The 200-Year Duel (The Hamiltons and the Burrs are still at it)

Two centuries after their famous forebears met on the banks of the Hudson, the Hamiltons and the Burrs are still at it.

"LOOK AT THIS," said Antonio Burr. "Look at what they're selling." Standing in the gift shop of the New-York Historical Society on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Burr held a magnet to the light. On it were portraits of his ancestor Aaron Burr, the third vice president of the United States, and Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, whom Vice President Burr killed in a duel 200 years ago. Each man's portrait stared coldly at the other's.

It was a dull gray day in late October, and Burr had just spent an hour walking through "Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America," the blockbuster, $5 million bicentennial exhibition that opened in early September and will close on February 28. The show portrays Hamilton as a giant--a leading champion of the Constitution, the Founding Father of America's financial institutions, the visionary who saw that the United States would one day become an economic and military superpower. To Hamilton's many admirers, all this is beyond dispute. Not to Antonio Burr.

He is a small man, compact and bespectacled, with a graying goatee and pale blue eyes. He is 51 years old. Also, he is Chilean. He often ends sentences with "man." Sometimes he flails his arms wildly to make a point.

"This is what I don't understand," he continued, examining the magnet. "This whole exhibition, it criticizes Burr, it calls Burr a man without principle, it blames Burr for Hamilton's death. But when you get to the gift shop, what do you have? You have them selling Burr and Hamilton together. Look at this."

He motioned to a stack of T-shirts with Hamilton and Burr's portraits on them, to a Hamilton-Burr mug, to a Hamilton-Burr keychain.

"But they still don't give Burr any respect," he said. "They still don't treat him as an equal."

Burr moved into the Historical Society's main foyer. Two bronze statues stood in the center of the hall, lifesize replicas of Burr and Hamilton (each 5'7"), shown just before the fatal duel. The Hamilton statue looked frail. It wore a pair of wire-rim glasses. Aaron Burr's statue was grimacing.

"My problem here, with this exhibit, is that this is hagiography," Antonio Burr said.

"This is the life of a saint," he went on. "The whole story--Burr's story--isn't told."

Here's why. For Antonio Burr, the lionization of Hamilton unfailingly means the demonization of his forebear. He's not alone in thinking so. Some of Aaron Burr's descendants have been working to advance their man's reputation for a very long time. And their numbers have grown. There are about 70 of them now, all smart and engaging people like Antonio Burr, and it was at their instigation that the town of Weehawken, New Jersey, agreed to host a reenactment of the Hamilton-Burr duel last July, on its 200th anniversary, with Antonio Burr in the role of his accursed ancestor. With the reenactment, the efforts of Burr's defenders seemed at last to pay off, for a few fleeting moments.

THE STORY of the duel begins sometime after 5A.M. on July 11, 1804, when the vice president of the United States and the former secretary of the treasury left their homes in New York City, met their seconds at docks along the Hudson, and rowed, in separate boats, across the river to the dueling grounds in Weehawken. The journey took two hours.

Back then the Weehawken cliffs were sparsely populated, densely covered with trees, and seemingly impregnable. Yet twice a day, at low tide, the water receded from the foot of the cliffs, exposing a gravelly beach where a boat could land. A path led from the beach to a ledge about 20 feet above the water that was long and narrow and ideal for dueling. At least 70 duels were fought there, and at least 36 men were killed there, including Hamilton.

The rivalry that culminated in the infamous duel was long in the making. Hamilton and Burr had first known each other as young lawyers in Albany, New York. Then during the Revolutionary War both served on General Washington's staff, where the bilingual Hamilton often acted as interpreter for America's French allies, including the Marquis de Lafayette. For this and other reasons (one probably apocryphal story has Washington catching Burr reading his correspondence), the general's favorite was Hamilton.

The future duelists' rivalry deepened over time. Hamilton thought Burr a man without principle; Burr--whose political career included stints as New York attorney general and U.S. senator, before he tied Thomas Jefferson in the Electoral College in the 1800 presidential election and so became vice president--thought Hamilton a schemer. He was convinced Hamilton was seeking to subvert him. Hamilton was a Federalist, Burr a Democrat, and the newspapers associated with each man cast aspersions on the other. Eventually the two grew bitter and desperate. As the Federalists' power waned, Hamilton's influence began to seep away. Vice President Burr, for his part, lost the 1804 New York gubernatorial race by one of the largest margins ever.

A few months after that defeat, Burr learned that Hamilton had expressed a "despicable opinion" of him at a dinner party. Soon afterward he issued the challenge to a duel. An exchange of letters ensued. Hamilton had several opportunities to apologize for his remark, but refused each. And so the two, meeting at Weehawken that July morning, raised their .54-caliber pistols in the air, then lowered them, then fired. Hamilton was struck and fell. He died the next day. Burr's reputation lay in ruins. "Two weeks after the duel," write Mike Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows in Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, "facing a murder indictment and fearing his house would be attacked by a mob," Burr left New York and disappeared "into obloquy everlasting."

Not quite. Within a month, Burr was indicted for murder in New York (though, in an era when laws against dueling were seldom enforced, he would never be tried). Lying low, he spent a couple of months on an island off the Georgia coast before returning to the capital. He had a dramatic flair, and liked to speak of "my friend Hamilton, whom I shot." His term as vice president ended in 1805. Two years later, Burr attempted to foment war with Spain, and was tried for treason. Acquitted, he left for Europe, where he remained until 1812. He died in 1836, alone in a Staten Island hotel, forgotten.

In death, by contrast, Hamilton became a martyr. And while his historical standing has waxed and waned over the years, he is now securely embedded in the Founders' pantheon. "Except for Washington," writes Ron Chernow, author of a magisterial new biography, "nobody stood closer to the center of American politics from 1776 to 1800 or cropped up at more turning points."

Nobody indeed.Even before assuming his place on the national stage, Hamilton had founded the Bank of New York, the New York Evening Post (now the New York Post), and the antislavery New York Manumission Society. Then he moved to the seat of power, as a delegate to the Confederation Congress, the Constitutional Convention, and the New York constitutional ratification convention. He never left.

Hamilton's intellectual accomplishments begin with his political writings. He masterminded the Federalist, the classic defense of the Constitution, coming up with the pseudonym "Publius," recruiting coauthors James Madison and John Jay, and writing 51 of the 85 essays himself. Along with the Constitution, the Federalist is America's chief contribution to Western political thought. Hamilton's portions, dealing with the executive and judicial branches, the Senate, national defense, and taxation, laid the foundation for the federal government as it exists to this day.

Next come Hamilton's theories of economic growth and national strength. He believed that in order for America to become a powerful nation--he often used the word "empire"--it would have to pursue technological innovation, create markets and industries, and develop a strong army and navy. He pursued these goals relentlessly. As secretary of the treasury, he wrote the famous Report on American Manufactures, which presciently argued that America's future was in industry, not agriculture. He then started one of the first manufacturing societies in Paterson, New Jersey. In Hamilton's day the treasury was larger than all other government agencies combined, and he used the power of his office maximally when he founded the Bank of the United States and nationalized the debt, taking on the credit burdens of the various states. This move, controversial at the time, bound the states' financial futures together, creating one vibrant national economy out of 13 squabbling ones.

Then, too, there is Hamilton's compelling life story. He was born illegitimate on Nevis island in the Caribbean in 1755. His father abandoned the family when he was 10. His mother died two years later. But a group of island merchants spotted his talents and paid for his education at King's College in New York (now Columbia University). From there, after the interlude in Albany, came the tour as aide-de-camp to Washington. In his rapid ascent to power, Hamilton was the ultimate American self-made man.

There's no getting around the fact that Burr was different. He was a patrician, for one thing. His major accomplishment--beyond serving heroically in the Revolutionary War--was organizing a political machine in New York that helped deliver the 1800 election to the Democrats and secured his position as vice president. While Hamilton was busy creating a nation, Burr was busy creating a political coalition. Burr "was a smart, clever man, and he said a number of funny things," the historian Richard Brookhiser, who curated the Historical Society's exhibition, has said. "But he was an empty narcissist."

THE TOWNSHIP of Weehawken occupies a thin strip of land along the New Jersey shore of the Hudson River, directly opposite the steel and glass cages of Midtown Manhattan. Every weekday morning and evening, the town's population balloons, as commuter cars and buses and trucks pour along Interstate-495 as it bisects Weehawken, before spiraling downward into the maw of the Lincoln Tunnel. Since the tunnel opened in 1937, the waterfront has been dominated by the access roads, empty lots, construction trailers, backhoes, orange cones, and ventilation shafts necessary for its construction and upkeep.

A grassy plaza called Lincoln Harbor park survives on one corner of the waterfront, however, and it was here that about 2,000 people turned out last July 11 to watch descendants of Hamilton and Burr reenact the duel. There were old people and young people and children and pets. They sat under a hot sun for hours. Families sat in the grass, seniors sat under the trees, and politicians and visiting dignitaries sat on a dais overlooking the stage. Weehawken's mayor, a man named Richard Turner, was there. So was Jim McGreevey, then still the governor.

A whole day's worth of activities had been planned: an early morning wreath-laying commemorating the duel, then introductory speeches from New Jersey politicians, then the reenactment, then the dedication of a commemorative plaque at the top of the Weehawken cliffs, and then, finally, a panel discussion featuring academics and biographers. There was a gentle breeze coming off the river, and a festive atmosphere to the proceedings.

Hamilton descendants wore bright red T-shirts emblazoned with John Trumbull's portrait of their forebear. Along the park's perimeter were booths selling bottled water, T-shirts, medallions, stamps, and coins. There was a booth for reporters and photographers and a special seating area for scholars. Richard Brookhiser was there, delivering impromptu lectures to anyone who was interested.

Apparently not everyone had come for love of history. "Alexander Hamilton's cool," said a man in a yellow golf shirt. "You gotta respect the guy who invented the telephone."

"The guy who went down--he was partial to Jersey, right?" asked a big-bellied man with tousled hair and dirty clothes. He looked as if he'd spent the night in the park. "If he'd lived," he went on, "all the skyscrapers would've been in Jersey, right?" (Wrong.)

Others joked at the anticlimactic nature of the event. "I got Burr with 2 to 1 odds," someone said. A preppy young man approached a girl and said, lamely, "So . . . what's your affiliation with Hamilton?"

Others, however, had a serious, quasi-professional interest in Hamilton and Burr. There was Scott Lindsay, a student at Georgetown University, and the president of the Alexander Hamilton Historical Society. He spent the moments before the reenactment handing out business cards and warning passersby that Hamilton was under attack. "There are people out there who want to replace Hamilton on the $10 bill with Reagan," he muttered darkly.

There were the Burr partisans, too, of course. All of them, including Antonio Burr, were members of the Aaron Burr Association, established in 1946 to "make known the patriotic contributions of Colonel Aaron Burr to our country, both during the War of the American Revolution and during the period of American history which followed that war." While the Hamilton descendants treated the reenactment mainly as an excuse for a family reunion, the Aaron Burr Association saw it as a crucial chance to prove their man's worth.

"It's going to be a very amicable affair," Stuart Johnson, president of the association, said over lunch a few days before the reenactment. In organizing the event, his group had shown gracious flexibility. "We submitted a proposed script to the Weehawken Planning Commission," he said, but "they decided that it was too anti-Hamilton."

Not without reason. The original script had Hamilton clearly shooting first. Plus, the Burr association wanted Douglas Hamilton, the Ohio computer salesman who portrayed his ancestor, to fall to the ground. Hamilton was leery.

Eventually the Burr people conceded both points. The narrator would say only that historians were uncertain who had shot first, and after he was shot the man playing Hamilton would drop to one knee. On the big issues, though--Hamilton had supplied pistols with hair-triggers of which Burr was unaware; the challenge was the fruit of a 15-year rivalry; Hamilton had passed up several chances to escape his doom--the Aaron Burr Association got its way.

"Because we gave in, and bowed to the suggestions of the Weehawken Historical Commission, the Hamilton people joined in on it," Johnson told me. He sounded pleased. It was, he said, a "classic compromise."

WHAT THE COMPROMISE PRODUCED was evenhanded treatment of the duelists. The politicians who got things rolling that morning, for example, were balanced to the point of intellectual paralysis. First up was Mayor Turner. Years ago, when the Burr association wanted to place a bust of Burr in the same park, Turner had fought the project tooth and nail. He'd won, and the bust had ended up in a bank in Newark. But he didn't mention this in his speech. If anything, Turner sounded as if he had reconciled with the Burrites.

Both duelists were "early patriots," Turner told the crowd. Both were "individuals who gave so much collectively to our country." The circumstances surrounding the duel didn't matter. Nor did the duel's consequences. Because "the past is the past." And "everyone is moving forward." Turner sat down.

McGreevey spoke next. "On this 'field of honor,'" he said, "two of the most accomplished men of their era, two political rivals who once briefly shared an alliance, engaged in a contest that would unite them in our nation's consciousness.

"To define Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr only by what occurred here 200 years ago would represent an oversight and an oversimplification," he continued. "The career achievements of these two men certainly exceed the extraordinary nature of this one incident."

McGreevey droned on, and the longer he talked, the more he sounded like a partisan of Burr, who was born in Newark, New Jersey.

"If history has undervalued Hamilton, it has, at the same time, demonized Aaron Burr," he said. "Historian Mark Hatfield wrote of our third vice president, 'Urbane and charming, generous beyond prudence, proud, shrewd, and ambitious, he stood apart from other public figures of his day.' A masterful politician, he drew praise from his contemporaries for his tenacity and evenhandedness, particularly in his role as president of the Senate."

"Regardless of the reputation earned in his day and awarded by posterity," the governor said, "Burr occupies a position in the gallery of noteworthy figures alongside such luminaries as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison."

McGreevey finished, and, as the presentations ended and the costumed actors took the stage, the Burrites glowed. This was their moment. The governor had elevated their man to the rank of Jefferson. The reenactment narrators drew further parallels between the duelists: They were of "similar height and age," both "became lawyers," both "were avid readers," both "enjoyed the finer things in life--good food, good wine, sumptuous surroundings." And both were "ladies' men."

But something was wrong. The scope of Hamilton's achievement was missing. It was nowhere acknowledged at the reenactment in Weehawken. Just as Burr's importance was inflated, so Hamilton's was shrunk. All the drama of the great man's end was drained away as the narrators read page after page from the letters Hamilton and Burr exchanged before the duel. At the behest of the Aaron Burr Association, the narrators painstakingly spelled out how it was that Hamilton could be deemed just as culpable as Burr. Then came a recitation of particulars relating to the pistols, the seconds, the weather on the day of the faceoff. It was nothing if not thorough.

It was also boring. But for the Burr association it was a glorious culmination. Throughout his 41 years as president, the group's founder, Dr. Samuel Engle Burr Jr., a professor of education at American University, had scoured books and magazines and radio shows and television shows and comic strips for inaccurate portrayals of his ancestor. And every time he had caught an artist or writer or educator portraying Aaron Burr in an unfavorable light, he had sent a note. By 1955, when the association was nine years old, Dr. Burr estimated he had written 15,000 letters--about 1,667 letters a year. Dr. Burr lived until 1987.

Year after year, letter after letter, he and the other members of his association nourished their grievance. "What we have in common," Dr. Burr said of the association late in his life, "is resentment over the assumption, which you even find in textbooks, that Aaron Burr was a scoundrel and murderer and traitor." This was nonsense, he said. And worse. It was "lies."

YET IF YOU STRIP AWAY the lies, if you absolve Aaron Burr of Hamilton's death, expunge his reputation as a scoundrel, and ignore his trial for treason, what are you left with? At best, a politician who was an early advocate of abolition and women's rights. But Burr never staked his career on those ideals or any others. To Burr, "politics was a game and a 'great deal of fun'--it invigorated him," said one reenactment narrator. "He was the first politician to be seen actively pursuing political office and the first to develop a 'political machine.'"

Burr anticipated our age not in his vision, but in his constant striving for political gain. "In the 18th century," the narrator went on, "it was not considered gentlemanly to look as though as you were trying to win votes." But Burr was different. Burr was an "anomaly." He was one of the first triangulators. A Democrat, "at times he rallied behind what were considered Federalist issues." Such promiscuity was not only political, of course. "Actually," confided Antonio Burr, "he was a lot like Bill Clinton."

In an era when history was being made in the play of political ideas, Burr was the other sort of politician. "Burr hardly ever committed his political philosophies or positions to paper," said the narrator. That was probably because he was more interested in power and success, celebrity and fortune. One imagines he'd feel right at home in today's Washington.

Would Hamilton? It is hard to say. His fierce love of principle might seem out of place. Yet in other ways, we live in Hamilton's world. He is present in our strong federal government and our strong military. He is present in our open markets, in our dominance of global affairs, in the fact that we have a single, national culture, not 50 state-based ones. "There is an elegant memorial in Washington to Jefferson," George Will once said, "but none to Hamilton. However, if you seek Hamilton's monument, look around. You are living in it. We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton's country."

Those words came alive for the few who stuck around Lincoln Harbor Park last July, after the stage was disassembled and most people had gone home. The diehards boarded buses that drove them up to Hamilton Park at the top of the Weehawken cliffs. There, members of the Aaron Burr Association, along with some Hamiltons and some representatives of the Weehawken Historical Commission, dedicated two plaques. One lists all the men who fought duels at the Weehawken dueling grounds. The other commemorates the most famous of those faceoffs.

The Burrs were ecstatic about the plaque, since it's the first representation of Burr allowed on public property in Weehawken. It depicts both contenders. They look away from each other, sad expressions on their faces. Their portraits are the same size. The inscription, placed between them like a restraining wall, reads:

The plaque, which gave such satisfaction to the Burrs, seemed so tiny, there in the clifftop park beneath a sky dotted with planes and helicopters, overlooking the stream of traffic churning toward the Lincoln Tunnel. Beyond, supertankers plied the river, and the great city rose across the distance. It was a scene alive with industry, energy, movement, and power--Alexander Hamilton's abiding legacy.

Great article. Hamilton would most definitely be in the the camp of the big government Democrats today, but Burr was no Republican.

Hamilton promoted some things which made us a great nation. The very limited banking envisioned by the Founders would be chaos in today's environment.

Burr "was a smart, clever man, and he said a number of funny things," the historian Richard Brookhiser, who curated the Historical Society's exhibition, has said. "But he was an empty narcissist."

Much like his descendent, Al Gore, eh?

5 posted on 12/07/2004 7:11:15 PM PST by Vigilanteman (crime would drop like a sprung trapdoor if we brought back good old-fashioned hangings)

Agreed. I am extrapolating to the future with regard to Hamilton. I might well have agreed with him back then.

"Actually," confided Antonio Burr, "he was a lot like Bill Clinton."

Hamilton partisans, on the other hand, acuuse Burr of being "a lot like Bill Clinton."

I strongly recommend the Ron Chernow bio of Hamilton. I've been reading it for a month now, it's a massive book, full of marvelous anecdotes. Hamilton's early life was so tragic, it's amazing that he rose above it as he did.

A comment about Burr sticks with me: the few memoirs that Burr wrote were filled with gossip, boasts about his sexual conquests, inconsequential fluff. Contrast this with the large body of essays that Hamilton produced.

It was such a tragedy that a nonentity like Burr was the one to put out the lights on Hamilton's promise.

10 posted on 12/07/2004 7:38:03 PM PST by Ciexyz (I use the term Blue Cities, not Blue States. PA is red except for Philly, Pgh & Erie.)

"There is an elegant memorial in Washington to Jefferson," George Will once said, "but none to Hamilton. However, if you seek Hamilton's monument, look around. You are living in it. We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton's country."

Well said. It's funny to think of McGreevey paying tribute to Aaron Burr.

It's certainly possible to criticize Hamilton, but he lived in the real world and tried to deal with real world problems. Jefferson, his chief opponent, was a great visionary, but a much less realistic thinker.

12 posted on 12/07/2004 7:43:22 PM PST by Lonesome in Massachussets (NYT Headline: "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of CBS", Fake But Accurate, Experts Say)

Excellent article. It simply flabbergasts me that anyone would flak for Burr at this late date, though I do think he genuinely regretted killing Hamilton.

Hamilton would have made a fair president, but he would've been a far better United States Senator. As a deliberative body, the Senate would've been uniquely suited to Hamilton's genius and wit. He was a great American, and the seeds for the great country we live in today were at least partially planted by Alexander Hamilton.

13 posted on 12/07/2004 7:48:42 PM PST by A Jovial Cad ("I had no shoes and I complained, until I saw a man who had no feet.")

Exactly right--you defined it just how it should be seen historically.

14 posted on 12/07/2004 7:53:15 PM PST by A Jovial Cad ("I had no shoes and I complained, until I saw a man who had no feet.")

How unfair of them to blame Burr for Hamilton's death, when it was obviously the fault of the gun manufacturer.

If I'm not mistaken, Burr was sued for divorce by his wife on grounds of adultery, and the decree granting the divorce was issued the very day he died.

"Hamilton would have made a fair president, but he would've been a far better United States Senator."

Hamilton could not become President for the same reason Arnold can't become President.

Hamilton was born in the Bahamas, he was not a natural born citizen of any of the united states.

Hamilton partisans, on the other hand, acuuse Burr of being "a lot like Bill Clinton."

So they agree with Antonio Burr.

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