John Sedgwick’s War of Two – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Learns our Founding Fathers left a Complicated Legacy

Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr are forever linked by their duel (a contraction of duo bellum, Latin for "war of two"), when the sitting Vice President killed a founding father and member of the first cabinet. This book brings them to life as more than just our third Vice President and the guy on the ten dollar bill, which, if pressed, is about all that I could have supplied about them.  Instead, in addition to being interesting characters in their own rights, they serve as foils for describing essential tensions about what kind of country the United States was going to become during and shortly after its birth and maybe to this day.  I read this book as homework before seeing the musical Hamilton, which I have now done and reported on here.  The lives of these two men are linked in this book as kind of mirror images and a chapter on Hamilton alternates with a chapter on Burr, frequently covering the same time period and often the same events from the perspective of the other as a way of articulating their duel not just as an event that linked them, but as the fated culmination of their parallel but very different lives. 

The author wrote a popular book.  He is a magazine reporter turned historical fiction writer and the book relies on the work of others and thus is not an original work of historical non-fiction, but he bookends this tale with a letter from Hamilton, written on the eve of his death, to his own great, great, great grandfather Theodore Sedgwick.  The letter contains language that is cryptic and foreign sounding, and the author wisely hints at it in the beginning, producing the full text only after telling his tale.  Even then, though, the letter is tough to make sense of, at least to me – not just because it alludes to things obliquely, but because what it is articulating sounds to my ear, and it is weird to say this: un-American.

Hamilton, by far the more interesting character of the two, was born in the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean.  Five small islands here produced, in the form of sugar, more wealth than all 13 colonies.  Sr. Croix, where Hamilton settled when he was 10, was as big a city as New York, and just as wealthy.  Sugar cane, growing on the islands, and its resulting sugar, had just been discovered by Europe, and the Europeans were figuring out that it was good for more than just putting in tea and were going mad for it, and willing to pay a premium to have it to bake into things they were discovering as quickly as they were devouring – cakes and cookies and stuff that at least I thought of as existing since the beginning of time.

Alexander Hamilton, who was the second son of a woman who left but could not divorce a cruel husband, was a bastard.  Further, the author alleges that Hamilton was not the son of James Alexander, the man she took up with, but a Mr. Stevens, who apparently cuckolded Mr. Alexander.  One of the consistent but not highlighted themes of this book is how badly women were treated during colonial times and how little freedom they had – but also that many of them used sexual relations to try to better their situations – often with disastrous results, but with few other options.  One could read this like a failed version of a Jane Austen novel – if you look at it from the perspective of the women, which the author seldom does.  (The musical does look through women's eyes in interesting ways - perhaps in part because it was based on a different text that includes more sensitivity to the experience of women).  In any case, Hamilton and his mother were stricken by yellow fever when he was 12 and she died.  He had to fend for himself; he was apprenticed to an import/export firm where he proved so competent that the owners felt free to return to New York and leave him in charge by the time he was 14 or 15.  He did a remarkable job – keeping books, but also learning how to dress down ship captains for delivering substandard goods.  The skills he learned – and an apparent aptitude for dealing with both numbers and people, served him well when he worked for George Washington during the Revolutionary War, helping Washington with correspondence and the problem of supplying the troops with provisions, and this, in turn, led Washington to appoint him the first secretary of the treasury.  In between, he contributed to the constitution and wrote the majority of the Federalist Papers - essays that helped to convince people to ratify the constitution.  More immediately, in St. Croix, a benefactor recognized that he had many skills; including writing poetry and the benefactor raised money to send Hamilton to New York to go to school, and Hamilton never looked back.  After the war, with his constitution in place, and as treasury secretary, he developed the Federal Monetary system that continues to be the basic foundation of our banking system today.

That Horatio Alger type story is told in much more detail in the book, and there are many bends and twists in it.  And Burr is used as a kind of foil – the author claims they are mirror images, or black and white versions of each other.  I am struck by the similarities of these men from different social strata – Burr, who came from all but American noble parentage – his grandfather was a very well known preacher and both his grandfather and father were Presidents of Princeton University – which at that time was essentially a seminary – training men to take on the most noble of professions.  But, like Hamilton, Burr was orphaned.  Also like Hamilton, he was incredibly smart and was the youngest graduate of Princeton, due not just to smarts but – in a mirror again of Hamilton – to very hard work.  Unlike Hamilton, Burr seemed to work hard, but in spurts – with periods of indolence or purposelessness in between.

I think that the way that the author means to be contrasting Burr with Hamilton is that Burr was driven by the principle of doing what was in Burr’s best interest – he appeared to be a man without external principle.  But I think there is more similarity in the two men’s positions than he points out.  Not that Hamilton is just driven by self-interest, which he certainly is, but that Hamilton’s principles are not clearly articulated.  Early on, in the time before the revolution, Hamilton is a believer in the crown, and he manages to talk his way out of a siege of King’s College by revolutionaries by the use of sophisticated rhetoric that allows him to sound sympathetic to the cause while retaining loyalty to the king.  Indeed, one of his claims – through the paternity that the author questions – it that he is descended, through James Hamilton, from Scottish Royalty.  Now we know that he fought on the Revolutionary side and was one of the founding fathers, working on the constitution, and, more than just that, working to get it ratified.

As the first secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton shaped in essential ways the country that we would become.  He was able to conceptualize the tremendous debt we accumulated in fighting the war as an asset – as something that could be sold.  He built a strong central bank and, when Jefferson was elected, it was working well enough that, even though it was counter to Jefferson’s principles, Jefferson retained it.  What principles was the bank in conflict with?  Jefferson, and the Southern Republicans opposed the northern Federalists' intent to make our nation into an industrial power.  Their interest, and their reliance on slave labor, created the ability to retain a noble way of life while preserving the agrarian lifestyle they valued.

Cincinnati from Covington, Kentucky, cira 1851 (Detail)

Robert S. Duncanson (1821-1872)

Really quite by accident, I was in our local art museum this afternoon, and wandering through the local wing in between seeing two travelling exhibits.  Two paintings struck my eye.  One was a vista that was painted looking north across the Ohio River early in the 1800s.  On the south side, there was a bucolic scene with slaves and cows and lots of green space.  Across the river was a city, with crowded housing, smoke mixing with the clouds to create a very early version of smog.  The second painting, also from the early 1800s, was of a poor white family headed north – leaving the south because they were unable to generate a living in competition with slave labor. 

North Carolina Emigrants: Poor White Folks, 1845

James Henry Beard

The Republicans, the Southerners, had a vision of the United States that was complex.  It included something that the Sierra Club would admire – something that today we would call ecologically sound.  But it also included a weird vision of a social system that was based on a class system of nobles – white privileged folks – and the slaves who supported them.  Those who did not fit in would, like Hamilton’s father – not one of the first two or three children of his royal father – be left to fend for themselves and have to settle for the leavings. 

Now, the Federalists were also all male, all white, and their vision was not without its internal problems.  But it was a very different vision of a world that would be based on economic opportunity.  It would create the bustling cities of the north that would draw the southerners to their prosperity and would belch smoke into the sky, but also create a middle class – a group of people who, while not wealthy, would be able to survive setbacks.  These people would create the backbone of an economic system – one driven by mass consumerism – that would become the world that we inhabit today.

So this book, read in preparation for seeing the hit musical “Hamilton” in New York next month (though my reluctant friend Dan maintains that I would have better prepared by buying and listening to the soundtrack), revealed an unexpected history, the seeds of the economic system that has come to define us.  Aaron Burr, the other character, is a shadowy figure.  Enamored first of his wife and then of his daughter who was named for his wife, he became vice president under peculiar circumstances.  He and Hamilton were among the first politicians in America to actively campaign and to organize voters – remember that we invented the modern democracy and so had to figure out how to move away from noble functioning – including the noble inhibitions that prevented pandering to the common man. Burr had secured the votes that Jefferson needed to become president by campaigning for him in the north.  There were no provisions made for parties in the constitution, so he and Jefferson – by running as a ticket – each received the same number of votes – but there was no distinction about which office the votes were cast - each received the exact same number of electoral votes – though clearly it was Jefferson the people intended to be president.  Burr didn’t quickly concede, angering Jefferson.  This kind of slinky, self-promoting behavior had previously alienated Burr from Hamilton and, when Hamilton besmirched his honor, Burr demanded a duel.

So, the letter; the night before the duel, Hamilton wrote his friend, Theodore Sedgwick, and the following terse paragraph summarizes some thoughts that he had been struggling with:

I will here express one sentiment, which is, that Dismemberment of our Empire will be a clear sacrifice of great positive advantages, without any counterbalancing good; administering no real relief to our real Disease; which is Democracy, the poison of which by a subdivision will only be the more concentrated in each part, and consequently the more virulent.

This is a funky paragraph.  Democracy is a disease?  Let’s set that aside for a moment.  Subdivision is a presentiment of the civil war – though also of a weird plot of Burr’s to divide off the Ohio Territories and the Louisiana purchase from the eastern colonies and create a second country that would conquer Florida and the other Spanish lands including Texas and Mexico.  Obviously that never came to pass – and Burr’s attempt ended up being incredibly feeble and thus I, at least, had never heard of it in the history books.  But there were natural divisions in the young country.  And Hamilton’s vision was that “our Empire” had positive advantages – and I think that the glue of that empire is economic.  And the goal of the empire?  In Hamilton’s mind it appears to be to support a country that is not Democratic, but one that is – what – aristocratic?  And Democracy is a poison that would only become more concentrated in a smaller batches – in smaller parts of the whole.  So Democracy is diluted by the large Federalist state or empire.  The bigger the government – the more it can be determined – not by the will of the people, who are perhaps fickle or driven by self-interest (this is speculation on my part), but instead by the governors – the ones who are in the know and who can determine a course of action which will be good for what?  For the Empire, I believe – for our Empire.

This is a stunning paragraph that is left by one of our founding fathers.  He was in decline – Jefferson’s ascent had not been good for his political fortunes, nor had a series of other factors, including his own behaviors.  But the sentiments included here are not hidden or coded – as they would have been if sent by the secretive Burr.  There is no sense that Hamilton experiences them as being in any way seditious or problematic.  Quite the contrary, he is speaking with certainty about beliefs that he believes others will share.  Remember, many were clamoring for Washington to declare himself King.   And seeing the musical helped clarify that his attachment to Washington was a source of much of Hamilton's power.  This letter is partly a mourning of what might have been.  We were in uncharted waters – and this had been a revolution that was led by the aristocrats, not the common men.  As low as Hamilton’s birth might objectively have been, he saw himself as the son of a nobleman and functioned as a patrician in a country that was harshly divided between the privileged and those who were not, while simultaneously it was a country that would be increasingly open to Horatio Alger like transformations that Hamilton himself had undergone - transformations supported by the financial system that Hamilton had built.

I am not at all sure what to make of this book.  I am struck, as I am reading another book about many things including our shared reluctance to acknowledge the impact of our development on our mature selves (I expect that I will be posting on that book here soon), that what I am marveling at is how important it is for us to reflect on our roots as a nation as well as doing it as individuals.  Our current political climate might be better understood if we abandoned some two dimensional views of history – the northerners were for X and the southerners were for Y – and substituted something more complex: Our founding fathers were an interesting blend of men who were struggling to articulate a new vision of a country – and were doing that from manifold perspectives – and as they did that they were necessarily influenced by the personal and cultural histories that each of them had lived.  They were articulating, and building into the DNA of the country, visions that contained unassimilated bits of previous governments – and imagined future Empires – that were expressed in a variety of founding documents – not just the constitution – and that may still be exerting powerful – if now distorted - influences on our political functioning.  Sedgwick points out that the monument to Hamilton visible from the dueling grounds at Weehawken New Jersey are not anything constructed on that site, but the skyline of Manhattan, visible across the Hudson River.  We are the children of parents whose vision could not have imagined what would come to pass as a result of their actions and our subsequent labors.

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