Hi, I'm the History Guy. I have a degree in history and I love history,
and if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
Alexander Hamilton, the fiery founding father who came to America as an immigrant and an orphan and
wound up being one of the most powerful people in the nation, has received a lot of attention,
lately owing to the 2015 musical based on the biography by Ron Chernow. And that is
well deserved, Alexander Hamilton was brilliant and a complex and interesting personality who
played a vital role in the founding of the nation. But he is almost as well known for
the circumstances of his death, shot to death in a duel with Aaron Burr, the Vice President
of the United States, as anything he did in life. And as intriguing as the Hamilton-Burr duel was,
it is even more interesting if you look at it in context of Alexander Hamilton's history with the
practice of dueling. Over his lifetime, Alexander Hamilton was a party to no less than 10 ‘Affairs
of Honor’. Seven as a primary and three others as someone else's second. And it's even more
interesting when you look at the duels that were engaged by members of his family, and the odd
string of coincidences that tied together the bizarre history of Alexander Hamilton's duels.
The story begins with the infamous Hamilton-Reynolds affair. In November of 1792, a
man named James Reynolds, was accused of financial crimes that involved public funds. When he was
arrested he tried to negotiate a deal by making an astounding claim. The Secretary of the Treasury,
Alexander Hamilton he said, was involved in the scheme. This information was passed to three US
senators who went to confront Hamilton about the charges, one of those being the Virginia Senator,
James Monroe, a future president of the United States. But when they talked to Hamilton the
story took even another twist, Hamilton claimed that his financial dealings with Reynolds had
nothing to do with the financial scheme, but instead were blackmail payments that Hamilton
was making because he had had an illicit affair with Reynolds wife, and Hamilton had letters to
prove his story. As the affair would have been a scandal, but would not have been illegal,
the Senators agreed to drop the matter, and all agreed that they would keep the details secret,
and the entire thing seemed to blow over...that is until five years later.
In 1792, a man named James Thompson Callender, a scandal-mongering journalist and pamphleteer,
published a pamphlet that included details on Hamilton's affair with Mrs. Reynolds, and included
some of the letters that had been part of the 1792 investigation. Embarrassed, Hamilton was forced to
release, publicly, details of the affair in order to free himself from charges that he participated
in the financial scandal. Hamilton was incensed and he was convinced that the person who had
released the letters was James Monroe. Monroe denied the charge and the two came very close to
calling each other ‘Liars’, a claim that could very easily lead to one or the other demanding
satisfaction in a gentleman's duel. The situation got so bad that in one face-to-face meeting,
Alexander Hamilton brought his brother-in-law, English businessman James Barker Church with him,
just in case it turned into a duel then and there and he had to have a second with him.
But the reason the two ended up not fighting a duel had to do with a third party. James Monroe
had invited a mutual acquaintance who they had both met while fighting the Revolution,
to be the intermediary as they argued back and forth, and that intermediary thought that they
were both being childish, and knew that a duel could end their careers. And he was the one that
was able to tamp down the rhetoric and prevent the two from escalating to the point where they had to
meet on the ‘Field of Honor’, something that could have cost either of them their lives and almost
certainly would have cost both of them their political careers. And that person, who prevented
Alexander Hamilton from having a career-ending duel with James Monroe, was Aaron Burr.
Burr and Hamilton had a history, at one time they had been friends but that really changed in
1791. At the time, the US Senate seat from New York was selected not by a vote of the people,
but by vote of the New York legislature. And Aaron Burr had managed to scheme through the legislature
to unseat the incumbent, Revolutionary War General Philip Schuyler. Philip Schuyler was the father of
Elizabeth Schuyler, who was married to Alexander Hamilton, and Hamilton was convinced Burr was
a rogue from the moment that he out-schemed his father-in-law for that Senate seat. But Alexander
Hamilton was not the first of Philip Skyler's sons-in-laws to fight a duel with Aaron Burr.
John Barker Church, the English businessman whom Hamilton had brought with him in the meeting with
Monroe, in case they had to fight a duel then and there, was married to another of Skyler's
daughters, and he hated Burr just as much as Hamilton did. And in 1799, he accused Burr of
taking bribes, that led to a challenge, which led to a duel at the dueling grounds in Weehawken,
New Jersey. Burr fired first, he missed. Church fired second and he missed, but he came very
close, his bullet tore Burr's cloak. Just a little bit over and it would have prevented
the duel that killed Alexander Hamilton. Their honor satisfied, they did not fire a second shot.
A poignant part of Act two of the musical Hamilton is the death of Hamilton's son Philip who was
killed, of course, in a duel. That duel which was fought in 1801, was fought between Hamilton's son
Philip, and a New York City lawyer who had made disparaging comments about Alexander Hamilton.
And Philip was shot to death in the duel, which was fought at the dueling grounds in Weehawken,
New Jersey, the same place where Philip's Uncle had fought the duel with Aaron Burr.
And was fought with dueling pistols that Philip Hamilton had borrowed from his Uncle,
John Barker Church, the same pistols that Church had used in his duel with Aaron Burr.
In 1804, Aaron Burr, who was then Vice-President of the United States, decided to run for Governor
of New York, and he lost that election largely because of opposition by Alexander Hamilton.
When some disparaging comments about Burr, made by Hamilton, were published in the paper,
it led to a challenge and a duel. That famous duel was fought at the dueling grounds in Weehawken,
New Jersey, the same grounds where Hamilton's brother in law had dueled the same man,
Aaron Burr, and where Hamilton's son Philip Hamilton had been killed. And
the pistols used in the duel were the set that belonged to John Barker Church,
the same set of pistols that had killed Hamilton's son in 1801, and nearly killed Aaron Burr in 1799.
Hamilton shot high, Burr struck Hamilton in the chest, a fatal and famous blow.
Dueling was not uncommon amongst the gentlemen class of early America, but fatalities were.
Hamilton's participation in so many challenges, even though he only fought the one duel,
shows how excessive his sense of Honor was, but of course the same could be said of Aaron Burr.
It is however a supreme irony that Aaron Burr, who had kept Alexander Hamilton from fighting an
ill-advised duel with James Monroe, later became the hand of Hamilton's death. The duel effectively
ended Burr's political career, eventually he was accused of treason in a supposed conspiracy
with Spain, and although he was acquitted he never again served in public office. To this
day he has a reputation, some say unfairly, of being a traitor to the nation. There's
still disagreement over exactly what happened in the duel between Hamilton and Burr because
no one who was present could say definitively who had fired first. Some claim that Hamilton
had missed on purpose, and in fact he left a note behind saying that he planned to do that,
although that note might have been a ruse. But others claim that Burr fired first,
and it was Burr’s shot that caused Hamilton to miss, and that entire question took a bizarre turn
in 1976. You see this infamous set of pistols that was owned by John Barker Church, and that was used
in all three of those duels involving Hamilton and Burr, were purchased in London in 1797,
and they stayed in the Church family until 1930, when they were sold to Chase Manhattan
Bank. Which was ironically, a descendent of the Manhattan company, which had been founded by,
Aaron Burr. And Chase Manhattan Bank still owns the pistols and sometimes puts them on display.
But in 1976 Chase Manhattan Bank allowed the Smithsonian Institution to inspect the pistols
and there they found a shocking twist. The pistols had been designed...to cheat. One of
the pistols had a special mechanism built in so that if you push the trigger far forward,
it would create a pistol with a hair-trigger, which might allow you to fire a hair faster than
someone you were fighting in a duel. Something that would have been incredibly dishonorable. And
as those pistols belong to Hamilton's family, it's likely that Hamilton knew about that modification
and Burr did not. And so some claim that the reason that Alexander Hamilton fired high in his
duel with Aaron Burr, was because he had chosen to cheat, using a pistol with a hair trigger,
and that caused him to fire early as he was lowering his pistol. And of course that's an
unanswerable question, and maybe that is fitting with the most enigmatic of America's founding
fathers. It is certainly another twist, in the bizarre history of Alexander Hamilton's duels.
In the History Guy and I hope you enjoyed this edition of my series, 5 minutes of history, short
snippets of forgotten history 5-10 minutes long. And if you did enjoy, then please go ahead and
click that thumbs up button which is there on your left. If you have any questions or comments, or
would like to make a suggestion for another topic for the History Guy please feel free to write
those in the comment section and I will be happy to respond. And if you'd like five more minutes
of forgotten history, all you need to do is click the subscribe button which is there on your right.