Um, Tony Dean. And today we'll be calling history to speak with Alexander Hamilton. He'll be answering our call on July 10th, 1804. The day before his fatal duel with Aaron Burr. When we think of the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, of course, we think about the wildly popular Broadway show. But what we often forget is that this dual or the interview, as they called it. It wasn't just two regular men pointing guns at each other to settle a dispute of honor.
This was the sitting vice president of the United States pointing a gun and killing the former secretary of the treasury who had worked directly under president George Washington. It would be about as absurd as former secretary of state Hillary Clinton getting into an argument with Mike Pence and then Hilary guns down Pence behind a CVS in Maryland. It's madness, but that's what happened.
As a result, Aaron Burr's life and reputation were ruined and he died in a boarding house with no money or friends, Alexander Hamilton on the other hand. Goes down in history as the person who created the bank of the United States, he was responsible for the plan that assumed state war debts, that overnight made America a powerhouse of growth. He helped replace the weak articles of Confederation that we're barely holding the states together with the U S constitution.
Then he wrote most of the Federalist papers to convince the nation that a ratified constitution would bring us together. As one strong United country, he created the coast guard, initiated a federal mint so that the United States would have one currency instead of a different one for every state and founded the New York post. And he did all of this.
After starting life as an orphan on a little island in the Caribbean sea that most people have never heard of ladies and gentlemen, fellow history, lovers, and masters of the Quill everywhere. I give you Alexander Hamilton . Hello, is that you, general Hamilton? It is. Hi, how are you this day, sir? Oh, I'm well, sir. I am so thankful for this opportunity to speak with you today. My name is Tony Dean and I'm talking to you from the future in the 21st century.
The device that you're holding is called a smartphone and it allows us to speak as if you and I were sitting in the same room with one another. It also allows me to share a record of our conversations with people around the world. And I was hoping that I could ask you some questions today and maybe even clear up some of the bad press that you've received over the years. But before I do, I understand this is a strange introduction. Can I answer any questions that you might have first?
Well, I will say that you said refer to bad press as given what is perhaps happening on the morrow I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to because I was quite popular with the Federalist and most importantly with his excellency the general But certainly this device is fascinating. My first thought is to wonder how it might be used to aid in commerce and manufacturing and in military matters, where it would improve communications tremendously.
I suspect if my great adversary, Mr. Jefferson, was here, he would begin dissecting it immediately to find out what makes it tick. Oh, I think Jefferson would be interested in this, but I think that you would be even more interested because you are spot on. This device is used in commerce. People don't even leave their homes anymore. They go into the device, they say, I need these goods delivered to my home. They communicate through them.
It's all the things that you would have wanted as you were, , building the financial system that is the United States. And so, yeah, I think that you would like it. You've created a manservant in a box.
Ha. Well, and, but to go back to what you said about bad press I guess, some of that came from Aaron Burr, and I understand that over the years, you and he have had not the greatest relationships, and I, if it's my understanding of the timeline where you are, you have some sort of engagement with him tomorrow. Well, Colonel Burr how much time do we have, sir? Because to list his faults will require quite some time. I will give you an example.
When I joined General Washington's staff, I was his closest aide and he was in all ways but biology a father to me. Colonel Burr was also appointed to the staff. He lasted some 10 days before being sacked for opening and reading the General's private correspondence. Colonel Burr in the election of 1800 was absolutely scandalous. I assume you will be asking me about Mr. Jefferson's despicable actions in the election of 1800. I won't go over those now.
But they precipitated what we call an interview that is to happen at Weehawken tomorrow. But a number of things. I said of Aaron Burr that he is for or against nothing but suits his interests and ambitions if there is an embryo Caesar in America, tis Burr. Wow! That is a big statement right there. An embryo Caesar? Indeed. The man quested for nothing but power. And it's a shame, because he had a brilliant mind.
But, for example, I will tell you that when the election of 1800 occurred, it was perhaps the dirtiest election in American history. I don't know about your time, but in this time, we have things called broadsides, , which were essentially political posters, the advertising of the day. To give you an example of how dramatic it was, a Federalist poster opposing Mr. Jefferson read, If the atheist Jefferson is elected.
Every virgin in America will be deflowered, every Bible seized and burned, and the streets will run red with the blood of murdered patriots. Now that, sir, is a negative ad. Wow. Colonel Burr, in this election stood as Mr. Jefferson's vice president. Now Mr. Jefferson in what was certainly the first purely partisan political act in American history, he realized that because of the abomination known as the Three Fifths Clause, that he would carry the electoral votes of the South.
But he was unsure if he would carry it up in the North, where Mr. Adams was quite popular, at least to some degree, as a Federalist. And so he decided to add a Northerner to his ticket. And he selected Colonel Burr. Now, Colonel Burr was of the wrong party, but of course, if you have no morals, that's not a problem. Colonel Burr just switched and became Jefferson's running mate.
Now in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention, we did make a mistake, which was corrected later by the 12th amendment. That mistake was to vote for the president and the vice president separately in the electoral college. As a result. Even though everyone in the nation knew that the nation had picked Mr. Jefferson as president, Colonel Burr as vice president, the tie was at 73 electoral votes for Jefferson and 73 electoral votes for Burr.
And in the Constitution, it provides for that situation. It is sent to the House of Representatives, where each state votes with a single vote, and the winner of that vote in the House will become president. Now, through some 35 ballots they remain tied because , Burr realized that if he could get a single of Jefferson's states to switch to him, instead of the worthless position of vice president, he could be president of the entire republic. And this went on for 35 ballots.
Finally, I could take it no longer, and I wrote to a friend. For a letter to be publicized. And I said this of Jefferson, I admit that his politics are tinctured with fanaticism, that he is too much in earnest in his democracy, that he has been a mischievous enemy of the principle measures of our past administration, that he is crafty and persevering in his objects, that he is not scrupulous about his means of success, nor is he mindful of the truth and he is a contemptible.
But I went on to say, by every virtuous and prudent calculation, Mr. Jefferson is to be preferred over Colonel Burr. He is by far not so dangerous a man, and he has pretensions to character. On the 36th ballot, Mr. William Bayard of Connecticut withheld his electoral vote from Burr. Mr. Jefferson became president, Mr. Burr became vice president, and I will say that he became disquieted with me on that date. It would get worse as the time passed.
I don't understand how it makes sense for the loser to become vice president. , , how is that relationship even gonna function? this is how you first saw it. Of course, under Washington we had Adams, but under Adams we had Jefferson as the vice president. Jefferson Mr. Adams for all his many uh, I can go on at quite some length about Mr. Adams later if you prefer. He was elected president to Mr. Jefferson Vice.
Mr. Jefferson was approached by Mr. Adams who said, we have both been selected by the American people, shall we work together? And Jefferson said no. And he spent his four years as vice president using public funds and other measures to publish secret tirades against Mr. Adams and myself. So then , when we see the election of 1800 and Jefferson runs for president, even though he always claimed he didn't die, I wrote of him that he most ardently quests after the presidential chair.
We saw him in all his political glory. The 12th amendment corrected perhaps an optimism that we had in Philadelphia. The hope was By doing it the way we originally wrote the Constitution, the very best man would be elected president, and the very next best man would be elected vice president, and they would work together for the betterment of the nation. What we did not anticipate was how quickly factions political parties formed.
And the 12th Amendment was a vital correction so that we elected a ticket, a president and vice president, rather than voting individually, and as a result, we've never had this exact same situation arise again. . , you had mentioned John Adams, and as I was doing some preparation for our conversation, I ran into something that John Adams had said, which was that you're the bastard brat of a Scottish peddler. Have you ever heard that?
Well, you have an interesting interview style, sir, I will say, to bring up gross insults from a silly little man. Mr. Adams said a number of, I will tell you that he referred to me as that little man, though I was taller than he, he referred to me as the most indefatigable intriguer in the United States, and perhaps in the world, and most famously, as you quoted, as the bastard brat of a Scots cuddler. Now, my father was actually a Scottish lord.
He did depart the family, abandon us when I was but a child. But I would write later that I actually had better claims in noble title than those who preen themselves on title in this country, like Mr. Adams. I simply called Mr. Adams your rotundity. For he was a man of spherical dimension and when he fired , the cabinet that General Washington appointed, I said, he is as wicked as he is mad.
And I I would say later I would be astonished of Adam's actions in the quasi war with France if I was capable of being astonished from anything from that quarter. And depending upon, I assume, sir, that your audience is gentleman, I will say this. Adam said of me that I suffered from a super abundance of secretions and could not find enough whores and christened men to draw them off. So you see our politics was a tad rougher than you might expect looking back from your day. Oh my gosh.
That is, it is literally no holds barred. , but it does seem like you got the better of the argument on Adams though. Well, and understand, sir, that we were in our day quite uncertain as to the future of the United States. And in your introduction, I believe you said it wrong, it's the United States. The emphasis should be on the first word. Because this was the remarkable thing that we achieved with the Republic. As Dr. Franklin was asked upon leaving the convention, What have you given us?
And he said a Republic if you can keep it. It was not at all clear in my time, that we would keep it at all. We had the Quasi War with France The only thing that prevented the pettiest European power from invading us was the glory of the Atlantic Ocean. So we certainly are in a delicate position, I hope in your day, the fact that you are speaking to me suggests the nation has survived and so that is a good thing, but we were unsure whether it would or not. These were difficult questions.
One reason we accepted General Washington as the first president was that we realized As a nation, that the precedence that he would establish would become essentially the ruling precedence for all future presidents. And Washington was the American Cincinnatus. In fact, he was twice the Cincinnatus.
You recall, of course, from your own education, the Cincinnatus was the Roman general who essentially left his plow in the field to take command, become an emperor, and when the crisis was over, resigned power and returned to his home. Washington did that twice. He did it at the end of the Revolutionary War, when he could have simply become a monarch, and he did it again at the end of his second presidential term.
And he honored me by having me write his farewell address, which he warned about a number of things, including permanent foreign entanglements. , , why is it that you spend all this time with Washington? I mean, you're with him from the time that you're young, from you're a teenager, and then you go through and you're the Secretary of the Treasury. Not quite a teenager, but I take your point. I was quite a young man. Yes. A young man. I'm sorry.
And so you spend all this time with him, and then you get to this point, you're the Secretary of the Treasury, and you literally create the financial system of the United States and all of this good that you do. Why is it that you don't end up running for president? Well, you ask a painful question. I will say this about the general very briefly. As I said earlier, he was in all ways, but biology, my father. And was a remarkable man. That does not mean we did not have our disagreements.
, I'm curious how you would study history, because General Washington to many people became almost God like in his personality, his image, the paintings, the sculptures I knew him as a man who was, as I said, capable of purple and volcanic rages a most horrid swear and blasphemer toward the end of the war. And I will admit that I have been constantly badgering the general to, to allow me to return to combat. I did in combat at the beginning of the war.
And then he asked me to come be his aid and I was for several years during this time, but I was itching to get back into conflict because frankly, The circumstances of my birth were awkward. My parents were deeply in love. And my mother was married, my father was not. She was married to another man, a person in the Dutch Isles who was compelled to become her husband when she was but 16. An abusive man who beat her and she fled, leaving my half brother Peter behind.
And she met my father, James Hamilton, and they were quite in love. When I was a lad of about eight my father left on a business trip that was scheduled to last some three months. He was gone for the next 35 years. When I was a lad of roughly ten my mother and I were taken ill with an ague, which you would call a tropical fever. I survived the treatment of being bled. She did not, and so I was essentially orphaned. I was placed in the care of a cousin who promptly hanged himself.
And another series of things until I had the first good fortune where a merchant named Nicholas Kruger took me in. And by the time I was 14, I was running his international, what might be called an international corporation. I was trading goods around the world. And it was I should explain I'm not a modest man. So I once told a person, Painting my portrait, to be sure and give credit to the length of my nose. And you can imagine what the subtlety of that was about.
, I once said, I am aware of my gifts, I only wonder why I'm not more handsome. Although the ladies did love me primarily because I was slim. Unlike so many of the gentlemen in my age. But As I became acquainted with Washington, I adored the man, but there was a time that we were at the headquarters and I passed him on the staircase and he said, Colonel Hamilton, I need you to attend to me. And I said, I will be there in just a moment, sir. I have a document to deliver.
It was, of all things, a document about bedding and blankets to give to the supply people. And then Lafayette detained me for perhaps a minute. I returned to the bottom of the stairs only to see at the top of the stairs the general shaking in one of his purple rages. And he said, Sir, you treat me with disrespect. You have kept me waiting at the top of these stairs this full ten minutes. Now, I had very little in my life other than my sense of honor. I was born awkwardly.
All that I had was taken from me. All that I could live on was my wit and my intellect. And to have my sense of honor challenged was something that other men with more resources might have been able to avoid, but I could not. And I said, Sir, it was not ten minutes, but since you bring this up, we now part. And at that moment, I resigned. Within an hour, he sent emissaries including Lafayette to try to apologize to get me to stay, but I would not be dissuaded.
And I was given a command and in fact, led the first attack at the climactic battle of Yorktown at the first readout number 10, I ordered my men to unload their muskets and fix the bayonets and follow me. And I was the first man over the wall. in the final major battle of the Revolutionary War. So the General and I were quite close. And as I say, a father to me in all ways. And I could go on, but I suspect you'd rather ask another question.
Well, I heard one time, and this is perfect, that if you ask Hamilton a question, that sometimes he'll give you a hundred thousand words whether you like them or not. I love everything that you're saying. But it still didn't answer the question. ? Why did you not run for president? I mean, who? I apologize. I I became overcome with my own eloquence. Well, there are there are two reasons. Primarily the awkwardness of my birth.
I will tell you that one of my school records had written across it in large red letters the phrase obscene child to ensure that I would never be allowed to attend school with unpolluted Children. I was educated primarily through my own gravitas and reading, devouring every book I could find on the island. I I was as I say, educated in commerce, and those individuals, along with the local minister, realized that I needed further education.
I was sent to the United States, then of course the colonies. I was enrolled in a school which would complete, in theory, all the education I had missed from a small lad . I completed that in nine months. And then petitioned the College of New Jersey, , for admission. I said, I wish to be admitted as a student on special status, because I am frankly smarter and better than any student you've ever had. I was not a modest man. And the Reverend Witherspoon, the President, agreed.
And he took it to the Board of Trustees, who remembered another uh, young man, several years my senior, who had attempted a similar study of two years and it essentially completed it, but suffered what might be called a nervous breakdown. His name was James Madison. And so I was refused. I then went to In my irritation, went to King's College, , and made the same request I was admitted.
I will confess that I did not graduate because the war arose, but by the time I was 40 and some years, I had received eight different honorary degrees from a number of prestigious universities. I did not run for president though, because one, the awkwardness of my birth, and second this is slightly more difficult to say, there were people who detested me. I was not one to suffer fools gladly, and as a result, I made powerful enemies in people such as Mr. Adams.
And it is quite clear that had I attempted to seek the presidency, I would have been unsuccessful, because of the backroom politics that would have denied me, based on prejudice of the nation, of my status as, Mr. Adams so colorfully claimed the bastard brat as well as those who are offended by my wit and my wisdom and my eloquence. I did, however, I turned down an appointment to the Senate. I twice turned down an appointment to the Supreme Court.
In fact, I even turned down two deals in speculation of property that would have made me a million dollars in my currency because I said we must always render ourselves to be as Caesar's wife in government service. That is to say. When you were offered a spot on the Supreme Court, I didn't know that. I have to believe that something like that, like sitting on a bench and just listening and not being As active as you normally were, it seems like that would be a maddening position for you.
Is that something that you could possibly enjoy? Well, it would have been interesting. I love the law. I studied law for some nine months, as one does in this century. I studied in the library of a man named Duane. And in the course of nine months became one of 35 lawyers in the city of New York practicing law. And I enjoyed the practice of law. I was criticized for never charging enough, which is why we always lived on the edge of poverty.
In fact, there was one case for Louis Laguerre, he was a merchant. The settlement, if you can imagine the sum this large, the settlement in his favor was 120, 000. I built some 1, 500. Aaron Burr was my co counsel. He was my deputy, and he built 2, 500.
So there was a, uh, an interest in the law, and I certainly could have written opinions, but I felt that I was more effective advocating the policies of the Federalist Party, which, of course, because the Supreme Court can only respond to what is brought before it, and is by definition, as we said in the convention, the weakest of the three branches, Virtually no power other than to deal with cases that are brought before it.
I would have been quite frustrated by the lack of important work to do. Right. And all the waiting. That's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking the Supreme Court would have been awful for you.
But the presidency, I think, is probably where you, maybe not, one of the benefits of the electoral college is I wrote, I believe it was federal 68, although I confess it might have been 63, but I believe it was 68, in which I said that the electoral college We'll have as a primary function, the preventing of any man who is not up to the task of being chief magistrate, as we refer to the presidency in that document the electoral college would stop anyone unskilled by
character or knowledge that the electoral college purpose would be to ensure that should the people make a mistake. And elect an ignorant demagogue, there would be a mechanism to fix that. In my time, of course, we had so few elections, and by the 18 4, of course, Mr. Jefferson in office it is not clear to me whether the Electoral College will do that function, but hopefully they will in the future. Okay. You know, you're gonna have to forgive this question. I will not necessarily, sir.
You asked me to forgive your question. I will remind you that I was involved in 11 affairs of honor. And should this question become too insulting, the count will become 12. Well, that is the reason that I prefaced this question with, it is not meant to be insulting, but as you know, sometimes I think you would be guilty of this as well. And I certainly am myself of saying what you're saying. What you think, and without necessarily meaning to harm, and that is the case here with this question.
But I'm wondering if you are almost too strong. And what I mean by that is, when you and Washington were working together, I've always wondered if maybe Washington was that filter that kept you from going too far, that was able to allow you to focus your brilliance, because there is so much of it, whether you're modest or not. I wonder if Washington functioned like that for you. What are your thoughts on that? Well, when the general died, I wrote Mr. Oliver, his private secretary, a letter.
And it is a letter which my critics have taken out of context. This is a problem in our age. Hopefully by your time you have fixed this. But I wrote in there that the general was an aegis, very essential to me, a protector. Is the meaning of the word Aegis. And perhaps one in the Republic has greater reason to regret his death than I. Because he was, in Aegis, very essential to me. But this is in more ways than just in mentorship, which he was certainly brilliant at.
I mean, he had a well thumbed copy of the Federalist Papers on his desk in the Executive Mansion in New York, but he was also a man of great and this actually, in his later life, became almost a burden for him. He was such a great man that at Mount Vernon when the young children, his grandchildren, his step grandchildren, would come and play, he would walk in the room to watch the children play and they would fall silent in the presence of this great man.
And he would have to leave sullen in the fact that his own grandchildren feared his immense greatness. And so it is a burden to be Washington and yet without him, our nation is nothing. He is the truly only essential American without, without Washington, we are simply all Canadians this day. Yeah. Wow. So when general Washington stepped down, what did the nation look like well, we had achieved a great deal.
Now, the general only wanted to serve one term, and in fact, at the end of his term, asked Mr. Madison to draft a farewell statement, which he did, and then Mr. Jefferson and I, who agreed, well, frankly I think we can say we agreed on two things in our lives, our respect for General Washington and our disdain for Aaron Burr, and We both approached the general and said, Sir, the country is not yet on a firm enough footing that you can step down.
We still need you as the president in order to make sure the nation is charting a course for the future. And he reluctantly agreed, and he would later say that he regretted only one moment of his second term, and that it was each and every goddamned moment therein. So the General nobly served. Ironically, Mr. Jefferson would almost immediately resign as Secretary of State. He was frustrated by having a staff of six and having very little influence.
I, as the Secretary of the Treasury, had a staff of over 145. Although many of them were revenue agents for tariffs to be collected at our major ports. I actually left the end of 1799, January 31st. I resigned, but the general and I remained in close correspondence and I remained one of his key advisors. And I, as I say, I'm not a modest man.
I flatter myself that the general on every occasion where there was an important decision to be made, he went with my advice over what I called the Virginia junta. The Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, all that group of which he himself was one, the Virginians but without exception, the general relied on my advice and followed the course of action I recommended, which of course, as you can imagine, was of great frustration to people like Jefferson, but also people like Adams, who felt ignored.
Well, of course you went with your advice. , Jefferson, Madison, those guys are all smart. But your ideas were better, and Well, I'm pleased to hear you say that from your day. It is, I will admit that in my life at this moment, a rather dark shadow has fallen across it. In my private life, I now reside at the Grange, a house I had built. On some 30 acres of farmland in Harlem that I purchased, and in the last three years of farming asparagus and strawberries, I have created a crop worth of 18.
So there is certainly a challenge there. I will tell you that the greatest crisis and tragedy of my life is the death of my first born son, Philip, who at the age of 18, three years ago, was essentially murdered by an older man in his 30s. My son had been at a play. He had heard Mr. George Aker and friends. Speaking of what they speculated was my willingness to seize the government by force if I had but an army.
Now I had a horse shot from under me twice, saving the U. S. Congress from capture, the Continental Congress from capture. I served in arms, as I say first man over the wall Yorktown to protect and fight for what later became the United States. So that is a nonsensical notion but my son, well, the newest cops, Mr. Acre, one of those cops, my son at 18, bold and brash, challenged Mr. Acre, who was in his 30s to a duel. What we would call an affair of honor. He should have denied.
He should have ignored it because it came from but a child, but he did not. And on the day of the duel I was unaware of what my son was doing. I was aware of what was going on. This was late 1801. And I had said that the only advice I gave my son was a gentleman throws away his fire. That is to say, shoots above the head of an adversary. Because it is not dignified to take the life, but you also don't fire straight up in the air.
You indicate, I could choose to put your life at risk, but I do not, and I now stand ready for your bravery or mercy. And the goal in a duel, if you intend to kill, is to fire very quickly on the command, present. Ready, present. Well, horrible morning of November 23rd, my son and his second rode across the Hudson to Weehawken in New Jersey a bluff halfway up the shore. And Mr. Aker and my son upon the command to present aimed their pistols at each other for a full minute.
And then my son moved his pistol away and Mr. Aker fired and killed him. My eldest daughter, Angelica, very close to a brother, went absolutely mad with grief and would remain to this day mentally defective, wearing the clothing of 18 1 and sitting at the piano forte, playing the songs of that year.
Over and over again, so a double crisis in my private life and in my professional life, the cloud was there and that, as I say, Mr. Jefferson was the president of the United States and it becomes so with my aid, as I mentioned earlier, so I did not know if that cloud, that shadow was a a long winter's night or a brief eclipse. And I worry as to what the future will hold in terms of the length of that shadow. I'm a little confused.
Are you saying, you told him to not fire, or to give up his shot, , so you did counsel him that he should attend the duel. Correct? Not precisely, because I, he was the man. And I would not tell him what he can and cannot do. But I said that in an affair of honor, a gentleman does these things. Now, that is not as reckless as it might sound, because, , , about 20 percent of duels resulted in any injury at all. These were smoothbore pistols.
And most people fired into the air to demonstrate their resolve without the risk of taking life. And I guess I assumed, tragically, horribly, mistakenly, that Mr. Aker was a gentleman. And , that morning I went to visit my friend, Nathan Hosek, a family physician, I found that he was gone. And the only reason he would be gone that early on a morning. would be to be the physician of the duel. And I was devastated.
Philip would die the next day in agony, his mother on one side, I on the other, begging us for help. And it was hope we could not provide. I can't even imagine losing your son like that. . And the mind of my daughter. Yeah. Yeah, I just can't even imagine it. And I guess what I'm wondering isn't the plan for you to have another duel tomorrow? Well, you are brusque, sir. Yes, there is an affair of honor and interview tomorrow with Mr. Burr. I will say this.
I'm a lawyer, and so I will tell you the facts as I know them, and you can decide on your own sense what I intend. I wrote to my friend Rufus King that I would fire into the air. He wrote back and said, don't be a fool. Burr will certainly shoot at you. And I intend to not have the hair trigger set on my pistol, which would have been allowed. A hair trigger allows you to push the trigger forward with just the slightest little effort to discharge the weapon, which makes it much more accurate.
I indicated I would not set that. And I told my friends I would simply fire into the air. Again, above Burr's head. What his intentions are, I cannot know. Remember, sir, that Mr. Burr It's the sitting vice president of the United States. Yeah. Now, there were 11 letters. When you ask the cause of the affair of honor, of what will become hopefully not a duel tomorrow in the interview, there are two answers.
The first I gave you in part, in terms of my defeating his efforts to become president in 1800. In 1802, he ran for governor in New York. I again intervened and prevented his election. So he was quite frustrated with being stuck in the vice presidency and his frustration with me. The final straw, one might say. is a newspaper story in a newspaper in Albany where I had attended a party. I enjoyed parties.
I enjoyed discussing things with ladies, although I never once had love for anyone but Eliza. I certainly enjoyed their company. And as the newspaper reporter stated some days later in reporting on this event, this party that Part of the evening was spent with people describing Colonel Burr in horrible terms. And then it said, and General Hamilton stated, I could state an even more despicable opinion of Burr, but I shan't. And this was what, in Burr's mind, was the last straw.
He wrote me a letter in which he said, essentially, I paraphrase what do you mean by despicable? You must tell me what you meant. I wrote back and I said in similar words you have done so many despicable things. If you will provide me with a list, I'll be happy to point out the one that I'm referring to now, which did not go over well with him. A series of another nine letters went back and forth until it was resolved. And in most cases, these letters would resolve the matter.
This is why it's called an affair of honor. The interview, what you call the duel, is a rare event. Rarely taking place. In fact, I will say this is to my detriment. General Washington, Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Adams, all of the leaders of that age, almost certainly had demands for duels, which they simply ignored. Their strength of character was enough.
With my sense of honor knowing that I had grown up, Desperate in poverty in the Caribbean, uneducated because of my bastard status, I could not let any slight pass. And you may judge me to be immature for this, but it is a simple fact.
And so I could not allow Mr. Burr, of all people, a man who I knew I was the better of, A man who was so reviled in his day, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if he's reviled in yours that I could not let that pass, and I did not necessarily expect it to end with an exchange of shots if it did, I expected it to be An honorable affair where both men fired over the heads and pronounced themselves satisfied. We shall see what happens at dawn tomorrow at Weehawken.
Well, from a from this consideration of honor, I completely understand why every slight It has to be addressed because your honor is everything. Your reputation is everything. I do understand that and especially when you've got people like Adams that will use absolutely anything like your poor upbringing , or your family history against you. But I guess the thing that I'm wondering is, and I you wrote a long letter about the affair. How does that not fall into the realm of honor?
How did that happen? You, sir, are a ruffian. Forgive me. To bring up, well, perhaps, to bring up Mariah Reynolds. I am not at all proud of this. Men are feeble beings. I was at my station in Philadelphia working as the Secretary of the Treasury, My wonderful wife was actually at her father's home in the Albany area for the summer where one would de camp to avoid the agues and illnesses that were endemic in large cities during my day.
And this lovely woman approached me at work, at my office, and said that she was like me, a New Yorker, and that her horrible husband had abandoned her. And knowing of my reputation, For gallantry and generosity, could I possibly provide her with any funding at all that would allow her to get home to her family in New York? No, I'm a gentleman. This was a young lady in distress.
Little did I know at the time that she was what in our day we might call a woman of ill repute, and her husband was the purveyor of the woman of ill repute. It was a plot. But I said I didn't have any currency with me. But if she would tell me where she was staying. I would come to her bedchambers that day after I left work and provide her with some small assistance. I borrowed 50 from a friend.
And as I would write, you call it a letter, it's a pamphlet of some 96 pages that I wrote because when her husband, despicable in this manner, would later be arrested and accused of speculation with public monies, his excuse, his claim was that I had actually been the agent and he was simply my lackey doing the work. And because I could not allow any. Any attack on my honor as the secretary of treasury to pass.
I wrote this long pamphlet, which I began by saying that I'm accused essentially of financial mismanagement for what I'm actually guilty of is an inappropriate relationship with his wife. And I went on for some 96 pages explaining what had happened. I said in the document that I took the note out of my pocket and gave it to her in her bedchamber. And that a discussion ensued in which it soon became clear that other than pecuniary consolation of the debt would be acceptable.
That's an awkward say of saying she can pay me in other ways than money. And let's simply say that I received consolation A number of occasions from Mrs. Reynolds I would later break it off with her. And then later her husband demanded 1, 500, which I had to borrow half of that and I paid him off. And he then sent me a letter saying, now that you have paid, I have no objection to you seeing my wife as a friend. And I received a letter from Mrs. Saying that her love for me was so deep.
But not seeing me was causing her to die. Now I asked you, sir, I could not allow this poor woman to die. Right. And the affair began again, but it was brief and faded. And I finally did break it off some years later, as you probably are aware. I had a visit from speaker Molenberg, Senator Monroe, and one of their gentlemen who had heard from Mr. Reynolds about this speculation. I explained it was a matter of the heart, provided them with canceled checks, documents, letters.
They pronounced themselves. Absolutely convinced of my innocence and speculation, but Mr. Monroe kept copies, and these would later be made public in a scandalous and disgusting way, and it nearly ruined my life. At this point, General Washington came forward, sent me a set of six, a wine cooler, that is to say a device that holds, a silver device that holds six wine bottles, and to cool them.
And he said in his note, not for the intrinsic value of the thing, but just as a statement of my sincere affection and regard, to have the greatest man in the world send you a note professing his respect and regard at the low point of your life, just shows what a wonderful man Washington is. . . Well, there is one thing I was wondering about pamphlet about the Reynolds and that is, I don't understand why there had to be so much detail in it.
You know, I was glancing at that document earlier today, and it said something about, you know, about how Mrs. Reynolds was very bendy or she could go in a lot of different positions. Why was that necessary to be in there? I believe I was able to achieve a wondrous array of positionings. I'm a very thorough man. when Secretary of the Treasury, I had, as you can imagine, made enemies.
And the result was that as Secretary of Treasury, there were those who were convinced, Jefferson was convinced that I was cheating with the federal government. I was speculating in some way, in other words, using public funds inappropriately.
And When his Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, came into office, Jefferson ordered him to check the books of the United States, which he did, and reported back to Jefferson that books of the United States balanced to the penny, and that the tree that I grew, the economy that I grew, was so perfect that to strike any branch from it would cause the entire system to wither, he said Hamilton created a perfect economic system.
Jefferson, on the other hand, believed , that I was more clever at hiding my But the simple fact is Hamilton Jefferson's own secretary treasury discovered that I had created a perfect system that balanced to the penny and as secretary treasury with just a few short weeks left in the session Mr. Jefferson's minions. Directed the department of the treasury to do a thorough accounting of the entire books of the United States.
And in some three weeks, I wrote 60, 000 words explaining the entire budget of the United States and turned it into them. The hope they had was that Congress would adjourn , till the next session and during the time they were adjourned, I would, in theory, have had time to hide all my malfeasance. But the fact that within three weeks, I returned to complete accounting of the United States in tremendous detail undercut any efforts by them to make me appear like a criminal.
So that is, I guess, my obsession with detail. You never know when it's going to be your friend. Yeah. What is it about you and this attention to detail? Because your history is that, , everything that you've written, you know exactly where it is. You're so organized with everything. , you got your thoughts all in order. Everything is, you know, It's so organized and , this is one of the things that I think Washington loved about you , I mean, how do you do that?
Where does this energy come from? I, do you drink a lot of coffee or something? , I think one must say that I had an unusual drive and I return again to my notion of honor that , in my day, I turned to the military early on because for someone with my awkwardness, there was no gentleman farmer situation awaiting me. But through the military, one could gain honor and respect.
And I did ultimately become , Under President Adams, much to his chagrin, , only because Washington intervened, I became the commanding general of all American forces in the quasi war with France in 1798. This obsession with detail has served me quite well. As I said, Gallatin said, Hamilton made no blunders, committed no frauds, he did nothing wrong. Only because of the level of detail I went into, was he able to make that statement. And, Thank you.
The foundation of the Bank of the United States. I wrote a famous paper report on manufacturing, an area where Mr. Jefferson and I sharply diverged was the notion of what kind of nation shall we have. I believed. That our nation was set first to be continental. I said our, the future of our nation depends upon men who are continental in their thinking. Meaning, getting to the Pacific Ocean. Jefferson thought it would take some 900 years for the first American settlers to reach that coast.
I I believe it only will take perhaps 300 years for the first Americans to reach the coast. I have great faith in their ability. And the notion that we must be a manufacturing society with an important agricultural Opponent goes against Mr. Jefferson who wanted a purely agriculture. He wanted nine in ten Americans to farm in their farms, live in what he called ward republics of 20 families where all the power would lie.
They would farm during the day, they would barter for what they did not have, and they would read Libby in the original and play their violins by night. And I would say, sir, that sounds like a wonderful view, a wonderful idyllic notion, but is utterly unreliable and utterly foolish. It is through advances in manufacturing, through medicine, through architecture, but especially medicine, through engineering, through businesses of yours that will allow this nation to grow and prosper.
And the fact that you are speaking to me now, some two centuries since, suggests that this view has come before because if you were one of Mr. Jefferson's farmers, you would not own the device you hold. I think you called it a smartphone. You would be holding a quill. And sometimes it can be poetic. Yeah, I think you'd be really happy how things turned out, for sure. Because your vision was very impressive.
I guess, kind Describe, you've got this vision of manufacturing in this industrialized United States of America. So, what do you picture the United States looking like in a hundred years, for example? Well, that's difficult to say but I would hope that it would be a nation of great cities great rural areas as well, because they obviously, we must be fed, but something that traded internationally.
Mr. Jefferson once said that he hoped the United States would be a fourth or fifth rate power like China, that the world might leave us alone. I believed we needed to be a great nation. internationally as well as domestically, and that we could only rely on the fortuitous positioning of two oceans to protect us for so long. We must be ready. And the best way to do that is to engage with the rest of the world and to have a robust economic system.
The bank of the United States, which I created within 30 days was fully capitalized. And as you can imagine, the sum is vast. Ten million dollars, which was more than the wealth of all other banks in America combined. And my goal was to what I call tie the rich, the wise, the well born, to the nation's success. So people like Mr. Hancock or Mr. Jefferson, had he actually had any financial success, which he did not to tie them to the belief that the more successful the country is.
And I call banks, the engines of commerce, a bankers, the nursery of wealth. A bank allows a person to borrow money to build a road. Perhaps they charge a toll. Perhaps they have a meeting house or a lodging at the end of that road. But they make their money because the road became a multiplier of their wealth. The road allowed travel, I would certainly propose.
I command a. A fleet of revenue cutters to be coast guardians to make sure that people who come to this country can't sneak in, but they must go through ports and pay their tariffs. , this creates wealth. I would imagine a system like that on our rivers. Our rivers are our highways. Perhaps in your day that you have a way to make the roads better than simply gravel or dust. And then roads could become more important, but the notion of an industrialized society making things, and I tied to this.
A simple fact of of topography, virtually every great river in America has at some point near its headwaters, a great waterfall and the Potomac, for example has this wonderful waterfall. And I argued that these great waterfalls can be used to harness Hydraulic power, water turning wheels. And as I said in the report on manufacturing, these places can be made to make everything from wire to hats.
And the machinery that can result from this free energy, if you will, these turning wheels and turning gears, will generate massive wealth, far more than a farmer. Planning is core. A vital service, but not the future of the nation. How do you calm down with all of these thoughts in your brain? Are you able to sleep at night? Not well, I will admit. I will pace back and forth. If I'm going to give a speech, I will pace back and forth for some hours until it is fully memorized.
I did give a speech on June the 18th 1787 at the convention. Shall I repeat that five hour address for you now? It will explain many things. You can cut it down to four and a half, that'd be great. you mock me, sir, and I resent that but I will leave it to you to to review the speech which talked about the kind of country we should have. One of the key things to me was this notion where Jefferson and I sharply disagreed on the notion of states.
I alone among the founding fathers was blessed by not having a home state. The awkwardness of my birth, notwithstanding, it was still in the Caribbean. So I came to as this lad of 16 on the ship Thunderbolt to the harbor of New York, not being a New Yorker or a Virginian or a Georgian or a Carolinian, but wanting to be an American. And the Articles of Confederation, you will recall this.
initial document for governance after we won our independence largely, although it took till the, yes, with the treaty, the Jay treaty in 94 to get it fully done, but essentially got the Brits out of our way and created an America. But the problem was that out of their previous sphere of a strong central government by the name of King George, the third, there were authors of the articles of confederation.
to empower the states and to have an incredibly weak national government to handle that tiny handful of things Jefferson called it delivering the mail and guarding the coasts that only a central government could do. Well, the problem with this is that it created these What I called jarring, jealous, and perverse petty states.
If you had currency in New York and you wish to go shopping in New Jersey, when you cross the bridge, mid bridge, you would find yourself changing out your coin for New Jersey currency. If you saw thought trade with Georgia, it was essentially an international trade act.
And these petty, perverse, and jealous states were What I call for them to be reduced to mere administrative units, and I believe that because your rights as an American, let me say this very clearly, your rights as an American should not vary based on the accident of the geography of your birth. An American born in Georgia should have the same fundamental rights as an American born in Virginia. Why was that not popular?
Well, because the central government they had seen under George III was so repressive that the idea of another central government was assumed to be repressive, and frankly, without the failure, the roughly decade failure of the Articles, I'm not sure we would have been successful in creating a new Constitution.
We initially And here's where I became involved in a way that your historians may say was a little sneaky , several of us called for a meeting at Annapolis to discuss the shortcomings of the articles. And when we got to Annapolis we pretended that we had a quorum. We did not. We only had four, I believe five states attended, which was not enough.
But we pretended that we did, and in Annapolis we issued a call for a convention in Philadelphia to discuss correcting the flaws of the Articles of Confederation. Now, I, along with others, knew all along that the way we intended to correct them was by getting rid of them. Now, the challenge is the articles did in fact have places which explained how they could be changed, how they could be altered, and how new states could be admitted.
So, it was not that the articles were without a mechanism of change, they were just so entirely flawed. As to make no sense at all. And so we began our Constitutional Convention with General Washington as the leader, as the chair of the convention. He spoke only two times, you can perhaps ask me about those later if you're interested. But we did over the months come up with what became the American Constitution, roughly. Initially, there were two major plans.
Called the New Jersey Plan, which was essentially a warmed over Articles of Confederation that the small states liked. And we had what we called the Virginia Plan, which was what the large states liked. And it was very similar, though not identical, to what ultimately got passed. It had things like a three person presidency and such. And then I mentioned my speech of the 18th.
There are those who question my motivation because in that speech on the 18th of June, I went on, as I say, for some five hours explaining why we needed an even stronger plan, an even stronger central government. I called in that speech for a president for life, I'm sorry, what did you say? Did you say president for life? With the monarchy just 20 years behind, this seemed like an odd position yet in all of his brilliance, Hamilton will clear this one up as well.
In the next episode, he'll also answer the question of which of the founding fathers was the weakest he'll discuss when he stole cannons from the British. And he'll talk about his incredible wife, Eliza who left behind a magnificent legacy of her own. Oh, and one more thing. He's definitely going to insult me a few more times. In fact, right after the recording had stopped, he said, you know, Mr. Dean, one more thing.
You don't many of the things that you've said to me today what have resulted in a duel in my time. I think I need to watch my step with these founding fathers. I'm glad you're enjoying the podcast. And if you haven't yet subscribed now, and we'll see you at the next episode of the calling history podcast with part two of Alexander Hamilton