Alexander Hemilton

If you have an American ten-dollar bill handy, look at the man portrayed on it and gi e a moment’s thought to his life and death. Alexander Hamilton en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Hamilton is one of the American history’s most luminous figures. As a coauthor of the Federalist Papers, he helped to articulate the philosophical basis of democracy. As American’s first secretary of the treasury, he devised the institutions that support modern market economies. At other times in his life he led three battalions in the Revolutionary War, helped launch the Constitutional Convention, commanded a national army, established the Bank of New York, served in the New York legislature, and founded the ‘New York Post’.

Yet in 1804 this brilliant man did something that by today’s standards was astonishingly stupid. Hamilton had long exchanged bitchy remarks with his rival Vice President Aaron Burr, and when Hamilton refused to disavow a criticism of Burr that had been attributed to him, Burr challenged him to a duel en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duel Common sense was just one of many forces that could have pulled him away from a date with death. The custom of dueling was already on the wane, and Hamilton’s state of residence, New York, had outlawed it. Hamilton had lost a son to a duel, and in a letter explaining his response to Burr’s challenge, he enumerated five objections to the practice. But he agreed to the duel anyway, because, he wrote, “what men of the world denominate honor” left him no other choice. The following morning he was rowed across the Hudson to face Burr on the New Jersey Palisades. Burr would not be the last vice president to shoot a man, but he was a better shot than Dick Cheney, and Hamilton died the following day. ~ Page 22 (Chapter: Honor in Europe & the early United States)

Dueling persisted in the 18th and 19th centuries, despite denunciations by the church and prohibitions by many governments. Samuel Johnson defended the custom, writing, “A man may shoot the man who invades his character, as he may shoot him who attempts to break into his house.” Dueling sucked in such luminaries as Voltaire, Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington, Robert Peel, Tolstoy, Pushkin, and the mathematician Evariste Galois, the last two fatally. The build up, climax, and denouement of a duel were made to order for fiction writers, and the dramatic possibilities were put to use by Sri Walter Scott, Dumaspere, de Maupassant, Conard, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Chekhov, and Thomas Mann. ~ Page 22

……. Today the expression “Take ten paces, turn, and fire’ is more likely to call to mind Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam than “men of honor.” ~ Page 23