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

1790s, Burr seemed disposed to tunnel beneath the warring camps, then pop up on the side promising him the bigger tribute. If Washington was the epitome of the virtuous leader who subordinated personal interest to the public good, Burr was a kind of anti-Washington, who manipulated the public interest for his own inscrutable purposes. 38
    At least so it appeared to Hamilton. As if to demonstrate that his questionable behavior in the presidential crisis of 1801 was no aberration, Burr repeated the pattern in 1804 during the campaign for governorof New York. Although still serving as vice president under Jefferson, Burr realized that the Republicans intended to drop him from the ticket when Jefferson ran for his second term. And so when Federalist leaders from New York approached him as a prospective candidate for the gubernatorial race, he indicated a willingness to switch party affiliations and run in his home state as a Federalist. This was the decision that caused Hamilton to repeat his earlier characterizations of Burr as the unprincipled American Catiline, which in turn generated the newspaper reports containing the offensive word “despicable.”
    But that was only half the story. For the Federalist leaders in New England were interested in recruiting Burr as part of a larger scheme that aimed at nothing less than the dismemberment of the American republic. (This was really what Henry Adams was referring to by the phrase “the most dramatic moment in the early politics of the Union.”) Their plan envisioned the secession of New England in the wake of Jefferson’s reelection and the simultaneous capture of New York, which would then join the secessionist movement to create a Federalist-controlled confederacy of northern states. Burr, true to form, refused to make any promises to deliver New York to the secessionists, but he also would not repudiate the conspiracy. 39
    Hamilton was aware of the Federalist plot, which was no half-baked scheme hatched by marginal figures, involving as it did several Federalist senators from New England and Timothy Pickering, the former secretary of state. “I will here express but one sentiment,” Hamilton warned his Federalist colleagues, “which is, the Dismemberment of our Empire will be a clear sacrifice … without any counterballancing good.” When apprised that the leading New England Federalists were waiting to hear that their old chief was committed to the secessionist plot, Hamilton made clear his opposition: “Tell them from ME, at MY request, for God’s sake, to cease these conversations and threatenings about a separation of the Union. It must hang together as long as it can be made to.” The last letter that Hamilton ever wrote, composed the night before the duel, was devoted to squelching the still-lingering Federalist fantasies of a separate northeastern confederation, a dream that refused to die until the moribund effort at the Hartford Convention in 1815 exposed it as a fiasco. 40
    What Hamilton seemed to see in Burr, then, was a man very much like himself in several respects: ambitious, energetic, possessing aninstinctive strategic antenna and a willingness to take political risks. Hamilton understood the potency of Burr’s influence because he felt those same personal qualities throbbing away inside himself. Both men also shared a keen sense of the highly fluid and still-fragile character of the recently launched American republic. The hyperbolic tone of Hamilton’s anti-Burr comments derived not so much from intense personal dislike
per se
as from his intense fear that the precarious condition of the infant nation rendered it so vulnerable to Burr’s considerable talents. Burr embodied Hamilton’s daring and energy run amok in a political culture still groping for its stable shape.
    The kernel of truth in Hamilton’s distinction between personal and political criticism of Burr resides here. In a sense it was an accurate statement of Hamilton’s