Alexander Hamilton (147 page)

James Madison seemed less concerned with Hamilton’s death than the exploitation of it by his Federalist opponents. Writing to James Monroe, he noted that “the newspapers which you receive will give you the adventure between Burr and Hamilton. You will easily understand the different uses to which the event is turned.”
²¹
Jefferson reacted to Hamilton’s death in the oblique style that Hamilton knew only too well. Three days after the funeral, almost as an afterthought in a letter to his daughter, Jefferson appended a postscript: “I presume Mr. Randolph’s newspapers will inform him of the death of Colo. Hamilton, which took place on the 12th.” Even now, Jefferson insisted on demoting General Hamilton back to a colonel. Aside from another fleeting reference to some “remarkable deaths lately,” Jefferson made no mention of the man who had been the bane of his political life for fourteen years.
²²

After returning from Weehawken, Aaron Burr’s boat docked at the foot of Canal Street, and he had proceeded on horseback to Richmond Hill with the blithe insouciance of a man who had just taken the morning air. Made of indestructible stuff, the vice president of the United States was not one to be tormented by guilt or unduly disturbed by some bloodshed. According to his early biographer James Parton, a young Connecticut relative dropped by Richmond Hill unannounced and found Burr in his library. Every inch the cordial host, Burr neglected to mention that he had shot Alexander Hamilton two hours earlier. While his antagonist was dying a half mile to the north, Burr breakfasted with his cousin and exchanged pleasantries about mutual friends. After the young relative left at about ten o’clock, he was walking down Broadway when a friend accosted him with astonishing news: “Colonel Burr has killed General Hamilton in a duel this morning.”

“Why, no, he hasn’t,” said Burr’s incredulous cousin. “I have just come from there and taken breakfast with him.”

“But I have this moment seen the news on the bulletin,” his friend insisted.
²³

Many such anecdotes circulated after the duel, portraying the bloodless composure and macabre humor with which Burr reacted to Hamilton’s death. Some reports spoke of revelry at Richmond Hill, while others said that Burr expressed regret only for not having shot Hamilton straight in the heart. Some of these tales were doubtless fabricated and rightly dismissed as Federalist propaganda. William Van Ness insisted that Burr, “far from exhibiting any degree of levity or expressing any satisfaction at the result of the meeting” with Hamilton, had shown only “regret and concern.”
²⁴
Indeed, right after the duel, Burr asked Dr. Hosack to stop by Richmond Hill and update him on Hamilton’s condition. But that about sums up the extent of Aaron Burr’s concern for Hamilton. For the rest of his life, he never uttered one word of contrition for having killed a man with a wife and seven children and behaved as if Hamilton’s family did not exist.

The rumors of this sangfroid surfaced in so many quarters and so perfectly coincide with the tone of Burr’s own letters as to inspire a certain credibility. On the day of Hamilton’s death, Dirck Ten Broeck wrote to his father, “Col. Burr is at his house, seemingly perfectly at ease and from report seemingly in perfect composure.”
²⁵
A Federalist paper,
The Balance and Columbian Repository,
conjured up a man “flushed with his victory” who cantered home after the duel and stopped to greet a married lady of his acquaintance, telling her “with gaiety that it was a fine morning.”
²⁶
The paper identified Burr’s breakfast companion that morning as not his cousin but his broker, Nathaniel Prime, summoned for an amiable business chat. The paper stated that it took “a circle of half a dozen gentlemen” to convince Prime afterward that Burr had fired a lethal shot at Alexander Hamilton that morning.

If Burr reacted initially in cavalier fashion to the duel’s outcome, it may have been because he did not yet know that Hamilton had informed both Pendleton and Rufus King of his plan to throw away his shot. To make this critical point stick, Hamilton repeated it several times on his deathbed and worked it into his farewell letters. As an artful lawyer, he had left behind a consistent trail of evidence for his posthumous vindication. Within a week, both Pendleton and Van Ness had published separate accounts of the duel and the correspondence leading up to it, sparking a hue and cry against Burr. Critics accused Burr of a premeditated plot to kill Hamilton, and overwrought citizens threatened to burn down his house. James Parton observed, “It was from that hour that Burr became a name of horror. The letters, for a person ignorant of the former history, were entirely damning to the memory of the challenger. They present Burr in the light of a revengeful demon, burning for an innocent victim’s blood.”
²⁷
Many Hamilton partisans believed that Burr had done more than just try to vindicate his honor and that he had gunned down Hamilton in cold blood. One New York newspaper said that Hamilton had fallen “by the hand of a BASE ASSASSIN!”
²⁸

Thus, Hamilton triumphed posthumously over Burr, converting the latter’s victory at Weehawken into his political coup de grâce. Burr’s reputation perished along with Hamilton, exactly as Hamilton had anticipated. Both the Jeffersonian and Federalist press canonized Hamilton and vied in detestation of Burr. “We find the direful blow to have been the entire consequence and fixed purpose of [Burr’s] own subtle, premeditated, fiend-like rancor,” thundered a Maryland editorial.
²⁹
An editor in Charleston, South Carolina, speculated that Burr’s heart must have been stuffed with “cinders raked from the fires of hell.”
³⁰
Burr scoffed at such reactions. He believed that he had suffered Hamilton’s slander for an unusually long period, had obeyed the standard dueling conventions, and was being persecuted by Hamilton’s hypocritical friends. “General Hamilton died yesterday,” Burr told his son-in-law on July 13. “The malignant federalists or tories and the embittered Clintonians unite in endeavouring to excite public sympathy in his favour and indignation against his antagonist. Thousands of absurd falsehoods are circulated with industry.”
³¹
It especially irked Burr that New York Republicans who had berated Hamilton for years were suddenly kneeling and genuflecting before his martyred image.

The thick-skinned Burr probably could have faced down the sullen New York crowds. Then he learned that the city coroner had convened a jury to probe Hamilton’s death. He knew that if he was indicted for murder, he might not be allowed to post bail, and so he began to mull over plans to leave town for several weeks. Ordinarily, gentlemen were not prosecuted for duels, and, since the duel had occurred in New Jersey, Burr did not think New York even had jurisdictional authority. “You can judge what chance I should have in our courts on a trial for my life, though there is nothing clearer to a dispassionate lawyer than that the courts of this state have nothing to do with the death of Genl. H[amilton],” he told Charles Biddle.
³²
In plotting his next moves, Burr also had to contend with the fact that he was bankrupt. Just one day after Hamilton died, Burr wrote forlornly to William Van Ness, “Can you aid me?”
³³

Burr refused to allow duels, debts, or death threats to slow the racy tempo of his love life. On the night of July 20, he made time for a parting tryst with his new love interest, “La G,” and boasted to Theodosia that she had shown “a degree of sensibility and attachment toward him” which pleased him very much.
³⁴
That he had killed Hamilton nine days earlier did not seem to affect his sexual appetite and may even have enhanced it. The following evening, under cover of dark and attended by his fifteen-year-old slave, Peter, Burr boarded a barge in the Hudson and fled from any retribution in New York and New Jersey. By July 24, the fugitive vice president had arrived in Philadelphia, where he stayed on Chestnut Street with Charles Biddle, whose son Nicholas Biddle was one day to become president of the Second Bank of the United States. Even if he was a pariah, Burr was determined to enjoy his quota of fun. He contacted a favorite mistress, Celeste, and then told Theodosia wryly, “If any male friend of yours should be dying of ennui, recommend him to engage in a duel and a courtship at the same time.”
³⁵
Such ghoulish humor was Burr’s stock-in-trade. Despite assassination threats, he stayed with Biddle for two and a half weeks and took only minimal precautions. Undeterred by hostile stares, he moved freely about the city. One paper reported, “Colonel Burr, the man who has covered our country with mourning, was seen walking with a friend in the streets of this city in open day.”
³⁶
All the while, Burr received reports from New York that the coroner’s jury was pursuing his friends and had clapped his close associate Matthew Davis into jail for not answering questions.

On August 2, 1804, the coroner’s jury delivered the verdict Burr had dreaded: that “Aaron Burr, Esquire, Vice-President of the United States, was guilty of the murder of Alexander Hamilton, and that William P. Van Ness and Nathaniel Pendleton were accessories.”
³⁷
Arrest warrants were issued, but the situation was not nearly as dire for Burr as it seemed, as New York governor Morgan Lewis protested Burr’s prosecution as “disgraceful, illiberal, and ungentlemanly.”
³⁸
Nonetheless, Burr feared that the governor might be coerced into ordering his extradition from Pennsylvania, and he made plans to flee farther south. He was convinced that, in the end, the charges would not stick, but he had to wait for the public hubbub to subside. Indeed, on August 14, a New York grand jury dropped the original murder indictment and replaced it with a lesser charge. Burr, Van Ness, and Pendleton were now accused of violating the law by sending a challenge to a duel.

For his temporary hideaway, Burr chose a large slave plantation on St. Simons Island, off the Georgia coast, an estate owned by his foppish friend Pierce Butler, the son of a baronet and a former senator. Before sailing south, Burr dabbled in the sort of secessionist mischief that Hamilton had feared, though of an even more treacherous nature. He held a secret meeting with British ambassador Anthony Merry and assured him that he would cooperate in any British attempt “to effect a separation of the western part of the United States from that which lies between the Atlantic and the mountains in its whole extent.”
³⁹
Inasmuch as Burr was now a political outcast, rejected by both parties, and a reprobate into the bargain, Merry considered the situation promising.

Burr passed several luxurious weeks on St. Simons with Peter and a young friend, twenty-one-year-old Samuel Swartwout. Outside of South Carolina, southerners tended to sympathize with someone who had slain Alexander Hamilton, and Burr was showered with presents by the islanders. In early September, he toured the Spanish-controlled Floridas, posing as a London merchant and surveying the territory for a possible secessionist plot. Then he started his journey northward under the pseudonym “R. King.” In many towns, his transparent disguise was quickly penetrated, and he was received royally, especially in the Jeffersonian stronghold of Virginia. He may have imagined that he was on the road to political rehabilitation, only to learn in late October that a grand jury in Bergen County, New Jersey, had indicted him for murder. The indictment was later tossed out because Hamilton had died in New York. Burr was taking no chances, however, and continued to steer clear of both New Jersey and New York. With irreverent humor, he wondered to Theodosia which state “shall have the honour of hanging the vice president.”
⁴⁰
The indebted Burr had another motive for boycotting New York: his creditors had seized his assets, auctioned his furniture, and sold Richmond Hill to John Jacob Astor, who was to subdivide it into four hundred small parcels and make a fortune. Now seven or eight thousand dollars in debt, Burr would face legal proceedings from local creditors if he crossed the state line. For the moment, the safest place in America for the vice president was the nation’s capital, where he could preside safely over the Senate.

At the opening of Congress on November 4, 1804, it was more than a trifle startling for some legislators to see Aaron Burr settling into his chair on the Senate dais. Federalist William Plumer rubbed his eyes in disbelief: “The man whom the grand jury in the county of Bergen, New Jersey have recently indicted for the murder of the incomparable Hamilton appeared yesterday and today at the head of the Senate!…It certainly is the first time—and God grant it may be the last—that ever a man, so justly charged with such an infamous crime, presided in the American Senate.”
⁴¹
An acute observer, Plumer noted that Burr had dropped his nonchalant veneer: “He appears to have lost those easy, graceful manners that beguiled the hours away [in] the last session. He is now uneasy, discontented, and hurried.”
⁴²

Frozen out of Jefferson’s administration for four years, Burr found a new warmth and hospitality in the wake of the duel. The president invited him to dine at the White House several times, and both Secretary of State Madison and Treasury Secretary Gallatin received him with newfound camaraderie. This may have expressed tacit contempt for Hamilton, but it also reflected another factor: as president of the Senate, Burr was to preside over the impeachment trial of Samuel Chase, an arch-Federalist and associate justice of the Supreme Court who had derided the “mobocracy” of the Jefferson administration.
⁴³
Chase had been charged, among other things, with unbecoming conduct in the trial of James T. Callender under the Sedition Act. The trial was part of Jefferson’s continuing assault on the Federalist-dominated judiciary. And the president’s confidence was only bolstered when he and George Clinton trounced Charles C. Pinckney and Rufus King in a landslide victory in the 1804 election.