As episodic rivals for financial influence and political power Anton Burr and Alexander Hamilton seemed fated for some fatal finale. Hamilton firmly believed in the right to bear arms, but as a check on the federal government's political and military muscle, not so people could go around shooting each other (though his own son was killed in a duel in 1801). Yet that is exactly what happened when Hamilton was challenged to a duel by Burr in the culmination of a long-standing feud between Hamilton's Federalists and Burr's Democratic-Republicans. The feud was stoked earlier in 1804, when Burr blamed Hamilton for his defeat in his campaign for governor of New York and focused on an unelaborated "despicable opinion" that Hamilton supposedly expressed. If Hamilton didn't deserve the blame, he would have welcomed it, having previously denounced Burr as, among other things, "a profligate, a voluptuary in the extreme.
Burr hoped a duel would revive his career. Hamilton was honor-bound to accept the challenge, which he did begrudgingly. To skirt New York's ban on dueling, on July 11, 1804, they rowed (in separate boats) to Weehawken (dueling was illegal in New Jersey as well but was prosecuted less aggressively.) Hamilton fired first, the historian Joseph J. Ellis concluded, "but he aimed to miss Burr, sending his ball into the tree above and behind Burr's location. Burr returned the fire and, intentionally or not, mortally wounded Hamilton. He was indicted for murder in both New York and New Jersey but never convicted.
Hamilton died the next day in Manhattan. The duel also proved fatal to Burr's political career. Burr would never again hold elective office. He became a pariah who lived in relative obscurity. Pressed for cash in 1833, when he was seventy-seven, he married Eliza Jumel, a former prostitute whose Morris-Jumel Mansion in Washington Heights was where George Washington maintained his headquarters after fleeing the British downtown in the fall of 1776. The mansion is also Manhattan's oldest surviving house. Jumel's property would later be intersected by the Croton Aqueduct, built to convey the fresh water from Westchester that Burr's Manhattan Company was never able to supply sufficiently from its wells downtown.
SAM ROBERTS BOOK TEXT 101 OBJECTS
