burr and hamilton--3/31/25

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Today's selection-- from A Magnificent Catastrophe by Edward J. Larson. The rivalry of two of America’s rising political stars, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton:

“If the road to the presidency in 1800 lay through New York, then Jefferson would have to ride to victory on Aaron Burr's Republican campaign machinery. At the time, few politicians fully trusted Burr and many actively disliked him—but no one doubted his influence over local politics in New York City, which then dominated that of its state. In April 1800, New York voters would elect the legislature empowered to select the state's twelve presidential electors, with New York City's large delegation in the lower house holding the balance of power. In 1796, Federalists controlling the state legislature had selected electors loyal to Adams and Thomas Pinckney. If Jefferson could capture those votes this time, he would likely win the election. Only Burr could deliver them by orchestrating a Republican takeover of the state legislature, but he would have to beat Alexander Hamilton to do so. 

“New York boasted a gallery full of High Federalist luminaries. During the spring of 1800, Alexander Hamilton commanded the nation's Army from his headquarters in New York City, Gouverneur Morris took office as the state's new senator, and John Jay served as governor in Albany. Federalists controlled both houses of the state legislature going into the April legislative elections and rejected a Republican proposal to choose presidential electors by district elections, which surely would have split the state's electoral vote in 1800. By retaining legislative appointment for presidential electors, New York Federalists hoped to deliver all of them for their party's candidates just as they had in every previous presidential contest. Burr had other ideas, which required a Republican victory in the April elections. With a singleness of purpose that awed friend and foe alike, he set about to make it happen. Hamilton, already Burr's rival, stood determined to stop him and maintain Federalist rule in New York. The contest became a historic clash within the larger presidential campaign.

“The 1800 census reported that New York City had finally surpassed Philadelphia as the nation's largest city and principal port. Yet, this increasingly cosmopolitan city-founded by the Dutch in 1626, conquered by the British in 1664, and bloated by German and Irish immigrants during the late 1700s—could not comfortably contain two men with such enormous egos and soaring ambitions as Burr and Hamilton. Short in stature but strikingly handsome and able to charm, they were destined to come into conflict repeatedly and have their relationship end in a deadly duel. The election of 1800 neither began nor finished their rivalry for power and influence; rather, it intensified it greatly.

“The parallels and perpendicularities between the two men were almost eerie. Born during the mid-1750s within a year of each other, Burr and Hamilton came from dramatically different backgrounds. Son of Aaron Burr Sr., a noted theologian and Princeton College president, and Esther Edwards, the scholarly daughter of the legendary evangelical minister Jonathan Edwards, Burr boasted a matchless American pedigree dating back to the earliest Puritan settlers of New England. ‘I have never known, in any country, the prejudice in favor of birth, parentage, and descent more conspicuous than that in the instance of Colonel Burr,’ John Adams once observed. In contrast, Adams slurred Hamilton as ‘a bastard brat of a Scotch peddler’ for his out-of-wedlock birth to a drifting trader and married Frenchwoman on the British West Indies island of Nevis. Adams made the comment about Hamilton in 1806, long after their bitter personal and policy disputes, which Adams never forgot or forgave, became public.

“Both Burr and Hamilton lost their parents at an early age and became wards of maternal relatives. Burr gained easy entry into Princeton while Hamilton overcame all odds by securing a place at King's College (later Columbia) in New York. Burr considered following his father and grandfather into the ministry but soon rejected the idea and never again showed marked interest in religion. Like Hamilton, Burr enjoyed a self-gratifying life punctuated with extramarital affairs. The Revolutionary War interrupted their academic studies, with both men joining the patriot army, serving on Washington's personal staff, and rising to the rank of colonel. Whereas Washington grew to rely heavily on Hamilton and trust him implicitly, the General quickly lost faith in Burr and had him transferred to combat positions, where he served with distinction. Years later, Washington insisted that Hamilton become his second-in-command for the Additional Army over President Adams's objection, but refused Adams's recommendation that Burr become a brigadier general in the same force. ‘Colonel Burr is a brave and able officer,’ Washington conceded at the time, ‘but the question is, whether he has not equal talents at intrigue.’ The comment infuriated Adams, who, when later recalling it, denounced Washington's pick, Alexander Hamilton, as ‘the most restless, impatient, artful, indefatigable and unprincipled intriguer in the United States, if not the world.’ Burr and Hamilton inevitably excited passions.

An early 20th century illustration depicting the duel between Burr (right) and Alexander Hamilton (left) on July 11, 1804, in Weehawken, New Jersey.

“After the Revolutionary War, both men gained eminence as two of the brightest lawyers in the booming city of New York. As attorneys, Burr and Hamilton occasionally collaborated on cases—including as co-counsel for the defense in a sensational murder trial during the weeks leading up to the election of April 1800. They married well and joined the city's social elite, although Burr's extravagant expenses often exceeded his sizable income. Each of them compounded his personal influence by attracting and sustaining a trusted circle of loyal lieutenants. Hamilton tended to draw in men of independent means and social standing, some much older than himself. Burr, in contrast, attracted a small corps of rising young New Yorkers, known as Burrites, who devoted themselves to his causes. ‘It was ever one of his characteristics to secure inviolable the attachment of his friends,’ one of them later wrote. It was here that Colonel Burr was all powerful, for he possessed in a preeminent degree the art of fascinating the youthful.’

Politics consumed both men by the late 1780s, but they chose different sides. Hamilton and his father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, became leading Federalists; Burr gravitated toward the circle of the state's long-serving Anti-Federalist (and later Republican) governor, George Clinton, first when elected to the state legislature and then as Clinton's attorney general. Within state politics, their relative prominence rose and fell as power passed back and forth between the two parties during the 1790s, even as Hamilton gained national influence as Washington's principal adviser and Treasury Secretary. When Clinton's faction took over the state legislature in 1791, for example, legislators chose Burr to replace Schuyler in the United States Senate, but Schuyler reclaimed the seat from Burr six years later after Federalists took back the legislature. In an effort to reach beyond their Southern base, Republicans looked to New York—a critical battleground state in the North—for their vice presidential candidates. The first nod went to Clinton, in 1792, and then again to him in 1804 and 1808. In 1796, however, many national Republicans favored Burr, but he secured only thirty electoral votes when some Southern Republican electors gave their second votes to Samuel Adams or Clinton. The experience both fed Burr's national ambitions and drove him to insist on strict party loyalty should he again stand for the vice presidency.

“In contrast to Hamilton, who remained a principled High Federalist and accumulated political power through ideological purity, Burr saw his path to glory through pragmatic politics. He took ideologically inconsistent stands on various issues and even courted Federalist support for a possible run against Clinton as governor in 1792—a move that Hamilton blocked within his party. Still smarting from his father-in-law's defeat for the Senate at Burr's hands a year earlier, Hamilton warned a Federalist confidant at the time, ‘As a public man [Burr] is one of the worst sorts-a friend to nothing but as suits his interest and ambition. Determined to climb to the highest honors of state and as much higher as circumstances may permit—he cares nothing about the means of effecting his purpose.’ Drawing on a historical analogy that his own opponents leveled against him, Hamilton concluded, ‘If we have an embryo-Caesar in the United States, 'tis Burr.’

“Losing his U.S. Senate seat in 1797 did not deter Burr. Again elected to the state legislature a year later, he supported legislation benefiting his investments, including a bill chartering the Manhattan Company, a banking institution disguised as a water company that offered borrowers a Republican alternative to the Bank of New York and the local branch of the Bank of the United States, both of which Federalists controlled. Defeated for reelection in 1799 amid accusations of self-dealing, Burr determined to build a Republican political machine that would stabilize his political fortunes. He set his sights on the April 1800 legislative election with the goal of securing the state for Jefferson and the vice presidency for himself. Hamilton stood in the way. In his brooding historical novel about Burr, Gore Vidal has his antihero say at this point in the narrative, ‘I suspect that when Hamilton looks at me he sees, in some magical way, himself reflected.’ It would have been a mirror image with many parts reversed.”

author:	Edward J. Larson
title:	A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign
publisher:	Free Press
pages:	87-91