The American Vice Presidency (9 page)

Two months later, Burr wrote Hamilton calling on him to explain or retract the use of the word
despicable
. Hamilton sloughed Burr off, saying the word
despicable
was too ambiguous for him to confirm or deny its use. He parsed words to squirm out of the bind. “ ’Tis evident,” he shamelessly argued, “that the phrase ‘still more despicable’ admits to infinite shades, from very light to very dark.” Then he asked, “How am I to judge of the degree intended? Or how shall I annex any precise idea to language so indefinite?” Remarkably, Hamilton concluded by seeming to minimize the whole matter: “I trust, on more reflection, you will see the matter in the same light as me. If not, I can only regret the circumstance, and abide the consequence.”
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But Burr would not let the matter go. He wrote back about the evasion, “I regret to find in it nothing of that sincerity and delicacy which you profess to Value,” lecturing Hamilton that “political opposition
can never absolve Gentlemen from the necessity of a rigid adherence to the laws of honor and the rules of decorum.”
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But now Burr had enough of Hamilton’s word games and dodges. He pressed for Hamilton’s apology. Still, Burr was not mollified with an apology. Apparently determined to humiliate Hamilton further, he demanded a flat retraction, to which Hamilton replied he could not be held responsible for any “
rumours
which may be afloat” over their long acquaintanceship. Going on the offensive, he now accused Burr of “premeditated hostility.” Burr finally ended the verbal duel by challenging Hamilton to a real one, with weapons of Hamilton’s choice.
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Another two weeks went by before they physically faced off. In that time, surprisingly, Hamilton and Burr both attended a Society of the Cincinnati dinner, at which Hamilton mounted a table and sang a lusty military ditty while Burr sat by morosely, listening. In the week before the duel, Hamilton showed no sign of concern, even hosting seventy guests at a lavish ball in a wooded site in which unseen musicians were hidden to serenade strolling couples.
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In anticipation of the worst, however, he wrote an “apologia” for later publication in which he again engaged in slippery semantic games, saying basically he hadn’t said anything against Burr that many others had not often said. Although he was strongly opposed to dueling, Hamilton said he felt obliged to accept the challenge to maintain his “ability to be in the future useful,” ostensibly to preserve his own honor but practically to save his political life. Of his intentions regarding the challenge, he wrote, “My religious and moral principles are strongly opposed to the practice of duelling.… As well because it is possible I have injured Col. Burr … as from my general principles and temper.… I have resolved to … 
reserve and throw away
my first fire, and
I have thoughts
even of
reserving
my second fire—and thus give a double opportunity to Col. Burr to pause and reflect.”
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Burr in advance of the duel wrote no similar rationale or indication of intent, instead penning letters to daughter, Theodosia, and son-in-law, Joseph Alston, on the prospective settling of his financial and property affairs, which were in disorder.

According to the extant code of honor, Hamilton selected a pair of
old family pistols for the duel and gave Burr his choice of the two. On the morning of July 11, on a cliff overlooking the Hudson River at Weehawken, New Jersey, the two heroes of the American Revolution paced off the required distance and on the signal fired the pistols. Hamilton’s shot went into the air, splitting an overhead branch; Burr’s shot hit Hamilton’s right hip and lodged in his spleen. He was taken by boat back across the Hudson to New York, where he died of his wounds the next day.
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The precise words of Doctor Cooper’s that had precipitated the duel were never reported, but Hamilton over the years had repeatedly slandered Burr without inciting a deadly confrontation. At the site of the duel, as Hamilton fell, Burr’s second (i.e., his assistant and witness) hustled him away, leaving in the wake of the sensational event a torrent of attacks on the sitting vice president as both a coward and an assassin. Hamilton received the equivalent of a state funeral three days after the duel, while Burr remained in his Richmond Hill mansion.

After eleven days, as a coroner’s inquest was held in New Jersey, bearing the threat of a murder charge against Burr, he fled, taking refuge in the Philadelphia home of his friend Charles Biddle. Subsequently he was indicted in New York for violating the law against dueling and by a New Jersey grand jury for murder. Again he joked of his dilemma with his daughter, writing her that the neighboring states were fighting over “which of them shall have the honor of hanging the vice-president!”
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In Philadelphia he met a favorite mistress, Celeste, about whom he whimsically confided to daughter Theodosia: “If a male friend of yours should be dying of ennui, recommend him to engage in a duel and a courtship at the same time.”
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Meanwhile, little had been said about removing Burr from being a heartbeat away from the presidency. He soon moved south to Georgia and Florida. Eventually he headed north, avoiding both New Jersey and New York, where indictments hung over him. The man who shot Alexander Hamilton to death was, however, still the vice president of the United States, and so, incredibly, he took refuge in Washington, where there was no law against dueling. After his arrival, Burr dined with a suddenly cordial Jefferson and was warmly welcomed by Madison and Gallatin. And when Congress convened on November 4, he took his chair as president of the Senate. Federalist senator William Plumber observed of the scene,
“It certainly is the first time—and God grant that it may be the last—that ever a man so justly charged with such an infamous crime, presided in the American Senate. We are, indeed, fallen on evil times.”
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In his final task as president of the Senate, Burr chaired a sensational trial of impeachment against the Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase, accused by Jefferson through congressional allies of making “a seditious and official attack on the principles of our Constitution and on the proceedings of [the] State.”
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Burr, still under indictment himself, imposed strict rules of decorum in the chamber as he presided even-handedly and was widely commended for his role. Chase was acquitted on all eight articles, and Burr, in his final official appearance as vice president, delivered a farewell speech to the Senate that was so unexpected and emotionally overwhelming that many of the listening senators were reduced to tears.

Over the next three years as a fugitive, Burr became involved in a series of bizarre adventures that included leading an attempted secession of the western part of the country being expanded by the Louisiana Purchase and the creation of a buffer state between Louisiana and Mexico with himself as president. In 1806 he led a force of about sixty men on flatboard boats down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers on a mysterious mission. When a confederate informed Jefferson that Burr was intent on committing treason, Jefferson ordered him captured, and in 1807 he was indicted. In his trial, presided over by longtime adversary John Marshall, Burr won acquittal on the grounds that the prosecution had failed to produce the two witnesses constitutionally required to commit him of treason. He moved to Europe for a time but returned to practice law, discredited and destitute when he died at age eighty.

Unlike the tenures of Adams and Jefferson before him, Burr’s vice presidency did not lead him to the presidency. Instead, like both of them, he occupied the office mostly devoid of official responsibilities and opportunities to shape and carry out the policies of the administration to which he was elected. His place in history was shaped not by the office he held but by a common political feud and the deadly resolution he insisted on, still honored at the time.

GEORGE CLINTON

OF NEW YORK

W
ith Aaron Burr banished from the Republican national ticket in 1804, another New Yorker, Governor George Clinton, was drafted to be Jefferson’s running mate, and upon election it fell to Burr as the departing president of the Senate to administer the vice presidential oath to Clinton as his replacement. The Jefferson-Clinton team was easily elected over the eroding Federalist Party slate of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina and Rufus King of New York. With the demise of presidential double balloting in the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, victory delivered both the presidency and the vice presidency to the same party. The general prosperity in Jefferson’s first term and national pride in the Louisiana Purchase assured the Virginian’s landslide reelection, carrying Clinton with him. Jefferson obviously had needed no help from the aging New Yorker, and over the next four years he treated his vice president accordingly.

The stand-alone election of the vice president, rather than the presidential runner-up being awarded the office, was a significant development. While it in no way increased the influence of the office unless the president so decided, it did set up the vice presidential nomination as a vehicle for barter by the presidential nominees in quest of electoral college support from certain states and regions of the country.

Clinton’s succeeding of Burr in the second office had its ironies. In
1800, Burr, as a leading political operative in the Empire State, had persuaded Clinton to join other state party luminaries to run as presidential electors. Their listing was widely credited with swinging New York and the election and had earned Burr his place on the winning ticket. Four years later, with Burr discredited, Jefferson was well pleased to have Clinton as vice president. Not only was he a fellow critic of the Federalist philosophy and someone on whom Jefferson had relied for political counsel on politics in the Empire State; at the age of sixty-five and overtly looking to retire from public life, Clinton also seemed unlikely to seek the presidency in 1808, when Jefferson hoped his friend and fellow Virginian James Madison would succeed him as president.

Like all three previous vice presidents—Adams, Jefferson, and Burr—Clinton soon learned that he would not make or influence policy in the administration in which he served. Despite his more than two decades of executive leadership in New York, during which he was accustomed to making high-level decisions, he was unfamiliar with the legislative branch in which he now would function, as well as with the city of Washington itself. Though he looked the part of a senator—silver-haired and distinguished—he had neither the legislative skills of his predecessor Burr nor Burr’s youthful enthusiasm.

John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, son of the former president, offered a harsh judgment of the man: “Mr. Clinton is totally ignorant of all the most common forms of proceeding in the Senate, and yet by the rules he is to decide every question or order without debate and without appeal. His judgment is neither quick nor strong: so there is no more dependence upon the correctness of his determinations from his understanding than from his experience. As the only duty of a Vice-President, under our Constitution, is to preside in Senate, it ought be considered what his qualifications for the office are at his election. In this respect a worse choice an Mr. Clinton could scarcely have been made.”
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The seven-term governor of New York and three-time loser of the presidency or vice presidency before replacing Burr on the Republican ticket in 1804, George Clinton was no aristocrat. A farmer-lawyer from rural Ulster County, in the Hudson River valley, he shared Jefferson’s commitment to agrarian interests and his wariness of federal encroachment on states’ rights and individual liberties. But he, too, was a Revolutionary War hero, rising
under Washington to the rank of brigadier general after an early political career in the colonial assembly and later as a member of the Second Continental Congress. First elected governor of New York in 1777, he succeeded wealthy Philip Schuyler, later the son-in-law of Hamilton and eventually a bitter political foe. At eighteen Clinton served on a privateer ship in the Caribbean in the French and Indian War, and after studying law in New York he returned to Ulster as county surrogate. He was elected to the Second Continental Congress in 1775, where he met Washington. After a few months in Philadelphia, Clinton returned to New York as the commander of the four county militias responsible for defense of the Hudson River highlands. Under his direction two forts were built, and he eventually recruited enlistments for the Continental army under Washington’s command. “The forts,” he reported, “are in so respectable a state of defense, as to promise us security against any attack on that quarter.”
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In April 1777, a New York convention drafted and adopted the state’s first constitution, and Clinton was among four men put forward for governor. A flurry of votes in secret ballot from members of the military under his command and farmers surprisingly elected him over the aristocratic Federalist Schuyler. Clinton’s election ushered in a new era of the “yeoman” influence of small farmers in the state’s politics.
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