become more pervasive, and the trade infinitely more lucrative, as the sweetener found its way into cakes, candy, jam, pastry, and innumerable other sweets for which the middle class had developed a craving. Just in England, the importation of sugar jumped from 10,000 tons a year in 1700 to 150,000 tons a century later. Sugar was white gold.
With sweetness the lure, Nevis became a global trading center, as if it weren’t on the edge of the world, but at the very center of it. African monkeys and mahogany trees, Indian mangoes, Tahitian breadfruit, Spanish oranges—everything on the island seemed to come from somewhere else. Only the monstrous iguanas were native-born. They were five feet long, with green-and-gold scales that were metal hard; it could take three bullets at point-blank range to kill them. And, of course, the slaves came to enrich the planters, receiving nothing but misery in return. They worked under a broiling sun from dawn to dusk, felling the trees, clearing the fields, planting the sugarcane, then hacking off the cane from a plant that grew head high, and hauling it off to windmills that powered rollers to squeeze out the sweet juice—and sometimes caught a hand or an arm in the process. The juice was boiled down to precious granulated sugar, which was then exported by ship. Primitive and unabashed, many of the Africans worked naked, giving their masters all the more flesh to sting with their whips. One especially sadistic planter, Edward Huggins, established the island record for cruelty when he gave a male slave 365 lashes and brought his whip down on a female for 292 more. Brought into court for malicious conduct, Huggins was exonerated: His slaves were his property to do with as he liked. Worn out by their misery, two of every five imported slaves died within five years of their arrival on the islands.
In the face of such horrors, the slaves were not placid, which is why half the cannons at that Christiansted fort where Rachel Faucette was imprisoned were trained inland. An Anglican minister named Robert Robertson in 1727 saw that whites and blacks were both enslaved, the blacks by their chains and the whites by their fear. The more fiercely the planters subjugated the slaves, the more determined the slaves were to seize their freedom, which brought on harsher measures still. Rev. Robertson noticed that as soon as the slaves stepped off the fetid slave ships that had brought them from Western Africa they sought to rebel—making them an early model of the revolution on the mainland to come. According to Robertson, they immediately schemed to “find ways of working off their Irons, and rise upon the Seamen, and snatching Billets of Wood, or whatever offers, knock them down, toss them over-board, turn their own weapons upon them, and mischieve them all they can; and these Insurrections are not sometimes to be quell’d without much Effusion of Blood, the Sailors being forced in their own Defence to fire upon and slaughter the slaves.” In reprisal, the island laws were savage: If a slave raised a hand in resistance, that hand was chopped off. Any runaway who was caught would lose a foot. If he ran again, he’d lose the other. And any slave who attacked a white would be decapitated, but not before he’d been castrated, and ravaged by red-hot pokers.
Riding the volcano that was Nevis, everyone, black and white, faced the same tenuous existence of life amid the sea. Like most islands, Nevis was prone to fierce storms that seemed to whip up out of nowhere: Suddenly, the skies would darken, birds start shrieking, fish scatter to deeper water, and then the winds would come, ferocious ones that ripped through the island, turning life sideways, uprooting trees, smashing boats at harbor, and blowing down the houses in their path. Slaves working the fields knew to throw themselves to the ground and dig their hands into the earth to keep from being blown away.
And then there were the earthquakes. One started with a “strange, hollow noise,” according to an eyewitness, and then the ground opened up great chasms that could drop a man to the center of the earth, hissing geysers shot boiling water twenty feet into the air, and a massive tidal wave rose on the horizon, surged toward the shore, and crashed so hard up the beach that its waters drove a third of a mile up the mountain, destroying everything in their path. When the waters finally drained away, the capital city of Jamestown was no more.
IT WAS AGAINST this background that Alexander Hamilton was raised—a harsh world of angry weather, divided between those who whipped and those who were whipped, with struggling, impoverished families like the Hamiltons caught in between. The aristocratic Burr, even after that spate of deaths, would have identified with the planters, in their fine houses well up the mountainside, enjoying the sea breeze. Although Hamilton maintained the optimism of the talented, his life was hard, and it always would be hard, a matter of constant, grinding toil, with little gladness in it. He would forever live under the baking heat of the flatland, down with the slaves.
A proud man whose eyes in portraits never engage with the viewer, but look askance, trained on some distant object only he can see, Hamilton seems always to be trying to set himself apart, and often, as in the celebrated John Trumbull portrait, to place himself above. From birth, he’d strained to raise himself—to rise above his standing as a bastard. A harsh word, “bastard,” but one that he heard often from journalistic gadflies and political enemies like John Adams, whose snub of him as “the bastard brat of a Scotch peddler” quickly entered the annals of vituperation. Thinking of his father’s claims to the Grange, Hamilton once declared, “I have better pretensions than most of those who in this Country plume themselves of Ancestry,” but then added a heartbreaking line, that his birth was “not free from blemish.” For, of course, his parents could not have been married at the time of his birth; his mother had been unable to extract herself from the odious Lavien. It would not be for another four years that Lavien agreed to a divorce so he could marry again—to a local laundress, demonstrating the depth to which he had sunk. Even then, Rachel was legally prohibited from remarrying. So Alexander and James Hamilton were bastards, and would remain bastards, and penniless ones at that. To the Danish court, they were termed “obscene.” Or in Lavien’s still more vicious term, they were “whore-children.”
It was a stain that Hamilton could never wash off, as desperately as he tried, and so did his descendants as they laid on encomiums to Alexander’s parents, as if adjectives could undo the ignominy. One hailed Rachel as a “woman of superior intellect [and] elevated sentiment,” and another praised James Hamilton as a “dreamer,” whose fancies at least had some elevation to them.
THREE
Platonic Love Is Arrant Nonsense
YOUNG AARON HAD recovered from his own fever by the time his mother died. Now orphans, he and his sister, Sally, two and five, were entrusted to the care of Dr. Shippen, the inoculant, who brought them to his home at the corner of Fourth and Locust Streets in Philadelphia, joining his own children there. Their grandmother Sarah Edwards was to collect them eventually, but, in mourning for her double loss, she was not able to come down from Stockbridge until six months later, in September of 1758. No sooner had she arrived than she contracted dysentery, a raging inflammation of the bowels that killed her.
It was a frightful string of calamities, and one made all the more troubling for its being visited on the family of the greatest theologian of the age. What sin was being punished? Did other believers have anything to fear? Or was suffering proof of election? Sally Prince spoke for many as she extolled Esther as “a mortified humble self-denied lively Christian.” While she was unnerved at the idea that “God points his arrows at me,” she decided she would “gladly . . . follow my dear beloved into the valley of DEATH.” She set aside all doubts. “I want to lay low at the foot of God and resign to him.”
It is impossible to know what the children thought. At nearly five, Sally would certainly have sensed the sweeping loss—not only of parents and grandparents, but also of her life in the grand president’s house at Princeton and in the more humble Edwards quarters in Stockbridge. At two and a half, Aaron would have just started to emerge into consciousness and to store lasting memories. His first understanding of the world would have been of a dreadful vacancy. In his case, a double vacancy, as he was not only missing his parents, but missing the grandparents whose memories would have brought them back to life. It wasn’t until long after, when Burr was in his sixties, that he found some letters of his mother’s in her final derangement, when it appeared that Aaron’s fever would take him from her, too. She made clear that she was content with that, for little Aaron did not belong to her at all, but to God, who was willing to “comfort” her by “enabling [her] to offer up the child by faith.” By then, Burr had been exiled from the country and had nearly starved in Europe. So he knew suffering intimately, and he knew how hardship can be distorted into a perverse form of pleasure.
The children stayed on with Dr. Shippen for two years, until they moved in with their uncle Timothy Edwards. The oldest of Jonathan Edwards’s three sons, he was, as a twenty-one-year-old bachelor, an unlikely choice. But now that his parents were dead, he’d already taken in several of his younger brothers and sisters. An aspiring merchant, he lived in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, on the shore of the Elizabeth River that opened onto Newark Bay. From there, a ferry made the twenty-seven-mile passage to New York City. Edwards soon took a wife, Rhoda Ogden, a respectable name in Elizabethtown, and they eventually added fifteen children of their own, making the house a small village of twenty-one children altogether.
Burr was not overly fond of his guardian, who must have been tremendously put upon, and he played the rebel, as if the deaths cut any bonds to the strict Calvinism of his ancestry. At four, annoyed by something Timothy Edwards had said, he ran away and hid for “three or four days.” At eight, irked by the “prim behavior and severe morality” of a female visitor, he climbed up into the boughs of a cherry tree and pelted her with cherries. At ten, he decided to bolt. He made it to the New York docks, where he prepared to go to sea as a cabin boy. When Edwards chased him down and spotted him on board one of the sailing ships, Aaron shinnied up the topgallant mast and refused to come down until, as he wrote later, “all the preliminaries of a treaty for peace were agreed on.” Meaning that his irate guardian would not thrash him for his misbehavior.
Burr stayed put after that, spending much of his time on the Elizabeth River, close to home. There he’d swim, fish, or paddle about in his skiff with Matthias Ogden, an easygoing sandy-haired boy, technically his uncle as the brother of his aunt Rhoda, who would be a lifelong friend and the first of his political allies.
In the early years both Aaron and Sally were tutored by Tapping Reeve, a brilliant, wide-eyed scholar with womanly, shoulder-length hair who’d graduated from Princeton a few years before. In the one surviving portrait, he looks startled, but then, he was the kind of person whose eyes were more closely trained on his books than on life around him. A legacy from their father sent Sally to a girls’ school in Boston, and Aaron to Elizabethtown Academy, a strict school of thirty boys where Aaron, small for his age, held his own with the other boys, being more argumentative. One of its founders was Reeve, who later pursued his interest in the Burrs by wooing Sally, an idea that Aaron found astonishing, since he always considered her a bore. Nonetheless, Reeve eventually married her and took her back with him to Litchfield, Connecticut, where he would establish himself as one of the great legal talents of the day, creating the nation’s first law school.
At the ripe age of eleven, after two years of the academy, Aaron decided it was time to enter the college where his father and grandfather had been presidents. He appeared before the college’s authorities to make his case. Burr never would be tall, but he must have seemed minuscule to those black-robed elders, especially with his elfin ears clapped on either side of an unimpressive little face with a narrow nose and dark eyes that were set so deep in bony sockets that they must have seemed like two tiny caves. The group took little more than one look at the lad and sent him home. To Burr, that was infuriating, and, to show them their error, he set himself to learn the entire first two years of the Princeton curriculum—Latin, the Hebrew Bible, and the Greek New Testament, as well as rhetoric, logic, mechanics, and on and on—in a single year, even though it would require an endless series of grueling eighteen-hour days, rising before daybreak and studying deep into the night by candlelight. With two years of the curriculum under his belt, he would enter as a junior, two years in. That would be his revenge, and that was the plan. But when he returned to Princeton in the fall of 1769 at thirteen to plead his case once more, the college had a new president, a rigorous Scot named John Witherspoon whose academic brilliance manifested itself in physical eccentricity—as he possessed a balding head that, to the younger students, looked like a top, narrow at the tip and fat in the middle. Unfortunately for Burr, Witherspoon brought new requirements for admission. Regardless of what Burr might have studied, as a candidate for the junior class he would have to pass a stringent set of exams of Witherspoon’s own devising or go up against three classmates in an oral exam to determine if Burr was at their level. Burr chose the first, and he was granted admission—but only as a sophomore, not as a junior.
Burr was outraged, but he had little choice except to accept entrance as a sophomore, and to redouble the effort he’d put in at Elizabethtown. He would do the work of sophomore year, and of junior year, and of senior year, too. At that rate, he’d enter his senior year at fourteen, the youngest student ever to have that standing, and have all the work needed to graduate already done.
Still solidly Presbyterian from his father’s time, Princeton, with its massive granite Nassau Hall, had a monastic, interior quality. There was a tavern in town, the Hudibras, that was located in a “commodious Inn,” and a general store, but few other diversions. After the students were awoken by a servant’s bang on the door at five thirty, the day began with a round of earnest prayers, and, from then on, prayers alternated with study and meals until the candles were snuffed out at nine. That is when, determined to make up that extra year, Burr bent over his books all the more—the Hebrew Bible, Tacitus, rudimentary mathematics, the pages a dull yellow in candlelight—until midnight or later. And if, in his exhaustion, his mind balked at the prospect of another page, he’d cut back on his meals to starve himself, in the belief that digestion was wearying him.
He did not complete the three years in one year as he’d hoped, but he did in two, passing the requirements for a Princeton degree at fifteen. He might have finished with Princeton then, but he remained. Rather than continue his studies, he chose to engage instead in what his close political ally and the editor of his posthumous memoir, Matthew L. Davis, primly termed “idleness, negligence and . . . dissipation.” This at a time when the college was caught up in another of the religious convulsions called awakenings; Burr could not have been less interested. It was the first example of the erratic streak that became a Burr characteristic, as if his compass might point north one week and south the next. So it was here: Burr could not have worked harder to win the acclaim of the college, to say nothing of his late father and grandfather. Now he sought to antagonize all of them.
There was another activity in Davis’s list of fripperies that may explain all the rest and would prove defining: “gallantry”—a courtly, and therefore deceptive, term for a casual involvement with the opposite sex. While Burr’s friends made light of his numerous sexual conquests, they won the scorn of Davis, who could be quite prim on the subject.* Burr was an unabashed sexual enthusiast from puberty, and he enjoyed the close companionship of dozens if not hundreds of women, all of them willing if not enthusiastic. But to Davis he was a predator, whose victims were powerless to resist. “In his intercourse with females,” Davis wrote, “[Burr] was an unprincipled flatterer, ever prepared to take advantage of their weakness, their credulity, or their confidence. She that confided in him was lost. No terms of condemnation would be too strong to apply to Colonel Burr.” Why, Davis asked, did a man like Burr waste his time on such frivolities? “It is truly surprising how any individual could have become so eminent as a soldier, as a statesman, and as a professional man, who devoted so much time to the other sex as was devoted by Colonel Burr.”
But Burr himself didn’t regard these affairs as pointless at all. They were the point. “For more than half a century of his life they seemed to absorb his whole thoughts,” Davis admitted. “His intrigues were without number. His conduct most licentious.”
Intrigues. In retrospect, the word fits the shadowy Burr psyche. But sex is always a matter of discretion, a romp to be enjoyed behind closed doors, and sex outside of marriage especially so. It can’t not be an intrigue. But if it is unmonitored, it is a matter for the couple alone to decide, an arrangement that puts the woman in a vulnerable position, as she can be far more compromised than the man. If it is hidden, it will also go unrecorded, which might have served Burr’s interests.
Was Burr dastardly—or loving? We’ll never know. While the romances of most men of his station were primarily for their satisfaction, Burr thought of love more as a fair exchange, and a physical one at that. This may have been a rebellion against the astringent Calvinism of his father and grandfather, who, however joyfully lascivious they might have been in marriage, looked on sex outside of wedlock as an abomination. For all of his scattershot affairs, Burr wasn’t just a deflowerer of women, someone who enjoyed the quest and lost interest when he had secured the prize—although plenty of women must have thought so. He genuinely loved women, and loved them so much that he wanted more of them. He delighted in idling with them, enjoying the free play of sex for hours. What would a man rather do than love? And, having loved, what man wouldn’t want to remember? Burr not only dedicated himself to these romances, but kept records so he could savor them all again later, like a botanist thrilled with every detail of some rare woodland flower he’d spotted years ago and pressed into a book. His whole life, he carefully saved all his diary entries, his mementos, his love letters, his couplets, and stored them all in a kind of romantic treasure chest where he hoped they would be safe forever, his most prized possessions. Davis burned all of it, every scrap.
A few sexual details slipped into Davis’s volume. The first of Burr’s many romantic conquests most likely dates from this year of liberation, when he was fifteen, and it is included, presumably, because it fits Davis’s thesis. As Davis tells the story, Burr seduced a young woman from Elizabethtown named Catherine Bullock and then cruelly abandoned her, leaving her to die, he says, of a “broken heart.” Of course, heartbreak is not a medical diagnosis, and later research has suggested that the cause of death was tuberculosis. And, in any case, heartbreak is born of eagerness, not disgust. It’s a fair guess that the relationship was brief and intense and ended by Burr, a statement that could apply to many of them. But that doesn’t mean it was “licentious.” Burr simply took his pleasure and then failed to give her enough in return.
His slight, chatty, Irish-born friend William Paterson, a Princeton graduate—and future Supreme Court justice—ten years older, wondered, like Davis, why Burr wasted so much time in Elizabethtown, when he could be improving himself at Princeton. Elizabethtown had always struck Paterson as too tempting, with so many delightful young ladies about. “Perhaps,” he told Burr, “the reason that I fear it, makes you like it. There is certainly something amorous in its air.” It was a scent that Burr could detect in any breeze. Paterson admits that he wasn’t immune, as he was himself just then hurrying to Philadelphia in pursuit of a certain “Miss ——,” whom Burr knew, and perhaps knew well. “Platonic love,” Paterson concluded, “is arrant nonsense.”
Burr tried writing a few orations that year of idleness, and one of the more memorable touched on the subject of “the passions,” which Burr considered the source of all action and feeling. “The passions give vivacity to all our operations,” he declared, “and render the enjoyments of life pleasing and agreeable.” He skipped over sexual passion, unsurprisingly, but may have alluded to it when he declared that no passions were inherently bad. Some were merely “unruly”—out of “balance”—and lacked “regulation.” In short, they were missing that “governor” his mother identified. They characterized the “savage tribes,” not “polished society.” They weren’t wrong, just out of place. He closed with a wish that no one fall victim to them. A wan wish, as it turned out, because he did.
Frisky and assertive, Burr became quite popular that last year. His fellow students called him “Little Burr,” and they meant it affectionately. He formed many attachments with the other rising young men in American politics, such as James Madison, Henry Brockholst Livingston of the New York political family, and the spirited Henry Lee III, better known later as Light-Horse Harry. Burr joined the Cliosophic Society, founded by his friend Paterson, a literary group where students gathered with a few chosen professors under the eaves of Nassau Hall to discuss poetry and practice orations like “Passions.”*
The Clio vied for intellectual supremacy with the American Whig Society, founded by Madison and the future poet Philip Freneau. Madison, always tin eared, derided the Clios as “screech owls, monkeys and baboons.” One of the professors was Dr. Samuel Smith, a dry stick whom Burr could not abide. Burr was Clio president, up in the big chair, slouching onto one chair arm, since he was too small to reach both simultaneously, when Professor Smith arrived an hour late to a meeting. Burr insisted that the professor stand before him while Burr scolded him, saying that the students expected a “different example” from him. Later president of the college, Smith must have quivered with indignation. The dressing-down became college legend.
When the time finally came to graduate, Burr delivered a commencement address on the topic of “Building Castles in the Air.” The text has been lost, but the thrust of it is evident—that a man needs to build a life on solid ground. This Burr did not do.
FOUR
The Prodictious Glare of Almost Perpetual Lightning
THE YOUNG ALEXANDER grew into a slim, narrow-shouldered boy with tender skin unsuited to the tropics; reddish brown hair that surely came from Rachel; and darting blue-violet eyes. As an illegitimate, or “outside,” child, Hamilton wasn’t allowed to attend school with the other children on Nevis, but he may have been tutored by a “Jewess,” one of the many who’d sought refuge on the islands for the same reason that Huguenots like Faucette did. Hamilton later claimed to have learned the Commandments in Hebrew. From Rachel, Hamilton came to appreciate the Anglican religion that drew her to church every Sunday, and he learned the French she’d learned from her father; he soon spoke it so fluently that he could later converse freely with the French diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Napoléon’s chief diplomatic aide. But the young Hamilton’s mind sponged up everything—historical facts, English poetry, mathematical principles, medical diagnoses. His true schooling came from a set of thirty-four leather-bound books, whose titles have to be guessed based on what he knew: the plays of Shakespeare, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Plutarch’s Lives, the poems of Alexander Pope. All of them shaped his understanding of the world and informed his writing too, giving it the forceful, rather impatient style of an adult well before he was one.
Strained by poverty, his parents’ relationship frayed over time from a constant bickering into open rages. Years later, Hamilton observed, “It’s a dog’s life when two dissonant tempers meet.” His own marriage would be placid, despite the disruptions he caused. When Alexander turned ten, his father left to collect a debt for a Saint Kitts client, and he never returned. Rachel took the boys across the water to neighboring Saint Croix, vaguely in the shape of the largemouth bass that could be found in abundance off its shores. It was a selfish move on James Hamilton’s part that brought his family nothing but woe. Still, ever after Hamilton was determined to be proud of his father. “You no doubt have understood that my father’s affairs at a very early day went to wreck, so as to have rendered his situation during the greatest part of his life far from eligible,” he later wrote a friend. “This state of things occasioned a separation between him and me, when I was very young.” It just happened; no one’s fault. But as the disappearance continued, the absence preyed on him. “What has become of our dear father?” he begged of his brother, James, more than a decade later, when his father had still not returned. He hated to think of him dying alone somewhere, untended, possibly starving. He’d send money—“to render the close of his life more happy than the progress of it”—if he only knew where.* His father had “too much pride and too large a portion of indolence,” he finally acknowledged, but nevertheless he clung tight to the notion that his father was worthy. As he put it: “His character was otherwise beyond reproach.”
In 1765, Rachel settled with her boys on the upper floor of a row house at 34 Company Street not far from the water in Christiansted, a sun-splashed town scented with salt air. She sold fish, flour, fruit, and other staples in a humble shop on the first floor. The store provided most of the family’s income, and much of their meals, supplemented by any milk Rachel could squeeze from the goat penned in back. Rachel had inherited five slave women from her father, and she rented them out for the brutal work in the sugar fields. By now, those five had produced four children, which were hers, too. One was a boy named Ajax, who became Alexander’s house slave, an uneasy relationship that spurred Hamilton’s abolitionism later.
In search of cheaper rent, Rachel shifted the family about a number of times, until 1767, when they came back to live at 34 Company Street once more. There, Rachel came down with one of the tropical fevers that swept across the island, and it soon infected twelve-year-old Alexander, too. Somehow she scraped up money for a physician, but his treatment was as harrowing as the disease—bloodletting, emetics, purgatives—and possibly more destructive, as it left them both exhausted, bathed in sweat, and oozing blood and excrement. Alexander rallied, but his mother continued to writhe on the bed, the fever burning her inside and out. Finally, on the night of February 19, 1768, Rachel lay still.
Alexander rallied to attend his mother’s funeral. The judge found public funds to outfit him and his brother with proper shoes and black veils, but that was all. As the mother of illegitimate children, Rachel was not eligible for the graveyard of the Anglican church she’d loyally attended. Instead, she was buried up the hill at the Grange, alone, under some mahogany trees. With his mother dead and father gone, Hamilton was no less an orphan than Burr. But he had no family members to rescue him. Instead, he had a family stigma to pull him further down.
When officers of the probate court swept into their rooms to inventory Rachel’s estate, they made clear they were not securing it for her two penniless sons, Alexander and James, but for her legal heir, Peter Lavien, the son Rachel had borne her husband. In a final act of malice, Johann Lavien had seen to it that his son should get everything, even though, at the time of Rachel’s death, Peter lived in some comfort in Beaufort, South Carolina, and had not laid eyes on his mother in eighteen years. So the last remnants of James and Alexander’s mother disappeared—all except for those books, which Alexander’s kind uncle James Lytton bought back for him; he kept them for the rest of his life.
Lytton’s ne’er-do-well son, also named Peter, was appointed guardian for the two teenagers, and he proved a horror of his own. Recently widowed, he’d scandalized the island by taking a black mistress and having a mulatto child with her. When a series of businesses failed, landing him ever deeper in debt, he became so irregular in his habits that his brother had him declared insane. Not long after, he was found lying in a pool of blood in his bed, having either shot or stabbed himself to death. His will passed over the Hamilton boys too. John Lytton tried to do something for them, but he was struck down by a fever too, and died in his bed.
Hamilton avoided emotional details in his letters, and he recorded no reaction at the time, but many years later, in 1782, he wrote of his irritation that Peter Lavien had died in Beaufort without thinking of him in his will. “He dies rich, but has disposed of the bulk of his fortune to strangers,” Hamilton complained. He was eager for something of his mother’s legacy. “The amount is not very considerable, but, whatever it might be, I shall be glad to have it.” Nothing was forthcoming.
Known in town to be studious and quick-witted, Hamilton caught on with the New York trading firm, Beekman and Cruger, that had supplied some of the goods in his mother’s shop from its local office. Both partners were from established mercantile families in New York and would do much to widen Hamilton’s view of the world. He caught another break when, improbably, a respectable King Street merchant named Thomas Stevens offered to take in both brothers, introducing them to a world of comfort they must have found unimaginable. Stevens had a bright, eager young son, Ned, who was two years older, but, with his flashing blue eyes and reddish hair, looked far more like Alexander than his own brother, James, did. Alexander never commented on the resemblance, but many others did. Thirty years later, Hamilton’s friend Timothy Pickering could not believe the similarity between Hamilton and Ned Stevens, who later became a doctor in New York. “I thought they must be brothers,” he wrote. When he passed that along to Stevens’s brother-in-law, James Yard, Yard was unimpressed, as he’d heard that “a thousand times.”
Although Hamilton died believing he was descended from Scottish lairds, he was likely the son of his new patron, Thomas Stevens of Saint Croix. Paternity would explain not only the uncanny likeness, but also the extraordinary gesture of extending guardianship to a non-relation. Properly, Alexander Hamilton was likely not Alexander Hamilton at all, but Alexander Stevens.
If Rachel had indeed been unfaithful, that would explain Lavien’s outrage and his insistence she be thrown in prison—depriving her of the ability to marry again and thus making Hamilton legitimate. Still, Lavien hadn’t been the one to damage Hamilton’s reputation. Rachel had done that, and then bestowed on her son the name of the man she betrayed.
THE JOB THAT Beekman and Cruger had in mind would have crushed an experienced wholesaler, to say nothing of a twelve-year-old. The firm supplied the island with everything from timber and shingles to pork and black-eyed peas—hundreds of items altogether, virtually everything that islanders needed but could neither grow nor make on their own. And, as for the goods and produce the island could grow to excess, Beekman and Cruger would ship it out to dozens of ports around the world. All of this was overseen by Alexander Hamilton, starting at age twelve.
Shipping was a matter of records, orders, inventories, prices, and weights, and nothing crossed the seas, bound for Saint Croix, or from it, without the details passing through the Beekman and Cruger office at the corner of King and King’s Cross Streets, just up from the harbor in Christiansted, not far from the fort where Hamilton’s mother had been imprisoned. At first, Hamilton’s work was supervised by the owners, but then David Beekman quit the business and Nicholas Cruger returned to New York, leaving Hamilton to run the office largely by himself. He didn’t just keep track of the paperwork, but handled the negotiations, assigned the cargo, and examined the goods themselves, coming and going, to make sure they were up to standard. All weights and measures were carefully recorded and compared, the results noted and filed. Hamilton also had to determine the most expedient sea routes, sometimes over a thousand miles, and the right type of ship, keeping in mind the proclivities of the captain and crew, who ranged widely in talents and temperaments, none of which were very appealing, and had to work out the various payments in more than a dozen different currencies, from Dutch stivers to Spanish pieces of eight. All of the records had to be set down in faultless penmanship in the ledger book, backed by an occasional stinging letter to enforce the agreements. “Believe me, sir, I dun as hard as is proper,” he assured Cruger, who oversaw his activities from New York.
It was at that desk that the young Alexander Hamilton left his “obscene” childhood behind. If this transition was born of necessity, it was also a product of his desire to make himself exemplary, with circumstances to match. If Burr assumed his mantle, Hamilton created his.
Not that it was easy overseeing blustery men many times his age, and many more his weight, while he teetered on the edge of nervous exhaustion from the weight of his cares. “I am so unwell,” he confided to Cruger just a few weeks after starting in, “that it is with difficulty I make out to write these few lines.” Nonetheless, he let Cruger know that he’d sold “30 bbls. flour more.” He rode his captains hard, cautioning a Captain Newton, off in “Curracoa,” to be “very choice” in the mules he selected, and to beware of the pirates along the “Guarda Costa” on his return. “Remember,” he added. “You are to make three trips this Season & unless you are very diligent you will be too late—as our Crops will be early in.” Before Newton could return, another ship appeared with seventy mules, but Hamilton assured Cruger by letter that the other mules would never sell, since the rival concern was demanding hard cash, and “Cash of all kinds [is] scarce here.” Sure enough, the other mules didn’t sell—but Newton’s didn’t either, since many of them had sickened en route.
It was a heady experience for a boy, but one he detested for his knee-scraping subservience to distant owners who’d left him with grueling, around-the-clock pressures and little hope that he would ever improve his situation. As he peered out from his King Street office at the human chattel being unloaded from Africa, he must have thought he had more in common with the burdened slaves than with their whip-wielding masters. Adding to Hamilton’s frustrations, Thomas Stevens had sent his son Ned to New York to be educated at King’s College while Hamilton labored on. “I contemn the groveling condition of a clerk,” he wailed to Ned, “to which my fortune, etc. condemns me, and would willingly risk my life, though not my character to exalt my station” (that “though not my character” is pure Hamilton). He went on:
I’m confident, Ned, that my youth excludes me from any hopes of immediate preferment, nor do I desire it, but I mean to prepare the way for futurity. I’m no philosopher, you see, but I may be justly said to build castles in the air. My folly makes me ashamed and beg you’ll conceal it, yet Neddy we have seen such schemes successful when the projector is constant. I shall conclude [by] saying I wish there was a war.
The castles make for an interesting point of contrast. Hamilton admitted to building them when he wasn’t, and Burr decried doing it when he was.
And, of course, there would be a war.
FOR ALL OF Hamilton’s complaints, he did have time for a little frivolity, and he spent it much the same way Burr did: pursuing women. If Burr recorded his activities in boastful letters, Hamilton resorted to rhymed couplets, and subtly suggestive ones at that.
So stroking puss’s velvet paws
How well the jade conceals her claws
And purrs; but if at last
You have to squeeze her somewhat hard,
She spits—her back up—prenez garde;
Good faith she has you fast.
Not bad for sixteen, both for a style that anticipates Byron and for a knowing way with women’s sexual ardor that suggests that, even then, he had enough experience to detail the intricacies of love. He was a quick study, after all.
His literary skills proved his salvation, and quite unexpectedly. The island was savaged by one of the ferocious, drenching hurricanes that periodically roared in from the sea. Most of the islanders scurried indoors to safety, but Hamilton ventured outside with a notebook and, bracing himself, scribbled some notes for a letter to the island’s Royal Danish American Gazette. Hailing the storm as “the most dreadful hurricane that memory or records can trace,” he went at it with a literary force that nearly matched its subject. “The roaring of the sea and wind—fiery meteors flying about in the air—the prodictious glare of almost perpetual lightning—the crash of the falling houses—and the ear-piercing shrieks of the distressed, were sufficient to strike astonishment into Angels.” This wasn’t just a storm; it was a message from the heavens: Humans were “vile worm[s]” that could use some humility.
A bravura performance, from one seemingly determined to deliver his own revenge on a world that had been so hard on him. In this scenario, Hamilton may have been a worm, only too aware of his pathetic limitations as a tiny clerk in a counting house, abused by fate. But, because of his knowledge, he was not a vile one—or a humble one, for that matter. He envied the hurricane’s wrath, its ability to waste the vile worms he detested. That was the inner message in his letter, wound tightly inside the outer one.
On an island not known for its literature, the composition was bound to command some attention, but the very elements that made him feel so frustrated and ashamed—his youth, his clerkship—made it a sensation, and it quickly won the attention of a Falstaffian minister, Hugh Knox, who’d drunk away his youth in New York City and then fallen under the sway of Rev. Aaron Burr Sr., of all people. The elder Burr reformed him by offering personal instruction in the Presbyterian faith, and then handed him off to the synod, who dispatched him to a small circle of hell—the hollow caldera of the remote volcanic island of Saba in the Leeward Islands. Only a few miles from Saint Croix, it had infrequent contact with any of the other islands, making it only a little more hospitable than the moon. Knox did his penance there for seventeen years, attending to the spiritual needs of the few villagers. Finally released from this purgatory, he returned to Saint Croix in time to read Hamilton’s gale-force prose and see a boy in desperate need of an education—at the Princeton of the now-deceased Burr Sr., Knox imagined, since its new president, Witherspoon, had put out the word that the college was seeking worthy students from just such far-flung places as Saint Croix. Knox got up a fund from the West Indies governor Ernst Frederick Walterstorff and various Lytton relations, and it was done. Within a week, Hamilton was aboard a packet bound for America, never to return.*
FIVE
Refinement
WHILE BURR DAWDLED at Princeton, Hamilton sailed into New York Harbor in the fragrant city heat of early summer 1773. No place in the world was so frenzied, so bustling. From the fortified Battery by the Hudson along the East River, the shoreline piano-keyed with wharves—Albany Pier, Murray’s Wharf, Beekman Slip, and a dozen more all the way around to the clattering shipyards well to the east—the sea air alive with squawking gulls, the rattle of cartwheels, the rude shouts of dockhands, the operatic cries of passengers searching for their ship, the yells of the newsboys, the patter of visitors in every conceivable language. It was a meeting of the Old World and the New, but it was a scene like no other along the coast, or in the world, for people came to New York to make an entrance into a new life in a city that called itself new, because it was new and always would be. Since 1760, the city population had swelled by almost a quarter to just under twenty-five thousand, beginning a stampede of immigrants that would soon push New York past Philadelphia as the most populous city in America.
It was made for Hamilton. The city would define him, and he would define it. Although he shifted his residence with the seat of government, from the moment he set foot on the dock, he never thought of anywhere else as home. Others might gape at the turbulence of such a rambunctious city; Hamilton was keen to throw himself into it and ride its waves. Even at sixteen, he was not one to be cowed. A handsome lad with those electric eyes and an erect bearing, he had grown used to staring down big-chested sea captains over shoddy merchandise and poor performance, and he was not likely to be put off by noisy New Yorkers. The proper John Adams of Massachusetts was appalled by New Yorkers and their unmannerly ways. “With all the opulence and splendor of this city, there is very little good breeding to be found,” he sniffed. “We have been treated with an assiduous respect but I have not seen one real gentleman, one well-bred man, since I came to town. At their entertainments there is no conversation that is agreeable; there is no modesty, no attention to one another. They talk very loud, very fast and altogether. If they ask you a question, before you can utter three words of your answer they will break out upon you again and talk away.” But that’s Adams at his fussiest. Hamilton would talk away. He was home.
EVEN AS ITS population grew, New York had fewer people than Saint Croix, and only half the land. But most residents were crammed onto the southern tip of the island by the harbor, where oddly angled streets ran past shops stuffed with fine goods; coffeehouses loud with political talk; taverns full of noisy, cussing patrons; and churches of every denomination, their spires dominating the sky. But the pews were emptying, as the awakenings receded. In Manhattan, God was passing out of style.
Inflated by the sugar trade, Saint Croix’s port did more business than New York’s, but New York’s economy, boosted by the first stirrings of industrialization, generated a much broader range of goods to send to the sugar islands, receiving their sugar, rum, and slaves in return. The activity created a rivalry with the mother country that was starting to grate on both sides—and would lead to a conflict that would define the age. To regain Britain’s edge, King George had pushed through the Stamp Act of 1765, imposing stiff duties on English paper goods, and would soon squeeze the colonists further with the fabled Tea Act, which stoked outrage throughout the colonies, and no less in New York, which drew so much wealth from British trade.
For all of its new immigrants and rising patriotic sentiment, New York was still, at heart, an English city, and as Hamilton wandered about a fashionable neighborhood like the one along Queen Street, he might have imagined himself in London’s Mayfair. Shops offered fine glassware, European furniture, leather-bound books, and other luxury goods of an energized economy. Wealthy merchant families like the Beekmans and Crugers built palatial homes. The ladies attired themselves in the latest London fashions—cloaks, hooped petticoats, and bonnets of India damask or Venetian poplin—while the men were decked out in “gallant” wigs, cravats, silk handkerchiefs, walking sticks, toothpick cases, and the occasional sword. The best families in Manhattan, exactly sixty-nine in total, owned elegant carriages, chaises, and phaetons, all of them relatively new presences to the city streets, to whisk their passengers to the Governor’s Ball, the charmingly informal “turtle feasts,” a card table for a private game of whist, some Haydn at the New York Harmonic Society, or the New Theater on Nassau Street to see Richard III, or, for a thrill, The Intriguing Chambermaid.
The growing economic disparity between rich and poor had given rise to a new word to clarify the social distinction: “refinement.” Just the word was refined, as only the rich used it, and employed troops of professionals to create it. Elocutionists instructed their charges to lengthen their vowels with more breath and to eliminate crude expressions like “Split me, madam” from their conversation. To instill social grace, dancing masters were enlisted to give their clumsy, gawky students a smoothness of motion. Smoothness was key. In a herky-jerky world, the aristocrat needed to be smooth. Class was certainly not new to New York, but it was new on this scale, and it had never before been a choice. For Hamilton, the choice was easy.
Whatever else Hamilton brought with him to America, he possessed only one article of value—a list of Rev. Hugh Knox’s connections among the Presbyterian elite. Given the city’s social stratification, for a young man from the West Indies—a place so foreign that many people expected him to be a Negro—it would be impossible to get anywhere without such entrée, and he could never have created it on his own. Foremost among the Presbyterians was the Reverend John Rodgers, a pompous figure who carried a gold-headed cane as he completed his rounds making loving gestures to the poor. At that point, Hamilton was bent on attending Princeton as Knox had intended. When they met, Rodgers must have mentioned that his son had recently attended the college. In fact, he had roomed there with a young man with a notable pedigree. Aaron Burr Jr., son of the former president—perhaps Hamilton had heard of him? Rodgers might have added that Burr was a remarkable boy who’d entered Princeton at thirteen and finished his studies just two years later, which was nearly a record. That, in turn, might have provoked Rodgers to ask Hamilton how old he was. Either then, or shortly afterward, Hamilton subtracted two years from his age—a curious development for a boy who had previously felt too young. Now he was no longer a year older than this Burr, but a year younger.
It was Hamilton’s first awareness of Burr, and it shaped him almost ineradicably, as Burr may have come to embody that elusive gentility Hamilton saw everywhere about him but could not think how to obtain. Rodgers must have advised Hamilton that, no matter how eager he was, he could not go directly to Princeton without formal schooling. This delay made the age adjustment all the more imperative. Hamilton agreed to attend Elizabethtown Academy, just as Burr had. Or, perhaps, because Burr had.
A mere coincidence at first, and the substance is a matter of some speculation, this virtual meeting of Burr and Hamilton through Rodgers. It might have been the work of that spider of Jonathan Edwards. But this spider is not at God’s mercy; men are at the mercy of it. In the world of Burr and Hamilton, after all, God is not the prime mover, leaving the spider to cast its silky, invisible web as it will. And sometime in 1773 the first wisp wound about these two proud, unsuspecting young creatures, joining them, and then the spider began the slow work of binding them, loop by loop, ever tighter in an unnatural embrace.
SIX
In the Roseate Bowers of Cupid
HAVING LIVED IN Elizabethtown since he was four, Aaron Burr had long since ceased to notice it. To a boy from the tropics like Hamilton, though, the chill in the air that fall, the turning leaves, and the first skim of ice on the Elizabeth River, all of it would have been astonishing, to say nothing of the grand brick houses in the center of town, the proper estates farther out, apple and pear orchards that extended to the rolling hills, the geese tottering about with long sticks tied sideways to their necks to keep them from escaping through the fence, or the town’s academy, a fine two-story building topped by a gleaming cupola, the first schoolhouse Hamilton ever entered.
Late that summer, Burr came home from Princeton, on one of his regular forays to visit one beauty or another, and he may have overlapped with Hamilton there when he was settling in. More likely, they didn’t cross paths, reflecting the radically different stations they occupied in those days, with Burr a longtime resident at the center of this elegant town and Hamilton a visitor on the outskirts.
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38 of 40 people found the following review helpful. ... letter from Alexander Hamilton to the author (John Sedgwick's great, great By Jonathan Pedrone This book opens with a letter from Alexander Hamilton to the author (John Sedgwick's great, great, great --many times great grandfather who was the Speaker of the House). Although the letter itself does not play a prominent role in the book, it is a very interesting factoid and offers a connection between the author and Hamilton.Being a student of history, and having read several historical biographies like this I found this book to be thoroughly enjoyable. The story of Hamilton and Burr's duel (and the eventual end of one of the founding fathers lives via a duel) is a fascinating story in history. Both Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr had a tremendous impact on this nation. One cannot go far anywhere in America and not see the impact of Hamilton's national bank.The book is extremely well written and researched. The author traces both histories of Hamilton and Burr from birth until their eventual deaths. The book is perfect for history buffs who want to relive some of the early days in the founding of our country. My only complaint with the book is that at times there was a bit too much information. All of the details, and names made the book at times a bit cumbersome. However, for a history buff the book is loaded with enough stories and interesting facts to keep you fully engaged until the end. In some ways I wish the book was a bit shorter, and left off some of the details for the ease of the reader. Readers may also find the inclusion of old letters (with all the variant spellings) to be a bit cumbersome at times -- going for authenticity the author has kept the original spellings.If you are interested in reading a biography of Hamilton and Burr this book is for you. If you have never heard of the story of their fateful duel in New Jersey, this book will also enlighten you. It is well written, extensively researched, and is certain to become a classic on the subject of Hamilton and Burr.
22 of 22 people found the following review helpful. A pair of wolves in a tight cage... By Cynthia K. Robertson as light defines shadow, or up defines down. The differences however, were oddly complementary, like the competing images of an optical illusion: Both couldn’t be taken simultaneously, but neither could be removed, either, without destroying the picture.”The loss of Hamilton to the country was especially tragic and I find it especially sad that his brilliant contributions to his adopted country have been mostly forgotten. Without his Federalist Papers, the Constitution would have probably not been adopted. He also created the financial system for our young country. While Burr was not without accomplishments, he was more about Aaron Burr and he often “combined high purpose with low skullduggery, a Burr trademark.” After reading War of Two, it seems inevitable that Hamilton and Burr would end up on the cliff in Weehawken, NJ. Sedgwick has a personal interest in both men as his great-great-great-grandfather, Theodore Sedgwick, was a career politician and remained friends with both. The last letter that Hamilton ever wrote was to Theodore Sedgwick, which the author reprints in War of Two.Today, Alexander Hamilton is largely forgotten and there is talk of removing him from the $10 bill (a travesty against the first Secretary of the Treasury and the creator of our system of finances). But at present, Hamilton the musical is a smash hit on Broadway. Maybe that musical, along with books like War of Two, will bring this important Founding Father back to prominence.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful. History of Two Enemies By Letta Meinen I love history and in this book War of Two by John Sedgewick was a winner for me. It covered the lives of two enemies Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr that stretch back as young men through their political life as adults. The book is complete in telling their life story that makes you feel just what they are going through as the development of our nation after the war with the English. Sedgewick seems to bring you into the story of the war and the terrible winter they encounter. All the people who are friends of these two are included which makes you pick sides as they mature into political people.I became fascinated with the story of the hardshi8ps that occurred to our young country tried to establish a government that was by the people and for the people. It made you wonder how we ever got a working government together as it was a turmoil between many of those living at that time. The story keeps you engrossed as I even took it with me on my trip and finished it while on vacation. Many people on our tour were interested in what I was reading so explained to them how the lives of two men were engrossed on our country.Personalities can become entwined and hard feelings ensued but these two Hamilton and Burr were outstanding men. Hamilton involved in helping create our government was a good friend of Washington during the war and convincing him to become the first President. All the hardships of conditions they were living in was clearly described that put you right in with them during that time.The families of both men were included in detail as Hamilton was a family man with many children but Burr was a lover of many women. He had one child a girl and was close to her for many years and depended on her to help him when he was out of money which was often. The hatred of these two men finally came to a head and a duel followed. Hamilton died and the life of Burr was followed until his death.For any history lover you will enjoy this book as it well describes what it was like in the early days of our country it makes you wonder how we ever got the country started. Sedgewick did a tremendous amount of research that included letter people wrote and they did write often to each other. He used much research of articles, newspaper items plus books written about these two men. Sedgewick came up with a great book that delved into the lives of these two men. It was a winner for me look for. this book in November.
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War of Two: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Duel that Stunned the Nation, by John Sedgwick
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War of Two: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Duel that Stunned the Nation, by John Sedgwick
