Alexander Hamilton, Revolutionary

A LITTLE MORE THAN A year after Philip died, Alexander sat at his desk in his new country house and began a letter to a friend, the man he had wanted to become president.

“My Dear Sir,” he wrote. “A garden, you know, is a very usual refuge of a disappointed politician. Accordingly I have purchased a few acres about 9 Miles from Town, have built a house, and am cultivating a Garden. The melons in your country are very fine. Will you have the goodness to send me some seed, both of the Water & Muss melons? My daughter adds another request, which is for three or four of your peroquets. She is very fond of birds.”

His garden and his girl. He lavished love and energy into both. While the garden grew, Angelica had still not recovered from the trauma of Philip’s murder. Would parakeets bring her back into her right mind? He could only hope as another year, 1802, was coming to a close.

During those sad months after Philip’s death, Alexander threw himself into the construction of a solid home for his family. Built far from the bustle of the wharves where he’d first landed as a boy, far from the clatter of wagons through the financial center he’d helped establish, the Grange was two stories tall and painted white, with eight fireplaces. Guests entered on the west, while verandas graced the north and south sides. Near the southwest corner of the house stood a nod to the work of Alexander’s life: a circle of thirteen smooth-barked, deciduous gum trees.

He’d had plenty of advice on the project from Eliza’s father, who provided clapboards for the siding and recommended design tips that would keep rodents at bay. Ezra Weeks completed the building. The construction and cultivation of his new home was costly, but nothing he would not be able to pay back with diligent work. Alexander was at last making a decent income, $12,000 a year.

“To men who have been so much harassed in the busy world as myself,” he wrote, “it is natural to look forward to complete retirement, in the circle of life as a perfect desideratum.”

Alexander both needed and wanted to return to the earth, with its cycle of sprouting and blooming and harvest and decay.

Dr. David Hosack, who’d tried to save Philip after the duel, helped Alexander with the garden, offering cuttings, bulbs, and encouragement. Alexander was as specific about his flowers and vegetables as he was about uniforms and supplies for soldiers. English raspberries belonged by the orchard. In the center of his garden would bloom an eighteen-foot ring of tulips, hyacinths, and lilies, planted in alternating clusters of nine. These would be surrounded by wild roses and laurel. He wanted dogwoods scattered along the edges of things, but not before the fruit trees were moved to the front. It would take a while for much to be produced by the farm, but variety began to emerge from the soil: strawberries, cabbages, asparagus.

As Alexander and his family took root there in grief, they found happy times, too. Friends like Gouverneur Morris came to call. So did Eliza’s family, and when her parents visited, they brought fruits and vegetables and even beef, although her father was growing too ill to visit often. Alexander and Eliza also attended plays, including the Tragedy of Alexander the Great with a Grand Heroic Spectacle of the Siege of Oxydrace.

In his solo moments, he walked through the woods of Harlem, where he’d once been a young soldier. This time, though, his quarry was not men but small game. Into the stock of his single-barreled gun, he’d carved A. HAMILTON, N.Y., a name that meant something in a city that had grown much under his leadership.

Work often brought him to Albany, a several-day journey by sloop or mail stage. During these trips, his thoughts traveled to his wife. Sometimes he sent her practical letters. The ice house might need a chimney, and he had ideas on how it should be constructed. Or there were compost beds to be built, which required a careful mix of clay (he knew just the sort), cow dung, and black mold.

“For indeed my Eliza you are very essential to me. Your virtues more and more endear you to me and experience more and more convinces me that true happiness is only to be found in the bosom of ones own family.”

Family. It was his refuge and his worry. Death had been greedy, stalking little Johnny, stealing Philip. He’d lost his father and George Washington. Philip Schuyler was ailing. Whenever Eliza took ill, Alexander’s heart seized.

Friends noticed how solicitous Alexander had become. At the Grange in April 1804, “there was a furious and dreadful storm,” a friend later wrote. “It blew almost a hurricane. His house stands high and was much exposed, and I am certain that in the second story, where I slept, it rocked like a cradle…. I was alone, and he treated me with a minute attention that I did not suppose he knew how to bestow.”

For Alexander, whose life had found its direction through a hurricane, death itself was the inexorable storm that laid waste to everything he held dear, again and again. He lived in the shadow of this inevitability.

This was another of the things he and Burr had in common. They’d been born far apart, Alexander on Nevis and Burr in New Jersey. But their lives had traveled parallel tracks toward each other since. Both were orphans. Both heroes in the Revolution. Both lawyers and statesmen. Both had wives they adored.

As Alexander doted on his children, Burr lavished his sole child, Theodosia, with love and attention. He ensured that she was educated with a rigor typically reserved for boys. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman impressed him as a particular work of genius. Death had been greedy with both. Burr’s wife suffered from cancer for all the time they knew each other. He’d wanted to quit the Senate to care for her, but she wouldn’t let him. She died in 1794, and Burr devoted himself more fiercely than ever to his precious girl.

As parallel as their lives had been, their key difference made collisions inevitable. Alexander believed in honor and the nobility of public service. Burr was about private gains. Politics was fun, not a matter of principle. George Washington had perceived this selfish core in Burr immediately. When Burr was briefly part of his military family in 1776, he did not impress the general. Burr was brave, yes, but he was fundamentally driven by the personal. Alexander shared Washington’s fundamental drive, to serve the nation. Thus, even when Alexander and Washington quarreled, they were able to patch things up.

Where Alexander was careful not to benefit personally from his public service, giving up his military pension, charging modest fees to his legal clients, and avoiding business ventures that could give him a conflict of interest, Burr did the opposite. Despite charging higher legal fees and engaging in shady deals, Burr still ended up in financial straits.

This became the heart of one of the most devastating charges Alexander made against Burr. There had been rivalry all along. Burr had opposed Alexander’s financial plans. He’d been a political opponent to Alexander’s beloved father-in-law. But he was financially corrupt. Alexander had seen this with Burr’s law clients. He’d felt the sting of it with the Manhattan Company.

This is why Alexander listed his opinions about the man in a private, nine-point letter to several friends—a letter that eventually found its way to Burr.

“1. He is in every sense a profligate; a voluptuary in the extreme, with uncommon habits of expence; in his profession extortionate to a proverb; suspected on strong grounds of having corruptly served the views of the Holland Company, in the capacity as a member of our legislature: and understood to have been guilty of several breaches of probity in his pecuniary transactions. His very friends don’t insist on his integrity.

“2. He is without doubt insolvent for a large deficit. All his visible property is deeply mortgaged, and he is known to owe other large debts, for which there is no specific security….”

No political office paid enough money to get Burr out of his financial trough. He would face the temptation of selling out the nation to a foreign country, abusing the public trust, or even causing a war. This made him dangerous.

Alexander wasn’t the only one who despised Burr. James Monroe—no fan of Alexander’s—said, “I consider Burr as a man to be shunned.”

Even Jefferson disliked his vice president. In his private journal, he wrote, “His conduct very soon inspired me with distrust. I habitually cautioned Mr. Madison against trusting him too much.”

IN JUNE 1804, ALEXANDER’S SON JAMES HAD asked for his father’s help on a speech he’d written for a class at Columbia.

Alexander wrote back: “I have prepared for you a Thesis on Discretion. You may need it. God bless you.”

His thesis for his son was infused with hard-won wisdom. Discretion would steer a man free from potential errors, Alexander wrote. “Discretion is the MENTOR which ought to accompany every Young Telemachus in his journey through life.”

Telemachus was the son of the Greek warrior Odysseus, a man known for his cleverness. Odysseus ended the Trojan War, and then took ten years to return home to his son and long-suffering wife, enduring many trials along the way (and sometimes cheating on his wife). It was an odyssey not unlike Alexander’s own.

That same month, Alexander received a letter from Burr, who demanded to know what Alexander had been saying about him. Two days later, Alexander replied. He’d tracked down the letter Burr had mentioned. The accusation in it was too vague to acknowledge. He trusted that Burr, after thinking about it, would agree. Otherwise, “I can only regret the circumstance, and must abide the consequences.”

That line said everything: this long rivalry had ruptured into an affair of honor.

Burr turned to William P. Van Ness, his second, to craft a response. When Alexander received it, he dug in his heels and chose a second of his own, Nathaniel Pendleton. The two seconds tried to reach an agreement that would head off a duel. They could not.

As the sparks between Burr and Alexander began to smolder, a veterans’ group called the Society of the Cincinnati met at the Fraunces Tavern to celebrate the Fourth of July. Both Alexander and Burr attended. Burr was gloomy and quiet, his gaze fixed on a cheerful Alexander as he sang along to “Why, Soldiers, Why,” which was also known as “Wolfe’s Song.”

THAT SAME DAY, A WEDNESDAY, ALEXANDER sat down to write the first of two farewell letters to his wife. Through Pendleton, Alexander let Burr know he’d be available to duel any time after the following Sunday.

When that Sunday arrived, Alexander and Eliza set out before the summer heat became oppressive for a stroll through the grounds of the Grange. Then he gathered his family around and read through the morning service of the Episcopal Church. The family spent that afternoon together, and when twilight fell, Alexander gathered his children around him at the base of a tree. They lay together in the grass until the sky blackened and the stars emerged from the infinite darkness overhead.

The next day, the seconds worked out the particulars of the duel. In his office at 12 Garden Street, Alexander seemed tranquil, going about business as usual. He tended his clients’ needs, and then he wrote his will and outlined his financial obligations, which weighed heavily on him. He worked until the setting sun’s rays bent through the window, casting a glow on the mundane tools of work. One man remained in the office with Alexander, a clerk named Judah Hammond. The clerk noticed nothing amiss as his boss stood by his desk in the gently fading light. “These were his last moments in his place of business.”

Alexander may have concealed his cares, but his heart groaned under the weight of them. Should he be killed, his wife and children would probably have to rely on the generosity of friends to escape poverty.

He didn’t want to duel. Duels violated his religious and moral principles. His life was of the utmost importance to his dear family. He owed money to others, and he did not wish to harm them with unpaid debt. What’s more, he didn’t have ill will toward Burr. It was a political matter, not a personal one. He had nothing to gain from dueling.

But he had to do it, and he enumerated his reasons. Yes, he’d said bad things about Burr’s political principles and private conduct, but he couldn’t disavow statements he believed to be true. This made the duel unavoidable, even as dueling was wrong.

As he contemplated what was to come, Alexander reserved empathy for Burr. Alexander’s words had no doubt been painful for his rival. What’s more, some lies might have been thrown into the mix by people who passed the comments along. The best Alexander could hope was that Burr had satisfied his own conscience with his actions.

For his part, he hoped the world believed his words were just. “It is also my ardent wish that I may have been more mistaken than I think I have been, and that he by his future conduct may shew himself worthy of all confidence and esteem, and prove an ornament and blessing to his Country.”

He had good reason to believe Burr would survive the duel and go on to shine. He planned to throw away his first shot, and maybe even his second, to give opportunity to Burr to pause and reflect.

THE DUEL WOULD HAPPEN JUST AFTER DAWN ON July 11. Alexander had been involved in many affairs of honor, but this was the first time he’d stare down a gun’s dark barrel. He hoped Burr would be as halfhearted as he’d been with John Church, taking lazy aim with a misloaded weapon. Then he could put this unhappy business behind him and return to the work of tending his family, his home, and his law practice.

The night before the duel, he visited Robert Troup and spent an evening with Oliver Wolcott and friends at Wolcott’s house. He put on his most cheerful face. Then he returned home and took to his desk. By the light of a candle, he wrote a final letter.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, ALEXANDER STEPPED OUTSIDE. It was 5:00 a.m.—about a half hour before sunrise. He closed the door to his house behind him; he had an appointment to keep. Because dueling was illegal in New York, the seconds had arranged for Alexander and Burr to meet in Weehawken, New Jersey, at a spot beneath the pale, ridged cliffs of the Palisades that was secluded enough and reachable from Manhattan by water.

Alexander and Burr crossed the Hudson in separate boats rowed by four men each. These men would neither see the duel nor the weapons and thus could not stand as witnesses should there be a trial. Alexander brought Pendleton and Dr. David Hosack. Burr brought William P. Van Ness and his surgeon. Alexander had a pair of pistols concealed in a portmanteau.

The boats crossed the river in the first glints of daylight. Burr arrived first, at six thirty in the morning. When Alexander landed just before seven, he found Burr and Van Ness with their coats off, clearing brush and tree limbs so there was enough space to fight.

The men greeted each other. The seconds cast their lots. Alexander’s won both, giving him the choice of where to stand. Pendleton would also call out the words to start the duel.

The seconds loaded the guns, the same pair used when a button was shot off Burr’s coat. Manufactured by Wogdon of London, these walnut pistols had concealed hair triggers that made them prone to fire quickly. They had sights on the front and rear, as well as nine-inch barrels weighted with bronze. The bores were unusually large, big enough to accommodate a one-ounce ball of lead.

The men stood ten paces apart. Alexander faced south. The bright morning sun shot its rays through the surrounding brush and trees.

“Stop,” he said. “In certain states of the light one requires glasses.” He pulled spectacles from his pocket, put them on, and checked his weapon’s sights. “This will do. Now you may proceed.”

Pendleton confirmed the men were ready. The seconds stood with their backs to the duelers so they could swear they saw no shots fired.

The men aimed. Shots rang out. One, from Alexander’s gun, lodged itself in a cedar bough twelve feet off the ground and behind Burr. The other blasted through Alexander’s abdomen, just above his right hip. It fractured a rib, ravaged his diaphragm and liver, and buried itself in his spine. The bullet’s force lifted him up on his toes. Then he turned to the left and collapsed, landing on his face.

“Dr. Hosack!” Pendleton dropped into the dirt and pulled Alexander into his lap.

Burr took a step toward his victim, a regretful look on his face. Then, without saying a word, he turned and fled. Van Ness concealed Burr’s face behind an umbrella so that neither the surgeon nor the bargemen could say they’d seen him.

Hosack raced to Alexander’s side. Gazing up, Alexander said, “This is a mortal wound, Doctor.”

The doctor stripped off Alexander’s clothing and knew immediately that the ball had struck a vital organ. Alexander stopped breathing, and when Hosack put his hand on Alexander’s heart, he perceived no motion.

“His only chance of survival is to get him to the water,” Hosack told Pendleton.

Pendleton carried Alexander out of the woods and to the riverbank. The bargemen loaded Alexander, pushed off, and raced toward Manhattan.

Hosack searched for signs of life. He rubbed Alexander’s face, his lips, and his temples with spirits of hartshorn, the same fluid that had helped rouse Philip in the bath when he had typhus. Hosack also smeared it on Alexander’s neck and chest, on his wrists, and palms, and even tried to pour a little into his mouth.

When the bargemen had rowed them some fifty yards from shore, Alexander sputtered a few breaths. Within minutes, he sighed, revived either by the hartshorn or the fresh air rising off the water.

But his pulse grew stronger and his breathing more regular. Soon, his vision returned.

Alexander glanced toward the gun case. “Take care of that pistol. It is undischarged, and still cocked; it may go off and do harm.” He tried to turn toward his second. “Pendleton knows that I did not intend to fire at him.”

“Yes,” Pendleton said. “I have already made Dr. Hosack acquainted with your determination as to that.”

Alexander, unaware his gun had indeed fired, closed his eyes and kept still. He asked the doctor once or twice how his pulse was, and informed him he couldn’t feel his legs. Hosack adjusted Alexander’s limbs, but it didn’t help. He’d been paralyzed.

As they drew near the shore, Alexander thought of his wife. “Let Mrs. Hamilton be immediately sent for—let the event be gradually broken to her; but give her hopes.”

From the shore, Alexander’s friend William Bayard scanned the river for their return. As they drew nearer, Bayard saw only Pendleton and the doctor sitting. He clasped his hands in fear.

Bayard, spying Alexander lying in the bottom of the boat, wept. Alexander was the only one who remained composed. The men carried him to a large, square room on the second floor of Bayard’s house in Greenwich Village.

He’d grown faint when he was removed from the boat, so Hosack administered a weak mixture of wine and water. They undressed Alexander, laid him in bed, and darkened the room.

The pain increased. Hosack gave him laudanum and other painkillers. Another doctor was summoned, but he could only shake his head. The French consul sent a surgeon from a nearby frigate to see if his experience treating gunshot wounds might help, but he only confirmed the opinion of the other doctors: there was nothing to be done for Alexander.

Eliza’s sister Angelica wrote from Bayard’s house: “My dear Brother, I have the painful task to inform you that General Hamilton was this morning wouned by that wretch Burr but we have every reason to hope that he will recover. May I advice that you repair immediately to my father, as perhaps he may wish to come down—My dear Sister bears with saintlike fortitude this affliction; The Town is in consternation, and there exists only the expression of Grief & Indignation.”

At one in the afternoon, a clergyman arrived to give Alexander his last rites. Before receiving Communion one last time, Alexander lifted his hands and said, “I have no ill will against Colonel Burr. I met him with a fixed resolution to do him no harm. I forgive all that happened.”

He was able to sleep a bit in the night, but by the next day, his symptoms worsened. His mind remained clear and focused on his family. When they arrived at his bedside, he opened his eyes and looked at the seven of them.

“Remember, my Eliza, you are a Christian.” He kept his voice firm. Then he closed his eyes until the people he loved most were taken from the room.

“My Dear Dearly Beloved and Affectionate Child,” Philip Schuyler wrote to Eliza, “If aught under heaven could aggravate the affliction I experience, it is that … I cannot fly to you to pour the balm of comfort into your afflicted bosom, to water it with my tears, to solace yours and mine in this depressing situation.”

Oliver Wolcott, who’d shared some of Alexander’s best and worst days as well as his last night, rushed over as soon as he heard the news. “Thus has perished one of the greatest men of this or any age,” he told his wife.

In a second letter, Wolcott wrote, “Yesterday General Hamilton expired in the midst of his family, who are agonized beyond description. No person who witnessed their distress will ever be induced to fight a duel—unless he is a person wholly insensible to every sentiment of humanity.”

Wolcott was in shock. Alexander had a brilliant mind. He was moral and decent. Devoted to his family. And here he’d been, secretly settling his affairs for days because a concern for justice over small matters had blinded him to the importance of his family obligations.

“It proves,” he wrote, “that on certain points, the most enlightened men are governed by the most unsound reasons.”

ALEXANDER’S FUNERAL TOOK PLACE JULY 14. New York City turned itself inside out for its favorite son. Starting at 10:00 a.m., a British warship dressed for mourning fired guns every five minutes for an hour. French frigates fired, too, and merchant vessels flew their flags at half-mast.

An enormous procession began at the Churches’ house on Robinson Street. When the casket appeared, the military saluted, and a band struck up melancholy music as mourners headed through town toward the church. So many had turned out: The Society of the Cincinnati. A militia regiment. Army and navy officers. Lawyers. Government leaders and agents from foreign consuls. Bank officers. Port wardens and ships’ captains. The entirety of Columbia College. Merchants, mechanics, and people from all walks of life followed the coffin as it was carried through the city to Trinity Church by a gray horse, filling the streets and doorways and standing on rooftops. Women everywhere wept.

Alexander’s hat and sword rested on top of the coffin, and his empty boots and spurs rode backward in the stirrups. Two black servants in white clothing and black-and-white turbans led his horse. As the mourners made their way up Beekman, Pearl, and Whitehall Streets, and then along Broadway to Trinity Church, more guns fired from the Battery.

Gouverneur Morris, flanked by four of Alexander’s boys, delivered the eulogy. He had given thought to what he’d say about his friend. He couldn’t gloss over his embarrassing birth. What’s more, Alexander had flaws: vanity, a lack of discretion, too many opinions. He’d died in a duel, an illegal practice. He’d been unfaithful to his wife. These truths had to be told, along with the other truths about him.

Slowly and clearly, Morris spoke his last words about his beloved, brilliant, complicated friend who’d flown to the mansions of bliss. His speech walked the crowd through Alexander’s past, from his days as a college student and a zealous military recruit to his time in Washington’s family, where he was a principal actor in the most important scenes of the Revolution. Morris reminded them of what happened in Philadelphia, where Alexander helped craft the Constitution, and followed with his years of public service.

“Washington sought for splendid talents, for extensive information, and, above all, he sought for sterling, incorruptible integrity—All these he found in Hamilton.”

Morris talked about the dark days, too, where people criticized Alexander’s work and his actions, and the way he continued to serve, even as he needed to care for his own family.

“He never lost sight of your interests,” Morris told the mourners. “I declare to you, before that God in whose presence we are now so especially assembled, that in his most private and confidential conversations, the single objects of discussion and consideration were your freedom and happiness.”

Yes, Alexander had been called ambitious, but he was not, except for the kind of glory that came from serving humanity. He was a veteran. A brilliant lawyer. An eloquent speaker and writer with no peer. He was a good man, a great one, too, and an inspiration for all.

“I CHARGE YOU TO PROTECT HIS FAME—It is all he has left—all that these poor orphan children will inherit from their father. But, my countrymen, that Fame may be a rich treasure to you also. Let it be the test by which to examine those who solicit your favour. Disregarding professions, view their conduct and on a doubtful occasion, ask, Would Hamilton have done this thing?”

After Morris’s final words rang through the air, Alexander’s body was lowered into the earth. The circle of life, his perfect retirement, was complete.

ALEXANDER’S DEATH HAD INDEED LEFT HIS FAMily in financial straits. Oliver Wolcott wrote to a small group of friends seeking to raise $100,000 to pay off Alexander’s debts and provide for Eliza and the children. All those rumors that he’d stashed away money, that he’d enriched himself in speculation, that he’d been corrupt—these were nothing more than empty words.

“My public labours have amounted to an absolute sacrifice of the interests of my family,” Alexander had written as he contemplated his death.

Even in his last hours, though, he had not seen everything clearly. His public labors had left his family poor. Protecting his honor had left them bereft of so much more.

When Nathaniel Pendleton opened the packet of papers Alexander had left for him, he found the last two letters Alexander had written to Eliza. One asked her to be of service to his cousin Ann Mitchell, the daughter of the Lyttons in Saint Croix. The other was for her heart alone. He’d written it on Independence Day, after he’d drunk wine with his fellow soldiers and sung a song of death while Aaron Burr seethed in the shadows.

The letter answered the mystery that was Alexander: the reason his honor was worth his life. It was something he’d only come to understand himself when the end was near.

This letter, my very dear Eliza, will not be delivered to you unless I shall first have terminated my earthly career: to begin, as I humbly hope, from redeeming grace and divine mercy, a happy immortality.

If it had been possible for me to have avoided the interview, my love for you and my precious children would have been alone a decisive motive. But it was not possible, without sacrifices which would have rendered me unworthy of your esteem. I need not tell you of the pangs I feel from the idea of quitting you, and exposing you to the anguish which I know you would feel. Nor could I dwell on the topic lest it unman me.

The consolations of Religion, my beloved, can alone support you; and these you have a right to enjoy. Fly to the bosom of your God and be comforted.

With my last idea; I shall cherish the sweet hope of meeting you in a better world.

Adieu best of wives and Best of women. Embrace all my darling Children for me.

Ever yours,

A.H.

JULY 4, 1804

HIS HONOR WAS WORTH HIS LIFE BECAUSE IT was the thing that made him worthy of love. All for love. That’s what honor had been for, the honor he’d been born without, the honor he’d given body, heart, and mind to earn. He’d nearly thrown it away with Maria Reynolds, and when he understood what he’d almost lost, he was willing to surrender his life so that he might deserve the best thing about it, someplace better, and for all time.

CHAPTER TWELVE

‘THIS IS a MORTAL WOUND’