Always the crisis! Yet this crisis which brought Hamilton in July to the duelling-ground at Weehawken was not the same as that which Pickering and Griswold had so lately tried to create. Pickering’s disunion scheme came to a natural end on Burr’s defeat in April. The legislatures of the three Federalist States had met and done nothing; all chance of immediate action was lost, and all parties, including even Pickering and Griswold, had fallen back on their faith in the “crisis”; but the difference of opinion between Hamilton and the New Englanders was still well defined. Hamilton thought that disunion, from a conservative standpoint, was a mistake; nearly all the New Englanders, on the contrary, looked to ultimate disunion as a conservative necessity. The last letter which Hamilton wrote, a few hours before he left his house for the duelling-ground, was a short and earnest warning against disunion, addressed to Theodore Sedgwick, one of the sternest Massachusetts Federalists of Pickering’s class.[123]
“Dismemberment of our empire,” said Hamilton, “will be a clear sacrifice of great positive advantages, without any counterbalancing good; administering no relief to our real disease, which is democracy,—the poison of which, by a subdivision, will only be the more concentred in each part, and consequently the more virulent.”
The New Englanders thought this argument unsound, as it certainly was; for a dissolution of the American Union would have struck a blow more nearly fatal to democracy throughout the world than any other “crisis” that man could have compassed. Yet the argument showed that had Hamilton survived, he would probably have separated from his New England allies, and at last, like his friends Rufus King and Oliver Wolcott, would have accepted the American world as it was.
The tragedy that actually happened was a fitter ending to this dark chapter than any tamer close could have been. Early on the morning of July 11, in the brilliant sunlight of a hot summer, the two men were rowed to the duelling-ground across the river, under the rocky heights of Weehawken, and were placed by their seconds face to face. Had Hamilton acted with the energy of conviction, he would have met Burr in his own spirit; but throughout this affair Hamilton showed want of will. He allowed himself to be drawn into a duel, but instead of killing Burr he invited Burr to kill him. In the paper Hamilton left for his justification, he declared the intention to throw away his first fire. He did so. Burr’s bullet passed through Hamilton’s body. The next day he was dead.
As the news spread, it carried a wave of emotion over New England, and roused everywhere sensations strangely mixed. In New York the Clinton interest, guided by Cheetham, seized the moment to destroy Burr’s influence forever. Cheetham affected to think the duel a murder, procured Burr’s indictment, and drove him from the State. Charges were invented to support this theory, and were even accepted as history. In the South and West, on the other hand, the duel was considered as a simple “affair of honor,” in which Burr appeared to better advantage than his opponent. In New England a wail of despair arose. Even the clergy, though shocked that Hamilton should have offered the evil example of duelling, felt that they had lost their champion and sword of defence. “In those crises of our public affairs which seemed likely to happen,” Hamilton’s genius in council and in the field had been their main reliance; he was to be their Washington, with more than Washington’s genius,—their Bonaparte, with Washington’s virtues. The whole body of Federalists, who had paid little regard to Hamilton’s wishes in life, went into mourning for his death, and held funeral services such as had been granted to no man of New England birth. Orators, ministers, and newspapers exhausted themselves in execration of Burr. During the whole summer and autumn, undisturbed by a breath of discord or danger, except such as their own fears created, they bewailed their loss as the most fatal blow yet given to the hopes of society.
The death of Hamilton cleared for a time the murky atmosphere of New York and New England politics. Pickering and Griswold, Tracy and Plumer, and their associates retired into the background. Burr disappeared from New York, and left a field for De Witt Clinton to sacrifice in his turn the public good to private ambition. The bloody feuds of Burr’s time never again recurred. The death of Hamilton and the Vice-President’s flight, with their accessories of summer-morning sunlight on rocky and wooded heights, tranquil river, and distant city, and behind all, their dark background of moral gloom, double treason, and political despair, still stand as the most dramatic moment in the early politics of the Union.
CHAPTER IX.
President Jefferson was told from day to day of the communications that passed between Burr and the Connecticut Federalists. Of all members of the Government, the most active politician was Gideon Granger, the Postmaster-General, whose “intimacy with some of those in the secret,” as Jefferson afterward testified, gave him “opportunities of searching into their proceedings.”[124] Every day during this period Granger made a confidential report to the President; and at the President’s request Granger warned De Witt Clinton of Burr’s intrigues with the Federalists. What passed in Rufus King’s library and in Burr’s private room seemed known at once by Granger, and was reported within a few days to Jefferson, who received the news with his innate optimism, warranted by experience.[125]
“It will be found in this, as in all other similar cases, that crooked schemes will end by overwhelming their authors and coadjutors in disgrace, and that he alone who walks strict and upright, and who in matters of opinion will be contented that others should be as free as himself, and acquiesce when his opinion is fairly overruled, will attain his object in the end.”
If Jefferson and his Virginia friends in 1798, when their own opinions were overruled, had expressed the idea of acquiescence as strongly, the nation might perhaps have been saved the necessity of proving later the truth of his words; but Jefferson could afford to treat with contempt the coalition between Burr and Pickering, because, as he wisely said, it had no cohesive force to hold it together, no common principle on which to rest. When Burr’s defeat in April and Hamilton’s death in July dissolved the unnatural connection, Jefferson let the secret die; he wanted no scandal. He stood a little in awe of the extreme Federalists, whom he called incurables, and was unwilling to exasperate them without an object.