It was Aaron Burr.
*
You have attributed to Burr the most atrocious and unprincipled of crimes. If he has not called upon you, he is either guilty, or the most despicable bastard in the universe, so degraded as to permit even General Hamilton to slander him with impunity.
—JAMES CHEETHAM, EDITOR OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN
Burr was a man without a party.
By contesting the tie election in 1800, he’d gambled and lost. Jefferson despised him. He was vice president in name only. So, naturally, he was now running for governor of New York. And he was doing it against his fellow Republican—Morgan Lewis, the trial judge Alexander had argued before in the libel case—in a move that split that party in two.
“Burr can’t win,” I said, nearly laughing at the preposterousness of it. Burr was universally detested as a lecher and an immoral cheat, even by those who’d voted for him.
“Eliza,” my husband said, with an impatient tone he used only when a law clerk was slow to understand him. “Not a single Federalist has come forward to run against either of them.”
That was the state of our party’s demoralization, given the mud that would inevitably be slung at anyone who dared to serve an ungrateful public. Perhaps democracy would always naturally devolve to a state when only a man like Burr—a greedy libertine without any care for what the world might say about him—would stand for election. For what gentleman could ever wish to expose his wife and children to the calumnies that had been visited upon us?
“Do you mean to run for the governorship?” I asked, upon a hard swallow, bracing myself to support him wholeheartedly if he were to say yes.
But Alexander barked a laugh. “And damn the state, if not the whole country, when I lose? No. You’ve seen how people greet me at polling stations.”
Reluctantly, I admitted, “You have, perhaps, a character too frank and independent for a democratic people. At least in the present climate.”
“Unfortunately, my angel, you have the right of it. But something must be done.” He shook his head and thumped his hand on the table.
In the days that followed, it became increasingly clear that Alexander was right. Something must be done. Because Burr wasn’t merely running for governor, he was also encouraging a new movement in northern states angered by Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory. Northerners feared that the new lands would favor slavery. And their solution was secession.
“Burr won’t be satisfied until he breaks this union.” Alexander raged inside the little room by the front door that he’d commandeered as his office and painted an incongruously cheerful shade of green. “How quickly people forget all that for which we fought!”
Even though I feared he’d disturb Ana where she sat peacefully stitching a pillow, or awaken the baby upstairs in the nursery, I was pleased to see that leonine spark return to his eye. It was as if he believed himself, again, a winter soldier, fighting frightening odds in a war for the country itself. “Which is why you must remind them by recruiting a Federalist to run against Burr.”
So we hosted a dinner party. A lavish one, where, having banished the children upstairs, we threw open the doors and hired musicians to play on the grounds. We accepted the compliments of everyone as they entered the front hall and saw the elegant painting of Washington and the bust of Alexander when he was secretary of the treasury, carved in the style of a Roman senator.
I worked the men’s wives, trying to detect if any of their husbands should be willing to stand as a candidate for governor. And Angelica, still beguiling in a gown of blue satin with a golden belt, embroidered in the pattern of a Greek key, tried to recruit promising men to the cause.
Amidst the clink of glasses and forks upon my pink and yellow floral china plates, I overheard my husband say to his old faithful Federalist lieutenants, “For God’s sake, cease these threats about a separation in the Union. It must hang together as long as it can be made to!”
If Burr got in, there’d be no more United States, he believed. Just North and South. But still no Federalist would run, leaving Alexander with an unthinkable alternative. Once again, he’d have to champion a Republican. First Jefferson. Now Morgan Lewis.
Finally, he set his mind to do just that, and the campaign against Aaron Burr began in deadly earnest. Alexander made speeches against Burr, held forth at dinner parties, and used whatever sway he still possessed to argue against Burr’s candidacy. As if, unable to save our son, Alexander became determined to at least save the union.