The Alternity Duel: Burr v. Hamilton v. History
"O Burr, O Burr, what has thou done?
Thou has shooted dead great Hamilton.
You hid behind a bunch of thistle,
And shooted him dead with a great hoss pistol."
-- caption on a wax tableau in New York City, July 1804Only once since Bosworth Field has the direction of a great nation depended on direct personal combat between two of its leaders. Two hundred years ago Sunday, America's future was determined by two pistol shots, fired by Alexander Hamilton, former Secretary of the Treasury and Inspector General of the U.S. Army, and Aaron Burr, the sitting Vice-President of the United States. The illegal -- and, to some modern historians perhaps not as capable of attaining the mindset of the times as they might be, insane -- duel between them echoes down to the present, even if many moderns prefer to hear the echoes as the impersonal rumbles of Industrialization or Westward Expansion rather than the sound of gunshots over the Hudson. When the modern reader rejects, say, the notion of a duel settling anything (much less the notion of a duel between, say, Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney), that too is partially the outcome of the "interview at Weehawken."
"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, . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: July 9, 2004
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