With the confrontation between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton working its way toward its latest incarnation, what with Lin-Manuel Miranda (as Hamilton) and Leslie Odom, Jr. (as Burr), facing each other for Best Actor in a Musical at the Tonys, on Sunday—and let it be said that, while Miranda is a genius, Odom deserves the acting prize more—the ancient New York rivalry has taken on new life, and then some. The Burr-Hamilton rivalry had haunted the imagination of the city long before Miranda got to it, of course, occasioning in these pages James Thurber’s great story “A Friend to Alexander,” about an ordinary Thurber husband haunted by Burr’s imagined perfidy in the famous fatal duel. But other relics of this competition can be found in improbable New York places, and none more than at the New York Society Library.
The Society Library, as readers of Ron Chernow’s fine foundational biography of Hamilton know, played an outsize role in the run-up to the American Revolution, chiefly because it was one of the few educational institutions in New York that was outside the hold of the Crown or the Church. Formed as a kind of book co-op, in 1754, it blessedly persists as a lending library to this day, having long ago moved uptown, to the north side of Seventy-ninth Street, between Madison and Park, after a long stay on University Place.
Astonishingly, a little inquiry proves that the library not only still keeps records of all the books that Burr and Hamilton borrowed (and, mostly, returned) but also has many of the books themselves—not merely the same titles, but the exact same books that Hamilton and Burr handled and thumbed and read and learned from. What’s more, it turns out that, by a series of benevolent bequests, the library also has a few choice and telling letters from Burr and Hamilton and even from Eliza Hamilton—“best of wives and best of women,” as Manuel’s lyrics have it—all speaking around, and eventually to, the famous and fatal affair. So, hearing this news, we quickly—as a writer would have put it in this magazine in Thurber’s day—hied ourselves over to the Society Library’s reading room, and went to work to find out more.
Hamilton’s borrowings, a perusal of the “charging ledgers” reveals, were relatively modest: despite his non-stop habits of work and composition, he found time to read, or anyway borrow, two novels, “The Amour of Count Palviano and Eleanora” and, as listed in the ledger, “Edward Mortimer (hist. of) by a lady.” (Could he conceivably have borrowed these books for some other, less-driven family member? Or have we rather underrated Hamilton’s taste for exotic romance?)
But Burr turns out to have been a voracious, monumental reader, the kind of guy libraries are made for. The books he borrowed over the years included James Boswell’s “The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides” and “The Life of Samuel Johnson”; a book called “Revolutions in Geneva”; a volume of Jonathan Swift; Edward Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (the first volume of which appeared in that big year, 1776). Burr read, or borrowed, nine volumes of Voltaire, and his entertainments included the novels “The Mysterious Husband” and, make of it what you will, “The False Friend.”
If there was a core interest to Burr’s reading, though, it lay in the great event of the era—much greater on a world scale than our own rebellion—and that was the French Revolution. Much of Burr’s reading turned around the event. He read voraciously and, it seems, ecumenically on France’s overturning, borrowing Jean-Gabriel Peltier’s “A Faithful Narrative of the Revolution” as well as both Robert Bisset’s admiring “The Life of Edmund Burke” and James Mackintosh’s “Vindication” of the French Revolution.
Among the surviving copies of books borrowed by Burr that are still intact and readable at the library are Boswell’s “Tour,” dense with Dr. Johnson’s table talk and his attacks on the “liberals” of his day, including David Hume, as well as a copy of William Wycherley’s plays. There is a particularly intriguing Burr-borrowed book called “The Whig Club,” which a little research shows was written by one Charles Pigott—the copy itself is anonymous—an odd character who seems to have written both for and, in this book, against the French Revolution. Pigott was famous in London in his day as a kind of Enlightenment-era Nick Denton, one of that type of journalist who confuses malicious curiosity about other people’s sex lives with staunch political integrity—and of whom contemporary life, as the eighteenth century would have said, is not absent. “The Whig Club” is basically a scandal sheet in volume form about the Whigs—i.e., liberal aristocrats—of the period and what they got up to. The names of the offenders are offered in a pitifully transparent disguise (Richard Brinsley Sheridan, for instance, is represented as R____ B____ S____), but someone has gone through the library’s copy with a pen and filled in almost all the blanks. (This is unlikely to have been Burr himself, but it did mean that there could have been no confusion about who the targets of the libels were.)
It is compelling to turn its pages and feel oneself beginning to bristle with indignation—and curiosity—at sex gossip that is now almost a quarter of a millennium old. Whatever else he made of it, and whether or not he filled in those blanks, Burr must have entirely enjoyed the account of John B. Church—the guy who actually married Hamilton’s beloved Angelica Schuyler (currently played so memorably, at the Richard Rodgers, by Renée Elise Goldsberry). “He embarked for New York,” we are told, “leaving his [London] creditors to lament their credulity.” Arriving in the colonies, “the boldness of his language introduced him to the acquaintance and the table of General Schuyler; he availed himself of the weakness of the daughter of that officer to obtain her affections. . . . As the struggle daily inclined to the side of America, Mr. Church advanced in importance, and launched into more extensive projects; and when the Court of Versailles threw off the mask, and signed eventually its own fate by espousing the part of the colonists, Mr. Church had influence to obtain the situation of commissary to the French army. He did not neglect the opportunities that offered.” Of his various alleged offenses, the author insists that they are “a mystery of iniquity too complicated to be unravelled, too black to be conceived. . . . His cupidity seemed to augment in proportion to his acquisitions.” (Church gets off lightly, most of his fellow “Whigs” having their intimate lives ripped open and then flayed alive.) Yet the politics of any time are always more entangled than history lets us see. At one point, Pigott calls on David Hume—whom, in Boswell, Burr would have been reading about as a dangerous radical—as the source of sound advice on the dangers of revolutionary action.
Turning to the letters, one finds new registers of emotion available, and one understands again why. Hamilton shows his political nous, as he makes a brisk but somewhat undermining recommendation of a Roman sculptor planning an American monument:
The last clause—meaning, obviously, please don’t waste money on monuments that you could spend on good deeds now, presumably including such things as building libraries—was a brisk way of being a public patron while slightly discouraging the plan in private. In any case, the monument never got off, or on, the ground, and, a little research shows, poor Ceracchi went back to Europe, where he eventually got guillotined in the French Revolution, one more casualty of that maelstrom. (One suspects that had Hamilton been more encouraging, New York would have kept a mediocre piece of neoclassical statuary, and Ceracchi his head.)
A heartbreaking letter remains from Eliza Hamilton, seeking help from Charles Goodhue after Alexander’s death at Burr’s aim:
Several thoughts encircle the enthralled peruser, as the eighteenth century stylists would also have said, of these documents and books and ledgers. First, how small and incestuous the circles of the Revolution were in New York, and how remote they really were from what they, too, perceived as the cockpit of action, in Europe—Burr and Hamilton had still to draw on Boswell and Burke with an avidity that Boswell and Burke would not quite have drawn on them. The tables, turned in the centuries since, make us forget how provincial our affairs might seem, to others and us. And then, re-reading Burr’s reading, one realizes how genuinely complicated the affairs of men were in that time—Burke’s account of the Revolution was not wrong, but neither were its defendants wrong, either. A muddle of good motives and bad acts had to be untangled then, as they still do now. Most of all, one is reminded, with the score of “Hamilton” running relentlessly through one’s head, that all of the players in this drama are again alive because a remarkable artist made them live again. To hold the paper of Eliza’s pathetic missive in one’s hands, and to think of Phillipa Soo bringing the woman back to life thirty blocks away, is a reminder of how little one can ever really know how human stories will be told and retold. Slipping back out onto the noise of East Seventy-ninth Street, three tentative conclusions suggest themselves: art alone makes old things new; the more you read, the less you know for certain; and self-government, of every kind, is hard.
