Hi, I'm the History Guy. I have a
degree in history and I love history, and if you love history too,
this is the channel for you. Alexander Hamilton, the fiery founding father who
came to America as an immigrant and an orphan and wound up being one of the most powerful people
in the nation, has received a lot of attention, lately owing to the 2015 musical based on
the biography by Ron Chernow. And that is well deserved, Alexander Hamilton was brilliant
and a complex and interesting personality who played a vital role in the founding of the
nation. But he is almost as well known for the circumstances of his death, shot to death
in a duel with Aaron Burr, the Vice President of the United States, as anything he did in life.
And as intriguing as the Hamilton-Burr duel was, it is even more interesting if you look at it in
context of Alexander Hamilton's history with the practice of dueling. Over his lifetime, Alexander
Hamilton was a party to no less than 10 ‘Affairs of Honor’. Seven as a primary and three others
as someone else's second. And it's even more interesting when you look at the duels that were
engaged by members of his family, and the odd string of coincidences that tied together the
bizarre history of Alexander Hamilton's duels. The story begins with the infamous
Hamilton-Reynolds affair. In November of 1792, a man named James Reynolds, was accused of financial
crimes that involved public funds. When he was arrested he tried to negotiate a deal by making an
astounding claim. The Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton he said, was involved in the
scheme. This information was passed to three US senators who went to confront Hamilton about the
charges, one of those being the Virginia Senator, James Monroe, a future president of the United
States. But when they talked to Hamilton the story took even another twist, Hamilton claimed
that his financial dealings with Reynolds had nothing to do with the financial scheme, but
instead were blackmail payments that Hamilton was making because he had had an illicit affair
with Reynolds wife, and Hamilton had letters to prove his story. As the affair would have been
a scandal, but would not have been illegal, the Senators agreed to drop the matter, and all
agreed that they would keep the details secret, and the entire thing seemed to blow
over...that is until five years later. In 1792, a man named James Thompson Callender,
a scandal-mongering journalist and pamphleteer, published a pamphlet that included details on
Hamilton's affair with Mrs. Reynolds, and included some of the letters that had been part of the 1792
investigation. Embarrassed, Hamilton was forced to release, publicly, details of the affair in order
to free himself from charges that he participated in the financial scandal. Hamilton was incensed
and he was convinced that the person who had released the letters was James Monroe. Monroe
denied the charge and the two came very close to calling each other ‘Liars’, a claim that could
very easily lead to one or the other demanding satisfaction in a gentleman's duel. The situation
got so bad that in one face-to-face meeting, Alexander Hamilton brought his brother-in-law,
English businessman James Barker Church with him, just in case it turned into a duel then and
there and he had to have a second with him. But the reason the two ended up not fighting a
duel had to do with a third party. James Monroe had invited a mutual acquaintance who they
had both met while fighting the Revolution, to be the intermediary as they argued back and
forth, and that intermediary thought that they were both being childish, and knew that a duel
could end their careers. And he was the one that was able to tamp down the rhetoric and prevent the
two from escalating to the point where they had to meet on the ‘Field of Honor’, something that could
have cost either of them their lives and almost certainly would have cost both of them their
political careers. And that person, who prevented Alexander Hamilton from having a career-ending
duel with James Monroe, was Aaron Burr. Burr and Hamilton had a history, at one time
they had been friends but that really changed in 1791. At the time, the US Senate seat from New
York was selected not by a vote of the people, but by vote of the New York legislature. And Aaron
Burr had managed to scheme through the legislature to unseat the incumbent, Revolutionary War General
Philip Schuyler. Philip Schuyler was the father of Elizabeth Schuyler, who was married to Alexander
Hamilton, and Hamilton was convinced Burr was a rogue from the moment that he out-schemed his
father-in-law for that Senate seat. But Alexander Hamilton was not the first of Philip Skyler's
sons-in-laws to fight a duel with Aaron Burr. John Barker Church, the English businessman whom
Hamilton had brought with him in the meeting with Monroe, in case they had to fight a duel then
and there, was married to another of Skyler's daughters, and he hated Burr just as much as
Hamilton did. And in 1799, he accused Burr of taking bribes, that led to a challenge, which led
to a duel at the dueling grounds in Weehawken, New Jersey. Burr fired first, he missed. Church
fired second and he missed, but he came very close, his bullet tore Burr's cloak. Just a
little bit over and it would have prevented the duel that killed Alexander Hamilton. Their
honor satisfied, they did not fire a second shot. A poignant part of Act two of the musical Hamilton
is the death of Hamilton's son Philip who was killed, of course, in a duel. That duel which was
fought in 1801, was fought between Hamilton's son Philip, and a New York City lawyer who had made
disparaging comments about Alexander Hamilton. And Philip was shot to death in the duel, which
was fought at the dueling grounds in Weehawken, New Jersey, the same place where Philip's
Uncle had fought the duel with Aaron Burr. And was fought with dueling pistols that
Philip Hamilton had borrowed from his Uncle, John Barker Church, the same pistols that
Church had used in his duel with Aaron Burr. In 1804, Aaron Burr, who was then Vice-President
of the United States, decided to run for Governor of New York, and he lost that election largely
because of opposition by Alexander Hamilton. When some disparaging comments about Burr,
made by Hamilton, were published in the paper, it led to a challenge and a duel. That famous duel
was fought at the dueling grounds in Weehawken, New Jersey, the same grounds where Hamilton's
brother in law had dueled the same man, Aaron Burr, and where Hamilton's son
Philip Hamilton had been killed. And the pistols used in the duel were the
set that belonged to John Barker Church, the same set of pistols that had killed Hamilton's
son in 1801, and nearly killed Aaron Burr in 1799. Hamilton shot high, Burr struck Hamilton
in the chest, a fatal and famous blow. Dueling was not uncommon amongst the gentlemen
class of early America, but fatalities were. Hamilton's participation in so many challenges,
even though he only fought the one duel, shows how excessive his sense of Honor was, but
of course the same could be said of Aaron Burr. It is however a supreme irony that Aaron Burr,
who had kept Alexander Hamilton from fighting an ill-advised duel with James Monroe, later became
the hand of Hamilton's death. The duel effectively ended Burr's political career, eventually he
was accused of treason in a supposed conspiracy with Spain, and although he was acquitted he
never again served in public office. To this day he has a reputation, some say unfairly,
of being a traitor to the nation. There's still disagreement over exactly what happened
in the duel between Hamilton and Burr because no one who was present could say definitively
who had fired first. Some claim that Hamilton had missed on purpose, and in fact he left a
note behind saying that he planned to do that, although that note might have been a ruse.
But others claim that Burr fired first, and it was Burr’s shot that caused Hamilton to
miss, and that entire question took a bizarre turn in 1976. You see this infamous set of pistols that
was owned by John Barker Church, and that was used in all three of those duels involving Hamilton
and Burr, were purchased in London in 1797, and they stayed in the Church family until
1930, when they were sold to Chase Manhattan Bank. Which was ironically, a descendent of the
Manhattan company, which had been founded by, Aaron Burr. And Chase Manhattan Bank still owns
the pistols and sometimes puts them on display. But in 1976 Chase Manhattan Bank allowed the
Smithsonian Institution to inspect the pistols and there they found a shocking twist. The
pistols had been designed...to cheat. One of the pistols had a special mechanism built in
so that if you push the trigger far forward, it would create a pistol with a hair-trigger,
which might allow you to fire a hair faster than someone you were fighting in a duel. Something
that would have been incredibly dishonorable. And as those pistols belong to Hamilton's family, it's
likely that Hamilton knew about that modification and Burr did not. And so some claim that the
reason that Alexander Hamilton fired high in his duel with Aaron Burr, was because he had chosen
to cheat, using a pistol with a hair trigger, and that caused him to fire early as he was
lowering his pistol. And of course that's an unanswerable question, and maybe that is fitting
with the most enigmatic of America's founding fathers. It is certainly another twist, in the
bizarre history of Alexander Hamilton's duels. In the History Guy and I hope you enjoyed this
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