A lesson learned from DUEL: ALEXANDER HAMILTON, AARON BURR, AND THE FUTURE OF AMERICA, by Thomas Fleming

Petty grudges and personal feuds can destroy promising futures.

    Once in a blue moon I manage to get over to our neighborhood used bookstore and find older gems that I missed along the way (an experience I highly recommend for book lovers everywhere). On a recent journey there I stumbled on Thomas Fleming's 1999 book Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Future of America, a topic I knew embarrassingly little about given the public adoration of the Hamilton play! I actually had encountered Fleming himself several years back through his fascinating book The Illusion of Victory, a revisionist take on World War I that essentially argued America's entire participation in that war had been a disastrous mistake, a topic that is still very much open to debate amongst historians. Reading Duel, I gained fascinating insight on the most famous murder of the Revolutionary war generation, and in particular on just how pointless and destructive personal grudges can be in the lives of people who should otherwise have achieved greater things.
    Fleming's book is long and takes a while to really get to the meat of the topic; his 100 pages or so analyzing the actual Hamilton/Burr duel and the subsequent fallout from it are gripping, but it takes a long time for him to get there, as much of the book is devoted to studying the internal dynamics of New York politics in the early decades of American History (even this History lover had a hard time keeping up with all the characters and their changing alliances). Fleming paints the two main figures of the book as men of great deeds and accomplishments who also had deep flaws that set them on tragic paths. A Revolutionary War hero, absolutely brilliant mind, and a visionary in seeing the potential of America as a modern economic world power--Hamilton alas was also a man of intense personal passions that led him astray from his wife and family, and also an avowed elitist who viewed ordinary Americans as idiots utterly unqualified for participating in politics. On his end, Burr was a brilliant and charismatic man who helped to develop the American political system, yet was also ambitious and conniving and all too willing to abandon political principles if he thought it would aid his quest for higher office. Together, the two men might have been able to lead the Federalist political party (descended from the Washington presidency) into a modern world and stood as a respected opposition to Thomas Jefferson's Democratic Republicans.
    Alas, they developed a deep animosity toward each other that was partly based on both of them wanting to be seen as the great future American leader, and not being willing to abide by the success of the other in that role. When the two began trading a series of angry letters over who had sabotaged Burr's campaign for governor in 1804, either one could have ended it by backing down and letting go of personal slights, but instead their pride demanded they escalate each correspondence by demanding "explanations" of perceived insults. When Burr finally challenged Hamilton to a duel, he was completely unaware that Hamilton (who had just watched one of his sons be killed in an equally pointless duel) had sworn to never fire on Burr and to simply throw away his shots; on his end, Hamilton put on the appearance of taking the duel completely seriously and carefully practicing aiming, which only served to further amp up Burr. In just a few moments of blind firing, Burr cut down Hamilton who could have been a great leader for America in the chaos leading up to the War of 1812, and simultaneously destroyed his own reputation as the nation recoiled from the act (which is widely credited to leading to dueling bans in the Northern states).
    Ultimately, Burr and Hamilton's refusal to deescalate their petty feud crippled the lives and careers of both men, and damaged any organized opposition to Jefferson and his political party's agenda for decades to come. Burr eventually proved somewhat unhinged (his dreams of a Napoleonic-like American empire of seceded Western states eventually saw him put on trial for treason), but who knows what more productive adventures he and Hamilton might have led had they not been so obsessed with protecting their manly honor. In a modern world where far too many leaders allow petty personal grievances to sabotage diplomacy and peace processes, a lesson can be learned from America's most famous flawed duelists that sometimes it's better to just be the better person, let the insults slide, and walk away. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A lesson learned from LINCOLN VS. DAVIS, by Nigel Hamilton

Your strength can quickly become your weakness, if you cannot pivot to changing circumstances. Nigel Hamilton’s Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents is an intriguing and at times frustrating book, especially if you’re well familiar with the Lincoln presidency and its major outline. The book sells itself as a study of the two leaders’ approaches to war leadership, yet it focuses almost exclusively on the first two years of the war (1860-1862), i.e. the time period when Lincoln often looked like a commander-in-chief who was totally in over his head, while Davis looked like he might very well successfully lead the Confederate States of America in a successful bid for independence. The book is a great read, but also frustrating in how limited its focus is; that said, Hamilton does a superb job in setting up the book’s heel turn in its final section, when Lincoln suddenly pivoted into greatness while Davis floundered his new “country” into oblivion, and that was in how Lincoln rec...
Read more

A lesson learned from YOU HAVE TO BE PREPARED TO DIE BEFORE YOU CAN BEGIN TO LIVE: TEN WEEKS IN BIRINGHAM THAT CHANGED AMERICA, by Paul Kix

There's never an "ideal" time to confront injustice--you just need to do it.      Lately I've been on a roll reading great books, but Paul Kix's new book recounting Martin Luther King's most famous protest campaign is a real page-turner, and one that feels deeply relevant in an era where people feel injustice happening on a global scale. As a man who has an interracial family, Kix tells a deeply personal story of how MLK, whose Civil Rights Movement had faltered and struggled for years to make major progress, finally awoke the conscious of America (and its ruling brothers JFK and RFK) with his Birmingham Campaign of 1963. Many of the Civil Rights Movement's most iconic moments came in the wake of Birmingham, and what was ironic about its success was that everyone told MLK it was an "ill-timed" protest--that he was better off waiting and hoping for more gradual progress.     MLK took on great personal risk when he and his fellow civil rights leade...
Read more

A lesson learned from THE UNEXPECTED ABIGAIL ADAMS, by John Smith

Nostalgia be damned—life was MUCH harder in the past, especially for women.   Abigail Adams is perhaps the single most famous woman of the generation of America’s Founding, and as such she has long been the subject of much fascination and study amongst American historians. Interest in her especially piqued in the wake of modern feminist movements, as people gravitated toward an outspoken and clearly powerful woman in an era where such things were very often frowned upon. In John Smith’s highly readable biography of her, he demonstrates how a major reason for her success was in how perfectly she navigated what people saw as her “proper place,” while also pushing back against it at every opportunity. However, one thing that struck me reading about her life was how brutal and short life could be for pre-modern women, even for the most privileged and powerful. 18 th century people suffered from loss on a level it would be hard for us to conceive of today, and we have forgotten all th...
Read more