Re-educating 'em

[Anmar]

Some would say that that was the day that the Federalist party died.

[pamsback]

 I'd say so Warph....

[flintauqua]

July 11, 1804
Asked if they were prepared, being answered in the affirmative, [Pendleton] gave the word 'present' as had been agreed on, and both of the parties took aim and fired in succession. The intervening time is not expressed as the seconds do not precisely agree on that point. The pistols were discharged within a few seconds of each other, and the fire of Col. Burr took effect. Genl. Hamilton almost instantly fell. Col. Burr then advanced toward Genl. Hamilton with a manner and gesture that appeared to Genl. Hamilton's friend to be expressive of regret, but without speaking turned about and withdrew, being urged from the field by his friend. . . . We conceive it proper to add that the conduct of the parties in that interview was perfectly proper as suited the occasion.

Statement for press prepared immediately after the duel by William Van Ness [Burr's second] and Nathaniel Pendleton [Hamilton's second], July 11, 1804

[Warph]

Alexander Hamilton, the author of most of the Federalist Papers, George Washington's closest advisor and the first secretary of the Treasury, died in agony 36 hours later after the duel. Aaron Burr headed off on a tour of the Southern states, where his friends welcomed him enthusiastically; he returned to preside over the Senate in November. Dueling was a felony in New York and New Jersey, and to kill a man in a duel a capital crime, but Burr was never tried for shooting Hamilton.

Arnold Rogow, a distinguished political scientist, boldly addresses both questions in "A Fatal Friendship." Previous writers have tended to cast the eminent patriot Hamilton as the victim of an amoral, ambitious Burr--which is unsurprising given that Burr's next major career move was to organize a conspiracy in 1805 to detach the western territories from the United States, conquer Mexico and set himself up as ruler of both.

Rogow by contrast maintains that Burr was no more of a political loose cannon, and less of a psychological one, than his victim; that Burr has had a worse reputation than the facts warrant and that Hamilton has enjoyed a better one than he deserves. Rogow paints the two as morally equivalent and equally flawed characters: arrogant, vain, impecunious, sexually voracious, power-hungry and insatiably ambitious. Hamilton knew how to antagonize Burr because he saw Burr as his own mirror image. Because Hamilton knew exactly what he was doing, he bears equal blame for his death.

Elements of this interpretation have been around for a long time. In 1889, Henry Adams surmised in his "History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison" that Hamilton, depressed at the death of his son and the big decline of the Federalist party, deliberately provoked a duel to end his life without the taint of suicide.

Claude Bowers concluded in 1925, on the basis of detailed comparisons, that "no other two men in the America of their day were so much alike" as Burr and Hamilton. Four decades ago Douglass Adair argued that the qualities Hamilton detested in Burr were his own, projected in "the process by which a man identifies in an antagonist his own secret desires." Rogow goes further, suggesting that Hamilton's obsession with Burr grew out of a repressed homoerotic attraction, "experienced as unacceptable in terms of prevailing social and introjected models of masculinity."

Hamilton so loathed Burr--and himself--that he sacrificed his life in order to destroy Burr's future in politics.  (Hmmmm.... maybe this is why Hamilton discharged his pistol in the air rather than at Burr... Warph)