Hamilton: Duel to the Death (Part 3)

On July 4, 1804, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr sat at the same dinner table in New York, just one week before they would face each other with pistols on a New Jersey riverbank. A guest noted that Burr was "silent, gloomy, sour," while Hamilton "entered with glee into the gay of a convivial party, and even sang an old military song." This contrast captures the strange, suspended quality of the days leading up to the most famous duel in American history—a duel that would kill one man, destroy the other, and become the defining drama of the early Republic.

The Two Men and Their Rivalry

Alexander Hamilton was born in 1755 on the island of Nevis, the illegitimate son of a Scottish father and a Huguenot mother. Orphaned young, he was sent to New York for his education, where he became a pamphleteer for the American cause, joined the Continental Army, and was talent-spotted as chief staff aide to George Washington. After the war, he wrote the majority of the Federalist Papers, became the first Treasury Secretary, and championed a strong central government, a national bank, and close ties with Britain. His Federalist Party squared off against Thomas Jefferson's Democratic Republicans in the first American party system. Hamilton was brilliant, energetic, and a superb writer—but also arrogant, acerbic, and gifted at turning allies into ene