FATAL FRIENDSHIP PB - Softcover

Rogow, Arnold

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809016214 ISBN 13: 9780809016211

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 1999

Synopsis

A dramatic reinterpretation of the duel that shocked America.

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.

About this title

About the Author

Arnold A. Rogow has taught at Stanford University, the University of Iowa, and the City University of New York. He is the author of many books, including James Forrestal: A Study of Personality, Politics, and Policy. He lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A Fatal Friendship

By Arnold A. Rogow

Hill & Wang

Copyright © 1999 Arnold A. Rogow
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780809016211

Chapter One

THE DUEL

    Early on the morning of Wednesday, July 11, 1804, as the sun rosein the sky over Long Island, promising a day that would be brightand warm after the haze burned off, two men holding pistols confrontedeach other on a narrow ledge overlooking the Hudson Riverat Weehawken, New Jersey. They were about to fight a duel, a notuncommon event in those days, but this was no ordinary duel andthese were not ordinary men. Aaron Burr, who by prearrangementarrived first, had been a senator from New York, and was Vice Presidentof the United States in the administration of Thomas Jefferson.Alexander Hamilton, who faced Burr across the clearing, had been theprincipal author of The Federalist Papers and in 1789 was appointedthe 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 rightside, inflicting a mortal wound. Thirty-six hours later he was dead, andnot long after reports of his death reached the public, Burr, indictedfor murder in both New York and New Jersey, was a fugitive fromjustice. Neither man had yet reached the age of fifty, and while Burrwas to live another thirty-two years, his political career had also suffereda wound from which it would never recover.

    The immediate cause of the duel were remarks hostile to Burr whichHamilton was said to have made the preceding February at a gatheringin Albany, New York. But as the following chapters seek to demonstrate,they had begun their travels to Weehawken far from Albany invery different parts of the world, and long before they were to meetfor the last time on the dueling ground.

one

BASTARDY AND LEGITIMACY

    Alexander Hamilton's beginnings were as inauspicious as AaronBurr's were promising. The dissimilarity between them could nothave been put more succinctly, if somewhat crudely in respect to Hamilton,than by John Adams, who referred to Hamilton as "a bastardbrat of a Scotch pedlar," whereas, in the case of Burr, he had "neverknown in any country, the prejudice in favor of birth, parentage, anddescent more conspicuous." So far as we know, Burr never alludedto Hamilton's illegitimacy, but others, as Adams's remark testifies, werenot so kind, Jefferson on one occasion venting his anger at Hamiltonby declaring, "It's monstrous that this country should be ruled by aforeign bastard!" For Hamilton, however, who was too shamed byhis illegitimacy to reveal it, and who must have been painfully awareof the extreme contrast between their backgrounds, Burr's being borninto a family of distinguished clergy and college presidents may havebeen the first of many reminders that certain differences between them,despite accomplishments on Hamilton's part that far surpassed thoseof 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 speculationthan fact. The date of his birth on the island of Nevis in the BritishWest Indies is reported both as January 11, 1755, and as January 11,1757, some of his many biographers alleging one date and some theother. There is near-unanimous agreement on the identity of his father,James Hamilton, but still some uncertainty, and significant disagreementregarding the circumstances and events of his childhood andadolescence. More is known about Burr's origins--although, somewhatparadoxically, Burr became less, and Hamilton more, revealingof 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 birthorder of his brother James, a disagreement that owes a great deal toconfused or careless statements by his son and biographer, JohnChurch 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, Hamiltonis described as Rachel's only surviving child. These contradictoryassertions have led some biographers to conclude that Hamilton'sbrother James was a half brother, the issue, before or after Hamilton'sbirth, of an unrecorded marriage of James Hamilton, Sr., who died in1799 at the age of eighty-one. An inevitable by-product of these uncertaintiesis that certain biographers assert that Hamilton was threeto five years older than his brother James, while others insist thatHamilton was the younger brother.

    Since there is no birth certificate or other reliable documentationestablishing Hamilton's birth date as 1757, his own family and manybiographers have regarded as authoritative Hamilton's indirect indicationthat 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, hewas "about sixteen" when he arrived in New York toward the finalmonths of 1772, and "nineteen" when he qualified for the degree ofbachelor of arts at the "College of New York" and in March 1776became 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 hismother's will in February 1768, Hamilton's age is given as thirteen,which, if correct, would indicate that he was born in 1755; his brotherJames, according to probate, was two years older, or, in other words,born in 1753. Other evidence, admittedly circumstantial, is a publishedpoem of October 17, 1772, attributed to Hamilton by J. C. Hamiltonand said to have been written by him "when 18 years old." At thattime, Hamilton was less than three months short of his eighteenthbirthday. Certain verses of this poem, to which we shall return, couldsuggest that the writer certainly was no younger than almost eighteen,although given Hamilton's precocity in a variety of areas, the possibilitythat he was sexually experienced at sixteen or earlier cannot beruled out.

    A further circumstance lending support to the 1755 date is a legaldocument of 1766 from the island of St. Croix which lists Hamiltonas a witness. This document, which was first discovered by the historianGeorge Bancroft, suggests that Hamilton was nine years old whenhe 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 thosedays, as Henry Cabot Lodge observed, serving as a legal witness ateither age was not impossible, but we may reasonably assume that thelikelihood of such an appearance increased as one grew closer to adulthood.

    Hamilton may well have believed that he was born in 1757, but hemay also have had compelling reasons to favor that date, as opposedto the earlier one. For, in addition to the understandable pride he feltin having achieved so much when he was very young--in the letter tohis 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 whichwas believed to be fact by his close friend and associate Timothy Pickering,that his father was not James Hamilton but Thomas Stevens ofSt. 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 resemblancebetween the two that he at first took them for brothers, a conclusionperhaps helped by the fact that the elder Stevens hadbefriended Hamilton after his mother's death. Some rumors allegingHamilton's true paternity named Rachel's first and only husband, JohnMichael Levine, whose name is variously spelled Lavine, Lavien, Lowein,and Levin, by whom she was divorced in 1759 but from whomshe had separated earlier, while other rumors hinted that his true fatherwas another Hamilton, the Governor of the Islands, William LeslieHamilton.

    The most fascinating as well as the least credible rumor was thatHamilton's biological father was none other than George Washington.Those who were tempted to believe this rumor, one of whom wasreported to have been Gertrude Atherton, who devoted a biographicalnovel to Hamilton, could cite in support of it Washington's presumedpresence in Barbados when Rachel was there, and his marked affectionfor and partiality toward Hamilton. They also argued that Hamiltonwas too distinguished to have been the son of a father who, failing ineverything he attempted, never amounted to much.

    The attribution to Washington of Hamilton's paternity is reminiscentof myths alleging that emperors and conquering heroes like the EgyptianPharaohs, Alexander the Great, and some of the Caesars weredescended from the gods. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans,if Hamilton had lived among them and was venerated, probably wouldhave had no trouble believing that his father, if not godlike, had qualitiesfar superior to those of ordinary mortals. Unfortunately, Washingtonwas not in Barbados or anywhere else in the West Indies ineither 1754 or 1756. He did spend approximately three months in Barbadosduring the winter of 1751, when he was nineteen years old, andthere contracted smallpox. Washington, furthermore, was childless, althoughhis 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 Hamiltonwas sterile, but was he Hamilton's father? The assumption that he was,although it was widely accepted as fact, is almost entirely based onstatements of Hamilton and his family that may or may not reflect thetruth. While he and his descendants made much of his descent fromthe distinguished House of Hamilton based in Ayrshire, Scotland, hisimmediate family did not reveal that James Hamilton was never marriedto his mother, Rachel, much less the dates when they began tolive together and when they separated. According to Hamilton's son,J. C. Hamilton, who mentions his grandfather James only once, hisfather was "the offspring of a second marriage," Rachel having divorcedher first husband, "a Dane, named Lavine."

    Hamilton's grandson Allan McLean Hamilton, writing with Pickeringand Lodge in mind, goes to greater length than his uncle toestablish his grandfather's descent from the Hamiltons of Ayrshire,who in turn could trace their ancestry to fourteenth-century forebearsand the dukes, earls, viscounts, and barons who followed them. In hisaccount, Rachel "when a girl of barely sixteen was forced into marriagewith a rich Danish Jew, one John Michael Levine [or Lawein], whotreated her cruelly," with whom she had one son, Peter. Leaving himin 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, givingas the reason they were unmarried that since Levine was granted thedivorce on grounds of abandonment, he was able to marry again,whereas Rachel, the defendant, was not. But such was their devotionto each other, writes their great-grandson, that they lived together untilRachel's death in 1768.

    While the statements of Hamilton's grandson are more dependablethan those of his son, many of them, at best, derive from family legendsor reflect what Hamilton wanted them to believe and what perhapsthey did believe. Whatever they believed, the facts as opposed to mythsare few. The exact date of James Hamilton's arrival in the West Indiesfrom Scotland, a crucial detail in establishing Hamilton's paternity andthe year of his birth, is uncertain; as biographer Robert Hendricksonobserves, "no one knows exactly where or when Hamilton's mother,Rachel, and his father, James Hamilton, met, or when they beganliving together, or when they parted. It is little more than traditionthat 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 1756to live with James, which, if true, raises the possibility that, whateverthe date of his emigration to the islands, James may not have beenHamilton's father, assuming he was born in 1755. The first and onlyreference to Rachel and James as a couple was occasioned by a baptismon the Dutch island of St. Eustatius in October 1758, where theyare referred to as husband and wife.

    Hamilton and his family had more reason to favor the 1757 date forhis birth than the earlier one of 1755, whereas his brother, if some ofhis biographers are correct in stating that Hamilton was older, wouldhave had less reason to be concerned about the dates of his father'sarrival from Scotland and his own birth. But the probate of Rachel'swill, as already noted, refers to her son, James, as two years older thanHamilton, which, if true, and if the other James was his biologicalfather, lends some credence to the belief held by a few biographersthat the elder James Hamilton had, like Rachel, been married beforeand had fathered a son. In that case, Alexander and his sibling Jameswere half brothers only. Unfortunately, Hamilton's brother or halfbrother James, who apparently died in 1786, left no letters or otherrecord of his existence, and almost nothing is known about the circumstancesof 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 dissolvedbecause of a technicality involving Rachel's divorce. Perhaps he toldhis family as well, but there is no mention of this or of James's andRachel's separation in his son's or grandson's biography. There also isno mention of a history of marital turmoil and separation on hismother's side and, if certain reports can be trusted, even worse happeningsthat occurred during Rachel's short life. Rachel herself wasprobably born in Nevis in 1729, and was eleven or so when her parents,John Fawcett, a physician of Huguenot extraction, and hermother, Mary, Fawcett's second wife, separated. Five years after hermarriage to Levine in 1745, by which time she had given birth toher son Peter, Rachel was charged with adultery and "whoring witheveryone." As a consequence, she spent an unknown amount of timein jail. For reasons not clear, Levine did not sue for divorce untilFebruary 1759, the divorce petition specifying that she was the motherof two illegitimate children, Alexander and James, that she had "twicebeen guilty of adultery," and that she had abandoned her husband,Peter's father. As if this were not enough, Rachel's connectionsthrough her father's first marriage included two bankruptcies and onecase of mental illness ending in suicide. What role, if any, these unhappyevents played in James Hamilton's desertion of Rachel and hertwo sons, which probably occurred in 1766 or earlier, is not established,but they could hardly have made a positive contribution to therelationship between James and Rachel.

    In addition to emphasizing his Scottish origins, the family mademuch of Hamilton's closeness to his father and brother, and his affectionfor his mother. But no one in the family or in Hamilton's circleof friends, with the possible exception of Edward Stevens, ever metJames Hamilton, Sr., or could have known what he or Rachel lookedlike. Nevertheless, A. M. Hamilton and other biographers have had nohesitation in writing that, in Hamilton's grandson's words, "he undoubtedlypresented the physical appearance of his Scotch fatherrather than his French mother." Observations, already mentioned,that Hamilton and Stevens could have been taken for brothers can beneither confirmed nor denied by reference to surviving portraits ofStevens and his father, for there are none.

    Evidence that Hamilton had much of a relationship with either hisfather or his brother is far from convincing. In a letter to his wife,Elizabeth, whom he usually called Betsey, probably written shortlybefore their marriage in 1780, Hamilton informed her that he had"pressed" his father to come to America "after the peace," and that hewould write him again to "present him with his black-eyed daughter,and tell him how much of her attention deserves his affection and willmake the blessing of his gray hairs." Despite this urging, which isconfirmed in the only surviving letter to Hamilton from his father,dated June 12, 1793, James never left the West Indies to meet hisdaughter-in-law and his grandchildren, perhaps for reasons, as hewrote his son, of ill health and the "war which has lately broke outbetween France and England." He refers to another letter to Hamiltonof 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, therecould not have been many. In that letter, Hamilton asks: "What hasbecome of our dear father? It is an age since I have heard from himor of him, though I have written him several letters." He sent moneyto his father and brother in 1796 and 1799, according to his grandson,but the amount is in dispute. A. M. Hamilton reported it as severalthousand dollars; Hendrickson as "more than a thousand dollars."

    On the other hand, when Hamilton was drawing up his will in July1795, he made some provision for the debts and obligations of himselfand certain associates but specifically excluded his father from suchconsideration, although he knew that James Sr. was "now in indigence."He had "hesitated," he wrote his friend and associate RobertTroup, "whether I would not also secure a preference to the drafts ofmy father--but these as far as I am concerned being a merely voluntaryengagement, I doubted the justice of the measure and I have donenothing. I regret it lest they should return upon him and increase hisdistress." These remarks, whatever the true state of Hamilton's feelingsabout his father, reflect, at the very least, a marked ambivalencein 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 hispublished version, deleted portions of it. In this letter of June 12, 1785,previously referred to, Hamilton agreed to honor his brother's draftupon him of fifty pounds "wherever it shall appear," but he confessedhimself unable to do more until some future date, at which time "Ipromise myself to be able to invite you to a more comfortable settlementin this country." in the meantime, he advised his brother in thesentences that followed, which were omitted in the J. A. Hamiltonversion: "Allow me only to give you one caution, which is, to avoid ifpossible, getting into debt. Are you married or single? If the latter, itis my wish, for many reasons, that you may continue in that state."J. A. Hamilton also deleted a concluding paragraph in which Hamiltonwrote his brother: "I do not advise your coming to this country atpresent, for the war has also put things out of order here, and peoplein your business find a subsistence difficult enough. My object will be,by and by, to get you settled on a farm." Assuming that his brotherdied in 1786, Hamilton could not have had much opportunity to bringhim to America, whether or not he was determined to achieve his"object"; in any event, he apparently never saw his father again afterhis 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 messagesto him. Hamilton also had no contact with Rachel's son Peter Levine,his half brother, who lived with his father before coming to SouthCarolina in 1764.

[CONTINUES ...]

Continues...

Excerpted from A Fatal Friendshipby Arnold A. Rogow Copyright © 1999 by Arnold A. Rogow. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809016214
• ISBN 13: 9780809016211
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 372