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Summer 2004, Volume 4, Number 1
"Why, Soldiers,
Why" - Thomas Fleming (HTML
version; PDF
version)
On the 200th anniversary of the duel between Alexander Hamilton
and Aaron Burr, as historian once again asks why they fought -
and offers some compelling new answers
Long Island's Beach Buggies - Joshua Ruff
Modify one Ford Model-A truck chassis, add some special tires
and a lust for speed, and you have a beach buggy that can zoom
along a beach at 80m.p.h.
The Summertime Kille - G. William Beardslee
The ravages of the 1832 cholera pandemic are still silently present
in a small family graveyard in Otsego County
The Man Who Won the West - Travis M. Bowman
Two hundred years ago, Lewis and Clark set off to explore the Louisiana Territory, purchased in 1803 through the persistent—and forgotten—negotiator, Robert Livingston
The Jubilee Fashion Show - Jenna Weissman Joselit
New York City celebrated its Golden Anniversary in 1948 with a month-long fashion show that established the Big Apple as a fashion center independent of Paris
Featured Article:
“WHY,
SOLDIERS, WHY?” by Thomas Fleming
The Alexander Hamilton–Aaron Burr duel of 1804 was one
of the most tragic face-offs in the nation’s history. Two
hundred years later, new research answers the historical question:
why did it happen at all?
On July 11, 1804, Colonel Aaron Burr, Vice President of the United
States, and General Alexander Hamilton, former Secretary of the
Treasury under President George Washington, journeyed to the west
bank of the Hudson River in the vicinity of the village of Weehawken,
New Jersey to fight a duel. Colonel Burr's first shot struck General
Hamilton just above the hip, tore through his liver, and lodged
in his backbone. Hamilton died in agony some thirty hours later.
Why did these two men, among the four or five best-known politicians
in America at the time, choose to settle their differences in
this deadly way? The question has exercised historians, novelists,
and playwrights for the past two hundred years.
A substantial number of novelists and playwrights have portrayed
Burr as a sinister murderer who cold-bloodedly forced a reluctant
Hamilton to fight. Others have seen Hamilton as a crafty dissembler
who hoped to kill Burr by using a secret hair trigger on his pistol.
Some psycho-historians have argued that the duel was a thinly
disguised suicide for Hamilton, while others have explained the
clash as an example of the popularity of the political duel in
the first decade of American national politics. The most common
explanation, stated in dozens of textbooks and histories, maintains
that Hamilton vigorously opposed and criticized Burr when he ran
for governor of New York in 1804. When Burr lost, he supposedly
sought revenge by challenging Hamilton.
Refuting History
The claim that Hamilton plotted to kill Burr by using a secret
hair trigger on his pistol is best refuted by the actual exchange
between Hamilton and his second, Colonel Nathaniel Pendleton,
as the latter handed Hamilton his pistol. "Do you want the
hair spring set?" Pendleton asked.
"Not this time," Hamilton said.
There was nothing secret about hair triggers. They were regularly
advertised in New York newspapers as an attractive feature of
some pistols. Few knowledgeable duelists used them, however, because
there was a possibly fatal tradeoff in getting the first quick
shot: no time to aim the gun.
Backers of the covert suicide theory point to the indubitable
fact that Hamilton's political career as leader of the Federalist
Party (forerunner of today's Republicans) was in ruins. Enemies
in the Democratic-Republican Party led by Thomas Jefferson had
forced him to publicly confess to an affair with a Philadelphia
woman, Maria Reynolds. In 1802, Hamilton's oldest son, Philip,
deepened his father's melancholy by dying in a political duel
with one of the general's Jeffersonian foes––a tragedy
that destroyed the
sanity of Hamilton's oldest daughter, Angelica. But Hamilton had
five other children who badly needed his fathering and care. Though
he was discouraged by President Jefferson's popularity, he had
by no means abandoned his hope of achieving power.
As for arguing that the spread of the political duel was a sort
of psychological “disease” that lured these two gifted
men to their appointment in Weehawken, this is true only as far
as it goes––which is not very far. The political duel
was the background, not the foreground, of the clash between General
Hamilton and Colonel Burr.
The most common explanation––Hamilton's supposedly
vigorous opposition to Burr in the race for the New York's governorship––has
a rather large hole in it. After giving one relatively bland speech,
in which he urged the members of the New York Federalist Party
not to support Burr, Hamilton never said another public word on
the subject. The reason was simple: almost every Federalist in
New York State dismissed Hamilton’s advice as envy, and
backed Burr with money and votes. Hamilton had virtually nothing
to do with Burr's defeat.
Ordeal by Slander
The man who destroyed the vice president's run for governor of
the Empire State was President Thomas Jefferson. He and Burr had
had a calamitous falling out after they won power in 1800. In
the balloting at the Democratic-Republican congressional caucus
that nominated Jefferson for another term early in 1804, Burr
did not receive a single vote for vice president. Instead, Jefferson
chose New York's aging governor, George Clinton, as his running
mate––thus giving his tacit approval for one of the
most vicious assaults on a major politician in the nation's history.
The director of this smear campaign was Governor Clinton's nephew,
DeWitt Clinton, the mayor of New York City, and his conduit was
The American Citizen, New York's Democratic-Republican newspaper.
In print, Burr was called a sadist who had lashed militiamen for
the fun of it during the American Revolution, and a "cowardly
bastard" for failing to challenge Hamilton after the Citizen
published a critical letter Hamilton had written about him in
1801. Burr was also accused of embezzling his clients' estates
(he was a lawyer), denounced as an atheist, and pilloried as a
man who seduced innocent virgins and ruined the reputations of
married women. Worst of all, according to the Citizen, he consorted
with Negroes to get their vote.
Few researchers who have portrayed Burr as evil have read this
ordeal by slander, or are aware that the vice president refused
to respond in kind.
The terrific abuse, climaxed by a crushing defeat at the polls,
left Burr a bitter, deeply depressed man. After a month of lonely
brooding, he came across a letter in a newspaper that described
some caustic remarks Hamilton had made about him at an Albany
dinner party a few days after Hamilton’s speech to the Federalists.
This letter became the ostensible reason for Burr's challenge
to Hamilton.
Old Soldiers
Beneath the surface was a far more potent reason. Colonel Burr
knew that there was another route to power––military
glory––and that General Hamilton was his chief competitor.
Few historians have noted how obsessively Hamilton clung to the
title he won when George Washington appointed him commander of
the American army in 1798 during the “quasi-war” with
Revolutionary France. He was listed in the New York City directory
as "General Hamilton." Burr was equally fond of his
Revolutionary War title of colonel. One of his close friends said
he had a lifelong "ardent love of military glory."
Reinforcing Burr's perception was the presence of Napoleon Bonaparte
on the world scene, a soldier whose military prowess had restored
order to France, another nation that had undergone a decade of
revolutionary chaos. Napoleon’s career was followed in obsessive
detail by American newspapers. Both Hamilton and Burr publicly
expressed their admiration for this "man of destiny,"
as his French followers liked to call him. And both men were privy
to information that made them think a similar chaotic situation
might develop in post-revolutionary America.
In 1803, President Jefferson had purchased the Louisiana Territory
from Napoleon, which had doubled the size of the American continental
domain. The Federalists of New England angrily denounced this
acquisition as unconstitutional and unnecessary, claiming that
the United States already had more open land than its population
could utilize. More to the point, the Yankees found intolerable
a future in which the South would be the dominant force in the
emerging nation. Led by Senator Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts,
who had been secretary of state under President John Adams, the
New Englanders began discussing secession. Their spokesmen in
Washington asked Vice President Burr what he thought of the idea.
He gave them the distinct impression that if he were elected governor
of New York, he was prepared to take the Empire State into the
new confederacy.
Hamilton, too, was aware of this bubbling conspiracy. In his lone
speech opposing the vice president's run for governor, the general
dwelt at length on the danger of Burr winning control of this
new nation.
The Threat of Secession
Even without New York, the possibility of New England's secession
remained strong. Senator Pickering talked of negotiating a treaty
with Great Britain that would unite New England and Canada in
a new nation. This was the chief reason Burr challenged Hamilton
to the duel: Hamilton was the one man who could compete with him
for command of a New England army if civil war broke out. If Hamilton
refused Burr's challenge, he would forfeit his claim as a military
leader.
A second reason for the challenge was the way Napoleon was spending
the $15 million that Jefferson had paid him for Louisiana. The
“Man of Destiny” had gathered an army of 200,000 men
and a huge flotilla of shallow draft gunboats to invade England
and end its struggle for world supremacy by dictating peace in
London's ruins. Many thought that if Napoleon succeeded, he would
dismiss the Louisiana Purchase as a scrap of paper and find reasons
to start a war with the United States to restore France's colonial
empire in North America. In one of the last letters Hamilton wrote,
he explained his acceptance of Burr's challenge as a wish "to
be in the future useful...in these crises of our affairs which
seem likely to happen." Previously he had instructed the
editor of the New York Evening Post, the newspaper he had helped
found, to issue a statement that he would never again accept public
office "unless called upon in the event of a foreign or a
civil war."
Showdown
At a Fourth of July dinner attended by both Hamilton and Burr
seven days before the duel, General Hamilton sprang up on the
table and sang his favorite song, "Why, Soldiers, Why?":
Why, soldiers, why
Should we be melancholy, boys?
Why, soldiers, why
Whose business is to die!
Colonel Burr's reaction to this bravado was a saturnine glare.
The duel, then, was a calculated risk, as well as an expression
of the long-running mix of envy and animosity between these two
old soldiers. They were ready to gamble a few more bullets, betting
on their previous record of survival. After all, only one in five
duelists died. The smooth-bore pistols were very inaccurate, even
at a duel's standard ten paces.
The antagonists confronted each other in glaring sunlight about
7 a.m. on July 11. The shelf of rock on which they fought has
long since vanished, dynamited by railroad builders. Hamilton's
second, Colonel Pendleton, won the toss and chose to position
the general with his back to the steep cliff. Silhouetted against
the sun and the shining river, Burr would be an excellent target.
Hamilton, still mourning his dead son, had told Pendleton and
other friends that a revulsion against dueling had led him to
decide to throw away his first "fire." But his remark
to Pendleton that he would not set the hair trigger "this
time" suggests that he planned to aim at Burr with his second
shot.
Hamilton's decision to fire in the air, called a "delope"
in duelling terminology, was not entirely altruistic. It would
make Burr look like someone who Hamilton did not think was worth
killing. It was a kind of insult, as well as a way of belittling
the seriousness of Burr's claim of wounded reputation.
Burr's first shot struck Hamilton as he was raising his gun. The
impact caused him to convulsively pull the trigger, sending his
bullet into an overhanging tree limb.
When the physician who had been waiting at the water's edge reached
the general's side, Hamilton gasped, "This is a mortal wound,
Doctor."
Contingency Thinking
Is there a modern lesson to be learned from this tragic collision?
Even the best-informed men, insiders such as General Hamilton
and Colonel Burr, found it difficult to predict what would happen
next in an era of turbulent politics. It explains why many contemporary
historians have made contingency an important term in their thinking
about history––another way of saying that politicians
often make large decisions about the future illuminated chiefly
by their hopes and fears.
SIDEBAR 1
“Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America”
August 28, 2004–February 28, 2005
To celebrate the 200th
anniversary of its founding, the New-York Historical Society has
announced a new exhibition, an education curriculum, and a public
program series focusing on Alexander Hamilton. Among the significant
materials on view at the Society’s New York City headquarters
will be the pistols used by Hamilton and Burr in their duel, original
copies of the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence,
and rare manuscripts of Hamilton and his contemporaries.
New-York Historical Society
Two West 77th Street
New York, NY 10024
(212) 873-3400
www.nyhistory.org
SIDEBAR 2
Many of the insights for this article originated from the twenty-seven
volumes of The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, edited by Harold
C. Syrett. Also invaluable were The Papers of Thomas Jefferson,
edited by Julian Boyd, and the Public Papers and Political Correspondence
of Aaron Burr, edited by Mary-Jo Kline. Additional letters and
memoranda are in the microfilm edition of The Papers of Aaron
Burr, also
edited by Kline.
For a grasp of the vicious campaign against Burr, the author extensively
explored the newspapers in the collection of the New-York Historical
Society, notably the New York Evening Post and The American Citizen.
Also at the Society are the Nathaniel Pendleton papers, which
shed much light on Hamilton's attitude toward the duel. The Essex
Institute Historical Collections have data on Timothy Pickering
and the New England secession conspiracy. The Special Collections
of Columbia University contain significant material on Mayor DeWitt
Clinton, the key player in the assault on Burr's character.(Return
to top.)
