Founding Brothers (3 page)

But, again, in a way that Paine could tell us was commonsensical and Jefferson could tell us was self-evident, both sides in the debate have legitimate claims on historical truth and both sides speak for the deepest impulses of the American Revolution. With the American Revolution, as with all revolutions, different factions came together in common cause to overthrow the reigning regime, then discovered in the aftermath of their triumph that they had fundamentally different and politically incompatible notions of what they intended. In the dizzying sequence of events that comprises the political history of the 1790s, the full range of their disagreement was exposed and their different agenda for the United States collided head-on. Taking sides in this debate is like choosing between the words and the music of the American Revolution.

What distinguishes the American Revolution from most, if not all, subsequent revolutions worthy of the name is that in the battle for supremacy, for the “true meaning” of the Revolution, neither side completely triumphed. Here I do not just mean that the American Revolution did not “devour its own children” and lead to blood-soaked scenes at the guillotine or the firing-squad wall, though that is true enough. Instead, I mean that the revolutionary generation found a way to contain the explosive energies of the debate in the form of an ongoing argument or dialogue that was eventually institutionalized and rendered safe by the creation of political parties. And the subsequent political history of the United States then became an oscillation between new versions of the old tension, which broke out in violence only on the occasion of the Civil War. In its most familiar form, dominant in the nineteenth century, the tension assumes a constitutional appearance as a conflict between state and federal sovereignty. The source of the disagreement goes much deeper, however, involving
conflicting attitudes toward government itself, competing versions of citizenship, differing postures toward the twin goals of freedom and equality.

But the key point is that the debate was not resolved so much as built into the fabric of our national identity. If that means the United States is founded on a contradiction, then so be it. With that one bloody exception, we have been living with it successfully for over
two hundred years. Lincoln once said that America was founded on
a proposition that was written by Jefferson in 1776. We are really founded on an argument about what that proposition means.

This does not mean that the political history of the early republic can be understood as a polite forensic exercise conducted by a marvelously well-behaved collection of demigods. Nor is the proper image a symphony orchestra; or, given the limited numbers involved at the highest level of national politics, perhaps a chamber music ensemble, each Founding Father playing a particular instrument that blends itself harmoniously into the common score. The whole point is that there was no common score, no assigned instruments, no blended harmonies. The politics of the 1790s was a truly cacophonous affair. Previous historians have labeled it “the Age of Passion” for good reason, for in terms of shrill accusatory rhetoric, flamboyant displays of ideological intransigence, intense personal rivalries, and hyperbolic claims of imminent catastrophe, it has no equal in American history. The political dialogue within the highest echelon of the revolutionary generation was a decade-long shouting match.
¹³

How, then, did they do it? Why is it that Alfred North Whitehead was probably right to observe that there were only two instances in Western history when the leadership of an emerging imperial power performed as well, in retrospect, as anyone could reasonably expect? (The first was Rome under Caesar Augustus and the second was the United States in the late eighteenth century.) Why is it that there is a core of truth to the distinctive iconography of the American Revolution, which does not depict dramatic scenes of mass slaughter, but, instead, a gallery of well-dressed personalities in classical poses?
¹⁴

My own answers to these questions are contained in the stories
that follow, which attempt to recover the sense of urgency and improvisation, what it looked and felt like, for the eight most prominent political leaders in the early republic. They are, in alphabetical order, Abigail and John Adams, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. While each episode is a self-contained narrative designed to illuminate one propitious moment with as much storytelling skill as I can muster, taken together they feature several common themes.

First, the achievement of the revolutionary generation was a collective enterprise that succeeded because of the diversity of personalities and ideologies present in the mix. Their interactions and juxtapositions generated a dynamic form of balance and equilibrium, not because any of them was perfect or infallible, but because their mutual imperfections and fallibilities, as well as their eccentricities and ex-
cesses, checked each other in much the way that Madison in
Federalist
10
claimed that multiple factions would do in a large republic.

Second, they all knew one another personally, meaning that they broke bread together, sat together at countless meetings, corresponded with one another about private as well as public matters. Politics, even at the highest level in the early republic, remained a face-to-face affair in which the contestants, even those who were locked in political battles to the death, were forced to negotiate the emotional affinities and shared intimacies produced by frequent personal interaction. The Adams-Jefferson rivalry and friendship is the outstanding example here, though there are several crucial moments when critical compromises were brokered because personal trust made it possible. Though the American republic became a nation of laws, during the initial phase it also had to be a nation of men.

Third, they managed to take the most threatening and divisive issue off the political agenda. That issue, of course, was slavery, which was clearly incompatible with the principles of the American Revolution, no matter what version one championed. But it was also the political problem with the deepest social and economic roots in the new nation, so that removing it threatened to disrupt the fragile union just as it was congealing. Whether or not it would have been possible to put slavery on the road to extinction without also extinguishing the nation itself remains an open question; it is the main subject of one of the following stories. Whatever conclusion one reaches concerning that hypothetical question, with all the advantage of hindsight and modern racial attitudes as a moral guide, the revolutionary generation decided that the risks outweighed the prospects for success; they quite self-consciously chose to defer the slavery question by placing any discussion of it out-of-bounds at both the national and federal levels.

Fourth, the faces that look down upon us with such classical dignity in those portraits by John Trumbull, Gilbert Stuart, and Charles Willson Peale, the voices that speak to us across the ages in such lyrical cadences, seem so mythically heroic, at least in part, because they knew we would be looking and listening. All the vanguard members of the revolutionary generation developed a keen sense of their historical significance even while they were still making the history on which their reputations would rest. They began posing for posterity, writing letters to us as much as to one another, especially toward the end of their respective careers. If they sometimes look like marble statues, that is how they wanted to look. (John Adams is one of my favorite characters, as you will see, because he was congenitally incapable of holding the pose. His refreshing and often irreverent candor provides the clearest window into the deeper ambitions and clashing vanities that propelled them all.) If they sometimes behave like actors in a historical drama, that is often how they regarded themselves. In a very real sense, we are complicitous in their achievement, since we are the audience for which they were performing; knowing we would be watching helped to keep them on their best behavior.
¹⁵

Chronology, so the saying goes, is the last refuge of the feebleminded and only resort for historians. My narrative, while willfully episodic in character—no comprehensive coverage of all events is claimed—follows a chronological line, with one significant exception. The first story, about the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, is out of sequence. In addition to being a fascinating tale designed to catch your attention, it introduces themes that reverberate throughout all the stories that follow by serving as the exception that proves the rule. Here is the only occasion within the revolutionary generation when political differences ended in violence and death rather than in ongoing argument. And Burr, if I have him right, is the odd man out within the elite of the early republic, a colorful and intriguing character, to be sure, but a man whose definition of character does not measure up to the standard.

Enough justifying and generalizing. If the following stories converge to make some larger point, the surest way to reach it is through the stories themselves. It is a hot summer morning in 1804. Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton are being rowed in separate boats across the Hudson River for an appointment on the plains of Weehawken. The water is eerily calm and the air thick with a heavy mist …

CHAPTER ONE

The Duel

T
HE MOST
succinct version of
the story might go like this:

On the morning of July 11, 1804,
Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton were rowed across the Hudson River in
separate boats to a secluded spot near Weehawken, New Jersey. There, in accord
with the customs of the
code duello,
they exchanged pistol shots at
ten paces. Hamilton was struck on his right side and died the following day.
Though unhurt, Burr found that his reputation suffered an equally fatal wound.
In this, the most famous duel in American history, both participants were
casualties.

While all the information in this version of the story is
accurate, its admirable brevity creates some unfortunate historical casualties
of its own. After all, if the duel between Burr and Hamilton was the most
famous encounter of its kind in American history, we should be able to conjure
up a mental image of this dramatic moment, a more richly textured picture of
“The Duel.” Only a fuller rendering will allow what was called
“the interview at Weehawken” to assume its rightful place of
primacy among such touted competitors as
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
or the film classic
High Noon.
In matters of this sort, succinct
summaries will simply not do. And so, in an effort to give this episode its
requisite density of detail, to recover the scene in its full coloration, here
is a more comprehensive version, which attempts to include all the available
and indisputable evidence that survives.
¹

A
ARON
B
URR
left his home on Richmond Hill
near the southern end of Manhattan at first light on Wednesday, July 11, 1804.
Although he slept that night on his couch and in his clothes, the vice
president of the United States was a lifelong disciple of Lord
Chesterfield’s maxim that a gentleman was free to do anything he pleased
as long as he did it with style. So Colonel Burr—the military title a
proud emblem of his service in the American Revolution—was elegantly
attired in a silklike suit (actually made of a fabric known as bombazine) and
carried himself toward the barge on the bank of the Hudson River with the
nonchalant air of a natural aristocrat strolling to an appointment with
destiny.

His grandfather, the great theologian Jonathan Edwards, had
once said that we were all depraved creatures, mere spiders hanging
precariously over a never-ending fire. But Burr’s entire life had been a
sermon on the capacity of the sagacious spider to lift himself out of hellish
difficulties and spin webs that trapped others. No one can be sure what was in
Burr’s mind as a single oarsman rowed him and William Van Ness, his
devoted disciple and protégé, toward the New Jersey Palisades on
the other side, but the judgment of posterity would be that Burr had finally
trapped Hamilton in his diabolical web, and he was now moving in for the
kill.
²

Meanwhile, just north of Richmond Hill, near present-day Wall Street,
Hamilton was boarding a small skiff with two oarsmen, his physician, Dr. David
Hosack, and his own loyal associate Nathaniel Pendleton. Like Burr, Hamilton
was properly attired and also carried himself with a similar air of gentlemanly
diffidence. He also carried a military title, thus outranking Burr with his
honorary designation as “General Hamilton,” based on his last
appointment, that of inspector general of the New Army in 1799. At forty-nine,
he was a year older than Burr and, like him, was a relatively short
man—an inch taller, at five feet seven inches—with similarly small
hands and feet, a somewhat delicate bone structure, and a truly distinctive
head and face. He was called “the little lion of Federalism”
because he was, in truth, little.

But the head was the place where God
had seen fit to mark the two men as polar opposites. Burr had the dark and
severe coloring of his Edwards ancestry, with black hair receding from the
forehead and dark brown, almost black, eyes that suggested a cross between an
eagle and a raven. Hamilton had a light peaches and cream complexion with
violet-blue eyes and auburn-red hair, all of which came together to suggest an
animated beam of light to Burr’s somewhat stationary shadow. Whereas
Burr’s overall demeanor seemed subdued, as if the compressed energies of
New England Puritanism were coiled up inside him, waiting for the opportunity
to explode, Hamilton conveyed kinetic energy incessantly expressing itself in
bursts of conspicuous brilliance.

Their respective genealogies also
created temperamental and stylistic contrasts. Unlike Burr’s
distinguished bloodline, which gave his aristocratic bearing its roots and
biological rationale, Hamilton’s more dashing and consistently audacious
style developed as a willful personal wager against the odds of his
impoverished origins. John Adams, who despised Hamilton, once referred to him
as “the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar.” While intended as a
libelous description, Adams’s choice of words was literally correct.

Hamilton had been born on the West Indian island of Nevis, the illegitimate
son of a down-on-her-luck beauty of French extraction and a hard-drinking
Scottish merchant with a flair for bankruptcy. In part because of his
undistinguished origins, Hamilton always seemed compelled to be proving
himself; he needed to impress his superiors with his own superiority. Whether
he was leading an infantry assault against an entrenched British strong point
at Yorktown—first over the parapet in a desperate bayonet charge—or
imposing his own visionary fiscal program for the new nation on a reluctant
federal government, Hamilton tended to regard worldly problems as personal
challenges, and therefore as fixed objects against which he could perform his
own isometric exercises, which usually took the form of ostentatious acts of
gallantry. Though he had not sought out the impending duel with Burr, there was
nothing in Hamilton’s lifelong pattern that would permit a
self-consciously bland and supremely triumphant refusal of the challenge. He
was moving across the nearly calm waters of the Hudson toward Weehawken, then,
because he did not believe he could afford to decline Burr’s
invitation.
³

We actually
know a good deal more about the thoughts in Hamilton’s mind at this
propitious moment. The previous evening he had drafted a personal statement,
which he enclosed with his last will and testament, declaring that he had
sincerely hoped to avoid the interview. Moreover, he claimed to feel “no
ill-will
to Col. Burr, distinct from political opposition, which, as I
trust, has proceeded from pure and upright motives.” What’s more,
he had decided to expose himself to Burr’s fire without retaliating:
“I have resolved, if our interview is conducted in the usual manner, and
it pleases God to give me the opportunity, to
reserve
and
throw
away
my first fire, and I have thoughts even of reserving my second
fire—and thus giving a double opportunity to Col. Burr to pause and to
reflect.” He did not think of this course of action as suicidal, but as
another gallant gamble of the sort he was accustomed to winning.
⁴

The usual
description of the duel’s location—the plains of Weehawken—is
misleading. Indeed, if one were to retrace the Burr-Hamilton route across the
Hudson and land just upstream from the modern-day Lincoln Tunnel, one would
come face-to-face with a sheer cliff 150 feet high. Anyone attempting to scale
these heights would hardly be capable of fighting a duel upon arrival at the
top. The actual site of the duel was a narrow ledge, about ten feet wide and
forty feet long, located only twenty feet above the water. It was a popular
spot for duels precisely because of its relative isolation and inaccessibility.
By prearranged agreement, the Burr party arrived first, just before 7:00 a.m.,
and began clearing away the incidental brush and rocks on the ledge.
⁵

Hamilton’s party arrived shortly thereafter, and the two seconds, Van
Ness for Burr and Pendleton for Hamilton, conferred to review the agreed-upon
rules of the interview. It was called an “interview” because
dueling was illegal in many states, including New York. Therefore, in addition
to the established etiquette of the
code duello,
veteran duelists had
developed an elaborately elusive vocabulary, what we would now call the
“language of deniability,” so that all participants could
subsequently claim ignorance if ever brought to court. None of the oarsmen, for
example, was permitted on the ledge to witness the exchange of fire. The
physician, David Hosack, was also required to turn his back to the
proceedings.
⁶

Because
Hamilton had been challenged, he had the choice of weapons. He had selected a
custom-made pair of highly decorated pistols owned by his wealthy
brother-in-law, John Church. Apart from their ornate appearance, the weapons
were distinctive for two reasons. First, they had been used in two previous
duels involving the participants: once, in 1799, when Church had shot a button
off Burr’s coat; then, in 1801, when Hamilton’s eldest son, Philip,
had been fatally wounded defending his father’s honor only a few yards
from the site at Weehawken. Second, they also contained a concealed device that
set a hair-trigger. Without the hair-trigger, the weapon required twenty pounds
of pressure to fire. With the hair-trigger, only one pound of pressure was
needed. While Hamilton knew about the hair-triggers, Burr almost certainly did
not.

After Pendleton and Van Ness loaded the pistols, which were
smoothbore and took a quite large .54-caliber ball, Pendleton whispered to
Hamilton, “Should I set the hair-trigger?” Hamilton responded:
“Not this time.” As they prepared to take their designated places,
then, both men were armed with extremely powerful but extremely erratic
weapons. If struck in a vital spot by the oversized ball at such close range,
the chances of a serious or mortal injury were high. But the inherent
inaccuracy of a projectile emerging from a smoothbore barrel, plus the potent
jerk required to release the cocked hammer, ignite the powder, and then send
the ball toward its target, meant that in this duel, as in most duels of that
time, neither party was likely to be hurt badly, if at all.
⁷

Burr and
Hamilton then met in the middle to receive their final instructions. Hamilton,
again because he was the challenged party, had the choice of position. He
selected the upstream, or north, side, a poor choice because the morning sun
and its reflection off the river would be in his face. The required ten paces
between contestants put them at the extreme ends of the ledge. It was agreed
that when both principals were ready, Pendleton would say,
“Present”; then each man would be free to raise and fire his
weapon. If one man fired before the other, the nonfirer’s second would
say, “One, two, three, fire.” If he had not fired by the end of the
count, he lost his turn. At that point, or if both parties had fired and
missed, there would be a conference to decide if another round was required or
if both sides agreed that the obligations of honor had been met.
⁸

Upon reaching
his designated location, just before the final command, Hamilton requested a
brief delay. He pulled his eyeglasses out of his breast pocket, adjusted them,
then squinted into the glare, raised his pistol, sighted down the barrel at
several imaginary targets, then pronounced himself ready. Burr waited with
patience and composure through this delay. Not only is there no evidence that
he had any foreknowledge of Hamilton’s declared intention to reserve or
waste his first shot, but Hamilton’s behavior at this penultimate moment
certainly suggested more harmful intentions. Why he would don his eyeglasses if
he did not plan to shoot at Burr remains a mystery.

What happened next
is an even greater mystery. In fact, the contradictory versions of the next
four to five seconds of the duel might serve as evidence for the postmodern
contention that no such thing as objective truth exists, that historic reality
is an inherently enigmatic and endlessly negotiable bundle of free-floating
perceptions. For our story to proceed along the indisputable lines established
at the start, we must skip over the most dramatic moment, then return to it
later, after the final pieces of the narrative are in place.

Two shots
had rung out and Hamilton had just been hit. The one-ounce ball had struck him
on the right side, making a hole two inches in diameter about four inches above
his hip. The projectile fractured his rib cage, ricocheted off the rib and up
through his liver and diaphragm, then splintered the second lumbar vertebra,
where it lodged. Even with all the benefits of modern medical science, the
internal damage would have made Hamilton a likely fatality, most certainly a
lifetime cripple. Given the limitations of medical science available then,
there was no hope. Hamilton himself recognized his own condition almost
immediately. When Dr. Hosack rushed forward to examine him, Hamilton calmly
declared, “This is a mortal wound, Doctor,” then lapsed into
unconsciousness.
⁹