Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Thus, at 7:00 A.M. on July 11, 1804, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr stood face-to-face, ready to settle their furious quarrel. Both gentlemen followed strict etiquette and “exchanged salutations.”

When Pendleton returned to the scene the next day, he tracked down Hamilton’s bullet and discovered that it had smashed the limb of a cedar tree more than twelve feet off the ground. The spot was also approximately four feet to the side of where Burr had stood—in other words, nowhere in his vicinity.

Hamilton alone seemed resigned as the end neared. At one point, speaking of politics, he said, “If they break this union, they will break my heart.”69 He could have left no more fitting political epitaph.

Adieu best of wives and best of women. Embrace all my darling children for me. Ever yours A H

bereaved family, his extended service to his country, and his woeful end, he achieved in death what had so often eluded him in life: an emotional outpouring of sympathy from all strata of New York society.

The New York Common Council, which paid for the funeral, issued a plea that all business in the city should halt out of respect for Hamilton. It was the grandest and most solemn funeral in the city’s history to date.

Preceded by two small black boys in white turbans, eight pallbearers shouldered Hamilton’s corpse, set in a rich mahogany casket with his hat and sword perched on top. Hamilton’s gray horse trailed behind with the boots and spurs of its former rider reversed in the stirrups.

In his oration, Morris was more just and generous toward Hamilton than in his grudging diary notes. He applauded Hamilton’s bravery in the Revolution; cited his legitimate doubts as to whether the Constitution could avert anarchy and despotism; and noted that Hamilton, far from being artful or duplicitous, was in most ways excessively frank: “Knowing the purity of his heart, he bore it, as it were, in his hand, exposing to every passenger its inmost recesses. This generous indiscretion subjected him to censure from misrepresentation. His speculative opinions were treated as deliberate designs and yet you all know how strenuous, how unremitting, were his efforts to establish and to preserve the Constitution.”

In death as in life, the assessment of Hamilton’s historical worth was sharply divided. His friends believed that a protean genius and rare spirit had exited the American scene. The Reverend John M. Mason thought him the “greatest statesman in the western world, perhaps the greatest man of the age.

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.

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.

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,

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.”

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

Notwithstanding his later denials, Burr instigated this lobbying effort. The senators argued that “most civilized nations” refused to treat dueling deaths as “common murders” and pointed to the absence of penalties in previous New Jersey duels.

As a result of Hamilton’s death, many reformers were denouncing dueling, though the archaic institution survived well into the nineteenth century, counting Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, John Randolph, Stephen Decatur, Sam Houston, Thomas Hart Benton, August Belmont, and Jefferson Davis among its practitioners.

His admirers hailed Burr as a visionary patriot, bent upon adding Spanish colonies to America, while detractors, including Jefferson, detected an evil plan to detach territory from the union. In 1807, Burr was arrested for treason and for trying to incite a war against Spain. He was acquitted by Chief Justice John Marshall, who applied a strict definition of treason. The acquittal only sharpened Jefferson’s contempt for “the original error of establishing a judiciary independent of the nation.”

He befriended the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham and spoke to him with remarkable candor. “He really meant to make himself emperor of Mexico,” Bentham recalled. “He told me I should be the legislator and he would send a ship of war for me. He gave me an account of his duel with Hamilton. He was sure of being able to kill him, so I thought it little better than murder.”

He still had his beloved Theodosia, however, whose portrait he had toted around Europe, cradling it in his lap during stagecoach trips. Though her husband was now governor of South Carolina, gossip claimed that he was abusing her.

At the end of 1812, the morose Theodosia sailed for New York to join her father, but she never made it. She died at sea, age twenty-nine, the victim of either a storm or pirates. It was the heaviest blow that Burr ever weathered, so crushing that he described himself as “severed from the human race.”

Only once did Burr betray any misgivings about killing Hamilton. While reading the scene in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in which the tenderhearted Uncle Toby picks up a fly and delicately places it outside a window instead of killing it, Burr is said to have remarked, “Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.”

On September 14, 1836, he died in a Staten Island hotel after two strokes and was buried in Princeton near his father and grandfather.

For Eliza Hamilton, the collapse of her world was total, overwhelming, and remorseless. Within three years, she had had to cope with four close deaths: her eldest son, her sister Peggy, her mother, and her husband, not to mention the mental breakdown of her eldest daughter.

On November 18, 1804, four months after his son-in-law slumped to the ground in Weehawken, Philip Schuyler died and was buried in the Albany Rural Cemetery.

she prayed for “the mercies of the divine being in whose dispensations” all Christians should acquiesce.

Eliza’s fierce, unending loyalty to Hamilton certifies that their marriage had been deeply rewarding, albeit marred by Maria Reynolds and other misadventures. Blessed with a forgiving heart, Eliza made ample allowance for her husband’s flaws. Two months after the duel, she described Hamilton to Nathaniel Pendleton as “my beloved, sainted husband and my guardian angel.”

Heavily indebted from abortive business ventures, Philip Schuyler died land rich but cash poor. The aura of Schuyler-family wealth had outdistanced reality.

To keep the family afloat, Gouverneur Morris organized a secret subscription fund among Hamilton’s friends. He had to conquer an automatic assumption that the Hamilton children, with their rich grandfather, would never know want. Morris and more than one hundred other subscribers poured in about eighty thousand dollars, while New England Federalists donated Pennsylvania land as well. This fund was such a closely guarded secret that Hamilton’s children did not know of it for a generation, and the Bank of New York managed to keep its existence confidential until 1937.

“Mr. Monroe,” she told him, “if you have come to tell me that you repent, that you are sorry, very sorry, for the misrepresentations and the slanders and the stories you circulated against my dear husband, if you have come to say this, I understand it. But otherwise, no lapse of time, no nearness to the grave, makes any difference.”15 Monroe took in this rebuke without comment. Stunned by the fiery words delivered by the elderly little woman in widow’s weeds, the ex-president picked up his hat, bid Eliza good day, and left the house, never to return.

Eliza aided her friend Dolley Madison in raising money to construct the Washington Monument and remained sharp and alert until the end.

When the ninety-five-year-old Eliza dined at the White House a month later, she made a grand entrance with her daughter. President Fillmore fussed over her, and the first lady gave up her chair to her. Everybody was eager to touch a living piece of American history.

On November 9, 1854—a turbulent year in which the Kansas-Nebraska Act was enacted and the union that Hamilton had done so much to forge stood gravely threatened—Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton died at age ninety-seven.