10 Paces and Shoot: The Hamilton Duel
Death By Pistol
The start of the end for Hamilton began in the 1800 presidential election. Hamilton, ever the Machiavellian acolyte, worked to defeat Jefferson and his own party’s nominee, John Adams. Jefferson did in fact beat Adams but tied with Aaron Burr with 73 electoral votes each. Hamilton viewed Jefferson as the lesser of two evils, and threw his support behind him. After six rounds of voting the House of Representatives elected Jefferson as president.
Events again repeated themselves in the New York gubernatorial election of 1804. Hamilton backed Morgan Lewis, and once again Aaron Burr lost the race.
The series of public defeats, at the hands of his rival, pushed Burr to the brink and their fierce private feud quickly spilled out into the public.
According to Chernow: Burr was such a dissipated, libidinous character that Hamilton had a rich field to choose from in assailing his personal reputation. Aaron Burr had been openly accused of every conceivable sin: deflowering virgins, breaking up marriages through adultery, forcing women into prostitution, accepting bribes, fornicating with slaves, and looting the estates of legal clients.
Conversations Hamilton had in private about Burr were published, without his knowledge, in newspapers around the country. In the past Hamilton had used the prospect of a duel to silence his critics, this time it was Burr who had been wronged, and he was the one seeking redress. In a rare turn of events, he had put Hamilton on the defense.
Chernow writes: Duels were elaborate forms of conflict resolution, which is why duelists did not automatically try to kill their opponents. The mere threat of gunplay concentrated the minds of antagonists, forcing them and their seconds into extensive negotiations that often ended with apologies instead of bullets. In the unlikely event that a duel occurred, the antagonists frequently tried to only wound each other, clipping an arm or a leg. The point was not to exhibit deadly marksmanship; it was to demonstrate courage by submitting to the duel.
Everything in Alexander Hamilton’s life pointed to the fact that he would not dodge a duel or negotiate a compromise. He was incapable of turning the other cheek. With his checkered West Indian background, he had predicated his career on fiercely defending his honor.
The two men met on the shores of the Hudson river in Weehawken, New Jersey at dawn on July 11, 1804. At the turn, Hamilton shot first and deliberately put his shot above Burr’s head. Burr, with all the time in the world to decide his next actions, took deliberate aim and put his shot directly into Hamilton.
According to Willard Randall in Alexander Hamilton: Alexander 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. 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.
Alexander Hamilton lasted thirty-one hours after Aaron Burr shot him. The pain and suffering during that time was beyond imagination. The ball had lodged inside his second lumbar disk, which had shattered, paralyzing his legs. His stomach slowly filled with blood from severed blood vessels in his liver.
His wife, who did not know about the duel, visited him with their seven children in the bed he lay dying. Hysterical from the news and seeing his fatal condition, she had to be sedated and led away. He died with his sister-in-law, Angelica, at his bedside.
Hamilton’s ancestry never gave him emotional stability or financial security. From the moment of his birth, he was surrounded by conflict--affection and abandonment, beauty and brutality, refinement and savagery. It is not too much of a stretch to proclaim Hamilton a genius at the science of politics. He was a horrible politician, but as a nation builder and strategic thinker, he was without an equal.
