Alexander Hamilton: A Life

457 Pages·2003·3.28 MB·English

by  Willard Sterne Randall

Alexander Hamilton: A Life
Willard Sterne Randall
For Nan and Lucy for their patience, love, and understanding
Colonel Hamilton awaits signal to attack Redoubt No. 10 at Yorktown. By Alonzo
Chappell (Hulton/Archive by Getty Images)
Table of Contents
Dedication
ONE “The Wish of My Heart”
TWO “A Short Time to Live”
THREE “Twice Guilty of Adultery”
FOUR “I Wish There Was a War”
FIVE “A Wandering Guest in Worlds Unknown”
SIX “Americans Are Entitled to Freedom”
SEVEN “Men Go to Those Who Pay Them”
EIGHT “We Shall Beat Them Soundly”
NINE “A System of Infidelity”
TEN “Treason of the Blackest Dye”
ELEVEN “Then We Must Part”
TWELVE “The Art of Fleecing Neighbors”
THIRTEEN “Acquisition of Power and Profit”
FOURTEEN “What May This Lead To?”
FIFTEEN “The Compass of National Authority”
SIXTEEN “A Host unto Himself”
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise for Alexander Hamilton: A Life
Other Works By Willard Sterne Randall
Copyright
About the Publisher
ONE
“The Wish of My Heart”
A
lexander Hamilton realized instantly that he would die. Before he even heard
the shot, the oversize lead ball had torn into his right side just above the hip,
crashed through a rib, sliced through his liver, shattering a vertebra. Pitching
forward on his face, Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury of the United
States, the author of the Federalist Papers, George Washington’s strong right
hand, the financial genius who had created Wall Street, and as inspector general
of the U.S. Army, launched the U.S. Navy, fell to the ground, clutching his
dueling pistol. His friend and second in the duel, Nathaniel Pendleton, rolled him
over, cupped him in his arms, and held him, half sitting, under a cedar tree, away
from the glaring July sunlight.
“Dr. Hosack!” Pendleton yelled. “Dr. Hosack!” Waiting with the oarsman
below by the Hudson shore, Dr. David Hosack rushed up the narrow path toward
the dueling place atop a small granite outcropping of cliff below the waking
village of Weehawken, New Jersey, that steaming Thursday morning of July 11,
1804. He brushed past Aaron Burr, vice president of the United States, shielded
by his second’s umbrella to conceal his face as he hastened toward a row-boat
that would hurry him across to New York City.
By the time Dr. Hosack, breathless, reached him, Hamilton had slumped to
the ground and was losing consciousness. But he managed to gasp, “This is a
mortal wound, Doctor.” Once, Hamilton had wanted to study medicine. He knew
anatomy. He knew the path of his pain, that his legs no longer moved. He
thought he would die on the spot. So did Dr. Hosack. When he pulled up the
bloody shirt, probed for a pulse, he could not hear Hamilton breathing. Hamilton
had, Dr. Hosack wrote a few weeks later, “become to all appearance lifeless. His
pulses were not to be felt. His respiration was entirely suspended. Laying my
hand on his heart, I considered him irrecoverably gone.”
Hosack and Pendleton carried Hamilton out of the woods and down the
steep path. The boatman helped wrestle him onto the barge, placing the ornate
case and pistol beside him. The doctor worked over him, rubbing spirits of
hartshorne over his face, lips, forehead, neck, breast, arms. The cool massage
seemed to have a miraculous effect. About fifty yards from shore, Hamilton
sighed, the fresh breeze on the open water helping to revive him. His eyes half
open, “to our great joy,” recounted Hosack, “he at length spoke: ‘My vision is
indistinct,’“ he said. “His pulse became more perceptible, his respiration more
regular; his sight returned.” But when the doctor tried to press Hamilton’s side,
to examine the wound, the pain was too much for Hamilton.
For a while, as the oars groaned in the tholes and slapped the water,
Hamilton tried to talk. He spied the pistol, lent to him by his friend John Church.
It was the same hair-triggered pistol Hamilton’s oldest son had used three years
before when he had been killed in a duel. The sight jolted him. “Take care of that
pistol!” Hamilton cried. “It is undischarged, and still cocked. It may go off and
do harm.” He did not realize he had fired the gun into the air when Burr’s bullet
had struck him. Now he tried to turn his head toward Pendleton, sitting behind
him in the stern. “Pendleton knows I did not intend to fire at him.” His second
nodded. “Yes, I have already told Dr. Hosack that.” Then Hamilton fell silent. He
remained calm, his eyes closed. Just before the boat bumped into the dock,
Hamilton asked his friends to summon his wife, Elizabeth, at home with their
seven children at The Grange at Manhattan’s northern tip. She had no idea of the
duel. “Let Mrs. Hamilton be immediately sent for. Let the event be gradually
broken to her, but give her hopes.”
Hamilton’s old friend William Bayard was looking down at him as the boat
docked. A servant had told him that Hamilton had rowed away from Bayard’s
dock at dawn with two other men. Now Bayard strained to see as the boat
neared: he could make out only two figures. Looking down into the boat, he
could see why. Bayard had known Hamilton some thirty years since Hamilton, a
young artillery captain, had fortified the Bayard family home and turned it into
Bunker Hill Fort at the outbreak of the Revolution. “I called [Bayard] to have a
cot prepared,” Dr. Hosack recorded. “He, at the same moment, saw his poor
friend lying in the bottom of the boat. He threw up his eyes and burst into a flood
of tears.” Hamilton alone appeared tranquil and composed. “We then conveyed
him as tenderly as possible up to the house.”
ALEXANDER HAMILTON lasted thirty-one hours after Aaron Burr shot him. When
they finally got him into a bed on the second floor of Bayard’s house on
Chambers Street, he was nearly comatose. The doctor undressed him and
administered a large dose of a strong anodyne, a painkiller. During the first day,
Hosack gave Hamilton more than an ounce of an opium and cider potion, called
laudanum, washing it down with watered wine. But, Hosack noted, “his
sufferings during the whole day were almost intolerable.” The ball had lodged
inside his second lumbar disk, which had shattered, paralyzing his legs. His
stomach was slowly filling with blood from severed blood vessels in his liver.
Hosack “had not the shadow of a hope of his recovery,” but he called in surgeons
from French men-of-war anchored in the harbor who “had much experience in
gunshot wounds.” They agreed that Hamilton’s condition was hopeless.1
During the night of July 11, the sedated Hamilton “had some imperfect
sleep.” He knew he had little time left to live: he asked Bayard to summon the
Reverend Benjamin Moore, Episcopal bishop of New York and president of
Columbia College, where Hamilton had once been a scholarship boy. In recent
months, Hamilton had prayed Episcopal Matins and Vespers with his family at
home. He had not attended any church since the Revolution. When the bishop
arrived, he refused Hamilton Holy Communion after he learned that Hamilton
not only had never been baptized an Episcopalian, but had been wounded in a
duel, something Moore considered a mortal sin. Instead, the bishop gave
Hamilton a lecture on the meaning of communion and left him to take some
“time for serious reflection.” Hamilton, clearheaded and determined now, asked
the Bayards to send for the Reverend John M. Mason, pastor of the Presbyterian
church and son of the man who had once sponsored him for a place at a
Presbyterian academy when he had arrived in New York, an orphan from the
West Indies. Hamilton as a boy had undergone a strong Presbyterian conversion
experience—although, as a bastard, he had not been allowed to receive
Presbyterian communion. But this Reverend Mason informed Hamilton that he
could only receive communion in church, at the altar, during a regular Sunday
ceremony. Hamilton pleaded for Bayard to go once more to Bishop Moore and
try to persuade him.
It was noontime on the twelfth, more than twenty-four hours after the duel,
before Elizabeth Hamilton arrived with their seven children. No one had told her
the truth. Hamilton, she believed, was suffering only from stomach cramps: he’d
had digestive disorders recently. Now she learned everything. She became
frantic. Hamilton had been semiconscious, his eyes closed. He opened them, saw
his children. His own grief at seeing his daughter Angelica, half mad since her
brother’s death in a duel over his father’s politics, swept over him. He closed his
eyes again, only saying to his wife, “Remember, Eliza, you are a Christian.” It
was as if he had banished her. She left with the children, sobbing hysterically.
When Bishop Moore called again, he lectured Hamilton once more on his
own “delicate” situation. He wanted to help “a fellow mortal in distress,” but he
must “unequivocally condemn” dueling. Hamilton agreed with him “with sorrow
and contrition,” Moore reported. If Hamilton survived, would he vow never to
duel again and use his influence to oppose the “barbaric custom”? It was a
promise Hamilton found easy to make. Would he live “in love and charity with
all men”? He answered yes, he bore “no ill will” to Aaron Burr. “I forgive all
that happened.” He received communion “with great devotion,” Moore recorded,
and “his heart afterwards appeared to be perfectly at rest.”
But Hamilton was now writhing in agony. He could not hear the commotion
downstairs when a note arrived from Aaron Burr, asking about his condition and
worrying about a rumor that Hamilton had never intended to fire at him. When
Bishop Moore returned the morning of the twelfth, he stayed at Hamilton’s
bedside—across the bed from another grief-stricken visitor, Hamilton’s sister-in-
law, Angelica Schuyler Church. She did not speak, nor did Hamilton. Over the
years, they had been lovers. For nearly thirty years, Angelica Church had loved
Hamilton more than her own dour, money-grubbing husband. Church, an expert
duelist, had fled England after believing he had killed a man, changed his
identity, grown rich selling supplies during the Revolution, and then returned to
take a seat in Parliament. He often had left Angelica alone in their Manhattan
mansion near Hamilton’s town house while Elizabeth Schuyler stayed in the
country with the children. John Church’s pistols had finally ended the affair.
Hamilton and Angelica could say nothing now. There was nothing more to say.2
On July 12, 1804, shortly after noon, with his mistress and his bishop at his
bedside, Alexander Hamilton died “without a groan.” He was forty-nine.
TWO
“A Short Time to Live”
I
n February 1768, on the Danish-ruled Caribbean island of St. Croix, yellow
fever came, as it did every year, to the narrow streets of bright-roofed houses in
Christiansted, the colony’s capital. It came from miasmic patches of undrained
land, from recesses in the lush green sugarcane-coated hills, from pools and
puddles where the larvae of mosquitoes bloomed in the splendid sunlight.
Nobody understood yet that the dreaded deadly fevers came on their almost
invisible wings, not, as they thought, on the hundreds of ships that plied the
Caribbean, bringing slaves in chains from Africa to work and die in the brutal
canebrakes. That winter, more than a century before anyone knew what caused it
or what to do to prevent it, yellow fever invaded the small two-story rented
house at No. 34 Company’s Lane, where Rachel Hamilton lived with her two
teenage sons, James, fifteen, and Alexander, thirteen. There, Rachel supported
her small family by running a store, selling provisions to nearby sugar
plantations.
At first, for about a week, Rachel, who had little money, tried to recover
with only the aid of a nurse midwife. But when her fever raged unabated, Rachel
finally summoned a physician, one Dr. Heering, on February 17. Following the
accepted practice of the time, Dr. Heering bled Rachel, cutting into her with a
double-bladed razor that punched holes deep in her delicate white arm,
producing a dark red current that quickly filled the doctor’s pan before he
tightened a tourniquet to staunch it. Dr. Heering then made Rachel drink his
favorite fever nostrum.
But this did no good. The next morning, he came back. This time, he
administered an emetic. He gave both Rachel and her son Alexander, who had
now also contracted the illness, the favored medicine. Burning with a high fever,
Rachel became dehydrated as she continued to vomit and perspire in the hot,
close bedchamber. She grew weaker with each visit of the doctor. Her attempt to
eat—the doctor ordered a chicken from her landlord and had the nurse-midwife
reduce it to broth—helped her to rally briefly. The nurse also gave frail, pale
Alexander his first nourishment in days, draining some of the fire from his