Read Alexander Hamilton Online
Authors: Ron Chernow
The next morning, Hamilton’s mind was still clear, though his strength was depleted and his body motionless. He could speak only with difficulty. Except for one heartbreaking moment, he managed to maintain his exceptional composure. Eliza had not allowed the children into their father’s presence the previous day, but she now realized that the time had come for Hamilton to bid them farewell. She held up their two-year-old boy, Philip, to his lips for a final kiss. Then Eliza lined up all seven children at the foot of the bed so that Hamilton could see them in one final tableau, a sight that rendered him speechless. According to Hosack, “he opened his eyes, gave them one look, and closed them again till they were taken away.”
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In Hamilton’s last hours, more than twenty friends and family members pressed into his chamber, most praying on their knees with their eyes fixed on Hamilton’s every expression. David Ogden said they gave way to “a flood of tears” and “implored heaven to bless their friend.”
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For some, the deathwatch became insupportable. “The scene is too powerful for me,” Gouverneur Morris wrote. “I am obliged to walk in the garden to take breath.”
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Morris later recalled the scene around Hamilton, “his wife almost frantic with grief, his children in tears, every person present deeply afflicted, the whole city agitated, every countenance dejected.”
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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.”
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He could have left no more fitting political epitaph.
Hamilton repeated to Bishop Moore that he bore no malice toward Burr, that he was dying in a peaceful state, and that he was reconciled to his God and his fate. His faculties stayed intact until about fifteen minutes before the end. Then, at 2:00 p.m. on Thursday, July 12, 1804, thirty-one hours after the duel, forty-nine-year-old Alexander Hamilton died gently, quietly, almost noiselessly. After a frenzied life of passion and drama, of incomparable heights and depths, it proved a mercifully easy transition. “Thus has perished one of the greatest men of this or any age,” Oliver Wolcott, Jr., wrote to his wife.
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A large bloodstain soaked into the Bayards’ floor where Hamilton expired, and for many years the family refused to expunge this sacred spot.
Eliza snipped a lock of hair from her husband’s head and commenced the long rites of widowhood. She was tortured with grief. “The poor woman was almost distracted [and] begged uncle Gouverneur Morris might come into her room,” said David Ogden. “She burst into tears, told him he was the best friend her husband had, begged him to join her in prayers for her own death, and then to be a father for her children.”
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Normally a witty, cosmopolitan man and bon vivant, the peglegged Morris could only stare at Eliza with tears streaming down his cheeks.
We do not know when Eliza first saw the hymn that Hamilton had written for her in the early-morning hours before the duel. Nor do we know when she tore open the envelope and read the farewell letter that Hamilton had composed for her on July 4, the day he attended the bittersweet banquet of the Society of the Cincinnati. At some moment during the next few days, a tearful Eliza sat down and read the lines that her dead husband had prepared for her:
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 should 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.
hen a handwritten notice of Hamilton’s death went up at the Tontine Coffee House, the city was transfixed with horror. “The feelings of the whole community are agonized beyond description,” Oliver Wolcott,
Jr., told his wife.
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New Yorkers of the era never forgot the extravagant spectacle of sadness, the pervasive grief. Even Burr’s friend Charles Biddle conceded that “there was as much or more lamentation as when General Washington died.”
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As with Washington, this mass communal sorrow provoked reflections on the American Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, and the founding of the government. Unlike at Washington’s death, however, the sorrow was laced with shock and chagrin at the senselessness of Hamilton’s demise.
Because of Hamilton’s relative youth, his large 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. This reaction was repeated in other former Federalist strongholds, with one Boston cleric telling of streets crowded “with those who carry badges of mourning because the first of their fellow citizens has sunk in blood.”
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In Philadelphia, muffled church bells sounded, and newspapers dressed their columns with funereal borders. For the rest of its term, the New York Supreme Court draped its bench in black fabric, while the Bank of New York building was also sheathed in black. For thirty days, New Yorkers wore black bands on their arms.
Everybody in New York knew that the city had lost its most distinguished citizen. As statesman Edward Everett later said, Hamilton had set the city on the path to becoming “the throne of the western commercial world.”
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The evening of Hamilton’s death, New York’s leading merchants exhorted one another to shutter their shops for a state funeral hastily arranged for Saturday, July 14. “The corpse is already putrid,” Gouverneur Morris wrote that Friday, “and the funeral procession must take place tomorrow morning.”
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Mourners assembled on Saturday morning in front of 25 Robinson Street (today Park Place), the home of John and Angelica Church. 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.
That Saturday morning, guns fired from the Battery, church bells rang with a doleful sound, and ships in the harbor flew their colors at half-mast. Around noon, to the somber thud of military drums, New York militia units set out at the head of the funeral procession, bearing their arms in reversed position, their muzzles pointed downward. Numerous clergymen and members of the Society of the Cincinnati trooped behind them. Then came the most affecting sight of all. 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. Then came Hamilton’s four eldest sons and other relatives, followed by representatives of every segment of New York society: physicians, lawyers, politicians, foreign diplomats, military officers, bankers, merchants, Columbia College students and professors, ship captains, mechanics, and artisans. Collectively, they symbolized the richly diversified economic and political mosaic that Hamilton had envisaged for America. Conspicuously missing were the female victims of the calamity: Eliza, Angelica Church, and Hamilton’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Angelica. Four-year-old Eliza and two-year-old Philip also stayed behind with their mother.
As the funeral procession wound east along Beekman Street, then down Pearl Street and around Whitehall Street to Broadway, the sidewalks were congested with tearful spectators, and onlookers stared down from every rooftop. There were no hysterical outbursts, only a shocked hush that deepened the gravity of the occasion. “Not a smile was visible, and hardly a whisper was to be heard, but tears were seen rolling down the cheeks of the affected multitude,” wrote one newspaper.
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So huge was the throng of mourners that the procession streamed on for two hours before the last marchers arrived at Trinity Church. “The funeral was the most solemn scene I ever witnessed,” wrote David Ogden. “Almost every person was in tears, even the rabble of boys and negroes who filled the streets seemed to partake of the general grief.... The windows were crowded with females who were, almost without exception, weeping at the fate of their departed friend.”
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A private drama enacted that day previewed the historical ambivalence that Hamilton was to inspire. Gouverneur Morris had delivered the funeral oration for Washington at St. Paul’s Chapel and was drafted to do the same honor for Hamilton. He was so shaken by Hamilton’s death that friends thought he might not bear the strain of the address, but his real problems were of an altogether different nature. Instead of rushing to eulogize his friend, Morris first succumbed to a host of doubts and anxieties. In part, he was alarmed by the vengeful outcry against Burr and decided to omit all mention of the duel, lest the vast assembly fly into an uncontrollable fury. “How easy it would have been to make them, for a moment, absolutely mad!” he said.
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But that problem was manageable compared to how to depict his brilliant but controversial and imperfect friend. For starters, there was the problem of his origins. “The first point of his biography is that he was a stranger of illegitimate birth,” Morris confessed to his diary. “Some mode must be contrived to pass over this handsomely.”
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And what about Maria Reynolds? “I must not either dwell on his domestic life. He has long since foolishly published the avowal of conjugal infidelity.”
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And then Hamilton had never been guilty of modesty: “He was indiscreet, vain, and opinionated. These things must be told or the character will be incomplete and yet they must be told in such a manner as not to destroy the interest.”
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Perhaps most problematic was the controversial bargain that Alexander Hamilton had struck with the Constitution, dedicating his life to what he deemed a flawed document. “He was on principle opposed to republican and attached to monarchical government,” Morris wrote.
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Morris distorted and exaggerated Hamilton’s views no less than his Republican enemies, but he identified a genuine, abiding conflict inside Hamilton as to whether republican government could achieve the proper balance between liberty and order.
Under the towering portico of Trinity Church, the funeral organizers had erected a carpeted stage with two chairs at the center: one for Gouverneur Morris, the other for John Barker Church. Hamilton’s casket rested on a bier in front of the stage. The sprawling crowd was so massive that when Morris spoke his voice seemed to fade away in the vast space, turning his speech into an unintended dumb show for many of those squeezed onto lower Broadway. 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.”
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Morris sensed that the crowd was disappointed with his talk. The indignant spectators wanted to hoot and jeer lustily at Burr, who was never even mentioned. Moreover, the impact of Morris’s words paled beside the arresting vignette of family grief presented to the spectators. Four of Hamilton’s sons—Alexander (eighteen), James (fourteen), John (eleven), and William (six)—sat weeping on the stage beside Morris. One paper recorded: “The scene was impressive and what added unspeakably to its solemnity was the mournful group of tender boys, the sons, the once hopes and joys of the deceased, who, with tears gushing from their eyes, sat upon the stage, at the feet of the orator, bewailing the loss of their parent! It was too much. The sternest powers, the bloodiest villain, could not resist the melting scene.”
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Once Morris had finished his speech, the casket was transferred to a grave site in the Trinity churchyard, not far from where Hamilton had studied and lived, practiced law and served his country. With Bishop Moore officiating, Hamilton’s remains were deposited in the heart of the district that was to become the center of American finance. At the close, troops gathered around his grave, formed a neat square, and fired three volleys at intervals into the air. Hamilton was laid to rest with full honors in a martial style that would have gratified the most florid fantasies of the adolescent clerk on St. Croix who had once prayed for a war to prove his valor. “This scene was enough to melt a monument of marble,” said Hamilton’s
New-York Evening Post.
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Thus ended the most dramatic and improbable life among the founding fathers.
Because of his untimely death at forty-nine, Hamilton has retained a freshness in our historical memory. He never lived to grow gray or acquire the stiff dignity of an elder statesman. “Somehow it is impossible to imagine Hamilton as an old man,” Catherine Drinker Bowen once wrote. “Even his hardheadedness and relentless skepticism showed a quality not of caution but of youthful daring, careless defiance.”
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The brilliance of his life was matched only by its brevity. The average life expectancy was then about fifty-five, so the dying Hamilton did not seem as young to his contemporaries as he does today, but many obituaries portrayed him as cut down by a bullet in his prime. Perhaps our impression of Hamilton’s youthfulness has been magnified by the longevity of the first eight American presidents, who lived an average of nearly eighty years, with only Washington failing to reach his seventieth birthday. Hamilton’s relatively short life robbed him not only of any chance for further accomplishment but of the opportunity to mold his historical image. Jefferson and Adams took advantage of the next two decades to snipe at Hamilton and burnish their own exploits through their lengthy correspondence and other writings. With his prolific pen and literary gifts, Hamilton would certainly have left voluminous and convincing memoirs.
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....He has left none like him—no second, no third, nobody to put us in mind of him.”
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His staggering catalog of achievements, compressed into a thirty-year span, has been matched by few Americans. But not everyone mourned his departure. In after years, John Adams grumbled of the duel, “No one wished to get rid of Hamilton in
that
way.”
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Adams complained to Jefferson that Hamilton’s death had been marked by “a general grief,” while Samuel Adams and John Hancock had died in “comparative obscurity.”
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In his autobiography, Adams took another potshot at Hamilton’s death: “Vice, folly, and villainy are not to be forgotten because the guilty wretch repented in his dying moments.”
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