Chapter 5
Mr. Burr Launches a Machine
THOUGH JOHN BECKLEY’S NAME is not familiar in history books, it should be, because he played a hugely important part in the young nation’s march toward the electoral crisis in 1800. His relative anonymity is due to the fact that he was ahead of his time. Beckley was a first-class party manager and campaign organizer in an era when no such callings were recognized or thought respectable. He was a paradox—born in Virginia in 1757 to a titled Englishman but thoroughly anti-British and republican in sentiment. At William and Mary College he became one of the founding members of Phi Beta Kappa. Later, as the diligent and skillful clerk of various Virginia revolutionary committees and legislative bodies, he became a friend and ally of Jefferson and Madison and, with the latter’s help, the first clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives. This insider role helped him to exercise impressive talents for collecting and passing along political intelligence, keeping contacts among like-minded leaders, composing and distributing pamphlets, and bringing voters to the polls. He put these skills wholeheartedly at the service of the defenders of republican purity against the schemes of “the Treasury,” meaning Hamilton’s Federalist followers.
As the story will later show, Beckley’s help was crucial in winning key states for Jefferson both in 1796 and 1800. But he was already a partisan activist in September 1792 when he set off from Philadelphia on a mission to New York, carrying a letter from Dr. Benjamin Rush to Rush’s friend, New York senator Aaron Burr. The effervescent doctor was asking Burr’s help “in removing the monarchical rubbish of our government.” Both he and Beckley had the upcoming election in mind. N o one doubted that Washington would be chosen again, but there were hopes that if antiadministration electors would concentrate their second-choice ballots on one man, they could make him vice president instead of John Adams. A good choice for the role would be New York’s popular governor, George Clinton. Both Beckley and Rush planned to get Burr’s help in persuading Clinton to accept. And Beckley did return with Burr’s assurance that he would do whatever was in his power to woo Clinton.1
But then a curious thing happened. Letters from other New Yorkers appeared to suggest that some of them would prefer Burr himself as the candidate. These were addressed to James Monroe, likewise a senator— from Virginia—engaged with Beckley in coordinating the rally of republican forces. Monroe, eventually to become the fifth president of the United States, was a friend of Madison and more especially of Jefferson, for Jefferson had been Monroe’s private tutor in law nine years earlier when Monroe, barely in his twenties, was just out of the army with the rank of major and a battle wound to prove his mettle. Monroe, like Beckley and Jefferson, had attended William and Mary College, and he was on good personal terms with Senator Burr, who had been a fellow student of Madison at Princeton. All these connections suggested the possibility of a mid-Atlantic-state “old boy” clique in the making. Yet Monroe, though he was on cordial personal terms with Burr, reacted to his possible candidacy by making it very clear that he would not do.
“If Mr. Burr was in every way inexceptionable,” Monroe wrote, “it would be impossible to have him elected. He is too young, if not in point of age, yet upon the public theater.... Some person of more advanced life and longer standing in public trust should be selected... particularly one who in consequence of such service had given unequivocal proofs of what his principles really were.” It would be “disagreeable,” Monroe wrote to Madison, to tell Burr that Virginia did not want him, “but this must be removed by the most soothing assurances of esteem on our parts.”2
Monroe’s letter revealed a good deal about how Aaron Burr was perceived by his 1792 contemporaries. At thirty-six, he was young indeed. He had not clearly shown what his “real principles” might be. And most important, some suspected him of underhandedly organizing the letter-writing campaign to replace Clinton’s name on the ballot with his own. And yet, if he were to be turned down, his ego would require soothing and flattery to keep him cooperating with the embryonic Republican Party, because that cooperation would be critical. Aaron Burr had the political deftness of a Beckley and then some—but none of Beckley’s willingness to leave the center stage to others. Hugely ambitious, vastly talented, always shadowed by criticism and suspicion, and never lacking for loyal friends and passionate enemies, Burr was an enigma in his own time and has teased historians, biographers, and novelists ever since. Whether a sinner or a victim, he was impossible to ignore or forget.
HE WAS almost exactly the age of Hamilton, with whom his name would be forever joined, and there were tantalizing similarities in their histories. Neither was born to wealth, but Burr, unlike Hamilton, had impressive connections. His father, a minister, was a cofounder of the College of New Jersey, which became better known later as Princeton. His mother was the daughter of Jonathan Edwards, one of the most distinguished churchmen in American history. Edwards is best remembered for a fire-and-brimstone revival sermon entitled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” intended to terrify listeners into recognizing their natural wickedness and total dependence on God’s grace to escape the eternal agony of hellfire. In fact he was no bellowing pulpitpounder but rather a deep thinker and writer who struggled to reconcile reason and science with the belief in divine absolutism and mankind’s helpless depravity. Burr inherited some of his grandfather’s intellectual sharpness and none of his pained suspicion of worldly pleasure. He would spend most of his life living well—on borrowed money.
He was—again like Hamilton—orphaned at an early age and, with his older sister, raised by relatives. Precociously intelligent, he was admitted to Princeton at age thirteen and graduated in 1773. His campus contemporaries included Madison and Freneau. He began to study law in the Litchfield, Connecticut, office of his brother-in-law Tapping Reeve, twelve years his senior. Reeve would go on to found a private school of law at Litchfield whose graduates came to include a galaxy of distinguished justices and officeholders. But Aaron Burr had hardly gotten familiar with his first textbooks when war, patriotism, and the lure of adventure called him away to brave and controversial service. As a “cadet,” still only nineteen, he endured the hunger and freezing cold of a December 1775 march to Quebec capped by a failed assault during a New Year’s Eve blizzard. Burr just missed death by a blast of gunfire that killed General Richard Montgomery, at whose side he was advancing. But he did not, as later rumored, plunge back through the drifts carrying the commander’s body on his shoulders.
In 1776 he was briefly on Washington’s staff, but earned and heartily returned the general’s lifelong dislike and was very quickly assigned elsewhere. There may be no truth to the story that Washington once caught him snooping through the mail on his desk, but it is on record that when a promotion to lieutenant colonel finally came through, Burr, whose estimate of his own abilities was never modest, wrote a blustering letter to the commander in chief saying, in effect: “What took you so long?” In the campaigns that followed his new posting, Burr overcame his boyish and diminutive appearance to emerge as a tough and competent officer, but by 1779, ill health due to the hardships of the field forced his resignation.
During his early service Burr had gotten himself a reputation as a flirtatious gallant, but midway through the war he fell seriously in love with a married woman ten years older than himself. She was Theodosia Prevost, living under suspicion in New Jersey as the presumed Tory wife of a long-absent British officer. When word came that James Prevost had died in the West Indies, Burr and the widow were wed in July 1782. He had just been admitted to practice law, after less than a year’s tutoring by a New York attorney. He talked his way into a waiver of a minimum time-of-study requirement by pleading his army service. He was now beginning his profession with a wife and five stepchildren to support and a habit of generous spending. But as the war ended and the British left, a tangle of conflicting claims over Tory property surfaced. There was plenty of work for a small corps of New York City lawyers including ex-colonels Burr and Hamilton, and both of them quickly proved able to excel and to make a living in their new peacetime calling. Burr soon became the father of a daughter of his own, Theodosia, born in 1783. Alone of his children she would live to adulthood.
Unlike Hamilton, Burr did not show any interest in the politics of nation building. He was chosen to the state assembly in 1784 but gave the job little attention and stuck unobtrusively to local issues during his one-year term. He appeared to have no strong political convictions, expounded no theories of government, added nothing to the stacks of pamphlets generated by the groundbreaking debates of the 1780s on how free Americans could best rule themselves. This can be interpeted as either selfish opportunism, flexibly leaving all options for personal advancement open, or as a sensible and farsighted commitment to pragmatic compromise within an existing system, the very soul of democratic politics. Burr’s historical critics and defenders endlessly argue both positions. In any case, he did not affront the general anti-Federalist sentiment in New York, which barely ratified the Constitution by three votes at the last minute. But with the new government in place in 1789, Burr suddenly entered political life with zest, and with intentions that were always slightly cloudy.
State politics were still in the mold set during colonial times, when the rich lands of the Hudson and lower Mohawk Valleys were carved into huge family estates sometimes embracing whole counties and more. Among them, clans like the Livingstons, Schuylers, De Lanceys, Van Rensselaers, Beekmans, and Morrises occupied most royal appointive offices and controlled the few that were elective through their influence on the small number of eligible voters. Joined by intermarriage with New York’s wealthy merchants, they made up a potent conservative aristocracy. Alternately feuding and dealing with one another, controlling perquisites and patronage, they turned elections into contests between groups of personal followers. The close division over the Constitution in New York, for example, was driven not only by issues but by the fact that some of the “first families” were anti-Federalists who wanted no shrinkage in the state power that was in their hands, while others hoped that a strengthened federal government would protect them from “the mob” and open new opportunities to commerce.
That old order began to change during the Revolution. First, authority collapsed in many places in the state that were fought over savagely by American and British regulars, militiamen, Indians, Tories, and guerrillas. When peace finally came, frontier settlers took up land in the virgin western portions of the state. Tory estates were seized and redistributed. Tax support for the Episcopal (formerly Anglican) church ended, and an antislavery movement began to grow. Immigration increased, new businesses were established; new voters were harder to control. A democratic tide was rising, and few could ride it better than George Clinton, elected wartime governor for a three-year term under the new state constitution in 1777. Reelected again and again, he was, at age fifty, bidding for his fifth consecutive term in 1789. By then a popular and seasoned old “pol,” Clinton had built a base among the “new” classes of independent farmers and middle-class businessmen while at the same time he used his own good family connections by marriage, plus his patronage, to maneuver for support from the highborn. He was almost impossible to beat.
Enter Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, at that time acquainted only as fellow members of the New York bar. Hamilton was the better known and more influential both as the son-in-law of Philip Schuyler, who became one of New York’s first two senators, and as leader of the state’s Federalists. Their choice to oppose Clinton was Robert Yates, a friend of Burr’s who had helped him get his license. So Burr supported Yates and found himself, on this one occasion, actually on the same side as Hamilton. Clinton won the election and, being the shrewd strategist that he was, held no grudges; he brought the gifted and popular young attorney into his own camp by naming Burr state attorney general. At the same time Clinton lured the powerful Livingston family away from their Federalist connections after Hamilton had already alienated them by denying them some expected patronage. So Burr now had the Livingstons and Clinton in his corner, and it quickly proved to be a crucial break. In 1790 one third of the Senate—including Senator Schuyler— came up for renewal. Clinton arranged to have Burr elected over Schuyler in the state legislature (which, in all states, chose senators until 1912), and then gave the vacated attorney generalship to a Livingston. A good deal of backroom conniving was involved. One furious Federalist complained of “twistings, combinations and maneuvers” that were “incredible.” No one was more outraged than Hamilton, whose proud relative had been unceremoniously dumped by Burr and his “myrmidons,” a term that literate voters in 1791 would immediately recognize as coming from the Iliad and meaning unquestioning followers of the warrior Achilles. From that moment on, the hostility of the secretary of the Treasury toward Burr would fester and swell to neurotic proportions.3
For Burr the victory was sweet in many ways. It elevated him from New York lawyer to national lawmaker, widened his contacts and aspirations, and also allowed him more freely to enjoy Philadelphia without the presence of his wife, whom illness kept at home during Senate sessions. She suffered from some kind of progressive, painful, and depressing disease, which, as she told her brother-in-law, drove her “as near a state of insanity as possible.”4 Like most spouses of public men at that time, she struggled to manage alone during Burr’s absences while he peppered her with letters full of advice, written in ignorance of actual home situations. To her burdens were added three pregnancies within five years of Theodosia’s birth. A girl was born in 1785 and died at the age of three, and there were two infants stillborn. But she appears to have remained devoted to Burr until the day she died in May 1794, and he wrote later that her life brought him “more happiness than all my successes,” and her death “dealt me more pain than all sorrows combined.”
Burr didn’t remarry until, as an old man of seventy-seven, he captured a rich widow twenty years his junior, though rumor credited him with many liaisons in the interim. His large, dark eyes, high forehead, and clean-cut profile made him attractive to women, and to these charms were added good manners and sprightly conversation. “Honey trickles from his tongue,” said one listener. Both sexes found him a charmer. As a New York Federalist businessman resignedly put it in a letter to Hamilton, “This person, C.B. [i.e., Colonel Burr] has an address not resistable by common clay.”5
Unlike many so-called womanizers, however, Burr respected female minds, those of wife and daughter included. Rather than have little Theodosia become “a mere fashionable woman, with all the attendant frivolity and vacuity of mind,” he wrote, “I would earnestly pray God to take her forthwith hence.”6 He chose tutors for her, drilled, directed, and quizzed her by post as she grew up, and had her reading Latin poetry and studying Greek grammar by the time she was ten—in addition to learning such parlor arts as playing the harp and piano. The child recognized and returned the love and dedication behind this pushing, and the unusual bond between the two as she grew into womanhood became one of the notable features of both their lives.
Educating Theodosia, entertaining the best of New York society, patronizing young artists like the portraitist John Vanderlyn, endorsing notes for old friends, and maintaining a Hudson riverside “country” home in what is now Manhattan’s Greenwich Village all cost far more than even Burr’s practice brought in. His letters were full of statements like: “I have been in hourly expectation of substantial relief in my pecuniary affairs,” or “as to money matters, I am in the same state of impotent distress as heretofore... on every side good prospects, but not one... productive of a shilling.”7 Like many contemporaries, he speculated in western lands, used his political power to help his investments, and was often a bare step from arrest for debt. That might well have been the reason why he was forever suspected of nursing grandiose projects to enrich himself, and why he continued his pursuit of high office even without any strong ideological commitments.
Early in 1792 he let his name be floated for governor of New York and was even mentioned favorably by some Federalists as a man who could draw votes from all sides. But Alexander Hamilton firmly shut the door on that idea. The Federalists instead named the aristocratic-looking John Jay, an impeccable and universally respected lawyer-diplomat born to a wealthy merchant family of Huguenot descent. Jay, in his late forties, already had a solid career behind him. With Franklin and Adams he had negotiated the peace treaty ending the Revolution, headed the department of foreign affairs of the toothless Confederation government, written some of the essays in The Federalist, and become the first chief justice of the United States Supreme Court. Full of piety, goodwill, and civic responsibility, he was the model of the “wise man” who is always chosen as trustee, arbitrator, and consultant—the very antithesis of Aaron Burr.
But Burr did not run against Jay. The state’s anti-Federalists needed someone stronger and named Clinton for a sixth term. Yet Burr wound up deciding the result. When the voting took place in the spring, Jay seemed to have won. However, the official vote counters found small, technical irregularities in the method by which ballots had been submitted in three counties, two of which Jay had carried. If those votes were thrown out, Clinton would win. The canvassers appealed to both New York senators for their opinions. Burr delivered a legal ruling against counting the disputed ballots. The canvassers accepted it, so Clinton remained governor and Burr was at the center of an apparent steal.
Federalists were left seething. Burr, swore one of them, “will prostitute talents, honesty & integrity... for the prosperity of a party.”8 No one was more vehement than Hamilton, who once more had seen Burr defeat a candidate he supported. When it seemed briefly possible that the nation’s republicans might name the senator as their candidate for vice president that September, Hamilton was positively livid. Burr, he wrote to one friend, was “unprincipled, both as a public and a private man.... Embarrassed, as I understand, in his circumstances, with an extravagant family, bold, enterprising, and intriguing, I am mistaken if it be not his object to play the game of confusion, and I feel it to be a religious duty to oppose his career.” Another letter declared that “as a public man, he is one of the worst sort—a friend to nothing but as it suits his interest and ambition.... ’Tisevident that he aims at putting himself at the head of what he calls the ’popular party,’ as affording the best tools for an ambitious man to work with.... In a word, if we have an embryo Caesar in the United States, ’tis Burr.”9
Most Federalists distrusted Burr almost that much, but the anti-Federalist opposition leaders were no less uncertain about his unsettled principles. No one ever seemed to be certain whether Burr was independent of party or simply ready to jump party lines whenever it would help him personally. Some believed him “unsettled in his politics and are afraid he will go over to the other side.”’10 Others found in the charismatic New Yorker “traits of character which sooner or later will give us much trouble. He has an unequalled talent for... forming combinations of which he is always the centre.”11 Possibly to address such concerns, Burr, during his next four years in Congress, loyally fought floor battles on behalf of what was by then clearly emerging as the Republican (in some places called the Democratic-Republican) Party. But his efforts were not entirely rewarding. In 1796, to anticipate the story slightly, Jefferson was the Republican candidate to succeed Washington in the nation’s third presidential contest. His supporters grappled again with the hard and still-unfamiliar job of getting agreement on a single figure to whom their electors’ second votes should go. Burr worked diligently to round up backing for himself and came near to exhaustion visiting Republican politicians in states from New Hampshire to Virginia under those abysmal eighteenth-century traveling conditions. By September he was at least unofficially the running mate. But when the votes came in, they still reflected Republican misgivings. The final tallies gave John Adams the presidency with seventy-one electoral votes, made Thomas Jefferson his vice president with sixty-eight, and showed Thomas Pinckney, a Federalist, with fifty-nine. Burr lagged far, far behind with thirty. Not even half of those voting for Jefferson had made him the number-two choice. The major blow had come from Virginia, where Burr had only one vote as against twenty for Jefferson; Georgia and South Carolina, which went Republican, gave him no votes at all; and North Carolina provided six compared with eleven for Jefferson.
The 1796 election in New York State brought more bad news. A Federalist majority was sent to the state legislature, which did not reelect Burr to another senatorial term. At the start of 1797, at forty-one, he was back in private life, smarting at the memory of the injustices done him by the Virginians.
Then, in just three years of effort, he put himself in a position where they had to turn to him for help in the election of 1800. Burr, using all his skills and allure, built a primitive but recognizable prototype of a modern urban machine.
THE KEY was building a base in the fast-changing, fast-growing city that was his home. According to later legend, his instrument was a kind of fraternal lodge known in 1797 as the Society of Tammany and Columbian Order in the City of New York, which he politicized and which was the origin of the notorious Tammany Hall that came to control New York’s Democratic Party for a full century starting about 1860. That is mythology. The Society, founded in 1788 by an upholsterer named William Mooney, was originally nonpartisan and dedicated to promoting “the smile of charity, the chain of friendship and the flame of liberty.”12 Its members liked rituals and patriotic parades in which they dressed up as Indians. Its officers were called “sachems,” and the “Long Room” in Martling’s Tavern that served as its headquarters was known as “the Wigwam.” Despite these apolitical beginnings, the Society, unlike more aristocratic associations, opened its doors to all, and gradually the ordinary workers who entered came to outnumber, then to alienate and drive away Federalist “braves.”
Burr was never even a member or a recorded participant in any Society activities. But he was linked to Tammany through several of its key members who were part of a clique of admiring young men surrounding him, known as Burrites. They were partners in his political and business undertakings and sometimes in his scrapes with the law. The best-known, Matthew Davis, would eventually become Grand Sachem of Tammany and likewise Burr’s devoted first biographer, managing to muddy the record further by losing or destroying much of his subject’s correspondence. Burr farsightedly recognized the long-range political meaning of his influential friends in the Society of Tammany, namely, the possibility of mobilizing the faceless new thousands to swing elections. He saw to it that the Burrites controlled steering committees, organized and publicized meetings to name and support candidates, prepared lists of voters that included financial information and previous political records, canvassed door-to-door for funds, and made sure that the faithful got to the polls on election day.
Meanwhile, he was easily elected to the state assembly again for two successive terms and was able to advance his cause by several activities there. One was to amend state laws so as to allow individuals to form “tontines,” that is, to chip in for group purchases of property, thereby automatically qualifying each member as a voter. Another spectacular stroke involved the creation of a “Republican” bank in New York. The city only had two banks, one of them a branch of the national Bank of the United States that Hamilton had created, and the other, purely local, the Bank of New York, also founded in 1791 under his leadership. Both naturally confined most of their lending operations to well-heeled Federalist applicants. Efforts to break the monopoly were routinely beaten back in the legislature. But Burr took advantage of the city’s increasing need for a pure water supply to get a state charter in 1799 for the Manhattan Company, a private corporation formed to deliver water through a system of deep “uptown” wells, steam pumps, and wooden pipes, to homes at the populous lower end of the island. He slipped into the charter a provision that any surplus funds collected to raise working capital could be invested as the directors saw fit. Being friends of Burr, they saw fit to create the Bank of the Manhattan Company. So in addition to providing water to several hundred (eventually over two thousand) grateful residence owners, Burr now controlled a bank that offered low-interest mortgages and other loans to shopkeepers, craftsmen, proprietors of small businesses, and rising professional men, all of whom had lacked the connections to get credit from Federalist bankers.
By the beginning of 1800 Burr had gathered around him a bloc of New Yorkers whose gratitude he had earned and whose votes he could count on, the classic definition of a “boss.” He was in an excellent position to send a slate of Republicans to the assembly in Albany in impending April elections. Their vote would be critical when that same assembly, in the fall, chose the state’s presidential electors. Candidate Jefferson would need them badly, and he knew it; “All will depend on the [New York] city election, which is of 12 members,” he reported to Monroe in January.13 To secure the state, he would have to deal with Burr, whom his Virginian followers had treated so poorly four years earlier. To “the Colonel,” that must have been a satisfying thought.
BURR’S WELL-OILED Manhattan operation would to some degree serve as the template for other urban political machines, but they would not emerge until years later in a more citified America. It was possible for him to work his arts in New York as early as he did only because New York City already had a society of many strands that could be woven into different political patterns. For most of 1789 and 1790 it had enjoyed the distinction of being the capital both of of New York State and of the United States of America. The n the federal government moved to Philadelphia, and in 1797 the state capital, too, was relocated to Albany for the better convenience of the growing “upstate” population. By then it did not matter much to the city’s self-image. New York might no longer be a political command post, but it was already on the way to becoming a financial, mercantile, manufacturing, and cultural capital. Its big-town profile, economic power, and special urban needs would become ingredients in the volatile political mixture of a diverse America still not comfortably united by 1800.
As a shipping center, New York was beginning to overtake (and would soon outstrip) Boston and Philadelphia. Between 1789 and 1801 the duties paid at the Federal Customs House overlooking the spacious, sail-dotted harbor rose from under $150,000 to some $5 million. The tonnage of vessels engaged in foreign trade shot from an approximate 19,000 to 146,000, and of those in the coastal trade from 5,000 to 34,000. In the same period the population roughly doubled from 33,000 to 65,000. Legions of carpenters, masons, glaziers, brickmakers, plasterers, blacksmiths, butchers, bakers, weavers, tailors, dyers, tinsmiths, tinkers, and potters—a Whitmanesque gallery of working people— toiled night and day to house and feed the growing multitude. Many services were performed by slaves, of which the whole state still had thousands.
New York lacked Boston’s tradition of piety and uplift, though it had plenty of churches (seven built in the 1790s alone), and despite the presence of Columbia College, it was not yet up to Philadelphia’s caliber as an intellectual center. But it had a strong sense of community responsibility to the poor and sick. In 1789 over six hundred paupers were dependent on the parish; the New York Hospital (ancestor of Bellevue) opened in 1791 and the New York Dispensary four years later. New York knew how to play as well as be serious, and there were ballrooms and theaters for the leisured. But the town’s main preoccupation was already getting to be business. In “downtown” streets (lit after dark by oil lamps) men of affairs gathered to bargain and deal in places like the Tontine Coffee House, which—in 1792—became the site of a regular meeting of stockbrokers, though they did not formally become the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street till early in the next century. Businessmen could also get news of markets and movements from as many as nine newspapers, copies of which were available to the diners and drinkers. Out-of-towners with transactions to complete could reach New York by a variety of stagecoaches, and the island city was well linked to its neighbors by regular sailing ferry service.
New York had its crude side, too. Wandering cows and pigs were still visible at public crossings, and dead dogs, cats, and rats were left to decompose in the gutters and vacant lots that turned into quagmires in rainy seasons. Along with open cesspools and damp cellars, these nursed a mosquito population that made New York yet another city vulnerable to yellow fever. An epidemic in 1795 took some 750 lives, and there was another in 1798, not as devastating as Philadelphia’s but still with a death toll over 2,000.
The city’s expansion northward was slowed by marshy ground near the East River and a large pond called “the Collect” that filled modernday Foley Square, where the Federal Court House now stands. It was ringed with breweries, potteries, tanneries, and ropewalks, which used its water. New Yorkers boated and swam there in summertime and cut figures on ice skates during winter. Two often overlooked landmark events took place on the Collect. In 1795 a New Jersey engineer, John Stevens, ran a small steamboat with a screw propeller on its calm surface. In 1796 John Fitch, who had already been operating a steamboat of his own devising between Philadelphia and other towns on the Delaware River, did likewise. Neither man, however, was able to interest capitalists in providing development money, so the honor of becoming the recognized father of the steamboat went to Robert Fulton, who a full eleven years later—with investment backing—ran his paddle-wheeler the Clermont up the Hudson from New York to Albany in two days. By then the Collect had already been filled in and disappeared.
There was already a distinctive New York style. It was cosmopolitan, as might be expected in a place whose families, high and low, claimed Dutch, English, French, Irish, Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jewish, West Indian, and African ancestors. And it was also full-blooded and jazzy. John Bernard, an English actor who played New York in 1797, later recorded his memories. At breakfast in his boardinghouse he saw foreign visitors and transients from states as far west as Kentucky, as far north as Vermont, and as far south as South Carolina, elbowing one another as they raced to empty platters of fish, ham, beef, boiled fowl, eggs, pies, lobsters, and vegetables washed down with “tea, coffee, cider, sangaree and cherry brandy.” Merchants left their homes at eight-thirty, and were on the wharves by midmorning shouting orders, dodging among crates and barrels, thumbing ledgers. Noon found them at the market, and at two they were “back again to the rolling, heaving, hallooing and scribbling.” At four they went home to dress for dinner, at seven to the theater, and at eleven to supper with friends to “smoke cigars, gulp down brandy and sing, roar and shout... till 3 in the morning.” Bernard concluded that it was simply the way New York functioned. “Thus the New Yorker,” he wrote, “enjoyed his span of being to the full stretch of the tether, his violent exertions during the day counteracting the effects of his nocturnal relaxations.”14 Abigail Adams may have put the same thought in another way when faced with the unpalatable prospect, to her, of moving the vice presidential home to Philadelphia. “When all is done,” she said, “it will not be Broadway.”15
TWO CENTURIES AFTER 1800, the metropolitan pattern already visible in New York would become the one most characteristic of the United States. But to Hamilton and Burr’s generation there was another kind of smaller-scale “urbanism” taking shape that would also generate conflicting interests needing to be expressed and reconciled through political parties. The town of Albany, neither exactly “rural” nor “urban,” was a showcase and headquarters for a briskly developing “inland commerce” not clearly anticipated in the architecture of the Constitution.
Albany, 150 miles upriver from New York, also lived by commerce— it had been founded by the Dutch as Fort Orange, a stockaded market where the Iroquois came to barter their furs for the white man’s hardware and whiskey—but its 1790 traffic was different. Albany collected the lumber, grain, and other farm produce of the Mohawk Valley just west of it, and of Vermont to the east, and shipped them downriver to New York. There they were bought and shipped to Europe. In return, manufactured goods were sent upstream for redistribution to the interior. Everything was on the modest scale befitting a “city” of between 3,500 souls in 1790 and 5,350 ten years later. Business was on a cash or barter basis—there were no banks—and the “merchant marine” numbered some ninety ships, half of them locally owned. They were small sailboats, usually operated by a crew of four, which included a cook for the eight or ten passengers who traveled each way. The round trip, with stops for loading and unloading by wagon, could take two or three weeks or even more. Winter ice closed business down, so an owner could count on only about ten round trips a year at a profit per trip of about one hundred dollars. Of Albany’s buildings that clung to rising heights on the west side of the lovely river, almost a third were stores, storehouses, and stables. Handling some manufactured goods like paper, processed tobacco, glass bottles, and leatherware made in neighboring towns gave the economy a little diversity.
It was a slow town. A visiting Frenchman said that hospitality was not “a prominent feature in the character of the inhabitants of Albany,” who had a “dull and melancholy” look.16 Aaron Burr, like other lawyers and legislators, regarded his time there as a kind of penance. He wrote to a young Frenchwoman: “You expect amusement from my letters— amusement from Albany! You have certainly lost your senses or your recollection—I eat breakfast and dinner & go to bed and attend court— this is the history of my life here.”17 Excitement of an unwelcome sort was provided by fires, to which the wooden structures were especially vulnerable. One in 1793 destroyed twenty-six houses. Three of the town’s slave populace, two of them women, were found guilty of setting it and were hanged. In 1797 another blaze consumed five blocks and prompted the clergy to declare it a “judgment of God for the sins of the community” and call for a day of prayer.18 There was not much opportunity for sin. A night watch of twenty-four men selected nightly and obliged to serve or pay six shillings patrolled the streets. And as late as 1803 there was only one “respectable” public house where men could lodge and exchange gossip and favors. An old-time resident recalled meeting Clinton, Burr, Hamilton, Livingston, and other notables there.
As against New York’s imported fabrics, Albany proudly wore homespun. She was still another part of a new America swimming into focus on the eve of the incoming nineteenth century. The river town would be one of many small-to-middle-sized inland commercial centers that depended for survival on continued immigration and development. In Albany’s case that specifically meant the steady creation of new farms in the virgin acres that stretched westward toward the Finger Lakes and the Genesee Valley. Other necessities were improved transportation, easy access to the capital required for new businesses, and loosening the grip of land-buying syndicates, some controlled by foreign investors, on huge tracts they were holding for speculation. These goals would be hard to achieve without breaking the power of the old families and the newer financial aristocracy that Hamilton was trying to create. So while some voters in the area around Albany supported federalism, there was a large core of voters ready to listen to Republican arguments. The s e were the source of George Clinton’s power. Between his upstate following of middling farmers and entrepreneurs and Burr’s downstate New York City working-class adherents there was a political marriage that would last for many years—long after both men were gone and the Federalist and Republican labels had been replaced by other party names.
Upstate and downstate, province and capital, coastland and upland all were labels that showed how class and regional issues were becoming solidified within every state. Each state had a differently “flavored” politics, but in all of them, broad-based political activity was becoming an unavoidable necessity. Politics was more than a mere survival tool, however. It was also a kind of entertainment, a collection of familiar rituals, and a bonding force among different social, ethnic, and religious groups. But its unifying qualities were offset when political argument was carried to dangerous and divisive extremes. Which force would triumph? The 1790s did not know, and with good reason often feared the worst.
Like national politics, the intrastate variety could be played with sharp elbows and threats of violence. But the major divisions in the country in the 1790s remained those separating the South, North, and West. They were reflected in many variations, and some of the most interesting and important were on display in three unofficial sectional “capitals,” Charleston, Boston, and Pittsburgh.