Alexander Hamilton (131 page)

On January 26, Burr hazarded one last meeting with Jefferson to determine whether he had any future in the national Republican party. Knowing it would be fruitless to ask Jefferson to keep him on as vice president, he abased himself to solicit “a mark of favor” from Jefferson that he could transmit to the world as evidence that he was leaving office with the president’s confidence.
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Mixing flattery with self-pity, Burr complained that the Livingstons and Clintons, abetted by Hamilton, had launched “calumnies” against him in New York and asked Jefferson to help defend his name.
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Jefferson held out no hope of political redemption. In his evasive style, he said that he never meddled with elections and had no plans to do so now. As for press attacks against Burr, Jefferson waved them away blithely, saying that he “had noticed it but as the passing wind.”
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Clearly, as far as Jefferson was concerned, Aaron Burr was persona non grata in the Republican party.

Burr concluded that his political salvation lay in New York. He would try to exchange places with George Clinton and run for New York governor, backed by a coalition of Federalists and disgruntled Republicans. Hamilton feared that Burr might try to unite New York with New England in a breakaway confederacy, courting Federalist votes in the process. With his talent for subtle suggestions, Burr had already dined with New England Federalist legislators, who had probed his views on the subject. Congressman Roger Griswold of Connecticut said that Burr spoke “in the most bitter terms of the Virginia faction and of the necessity of a union at the northward to resist it. But what the ultimate objects are which he would propose, I do not know.”
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Without committing himself, the inscrutable Burr kept alive hopes that, as New York governor, he might encourage state residents to forge a union with the New England states.
In essaying a New York comeback, Burr had to contend with two willful opponents: thirty-four-year-old De Witt Clinton, now New York’s handsome, overbearing mayor, and the damaged but still resourceful Hamilton. The resulting political battle was to be brutal even by the savage standards of the day. The
American Citizen,
Clinton’s mouthpiece, was to play an especially provocative role. To discredit Burr among Republicans, editor James Cheetham disinterred old charges that Burr had colluded with Federalists in the 1801 tie election. He took special pleasure in quoting Hamilton that Burr was a “Catiline” or traitor. This only aggravated tensions between Hamilton and Burr.

In hindsight, several Burr confidants blamed Cheetham for goading the two men into a duel. The editor “had done everything in his power to set Burr and Hamilton to fighting,” claimed Charles Biddle.
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Indeed, Cheetham exploited every opportunity to bait the two men. On January 6, 1804, he had jeered openly at Hamilton in print: “Yes, sir, I dare assert that you attributed to Aaron Burr one of the most atrocious and unprincipled of crimes. He has not called upon you....Either he is guilty or he is the most mean and despicable bastard in the universe.”
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Cheetham also prodded Burr, asking him if he was “so degraded as to permit even General Hamilton to slander him with impunity?”
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Now an embattled, lonely figure, Burr was as hypersensitive to attacks on his character as Hamilton. If he could not redeem his personal reputation, then he could not salvage his career. So that February he filed a libel suit against Cheetham, one of thirty-eight that the sleazy editor faced in his brief career. Cheetham mischievously responded that he was merely reiterating allegations that Hamilton had made against Burr: “I repeat it. General Hamilton believes him guilty and has said so a thousand times—and will say so and
prove
him so whenever an opportunity offers.”
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By stoking this animosity, Cheetham was playing a lethal game.

The Federalists had been so debilitated in New York by the Jeffersonians that they could not even field a viable gubernatorial candidate. It therefore became a question of which Republican or independent candidate to support. Sensing the futility of any Federalist candidacy, Rufus King rebuffed Hamilton’s entreaty that he run. In February, Hamilton and other leading Federalists caucused at the City Tavern in Albany to decide on a Republican candidate to back. (Hamilton was in Albany to deliver his summary remarks in the Croswell case.) Disconcerted by what he saw as a diabolical plot to dismember the union, Hamilton combated Burr with special intensity. In notes prepared for his speech, Hamilton said that Burr was an “adroit, able, and daring” politician and skillful enough to combine unhappy Republicans and wavering Federalists. But Burr, he said, yearned to head a new northern confederacy, and “placed at the head of the state of New York no man would be more likely to succeed.”
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Aware of Hamilton’s strenuous efforts to stop him, Burr informed his daughter, Theodosia, that “Hamilton is intriguing for any candidate who can have a chance of success against A[aron] B[urr].”
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A few months later, Burr pretended that he had had no idea of the true opinion that Hamilton entertained of his private character and summoned Hamilton to a duel on that basis. Yet on March 1, 1804, the
American Citizen
reported that Hamilton had criticized Burr for both his public
and
his private character: “General Hamilton did not oppose Mr. Burr because he was a
democrat
...but because HE HAD NO PRINCIPLE, either in morals or in politics. The sum and substance of his language was that no
party
could trust him. He drew an odious, but yet I think a very just picture of the little Colonel.”
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In the end, Hamilton endorsed for governor one of his earliest political foes, John Lansing, Jr., whom he had first tangled with as a fellow New York delegate at the Constitutional Convention. Hamilton thought Lansing would be a weak governor who would erode Republican unity. After Lansing declined the nomination, Republicans rallied around Chief Justice Morgan Lewis, who had married into the Livingston clan. This was a terrible blow to Hamilton, who did not think Lewis could win and feared that Federalists would now defect to Burr. “Burr’s prospect has extremely brightened,” he lamented.
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Indeed, on February 18, a caucus of disaffected Republicans nominated Burr for governor. Just as Hamilton foresaw, prominent Federalists, from John Jay to his own brother-in-law Stephen Van Rensselaer, lined up behind Burr. In disgust, Hamilton told Philip Schuyler that he would not get involved in the election, but he was incapable of inaction. He ended up campaigning for Lewis to the point that one Burr lieutenant wrote, “General Hamilton . . . opposed the election of Colonel Burr with an ardor bordering on fanaticism. The press teemed with libels of the most atrocious character.”
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As groups statewide endorsed Burr—“Burr is the universal, I mean the general, cry,” exclaimed one exuberant observer—Hamilton fell into a despondent state.
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In this mood, he lashed out at any efforts to impugn his character. On February 25, one week after Burr was nominated, Hamilton went to the Albany home of Judge Ebenezer Purdy to confront him with reports that he had revived an old canard: that before the Constitutional Convention Hamilton had secretly plotted with Britain to install a son of George III as an American king in exchange for Canada and other territories. To emphasize the gravity of the visit, Hamilton took along another judge, Nathaniel Pendleton, a Virginia native and later his second in the duel with Burr. With Pendleton taking notes, Purdy refused to disclose the source for his story, admitting only that the man lived in Westchester and had seen the telltale British letter in Hamilton’s office. The source, in fact, was Pierre Van Cortlandt, Jr., who had clerked for Hamilton in the mid-1780s before becoming a Republican politician. More to the point, Van Cortlandt was now the son-in-law of George Clinton.

Hamilton told Purdy that he was determined to trace the slander. Purdy mentioned that Governor Clinton had a copy of the British letter, and Hamilton decided to contact his old bogeyman. That same day, Clinton was nominated by the Republicans as Jefferson’s running mate for vice president. Hamilton demanded of his longtime foe “a frank and candid explanation of so much of the matter as relates to yourself.”
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Clinton said that a General Macomb had shown him a copy of the letter around the time of the Constitutional Convention. Hamilton insisted that Clinton send him the letter, if he retained it in his files, so that he could hunt down its source. Clinton sent a blunt, unrepentant reply, saying that he could not find the letter but precisely recollected its contents: “It recommended a government for the United States similar to that of Great Britain.... The [American] House of Lords was to be composed partly of the British hereditary nobility and partly of such of our own citizens as should have most merit in bringing about the measure.”
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Clinton clearly gave credence to this nonsensical fairy tale, and he no longer felt any need to defer to Hamilton, who had lost his power and could now be bullied. In a guarded response, Hamilton expressed hope that if Clinton found the letter, he would hand it over to him. For fifteen years, Hamilton had tried to run down the sources of the lies told about him. The effort had left him weary and dispirited, but he still could not shed the fantasy that, if only he went after slander with sufficient persistence, he could vanquish his detractors once and for all.

To fathom the full bitterness of Aaron Burr in the spring of 1804, one must dip into the hateful campaign literature spewed forth by his opponents during the gubernatorial race. Few elections in American history have trafficked in such personal defamation. Undeterred by Burr’s libel suit, Cheetham’s
American Citizen
engaged in ever more reckless sallies against him. Cheetham advised readers that his staff had assembled a list of “
upwards of twenty women of ill fame
with whom [Burr] has been connected.” Another list in his possession, he said, cited married ladies who were divorced due to Burr’s seductions as well as “chaste and respectable ladies whom he has attemped to
seduce.
”
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The most infamous Cheetham tale concerned a “nigger ball” that Burr allegedly threw at his Richmond Hill estate to woo free black voters.
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Supervised by his slave Alexis—described by an early Burr biographer as “the black factotum of the establishment”—this party was said to have featured Burr dancing with a voluptuous black woman, whom he then seduced.
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This election coverage set a new low for Cheetham, which is saying something.

While being battered by the press, Burr had to fend off a wave of anonymous broadsides in the streets, his well-known profligacy forming the theme of many of them. Cheetham wrote some of them, including one claiming that the father of a young woman deflowered by Burr had arrived in New York to seek revenge. One by “Sylphid” warned, “Let the disgraceful debauchee who permitted an infamous prostitute to insult and embitter the dying moments of his injured wife—let him look home.”
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Another handbill, signed “A Young German,” accused Burr of looting the estate of a Dutch baker to relieve his own indebtedness of six thousand dollars.
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“An Episcopalian” informed readers that Burr “meditates a violent attack upon the
rights of property.
”
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Some broadsides even got around to dealing with politics. “The Liar, Caught in His Own Toils” reiterated the familiar refrain that Burr had tried to swipe the 1800 election from Jefferson and now planned to dismember the union.
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At his late January meeting with Jefferson, Burr had identified Hamilton as the author of unsigned broadsides against him, but no evidence of this exists. Even in private letters, Hamilton never referred to specific carnal acts committed by Burr; in that sense, he was quite discreet. Yet Burr may have thought that Hamilton secretly contributed to Federalist slander, even though most of the offensive handbills echoed articles in the
American Citizen
and probably originated with Republicans. From his campaign literature, it was clear that Burr, like Hamilton, felt persecuted by slander and powerless to stop it. One broadside said indignantly, “Col. Burr has been loaded with almost every epithet of abuse to be found in the English language. He has been represented as a man totally destitute of political principle or integrity.”
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Burr feigned indifference to the “new and amusing libels” published against him, as if nothing could shake his perfect aplomb.
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Unlike his opponents, he ran a clean, if aggressive, campaign from his John Street headquarters. He fought with his usual zest and charm, and his criticisms of Morgan Lewis fell within the bounds of propriety. Criticizing nepotism among the Livingstons and Clintons, he lent his campaign a populist tinge by styling himself “a plain and unostentatious citizen” who ran for office “unaided by the power of innumerable family connections.”
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To elevate Burr in Federalist eyes, his broadsides likened him to Hamilton. One sheet described him as a first-rate lawyer who stood on a par “with Hamilton in point of sound argument, polished shafts and manly nervous eloquence, impressive and convincing reasoning.”
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Despite the propaganda barrage directed against him, Burr thought the race was winnable, and his followers remained sanguine as the April vote approached. Oliver Wolcott, Jr., considered it “most probable that Colo. Burr will succeed. It is certain that he commands a numerous and intrepid party who are not to be intimidated or subdued.”
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Days before the election, Hamilton sounded mournful about the outcome. “I say nothing on politics,” he confided to his brother-in-law Philip Jeremiah Schuyler, “with the course of which I am too much disgusted to give myself any future concern about them.”
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As usual, Hamilton proved too pessimistic. When the votes were counted in late April, Burr had narrowly won New York City, but he was outvoted so heavily upstate that he lost the race by a one-sided margin of 30,829 to 22,139.