The Burr-Hamilton Duel

On the morning of July 11, 1804, two of America's most prominent founders met at the dueling grounds in Weehawken, New Jersey, as the sun rose over the Hudson River. Vice President Aaron Burr raised his pistol and fired. Alexander Hamilton fell, struck in the abdomen, a pistol ball driving toward his spine. He would be carried across the river to New York City and would linger in agony through the following morning — but the shot that ended his life also ended the Federalist era of American politics.

The men who met that morning had been rivals for years, their enmity running deeper than personal dislike. Hamilton, born on the Caribbean island of Nevis around 1755, had risen from poverty to become the architect of America's financial system. As the first Secretary of the Treasury under George Washington — a general for whom Hamilton had served as aide-de-camp during the Revolution — he built the national bank, assumed the states' war debts, and laid the framework for a powerful commercial republic. Burr, born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1756, was his temperamental and ideological opposite: charming where Hamilton was abrasive, pragmatic where Hamilton was doctrinaire, and firmly aligned with the Democratic-Republicans where Hamilton led the Federalists.

Their rivalry crystallized into something lethal during the presidential election of 1800, when Jefferson and Burr tied in the electoral college, throwing the election into the House of Representatives. Hamilton, despite his reservations about Jefferson, viewed Burr as the greater threat to the republic. He reportedly described his opposition to Burr as "a religious duty" and lobbied members of Congress to choose Jefferson. The intervention worked: Jefferson became president, Burr became vice president, and Burr became a political outcast in the administration he was meant to serve.