Dining with the Hamiltons (and the Bonapartes), 1804

Susan reporting,

One of the reasons I especially enjoy research with handwritten letters is being able to see the little things that reproduced transcriptions often omit. The excerpt, above, is from the bottom corner of a letter than Alexander Hamilton wrote to Victor Marie du Pont de Nemours in May, 1804. Most of the letter concerns the repayment of a debt, with a complicated explanation of the principal and the interest accrued. As dry as this may be, the letter has importance because of the two parties corresponding - the former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury writing to a prominent French-American diplomat and businessman.

But it's the non-business part of the letter that intrigued me.  Aside from the fact that I wish I could end letters with Hamilton's grandiloquent yet breezy closing sentence ("The multiplicity of my affairs will excuse my delay in completing this business"), it's that little postscript to the left that caught my eye.

P.S. I sent you some days since a note requesting you to meet Mr. Bonaparte at my house on Sunday three oClock to dine. I hope to have the pleasure of seeing you.

Yes, Hamilton is displaying his typical impatience because Du Pont hadn't responded to his first invitation, but he's also describing what must have been quite a grand dinner. Mr. Bonaparte was Jérôme Bonaparte, the youngest brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of France (and soon to become Emperor.) While visiting America, the nineteen-year-old Jérôme had fallen in love with Elizabeth "Betsey" Patterson of Baltimore and had married her. An American merchant's daughter did not fit into Napoleon's dynastic plans, however, and the First Consul had already made his displeasure known.

But in May of 1804, Jérôme and Betsey were glamorous newlyweds, and having them as guests must have been a social coup. In addition to the French-born Du Pont, the guest list included Hamilton's good friend, statesman and bon vivant Gouverneur Morris, who had served as the American Minister Plenipotentiary to France. Considering that Hamilton also spoke French fluently, it's easy to imagine French - the language of 18thc diplomacy and worldly sophistication - as the language of choice during the meal.

Several days after this letter, Hamilton wrote a quick note to his wife, Eliza Schuyler Hamilton, to let her know that "On Sunday Bonaparte & wife...with dine with you. We shall be 16 in number...." Because this note is undated, it's impossible to tell exactly how much warning Hamilton gave Eliza before the dinner. At this time, he had his law office in what is now lower Manhattan, and often remained there overnight instead of making the long trek (which could take a couple of hours, depending on the weather) by horse or carriage to the family's country house, The Grange, in the then-rural northern part of Manhattan. Eliza and the couple's younger children were living at The Grange, which would have been site of the dinner.

In the same note, Hamilton asks Eliza to send the "coachee" to town on Saturday - perhaps he intended to provide transportation for at least some of his guests - and the "waggon", probably for more provisions for the meal.  He also says that it was "my intention to get out Gentis and perhaps Contoix"; Gentis had been employed by the Hamiltons as a cook, and Contoix had also worked for the family. Clearly Hamilton was planning an impressive dinner.

Now Eliza was an accomplished hostess, and I'm betting that none of this fazed her. She would have handled French guests, extra servants, and an elegant meal with gracious aplomb. While sixteen guests could have been a tight fit in The Grange's dining room, right, the accommodating design of the house would have let her open the doors into the parlor and add another leaf or two to the table. I can also imagine Hamilton himself fussing over every detail of his dinner from the menu to the wines, and sparing no expense, either. With the tall windows open to catch the breezes from the river, it must have been a merry and pleasurable evening indeed.

But the hindsight of history casts an undeniable shadow over this luxurious little dinner.
A little over a year later, the marriage of Betsey and Jérôme Bonaparte would be annulled by Napoleon. Betsey would eventually return alone to America with their infant son, while Jérôme would marry the German princess his brother had chosen. At the time of this dinner, Hamilton had already begun exchanging barbs with another New York lawyer, a conflict that would fester and escalate throughout the spring and early summer. This dinner took place on May 13, 1804. Almost exactly two months later, on July 12, Alexander Hamilton would die of wounds suffered in his duel with Aaron Burr.

Thanks to Lucas R. Clawson, reference archivist & Hagley historian, Hagley Museum & Library, for sharing this letter with me.

Above: Detail of a letter from Alexander Hamilton to Victor Marie du Pont de Nemours, May 1804; collection of Winterthur Museum.
Lower right: Dining room at The Grange, New York, NY. Photo ©2017 Susan Holloway Scott.

Read more about Eliza and Alexander Hamilton in my latest historical novel I, Eliza Hamilton, now available everywhere.

Hamilton vs. Burr: The Most Infamous Duel in American History, 1804

Susan reporting,

Loretta and I have been friends forever, and between us we've written a LOT of books. Over the years, there's been much commiseration over characters that don't behave, or plots that are hopelessly knotted, or cover art that's just so not what we'd imagined. But we had a first with our two current books: we both wrote stories with duels. (See Loretta's post about dueling pistols here, and a Friday Video about firing 19thc pistols here.)

Since my book - I, Eliza Hamilton - is a historical novel based on the life of the life of the wife of Alexander Hamilton, I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the duel in my story doesn't end happily for my protagonists. Early on the morning of July 11, 1804, Hamilton had himself rowed across the Hudson River to Weehawken, NJ for an "interview", the term for the arranged time for two gentlemen to meet for a duel, with Aaron Burr.  (For the background to the duel and its aftermath, see Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic by Joanne B. Freeman. Wonderfully detailed and readable, this is the same book that Lin-Manuel Miranda consulted while he was writing Hamilton: An American Musical.)

Following the conventions of the day, their seconds watched as witnesses, while the attending physician and the boatmen turned their backs. There was disagreement as to what exactly happened when the two pistols fired. Most believe that Hamilton intentionally fired into the air, satisfying the demands of honor, but keeping to his beliefs as a Christian by not taking another man's life. Burr, however, fired towards Hamilton, severely wounding him.

Partially paralyzed, bleeding profusely, and drifting in and out of consciousness, Hamilton was taken back to Manhattan to the house of Nicholas Bayard, upper right, where he died the following afternoon, surrounded by his grief-stricken family and friends. In addition to his widow Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, he left behind seven children, the youngest still an infant. Less than three years earlier, the Hamiltons' eldest son, Philip, aged 19, had also been killed in a duel defending his father's honor - possibly with the same pistols.

Even in an era long before social media, word of the duel spread swiftly, and by noon all of New York knew of it. The shock, outrage, and sorrow following Hamilton's death were immediate. he had been a popular man in the city he'd made his hometown, and the tragedy of his death plunged New York into deep mourning.

Burr, meanwhile, had fled to avoid being charge with murder. Although he had followed the rules of dueling, Burr was reviled for killing Hamilton, and while the murder charges were eventually dismissed, his life, fortunes, and reputation never recovered.

The entire country was stunned. How could the current vice president of the United States and the former Secretary of the Treasury - both respected gentlemen, lawyers, and veterans from the Revolutionary War - engage in a fatal duel for the sake of honor? The practice was deplored and defended, sermons thundered from pulpits, and the sight of Eliza shrouded in mourning with her fatherless children touched everyone who glimpsed it. Over two hundred years later, the Hamilton-Burr duel remains the most famous/infamous duel in American history, and likely the only one most modern Americans can name.

Within a year of Hamilton's death, a marble monument in his honor had been placed at the site of the duel at Weekhawken, left. Before long, souvenir-seekers had chipped away so many pieces of the marble that the monument was finally taken down around 1820, and later in the century the original dueling grounds were obliterated by railroad construction. Only the pitted marble plaque from the monument's base, lower right, now remains in the New-York Historical Society. Today the duel is commemorated in Weekhawken with a small park at the top of the Palisades overlooking the original site. The park includes a bust statue of Hamilton, the stone where he was traditionally believed to have rested against after being wounded, and a stunning view of the Manhattan skyline. It's become such a popular site for visitors that it now has it has a page on TripAdvisor.

The New-York Historical Society also owns exact replicas of the pistols used in the duel, above. The original 18thc pistols were made by the noted gunsmith Robert Wogdon in London, and belonged to Hamilton's brother-in-law, John Barker Church. The original pistols still exist, and are now in the headquarters of J.P. Morgan & Chase Company. This modern bank is the descendant of The Manhattan Company, founded by Burr in 1799 as a water service company - which quickly evolved into a bank to rival the Bank of New York, founded earlier by Hamilton.

Have I seen the original pistols? No; I haven't the heart (but you, who are of sterner stuff, can see a photo of them here). Seeing the replicas and realizing exactly how large the ball must have been to fit those barrels - and imagining the damage such a ball would cause - was enough for me.

And yes, when I wrote the scene with the aftermath of that duel through Eliza Hamilton's eyes, I cried.

Top: Hamilton-Burr Dueling Pistols, replica set, 1976, New-York Historical Society. Photo ©2017 Susan Holloway Scott.
Upper right: Bayard House (Where Hamilton Died), 1892, New York Public Library.
Middle left: The Monument to Alexander Hamilton by Pavel Petrovich Svinin, c1811-1813, Metropolitan Museum of Art. (black and white reproduction)
Lower right: Location Where Alexander Hamilton was wounded, maker unknown, 1805, New-York Historical Society. Photo ©2017 Susan Holloway Scott

Friday Video: Dueling Pistols in Real Life

Loretta reports:

As promised, today we have some video dealing with early 19th-century pistols.

You might want to watch “A brief introduction to the rules of historical pistol duels” as well, though I ask you to bear in mind that the Code Duello was not followed by everybody everywhere. For the duel in A Duke in Shining Armor, I referred to The Art of Duelling (1836), whose rules are different. This same gun aficionado simulates a duel here. This and today's official video make it clear how difficult it was to shoot accurately, even with the finest pistols and lots of practice. In short, in my story I did take liberties regarding the level of accuracy generally possible.

Though the video doesn't show the loading process in quite as much detail as this Nerdy History Girl could wish, Sklar does give an idea of what was involved in loading a pistol, while his examination of the gun offers a clue to how many things could go wrong—as The Art of Duelling emphasizes.


Video: Showing and firing an antique percussion pistol (Aston 1842)

Image at top is a still from the video. Readers who receive our blog via email might see a rectangle, square, or nothing where the video ought to be. To watch the video, please click on the title to this post or the title of the video.

Dueling Pistols and How They Work

Loretta reports:

A duel figures prominently in A Duke in Shining Armor. I’ve posted about dueling practices (here and here), and will again. Today, though, I thought you might want to take a look at some actual weapons.

The elaborately fitted-out case from the Museum of London features a pair of Flintlock Dueling Pistols of about 1810. (By the time of my story, the men would be using percussion lock pistols. However, the conversion didn’t demand a whole redesign of the pistol. Many flintlocks were easily converted to percussion, as you will discover if you click on the links above.)

According to the entry on the museum website:

“In the case with these pistols are the necessary accessories for cleaning and loading them. These include a brush, a powder flask, a ram rod, a bullet mould and a ladle for pouring the molten lead to make the bullets…The barrels of the pistols are double-stamped with the mark of two crossed sceptres beneath a crown. This records that they were made privately and proofed (test-fired) at the Board of Ordnance proofing house in the Tower of London. The pistols are fitted with rain-proof flash pans, an innovation that kept the powder dry in bad weather. The name on the lockplate 'Toms' is likely to be an engraving error. The pistols were probably made by William Tomes, a gunsmith with a workshop on Whitechapel Road. Tomes was a military contractor who supplied guns to the East India Company."

In my investigations online, however, most of the cases are a little simpler. Preparing, loading, and firing a a gun in the early 1800s was, however, a complicated business. But a video is worth thousands of words: Please watch for a demonstration on Friday's video.

Readers of Georgette Heyer, not to mention numerous other Regency-era authors, will have come upon the name Manton. You can get several close-up views of a Regency era pair of these highly regarded dueling pistols here.

Photographs copyright 2018 Walter M. Henritze III.

The Green Man Inn, Putney Heath

Loretta reports,

The Green Man Inn at the northern end of Putney Heath features in a crucial scene of A Duke in Shining Armor. Like many of the places I use in my books, it did exist. Like not quite so many, it still exists, and so of course I was thrilled to actually pay a visit there during my stay in London last summer.

Many of the old travel books online emphasize the inn’s importance as a resort of highwaymen. However, I’ve focused on its use as a place for bolstering one’s courage before a duel and—for the survivors, a place to calm the nerves with a brandy and soda (as is recommended by my favorite book on dueling, The Art of Dueling).

Duels took place nearby in Putney Heath at dawn or (less usually) dusk. Duelists chose out-of-the way places, like Putney Heath or Battersea Fields because they were reasonably close to London, yet far enough away to reduce chances of the authorities blundering in and spoiling the fun of men trying to kill each other. Duels, though they remained a popular way for gentlemen to settle disputes, were against the law.

Doubtless the landscape has changed over the last century and a half—fewer trees then, for instance, in many places than there are today. Still, given the heath’s reputation as a favorite spot for highwaymen, I suspected it was as easy to find a suitable place, not far from the road yet not visible from it, as it was during our visit. A short walk took us to what looked like an ideal spot: A good sized clearing where the ground was level, offering both combatants a clear sight. Yet the road wasn’t far away, and it was easy to imagine the carriages standing by, ready to take the duelists, alive, wounded, or dead, away.

Images:
The Green Man photograph © 2018 Walter M. Henritze
Green Man, Putney from Charles G. Harper's The Old Inns of Old England : a picturesque account of the ancient and storied hostelries of our own country 1906
Cruikshank, The Point of Honor decided, or the Leaden argument of a Love affaire, from The English Spy, 1825

Please click on images to enlarge.