Alexander Hamilton (140 page)

William Plumer wasn’t the only person who gagged at Burr’s incongruous presence in the Senate when the Chase impeachment trial started on February 4, 1805. One newspaper registered its shock thus: “What a page will that be in the history of the present democratic administration . . . that a man under an indictment for MURDER presided at the trial of one of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, accused of a petty misdemeanor!”
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Chase was acquitted of all charges, while Burr was universally praised for his evenhanded conduct of the trial. For the moment, things were looking brighter for Burr. Before he stepped down as vice president, one Republican senator defended his duel by citing David and Goliath and claiming that Burr was controversial “only because
our
David had slain the Goliath of Federalism.”
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On March 2, Burr delivered a celebrated farewell speech to the Senate in which he praised the institution as a “sanctuary and a citadel of law, of order, of liberty.”
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His words possessed such poignant eloquence—the speech was his farewell to public life—that they wrung tears from many colleagues.

After leaving the vice presidency, Burr suffered instant political exile. He had outlived his brief usefulness for the Republicans and his courtship of the Federalists had ended with him gunning down the party’s erstwhile leader. He was now bankrupt and stateless, a wanted man, even if he flippantly dismissed the New Jersey indictment. “You treat with too much gravity the New Jersey affair,” he lectured Theodosia. “It should be considered a farce and you will yet see it terminated so as to leave only ridicule and contempt to its abettors.”
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Beneath his inveterate banter, Burr was worried: “In New York, I am to be disfranchised and in New Jersey hanged. Having substantial objections to both, I shall not, for the present, hazard either but shall seek another country.”
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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.

With the restless spirit that had long perturbed Hamilton, Burr roamed through the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys, where frontier settlers tended to tolerate duels and despise Federalists. He explored various cabals with England to seize portions of American soil, including Louisiana and other territories west of the Appalachians, in order to forge a new empire. This would-be conquistador also meditated an auxiliary plot to march into Mexico and liberate it from Spanish rule. 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.”
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For four years, the disgraced Burr traveled in Europe, resorting occasionally to the pseudonym H. E. Edwards to keep creditors at bay. Sometimes he lived in opulence with fancy friends and at other times languished in drab single rooms. This aging roué sampled opium and seduced willing noblewomen and chambermaids with a fine impartiality. All the while, he cultivated self-pity. “I find that among the great number of Americans here and
there
all are hostile to A.B.—All—What a lot of rascals they must be to make war on one whom they do not know, on one who never did harm or wished harm to a human being,” he recorded in his diary.
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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.”
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Always capable of irreverent surprises, Burr gave Bentham a copy of
The Federalist.
The shade of Alexander Hamilton rose up to haunt Burr at unexpected moments. In Paris, he called upon Talleyrand, who instructed his secretary to deliver this message to the uninvited caller: “I shall be glad to see Colonel Burr, but please tell him that a portrait of Alexander Hamilton always hangs in my study where all may see it.”
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Burr got the message and left.

By the time Burr sailed home in 1812 as “Mr. A. Arnot,” all charges had been dropped against him. To get back on his feet in New York, he borrowed a law library from Robert Troup and tried to revive his practice. A solitary figure who had relinquished interest in politics, he soon lost the last emotional props of his life. That summer, his adored grandson, Aaron Burr Alston, died at age ten. 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.”
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Four years later, his son-in-law, Joseph Alston, died at thirty-seven. This rash of calamities recapitulated the stunning sequence of deaths that Burr had suffered as a child. Already a ghost of times past, Burr became a famous recluse, occasionally pointed out on the New York streets. He seldom socialized beyond a small circle of people.

As for the duel with Hamilton, Burr almost never showed any remorse. Soon after returning to America, he visited his aunt, Rhoda Edwards, who worried about his immortal soul and warned him, “You have committed a great many sins against God and you killed that great and good man, Colonel Hamilton. I beseech you to repent and fly to the blood and righteousness of the Redeemer for pardon.” Burr found this rather quaint: “Oh, aunt, don’t feel too badly,” he replied. “We shall both meet in heaven.”
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One day, Burr was walking down Nassau Street in New York when Chancellor James Kent happened to see him. Kent lost all control, swooped down on Burr, and started flailing at him with his cane. “You are a scoundrel, sir!” Kent shouted. “A scoundrel!” His legendary aplomb intact, Burr tipped his hat and said, “The opinions of the learned Chancellor are always entitled to the highest consideration.”
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Then he bowed and walked away.

Burr never lost his sense of humor about having killed Hamilton and made facetious references to “my friend Hamilton, whom I shot.”
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Once, in the Boston Athenaeum, Burr paused to admire a bust of Hamilton. “There was the poetry,” he said, tracing creases in Hamilton’s face with his finger.
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Another time, Burr paused at a tavern to refresh his horses and wandered over to a traveling waxworks exhibition. He suddenly came upon a tableau that represented him and Hamilton in the duel. Underneath ran this verse: “O Burr, O Burr, what has thou done? / Thou hast shooted dead great Hamilton. / You hid behind a bunch of thistle, / And shooted him dead with a great hoss pistol.”
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In relating the story, Burr roared with laughter. 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.”
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Burr lingered on for twenty-four years after he returned to America. In 1833, age seventy-seven, he mustered enough strength or cynicism for one final romance and married a fabulously wealthy widow, fifty-eight-year-old Eliza Jumel, who occupied a mansion in Washington Heights. (Improbable legend claims that Hamilton once had a fling with her.) Née Betsey Bowen, she had started life as a courtesan and had borne an illegitimate son before marrying the rich wine merchant Stephen Jumel. Burr, as usual, behaved like a scamp and frittered away Madame Jumel’s money while being unfaithful. A year later, she filed for divorce and accused her incorrigible husband of adultery. Why had she expected Burr to reform at this late hour? On September 14, 1836, he died in a Staten Island hotel after two strokes and was buried in Princeton near his father and grandfather. The death mask of Aaron Burr is haunting and unforgettable, with the nose twisted to the left, the mouth crooked, and the expression grotesque, as if all the suppressed pain of his life were engraved in his face by the end. John Quincy Adams left this epitaph of the man: “Burr’s life, take it all together, was such as in any country of sound morals his friends would be desirous of burying in profound oblivion.”
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EPILOGUE

or 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. Because the news of Hamilton’s death further weakened the already precarious health of Philip Schuyler, Eliza stayed in Albany to nurse him. As his gout flared up anew, he hobbled about in tremendous pain and became bedridden. “I trust that the Supreme Being will prolong my life that I may discharge the duties of a father to my dear child and her dear children,” Philip Schuyler told Angelica Church. Eliza “knows how tenderly I loved my dear Hamilton, how tenderly I love her and her children.”
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The Supreme Being, alas, had other plans for the ailing general. 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.

How did Eliza soldier on after these dreadful events that came thick and fast upon her? A month after the duel, she answered a sympathy note from Colonel William S. Smith, who had written to inform her that the Society of the Cincinnati would erect a monument to Hamilton in Trinity Church. In her letter, Eliza alluded to the forces that would sustain her. Suffering from “the irreparable loss of a most amiable and affectionate husband,” she prayed for “the mercies of the divine being in whose dispensations” all Christians should acquiesce. Beyond religious solace, she drew strength from sympathetic friends and family members and the veneration paid to her husband. She wrote, “The wounded heart derives a degree of consolation from the tenderness with which its loss is bewailed by the virtuous, the wise, and humane” and “that high honor and respect with which the memory of the dear deceased has been commemorated.”
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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.” She thought that God, in snatching Hamilton away, had balanced the ledgers of her life, inflicting exquisite pain equal to her matchless joy in marriage: “I have remarked to you that I have had a double share of blessings and I must now look forward to grief.... For such a husband, his spirit is in heaven and his form in the earth and I am nowhere any part of him is.”
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She pored so frequently over his letters to her that they began to crack and crumble into dust. Around her neck, she wore a tiny bag containing brittle yellow scraps of the love sonnet that Hamilton had given to her during their courtship in Morristown—the scraps were sewn together as the paper decomposed—and the intimate farewell letter he had prepared for her on the eve of the duel.

Eliza retained boundless affection for “her Hamilton,” even though he had left her stranded in a terrible financial predicament. Hamilton died illiquid, if not insolvent. This mocked the hardy Republican fairy tale that he had enriched himself as treasury secretary and colluded with British paymasters. The secret London bank account that legend said awaited him when the monarchy returned to America—a staple of Jeffersonian lore—had never existed. America’s financial wizard earned comparatively little in his lifetime, and his executors feared that any distress sale of his assets—chiefly the Grange and some land in western New York and the Ohio River valley—would slash their value. Gouverneur Morris was appalled by the magnitude of Hamilton’s debts and confided to Rufus King,

Our friend Hamilton has been suddenly cut off in the midst of embarrassments which would have required years of professional industry to set straight—a debt of between fifty thousand and sixty thousand dollars hanging over him, a property which in time may sell for seventy or eighty thousand, but which, if brought to the hammer, would not, in all probability, fetch forty.
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Philip Schuyler had already disposed of a considerable portion of his wealth among his eight children and their descendants—his entire estate of thirty-five thousand dollars could not have covered Hamilton’s debts—so Eliza’s inheritance fell dreadfully short of Hamilton’s more sanguine expectations. She inherited farmland around Albany and Saratoga that yielded a paltry $750 in annual income and did not begin to defray her expenses. 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.