.For almost two centuries, historians have struggled to explain the extraordinary duel that killed Alexander Hamilton, our first Secretary of the Treasury, and ended Vice President Aaron Burr's political career. In A Fatal Friendship, the distinguished political scientist Arnold A. Rogow demonstrates for the first time that the roots of the fatal encounter lay not in Burr's (admittedly flawed) political or private conduct but rather in Hamilton's conflicted history and character.
With his detailed archival research, his close (and unprecedented) examination of the friendship between the two heroic figures, and his bold, imaginative writing, Rogow changes forever our understanding of honor, politics, and friendship in the early American Republic.
For almost two centuries, historians have struggled to explain the extraordinary duel that killed Alexander Hamilton, our first Secretary of the Treasury, and ended Vice President Aaron Burr's political career. In A Fatal Friendship, the distinguished political scientist Arnold A. Rogow demonstrates for the first time that the roots of the fatal encounter lay not in Burr's (admittedly flawed) political or private conduct but rather in Hamilton's conflicted history and character.
With his detailed archival research, his close (and unprecedented) examination of the friendship between the two heroic figures, and his bold, imaginative writing, Rogow changes forever our understanding of honor, politics, and friendship in the early American Republic.
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Overview
For almost two centuries, historians have struggled to explain the extraordinary duel that killed Alexander Hamilton, our first Secretary of the Treasury, and ended Vice President Aaron Burr's political career. In A Fatal Friendship, the distinguished political scientist Arnold A. Rogow demonstrates for the first time that the roots of the fatal encounter lay not in Burr's (admittedly flawed) political or private conduct but rather in Hamilton's conflicted history and character.
With his detailed archival research, his close (and unprecedented) examination of the friendship between the two heroic figures, and his bold, imaginative writing, Rogow changes forever our understanding of honor, politics, and friendship in the early American Republic.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780809016211 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 09/01/1999 |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.82(d) |
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Chapter One
THE DUEL
Early on the morning of Wednesday, July 11, 1804, as the sun rose in the sky over Long Island, promising a day that would be bright and warm after the haze burned off, two men holding pistols confronted each other on a narrow ledge overlooking the Hudson River at Weehawken, New Jersey. They were about to fight a duel, a not uncommon event in those days, but this was no ordinary duel and these were not ordinary men. Aaron Burr, who by prearrangement arrived first, had been a senator from New York, and was Vice President of the United States in the administration of Thomas Jefferson. Alexander Hamilton, who faced Burr across the clearing, had been the principal author of The Federalist Papers and in 1789 was appointed the first Secretary of the Treasury by George Washington.
Following the command "Present!" given by one of the seconds, there were two shots, one of which penetrated Hamilton's lower right side, inflicting a mortal wound. Thirty-six hours later he was dead, and not long after reports of his death reached the public, Burr, indicted for murder in both New York and New Jersey, was a fugitive from justice. Neither man had yet reached the age of fifty, and while Burr was to live another thirty-two years, his political career had also suffered a wound from which it would never recover.
The immediate cause of the duel were remarks hostile to Burr which Hamilton was said to have made the preceding February at a gathering in Albany, New York. But as the following chapters seek to demonstrate, they had begun their travels to Weehawken far from Albany in very different parts of the world, and long before they were to meet for the last time on the dueling ground.
one
BASTARDY AND LEGITIMACY
Alexander Hamilton's beginnings were as inauspicious as Aaron Burr's were promising. The dissimilarity between them could not have been put more succinctly, if somewhat crudely in respect to Hamilton, than by John Adams, who referred to Hamilton as "a bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar," whereas, in the case of Burr, he had "never known in any country, the prejudice in favor of birth, parentage, and descent more conspicuous." So far as we know, Burr never alluded to Hamilton's illegitimacy, but others, as Adams's remark testifies, were not so kind, Jefferson on one occasion venting his anger at Hamilton by declaring, "It's monstrous that this country should be ruled by a foreign bastard!" For Hamilton, however, who was too shamed by his illegitimacy to reveal it, and who must have been painfully aware of the extreme contrast between their backgrounds, Burr's being born into a family of distinguished clergy and college presidents may have been the first of many reminders that certain differences between them, despite accomplishments on Hamilton's part that far surpassed those of Burr, had been unalterably resolved in Burr's favor.
Hamilton's beginnings were also, in important particulars, obscure, and to this day much about his origin is more a matter of speculation than fact. The date of his birth on the island of Nevis in the British West Indies is reported both as January 11, 1755, and as January 11, 1757, some of his many biographers alleging one date and some the other. There is near-unanimous agreement on the identity of his father, James Hamilton, but still some uncertainty, and significant disagreement regarding the circumstances and events of his childhood and adolescence. More is known about Burr's origins--although, somewhat paradoxically, Burr became less, and Hamilton more, revealing of himself as their life histories unfolded--but Burr's early years, too, do not yield a complete record or one that has gone unchallenged.
Biographers also disagree, in Hamilton's case, on the age and birth order of his brother James, a disagreement that owes a great deal to confused or careless statements by his son and biographer, John Church Hamilton. In J. C. Hamilton's first book about his father, Hamilton is referred to as the youngest of several sons of his mother, Rachel, who died in 1768, but in a later book about his father, Hamilton is described as Rachel's only surviving child. These contradictory assertions have led some biographers to conclude that Hamilton's brother James was a half brother, the issue, before or after Hamilton's birth, of an unrecorded marriage of James Hamilton, Sr., who died in 1799 at the age of eighty-one. An inevitable by-product of these uncertainties is that certain biographers assert that Hamilton was three to five years older than his brother James, while others insist that Hamilton was the younger brother.
Since there is no birth certificate or other reliable documentation establishing Hamilton's birth date as 1757, his own family and many biographers have regarded as authoritative Hamilton's indirect indication that he was born that year. Hamilton told family members that, as he put it in a 1797 letter to a kinsman of his father in Scotland, he was "about sixteen" when he arrived in New York toward the final months of 1772, and "nineteen" when he qualified for the degree of bachelor of arts at the "College of New York" and in March 1776 became a captain of artillery in the American Army. These statements, if true, support the 1757 date.
But not all evidence points to 1757. In the probate record of his mother's will in February 1768, Hamilton's age is given as thirteen, which, if correct, would indicate that he was born in 1755; his brother James, according to probate, was two years older, or, in other words, born in 1753. Other evidence, admittedly circumstantial, is a published poem of October 17, 1772, attributed to Hamilton by J. C. Hamilton and said to have been written by him "when 18 years old." At that time, Hamilton was less than three months short of his eighteenth birthday. Certain verses of this poem, to which we shall return, could suggest that the writer certainly was no younger than almost eighteen, although given Hamilton's precocity in a variety of areas, the possibility that he was sexually experienced at sixteen or earlier cannot be ruled out.
A further circumstance lending support to the 1755 date is a legal document of 1766 from the island of St. Croix which lists Hamilton as a witness. This document, which was first discovered by the historian George Bancroft, suggests that Hamilton was nine years old when he signed it if, in fact, he was born in 1757; if 1755 is the correct date, he would have been eleven at the time. In the West Indies in those days, as Henry Cabot Lodge observed, serving as a legal witness at either age was not impossible, but we may reasonably assume that the likelihood of such an appearance increased as one grew closer to adulthood.
Hamilton may well have believed that he was born in 1757, but he may also have had compelling reasons to favor that date, as opposed to the earlier one. For, in addition to the understandable pride he felt in having achieved so much when he was very young--in the letter to his Scots relative he calls attention to his age "sixteen" once and "nineteen" twice--the later date raises fewer questions about his paternity. Certainly, Hamilton was aware of the rumors, at least one of which was believed to be fact by his close friend and associate Timothy Pickering, that his father was not James Hamilton but Thomas Stevens of St. Croix, the father of his boyhood friend Edward (Ned) Stevens, with whom Hamilton remained in touch throughout his life. Pickering, to whom Lodge referred at length, was so impressed by the resemblance between the two that he at first took them for brothers, a conclusion perhaps helped by the fact that the elder Stevens had befriended Hamilton after his mother's death. Some rumors alleging Hamilton's true paternity named Rachel's first and only husband, John Michael Levine, whose name is variously spelled Lavine, Lavien, Lowein, and Levin, by whom she was divorced in 1759 but from whom she had separated earlier, while other rumors hinted that his true father was another Hamilton, the Governor of the Islands, William Leslie Hamilton.
The most fascinating as well as the least credible rumor was that Hamilton's biological father was none other than George Washington. Those who were tempted to believe this rumor, one of whom was reported to have been Gertrude Atherton, who devoted a biographical novel to Hamilton, could cite in support of it Washington's presumed presence in Barbados when Rachel was there, and his marked affection for and partiality toward Hamilton. They also argued that Hamilton was too distinguished to have been the son of a father who, failing in everything he attempted, never amounted to much.
The attribution to Washington of Hamilton's paternity is reminiscent of myths alleging that emperors and conquering heroes like the Egyptian Pharaohs, Alexander the Great, and some of the Caesars were descended from the gods. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, if Hamilton had lived among them and was venerated, probably would have had no trouble believing that his father, if not godlike, had qualities far superior to those of ordinary mortals. Unfortunately, Washington was not in Barbados or anywhere else in the West Indies in either 1754 or 1756. He did spend approximately three months in Barbados during the winter of 1751, when he was nineteen years old, and there contracted smallpox. Washington, furthermore, was childless, although his wife, Martha, who had four children by her previous husband, sought to become pregnant; probably he was sterile.
There is no circumstantial or other evidence that James Hamilton was sterile, but was he Hamilton's father? The assumption that he was, although it was widely accepted as fact, is almost entirely based on statements of Hamilton and his family that may or may not reflect the truth. While he and his descendants made much of his descent from the distinguished House of Hamilton based in Ayrshire, Scotland, his immediate family did not reveal that James Hamilton was never married to his mother, Rachel, much less the dates when they began to live together and when they separated. According to Hamilton's son, J. C. Hamilton, who mentions his grandfather James only once, his father was "the offspring of a second marriage," Rachel having divorced her first husband, "a Dane, named Lavine."
Hamilton's grandson Allan McLean Hamilton, writing with Pickering and Lodge in mind, goes to greater length than his uncle to establish his grandfather's descent from the Hamiltons of Ayrshire, who in turn could trace their ancestry to fourteenth-century forebears and the dukes, earls, viscounts, and barons who followed them. In his account, Rachel "when a girl of barely sixteen was forced into marriage with a rich Danish Jew, one John Michael Levine [or Lawein], who treated her cruelly," with whom she had one son, Peter. Leaving him in 1755 or 1756, she subsequently "went to James Hamilton [and] Alexander Hamilton was born a year later." Unlike his uncle, A. M. Hamilton does not claim that James and Rachel were married, giving as the reason they were unmarried that since Levine was granted the divorce on grounds of abandonment, he was able to marry again, whereas Rachel, the defendant, was not. But such was their devotion to each other, writes their great-grandson, that they lived together until Rachel's death in 1768.
While the statements of Hamilton's grandson are more dependable than those of his son, many of them, at best, derive from family legends or reflect what Hamilton wanted them to believe and what perhaps they did believe. Whatever they believed, the facts as opposed to myths are few. The exact date of James Hamilton's arrival in the West Indies from Scotland, a crucial detail in establishing Hamilton's paternity and the year of his birth, is uncertain; as biographer Robert Hendrickson observes, "no one knows exactly where or when Hamilton's mother, Rachel, and his father, James Hamilton, met, or when they began living together, or when they parted. It is little more than tradition that they met . . . about 1750 or a year or two later." A. M. Hamilton, as noted earlier, has Rachel not leaving her husband until 1755 or 1756 to live with James, which, if true, raises the possibility that, whatever the date of his emigration to the islands, James may not have been Hamilton's father, assuming he was born in 1755. The first and only reference to Rachel and James as a couple was occasioned by a baptism on the Dutch island of St. Eustatius in October 1758, where they are referred to as husband and wife.
Hamilton and his family had more reason to favor the 1757 date for his birth than the earlier one of 1755, whereas his brother, if some of his biographers are correct in stating that Hamilton was older, would have had less reason to be concerned about the dates of his father's arrival from Scotland and his own birth. But the probate of Rachel's will, as already noted, refers to her son, James, as two years older than Hamilton, which, if true, and if the other James was his biological father, lends some credence to the belief held by a few biographers that the elder James Hamilton had, like Rachel, been married before and had fathered a son. In that case, Alexander and his sibling James were half brothers only. Unfortunately, Hamilton's brother or half brother James, who apparently died in 1786, left no letters or other record of his existence, and almost nothing is known about the circumstances of his birth, life, or death.
Hamilton as late as 1802 may have told at least one of his friends, James McHenry, that the marriage of his parents had been dissolved because of a technicality involving Rachel's divorce. Perhaps he told his family as well, but there is no mention of this or of James's and Rachel's separation in his son's or grandson's biography. There also is no mention of a history of marital turmoil and separation on his mother's side and, if certain reports can be trusted, even worse happenings that occurred during Rachel's short life. Rachel herself was probably born in Nevis in 1729, and was eleven or so when her parents, John Fawcett, a physician of Huguenot extraction, and her mother, Mary, Fawcett's second wife, separated. Five years after her marriage to Levine in 1745, by which time she had given birth to her son Peter, Rachel was charged with adultery and "whoring with everyone." As a consequence, she spent an unknown amount of time in jail. For reasons not clear, Levine did not sue for divorce until February 1759, the divorce petition specifying that she was the mother of two illegitimate children, Alexander and James, that she had "twice been guilty of adultery," and that she had abandoned her husband, Peter's father. As if this were not enough, Rachel's connections through her father's first marriage included two bankruptcies and one case of mental illness ending in suicide. What role, if any, these unhappy events played in James Hamilton's desertion of Rachel and her two sons, which probably occurred in 1766 or earlier, is not established, but they could hardly have made a positive contribution to the relationship between James and Rachel.
In addition to emphasizing his Scottish origins, the family made much of Hamilton's closeness to his father and brother, and his affection for his mother. But no one in the family or in Hamilton's circle of friends, with the possible exception of Edward Stevens, ever met James Hamilton, Sr., or could have known what he or Rachel looked like. Nevertheless, A. M. Hamilton and other biographers have had no hesitation in writing that, in Hamilton's grandson's words, "he undoubtedly presented the physical appearance of his Scotch father rather than his French mother." Observations, already mentioned, that Hamilton and Stevens could have been taken for brothers can be neither confirmed nor denied by reference to surviving portraits of Stevens and his father, for there are none.
Evidence that Hamilton had much of a relationship with either his father or his brother is far from convincing. In a letter to his wife, Elizabeth, whom he usually called Betsey, probably written shortly before their marriage in 1780, Hamilton informed her that he had "pressed" his father to come to America "after the peace," and that he would write him again to "present him with his black-eyed daughter, and tell him how much of her attention deserves his affection and will make the blessing of his gray hairs." Despite this urging, which is confirmed in the only surviving letter to Hamilton from his father, dated June 12, 1793, James never left the West Indies to meet his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren, perhaps for reasons, as he wrote his son, of ill health and the "war which has lately broke out between France and England." He refers to another letter to Hamilton of the preceding June, and there may have been others back and forth, but judging by Hamilton's letter to his brother of June 22, 1785, there could not have been many. In that letter, Hamilton asks: "What has become of our dear father? It is an age since I have heard from him or of him, though I have written him several letters." He sent money to his father and brother in 1796 and 1799, according to his grandson, but the amount is in dispute. A. M. Hamilton reported it as several thousand dollars; Hendrickson as "more than a thousand dollars."
On the other hand, when Hamilton was drawing up his will in July 1795, he made some provision for the debts and obligations of himself and certain associates but specifically excluded his father from such consideration, although he knew that James Sr. was "now in indigence." He had "hesitated," he wrote his friend and associate Robert Troup, "whether I would not also secure a preference to the drafts of my father--but these as far as I am concerned being a merely voluntary engagement, I doubted the justice of the measure and I have done nothing. I regret it lest they should return upon him and increase his distress." These remarks, whatever the true state of Hamilton's feelings about his father, reflect, at the very least, a marked ambivalence in his attitude toward the older man.
Hamilton's single surviving letter to his brother is also revealing, indeed so much so that his son James Alexander Hamilton, in his published version, deleted portions of it. In this letter of June 12, 1785, previously referred to, Hamilton agreed to honor his brother's draft upon him of fifty pounds "wherever it shall appear," but he confessed himself unable to do more until some future date, at which time "I promise myself to be able to invite you to a more comfortable settlement in this country." in the meantime, he advised his brother in the sentences that followed, which were omitted in the J. A. Hamilton version: "Allow me only to give you one caution, which is, to avoid if possible, getting into debt. Are you married or single? If the latter, it is my wish, for many reasons, that you may continue in that state." J. A. Hamilton also deleted a concluding paragraph in which Hamilton wrote his brother: "I do not advise your coming to this country at present, for the war has also put things out of order here, and people in your business find a subsistence difficult enough. My object will be, by and by, to get you settled on a farm." Assuming that his brother died in 1786, Hamilton could not have had much opportunity to bring him to America, whether or not he was determined to achieve his "object"; in any event, he apparently never saw his father again after his parents separated, or his brother after leaving the West Indies. When Edward Stevens was planning a visit to St. Croix in May 1796, Hamilton did not suggest that Stevens visit his father or carry messages to him. Hamilton also had no contact with Rachel's son Peter Levine, his half brother, who lived with his father before coming to South Carolina in 1764.
Table of Contents
| Preface | xi | |
| The Duel | 3 | |
| 1 | Bastardy and Legitimacy | 4 |
| 2 | The Cannon's Mouth | 26 |
| 3 | Husbands, Wives, Lovers | 54 |
| 4 | Endings and Beginnings | 77 |
| 5 | From Cincinnati to Philadelphia | 102 |
| 6 | Seizing the Day | 125 |
| 7 | Les Liaisons Dangereuses | 150 |
| 8 | Farewells to All That | 175 |
| 9 | Odd Destinies | 201 |
| 10 | Thirteen Weeks to Weehawken | 228 |
| 11 | A World Too Small? | 251 |
| Epilogue | 273 | |
| Notes | 287 | |
| Selected Bibliography | 333 | |
| Index | 339 |