War of Two: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Duel that Stunned the Nation

by John Sedgwick Narrated by P.J. Ochlan

Overview

A provocative and penetrating investigation into the rivalry between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, whose infamous duel left the Founding Father dead and turned a sitting Vice President into a fugitive. In the summer of 1804, two of America's most eminent statesmen squared off, pistols raised, on a bluff along the Hudson River. That two such men would risk not only their lives but the stability of the young country they helped forge is almost beyond comprehension. Yet we know that it happened. The question is why.

In War of Two, John Sedgwick explores the long-standing conflict between Founding Father Alexander Hamilton and Vice President Aaron Burr. A study in contrasts from birth, they had been compatriots, colleagues, and even friends. But above all they were rivals. Matching each other's ambition and skill as lawyers in New York, they later battled for power along political fault lines that would not only decide the future of the United States, but define it. A series of letters between Burr and Hamilton suggest the duel was fought over an unflattering comment made at a dinner party. But another letter, written by Hamilton the night before the event, provides critical insight into his true motivation. It was addressed to former Speaker of the House Theodore Sedgwick, a trusted friend of both men, and the author's own ancestor.

John Sedgwick suggests that Hamilton saw Burr not merely as a personal rival but as a threat to the nation. Burr would prove that fear justified after Hamilton's death when, haunted by the legacy of his longtime adversary, he embarked on an imperial scheme to break the Union apart.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Susan Dunn

…[a] lively, wide-ranging and immensely readable book. The world of War of Two is often more personal than political, an intimate portrait of Hamilton and Burr as they plunged toward their fatal collision.

Publishers Weekly

09/28/2015
Journalist and novelist Sedgwick (In My Blood) looks back on one of America’s earliest scandals: the duel between Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first secretary of the treasury, and Aaron Burr, the sitting vice president. The standoff stemmed from Hamilton calling Burr dangerous, but it was fueled by the interaction of two men for whom “relative standing was everything.” Hamilton, who had risen from illegitimacy and poverty to great power, possessed “a protean ability not just to make enemies but to create them,” and his influence waned accordingly. The nation’s rising star was Aaron Burr, whose political career began as “a testament to his high standing as a lawyer and to his elite background.” Sedgwick perceptively suggests that Burr’s skill at influencing public opinion epitomized for the emerging Republicans what Hamilton’s preference for elite governance did for the Federalists: competing versions of democracy. Never gaining Thomas Jefferson’s trust even as his vice president, Burr sought a power base in New York—where Hamilton had returned after leaving the government. Both men felt unacceptably diminished; each focused on the other as cause and symbol of his own relative decline. Sedgwick shows that while the duel was not inevitable, the pair’s final encounter was predictable. Agent: Dan Conaway, Writers House. (Nov.)

From the Publisher

Praise for War of Two

“Sedgwick’s War of Two, like Chernow’s great biography, has depths and details that the musical [Hamilton] cannot match.”—Gordon Wood, The New York Review of Books
 
“[A] lively, wide-ranging and immensely readable book. The world of War of Two is often more personal than political, an intimate portrait of Hamilton and Burr as they plunged toward their fatal collision.”—The New York Times
 
“John Sedgwick has done a great thing here: he has painted a compelling and original portrait of a defining American rivalry. A story of ambition, conviction, and finally of bloodshed.”—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
 
“In crisp, lively prose, the author presents evenhanded and insightful profiles of two highly intelligent, driven men with substantial flaws and very different characters...[An] entertainingly irreverent account of two consequential men from the dawn of the American republic.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
“John Sedgwick rescues the most famous duel in history from musty mythology and gives us a richly textured, spirited, absorbing tale of yearning, rivalry, and pathos. War of Two reads like the Great American Novel—but it’s all true.”—Evan Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of Being Nixon: A Man Divided
 
“Sedgwick perceptively suggests that Burr’s skill at influencing public opinion epitomized for the emerging Republicans what Hamilton’s preference for elite governance did for the Federalists: competing versions of democracy.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“An explosive historical narrative. With Sedgwick’s deft, clever writing, this true story of the dangerous and dramatic world of the Founders becomes as gripping as any novel.”—Matthew Pearl, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Bookaneer
 
“The famous duel has been recounted before, but never with such illuminating attention to the layers upon layers of ambition, vanity, talent, honor and pigheadedness that marked the antagonists...A master storyteller.”—H. W. Brands, New York Times bestselling author of The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace

Kirkus Reviews

2015-08-15
A parallel biography of two prominent figures from the Federalist era whose lives came into catastrophic collision on a dueling ground. Alexander Hamilton had a dazzling career as a young man. Chief aide to George Washington during the American Revolution and author of most of the Federalist Papers, as the first secretary of the treasury, he performed the miracle of putting the new nation's finances on a sound footing. Aaron Burr, a lawyer of prominence and brilliance equal to Hamilton's, engaged in politics to advance his own interests rather than any cause. He came within a single electoral vote of being elected president in Thomas Jefferson's place in 1800, gaining the vice presidency and Jefferson's enmity instead. Sedgwick (In My Blood: Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family, 2007, etc.) presents an emotional and psychological biography of the pair, partially inspired by Gore Vidal's satirical novel Burr (1973). In crisp, lively prose, the author presents evenhanded and insightful profiles of two highly intelligent, driven men with substantial flaws and very different characters: the hyperactive Hamilton, of volcanic output and intense devotion to the Federalist cause, the brooding and libidinous Burr, communicating in code, both attached to the contemporary lethal cult of honor. Sedgwick strives to present this as something of a Greek drama in which his characters gradually swirl closer together, increasing in hostility until their duel appears almost inevitable. The strategy is not entirely successful. Burr and Hamilton cooperated occasionally and didn't come into conflict with each other often or sharply enough to warrant the characterization as archrivals. By the time of their duel, they were both washed up, in severe financial distress, and with no political prospects. It almost seems as though they fought because they no longer had anything better to do. An overly detailed but entertainingly irreverent account of two consequential men from the dawn of the American republic.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171228538
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	10/20/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The case of dueling pistols owned by Hamilton’s good Federalist friend New York senator Rufus King. Similar to the Robert Wogdon flintlock pistols used in the fatal duel between Hamilton and Burr, these were made by H.W. Mortimer. They were never fired but demonstrate that such equipment was de rigueur for a gentleman of the political class and indicate the elaborate machinery involved in defending one’s honor.
AUTHOR’S NOTE

One fall afternoon several years ago, I was in the reading room of the Massachusetts Historical Society, a splendid brick bastion in Boston’s leafy Fenway neighborhood. I was prowling through the society’s extensive collection of Sedgwick family papers for a book I was writing about my family’s history when the head librarian, Peter Drummey, came up and tapped me on the shoulder and said he had something to show me.

“We’ve got this one on display up front,” he whispered. “Come, you should see it.” He led me through a series of rooms to an exhibition space showing the society’s prized holdings in long glass cases. Peter stopped beside one of them and pointed toward a wrinkled letter, yellowed with age, its once-black ink long since faded to brown, that was propped up on glass. “There. Take a look.”

I bent over the case. “New York, July 10, 1804,” I read out.

My Dear Sir

I have received two letters from you since we last saw each other—that of the latest date being the 24 of May. I have had in hand for some time a long letter to you, explaining my view of the course and tendency of our Politics, and my intentions as to my own future conduct. But my plan embraced so large a range that owing to much avocation, some indifferent health, and a growing distaste for Politics, the letter is still considerably short of being finished—I write this now to satisfy you, that want of regard for you has not been the cause of my silence—

“Wait, this isn’t—?” I asked.

Peter nodded. “Yes—Alexander Hamilton’s last letter. Written the night before he was shot.” By the sitting vice president Aaron Burr, he need hardly have added, in the famous duel at Weehawken, New Jersey, in 1804, an event that Henry Adams called the most dramatic moment in the politics of the early Republic.

“And look, it’s to one of yours.” He beamed. “His good friend and legislative ally Theodore Sedgwick.” Of course—the name was scrawled hastily across the bottom.

I’d known about the letter, but I’d never seen it. Theodore was my great-great-great-grandfather. A career politician, he’d helped push Hamilton’s economic agenda through the House when he was a representative from Massachusetts, and ultimately rose to become Speaker of the House for the fateful election of 1800 that wrested control away from his Federalist Party and turned it over to Thomas Jefferson and the Republican “Jacobins,” as he thought of them, alluding to the bloodthirsty radicals of the French Revolution. Much to Hamilton’s distress, Theodore had tried fruitlessly to steer the election to Burr, a friend from the Berkshires. Still, Theodore had been one of the only politicians who’d remained a trusted friend of both men, which was why Hamilton was writing him then.

We will return to the letter later, in its time. Taken out of context, it may seem tangential and, unusually for Hamilton, wildly overblown. It is likely to defy expectations as to why Hamilton crossed the Hudson at daybreak and faced his doom. In a few choice sentences, Hamilton offered a better explanation about his part in the duel, and a better prediction of what would come from it, than he did anywhere else. Theodore Sedgwick never responded, since by then there was no one to respond to.

When earlier members of the family encountered the letter, they could see its value to history, for several added urgent notations on the back before they passed the letter down to the next generation. All conveyed the same message: This letter must be preserved.
The Fatal Dinner

Searching for the true origins of the fatal hatred between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr is like trying to trace the wind to its source. It is easier to detail how the gusts are knocking tree limbs about. There was never any question that Burr shot Hamilton in anger. As for why, everyone turned to a remarkable series of letters, eleven in all, that Hamilton and Burr, or their surrogates, volleyed back and forth in the run-up to the slaughter and that filled the newspapers afterward. The letters have much of the quality of legal arguments, as befits the work of the two most prominent lawyers in the city, as each tried to pin the blame on the other, and they make up a duel of their own, a war of words.

While each man clearly disdained the moral character of the other, the issue at hand was far more limited, and more precise, as it turned, remarkably, on a single word, spoken in haste at a dinner party in Albany that February, in the midst of an abominable winter that, from November to May, was the coldest and snowiest on record. Only the steep roofs of the city’s Dutch houses were clear of the otherwise endless freezing white. The event was held at the State Street home of a powerful local judge named John Tayler, whose mouth seemed always down turned in displeasure. He ran nearly everything in town from the waterworks to the local New York State Bank, which he’d conveniently located directly across the street, and he was at work on plans for a new granite statehouse a few blocks away. The city had long been so Dutch that, it was said, even the dogs barked in Dutch. The Reformed Protestant Dutch Church still commanded one end of State Street—but a sturdy new Episcopal church had risen at the other, reflecting the developing political tensions of the city.

Tayler had invited in a few gentleman friends who were staying in the city for an ample repast before a roaring fire. The men duly arrived by sleigh on the snow-packed street. Their cheeks must have been raw as they came stamping into the front hall, their top hats and capes dusted with white. Federalists all, they dressed in the Federalist fashion; for clothing, too, was divided by party. Unlike Republicans, these good Federalist men all wore traditional knee-high silk stockings and buckled shoes, eschewing the blowsy shirts and crude trousers affected by the Republicans. Or worse. Even on formal occasions, President Jefferson was known to lounge about the President’s Mansion in a dressing gown and slippers.

The purpose tonight, however, was not mere conviviality. Since this was Albany in an election season, and one that featured the almost lubricious prospect of the disgraced vice president Aaron Burr’s attempt to seize the governor’s chair, the topic would be politics and, for a diversion, more politics. But for its designation as the state capital, after all, Albany would have remained what it once was: a nice piece of land along the Hudson, rich in strawberries. And these men possessed political opinions of value. Among them were the eminent James Kent, chief justice of the New York State Supreme Court, and the Dutch aristocrat Stephen Van Rensselaer, the eighth patroon, or lord of the manor, a onetime candidate for governor himself whose estate, Rensselaerswych, once encompassed all of Albany. But the prize guest of the evening was Alexander Hamilton.

In his younger days, Hamilton had cut a girlish figure, wasp-waisted, slim limbed, with none of the manly chest you’d associate with an orator who could dominate a hall for hours. He’d had a dancer’s grace, too, pirouetting and gesturing as he kept up an endless stream of talk. (No one had ever talked as much as Hamilton—the world might have drowned in his words.) Now it was only the talk anyone remembered. At forty-nine, he’d aged noticeably, thickened up, slowed. Even his electric, violet-blue eyes had dimmed, like a fire that had burned down to embers. And his hair, once a lustrous strawberry blond—a token of his Scottish heritage, it was said—had gone pale and brittle, but Hamilton still wore it straight back, clasped in his trademark club behind.

America was still a thinly populated country of only a few million free whites, most of them clumped in a few cities from Georgia to the Massachusetts coast that was not yet called Maine. If the elite weren’t related by blood or marriage, they’d served together in the war or gone to college together. So here, Hamilton knew Kent from his earliest days as a lawyer, and he knew Van Rensselaer because Van Rensselaer was married to Hamilton’s wife’s sister. But, of course, familiarity doesn’t always guarantee warmth. Among intimates, a slight can cause a cooling, and then chill into an icy fury, and so the political world of the young America was driven by the dual polarities of Anton Mesmer, the German physician who believed that everyone and everything is held together by a magnetic force. Those who loved, loved like newlyweds. Those who hated, hated like demons. Thinking he was among men he loved and who loved him, Hamilton ventured an opinion of a man he didn’t. When questioned about Burr’s candidacy for governor of New York, Hamilton was dismissive, but, being Hamilton, he expressed himself with memorable acuity. He said that he found Burr to be “dangerous.” He said other things too, but that was the only one that mattered.

Hamilton had said so many words, it was probably inevitable that he would say a wrong one. This was a wrong one, and no more words from him could make it right. For there was another man there that night, one whom Hamilton failed to take into account. It was Tayler’s young son-in-law Dr. Charles D. Cooper, who was staying over. He was so taken by Hamilton’s fevered denunciations of the vice president that he did something dangerous. He jotted down a summary for a political friend in Manhattan, and that man—unidentified—must have found the comments of larger interest, for he passed them along to the Evening Post’s editor, William Coleman, who was eager to run them, but with a disclaimer in case Burr take offense and make a challenge against him. The editor persuaded Hamilton’s father-in-law, the former New York senator General Philip Schuyler, to add a line expressing doubt that Alexander Hamilton would say anything so harsh about Burr after he’d pledged neutrality in Burr’s gubernatorial contest. That was a howler. Everyone knew that Hamilton had been anything but neutral in that election.

Up in Albany, Dr. Cooper read the Schuyler note in the Post, and he took offense at Schuyler’s insinuation that he’d gotten the story wrong or possibly had made it up entirely. Furious, he wrote a stiff letter to the Federalist Albany Register, to reiterate that Hamilton absolutely had called Burr “dangerous,” and that was not all. He added, tantalizingly, “I could detail for you a still more despicable opinion which Mr. Hamilton has expressed to Mr. Burr.”

Still more despicable.

That did it.

As Burr told a friend later, with the lightly veiled anger that was the purest expression of his breeding: “[Hamilton] had a peculiar talent of saying things improper and offensive in such a manner as could not well be taken hold of.” Dr. Cooper’s letter in the Register didn’t come to Burr’s attention for a full two months, in the middle of June, by which time Hamilton had succeeded in snatching the governorship from him in humiliating fashion: Burr lost by the greatest margin of any gubernatorial candidate in the state. Burr was not inclined to be forgiving. He intended to extract from Hamilton the full meaning of Cooper’s words, if he had to use pincers to do it.

On June 18, 1804, he dispatched a note to Hamilton at his law office in New York.

Sir:— I send for your perusal a letter signed Charles D. Cooper, which, though apparently published some time ago has but very recently come to my knowledge. Mr. Van Ness, who does me the favor to deliver this, will point out to you that clause of the letter to which I particularly request your attention.

You must perceive, sir, the necessity of a prompt and unqualified acknowledgement or denial of the use of any expression which would warrant the assertions of Dr. Cooper.

I have the honor to be,
With that, the game was on. Those eleven letters passed between them, but when the third, from Burr, declared that he had been dishonored, it became clear that the men would be headed across the Hudson to the dueling ground in Weehawken to resolve the matter at dawn with pistols.

BUT IT IS the rare lethal dispute that stems from a single word, or even several words. And, while “dangerous” was insulting, and “despicable” more so, the words merely evoked a string of calumnies that Hamilton had leveled against Burr at every presidential election up through the last one, the epic contest of 1800, when Jefferson and Burr tied in the Electoral College, throwing the matter to the House of Representatives. While Hamilton had always disdained Jefferson, he loathed Burr so utterly that he fought to counter every attempt by the Federalists to cut a deal with him that would award him the presidency, not Jefferson. It is a mark of Hamilton’s aversion to Burr that he embraced the anti-Christ instead.

As to Burr, there is nothing in his favour. His private character is not defended by his most partial friends. He is bankrupt beyond redemption, except by the plunder of his country. His public principles have no other spring or aim than his own aggrandizement. . . . If he can, he will certainly disturb our institutions to secure to himself permanent power and with it wealth. He is truly the Catiline of America.

As every classicist knew, the dissolute Catiline was one of the greatest traitors of the classical age, leading troops against the Roman Republic in a monstrous conspiracy that was foiled by Cicero, the canny orator in whom Hamilton may have seen a little of himself.

But Hamilton’s political antipathy dated back to the presidential contest of 1792, when Burr rather audaciously put himself forward as a vice presidential candidate for the nascent Republican Party against the Federalist incumbents, Washington and Adams. At that point, Burr had been elected New York assemblyman, then appointed attorney general by the governor, who later persuaded the Assembly to make him senator from New York just the year before his vice presidential bid. He was hardly a political threat to the Federalists, and certainly not in a campaign against Washington. Yet Hamilton savaged him:

I fear [Burr] is unprincipled both as a public and private man. . . . I take it he is for or against nothing but as it suits his interest or ambition. . . . I am mistaken if it be not his object to play the game of confusion and I feel it a religious duty to oppose his career.

A religious duty, no less. Divinely inspired, and permanent. And this for a man who went on to garner just one electoral vote, from South Carolina.

While Hamilton did not hesitate to say such things, and more, against Burr, Burr never responded in kind, preferring to answer Hamilton’s contempt with silence, which may have been all the more infuriating. Hamilton’s vituperation was unanswerable in any case, as it stemmed from something far deeper than any transient political disagreement but may have been embedded in his psyche. But in seeing evil in Burr, he brought some out in himself. The duel did not derive from circumstances, but from the essence of who these men were and aspired to be.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "War of Two"
by .
Copyright © 2015 John Sedgwick.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
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