what events led to the duel between hamilton and burr

_{Analogy of the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr (1887).}

On July 11, 1804, former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and Vice President Aaron Burr faced off in the near infamous duel in American history. Burr fatally wounded Hamilton, who died the next twenty-four hours. Hamilton's premature death transformed him from one of the last stalwarts of the fading Federalist Party to an American martyr, the namesake of towns across the country, and the face of the ten-dollar beak.

Lin Manuel Miranda (right) wrote 2015'southward Broadway sensation, Hamilton (left), and too starred as the Tony Laurels winning cast's titular character.

Two centuries later, with the success of Lin Manuel Miranda'due south musical Hamilton, he has also become a pop culture icon. Meanwhile, as the character of Aaron Burr puts it in Hamilton: "He may take been the first one to dice / Just I'm the ane who paid for it." The duel effectively concluded Burr's public career, precipitating a slide into persona non grata obscurity and treason.

The duel culminated a simmering conflict betwixt the two men rooted in the ballot of 1800. Hamilton had helped his political enemy, Thomas Jefferson, defeat Burr in that election. (Burr ran equally Jefferson's vice-president, just both men concluded up with the same number of votes in the Electoral College, meaning the House of Representatives decided the election—a constitutional oddity that the 12^thursday Amendment soon rectified.) Hamilton's well-known animosity toward Jefferson made his campaign confronting Burr all the more maddening.

A statue of Aaron Burr on display at the 2019 Hamilton Exhibition in Chicago.

In 1804, when Burr began a campaign for governor of New York, Hamilton over again waged political state of war. Burr took the political claiming as an affront to his personal laurels. Equally the candidate representing his faction in the election, his loss was besides seen as a humiliation to the political party as a whole. Winning a duel not only won back honor after an electoral defeat, merely also dishonored the duel'due south loser, and past proxy, their faction.¹

In the heat of that campaign, it was asserted that Hamilton claimed Burr was "a dangerous man" unfit for the trust of political function.ⁱⁱ Reeling from the sting of defeat and the public dishonor that accompanied it, Burr wanted to dishonor Hamilton in return.

Unwilling to put the personal barb behind him, Burr insisted on the duel.ⁱⁱⁱ

Accounts of the duel are, past design, shaky. Since dueling was illegal, witnesses turned their backs to the duel to give them plausible deniability. What is clear, though, is that Hamilton missed while Burr hit Hamilton in the stomach. Hamilton died the following day. Burr was charged with murder but never faced trial.

_{A plaque designating the Weehawken, NJ dueling grounds where the Hamilton-Burr duel took place.}

Burr appeared to relish his role in Hamilton's death, only the duel discredited him with the public—a fate that contributed to his involvement in a conspiracy to have western lands and institute a split government. He was tried for treason in 1807 but was acquitted.

Shocking as Hamilton'southward death might have been, duels were mutual in early on American history. They were then frequent, in fact, that at the time of the Hamilton-Burr duel many leading figures, including time to come president Andrew Jackson, fought a duel to preserve their honor. That code of honor allowed many steps to resolve a dispute, each with their ain set of cultural norms. If all those failed, a duel would settle the conflict once and for all.

_{A British illustration of 2 duelists shooting into the sky to complete an unwanted duel with award (1893).}

A duel did not require a winner or loser. In fact, they did not require bloodshed at all. The mere deed of standing on the dueling ground and being willing to die for ane's laurels sufficed for almost. Many duelists threw away their shots—either by shooting into the ground in forepart of themselves or shooting well above their opponent. Many who engaged in duels frequently missed their targets on purpose—valuing life over decease but demonstrating that each was willing to die for his honor. Hamilton probably did just that.^iv

In the decades leading to the Civil War, dueling became another stardom between Northward and South. Northern states began to outlaw the practice while it remained an important part of Southern civilisation. Southern congressmen used the threat of deadly violence to great effect past stifling congressional debate and preventing any political road to the end of slavery.

After an 1838 duel in which Representative William Graves of Kentucky killed Representative Jonathan Cilley of Maine, Congress outlawed dueling in Washington, D.C. By 1859, 18 of 33 states had made dueling illegal.⁵

_{A northern cartoon satirizing a Confederate Coat of Artillery. To the left of the shield are 2 men engaged in a duel (1862).}

Nevertheless, partisanship in American politics grew stronger in the years leading to the Civil State of war. That partisanship often led to personal insult and perceived affronts to personal accolade and notions of masculine identity. House clerks documented several fistfights, the brandishing of knives and guns, and fifty-fifty a caning, all attempts at silencing voices seen as threatening to sectional political values.⁶

Though Hamilton and Burr occupied positions at the highest levels of American politics, their story was never really about politics or policies. Instead, duels resulted from bruised feelings and thin skins.

_{A 2015 parody of the 1993 Got Milk campaign featuring Tony Award winner Leslie Odom Jr., who portrayed Aaron Burr in the Hamilton Original Broadway C ast.}

While politicians today no longer square off with pistols, recent threats of violence made by politicians, and actual acts of violence as when Congressman Greg Gianforte (R-MT) assaulted a reporter in 2017, remind us that some political egos are as fragile as ever.

--Posted July 11, 2019

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¹ Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Commonwealth (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2002), 188.

² For more on the intricacies of honor in the Hamilton-Burr duel, run into Freeman,Affairs of Honor, 189-198.

³ "Letter From Alexander Hamilton to Aaron Burr, 20 June 1804."

⁴ For an outline of the testify surrounding the possibility of Hamilton wasting his shot see: Hamilton'due south "Statement on Impending Duel with Aaron Burr," and Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Knopf, New York, 2000) pp. 30-31.

^five For more on the event of the Cilley-Graves duel on Congress, meet Chapter 3 of Joanne B. Freeman's The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).

⁶ For more on how House clerk B.B French documented congressional violence leading to the Civil War, run across Freeman, The Field of Blood.

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Source: https://origins.osu.edu/milestones/july-2019-hamilton-burr-duel?language_content_entity=en