New Jersey

Sale of Hamilton Duel Site Sets Hudson County Record

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On October 16, 2014, a mansion built on the site of the Hamilton-Burr duel in Weehawken, New Jersey sold for $6.2 million, setting a new record for Hudson County.  According to the New York Post, the property was purchased by “part of an unnamed top fashion family.”

The Daily Mail has published several pictures of the mansion and states:

“The 7,200-square-foot floor plan is divided into four bedrooms, a gym, an extravagant office, and a private terrace with gaping windows looking out over the Hudson River. “

Idyllic: The new owners can recline among the shrubbery on their private terrace while taking in the buzz of New York City

Historic: The opulent rooms are decked in oak wood, marble and gold, with wrought iron railings outside in neoclassical style

Spell-binding: At night, the bright white house which is lined with trimmed rows of hedges and potted plants, gleams 

The house was built in 2002, and was originally listed for $7.5 million.  Real estate firm Douglas Elliman listed the property.

New Hamilton Play: At Liberty Hall

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This fall, Premiere Stages at Kean University will be producing a new play about Alexander Hamilton.

The flyer for the production describes the show as follows:

At Liberty Hall follows two high school students who’ve just moved to New Jersey: Cristian Rosaria, a funny but unfocused teenager from Queens, by way of the Dominican Republic; and Alexander Hamilton, 16, the subject of Cristian’s 10th grade history project.  This time-bending story finds common threads of humor, honor, and awkwardness as told through the experiences of a someday-Founding Father and a kid looking for a way out of the projects.

The show will run from October 16-19 and is part of the exciting Four Centuries in a Weekend events in Union County, New Jersey.  Tickets are available here for $15.

Liberty Hall Museum, which is partnering with Kean University to produce this play as part of the Liberty Live project, recently hosted an excellent CelebrateHAMILTON 2014 event, which I attended.  Liberty Hall was the home of William Livingston, the first governor of New Jersey.  Hamilton was well-acquainted with the Livingston family.  Livingston’s son, Henry Brockholst Livingston, was Hamilton’s classmate at King’s College, and would later be one of his close contemporaries at the New York bar.  Livingston’s eldest daughter, Susan, was married to John Jay in 1774.

Hamilton’s Views on Race and Slavery: The New York Manumission Society

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Following the American Revolution, the issue of slavery came into focus for many Northerners.  The rhetoric of slavery and liberty had been used frequently during the Revolution, but in its aftermath, the protection property rights and the maintenance of existing state economies, particularly in the South, prevented any full-scale national movements towards abolition.  In this landscape, the state of slavery in the Northern states became more contentious.  Robin Blackburn describes the importance of New York in the slave landscape:

New York and New Jersey “together accounted for three quarters or all slaves outside of the South,” and slavery in both states “survived constitutional and legislative challenges in the revolutionary and immediate post-revolutionary period.”

On February 4, 1785, the New York Manumission Society was formed.  Historian Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan characterized the Society as “the site of concerted efforts to unite dreams of human perfectibility to the practical labor of effecting change.”  Hamilton was the first vice president and his friend and fellow Federalist John Jay was the first president, staying in that office for five years.  Hamilton served as president for one year in 1788 before moving to Philadelphia to take up his position as Secretary of the Treasury.

The Quaker Friends Society newsletter recounted a 1786 petition that Jay, Hamilton, and other members of the society sent to New York that began:

“Your memorialists being deeply affected by the situation of those, who, although free by the laws of God, are held in slavery by the laws of the state…”

The stated goals of the Society were noble, but they were also decidedly moderate- limited to the state of New York and reflecting the fact that many of the founders of the organization were slaveholders:

“1st to effect, if possible, the abolition of slavery in this state, by procuring gradual legislative enactments; 2dly to protect from a second slavery such persons as had been liberated in the state of New York, or elsewhere, and who were liable to be kidnapped, and sold to slave dealers in other places; and 3dly to provide means for educating children of color of all classes.”

While Hamilton consistently supported the Society and was an active member whenever he was living in New York, he also pushed its members to points of discomfort by proposing more radical plans for abolition than many of his fellow members were comfortable with.  For example, Ron Chernow describes the 1785 proposal of the Society’s ways-and-means committee headed by Hamilton to require members to commit to freeing some of their own slaves immediately, and younger slaves within 5 years.  Hamilton’s proposal would have caused financial harm to members, and was quickly rejected as being too sudden.

The 2004 Senate Concurrent Resolution 123– Recognizing and Honoring the Life and Legacy of Alexander Hamilton on the Bicentennial of His Death Because of His Standing as One of the Most Influential Founding Fathers of the United States notes:

“…as a private citizen Alexander Hamilton served many philanthropic causes and was a co-founder of the New York Manumission Society, the first abolitionist organization in New York and a major influence on the abolition of slavery from the State…Alexander Hamilton was a strong and consistent advocate against slavery and believed that Blacks and Whites were equal citizens and equal in their mental and physical faculties.”

Hamilton lived to see New York embark on a path of very slow, gradual abolition, as Pennsylvania had done earlier.  In 1788, the slave trade was abolished and aspects of the slave code were softened.  In 1799, the legislature passed An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,  which “allowed masters to keep their younger slaves in bondage for their most productive years, to recoup their investment. The law freed all children born to slave women after July 4, 1799, but only after they had reached their mid-twenties.  Hamilton’s bolder vision of emancipation was never reached, but the efforts of the New York Manumission Society were instrumental in building acceptance of a free, multicultural society to New York.

The Other Hamilton Duel: Philip Hamilton and George Eacker

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While Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr’s 1804 duel is notorious in history and pop culture, a lesser-known deadly duel occurred three years earlier between Hamilton’s oldest son, Philip, and George Eacker, a critic of Hamilton and supporter of Burr.

Hamilton took great pride in his son’s academic achievements.  He wrote to him regularly while Philip was studying at boarding school, and created a rigorous set of rules to govern Philip’s study schedule.  In 1797, when Philip was a young teenager, he contracted a deadly illness and Hamilton reportedly “administered every dose of medicine” to his son during his recovery.

The close relationship between father and son may have contributed to Philip’s eagerness to defend his father’s name.  Eacker, a 27-year-old lawyer, had made a speech in July accusing Alexander Hamilton of being willing to overthrow Thomas Jefferson’s presidency by force.  In the speech, Eacker accused Hamilton of misusing his position as Inspector General during the Adams administration to intimidate his political enemies.  On November 20, 19-year-old Philip and his friend Richard Price confronted Eacker about the speech when the three men were at a social event. After Eacker insulted them, the boys challenged Eacker to a duel.  Dueling was already illegal in New York, so the men planned to meet in New Jersey.  Eacker and Richard Price took the field first at Weehawken, on November 22. They exchanged shots, but no one was injured; according to convention, honor was satisfied.  The next day, Philip faced Eacker and fell to a ball from Eacker’s smoothbore dueling pistol.  He died the next day.  The death caused a massive strain on the Hamilton family and led to the nervous breakdown of Hamilton’s daughter Angelica.

Robert Troup observed about Hamilton after Philip’s death in a December 5, 1801 letter to Rufus King:

Never did I see a man so completely overwhelmed with grief as Hamilton had been.  The scene I was present at, when Mrs. Hamilton came to see her son on his deathbed (he died about a mile out of the city) and when she met her husband and son in one room, beggars all description!  Young Hamilton was very promising in genius and acquirements, and Hamilton formed high expectations of his future greatness!”

Alexander Hamilton was killed three years later, on the same dueling grounds in Weehawken and with the same dueling pistols.