Hamilton and Burr in Boston (episode 357)

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Jake:
[0:03] Welcome to Hub History, where we go far beyond the freedom trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the hub of the universe.

Hamiltons in Boston

Jake:
[0:14] This is episode 357, Hamilton and Burr in Boston. Hi, I’m Jake. This week, I’m talking about Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr in Boston. For fans of the Hamilton musical, we’ve had lots of past podcast appearances from the cast of characters from the musical. Back in episode 274, we talked about the years when Angelica Schuyler lived under an assumed name in Boston. Thomas Jefferson made an appearance in episode 277 where we cataloged his epic shopping spree in Boston, the Marquis de Lafayette’s at the center of episode 163, which chronicles his many visits to Boston, culminating in his 1825 trip where he carried a keg of soil from Bunker Hill back to France to be buried under. Because he commanded most of the siege of Boston, George Washington has been on the show a lot over the past few months, and even General, instead of me, Charles Lee, made an appearance in our recent episode 341 about the Marblehead schooner that was named after him.

Jake:
[1:23] Over all those episodes, the stars of the show, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, have not appeared in Boston. This week, we’re rectifying that omission. We’ll talk about Hamilton and Burr’s fateful final meeting in Boston, as well as each of their first visits to our fair city.

Jake:
[1:43] But before we talk about Hamilton and Burr in Boston, I just want to pause and say thank you to our most recent sponsors, Maurice M. and John S. Without the support of listeners like Maurice and John, I wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the online mastering service that I use to polish up the show, or the automated transcription that both makes the show accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and makes us easier for search engines to discover, or the research databases and newspaper archives that I use to find sources for the show. It would probably also mean that we wouldn’t be able to pay to maintain the podcast media feed and the show website at hubhistory.com. Maurice signed up to become a Patreon sponsor, making a recurring monthly contribution, while John sent in a one-time gift on PayPal. Both methods of supporting the show matter, they’re appreciated, and they both help me keep making Hub History. So to John, Maurice, and everybody who’s already supporting the show, thank you. And if you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, it’s easy. Just go to patreon.com slash hubhistory or visit hubhistory.com and click on the Support Us link. And thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors.

Hamilton’s First Boston Visit

Jake:
[3:06] 282 years ago this week, Alexander Hamilton arrived in Boston for an initial visit that would last 10 days. During that time, he examined the town’s defenses, dined in the local delicacy, salt cod, and watched a prisoner exchange by the old statehouse, recording all his observations in a detailed travel diary that he called his itinerarium. The itinerarium was later published, and it remains one of the most comprehensive accounts of British North America in the mid-18th century. In a 1967 essay in the journal American Speech, Jeffrey Needler describes its impact. Among the finest American writings of the 18th century, and certainly its best travel book, is the itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton depicts a world almost Chaucerian in breadth, or as in some painting by Bruegel. He paints a scene so peopled with men and activities that the canvas can scarcely contain their tumultuous profusion. Portraiture he always provides, though never as an end in itself.

Jake:
[4:15] Now, fans of the musical and other Hamill nerds will note that the founding father, Alexander Hamilton, was born about 271 years ago. And I just said that Alexander Hamilton visited Boston 282 years ago. So how was he visiting Boston about 11 years before he was born? Well, because I’m cheating. Sorry. This part of the story is not about the founding father, Alexander Hamilton, but rather about a Scottish-born doctor of the same name who lived in Annapolis, Maryland, when he wasn’t traveling. This Alexander Hamilton enslaved a black man named Dromo, who accompanied the doctor on his exploration of the East Coast. It took them about four months to make their way from Annapolis to Boston by horseback and the occasional ferry ride. They followed the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore, then they crossed to the Delaware Bay and the Delaware River up to Philadelphia and Trenton, then ventured over land to the mouth of the Hudson to visit New York. Leaving New York, they took a coastal route along the Long Island Sound, through New Haven and New London and Connecticut, up the Narragansett Bay to Newport and Providence, and then into Massachusetts, where they arrived in the vicinity of Boston on July 18, 1744. Having spent the night before in Bristol, Rhode Island.

Jake:
[5:40] Regular listeners will recognize Hamilton’s route as following the Lower Boston Post Road, which we talked about in episode 352, so it should come as no surprise to learn that he entered town through Dedham, describing his view of the Blue Hills along the way. The doctor arrived in Boston at about 8 p.m. and went straight to a tavern to arrange lodging for himself, the enslaved Dromo, and their horses, writing, The tavern where the doctor stayed would later be known as the Bunch of Grapes, which is remembered as a gathering place for patriots in the years leading up to our American Revolution. It was located at the corner of King Street and Mackerel Lane. Today, a plaque noting the former location of the bunch of grapes is attached to the facade of a building on State Street, just a few doors down the hill from our old statehouse. In the 18th century, this was the very heart of Boston, almost next door to the seat of royal government in the province and among the great merchant houses of the city.

Jake:
[6:59] The next day, he started exploring our city, starting with taking in the view from a high point on Beacon Hill, writing, The Neck, which joins this peninsula to the land, is situated southwest from the town, and at low water, is not above 30 or 40 paces broad, and is so flat and level that in high tides, it is sometimes overflowed. The town is built upon the south and southeast side of the peninsula, and is about two miles in length, extending from the neck of the peninsula northward to that place called North End, as that extremity of the town next to the neck is called South End. Behind the town are several pleasant plains, and on the west side of the peninsula are three hills in a range, upon the highest of which is placed a long beacon pole. He described seeing a great many islands in the bay, including Castle Island with its Fort and Boston Light, a high building of stone in the form of a pillar, upon the top of which every night is kept alight to guide ships into the harbor. After breakfast that first morning, he delivered letters of introduction to a few gentlemen of Boston, establishing a line of credit and gaining access to the Exchange, the public market on the first floor of the townhouse, meaning our old statehouse.

Jake:
[8:22] He had lunch at a tavern inside the exchange, chatting with government officials and prominent merchants. After lunch, he explored Long Wharf, then was given a tour of the North End and the waterfront. From this point on, the doctor felt that he knew his way around Boston well enough, so he started exploring on his own. One day, he recounted, I saw at the change some Frenchmen, officers of the Flag of Truce, with prisoners for exchange from Canso, and of the privateer taken by Captain Tang. This was at the height of King George’s War, which was fought along the northern frontier between the New England colonies and their Haudenosaunee allies, and the French and their Wabanaki proxies. Hamilton continues, They were very loquacious after the manner of their nation, and their discourse, for the most part, was interlaced with oaths and smut.

Jake:
[9:21] On another day in Boston, Hamilton heard a noise outside his window and pulled back the curtain to see a parade of Haudenosaunee chiefs marching up the street outside. Here’s how he described the scene in his itinerarium. The fellows all had laced hats, and some of them laced matchcoats and ruffled shirts, and a multitude of the plebs of their own complexion followed behind them. This was one Henrique, and some of the other chiefs of the Mohawks, who had been deputed to treat with the Eastern Indians bordering upon New England. These Mohawks are a terror to all around them, and are certainly a brave, warlike people, but they are divided into two nations, Protestants and Roman Catholics, for most of them are Christians. The first take part with the English, the latter with the French, which makes the neighboring Indians, their tributaries, lead an unquiet life, always in fear and terror and in uncertainty how to behave.

Jake:
[10:23] These Mohawks were one of the six nations making up the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy that claimed a homeland stretching from the Great Lakes to the St. Lawrence River and then down the Ohio River Valley to Kentucky. The government of Massachusetts had brought the leaders of one of the primary nations to town to try to talk sense into another one of the nations, which had broken with tradition and supported the French over the traditional Haudenosaunee allies, the British. You can learn a lot more about the fault lines among the Haudenosaunee that eventually fractured during our American Revolution from the Iroquois History and Legends podcast.

Jake:
[11:04] While he was visiting Boston, Hamilton drank tea, rum, and punch, and he recorded meals taken at his lodgings, at the exchange, and as a guest in many private homes. However, he only described one meal taken in Boston in enough detail to know what he actually ate. On July 21st, he writes, I was invited to dine upon salt codfish, which is here a common Saturday dinner, being elegantly dressed with a sauce of butter and eggs. After dinner, I went home and slept till the evening, the weather being pretty hot and I having drunk too much wine. It made me heavy.

Jake:
[11:46] Dr. Hamilton’s exploration of Boston over almost two weeks allowed him to gain a nuanced understanding of both the physical characteristics of the town and some of the unique characters to be found here. An article by Leslie Landrigan for the New England Historical Society surveys some of the connections he made.

Jake:
[12:05] His Boston visit brought him into contact with all sorts of people. Attractive coquettes, a Frenchman with odd dining habits, a painter, and a couple of embarrassed Philadelphians. He met the artist John Smybert, the most influential artist in New England at the time. He also went to Cambridge to meet with the president of Harvard, the Reverend Edward Holyoke. One thing that’s fun to note is that the doctor was educated, but his spelling of the new words he encountered in New England is phonetic. This becomes relevant when he reports on a day spent exploring some of the construction sites in Boston, visiting a new battery with about 15 cannons that was being built on a dock near Long Wharf, wandering through shipyards where new vessels were being constructed, and finally coming to… The new market house, an elegant building of brick with a cupola on the top. This was built at the proper expense of one funnel. a substantial merchant of this place, lately dead and presented by him to the public. It is called by the name of Funnel Hall.

Jake:
[13:16] I point this out because Hamilton spells the name of the benefactor who built the new market that’s named after him, F-U-N-E-L-L. So that must have been the pronunciation that he heard on the streets of Boston in 1744 for the landmark that we know as Faneuil Hall. Thank you.

Leaving Colonial Boston

Jake:
[13:36] After an initial visit of ten days, Dr. Alexander Hamilton left Boston on Saturday, July 28, 1744. His journey took him north and east, up to Marblehead, Newburyport, Portsmouth, and eventually as far as York, Maine. With York sitting uncomfortably close to the seat of war in northern Maine, the doctor then turned back toward home. He stayed in Boston for another thirteen days on his way to the south. In a 1988 article in the journal American Literature, Robert Miklas sums up Hamilton’s opinion of colonial America, and the exception in Boston that proved the rule. The portrait that our splenetic traveler draws of colonial life in the itinerarium is not a particularly flattering one. On the whole, the itinerarium portrays colonial life as crude and unmannerly. Hamilton concludes the itinerarium by saying that, As to politeness and humanity, life throughout the colonies was much alike, meaning crude, except in the great towns where the inhabitants are more civilized, especially at Boston. The average colonial in the itinerarium is impertinent, uncouth, and easily duped.

Boston’s Colonial Verdict

Jake:
[14:57] On August 16th, 1744, the eve of his departure from Boston to find his way back to Annapolis, Dr. Hamilton summed up his impressions of Boston. I need scarce take notice that Boston is the largest town in North America, being much about the same extent as the city of Glasgow in Scotland, and having much the same number of inhabitants, which is between 20,000 and 30,000. It is considerably larger than either Philadelphia or New York, but the streets are irregularly disposed and in general too narrow. The best street in the town is that which runs down toward the Long Wharf, which goes by the name of King Street. This town is a considerable place for shipping and carries on a great trade in time of peace. Boston is better fortified against an enemy than any port in North America, not only upon the account of the strength of the castle, but the narrow passage up into the harbor, which is not above 160 feet wide in the channel at high water.

Jake:
[16:02] There is more hospitality and frankness shown here to strangers than either at York or at Philadelphia, and there is an abundance of men of learning and parts, so that one is at no loss for agreeable conversation, nor for any set of company he pleases. Assemblies of the gayer sort are frequent here, the gentlemen and ladies meeting almost every week at concerts of music and balls. I was present at two or three such, and saw as fine a ring of ladies, as good dancing, and heard music as elegant as I had been witness to anywhere. I must take notice that this place abounds with pretty women, who appear rather more abroad than they do at York, and dress elegantly. They are, for the most part, free and affable as well as pretty. I saw not one prude while I was here.

Jake:
[16:53] So, according to Alexander Hamilton, Boston was the one city in North America that was worth actually visiting. I’m sorry I had to trick you by pretending briefly that he was the other, more famous Alexander Hamilton, but this Alexander Hamilton’s descriptions of Boston are just too good to pass up.

Burr Rides to Cambridge

Jake:
[17:14] So now it’s time to turn our attentions from the fake Alexander Hamilton to Aaron Burr, the real Aaron Burr, not some Maryland doppelganger. Aaron Burr first came to Boston when he was 19 years old. He had excelled at the college that we now know as Princeton, but quite unlike his onstage character, as news of the outbreak of war spread, he was filled with an all-consuming passion to join the American lines surrounding Boston. When he heard about the fighting at Lexington and Concord, Burr was studying law in Litchfield, Connecticut. it. He was on the shorter side with a slight frame, narrow shoulders, and the quiet air of an intellectual. A true nerd, to put it in the modern parlance. Nobody thought he’d be a good soldier, but he immediately wrote to his childhood friend Matthias Ogden and suggested that they should both ride straight to Cambridge to volunteer. Ogden declined, however.

Jake:
[18:14] Two months later, when he heard news of the bloody fighting at Bunker Hill, Aaron Burr couldn’t be stopped. Instead of writing a letter, he jumped on a horse and rode 125 miles from Litchfield to his friend’s house in Elizabeth, New Jersey, just outside Newark and not far from Weehawken. There, he begged and bullied his friend until Ogden agreed to volunteer with him, and the two of them turned around and rode an additional 225 miles north to Cambridge. There they presented a letter of introduction signed by the President of Congress, whose signature would soon become the most famous in American history. The letter was dated July 19th and read, Sir, the earnest desire of several members of Congress, joined to a hearty wish of rendering service to the gentlemen, induce me to take the freedom to introduce to your notice Mr. Ogden and Mr. Burr of the Jerseys, by whom this will be handed to you. They are gentlemen of reputation, and visit the camp not as spectators, but with a view of joining the army and being active during the campaign. I beg you will please to place them in such a department as you shall judge suitable. Your notice of these gentlemen I shall esteem a particular favor. I have the honor to be your most obedient and humble servant, John Hancock.

Jake:
[19:39] The two teenagers presented their letter of introduction to the new general of the brand-new Continental Army, who had taken command scarcely over two weeks before. Michael Shellhammer, in a 2015 article about the bad blood between Aaron Burr and George Washington decades later, during the presidential administration of John Adams, wrote, There was no animosity between the two men when they first met in August 1775, at the camp of the newly formed Continental Army at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Coming from a prominent New Jersey family, Burr and his friend Matthias Ogden arrived at camp with a letter of introduction from Continental Congress President John Hancock. Washington had no officer appointments available, but accepted Burr and Ogden as volunteers, a status without official rank that promising young gentlemen held while awaiting commissions.

Jake:
[20:34] While waiting for an appointment or a commission in the heat of the summer, it seemed like Burr’s delicate intellectual’s constitution would end his military ambitions before they could really get started. He contracted a camp fever and was soon confined to bed. Epidemics of dysentery and smallpox tore through the continental camps that summer, but it’s not clear to me whether Aaron Burr caught one of those dreaded diseases or a lesser one. In a 2017 article, Burr biographer David O. Stewart wrote, Though Burr was bedridden with fever, his fighting spirit burned brightly. He learned that Benedict Arnold would lead a force into Canada through the backwoods of Maine, then rendezvous with another contingent that would invade through the Champlain and St. Lawrence Valleys. Burr rose from his sickbed and walked 60 miles to join Arnold at Newburyport. Reports of a frail and sickly Aaron Burr must have been exaggerated, because he completed the entire hellish march through northern Maine, when half of Arnold’s starving expedition deserted or died along the way. You can listen to our episode 335 for more of that story. Burr would not immediately return to Boston. After the failed invasion of Quebec, he followed the theater of war to Manhattan, Monmouth, Valley Forge and West Point.

Burr Returns to Boston

Jake:
[22:01] The Burr who returned to Boston was an old man. By this time, his wife Theodosia had died, and his daughter Theodosia had been lost at sea. He’d been elected as vice president to President Thomas Jefferson, and stood trial for his life after Jefferson charged him with high treason for attempting to steal America’s western territories and create an independent nation west of the Ohio River with himself installed as emperor. Most famously, of course, he had killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel that ruined his reputation in polite society. In the summer of 1833, Burr remarried a younger, extremely wealthy widow, but they separated after just a few months. While in the middle of an ugly divorce, Aaron Burr was introduced to an idealistic young Bostonian who was visiting New York City as part of a road trip that he took to celebrate his recent graduation. An 1890 biography of abolitionist Wendell Phillips describes the stop that he made in Manhattan on his way home from Philadelphia during the September 1834 trip that he took after graduating from Harvard Law.

Jake:
[23:16] Facing homeward, Phillips stopped for a few days in New York. In some way, he made the acquaintance of Aaron Burr during his Terry. The slayer of Hamilton was exceedingly polite and showed him the sights. Soon after his return, Burr visited Boston. Phillips called on him at the Tremont Hotel and offered to act the part of a Ciccerone. Ciccerone is an 18th century word for a professional tour guide, which comes to us from Italian because so many rich tourists wanted to see the wonders of ancient Rome in the 18th century. So, Ciccerone, tour guide.

Jake:
[23:58] The Tremont Hotel was Boston’s grandest hotel when it opened in 1829. It stood at the corner of Beacon Street and Tremont, right across Tremont from today’s Omni Parker, which was the Tremont’s younger sibling when it opened in 1855. Among the cutting-edge innovations in hospitality that were offered at the Tremont were individual locking rooms that each had a call bell system to summon the hotel staff, a basin and free soap in each room for washing up, and gas lamps in case you wanted to stay up late and read.

Jake:
[24:36] The hotel also had a fairly modern reception area, a dining room, and a ladies’ ordinary, a separate restaurant that made it socially acceptable for women to dine without a male escort. Most famously, it had indoor plumbing, with shared toilets on the first floor, and hot baths in the basement. Burr made himself right at home in this luxurious new hotel, probably by spending some of his soon-to-be ex-wife’s fortune.

Hamilton’s Bust Encounter

Jake:
[25:07] It was on this visit that Burr had his final encounter with Alexander Hamilton, though even casual observers will note that the fatal duel in which Burr shot and killed Hamilton occurred 30 years earlier, in 1804. Among other places, they went to the Athenaeum, then on Pearl Street to see the pictures and look at the library. As they walked down the hall between the alcoves, Phillips caught sight of a bust of Hamilton, one of the ornaments of the library which he had forgotten was there. He tried on some pretext to draw Burr in another direction, but he too had seen the bust and marched straight up to it. He stood facing it for a moment, then turned and said, A remarkable man. A very remarkable man. Upon this, he wheeled on both heels in military style and moved on again with great composure.

Jake:
[26:04] Burr stood stoic in the moment, but imagine the feelings that coursed through him as he confronted the face of Alexander Hamilton, the man that he had killed. Burr was an old man now, pushing 80 years old. I couldn’t find a portrait of Burr from these later years, but after he died, deeply in debt on the day his divorce was finalized just two years after this trip to Boston, a death mask was made of his face that remains in the collection of the New York Historical. It shows a man with deep, hollow eye sockets and thin lips pressed tight over toothless gums, deeply lined cheeks, and a long, crooked nose. I have to imagine that his face looked a little bit better while it was still alive, but the death mask gives evidence of hard living and burrs decades of infamy, while the face of Hamilton that he was confronted with was frozen in youth.

Jake:
[27:02] The image of Hamilton that Burr had come face to face with was a plaster copy of a marble bust by Giuseppe Siracchi. Siracchi had sculpted a terracotta version from life, meaning that Hamilton sat for him as a model while he was visiting Philadelphia in 1791 or 1792, less than a decade before Hamilton’s death. On that same visit, Sirachi also created busts of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and other members of America’s founding generation in hopes of securing a contract for a major monument in the new United States.

Jake:
[27:41] He didn’t get the contract. Instead, he took his terracotta model back to Rome, and there he created a beautiful likeness of the treasury secretary in marble. Sirachi then created copies of this marble bust in both marble and plaster, while other artists used this bust as the basis of their own Hamilton portraits, including the Trumbull portrait that graces our $10 bill. Sirachi sent the original marble statue to the Hamilton family in 1796. This youthful face was the same bust of Hamilton that I came face to face with at the Hamilton Grange in Manhattan a few years ago. When I finally saw the Hamilton musical in 2018, I went to visit his Grange before heading home the next morning. The Grange is the quiet uptown home that the Hamiltons moved to in 1802, which then stayed in the family for 30 years, before being sold a few times and eventually opening as a museum in 1930. It’s now operated by the National Park Service, and the NPS website says that the bust that welcomes visitors inside the front door of the federal-style mansion is a marble original created by Sirachi. The one Burr found so remarkable was a mere plaster copy. Having not shot the man, I probably found my meeting with Hamilton’s bust a little bit less unsettling than Burr did.

Jake:
[29:09] To learn more about Dr. Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, check out this week’s show notes at hubhistory.com slash 357. I’ll have links to a lot of good stuff this week, including the full text of Dr. Hamilton’s itinerarium, as well as the map of his travels that accompanied a 1907 edition, and journal articles describing the importance of Hamilton’s work. For Aaron Burr’s visits to Boston, we’ll have pictures of the Sriracha bust of Hamilton, along with Burr’s death mask to help drive home the contrast between the two of them. I’ll have links to John Hancock’s letter of introduction for Burr, as well as the articles I quoted from David O. Stewart and Michael Shellhammer. I’ll also have photos of the interior and exterior of the grand and innovative Tremont House Hotel, plus the biography of Wendell Phillips that introduces us to the final confrontation between Hamilton and Burr at the Boston Athenaeum.

Jake:
[30:09] If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can email podcast at hubhistory.com. I still have profiles for Hub History on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and over on Mastodon as at hubhistoryatbetter.boston. Lately, however, the only social media site where I’m active, where I post and engage with listeners, is Blue Sky. If you want to find me on Blue Sky, just search for hubhistory.com. If none of that strikes your fancy, just go to hubhistory.com and click on the Contact Us link. While you’re on the site, hit the subscribe link, and be sure that you never miss an episode. If you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, please consider writing us a brief review. If you do, drop me a line, and I’ll send you a Hub History sticker as a token of appreciation. That’s all for now. Stay safe out there, listeners.