The Duel: “Once more Adieu”

Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804)
From The Essential Hamilton: Letters & Other Writings

Interesting Links

“The Burr Conspiracy” (American Experience, PBS)

The only surviving letter from Philip Hamilton to Alexander Hamilton (Founders Online, National Archives)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Examine Well Your Heart,” Alexander Hamilton
• “The Spirit of party has overpowerd the Spirit of Patriotism,” Abigail Adams
• “The President in Peril,” James Monroe

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The Essential Hamilton: Letters & Other Writings
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List price: $14.95
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Alexander Hamilton: Writings
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The Monument to Alexander Hamilton at Weehawken, 1811–ca. 1813, watercolor and gouache on paper by Russian artist Pavel Petrovich Svinin (1787–1839). Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of New York. Inset: The base tablet for the monument, which reads “On this Spot fell, July 11th 1804, Major General Alexander Hamilton. As an expression of their affectionate Regard to his Memory and of their deep regret for his Loss The St. Andrews Society of the State of New York have erected This Monument.” New-York Historical Society.

By the 1820s the site had been vandalized and the entire monument and fence had been removed or destroyed. The tablet was recovered in the years following by the owner of the property, James Gore King, who preserved the remnant at his estate. (King was the son of New York Senator Rufus King, a friend and supporter of Hamilton and one of the signers of the Constitution.) The tablet was later donated to the New-York Historical Society, where it can still be seen today.

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On November 23, 1801, Alexander Hamilton’s son Philip was mortally wounded in a duel with George Eacker, a Republican lawyer who had vociferously criticized the elder Hamilton’s policies at a Fourth of July speech earlier that year. Philip and a friend, Stephen Price, had heckled Eacker while at the theater, and their argument was carried out onto the street, ultimately resulting in two duels between Eacker and the young men on consecutive days. The older man and Price emerged unharmed from their duel, while Philip died from Eacker's shot. “My loss is indeed great,” Hamilton wrote to the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a friend of the family, although a frequent critic of Hamilton’s politics. “The highest as well as the eldest hope of my family has been taken from me. You estimated him rightly—He was truly a fine youth.”

Less than three years after Philip’s death, Alexander Hamilton found himself near the spot in New Jersey where his son had been killed when he took part in the most famous duel in American history. The following summary explaining the events leading up to the duel is from The Essential Hamilton, edited by Joanne B. Freeman, author of Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic.

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Hamilton’s political excesses and personal recklessness came to a head when he became entangled in an affair of honor with Aaron Burr. The two had known each other for decades; meeting during the war, mingling with the same friends, attending the same parties, even acting as co-counsel in court. As Hamilton had admitted in 1800, they liked each other personally. But politically, they clashed time and again.

In 1804, their ongoing rivalry reached its fatal culmination. Burr’s political career was foundering. Denied the possibility of a second term as vice-president by Jefferson, he had run for Governor of New York and lost. Eager to redeem his name and prove himself a leader worth following, he took notice when someone put a newspaper clipping in his hand reporting that at a dinner, Hamilton had claimed that Burr was unfit to hold the reins of government, and then said something “still more despicable” that the writer refused to put on paper. As Burr well knew, risking one’s life for one’s reputation in an affair of honor was considered a powerful display of leadership.

With this in mind, Burr seized at the word “despicable” and demanded an explanation, sending Hamilton the opening letter of a formal affair of honor on June 18. Hamilton’s response was an unfortunate blend of hedging and bravado; he debated the meaning of the word “despicable” and then declared himself responsible for anything he had said. Outraged at Hamilton’s tone and grammar lesson, Burr accused him of not behaving like a gentleman, an insult that Hamilton couldn’t ignore. For ten days, the two men negotiated through their seconds, hoping to find a way out of the tangle, until Burr—desperate to redeem his name—did what many grievously insulted gentlemen did during affairs of honor: he demanded an impossible apology to force his opponent to fight. When Burr asked Hamilton to apologize for every insult offered during their fifteen-year rivalry, Hamilton refused, and their duel was on.

Once the duel was agreed to, Hamilton struggled to put his affairs in order in case of his death. He wrote a financial statement admitting that he was deeply in debt. He wrote not one but two farewell letters to Elizabeth, on July 4 and 10, 1804. And remarkably, the night before the duel, he explained why he felt compelled to fight.

The next day, Hamilton rose at dawn and was rowed across the Hudson River to a dueling ground in Weehawken, New Jersey. Burr’s shot pierced Hamilton’s liver and lodged in his spine. Hamilton died the next day, surrounded by family and friends.

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For our Story of the Week selection, we present both letters Hamilton wrote to his wife, as well as the statement he left among his papers explaining his decision to fight in the duel.

Notes: The moderate and judicious friend referred to in the statement is Rufus King, whom Hamilton consulted about the propriety of Burr’s demand for an explanation. Ann Mitchell, mentioned in the second letter to Hamilton’s wife, was his cousin; she supported him during his youth in the West Indies.

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This letter, my very dear Eliza, will not be delivered to you, unless I shall first have terminated my earthly career. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Account of a Hurricane

Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804)
From The Essential Hamilton: Letters & Other Writings

Interesting Links

“The West Indian Island That Shaped Alexander Hamilton” (Ann Mah, The New York Times)

“Hamilton Takes Command” (Willard Sterne Randall, Smithsonian Magazine)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Examine Well Your Heart,” Alexander Hamilton
• “Storm and Shipwreck,” James Fenimore Cooper
• “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake,” William James

Buy the book
The Essential Hamilton: Letters & Other Writings
Paperback • 447 pages
List price: $14.95
Save 35%, free shipping
Web store price: $9.95

Also available
Alexander Hamilton: Writings
Clothbound • 1,108 pages
List price: $42.50
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“View in Antigua: Effects produced upon the House at Clark's Hill by the Hurricane in 1772,” watercolor and body color over pen and ink on laid paper by English artist Thomas Hearne (1744–1817).

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Alexander Hamilton first came to public attention at the age of seventeen. His father had abandoned the family when Alexander was ten, and his mother died four years later. He was effectively an orphan, working as a clerk for a mercantile firm on the island of Saint Croix at the end of August 1772, when a major hurricane, one of the strongest of the century, roared through the Caribbean. Nearly every ship at harbor was swept aground, some as far as 100 yards inland, and giant boulders and rockslides came crashing down from the surrounding hills. An account written later in the year details the damage to each of the islands. In St. Croix, “every house almost at Christianstadt [the island’s capital city], and all the plantations and negro-houses levelled. Only three houses left standing at Frederickstadt, and numbers of people killed.” After striking the islands, the storm then continued its path of destruction along the Florida panhandle, the Alabama coast, and New Orleans. Some meteorologists have categorized this catastrophe, with its extraordinary storm surge, as a tsunamic hurricane.

A week later Hugh Knox, a Presbyterian minister who had immigrated to Saint Croix earlier that year, delivered a sermon to the island’s frazzled population. After the service Alexander, profoundly impressed by Knox’s oration, went home and wrote a letter to the father he had not seen for nearly seven years. “Hamilton did not know it, but he had just written his way out of poverty,” remarks biographer Ron Chernow. The young man apparently showed the letter to Knox, who doubled as a journalist and occasional editor for The Royal Danish American Gazette, a newspaper established two years earlier and distributed widely throughout the West Indies. On October 3, Hamilton’s letter was published in the paper with a headnote:

The following letter was written the week after the late Hurricane, by a Youth of this Island, to his Father; the copy of it fell by accident into the hands of a gentleman [Knox], who, being pleased with it himself, shewed it to others to whom it gave equal satisfaction, and who all agreed that it might not prove unentertaining to the Publick. The Author’s modesty in long refusing to submit it to Publick view, is the reason of its making its appearance so late as it now does.

The letter caused a sensation and, led by Knox, local businessmen established a fund to send Hamilton to the North American mainland to attend school. Within weeks the teenager was sailing to Boston—and four years later he was standing at George Washington’s side as a lieutenant-colonel in the Continental Army.

Note: The general referred to in the last paragraph of Hamilton’s letter is Ulrich Wilhelm Roepstorff, the Danish governor general of Saint Croix.

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I take up my pen just to give you an imperfect account of one of the most dreadful Hurricanes that memory or any records whatever can trace, which happened here on the 31st ultimo at night. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

“Examine Well Your Heart”

Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804)
From The Essential Hamilton: Letters & Other Writings

Interesting Links

“Why Elizabeth Hamilton Is Deserving of a Musical of Her Own” (Kat Long, Smithsonian)

Video: Joanne Freeman answers your questions about Alexander Hamilton

Audio: “That Would Be Enough”: duet from Hamilton

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Remember the Ladies,” Abigail Adams & John Adams
• “The Sentiments of a Lady in New-Jersey,” Anonymous
• “The Urgent Necessity,” George Washington & John Adams

Buy the book
The Essential Hamilton: Letters & Other Writings
Paperback • 447 pages
List price: $14.95
Save 35%, free shipping
Web store price: $9.95

Also available
Alexander Hamilton: Writings
Clothbound • 1,108 pages
List price: $42.50
Save 34%, free shipping
Web store price: $28.00

Phillipa Soo as Elizabeth Schuyler and Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton in Hamilton: The Musical. (Joan Marcus / The Public Theater)

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ELIZA:
I knew you’d fight until the war was won
         (HAMILTON: The war’s not done)
But you deserve a chance to meet your son
Look around, look around at how lucky we are
To be alive right now

HAMILTON:
Will you relish being a poor man’s wife
Unable to provide for your life?

         (From “That Would Be Enough,” by Lin-Manuel Miranda, from Hamilton: The Musical)

Alexander Hamilton and Elizabeth Schuyler first met in the fall of 1777, at a dinner in Albany at the home of her father, General Philip Schuyler, a commanding officer of the Revolutionary Army. They would not see each other again until a little more than two years later, in early February 1780, when Elizabeth visited relatives in Morristown, New Jersey. Her father had given her introductory letters to George Washington, whose troops were stationed nearby for the winter. Serving on Washington’s staff, Alexander inevitably encountered Elizabeth and, as a fellow aide said at the time, “Hamilton is a gone man.”

Later that month Alexander wrote to one of Elizabeth’s sisters—almost certainly Margarita, the youngest of the three Schuyler daughters in their early 20s. “I have already confessed the influence your sister has gained over me; yet notwithstanding this, I have some things of a very serious and heinous nature to lay to her charge,” Hamilton wrote in a letter laying out the “mischiefs” Elizabeth was guilty of:

She is most unmercifully handsome and so perverse that she has none of those pretty affectations which are the prerogatives of beauty. Her good sense is destitute of that happy mixture of vanity and ostentation which would make it conspicuous to the whole tribe of fools and foplings as well as to men of understanding. . . . In short she is so strange a creature that she possesses all the beauties virtues and graces of her sex without any of those amiable defects, which from their general prevalence are esteemed by connoisseurs necessary shades in the character of a fine woman. . . . She has had the address to overset all the wise resolutions I had been framing for more than four years past, and from a rational sort of being and a professed contemner of Cupid has in a trice metamorphosed me into the veriest inamorato you perhaps ever saw.

By the beginning of March, the couple were engaged to be married.

In his best-selling biography of Hamilton, Ron Chernow describes how the colonel “sometimes mooned about in a romantic haze, very much the lovesick swain” and during the year of their engagement sent to Elizabeth “the most candid letters of his life”—nearly two dozen of which have survived. Even though he was marrying into a rich family, it’s clear that “Hamilton was too proud to sponge off the Schuylers,” and one recurring theme of the letters is insecurity over his relative poverty. Yet the couple would prove to be well-matched; Chernow laments the fact that “she remains invisible in most biographies of her husband,” perhaps because she “was certainly the most self-effacing ‘founding mother.’” In her introduction to The Essential Hamilton, Joanne B. Freeman describes how Elizabeth became “a calming presence and a pillar of strength in Hamilton’s all too harried life. His letters to her show the highs and lows of their relationship, from their flirtatious courtship to their close companionship of later years.”

When Lin-Manuel Miranda was writing his now-famous musical, he was especially inspired by the letters to Elizabeth, particularly one sent in August 1780, which we present as our Story of the Week selection.

It kind of captures everything I love about Hamilton. He’s kind of arrogant, he’s kind of insecure, he’s unbelievably romantic, it’s funny, it’s sad, and it’s basically him saying to Eliza, “Don’t marry me if you think you can’t be happy broke—because we might end up broke.”

Miranda adapted a line from this letter (“Do you soberly relish the pleasure of being a poor mans wife?”) as a line of the song “That Would Be Enough.” Last summer, the week before the show’s final performance featuring the original cast, the actor read the letter from the Library of America edition of Hamilton’s writings to a crowd of hundreds of fans gathered on the street outside the Times Square theater. The video of Miranda’s reading is presented below, followed by the text of the letter itself in the usual Story of the Week formats.

Note: Lieutenant Colonel Richard Kidder Meade, mentioned on the first page of Hamilton’s letter, was an aide-de-camp to Washington. In 1780 he married Mary Fitzhugh Grymes Randolph, a widow. Portia was the daughter of Cato the Younger and the wife of Brutus, the leader of the conspirators who assassinated Julius Caesar. The postscript mentions a letter from John Mathews, a South Carolina delegate to the Continental Congress.

Following a brief introduction, Miranda’s reading of the letter begins at the 1:25 mark.


If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

On the Absurdity of a Bill of Rights

Noah Webster (1758–1843)
From The Debate on the Constitution

Interesting Links

Debating the Bill of Rights (Jack Lynch, Colonial Williamsburg)

Noah Webster House (West Hartford, CT)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Washington Resigns His Commission,” George Washington & Thomas Mifflin
• “The Urgent Necessity,” George Washington & John Adams
• “Remember the Ladies,” Abigail Adams & John Adams

Buy the book
The Debate on the Constitution
Federalist and Anti-Federalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification 1787–1788
Two-volume boxed set
2,389 pages

“Noah Webster, The Schoolmaster of the Republic,” 1886 print by Root & Tinker. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. The image of Webster at the center is an engraving based on an oil portrait, c. 1823, by American painter Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872).

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Noah Webster’s name will endure—as it has already endured for two centuries—for his Compendious Dictionary of the English Language published in 1806, as well as for the larger American Dictionary of the English Language that appeared in 1828. It was a lifelong project begun much earlier. In 1783, as a twenty-five-year-old schoolteacher in Goshen, New York, he began publishing his Grammatical Institute of the English Language, the first part of which became The American Spelling Book. (Part Two was a guide to grammar, and Part Three contained a reader.) Commonly referred to as the “Blue-Backed Speller” or the “Old Blue Back” for its distinctive covers, the spelling book sold tens of millions of copies during the subsequent century as it became the required text for (and the bane of) generations of American students.

Less familiar to many readers is the pivotal role Webster played in the founding of the American republic and the adoption of its new constitution—and his advocacy was very much related to the success of his publications. The difficulty of securing copyrights from thirteen separate state governments for each subsequent edition of his spelling book convinced him of the need for an effective national government, and he became an advocate for the Federalist cause. Until the new Congress passed the Copyright Act of 1790, he was forced to spend much of his time during the 1780s traveling from state to state to obtain the copyrights for his various works.

Webster intially advocated for a stronger national government in a 1785 pamphlet titled Sketches of American Policy. He later boasted that his tract was the first proposal for a new constitution—a claim the historian Joseph Ellis calls “debatable [since] several new schemes for a more effective government came into circulation about this time.” But Webster’s influence was extensive, in part because of his ability to distribute the pamphlet as he traveled among all thirteen states. In fact, in an article written for a Connecticut newspaper in 1786, he coined the terms “federal” and “antifederal” to describe the opposing factions.

When a new constitution was proposed in 1787, he used various pseudonyms to publish articles supporting ratification. Under the name “Giles Hickory,” Webster published four papers in American Magazine, a short-lived periodical he himself had established that year. His articles attacked common principles of Revolutionary thought that might constitute limitations on the will of the people—a stance that contradicted some of the views he had expressed earlier in Sketches. One of the main objections to the new constitution was that it did not include a bill of rights, an argument Webster dismisses in his first Hickory letter by responding that such documents are only needed as protection against tyrants and would become unnecessary in a government elected by the people. Webster’s arguments would be echoed by Alexander Hamilton in May 1788:

It has been several times truly remarked that bills of rights are in their origin, stipulations between kings and their subjects, abridgments of prerogative in favor of privilege, reservations of rights not surrendered to the prince. . . . . Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing, and as they retain every thing, they have no need of particular reservations. . . . [Bills of rights] would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? [From Federalist No. 84]

In the end, of course, the opposing factions reached a compromise. When the Massachusetts legislature hesitated to ratify the Constitution, John Hancock proposed ratifying it with the proviso that various amendments be adopted afterward—an idea followed by four other states. The ten amendments we know as the Bill of Rights were finally adopted at the end of 1791.

Notes: In the second paragraph Webster refers to the Magna Charta and the view, first asserted by seventeenth-century royalists to undermine the claim by the House of Commons to being immemorial, that there was no record of a Commons until the 49th year of the reign of Henry III (1265). The statute of the 2d of William and Mary, mentioned at the top of page 670, is the Habeas Corpus Act (1679), passed to prevent imprisonment without proper legal authority.

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One of the principal objections to the new Federal Constitution is, that it contains no Bill of Rights. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

“The Urgent Necessity”

George Washington (1732–1799) & John Adams (1735–1826)
From John Adams: Writings from the New Nation 1784–1826 and George Washington: Writings

Interesting Links

“Always Ready, Even 230 Years Later” (Erika Cosme, The Mariner’s Museum and Park, Virginia)

“The War Between Adams and Hamilton” (Arthur Schlesinger Jr., New Republic)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Washington Resigns His Commission,” George Washington & Thomas Mifflin
• “Destruction of the Tea in Boston,” John Adams

Buy the books
John Adams: Writings from the New Nation 1784–1826
Over 200 letters, diary excerpts, political essays, and presidential messages

George Washington: Writings
Over 440 letters, orders, addresses, and other writings

Christopher Jackson (center, as George Washington) and Lin-Manuel Miranda (as Alexander Hamilton) in the Broadway musical Hamilton. Photograph posted on Twitter by David Korins, the show’s set designer.

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In a profile of George Washington written fourteen years after his death, Thomas Jefferson recalled, “His temper was naturally irritable and high toned but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendency over it. If ever however it broke its bonds he was most tremendous in his wrath.” During his own term as president John Adams found himself on the receiving end of that wrath when he brought Washington out of retirement to lead a fledgling U.S. Army against the French.

As tensions mounted between the two countries during the 1790s (climaxing in what became known as the Quasi-War), fears of an invasion by French forces increased. In early July 1798 Washington made it known privately that, if Alexander Hamilton were his deputy, he might be willing to come out of retirement to defend the country against France. Adams subsequently appointed Washington as commander-in-chief of a new army created by Congress to resist the threat—but he did so without consulting the retired general, who learned of his confirmation from accounts in the press. The Secretary of War, James McHenry, subsequently delivered the commission to Washington, who in the end decided to accept the appointment.

As Ron Chernow writes, “Adams had asked McHenry to sound out Washington on his preferred officers without realizing that Washington would regard his advice as binding. . . . Here lay the dilemma in a nutshell: neither Hamilton nor Washington would serve without Hamilton being the main deputy, while Adams found this intolerable.” Washington thus indicated that his chief officers should be, in order, Hamilton, Charles Pinckney, and Henry Knox—even though the latter two outranked Hamilton, who was merely a colonel during the Revolution. In addition, Adams simply detested Hamilton. As he later wrote, “His origin was infamous; his place of birth and education were foreign countries; his fortune was poverty itself; the profligacy of his life—his fornications, adulteries, and his incests—were propagated far and wide.” Adams exercised his prerogative as President and recommended to the Senate that the order of the ranking be reversed.

That decision whipped up Washington’s indignation, and he sent a harshly worded letter to Adams in late September. In the face of his predecessor’s anger, Adams was left with little choice but to acquiesce. And so Washington, with Hamilton as deputy, traveled to Philadelphia in November to direct planning of the new army. By December 19 he was back in Mount Vernon, and the easing of rancor between France and the United States the following spring allowed him to return semi-permanently to retirement. Most of the command duties were carried out by “General Hamilton,” who almost singlehandedly created the new army—which only increased the belief by some civil leaders that he meant to spearhead some “mischievous plot” against Adams.

For this week’s selection, we present three pieces of correspondence that detail this story: Adams’s short missive informing Washington of his appointment, followed by Washington’s gracious acceptance and, two months later, his angry follow-up letter upon learning his assignment of officers had been countermanded.

There was a sequel to this kerfuffle: After Washington’s death on December 18, 1799, Adams refused to elevate Hamilton to commander of the Army and instead left the position unfilled. Still saddled with the responsibilities—yet still without the honor—Hamilton saw what was coming and wrote to an ally that it was “certain that my present station in the army cannot very long continue.” In May 1800, to Adams’s relief and with his encouragement, Congress disbanded the army that Hamilton had built over the previous two years—an act that unleashed Hamilton’s fury toward the President and cemented a mutual antipathy that carried over into the next election and beyond.

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If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.