Home on the grange?

Poor Alexander Hamilton. The only house he ever owned, Hamilton Grange, has been uprooted and moved not once but twice since its original construction in Upper Manhattan. Hopefully this time, however, the first Treasury secretary's home has found a permanent home of its own.

The building, a national landmark, was closed in 2006, and ever so carefully moved to St. Nicholas Park. And, in news that will surely excite the history buffs among you, the Grange is set to reopen Sept. 17, Curbed reported earlier today (via Harlem + Bespoke).

But that's not all! According to the National Parks website, an array of re-opening festivities will take place all day that day, including a live reenactment of Hamilton himself showing what life was like in New York way back in the day. Who will play Aaron Burr, we wonder?

eknutsen@observer.com

As I watched the TV talking heads dissect the event, one resident wizard made the point that the atmosphere in the Congress was relatively tame compared to Prime Minister’s questions in the British Parliament. While that is true, it sort of misses the point. In Britain the head of government is the Prime Minister, but the head of state is the Queen. In Israel and many other Parliamentary democracies the head of state is the President and the head of government is the Prime Minister. In the United States the President is both the head of government and the head of state. This means that President Obama’s role is not simply to manage the federal bureaucracy, but to represent and symbolize the nation as well. He not only cuts the budget, he is expected to cut ribbons too. In our democracy there is no King to symbolize the nation’s history or culture. The President plays that role. He is both Prime Minister and King.

I should mention that this does not make me a monarchist, or President Obama a monarch. Last week I was quoted making the same point in a wonderful article by the Associated Press writer Jocelyn Noveck on heckling in Congress, and I have received a pile of e-mails explaining that America has no king. That is clear, but the function of head of state and head of government is often split in most political systems, just not in ours.
 
This combination can be confusing, and at times Presidents have tried to take advantage of the dual role by arguing that those who disagree with their policy positions are unpatriotic. That is of course completely false. A President’s policies are fair game. In fact, it’s also OK to call the President a liar. It’s just probably not something you should scream at him while he is speaking to a joint session of Congress in front of 30 million TV viewers.

This has been a nasty political summer as evidenced by disruptions at Town Hall Meetings on health policy and the absurd attack on the President for advising school kids to stay in school, work hard and do their homework.  While many of us long for civility and respect in our political debates, it’s important to remember that American political history has not always been characterized by mild discussion and broad consensus. Back in 1804, at the start of the republic, Alexander Hamilton died after being shot by Aaron Burr- possibly a low point for political civility in the early days of our poltical system.  In the mid-19th century a complete breakdown of our political process led to the Civil War.  According to the web site of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, political dialogue in the House was particularly contentious in the years leading up to that horrific war, In fact,

“The most infamous floor brawl in the history of the U.S. House of Representatives erupted as Members debated Kansas’s pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution late into the night of February 5-6 [1858]. Shortly after 1 A.M., Pennsylvania Republican Galusha Grow and South Carolina Democrat Laurence Keitt exchanged insults, then blows….More than 50 Members joined the melee.” 
 
The 20th century was no picnic either. More than a few of us remember the discord at the -1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago as well as the many moments in the 1960’s when orderly and symbolic civil disobedience descended into disruption and violence.

In a world made smaller by low-cost information and communication technology and made more dangerous by constant advances in the technology of destruction, civility and peaceful methods of dispute resolution become more and more important.  I write this on September 11, 2009 and have been reminded all day of the presence of evil in the world and the importance of civility and the rule of law in modern life. In his famous June 1963 American University speech on the path to world peace, John Kennedy spoke about the need for nations to develop safe ways to resolve sharp differences and live in peace. JFK urged tolerance and civility when he said:

“So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.”

Health care, climate change, the economy and issues of war and peace dominate national policy debates in our nation’s capital. There is a great deal of political power and a boatload of money at stake for our Representatives in Washington, their constituents back home and powerful stakeholders. The presence of these powerful forces and vested interests make it even more important that the discussion be civil and that all parties be respectful of each other. Despite the attention he has garnered from his shout at the President, I am certain that Representative Wilson wishes he hadn’t pushed the “send” button the other night. My hope is that his fifteen minutes of national fame does not inspire others to mimic his unfortunate outburst.

"Today was not a victory of one candidate or one Party but of all those irrepressible optimists who have dreamed of a resurgent New York," said Spitzer, who vowed to work to make New York "once again the greatest state in the nation."

He stepped back from the podium to kiss his wife. He marveled at his parents' 61-year marriage. ("As they say on my favorite TV show, 'Booyah.'") And he quoted Alexander Hamilton and Walt Whitman.

He built up to a crescendo, noting that his oft-stated conviction that everything changes on Day one was "now the promise of a governor" and added, "I will never break faith with those who have invested their hopes and dream on this great state."

With that, the entire Democratic ticket (minus Alan Hevesi) climbed on stage, raised their arms and clapped to Start Me Up. And the rank-and-filers headed for the exits.

--Jason Horowitz

The final hands:

Media Mob K K 8 6 7

Daily Transom Q Q 7 6 4

The Media Mob wins! Game, set, and...well, set, anyway: 3 to 2. The World Series of "Post Poker" is over! No time for losers, Daily Transom!

"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be." This sentiment, which Ron Chernow borrows as an epigraph for his engrossing biography of the most brilliant and charismatic of the Founders, reveals Alexander Hamilton as the highly articulate philosopher of American realism. He never wallowed in the seductive waters of American exceptionalism, which too often saw the new republic as another Eden, free from the corruptions of Europe and chosen by God to lead the world. In The Federalist Papers , he asked: "Is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age, and to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?" At a time when the Bush administration has embarked on an imperial mission-with the President declaiming, "We are changing the world"-Hamilton's cautionary words are just what we need.

The roots of Hamilton's realism lie in his childhood. It's hard to imagine anyone with his unpromising start rising to such great heights in so short a time. He was born on the West Indian island of Nevis in 1755. His father, James Hamilton, the impoverished fourth son of a Scottish laird, sought his fortune in the West Indies but failed to prosper. There he met Rachel Faucette, whose father was a French Huguenot, and they produced two children, James and Alexander. Rachel had been previously married, and though she'd divorced her husband, she never married Hamilton's father. The social stigma of illegitimate birth forever shadowed Alexander's life. The family settled on the island of St. Croix, but when James Jr. was 12 and Alexander 10, their father deserted them. It's likely that Alexander never saw his father again, though they corresponded from time to time.

His mother supported the family by running a shop, and Alexander probably went to school nearby. When Hamilton was 12, however, she died of an unspecified disease. Even the meager living she'd secured from the shop was taken away when her first husband reappeared and was awarded what was left of her estate. At 14, Alexander found himself a penniless orphan.

Aware of the travails that the Hamiltons had undergone, local merchants decided to apprentice the older boy to a carpenter, while Alexander, already known for his quick intelligence, was sent to work as a clerk in an export-import house. He was also taken in by a benevolent merchant, who may well have been his real father. The most persuasive evidence of this is the startling resemblance of Alexander to Edward Stevens, the merchant's son, who became Hamilton's best friend.

It soon became evident that Hamilton was a remarkably gifted boy who complemented his studies with omnivorous reading; he was a true autodidact. He was also showing signs of becoming a gifted writer, sending poems to the local newspaper and later a highly colored description of a hurricane in a letter to his father, a copy of which fell into the hands of a Presbyterian minister. The preacher decided that Hamilton should be sent to America to further his education. A subscription fund was organized by the leading citizens of St. Croix to send Hamilton to New York, and at 17 he boarded a ship for America, never to return.

What he could not leave behind were vivid memories of the brutal treatment accorded the slaves who were imported from Africa to cut sugar cane. As a result of what he saw growing up, Hamilton became an avowed abolitionist, eventually joining the New York Manumission Society.

Four years after he'd arrived in New York, after a little more than two years studying at King's College (now Columbia University), Hamilton dropped out to become a captain of an artillery company, distinguishing himself in the battle of New York and later, when he supported Washington in crossing the Delaware River to engage the Hessians at Trenton.

Washington admired the exploits of the young soldier, and was aware, also, of his gifts as a writer. He invited the 22-year-old to join his staff as an aide-de-camp, with the rank of lieutenant colonel. In less than five years, Hamilton had risen from a lowly clerk in St. Croix to become the equivalent of Washington's chief of staff. Yet the impetuous young man later became unhappy serving on Washington's staff and yearned to command his own troops in battle, which he knew would further his career. It took him four more years to regain a field command to participate in the decisive battle of Yorktown.

With a marriage to Elizabeth Schuyler, the daughter of a Hudson River patroon, General Philip Schuyler, Hamilton rose to the top ranks of the American aristocracy. His career took off: Returning to King's College to race through law school, Hamilton soon attended the Confederation Congress in Philadelphia and witnessed the weaknesses of a less unified nation. Soon he was working with James Madison to persuade Americans to endorse a new Constitution, based on the proposition that America would be a representative democracy, not one at the mercy of recalls, referendums and plebiscites. The collection of articles that Hamilton, Madison and John Jay wrote in support of the Constitution, later published as The Federalist Papers , remains one of the great works of political thinking.

Hamilton was indefatigable: At 34, he became Secretary of the Treasury in Washington's administration. As Mr. Chernow points out, "Hamilton planned … to transform America into a powerful, modern nation-state-a central bank, a funded debt, a mint, a customs service, manufacturing subsidies." His vision of America as a great financial and industrial state became the young republic's future.

What Hamilton wanted, above all, was to create a stable nation that would balance the need for order with that of freedom. Mr. Chernow concludes that his central flaw lay "in thinking that the rich would always have a broader sense of public duty and would somehow be devoid of self-interest, instead of being captives to an even larger set of interests."

Hamilton's effectiveness owed everything to his President. Washington never lost his faith in the correctness of Hamilton's polices. Hamilton, in turn, needed Washington's wise counsel to curb his excesses. The President was a steady helmsman and kept his combative Treasury Secretary in line. Once Hamilton was no longer in government, any slur upon his honor was met with a violent verbal or written response, and these outbursts damaged his reputation. His attack on John Adams as President was so vituperative that it eliminated him from running for the Presidency.

The other major error that Hamilton committed was to write a lengthy essay on his liaison with Maria Reynolds, a married woman who enticed Hamilton into an affair and then conspired with her spouse to blackmail her lover. James Monroe, no friend of Hamilton's, made the scandal public. In response, Hamilton felt compelled to describe the affair and the blackmail in detail, lest anyone think he had provided Maria's husband with money to secretly enrich himself through improper speculation in government securities. Hamilton could admit to being an adulterer, but never was he a crook. The scandal, however, forever sullied his name.

Although Hamilton worked to make Jefferson President over Aaron Burr, he had little use for either Jefferson or Burr, a lawyer and intriguer whom Hamilton had known since he first arrived in America. Burr, serving as Vice President under Jefferson, never forgave Hamilton. When Burr accused Hamilton of personally insulting him by calling him "despicable," Hamilton, who maintained that he only criticized Burr for his political views, refused to apologize-which led to their fateful duel.

On July 11, 1804, on a ledge overlooking the Hudson River in Weehawken, N.J., Burr mortally wounded Hamilton, who had deliberately fired in the air in order to avoid killing his antagonist. Never has there been an outpouring of grief to equal the mourning for this quintessential New Yorker: For 30 days, the city's residents wore black armbands. "This scene was enough to melt a monument of marble," said the New-York Evening Post (a newspaper Hamilton had founded).

The extraordinary and improbable career of Alexander Hamilton had come to an end, and here we have another fitting tribute to it: Ron Chernow's massively researched and beautifully written biography.

James Chace is a professor of government at Bard College. His new book, 1912: The Election That Changed the Country (Simon and Schuster), has just been published.

Fashion Week nips at our heels like a terrier, and it don't look pretty, sister girlfriends. But some people just can't wait to get crackin': Diane von Furstenberg -the Susan Sontag of the fashion set-winds herself into a wrap dress and shows up at the launch party for Café Bohême (a coffee-vodka liqueur), topped with a frothy art auction. Translation: downtown types holding theme martinis. "We got models, creative directors and designers -there are 23 innovators in all-to create collages that will be on display, so we're going to see some diverse stuff," said a publicist. Innovators include the aforementioned Ms. von Furstenberg, Ben ("Naomi's my sister!") Watts, Charlotte ("Samantha's my sister!") Ronson , mad potter Jonathan Adler , designers Alice Roi (the anti-Shoshanna) and Matt Damhave (the anti–Tara Subkoff). The collages will be auctioned off to benefit Free Arts for Abused Children. We asked what they look like (the collages, not the children). "We don't know. It's going to be a surprise for all of us. All we did was give them a theme, ' Bon Vivant ,' which means 'Living well is the best revenge.'" We though it was trashing your ex- "lover" in the pages of the New Yorker …."

[Free Arts for Abused Children, Lot 61, 550 West 21st Street, 9 p.m. to midnight,

by invitation only, 212-625-3165 for ticket requests.]

Thursday 29th

O.K., we're willing to humor our wee Mayor by pretending that the Olympics would be a great thing for New York (actually, who do we think we're kidding ? It would be a disaster from the word go : clogged traffic, the city filled with wide-bottomed Midwesterners and gangly German athletes, Islamist terrorists rubbing their hands in glee … ), so we're not going to do a little jig that the U.S.A. luge team is coming to town today with their luges and tight bodysuits-this ain't Aspen, folks, we're a city, remember? Anyway, if you want to lie on your back and go 60 miles an hour without having to go for dinner and drinks first, the luge lads will be encamped on various icy patches of the city today …. Once you're spent, glide on over to the super-duper Cooper Union for two scoops of Schadenfreude ! Snow-maned Susan Sontag (below) -the Diane von Furstenberg of the intellectual set -lectures on her latest, Regarding the Pain ofOthers , rethinking the way pictures inspire dissent, foster violence or create apathy, focusing mainly on photos of atrocities and their role in our culture (in other words, Britney's wedding pic). "She's out of the country and really unreachable!" trilled a flack when we phoned. Alas . Bring the sultry septuagenarian a cupcake-her birthday was yesterday.

[Learn to Luge, Battery Park, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Union Square Park, 5 to 7 p.m., www.nyc.gov/parks; Susan Sontag, the Great Hall, 7 East Seventh Street, 6:30 p.m., 212-353-4195.]

Friday 30th

Hello, Dalí! Film-studies majors in prescriptionless glasses with "dirty" hair (strategically mussed with a caviar-based pomade ) follow their clunky black shoes ( clunk! clunk! clunk! ) to the Film Forum for a screening of L'Age d'Or and Un Chien Andalou (that eye-slitting scene gets us every time ). According to Dalí, the theme is "the pure and correct line of 'conduct' of a human who pursues love through wretched humanitarian patriotic ideals and the other miserable workings of reality." Mm'kay? If you've got a lactose-intolerant boyfriend you'd like to get rid of, it's only two days 'til the annual Great Grilled Cheese Meltdown. Take him to the Comfort Diner (a different grilled cheese every day for the month of February.) Feast on the inside-out grilled cheese fondue with Gruyére and Emmentaler. Back in college, we made ours with Cheez Whiz and an iron ….

[Screening, Film Forum, 212-966-0730; Great Grilled Cheese Meltdown, the Comfort Diner, 214 East 45th Street, 212-867-4555, or 25 West 23rd Street, 212-741-1010, throughout February.]

Saturday 31st

What's hotter than a room full of insurance executives? Tonight, the maniacs of SBLI USA Mutual Life Insurance Company are holding their annual gala to benefit America's Second Harvest, which works to alleviate hunger in the U.S. "The entrance is going to be set up like Auntie Em's house, and there will be gizmos to make it look like there are twisters," said a flack. "Then you're going to walk through Munchkin Land, and there'll be a casino and auction in the Enchanted Forest. The awards ceremony will take place in the Emerald City, and there will be medals given out signifying courage, wisdom and love. Oh, and the food will be set up to remind us of the needs of the hungry." How about the needs of those who are getting screwed by insurance companies? (Oops! Sorry, sir!) Meanwhile , if you always thought it would've been cool to live in the 19th century so you could say, "Pistols at dawn!" , think again- Alexander Hamilton did and consequently didn't get to see much of the 19th century. "He and Aaron Burr exchanged 10 or 12 letters over a few weeks prior to his death, and you can see this dueling etiquette, with exchanges like ' You, Sir, did not deny …, '" said Jim Basker, M.C. of today's Hamilton hoedown at the New-York Historical Society. Hear all about the man on the tenner-visionary, soldier, statesman, crappy marksman. "People will be surprised to learn that he was the only immigrant Founding Father. He was a poor, illegitimate kid from the Caribbean Islands who became one of the leading founders of America." But what's his value today? "I'll tell you something that's thrilling to me-so far, we've had 700 people sign up! That many people coming to hear about one historical figure is pretty stunning. I think Hamilton's stock is rising! … The first panel is called 'Hamilton and Money,' because he's famous for his expertise in helping to organize the American economy. He's the genius who insisted upon the assumption of debt and the mixed economy. Those are very Hamiltonian ideas. Oh, and the artsy people might be interested in this part-" Click!

[SBLI USA's 2004 Recognition Gala, Sheraton New York Hotel, Imperial Ballroom, 811 Seventh Avenue, 7 p.m., 212-356-0307; Alexander Hamilton, the New-York Historical Society, 2 West 77th Street, 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., 646-366-9653.]

Sunday 1st

One of The Times ' more predictable Op-Ed stars, Paul Krugman, is a dewy-eyed bearded gent, and today he podium-izes at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. Once he gets you stoked, head over to the Gramercy Theater and see Tom Cruise test the elastic on his Hanes and many frogs descend from the heavens over Los Angeles as MoMA screens Magnolia as part of its "The Hidden God: Film and Faith" series. On the tube, the Carolina Panthers play the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl.

[Paul Krugman speaks, New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street, 11:30 a.m., 212-874-5210; Magnolia screens as part of MoMA's "The Hidden God: Film and Faith," the Gramercy Theatre, 127 East 23 Street at Lexington Avenue, 1 p.m., 212-777-4900.]

Monday 2nd

When Sex and the City 's last Manolo has been scuffed, we'll wager that not many will miss Sarah Jessica Parker's uncanny Dee Snider impersonation. No, what'll really be missed are the hiss-fests between Mario Cantone and Willie Garson. Mr. Cantone came to the phone on a recent afternoon; he'd just awoken. We told him we'd miss his catfights with Stanford Blatch. "I know-me, too. Fucking with each other like that. It's fun-I loved givin' him shit. I really thought I was going to end up with him …. If I end up with him, I'm gonna kill somebody. I will not end up with Willie Garson. I love Willie, but we're not going to end up together as lovers- sissy, bald straight man playing a gay man. He prisses it up with the best of them, doesn't he?" (You haven't met our Big-Cheese Editor.) Tonight, you can catch Mario-along with Joy Behar, Darrell Hammond and Judy Gold-at Caroline's on Broadway. Proceeds benefit individuals with AIDS, H.I.V. and AIDS-related illnesses.

[Comedy Cares, Caroline's on Broadway, 1626 Broadway, 7 p.m., 212-840-0770.]

Tuesday 3rd

What happened to mustaches? Has it really been 30-some odd years since they represented maximum mackdom? Has Burt Reynolds truly been replaced by Ewan McGregor? Thurman Munson -the scrappy Yankee catcher who died tragically in an airplane crash in 1979-is given his due tonight. "In a way, he was like a lowercase Yogi Berra," said Bill James , author of The 2004 Bill James Handbook . "Yogi was not an athlete, but an extremely effective player-meaning he wasn't quick or graceful or pretty, but he got the job done. Thurman was like that: He got the job done." And the 'stache? "There wasn't very much pretty about Thurman, including the mustache. Thurman was not a good-looking guy, particularly. He had a kind of scruffy-looking mustache that seemed to fit an image." Inasmuch as we'd like to rub shoulders with other mustachioed greats like Rollie Fingers and Catfish Hunter, we'll make due with John Starks, Roger Clemens and John Franco -who proves you can collect Medicare and still pitch.

[Thurman Munson Awards Benefit, Marriott Marquis Hotel, 1535 Broadway, 7 p.m.,

212-888-7003.]

Wednesday 4th

The other Weill- not the rainmaker from Citigroup -has an evening devoted to his bad self, starring Tadpole r Bebe Neuwirth . "Singing Kurt Weill is much closer to who I am than anything else I've done," said Ms. Neuwirth. "Lilith Crane is not who I am- except that I'm really shy. And I'm extremely driven!" Nordoesshe have much in common with Chicago 's fishnetted Velma Kelly. "I don't really go around murdering people. Or carrying a machine gun." Or, for those who like to harrumph a lot: Times man William Safire speaks at the Y.

[ An Evening of Kurt Weill , Alice Tully Hall, 8 p.m., 917-322-2140; "Observations," William Safire, the 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, 8 p.m.,

212-415-5500.]

Soon after President Bill Clinton was impeached, you announced that you were reading the Federalist Papers . This meant you were reading primarily the words of Alexander Hamilton, who conceived the series and wrote two-thirds of the essays, including all those dealing with the Presidency. They ran in New York newspapers, like Op-Ed pieces. Which of us writes so well?

Like you, Hamilton was a politician, and an intellectual; like you, he was not a native New Yorker. But like you, he became the quintessential smart city kid.

You have been re-reading Hamilton, not reading him, for you have long admired him. Indeed, the last time I heard you speak, which was at Eric Breindel's funeral, you quoted the phrase from Federalist No. 70 on "energy in the executive," which you said poor Eric had. Your thoughts now rightly turn to the nation's Chief Executive, and what the energy of the office and the behavior of the incumbent require of you as a Senator.

Hamilton was first dragged into the Clinton scandals when the White House compared Mr. Clinton's behavior to Hamilton's during the Reynolds affair, an adultery scandal of the 1790's. The many lies in the White House's version of the Reynolds affair, which you would not have needed The New York Times ' follow-up story to spot, were as gross as Mr. Clinton's more recent claim that he resembles Nelson Mandela. Instead of trying to clean up these moral and intellectual messes (a full-time job in this administration), you have turned to Hamilton's thoughts.

The core of his thoughts on the Presidency is to be found in the Federalist , in Nos. 67 to 77. The core of this core is the opening of Federalist 70, where Hamilton asserts that a "vigorous executive" is compatible with "republican government." If it were not, republican government would be impossible. There speaks the former staff officer, who had watched an impotent Congress struggle with the problems of debt and the Army's pay.

Hamilton outlines the prerequisites for vigor: unity (one man for the job, not a committee); fixed terms; fixed pay; "competent powers." But how can an office made vigorous be kept in check? One answer Hamilton gives is the exposure inherent in the job. Intriguers and flatterers might become state governors, he writes in Federalist 68, but surely more would be expected of Presidents. He writes that "there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue." If the glare of national life does not winnow out the unfit, there is another remedy: "actual punishment in cases which admit of it" ( Federalist 70). Since the argument from exposure failed in Hamilton's lifetime, as Aaron Burr nearly became the third President (Hamilton's efforts to stop him ultimately cost him his life), that leaves punishment.

Private passions, Hamilton knew, can generate cases of serious misconduct. Federalist 6 is a sermon on "great national events, either foreign or domestic," caused by "personal considerations." Hamilton cites as one of many examples "the celebrated Pericles," who "in compliance with the resentment of a prostitute … attacked, vanquished, and destroyed the city of the Samnians." Hamilton is following Plutarch here, not the more reliable Thucydides. But the point is not what actually happened in ancient Athens, but what he feared for America.

Federalist 6 takes on extra bite because Hamilton became embroiled with a blackmailing adulteress, if not an actual prostitute, four years after writing it; his defense of himself would be that his folly led to no "great national events." Now perjury is not as serious an "event" as destroying a city (though bombing Sudanese aspirin factories and random Iraqis may be). But how serious did Hamilton consider it?

In 1795, President Washington was falsely accused of overdrawing his expense account. Hamilton wrote a defense of his old boss, ending with a scornful list of the "heinous charges" that had been made against him-"violation of the Constitution, violation of the laws, exertion of arbitrary will." The climax of the list was "intentional perjury!" "Perjury" was capitalized. Eighteenth-century writers scattered capital letters pretty freely, but not on peccadillos. Then there is the discussion of "religion and morality" in the Farewell Address, which Hamilton drafted for Washington a year later. Of all their "connections" with "political happiness," Hamilton singled out one: the sense of "religious obligation" that attaches to "oaths" in "courts of justice." The moralizers of the 1790's called in religion not to promote family values, or to keep kids off drugs, but to discourage lying under oath.

Why this vehemence? Hamilton had the professional prejudices of a lawyer, whose clients ranged from merchants suing each other to a laborer accused of stuffing his girlfriend down a well. But he was also a passionate theorist of the law, which he saw as a check on mob violence, a remedy against deadbeat debtors (especially rich ones, like Thomas Jefferson) and grease for the wheels of commerce. The law was a root of American order; perjury was a worm attacking it. Perjury in the executive branch might well strike him as a high crime or misdemeanor.

Finally, there is Hamilton's great speech of June 27, 1788, at the New York State ratifying convention for the Constitution-a masterly disquisition on power and trust. "Sir, when you have divided and nicely balanced the departments of government, when … you have rendered your system as perfect as human forms can be, you must place confidence, you must give power." Checks and balances, he is saying, can't solve all our problems. Rulers must have virtue as well as freedom to act. What then should the people do when the only confidence they can place in the men currently in power is that they will abuse it?

All this you have read. But perhaps you will be guided by another New Yorker, Representative Timothy J. Campbell, whom you described with an admiring wink in Beyond the Melting Pot . He asked a favor of President Grover Cleveland, only to be told that it was unconstitutional. "'Ah, Mr. President,' replied Tim [you wrote], 'what is the Constitution between friends?'"

One hundred and ninety-four years ago, long before schoolchildren found less elaborate ways to unleash aggression with guns, two rival New York politicians met each other at a discreetly hidden dueling ground in Weehawken, N.J. There, across the river from what is now 42nd Street, on a grassy ledge 20 feet above the Hudson, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton confronted each other at 10 paces with cocked .54-caliber pistols.

What followed on the field of honor that sunny Wednesday morning, July 11, 1804, was a tragedy that permanently altered the history of the early republic. Hamilton, 47, former Secretary of the Treasury under George Washington and creator of the national banking system, was fatally wounded and became an instant martyr. After hours of excruciating suffering, Hamilton died at 2 o'clock on July 12 and was given a funeral worthy of the "first citizen"–or saint–of New York. Burr, 48, Vice President of the United States, was indicted for premeditated murder in New Jersey and New York, and fled south, a fugitive from justice. Ever after ostracized as a coldblooded killer, Burr became a political outcast. As John Randolph of Virginia observed, Burr had "fallen like Lucifer, never to rise again."

In this well-researched but clumsily written study of the complex relationship between the opponents in the infamous duel, historian Arnold A. Rogow has re-examined evidence in both men's biographies to suggest that the motives that led Hamilton and Burr to such extreme hostility had been established years before their rivalry turned fatal in 1804. Both men had grown up as orphans. Hamilton, the illegitimate, unacknowledged son of a Jamaican planter and a mother accused of "whoring," envied the more privileged background of Burr, who, though he lost both his parents and grandparents at an early age, was the son of the second president of Princeton (then the College of New Jersey) and grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century theologian whose sermons sparked America's Great Awakening. Hamilton was denied admission to Princeton, where Burr graduated in 1772, but enrolled at Columbia (then Kings College).

During the American Revolution, both men distinguished themselves in characteristic manner: Hamilton as a duplicitous, fawning aide to Gen. George Washington, Burr as an independent-minded outsider and brave lieutenant colonel under Gen. Benedict Arnold. With the war won and the Constitution invented, the rivalry deepened when Hamilton and Burr became New York lawyers in 1783, often serving together as co-counsels in court, prosecuting civil and criminal cases. With women, both were courtly, gallant, dashing, with "persuasive voices." Both married for love and security: Hamilton into one of New York's richest, most influential families, the Schuylers; Burr to a widow 10 years older than himself.

Outwardly friendly to each other as they helped to turn the United States into a single, centrally governed nation, Hamilton and Burr remained rivals on a deeper level. Short, proud men, they were "mirror images of each other," Mr. Rogow suggests. For Hamilton, however, the reflection was distorted. In Burr he glimpsed his own darker impulses. Naturally vengeful, stimulated by self-hatred, Hamilton began to wage war on Burr in 1792. "I feel it to be a religious duty," he wrote that September, "to oppose his career."

For the next 12 years, Hamilton sabotaged his rival at every turn. He helped to engineer Burr's defeat in the mixed-up Presidential election of 1800–Burr and Jefferson received an equal number of electoral votes, throwing the election into the House of Representatives–and again in the New York gubernatorial race of 1804. Hamilton's letters again and again decry Burr for being "profligate," a "voluptuary in the extreme." Yet Hamilton was no angel himself. He suffered, as John Adams harrumphed, from a "superabundance of secretions" which "he could not find whores enough to draw off." But it was Hamilton's obsessive and implacable hatred of Burr that became his true vice and, as Mr. Rogow shows, his ultimate undoing.

The rivalry reached its inevitable climax when Hamilton spread word during the New York gubernatorial contest that Burr was "a dangerous man" who "ought not to be trusted." The final straw was added when Hamilton suggested that, even beyond politics, he held a "still more despicable opinion" of Burr, whereupon Burr demanded satisfaction and challenged Hamilton to the famous duel.

Historians have for decades debated what drove Burr to react so strongly to provocation. Burr, by nature sanguine, was not easily offended; and by 1804 he was a thick-skinned New York politician. An organizer of the Tammany Hall political machine and a former United States senator, Burr knew how to turn the other cheek when a rival such as Jefferson declared him a "crooked gun or other perverted machine."

From 1860 to the present, biographers and novelists alike have speculated about the role that women played in the conflict between Hamilton and Burr. Eliza Bowen Jumel, said to have been a prostitute in her youth and both men's lovers (Burr later married Jumel), has been suspected of coming between the antagonists, as has Hamilton's mistress of 1791, Maria Reynolds, whom Burr represented when she sued her husband for divorce in 1793. But it was Gore Vidal's brilliant, intuitive leap in Burr (1973) to recognize that it was the unusually close and often seductive relationship between Burr and his daughter Theodosia (deepened by the death of Theodosia's mother in 1794) that was the true source of the slander that resulted in Burr's challenge. Seen by Hamilton as incestuous, Burr's intimacy with Theodosia, however far it went in actuality, supplied both men with an understandable motive for wanting to destroy each other. "I couldn't think of anything of a 'despicable' nature that would drive [Burr] to so drastic an action," Mr. Vidal explained in private correspondence with Mr. Rogow in 1995.

From the novelist's brainstorm, the historian has now gone the next step, uncovering evidence that Hamilton did indeed believe that Burr could be his own daughter's lover. Decoding Hamilton's confidential correspondence with Gouverneur Morris in 1792–the same year Hamilton declared his holy war on Burr–Mr. Rogow reveals that Hamilton assigned code names to President Washington (Scavola, a first-century B.C. Roman tribune), five cabinet officers (Hamilton dubbed himself "Paulus," a brilliant general and much admired writer in the third century A.D.), and 19 Senators and Representatives, including Burr, to whom Hamilton gave the name of "Savius," a first-century A.D. Roman who was charged with seducing his son–an act, Mr. Rogow writes, said to have "scandalized even the most debauched Romans of his day."

While motive is now clearer, still without being definitive, details of the duel in Weehawken have long been uncertain. Did both men fire a shot? Who fired first? Eyewitness accounts disagreed on practically every important point. Burr's second, William P. Van Ness, afterward insisted that Hamilton fired first and fired to kill; after fussing with his spectacles because of the angle of the morning light, Hamilton leveled his pistol at Burr, in accordance with the rules of dueling, and fired a shot that was intended "to take, if possible, the life of his adversary."

Hamilton's second, Nathaniel Pendleton, was meanwhile confident that Hamilton had not fired first, but instead had kept to his "fixed resolution to do [Burr] no harm." Hamilton's letters to his wife on July 10 confirm that he wanted posterity to know that he had decided to risk his life at Weehawken but intended not to fire his weapon. Indeed, as Hamilton lay dying, and as the New York Evening Post , the newspaper Hamilton had founded, reported on July 16, Hamilton maintained that he had not fired at Burr, and that he planned to reserve and throw away his shot. A search of the dueling ground by Pendleton revealed that Hamilton had squeezed off a shot that went 4 feet wide of Burr, hitting a tree limb 12 1/2 feet off the ground.

Until 1976, no one had ever had a chance to look at the most important pieces of surviving evidence–the pistols themselves, a set of 9-inch, English-made dueling weapons provided by Hamilton and borrowed from his brother-in-law, John Barker Church. On the occasion of the U.S. Bicentennial, an arms expert was invited to supervise the creation of authentic reproductions of the pistols by David Rockefeller, chairman of the board of the Chase Manhattan Bank, in whose vaults the pistols had been stored since 1930. The arms expert, Merrill Lindsay, discovered that, unlike proper dueling pistols, both of the Church weapons had been weighted for greater accuracy and were designed less for dueling, as Mr. Rogow emphasizes, than for killing. Most surprising of all, both pistols had been equipped with a concealed hair-trigger that required a mere half-pound squeeze rather than the usual 10- to 12-pound pull. Hamilton, knowing the trick, could therefore have squeezed off a shot far more quickly than Burr. Hamilton, moreover, owned a pair of regular English dueling pistols but had decided to borrow the trick set from his brother-in-law.

Mr. Lindsay maintained that Hamilton "booby-trapped himself" at Weehawken. "As Hamilton lowered the gun on its target, he was holding a little too tightly and accidentally fired before he had Burr in his sights. Burr squeezed hard and slow and put an aimed shot into Hamilton." This also explains why, with death fast approaching, Hamilton would stick to his story, pre-established on the eve of the duel, that he never intended to fire at Burr. If a hidden hair-trigger were found in pistols that Hamilton had supplied for the duel, Burr might look less the villain and Hamilton more the fool.

On July 20, John Randolph of Virginia wrote to James Monroe. Hamilton's "violent death, at the hands of a man whom he persisted in discountenancing … which at first might be imputed to elevated principles, is, I fear, for the honor of human nature to be referred to personal pique against Mr. Burr." Or, as Jay Gatsby says to Nick Carraway in American literature's most all-purpose explanation for love that ends in violent tragedy, "It was just personal."

Hamilton, the more emotionally flawed of the two, could not help himself. His blind aim had been to destroy Burr, even if the cost to himself was absolute. "Had he valued his own life more and hated Burr less, there probably would have been no fatal duel," Mr. Rogow concludes, "but for the duel not to have happened would have required a history and a relationship between the two very different from the one described here." It would also have required a different society, and a different set of values about hostility and tolerance and the use of guns in American life. We can only marvel that more of our great political rivalries–Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy come most quickly to mind–did not end up on the grassy ledge in the heights of Weehawken.

Late in life, Burr got the last word. Referring to Lawrence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy , in which the narrator's Uncle Toby, tormented by a fly all through dinner, at last catches the fly, but instead of retaliating frees it, Burr remarked, "If I had read Sterne more, and Voltaire less, I should have known that the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me."