Alexander Hamilton (37 page)

In his early years, Hamilton drew much of his social sustenance from the small, clubby circle of New York lawyers. The New York Directory for 1786 listed approximately forty people under the rubric “Lawyers, Attorneys, and Notary-Publics.” The departure of many Tory lawyers had cleared the path for capable, ambitious men in their late twenties and early thirties, including Burr, Brockholst Livingston, Robert Troup, John Laurance, and Morgan Lewis. They were constantly thrown together in and out of court. Much of the time they rode the circuit together, often accompanied by the judge, enduring long journeys in crude stagecoaches that jolted along bumpy upstate roads. They stayed in crowded, smoky inns and often had to share beds with one another, creating a camaraderie that survived many political battles.

To assist with a caseload of mostly civil but also criminal work, Hamilton struck a partnership with Balthazar de Haert, who was either his colleague or his office manager for three years. Though he had just passed the bar himself, Hamilton was swamped with requests to coach aspiring lawyers, and he trained the sons of many prominent men, including John Adams. Hamilton struck his young charges as an exacting boss. One early trainee, Dirck Ten Broeck, recruited straight from Yale, wrote a former classmate a mournful letter about clerking for the little dynamo: “But now, instead of all the happiness once so near to view, I am deeply engaged in the study of law, the attaining of which requires the sacrifice of every pleasure [and] demands unremitted application.... [H]eavy for the most part have been the hours to me.”
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Notwithstanding later conspiracy talk that he had stashed away bribes from the British, Hamilton seemed relatively indifferent to money, and many contemporaries expressed amazement at his reasonable fees. The duc de La RochefoucauldLiancourt commented, “The lack of interest in money, rare anywhere, but even rarer in America, is one of the most universally recognized traits of Mr. Hamilton, although his current practice is quite lucrative. I’ve heard his clients say that their sole quibble with him is the modesty of the fees that he asks.”
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Robert Troup said that Hamilton rejected fees if they were larger than he thought warranted and generally favored arbitration or amicable settlements in lieu of lawsuits.

Hamilton’s son James related two incidents that show his father’s legal scruples. In one case, the executor of a Long Island estate tried to retain Hamilton to defend him against some heirs who were suing him. To soften him up, the man pushed a pile of gold pieces across Hamilton’s writing table before stating his case. When he was done, “Hamilton pushed the gold back to him and said, ‘I will not be retained by you in such a cause. Take your money, go home, and settle without delays with the heirs, as in justice you are bound to do.’ ”
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Another time, he flatly refused the business of a certain Mr. Gouverneur after learning he had made disparaging remarks about the “attorneylike” way somebody had padded his bill. In a caustic note, Hamilton lectured Gouverneur that his behavior “cannot be pleasing to any man in the profession and [that it] must oblige anyone that has proper delicacy to decline the business of a person who professedly entertains such an idea of the conduct of this profession.”
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As a lawyer in a humming seaport and financial hub, Hamilton dealt with innumerable suits over bills of exchange and maritime insurance. He also gravitated toward cases that established critical points of constitutional law. It would be a mistake, however, to think of Hamilton only as a cloud-wreathed, Olympian lawyer. He sometimes represented poor people in criminal cases on a pro bono basis or was paid with just a barrel of ham. He had an incorrigible weakness for aiding women in need. In December 1786, he defended a spinster, Barbara Ransumer, who was indicted for stealing fans, lace, and other costly items. “I asked her what defence she had,” Hamilton recollected. “She replied that she had none.”
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Unlike many modern lawyers, Hamilton represented clients only if he believed in their innocence. But he disobeyed his personal rule with Ransumer. In a speech dripping with shameless pathos, he managed to persuade the jury of her innocence. “Woman is weak and requires the protection of man,” Hamilton summed up. “And upon this theme, I attempted to awaken the sympathies of the jury and with such success that I obtained a verdict of ‘not guilty.’ I then determined that I would never again take up a cause in which I was convinced I ought not to prevail.”
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That same year, Hamilton represented George Turner, who was indicted as a “dueller, fighter, and disturber of the peace,” again suggesting that Hamilton was perhaps less averse to dueling than he later intimated.
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Hamilton was regarded as one of the premier lawyers of the early republic and was certainly preeminent in New York. Judge Ambrose Spencer, who watched many legal titans pace his courtroom, pronounced Hamilton “the greatest man this country ever produced....In power of reasoning, Hamilton was the equal of [Daniel] Webster and more than this could be said of no man. In creative power, Hamilton was infinitely Webster’s superior.”
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A no less glowing encomium came from Joseph Story, a later Supreme Court justice: “I have heard Samuel Dexter, John Marshall, and Chancellor [Robert R.] Livingston say that Hamilton’s reach of thought was so far beyond theirs that by his side they were schoolboys—rush tapers before the sun at noonday.”
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Whence the source of this legendary reputation? Hamilton had a taste for courtroom theatrics. He had a melodious voice coupled with a hypnotic gaze, and he could work himself up into a towering passion that held listeners enthralled. In January 1785, jurist James Kent watched Hamilton square off against Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, who was representing himself in a lawsuit claiming additional land south of his vast estate on the Hudson. (The post of chancellor was one of the top judicial positions in the state.) A member of New York’s most powerful family, Livingston was tall and confident and moved with the natural grace of a born aristocrat. In comparison, Hamilton’s style seemed almost feverish. “He appeared to be agitated with intense reflection,” Kent recalled. “His lips were in constant motion and his pen rapidly employed during the Chancellor’s address to the court. He rose with dignity and spoke for perhaps two hours in support of his motion. His reply was fluent and accompanied with great earnestness of manner and emphasis of expression.”
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In speech no less than in writing, Hamilton’s fluency frequently shaded into excess. Hamilton had the most durable pair of lungs in the New York bar and could speak extemporaneously in perfectly formed paragraphs for hours. But it was not always advantageous to have a brain bubbling with ideas. Robert Troup complained that the prolix Hamilton never knew when to stop: “I used to tell him that he was not content with knocking [his opponent] in the head, but that he persisted until he had banished every little insect that buzzed around his ears.”
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Troup also speculated that Hamilton was so distracted by public matters later on that he never had the chance to become deeply read in the law. This was probably true. On the other hand, the myriad claims on his time forced Hamilton to avoid trivia and plumb the basic principles of a case. “With other men, law is a trade, with him it was a science,” said Fisher Ames.
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He forced other lawyers to fight on his turf, starting out with a painstaking definition of terms and then reciting a long string of precedents. He brought into court lengthy lists of legal authorities and Latin quotations he wished to cite. His sources were varied, esoteric, and unpredictable. His legal editor, Julius Goebel, Jr., has observed: “Hamilton’s reading was not confined to English law, for in addition to citations to basic Roman law texts we find him proffering passages from exotics like the Frenchman Domat, the Dutchman Vinnius, and the Spaniard Perez.”
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A good-natured legal rivalry arose between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Sometimes they worked on the same team, more often on opposing sides. Hamilton did not drag political feuds into dinner parties and drawing rooms, and so he mingled with Burr cordially. Later on, Hamilton said that in their early relationship they had “always been opposed in politics but always on good terms. We set out in the practice of the law at the same time and took opposite political directions. Burr beckoned me to follow him and I advised him to come with me. We could not agree.”
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Burr’s friend Commodore Thomas Truxtun verified this rapport in nonpolitical matters: “I always observed in both a disposition when together to make time agreeable...at the houses of each other and of friends.”
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Burr and Hamilton supped at each other’s homes, and Burr’s wife, Theodosia, visited Eliza. In 1786, the two men helped to finance the Erasmus Hall Academy in Flatbush, the forerunner of Erasmus Hall High School, today the oldest secondary school in New York State.

Many weird coincidences stamped the lives of Hamilton and Burr, yet their origins were quite dissimilar. Burr embodied the old aristocracy, such as it then existed in America, and Hamilton the new meritocracy. Born on February 6, 1756, one year after Hamilton, Burr boasted an illustrious lineage. His maternal grandfather was Jonathan Edwards, the esteemed Calvinist theologian and New England’s foremost cleric. Edwards’s third daughter, Esther, married the Reverend Aaron Burr, a classical scholar and theologian who became president of Princeton.

The infant Burr was born into the most secure and privileged of childhoods, yet it was steeped in horror. At the time of Burr’s birth, the college was moving from Newark to Princeton, and in late 1756 the family took up residence in the new president’s house. Then came a nightmarish chain of events. In September 1757, Aaron Burr, Sr., died at forty-two and was replaced five months later as president by his father-in-law, Jonathan Edwards. Soon after arriving, Edwards was greeted with the news that his own father, a Connecticut clergyman, had died. Princeton had recently been struck by smallpox, which Edwards promptly contracted by inoculation, dying two weeks after settling in. Then Burr’s mother, Esther, came down with smallpox and died two weeks after her father. Dr. William Shippen took Burr and his orphaned sister into his Philadelphia home. When Grandmother Edwards came to reclaim the children, she contracted virulent dysentery and died shortly afterward. Thus, by October 1758, two-year-old Aaron Burr had already lost a mother, a father, a grandfather, a grandmother, and a great-grandfather. Though he lacked any memory of these gruesome events, Burr was even more emphatically orphaned than Hamilton.

Raised in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and Elizabethtown, New Jersey, by his uncle, the Reverend Timothy Edwards, Burr attended the same Presbyterian academy that later educated Hamilton. Entering Princeton at thirteen, he developed into a first-rate scholar and delivered a commencement speech entitled “Building Castles in the Air,” in which he declaimed against frittering away energy on idle dreams. Burr studied law with his brother-in-law, the Connecticut jurist Tapping Reeve, then fought courageously in the Revolution.

Like Hamilton, the impeccably tailored Burr made an elegant impression, with his lustrous dark eyes, full lips, and boldly arched eyebrows. He was witty, urbane, and unflappable and had a mesmerizing effect on men and women alike. Despite his later courtship of the Jeffersonians, Burr never shed a certain patrician hauteur, epicurean tastes, and a faint disdain for moneymaking activities. He believed that through self-control he could learn to control others. With his impervious aplomb, he was a better listener than talker. Hamilton was easy to ruffle, whereas Burr hid his feelings behind an enigmatic facade. When faced with confessions of wrongdoing, Burr said coolly, “No apologies or explanations. I hate them.”
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Unlike Hamilton, he could store up silent grievances over extended periods.

Throughout his career, Hamilton was outspoken to a fault, while Burr was a man of ingrained secrecy. He gloried in his sphinxlike reputation and once described himself thus in the third person: “He is a grave, silent, strange sort of animal, inasmuch that we know not what to make of him.”
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As a politician, Burr usually spoke to one person at a time and then in confidence. Starting in college, he wrote coded letters to his sister and classmates and never entirely discarded the self-protective habit. Nor did he commit ideas to paper. Senator William Plumer remarked, “Burr’s habits have been never to trust himself on paper, if he could avoid it, and when he wrote, it was with great caution.”
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As Burr once warned his law clerk, “Things written remain.”
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This caution reflected Burr’s principal quality as a politician: he was a chameleon who evaded clear-cut positions on most issues and was a genius at studied ambiguity. In his wickedly mordant world, everything was reduced to clever small talk, and he enjoyed saying funny, shocking things. “We die reasonably fast,” he wrote during a yellow-fever outbreak in New York. “But then Mrs. Smith had twins this morning, so the account is even.”
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By contrast, Hamilton’s writings are so earnest that one yearns for some frivolous chatter to lighten the mood.

It is puzzling that Aaron Burr is sometimes classified among the founding fathers. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin, and Hamilton all left behind papers that run to dozens of thick volumes, packed with profound ruminations. They fought for high ideals. By contrast, Burr’s editors have been able to eke out just two volumes of his letters, many full of gossip, tittle-tattle, hilarious anecdotes, and racy asides about his sexual escapades. He produced no major papers on policy matters, constitutional issues, or government institutions. Where Hamilton was often more interested in policy than politics, Burr seemed interested
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in politics. At a time of tremendous ideological cleavages, Burr was an agile opportunist who maneuvered for advantage among colleagues of fixed political views. Hamilton asked rhetorically about Burr, “Is it a recommendation to have
no theory
? Can that man be a systematic or able statesman who has none? I believe not.”
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In a still more severe indictment, Hamilton said of Burr, “In civil life, he has never projected nor aided in producing a single measure of important public utility.”
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