Alexander Hamilton (135 page)

During this strange period of concealment, Hamilton continued to perform his fatherly duties. His son James, now a student at Columbia College, asked him to review a speech he had written. James was mystified by his father’s response and only later understood its import. “My dear James,” Hamilton began, “I have prepared for you a thesis on discretion.
You may need it.
God Bless you. Your affectionate father. A.H.”
⁶⁴
In retrospect, this homily sounds like the confessions of a man who had never learned to be discreet himself. Hamilton told his son: “A prudent silence will frequently be taken for wisdom and a sentence or two cautiously thrown in will sometimes gain the palm of knowledge, while a man well informed but indiscreet and unreserved will not uncommonly talk himself out of all consideration and weight.” Someone without discretion, Hamilton added, was apt to have “numerous enemies and is occasionally involved by it in the most [difficul]ties and dangers.”
⁶⁵
Did Hamilton here give vent to tacit regret for the loose language he had employed toward Burr?

By the spring of 1804, Alexander and Eliza had completed their retreat, the Grange, and begun entertaining on a grander scale. In May, they had hosted a dinner for Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoleon’s youngest brother, who had just married Elizabeth Patterson of Baltimore. Then, in the week preceding the duel, Hamilton invited seventy people to the Grange for a lavish ball that included John Trumbull, Robert Troup, Nicholas Fish, and William Short, Jefferson’s onetime secretary in Paris. Hamilton was fascinated by the French
fête champêtre,
the elegant alfresco parties held in wooded surroundings, favored by the French aristocracy. In the woods, Hamilton had planted a small cluster of unseen musicians, so that guests caught faint strains of a horn and clarinet as they strolled. John Church Hamilton left a sketch of his father at this dinner that conveys his social magnetism:

Never was the fascination of his manner more remarked, gay and grave as was the chanced topic....Never did he exhibit more the safe softness with the man of society. Eloquent feelings, sportive genius, graceful narrative—all spoke the charm of a generous, rich, and highly cultivated nature. Even at this time, amid the brilliant circle, he brought forward the son of a deceased friend, commended him to the attention of an influential friend, then took him aside and conferred with him as to his plans for the future. This was one of the last sunny days of Hamilton’s short life.
⁶⁶

Hamilton devoted considerable time to arranging his affairs and drawing up farewell letters. The solemnity with which he performed these duties seems to bespeak some premonition that he might die. On July 1, he drew up a statement of assets and liabilities that showed him with a comfortable net worth. Yet he acknowledged that, if death prompted a forced sale of his property, the proceeds might not suffice for his fifty-five thousand dollars in debt. Most of the money had been spent on the Grange, so he needed to defend this splurge: “To men who have been so much harassed in the busy world as myself, it is natural to look forward to a comfortable retirement in the sequel of life as a principal desideratum. This desire I have felt in the strongest manner and to prepare for it has latterly been a favourite object.”
⁶⁷
Hamilton had expected to retire his debts with his twelve thousand dollars in annual income. Now he had to reckon on the chance that Eliza might be deprived of this money. Trying to console himself, he computed that Eliza stood to inherit some money from her recently deceased mother, and “her father is understood to possess a large estate.”
⁶⁸
He further noted that the Grange, “by the progressive rise of property on this island and the felicity of its situation,” would “become more and more valuable.”
⁶⁹
Unfortunately, Hamilton’s estimates were to prove grossly optimistic, so that the man who had so ably managed the nation’s finances left his own family oppressed with debts.

Aware of the duel’s political dimensions, Hamilton labored over a statement that would justify his conduct to the public. He admitted that he might have injured Burr, even though he had spoken only the truth. As a result, he wrote, he planned “to
reserve
and
throw away
my first fire and I
have thoughts
even of
reserving
my second fire and thus giving a double opportunity to Col Burr to pause and to reflect.”
⁷⁰
The wording here is significant. Hamilton assumed that Burr would have two such opportunities. Thus, Hamilton would have to signal to Burr his intention to waste his shot. He could either, as Philip had, fail to lift his pistol, or fire first and very wide of the mark.

In the statement, Hamilton acknowledged the grievous pain he might cause his family and even the harm he would do to his creditors. Writing for public consumption, Hamilton sounded more statesmanlike toward Burr than he probably felt. It is hard to take at face value his contention that he bore “no
ill-will
to Col Burr distinct from political opposition.”
⁷¹
He saw that while he had much to lose by refraining from the duel, he had precious little to gain by facing it: “I shall hazard much and can possibly gain nothing by the issue of the interview.”
⁷²
Why then did he fight? To maintain his sense of honor and capacity for leadership, he argued, he had to bow to the
public’s
belief in dueling: “The ability to be in future useful, whether in resisting mischief or effecting good, in those crises of our public affairs which seem likely to happen would probably be inseparable from a conformity with public prejudice in this particular.”
⁷³
In other words, he had to safeguard his career to safeguard the country. His self-interest and America’s were indistinguishable. For Burr, Hamilton’s letter reeked of sanctimony. When he later read it, he reacted with coldhearted contempt: “It reads like the confessions of a penitent monk.”
⁷⁴
FORTY-TWO

n his last days, Hamilton seemed wistful but not distraught. He seems to have made peace with his decision to duel and elected to savor his remaining hours with his family. On Sunday morning, July 8, he, Eliza, and the children wandered the shady grounds of the Grange in the morning coolness. Back at the house, encircled by his family, he “read the morning service of the Episcopal church,” recalled John Church Hamilton.
¹
Then, later in the day, “gathering around him his children under a near tree, he laid with them upon the grass until the stars shone down from the heavens.”
²

On Monday morning, July 9, Hamilton left Eliza at the Grange and rode down to lower Manhattan, where he drafted a will at his last Manhattan town house at 54 Cedar Street. He named John B. Church, Nicholas Fish, and Nathaniel Pendleton as executors. In this document, he again stated, with more hope than true conviction, that his assets would extinguish his debts: “I pray God that something may remain for the maintenance and education of my dear wife and children.”
³
As a man devoted to property rights and the sanctity of contracts, he also fretted about the fates of his creditors: “I entreat my dear children, if they or any of them shall ever be able, to make up the deficiency.”
⁴
And again he expressed the tentative hope that the Schuyler fortune would save Eliza: “Probably her own patrimonial resources will preserve her from indigence.”
⁵
That the methodical Hamilton left dangling the critical question of Eliza’s future solvency seems shockingly out of character.

More than Hamilton, Burr found waiting for the duel unbearable, telling William Van Ness that he preferred an afternoon duel and did not care to “pass over” another day of delay. “From 7 to 12 is the least pleasant [time], but anything so we
but
get on,” he moaned.
⁶
A surgeon usually attended duels, and Hamilton proposed his friend Dr. David Hosack. Burr seemed inclined to skip medical attention, appending this curious postscript to Van Ness: “H[osack] is enough and even that unnecessary.”
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Does this signify that Burr planned to kill Hamilton, making a surgeon superfluous? Did he hope that, if wounded, Hamilton would simply bleed to death? Or did he think that nobody would be injured? We’ll never know. On the afternoon of July 9, Van Ness and Pendleton finalized plans for the duel, which would take place at dawn on Wednesday, July 11, across the river in Weehawken, New Jersey.

Right up until the end, Hamilton comported himself with stoic gallantry, giving no hint of what was to come. He spent the afternoon and evening of July 9 with his old Treasury protégé, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., who found Hamilton “uncommonly cheerful and gay.”
⁸
On his last workday, July 10, Hamilton ran into a family friend and client on Broadway, Dirck Ten Broeck, who reminded him that he had forgotten to deliver a promised legal opinion. Afterward, Ten Broeck reflected with astonishment on Hamilton’s reaction: “He was really ashamed of his neglect, but [said] that I must call on him the next day, Wednesday—(
the awful fatal day
)—at 10 o’clock, when he would sit down with me, lock the door, and then we would finish the business.”
⁹
This represents, again, extraordinary proof of Hamilton’s sense of responsibility. Far from being suicidal, Hamilton planned to go straight from the early-morning duel to his office to catch up on work—hardly the behavior of a depressed man meditating suicide. Nobody who saw Hamilton right before the duel reported any special symptoms of gloom.

During Hamilton’s final day at his Garden Street (today Exchange Place) law office, his clerk, Judah Hammond, observed nothing untoward in his demeanor: “General Hamilton came to my desk in the
tranquil
manner usual with him and gave me a business paper with his instructions concerning it. I saw no change in his appearance. These were his last moments in his place of business.”
¹⁰
Hamilton drafted an elaborate opinion in a legal matter. Late in the afternoon, he made a last stop on his itinerary, one that must have carried sentimental meaning. For weeks, his King’s College chum Robert Troup had lain bedridden with a grave illness that Hamilton feared might prove mortal. When he dropped by to visit Troup, Hamilton did not mention the duel and overflowed with medical suggestions. “The General’s visit lasted more than half an hour,” said Troup, “and after making particular inquiries respecting the state of my complaint, he favored me with his advice as to the course which he thought would best conduce to the reestablishment of my health. But the whole tenor of the General’s deportment during the visit manifested such composure and cheerfulness of mind as to leave me without any suspicion of the rencontre that was depending.”
¹¹

On the eve of the duel, Nathaniel Pendleton stopped by Hamilton’s town house and made a last-ditch effort to dissuade him from his resolution to squander his first shot. Once again, Hamilton insisted he would fire in the air. When Pendleton protested, Hamilton indicated that his mind was made up. “My friend,” he told Pendleton, “it is the effect of a religious scruple and does not admit of reasoning. It is useless to say more on the subject as my purpose is definitely fixed.”
¹²

Hamilton dedicated his last night to the activity that had earned him such lasting fame: framing words. Since one purpose of the duel was to prepare to head off a secessionist threat, he wrote a plea to Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, warning against any such movement among New England Federalists: “I will here express but one sentiment, which is that dismemberment of our empire will be a clear sacrifice of great positive advantages without any counterbalancing good.”
¹³
The secession movement would provide no “relief to our real disease, which is democracy”—by which he meant unrestrained, disruptive popular rule.
¹⁴

That evening, in surveying his life, Hamilton was evidently transported back to his West Indian boyhood and the near-miraculous escape that he had made from St. Croix more than three decades earlier. His mind turned to his cousin, Ann Mitchell, who had rescued him with money for his education. At ten o’clock, Hamilton took up his quill and wrote to Eliza, “Mrs. Mitchell is the person in the world to whom as a friend I am under the greatest obligations. I have [not] hitherto done my [duty] to her.”
¹⁵
Ann Mitchell was struggling in impoverished circumstances, and Hamilton expressed a fervent wish that his estate might “render the evening of her days comfortable.” Should that prove impossible, he told Eliza, “I entreat you to ...treat her with the tenderness of a sister.”
¹⁶
He also told Eliza that he could not bear to kill another human being and that the “scruples of a Christian” had convinced him to expose his life to Burr: “This must increase my hazards and redoubles my pangs for you. But you had rather I should die innocent than live guilty. Heaven can preserve me and [I humbly] hope will, but in the contrary event, I charge you to remember that you are a Christian.”
¹⁷
In contemplating the duel, Hamilton may have miscalculated, may have been egregiously foolish, may have talked himself into the mad and elliptical logic of dueling, but he definitely was not in a suicidal state of mind.

Many thoughts swirled through Aaron Burr’s brain in his last days, and some of the most vexing pertained to money. The profligate Burr was more than short of cash: he was dead broke. The previous fall, he had contemplated selling his Richmond Hill estate to ward off demanding creditors. That he faced financial as well as political ruin may help to explain his almost palpable mood of desperation while seeking a duel with Hamilton. According to John Church Hamilton, in the period immediately preceding the duel (presumably before the challenge was issued) Burr was so harried by debt that he appealed even to Hamilton for help. Hamilton’s son related this incredible tale that Eliza told her children:

Hamilton was at his country seat and, soon after the early summer sun had arisen, was awakened by a violent ringing at the bell of his front door. He arose, descended, and found Burr at the door. With great agitation, he related circumstances which rendered immediate pecuniary assistance absolutely necessary to him. On returning to his bed, Hamilton relieved the anxiety of his wife caused by his early call. “Who do you think was at the door? Colonel Burr. He came to ask my assistance.”
¹⁸