The Burr quarrel of Alexander Hamilton

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In 1801 Hamilton built a country house called the Grange on Manhattan island and helped found a Federalist newspaper, the New York Evening Post, the policies of which reflected his ideas. Through the Post he hailed the purchase of Louisiana in 1803, even though New England Federalists had opposed it. Some of them talked of secession and in 1804 began to negotiate with Burr for his support. Almost all the Federalists but Hamilton favoured Burr’s candidacy for the governorship of New York state. Hamilton urged the election of Burr’s Republican opponent, who won by a close margin, but it is doubtful that Hamilton’s influence decided the outcome. In any event, Hamilton and Burr had long been enemies, and Hamilton had several times thwarted Burr’s ambitions. In June 1804, after the election, Burr demanded satisfaction for remarks Hamilton had allegedly made at a dinner party in April in which he said he held a “despicable opinion” of Burr. Hamilton held an aversion to dueling, but as a man of honour he felt compelled to accept Burr’s challenge. The two antagonists met early in the morning of July 11 on the heights of Weehawken, New Jersey, where Hamilton’s eldest son, Philip, had died in a duel three years before. Burr’s bullet found its mark, and Hamilton fell. Hamilton left his wife and seven children heavily in debt, which friends helped to pay off.

Legacy

Hamilton was a man both of action and of ideas, but all his ideas involved action and were directed toward some specific goal in statecraft. Unlike Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson, he did not have a broad inquisitive mind, nor was he speculative in his thinking in the philosophical sense of seeking intangible truths. He was ambitious, purposeful, a hard worker, and one of America’s administrative geniuses. In foreign policy he was a realist, believing that self-interest should be the nation’s polestar; questions of gratitude, benevolence, and moral principle, he held, were irrelevant.

What renders him fascinating to biographers are the streaks of ambition, jealousy, and impulsiveness that led him into disastrous personal clashes—the rupture with Washington in 1781, which luckily did him no harm; an adulterous affair in 1791, which laid him open to blackmail; the assault on Adams that doomed Federalist prospects in 1800; and perhaps even the duel in which he died. The union of a mind brilliantly tuned to the economic future with the temperament of a Hotspur is rare.

Most of all, Hamilton was one of America’s first great nationalists. He believed in an indivisible nation where the people would give their loyalty not to any state but to the nation. Although a conservative, he did not fear change or experimentation. The conservatism that led him to denounce democracy as hostile to liberty stemmed from his fear that democracy tended to invade the rights of property, which he held sacred. His concern for property was a means to an end. He wished to make private property sacred because upon it he planned to build a strong central government, one capable of suppressing internal disorders and assuring tranquillity. His economic, political, military, and diplomatic schemes were all directed toward making the Union strong. Hamilton’s most enduring monument was the Union, for much of it rested on his ideas.

In 2015 Alexander Hamilton became newly central to national discussion in the United States as a result of the explosive popularity of a critically acclaimed new musical based on his life. Written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who also starred in the title role, Hamilton married hip-hop and Broadway in previously unimaginable ways and lifted Hamilton higher in the pantheon of Founding Fathers while humanizing him in touching and inspiring ways. Hailed as the most significant new American musical in a generation, it swept the 2016 Tony Awards.

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