Redstate

By tacitus Posted in History — Comments (9) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Picture, if you will, a public ceremony in April 2065 honoring Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth -- two men, patriots each in their own way, who just happened to have a fatal meeting on a fateful evening. Or perhaps citizens will gather in a plaza in Dallas in November 2163 to honor Lee Harvey Oswald and John F. Kennedy: two Americans, each with their own compelling vision, who just happened to have a fatal clash on a fateful afternoon. If this strikes you as ridiculous -- and well it should -- then we must stop to ask why the villainous Aaron Burr is being honored alongside Alexander Hamilton in this week, the two hundredth anniversary of the latter's murder on the duelling field at Weehawken.

If you care about historical justice, read on.

The reenactment of the 11 July 1804 duel between Burr and Hamilton was, ultimately, a profound disappointment. We know the facts of the case (in this instance, largely derived from the same book everyone else is reading): We know that Hamilton, having over the course of several decades formed an (accurate) opinion of Burr as a man with ambition but without principle, was determined to block the then-sitting Vice President from the governorship of New York, from whence Hamilton suspected Burr planned to foment the establishment of a secessionist northern confederacy. This was not an unreasonable suspicion: secessionist sentiment in New England took root with the election of Jefferson, built through the War of 1812, and did not entirely die until several years after; Burr, on the other hand, was later publicly shown to harbor grand designs on a nation of his own in North America. As a man detested by George Washington, a double-crosser of both Federalists and Republicans, and a known swindler of the public trust, Burr earned Hamilton's suspicion in spades. Burr lost his bid to reign sovereign in Albany: this was perhaps due more to Jefferson's effort than Hamilton's -- the President also loathed Burr for his perceived role in trying to "steal" the 1800 election -- but a private citizen was the more accessible target of a defeated man's rage. And so the fatal events were set in motion.

These things we know. We know that Burr chose to provoke a duel with Hamilton by making unreasonable demands upon his honor -- namely, Hamilton would have to foreswear ever having held a negative opinion of Burr. We know that after the duel was agreed upon, Burr spent days practicing his dead shot. We know that Hamilton resisted the entreaties of his friends to practice at all. We know that Hamilton confided his plan to not kill Burr on the duelling field to his second. We know that Hamilton fired his pistol into the air. We know that Burr saw the tree branch far above him splinter with Hamilton's round. We know that Burr coolly took aim and shot down Alexander Hamilton.

After a full day of agony, Hamilton died.

It is impossible to call this anything but premeditated murder. Combined with the rest of Burr's career, it is an act consistent with the character of a man of infamy. (Indeed, but for his battlefield service in the Revolution, it would be difficult indeed to say much good of Aaron Burr.) Following this and his subsequent trial for treason, Burr spent the rest of his life in a well-deserved isolation from the company of patriots and honorable men.

Why, then, the farce of the events surrounding the reenactment of the fatal duel? Why did the Mayor of Weehawken laud both men as "two individuals that gave so much to this country"? Why did Congressman Bob Menendez and Governor Jim McGreevey both cast the duel as a mysterious meeting of two great patriots? Why must Hamilton suffer the indignities of both sharing a commemorative coin with his murderer, and of having that murderer commemorated with a plaque at the very site of his monument?

And most shameful of all, why must the behavior of the modern descendants of Aaron Burr live down so ably to the example of their ancestor?

"Honestly, when I started this, I really had no ill will towards the Burr family," said Doug Hamilton, the great, great, great, great, great grandson of the former Treasury Secretary, who participated in the reenactment. "But the Burr people wanted to bring Hamilton down. At one forum, a Burr person said, 'Well, we all know that Hamilton was gay.' I mean, what is that? They said their guy wasn't at fault. Obviously, this whole thing is about making their guy look good. It's gotten really intense."

And:

"There was an animosity on the part of Alexander Hamilton toward Aaron Burr for which there was nothing in Aaron Burr's record that could be justified," Antonio Burr, a psychologist from New York, said Sunday.

It's not great-granddad's fault, folks. There's whitewashing afoot, and if the petty, grasping politicos of the modern day are called upon to assist in it, well, they'll be more than happy to. Pathetic. Shameful.

This isn't merely the stuff of history-minded pedants. This matters. If, to paraphrase Kundera, the struggle of good against evil is the struggle of memory against forgetting, then we owe it to ourselves and to posterity to remember well and remember truly. In an age where a man runs for President on the strength of his service record without honest reference to his profound dishonoring of that service; in an age where one of the great liberators of the past century is derided by small men; and in an age when too many forget the truth about not just the murder of a single man two centuries past, but the slaughter of thousands three years distant; in this age, perhaps more than any, we must remember well.