Free Joseph J. Ellis by Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

fifteen-year period of interaction. Actually, Burr and Hamilton had known each other almost twice that long, from their youthful days as officers in the Continental Army. But Hamilton’s reference to “fifteen years” turned out to be a precise estimate of their history as political antagonists. The hostility began in 1789, when Burr accepted the office of attorney general in New York from Governor George Clinton after campaigning for Hamilton’s candidate, who lost. Burr’s facile shift in his allegiance, the first in what would be several similarly agile switches during his career, captured Hamilton’s attention and produced his first recorded anti-Burr remarks, questioning Burr’s lack of political principle.
    If the first crack appeared in 1789, the real break occurred two years later. In 1791 Burr defeated Philip Schuyler, Hamilton’s wealthy father-in-law,in the race for the United States Senate, when several rival factions within the clannish, even quasi-feudal, politics of New York united to unseat the incumbent, who was generally perceived as a Hamilton supporter. It was all downhill from there. Burr used his perch in the Senate to oppose Hamilton’s fiscal program, then to decide a disputed (and probably rigged) gubernatorial election in New York against Hamilton’s candidate. Hamilton, in turn, opposed Burr’s candidacy for the vice presidency in 1792 and two years later blocked his nomination as American minister to France. The most dramatic clash came in 1800, when Burr ran alongside Jefferson in the presidential election—his reward for delivering the bulk of New York’s electoral votes, which made Jefferson’s victory possible. The election was thrown into the House of Representatives because of the quirk in the electoral college—subsequently corrected by the Twelfth Amendment—which gave Burr and Jefferson the same number of votes without specifying which candidate headed the ticket. Hamilton lobbied his Federalist colleagues in the House to support Jefferson over Burr for the presidency, a decision that probably had a decisive effect on the eventual outcome. Finally, in 1804, in the campaign for governor of New York, which actually produced the remarks Burr cited in his challenge, Hamilton opposed Burr’s candidacy for an office he was probably not going to win anyway. 34
    This brief review of the Burr-Hamilton rivalry provides a helpful sense of context, but to fully appreciate Burr’s eventual charges, and Hamilton’s private acknowledgment that they were justified, one needs to know, specifically, what Hamilton said about Burr. Throughout this same period, Hamilton made a host of political enemies about whom he had extremely critical things to say (and vice versa). Indeed, Jefferson, rather than Burr, was Hamilton’s chief political enemy, followed closely behind by Adams. This made logical as well as political sense, since Jefferson was the titular leader of the Republican opposition and Adams was the leader of the moderate wing of the Federalists, a group that found Hamilton’s policies sometimes excessive and his flamboyant style always offensive. But within this Hamiltonian rogues’ gallery, Burr was always the chief rogue, and what Hamilton said about him was truly distinctive.
    Whereas Hamilton’s central charge against Jefferson was that he was a utopian visionary with a misguided set of political principles, hiscore criticism of Burr was that he was wholly devoid of any principles at all. Burr was “unprincipaled, both as a public and private man,” Hamilton claimed, “a man whose only political principle is, to mount at all events to the highest political honours of the Nation, and as much further as circumstances will carry him.” Sporadic attacks on Burr’s character along the same lines—“unprincipaled in private life, desperate in his fortune,” “despotic in his ordinary demeanor,” “beyond redemption”—are littered throughout Hamilton’s correspondence